Onboarding Tips - Week 52 | Iterative Changes vs. Onboarding 2.0

Week 52 | Idea 52 | Iterative changes vs. Onboarding 2.0

Like any function, it is essential for your onboarding function to mature and grow in ways that serve your customers and business better. It helps to have quarterly “team goals” to run programs across the onboarding team that can drive higher maturity.

Here’s our suggested approach:

1. First, measure and benchmark your onboarding function along key dimensions. That way, you can identify top areas of growth for the team, and invest in initiatives to level up on those dimensions.

Some of the dimensions I’d recommend looking at include Value Orientation (of your teams and processes), Customer Experience and Delivery maturity, Adaptability, Organisation maturity, Systems and metrics maturity, and Productivity.

You can see where you stand using this maturity assessment quiz we put together. Hope it gets you thinking about some aspects of your onboarding today that can be changed easily :).

2. Next, based on the stage of your company, you can figure what’s going to hurt you most, and drive programs that help you measure on those dimensions.?

You can execute on this in 2 ways:

• The iterative way: Do your iterations with quarterly goals. Don’t pick too many changes all at once, as that could overwhelm the team and result in subpar execution of multiple ongoing initiatives. Pick one high impact change, and maybe a couple of simple ideas. For selecting ideas, you can look at our Propel Ideabook, or just go back in time and browse through these onboarding tips.
• The Big Bang approach: If onboarding is struggling, and you feel it is essential for the business to drive multiple changes at once, one thing I’ve seen companies do is put together an “Onboarding 2.0” program to drive big changes, involve the whole team in identifying the changes, and align on direction you are rowing towards. Note that bringing big changes will take time, so budget 1-2 months to identify the scope of your changes, and another 3-5 months to build and launch your new program.?

3. Take help where you need it:

If you are going the Big Bang route, you may want to hire an external consultant that’s done this before - to identify and help craft these changes faster. They are likely to have seen how different decisions can pan out in your organisation, and this will increase the probability of your initiative succeeding.

Look towards experts who’ve run post sales orgs before, or coached companies on these topics in the past. From our Preflight Community, you may want to engage experts like Donna Weber for learning sessions and workshops, or consulting firms like Jeff Kushmerek ’s Infinite Renewals, Rod Cherkas ’s Hello CCO to help guide and manage this transition. There’s also CS consulting companies like Growth Molecules? , SuccessHACKER , The Success League , that can help guide you.

4. Get a budget to improve onboarding:

Help your company understand the importance of levelling up on onboarding and secure a budget for these enhancements and engagements. Your customers will thank you for making them successful faster, easier. Your VP CS and Customer Success team will thank you for it - as incoming customers post onboarding will be in a happier place, leading to lesser churn, higher NRR. Your CFO will thank you for it - again higher NRR, but also faster time to revenue. Your team will thank you for helping them grow in their role and career.?If you need help making the case, just reach out to us :).

So let's get those new initiatives for Q4 2022 going in your companies!

PS: We'd love to learn if you've recently run any programs / initiatives that have had strong impact on your customer outcomes. Also, if you’ve done an Onboarding 2.0 transformation recently, or have more ideas/feedback on this, do add a comment here or DM me :). We’re always looking to learn!