Prescriptive Customer Onboarding As A Company Growth Strategy
The power of prescriptive onboarding within your customer success and project management teams…
When designing a strategic growth plan, what companies tend to focus on are things like:
attracting new customers
product adoption
up-selling
thought leadership campaigns
team structure
While focusing on those areas is important, there's a key growth strategy component that’s often overlooked—a prescriptive onboarding process for your customers.
After you’ve made a sale, it’s not enough to assume your customers know where to go and how to get started. It’s not their job to figure this out. It’s your job to show them around and help them feel comfortable.
At Growtelligence™, we believe a prescriptive, intelligent approach to customer welcoming is one of the best ways to help your company scale.
“Onboarding is all activities involved in introducing a new customer to your product or service and maximizing the investment they made with you. ”
According to a recent study from Harvard Business Review, "an increased focus on onboarding offers a significant or moderate positive impact over the life of the contract for revenue, client renewals, and client referrals."
Many companies leverage a tech stack that includes products like Outreach, ZoomInfo, and Salesforce to enable their team pre-sale. However, during post-sale, they fail to enable their customer success or delivery teams with the technology and processes required to deliver the right customer experience at the right time.
Don't let this happen.
You’re investing time and money into turning leads to prospects and prospects to customers but failing to define early milestones and engagement touchpoints within your customer's journey will lead to a high churn and low adoption success. Instead, take the extra time to create an excellent customer onboarding experience that creates loyal product users and advocates.
Six ways to provide a better customer onboarding experience:
1. Do your research and prepare
Whatever amount of time you plan to spend with your customer during your first interaction, spend an equal amount of time preparing. Whether you have a low-cost SaaS product or a high-end bespoke service, you need to understand how to provide prescriptive experiences based on the types of companies and people you are working with. Firmographics, which are descriptive attributes of companies, can be used to group individual companies into meaningful market and customer segments. Firmographics are to businesses and organizations what demographics are to people. There are many different criteria for segmenting your customers using firmographics, such as industry (NAICS Code), annual revenue, company size, geographic area, type (Public, Private, Subsidiary), or Fortune Ranking to name a few. By understanding your customers' business, roles, and problems, you will speak their language and relate to them, ensuring a great experience from the start.
2. Create alignment with your sales and marketing team
Make sure you are attracting and selling to good-fit customers. Bad-fit customers are those that don't fit into your model and will never be happy. Your sales team needs to be encouraged and empowered to say ‘no’ to bad-fit customers early on, regardless of what sales goal they may be chasing.
A customer onboarding experience to be proud of starts with your sales and marketing team. Internal miscommunication will lead to a rocky start that instantly erodes trust. A significant reason for onboarding going off-course is a disconnect between what your team promised, your customer expectations, and reality. Ensure that the content you present during pre-sales aligns with the materials and methodologies used by your customer success, project management, and implementation teams. Train your people regularly, actively ask for feedback on the content with your trusted customers, and evolve your process as your teams and company grow.
3. Ask your customers what's important early and often
You can have the most exceptional content and training in the world, but it doesn't matter if you don't know what's important. Know what challenges you’re trying to solve, what desired outcomes your customers want to see, and agree to it in writing through an email or a shared doc. Look for quick wins and tackle them first. In a continually changing business landscape, revisit what's important each week, month, and quarter.
4. Automate and optimize
The time to capitalize on customer excitement and keep the momentum your sales team has created is when they contract with your company. Have at least one engagement point the same day they bought. Otherwise, traction can be lost, and your onboarding experience will fizzle. When that first deal closes, an automatic welcome email or text should go out to the customer that includes the next steps and what the coming days, weeks, and months will look like. Also, automate that first live meeting with a product like Calendly, which helps you schedule meetings without the frustrating, back-and-forth time-wasting emails with your customers.
5. Designate one single customer success and onboarding leader
While many departments may help deliver on your promises, your customer contracted with one company, not seven different departments. While most organizations claim to be customer-centric, few are. According to research from Russell Reynolds, just 39 percent of companies either have one or more senior-level executives leading the charge on customer experience or have a similar "customer-first" mandate. From the very top (I'm talking to you, founders and CEOs), enable your leader to be bold, creative, and with the autonomy and funding to onboard your customers with ease.
6. Enable and empower with relevant content
Find opportunities to show "micro-value" as quickly as possible when your customer chooses you. Well-tuned, prescriptive onboarding leads to enabling your customers to adopt your products and services rapidly and efficiently. And the moment they're not finding value, they will begin looking for a better solution somewhere else. Enabled customers, on the other hand, are quickly engaged and invested, which creates stickiness and loyalty.
Proactively send them relevant whitepapers, training guides, use cases, stories, and best practices at every single step in your onboarding process.
Want help creating a customer-centric onboarding experience as a strategic part of your company’s growth strategy? Get in touch below!
About The Author
Ross Reed is a company growth expert and entrepreneur who has developed and led high-performing companies, from bootstrapped start-ups to global technology corporations, including INC 5000 fastest-growing companies.