How to Build a SaaS Customer Onboarding Process

The successful onboarding of a new customer is a critical process for your company to master. Onboarding includes several steps: transitioning knowledge from the sales team, handing off the relationship from sales to account management, setting up a customer's invoicing account, granting access to your product, training, and establishing support channels. A customer forms her first lasting impressions of your product and your company during this period. It is essential that the description of the 'promised land' that the customer signed onto is preserved, maintained, repeated and tracked.

The impact: Establishing a process for successful onboarding directly impacts a customer's adoption, the tone of the rest of your relationship, and the likelihood of future churn and expansion.

The goal: Create a robust customer onboarding process that preserves the definition of the promised land for customers, reiterates that definition, outlines the internal steps for the customer to reach it, and establishes clear metrics for when that is achieved.

Background

Your goal during onboarding is to align a customer's perceived value of your product, a perception developed during the sales process, with the actual value they experience when using the product. You need to be able to show a customer that the value proposition you made is achievable. Ultimately, a customer needs to understand what your product can do, how to do it, and then how to realize his particular goals.

In order to deliver on these objectives, you will need a solid understanding of the customer who is onboarding so you can deliver the specific value proposition this particular customer has bought. Moreover, you will need to be prepared to deliver concise and clear training materials to get a customer quickly up to speed using your product. A quick delivery is important to maintain the momentum gained during the sales process and drive adoption.

The goal during onboarding is not to get a customer to expert user status, but for their perceived value to equal their realized value. This means helping them get closer to knowing the promised land and chart a path to get there. Leave secondary features for later exploration and focus on what was communicated and what they bought into during the sales process. Otherwise, you risk overwhelming a new customer and their losing sight of the features they most need to use.

Steps

Process Generation.

1. Person Accountable: You should always name a specific role accountable for this function. Golden Section advocates that the person accountable for onboarding customers have a specific, specialized role within your company. For example, have a Solutions Expert (SE) who handles all aspects of the onboarding phase, ensuring successful implementation, training, and understanding of support channels. Once onboarding has been completed, the SE should hand-off the account to the Account Executive.
2. Process Steps: Set out clear, discrete steps to define each of the following processes that must be completed during onboarding.
   • Hand-off from Sales. We recommend having a specific process in place to ensure hand-off happens in a timely manner with sufficient transfer of knowledge. Possibly let a signed contract be a trigger for the Sales Rep to fill out the provided Customer Profile template. The Customer Profile must then be passed to and acknowledged by the SE.
   • Invoicing / Account Creation. See Play: A/R Management for guidance on an invoicing process.
   • Implementation. This includes any set-up and granting access or licenses that needs to occur for a customer to actually use your service. Particularly for enterprise products, the implementation process can be intricate and time-intensive. See Play: Implementation Project Life Cycle for help creating an Implementation plan.
   • Customer Training.
   • Product Use Training. See the more detailed notes below for guidance on training.
   • Familiarize the customer with your company, particularly support channels. This is an important component of training. You don't want your customer to not know how to get support.
   • Adoption Metric. Identifying an adoption metric is a useful tool to ensure successful onboarding. The ultimate goal of onboarding is to get a customer to initial adoption, and the high-touch period of onboarding should not be terminated before it is achieved. The adoption metric your company chooses will be highly specific to your product. However, consider factors that drive usage and indicate a product has been adopted (ex 50 forecasts generated). The success of the adoption metric signals that the customer is well on its way to the promised land and no longer needs SE support.
   • Hand-off to Account Manager. Once the adoption metric has been met, what needs to be done to pass the account back to the Account Manager?
3. Concluding Event: What is the final outcome of the process that signals onboarding is complete? We don't want any processes to be left in limbo.
4. Timeframe. How long should this process take? It is important to keep a steady cadence to these processes to maintain momentum. Remember that even small onboarding processes should be mapped (1 hour onboarding meetings) and tracked.
5. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): What metrics can be tracked to indicate the efficiency and effectiveness of this process? You don't want this process to be heavier than necessary, but you also don't want to short-change it.
   1. Post-onboarding surveys, account manager surveys, and renewal/churn data can all inform the efficacy of this process.
6. Codification. Golden Section recommends creating a checklist from the above processes for your SE to follow. Each task must be completed before onboarding is complete and the account can be handed back to an account manager.
   1. Specific Notes on the Training Process.
   2. Preparation is key. The first step to successful onboarding is a clear understanding of a customer's needs and expectations.
7. Create an Internal Training Cheat Sheet. Using the customer segments you have previously developed (ref Play: Customer Segmentation), create an Internal Training Cheat Sheet for each segment. Questions to answer on the Cheat Sheet:
   • What is the specific value proposition to this segment? Justify why your product is a good fit for this segment and what solution you are providing to what need.
   • How do our most retained customers in this segment use the product? Analyze the use case for your most satisfied customers to explore how to replicate that success.
   • What are the MINIMUM features of your product that will get a customer from this segment to realize the value proposition (the promised land)? One key to onboarding is to make it as simple as possible for your customer to feel like an adept user of your product. Do not overwhelm them with irrelevant information or features that don't speak to their minimum needs. Reduce the noise and help them focus on realizing their minimum value proposition during this time.
8. Create Training Guides. Using the cheat sheet you just created, develop Training Guides for each segment to teach a user how to use the identified set of minimum features.
   • A Training Guide must lead a customer to immediate, relevant, easy action on your platform.
   • A Training Guide can take many forms, including training checklists, interactive onscreen guidance, automated process walkthroughs, and onboarding videos.
   • Golden Section recommends Training Checklists as an effective tool to give to customers during this process. A training checklist breaks down the larger workflow into meaningful, smaller steps. The outline form of a checklist gives a customer context for what they are doing and why, sets expectations for what he should be able to do by the end, and also anchors a customer's memory so the workflow becomes routine.

Once the process has been in operation for a few months, experiment with new methodologies to improve the onboarding process. Over time, your goal is to decrease customer time-to-value and increase quick wins.

Recently onboarded customers are a valuable resource to help identify opportunities for improvement. Reach out to a few customers who have finished onboarding in the prior 45-60 days. It is likely unhelpful to ask customers onboarded less recently as the onboarding experience will be less fresh in their minds.

Questions to ask: When did your ah-ha moment occur? What prompted it? What part of the process could have been improved? Take this information back to your team to draw insights and improve the onboarding process.

Additionally, it is helpful to track cohorts of onboarded customers to measure improvements in your onboarding process. Questions to consider when analyzing improvements: did the onboarding process take less time? How long did it take for this cohort to reach full adoption? How many from this cohort would be classified as weak engagement? How many from this cohort are expert users? In the long run, how were churn and expansion affected?

Unless the modification is urgent, don't rush iterations. Allow enough time for the results from previous iterations to become apparent before making more. You will need at least the average length of onboarding to see any results.