How to Nail Post-Sales Onboarding in B2B SaaS

Hello there! ?? Welcome to the Hyperengage Newsletter where every other week we share insights & trends from industry leaders in B2B SaaS with a special focus on customer journeys. If you’re new and want to catch up on the SaaS-o-sphere, click the “subscribe” button above. But anyway, let's get started on how to master SaaS onboarding.

Onboarding is a critical step in the customer journey that sets the tone for the entire relationship. Done right, it ensures customers are set up for success and can lead to long-term loyalty and growth. Done wrong though, and you’ll incur additional support costs, difficulty in upselling or even customer churn.

In fact, inadequate onboarding is the third most significant reason customers leave, trailing only behind a poor product fit and lack of engagement. (Source: Precursive)

So, let’s look into the essentials of effective onboarding, the common challenges faced today, and expert-backed solutions to overcome these hurdles.

Defining Onboarding in B2B SaaS

There are many different definitions of onboarding in the context of B2B SaaS. Onboarding can mean many different things depending on if your GTM motion is sales-led or product-led along with it varying across industries and segments as well as the size of your target customers.

Focusing on Post-Sales Onboarding

For simplicity’s sake, let’s just focus on the post-sales onboarding process. This is after the point at which the customer is handed off from sales and to the CSMs.

After this handoff, the goal here is to get the customer towards product activation. Product activation is when users have gone through all the implementations, have the product in their hands, and are just now realizing the value that was initially promised during pre-sales through an action they’re performing inside the product. This is the first step towards product adoption.

Onboarding varies across industries, but Arrows offers a solid definition:

”Onboarding is the moment your customer experiences the value they expected to gain by buying your product.”

Pinpointing this exact moment and understanding what it entails can be challenging. However, achieving this clarity can significantly impact your product team’s efficiency and overall company success.

The Critical Importance of Effective Onboarding

According to Appcues, successful onboarding can result in both creating product advocates and improving retention rates.

Furthermore, veterans in the field agree on the importance of effective onboarding.

“[The] main thing that we would like to focus with all our customers is currently just the onboarding process, because I truly believe that it’s 90% of the whole success with your customer.” ~Alexandra Sagaydak, CCO, PeopleForce

As mentioned before, one size does not fit all when it comes to onboarding. Depending on your customer segment, how you onboard will vary. But the ultimate goal is to guide users to the point of product activation, where they fully understand and utilize the product’s value. The goal here is to reduce TTV (Time-To-Value) as much as possible.

Identifying Onboarding Challenges

Despite its importance, onboarding is often fraught with challenges.

To delve deeper into these challenges, we turn to William Stevenson, Founder and COO of Onboard, a customer onboarding software designed to streamline the process and launch customers faster.

William Stevenson brought a wealth of experience during his time on the Hyperengage podcast. Having built and managed customer success and onboarding teams over the past decade. he identified several critical pain points in the onboarding process:

Lack of Dedicated Tools:

Onboarding teams often struggle because they lack dedicated tools and are stuck using Excel files, Google Sheets, or generic project management software.

“Your onboarding team is usually stuck with Excel files, Google Sheets, generic project management software, something that some other department purchased and passed down to them.” ~William Stevenson

This was definitely a struggle in the past, nowadays though, there is a multitude of onboarding software options such as Onboard, Dock, and Arrows, that can streamline the processes for you and your customers.

Visibility Issues:

One of the most crucial elements of onboarding is ensuring visibility for everyone involved. Customers often don't have a clear view of the onboarding process. They receive information in a piecemeal fashion, making it difficult for them to plan properly.

This was a key detail brought up by William Stevenson. He would encounter companies that believe they have a clear view of the onboarding process, but the customer remains in the dark. Typically, customers would only receive fragmented updates through sporadic emails requesting specific actions, rather than a comprehensive overview from the start. Without this upfront information, customers cannot effectively plan ahead.

Many times, people would report to William that the delays are always on their customer’s end rather than their own. However, the real issue was the lack of upfront information provided to them, hindering their ability to plan the implementation accurately.

Enhancing Your Post-Sales Onboarding Workflow

How you choose to improve your onboarding processes will vary on your specific product and its use cases, as well as the customers you’re targeting. It’s impossible to provide a solution to every situation especially when we consider how your onboarding processes will vary from segment to segment.

What we can do, however, is examine what has worked in the past. So let’s take a look at the case of Heap, a digital insights platform with a hybrid go-to-market motion.

Starting With a High-touch Motion and then Scaling It

Heap started with an onboarding NPS in the negatives but managed to elevate it to plus 50 within just a year. So how did they do it?

On the Hyperengage podcast, we sat down with Tushar Bansal, SVP of Customer Success at Contentsquare (Formerly SVP of Global CS at Heap), where we delved into the onboarding challenges faced at Heap.

As Tushar put it, his team embraced the mantra, "First nail it, and then scale it.” Between 2021 and early 2022, Heap made substantial efforts to transform their onboarding process, achieving an impressive NPS score above 50, surpassing industry standards.

This improvement came at a cost, though, as their high-touch approach required a significant investment of time—spending 50 to 60 hours, sometimes even hundreds, per customer.

The Scalability Dilemma of High-Touch Customer Success

While Heap was able to increase their onboarding NPS and finally achieve customer satisfaction for this portion of the customer lifecycle, this method posed challenges for their SMB segment, where the high cost of onboarding wasn't justifiable.

So having achieved great results in customer activation, the next challenge was to scale and make the process more efficient. To address this, the team emphasized setting the right expectations during pre-sales, ensuring customers understood the resources needed to engage with and get value from the tool.

Utilizing Online Educational Resources

Heap also leveraged their online educational resources, such as Heap University, offering free courses to help customers self-serve and be better prepared when interacting with onboarding teams. This approach aimed to reduce the burden on both parties and improve efficiency.

Moving Towards a One-to-Many Onboarding Model

Despite these improvements, Heap's onboarding remained a one-to-one process. The next step in their evolution was to implement a one-to-many onboarding experience, maintaining the same level of structured content and value while grouping customers together. This method aimed to reduce costs for SMBs by sharing resources and services.

However, it is crucial to avoid excessive standardization. Tushar cautions that providing cookie-cutter solutions could lead to the same problems encountered in 2021, where customers struggled to connect with the content presented to them.

To this end, Heap experimented with various approaches to deliver a more scalable onboarding solution, such as grouping similar use cases and differentiating parts of the process that can be delivered separately versus combined.

At the end of the day, there is no definitive one-size-fits-all onboarding solution. By following these strategies and learnings from industry experts, you can transform your onboarding process into a powerful tool for ensuring customer success and driving long-term growth.

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