First 100 days... with your clients

In the US, new presidents report the early achievements of their administrations in a report called "The First 100 Days". This period is considered important because it sets the tone for the new administration and is seen as a critical time to accomplish key policy goals.

What happens if you try to replicate this practice to the first 100 days of you as a provider of your customers? A report from McKinsey, shows that, in B2B, new client's onboarding may take up to 100 days. Therefore, the answer to the previous question is alarming: In your first 100 days report, you won't be able to mention any achievement. Your newly acquired clients won't have experienced your product or service core value and they won't have any incentive to keep on trying to get fully onboarded.

It's curious how much effort companies put on sales and how they underestimate the importance of client onboarding. If you sell but you can't onboard clients properly, their time-to-value and product adoption will be disappointing, leading to high churn rates. And in B2B, new clients' onboarding is a real struggle for several reasons:

• Handoffs between Sales and Customer Success: Usually, Sales teams job finish when clients sign a contract. Then, the onboarding is usually handled by the Customer Success teams, that don't necessarily have all the information or a relationship with the client.
• Handoffs between the Buyer and User personas: In B2B, the person that decides to purchase a product or service, doesn't necessarily make the implementation or use the product. In most cases, you have a decision maker that makes the purchase and other team members that need to make an implementation of a product that they neither know nor understand.
• A lot of tasks, performed by different people: B2B onboarding takes time, because both sides need that a lot of people perform different tasks. For instance, you may need the HR team to complete a file with the employees names divided by team, or the Engineering team to implement an SDK. These stakeholders have other priorities and backlog and won't probably prioritize this new product implementation.

You might be asking... Why is this important and why is Tobias writing about this?

Probably, you remember that a few months ago we decided to pivot. And when we were looking for our new company focus, we wanted to find a real problem that a lot of people suffer with a large market opportunity.

A few months ago, when we decided to pivot, we started a customer discovery process, conducting +60 interviews. We realized that the B2B onboarding process is a general problem that most of the companies suffer. In most cases, the interviewees mentioned that they do a lot of manual and repetitive tasks, they don't have clear analytics throughout the process and that a lot of clients churn. And that's exactly the problem we're trying to solve.

In case this problem resonates with you, I'd love to read your comments!