Exceptional Customer Onboarding

“Our job is to connect to people, to interact with them in a way that leaves them better than we found them, more able to get where they’d like to go” — Seth Godin

This post is titled Exceptional Customer Onboarding for a reason: The onboarding phase is the most important moment we have to set the course of success for our customers.

For NASA to launch the Space Shuttle, almost 90% of the fuel required is burnt at lift-off. We often see the very same thing in Customer Success—the energy, excitement and engagement in the onboarding phase needs to be capitalised, before it too, burns out.

This has been written to help you shorten ‘Time to Value’ and ultimately lead your customers to renew, expand and see success from their investment in your offering.

Which is what we’re here to do, right?

Earlier this year, I surveyed Customer Success professionals and leaders across APAC, about their onboarding process. The plan was to create a comprehensive guide to B2B/Enterprise centric onboarding, but I learnt a few things along the way:

• The appropriate experience for one vendor–customer relationship varied greatly.
• Survey design is hard. Interpretation of the of questions varied enough that some responses weren't useful.
• The sample size (22 responses) wasn’t great enough for me to feel comfortable billing the output as a comprehensive representation.

Instead, you have this post. Informed by those insights but not pretending to be the definitive, unquestionable know-it-all guide to onboarding. One thing that is clear though: exceptional onboarding doesn’t mean getting fancy. It’s mostly doing a number of basic things really, really well.

So, if you’re a new CSM here’s a set of practical steps to help you on your way to being exceptional at (Enterprise) customer onboarding.

The Foundations of Exceptional Onboarding

Sales to Customer Success Handover

If your organisation’s sales process has an Account Executive close a deal which is then followed by your involvement, you’ll want to make sure you’ve got clarity from your sales counterparts first. Make sure you’ve got a head-start on knowing:

• Why your customer decided to buy (and why now)?
• Who was an advocate throughout the sales process?
• How does this investment fit within a broader strategy or set of priorities for the company?

If your company doesn’t have a standardised approach, create one for yourself and use it regularly. Walking in to a kick-off call or meeting at least semi-informed will let you establish credibility faster and allow you to use your time (and your customer’s) far more effectively.

Kick-off Calls & Meetings

Quickly schedule a distinct, mutually beneficial kick-off with relevant stakeholders that will be rolling out your solution within their organisation. Broadly, your kick-off should have three objectives:

• Confirm and get crystal clear on your customer’s intentions for your solution. You’ll use these to set defined, measurable success measures. Hint: Your customer should be talking 80% of the time here.
• Establish a plan for success. Lay out a clear roadmap based on prior successful implementations. You want each customer to have an appropriate experience for realising success, but you’ll find it’s far more likely to happen if you can guide them along the way. Remember, you’re the expert at rolling this out; this project is likely just a small part of your customer’s overall job.
• Set commitments on next steps. Book in follow-up conversations. Share technical docs with relevant stakeholders. Schedule training: Important: Make clear commitments to your stakeholders and in return expect that to be reciprocated—it’s important all parties are ready to do their part.

Build a relationship. Don’t just solve the problem.

Unhappy customers with good outcomes might renew, unhappy customers with bad outcomes certainly won’t. The customers that grow, expand and become success stories though, have both great outcomes and great experiences.

Customer Success = Customer Outcomes + Customer Experience         

As a CSM you don’t have complete control over experience-influencing factors like billing, product, or reliability but you do control of the quality of your relationships.

If you have the budget, take your customer to lunch. Send a thank you card. Remember their dog’s name. Above all, just be genuinely interested. Of course, if you’re in the role that’s all probably second nature to you.

Establish Success Measures. The right ones at the right time.

Whilst some CS functions will devoutly encourage these to be set on day one, the reality is in many cases your customer just won’t be able to articulate precise success measures this early and your offering may take time to properly size the value. More importantly though, measurable, commercially relevant outcomes are simply the wrong things to measure early.

You want to segment your success measures into two buckets: onboarding goals and customer outcomes. It’s rare you would want leading indicators to take any more than ~2 weeks post-kick-off to be set, but lagging indicators can genuinely take months. That said, the faster you can define both sets the better—and you should attempt to shorten the time it takes with every subsequent customer.

To spur ideas, example onboarding goals might look at licence activation, user logins per week, consumption, mobile app utilisation, messages sent, licence activation or profile completeness.

Customer Outcomes might look like: Lower support call volume by 20%, increase sales conversion rate by 15%, save $1.8M, add 1000 MQL’s, 99.99% uptime, or a 10pt increase in NPS.

This is an important point and deserves some extra attention, so let’s use an example. To use a subject I have some experience in, we’ll take one from above, ‘Increase sales conversion rate by 15%’, and assume we’re selling some form of sales acceleration software.

• What’s the big goal? You might know, directionally, that your customer invested in your software to ‘increase sales’. You find out in a kick-off call that their reps only close 20% of deals in the pipeline. You hone in conversion rate as a key-lever since you know your product can help with this metric.
• Onboarding Goals. Knowing that there’s a longer-term outcome to be solved, there are some things that need focus right now. Your customer and their users cannot realise the value of your offering if they aren’t using it. At this point you’ll want to connect early behaviours with the likelihood of success. It might sound something like this with your client: “We know that sales reps who log-in [x] times per month, and do [y] activities generate opportunities that are 2x more likely to close”. Ensure everyone is clear on both the goals you mutually set and a timeframe for these to be achieved. If you have more than 3 goals, you probably have too many.
• Measurement Maturity. As early onboarding goals progress, it’s time to create a more mature model for measuring success. Using the data you have so far, your past experiences, as well as customer input, you set your first round of Customer Outcomes to measure. Importantly, you pick the soonest reasonable timeframe that you can demonstrate material success. Sticking with our example, your customer’s sales cycle might be 90 days. You round-up the remainder of the quarter and then add a full 90-days, so that you can measure the entire period. You set an incremental conversion rate increase of 5% for the next quarter... baby steps.

In the example above, we don’t rush into measuring outcomes before we know if we’re travelling in the right direction. We also don’t set measurements for say, 12 months away, which might be the end of the current contract.

Customer Success Plans

Put simply, if you don’t have a plan that’s accessible, measurable and has commitment from all stakeholders, you’re just not doing the job.

Successful customers go on a journey of deliberate, appropriate experiences that increasingly move them toward their goals.

Your Success Plan may be orchestrated in software such as Gainsight, it might be in Airtable, Trello, Microsoft Project, or simply Excel.

This might be controversial, but I’m of the opinion that these don’t have to be complex. In fact, they’re more useful if they’re not. Success Plans typically just need two fundamental parts:

Clearly stated goals the vendor and client have committed to working towards.

The major activities that each party will be accountable for. That’s it. Refer back to the plan regularly. Update as required. Make sure everyone has visibility. Get on with the real work.

Education & Enablement.

This looks like the easy part. If you’re a CSM, you’re probably a great trainer. You love the product, you know it well, you can impress new users.

Here’s the thing: Your job is not to get users to learn your product. Your job is to create lasting behavioural change that helps them achieve their goals.

Some golden rules for education & enablement:

• Don’t do training without established onboarding goals.
• Don’t do training with reps without their managers coming along for the ride (ideally spend the time with them first).
• Don’t make your customer (or their reps) dependant on you for their own success. What resources can you create that scale? Can you enable someone internally to act as a champion? Do you have a community people can join?
• Stop talking about your product. Review your slide decks, your guides, your emails. Ruthlessly prioritise stakeholder goals and connect them back to behaviours in your product and organisational processes that get them there.
• Find relevant integrations (ie. CRM apps, Slack integrations, Outlook Add-ins, etc) and work hard to have these enabled. The more you can make your product less ‘one more thing’ and more just part of what the organisation already does, the greater the likelihood of success.

The first Business Review

Your first Business Review should bookend the onboarding period. If you don’t yet know what a suitable onboarding time is, starting looking at the data you have to see if there are usage and/or success correlations. Failing that, here’s a number: 60 days. Scale up or down as appropriate.

Schedule the first review and make sure you have two types of stakeholders: Ones that are responsible for results so far, and those that will be necessary to get the future results necessary to achieve the Customer Outcomes. This is important, because you’ve likely learnt at this stage that a key department haven’t held up their end of the commitments or that there’s opportunity for another function to be involved to get better results.

Unlike subsequent reviews, your first Business Review should likely have a fairly standard agenda across most customers.

• Recap the onboarding goals established at kick-off. Make it clear where the company is tracking. Celebrate successes and then highlight the misses.
• Set a plan for correction or acceleration. Work with your customer to adjust the goal posts and double-down/expand activities that are working. This is where ‘organisational energy’ can drop-off and we want to do everything possible to offset this naturally occurring phenomenon. You should be referring to or adding to your Success Plan.
• Create space for your customer to teach you more. Your customer has goals, but so might your individual stakeholders; find out if you’re meeting those too. Learn if there’s an up-sell opportunity in another department or an early success story to celebrate.

And if you’ve nailed the steps above there’s a good chance you’ve done an exceptional job at onboarding.

It isn’t complex, but that doesn’t make it easy.

Closing Thoughts

There’s definitely an art and a science to customer success. The function is rapidly evolving and newer, better, more codified ways to do effective customer onboarding will continue to unravel.

In the meantime, hopefully this practical approach will help you create more value for your customers and ultimately your employer.

I’d love, love, love to hear your thoughts on Customer Onboarding. What do you agree with? What do you disagree with? What did I miss? Maybe you have an awesome template or a tip to share with us all?

Let me know in the comments and please share with your customer success colleagues if you found this valuable.