I recently finished Donna Weber’s book Onboarding Matters: How Successful Companies Transform New Customers Into Loyal Champions (2021) and I was pleased to see that it captures many of the key tenets of customer success that I have been touting. It also provides additional insights that clarify some of the challenges I’ve been struggling to pinpoint and solve. In this blog post, I provide a summary of the key points and my learnings.
Onboarding Matters emphasizes the critical role of structured customer onboarding in transforming new clients into loyal advocates. Weber introduces the Orchestrated Onboarding® framework, a six-phase approach designed to guide customers from initial engagement to expansion.
The six phases are:
Embark: Initiate the customer journey during the sales cycle, setting clear expectations and preparing both parties for a successful partnership
Handoff: Seamlessly transition responsibilities from sales to the onboarding team, ensuring continuity and maintaining the customer's confidence
Kickoff: Formally launch the onboarding process, aligning goals, timelines, and success metrics between the customer and the provider
Adopt: Facilitate product adoption by providing training, resources, and support tailored to the customer's needs, driving engagement and satisfaction
Review: Assess progress against established goals, gather feedback, and address any challenges to reinforce value and foster trust
Expand: Identify opportunities for growth, such as upselling or cross-selling, and continue to nurture the relationship to build long-term loyalty
Weber underscores that neglecting a structured onboarding process can lead to customer dissatisfaction and increased churn. She states, "When customers fail to launch, you never win back their business. It's onboarding that drives renewals." (Onboarding Matters, p. 22). Implementing the Orchestrated Onboarding® framework not only enhances customer satisfaction but also contributes to higher solution adoption and increased customer lifetime value.
Here are my key takeaways from the book:
The importance of taking a customer-centric view
Companies tend to be internally focused more than focused on specific customer needs - Avoid taking an “internal perspective” when designing customer journeys.
Design thinking principles - the entire company, from CSMs to leaders, need to learn as much as they can about what customers want and need. Lead with empathy. Ask customers questions and really listen to their feedback. Interview a diverse set of customers and gather their input. Use learnings to prototype Customer Success programs, then test them with a small set of customers and adjust them.
Cognitive closure
it is important to define a clear end to the buyer’s journey and start of the customer journey. Weber writes, “Providing a clear ending of the buyer journey and a clear beginning of the customer journey keeps customers from dwelling in buyer’s remorse.” (Onboarding Matters, p. 7)
Customer success begins in pre-sales
The "Embark" stage happens in pre-sales - get customers excited about their upcoming adoption and get them prepared. Set clear expectations about the role they need to play and how we will work together to achieve their goals.
According to customer experience expert Joey Coleman, “The best companies in the world take the customer experience offered after the sale and infuse it into marketing and sales, so the customer gets a flavor of the good things to come. This not only incentivizes prospects to sign on the dotted line, but also properly sets the expectations for what will happen after the sale.” - Donna Weber, Onboarding Matters, p. 33
Success plan - build a living document, starting during the Embark stage, that captures business goals, implementation timeline, roles and responsibilities, and risks. Get customer sign off for the success plan!
Handoff meeting - this is a meeting that happens prior to the kickoff meeting; the CSM is introduced and the expectation is set that the CSM will be leading the onboarding process. The handoff meeting also ensures the correct people from the customer organization are involved and understand the purpose and goals of the project, and gains alignment of resource needs and risks to ensure a smooth kickoff and onboarding process.
The customer handoff is designed to calm neural networks and to build trust with clear endings and clear beginnings. - Donna Weber, Onboarding Matters, p. 47
Kickoff meeting - the kickoff meeting, led by the CSM, happens after the opportunity closes, and typically within approximately ten days of the handoff meeting. It sets common expectations across all customer stakeholders about the project plans and deliverables, timelines, and roles and responsibilities.
While the Handoff is about relationships, building trust, and the big picture goals and outcomes, the Kickoff stage is about the details of implementation and adoption. - Donna Weber, Onboarding Matters, p. 62
The need for cross-role collaboration for customer success
The account team and Customer Success Manager (CSM) are in it together and need to act as one team.
Education and Professional Services should align around customer success.
Others such as support and customer marketing can also help map the customer onboarding journey.
Avoid playing “bunch ball” - having too many internal stakeholders on a call with a customer overwhelms the customer. You don’t need all roles on every call. Rely on a system of clear documentation so that internal stakeholders can understand the current state and highlights of customer conversations without having to go to every meeting. The goal is to build transparency and trust across all internal roles. A success plan as a living document achieves this.
Quick wins in the "Adopt" stage are crucial!
Time to first value (TTFV) - needs to reflect value from the customer perspective, not from an internal perspective (e.g. having a user login is not really value delivered to the customer). Use design thinking principles and have conversations with customers to understand what resonates with them.
Conversations with customers help you hear the language and metrics they use to justify the investment in your solution. - Donna Weber, Onboarding Matters, p. 105
It’s important to figure out how to get customers to experience quick wins and shorten the TTFV. Using in-app guidance or simple learning pathways can help a customer realize value before the platform is even fully implemented
Find ways to phase onboarding for products with long implementation timelines. This is probably the biggest “aha!” moment I had. I was always uncomfortable in Professional Services scoping a complex implementation for a customer that would take 3 months to complete, especially given that the SaaS contract is only 12 months in length. Spending 25% of that initial contract getting a server ready for use is risky. Phasing the onboarding to see some quick wins gives the customer demonstrable results more quickly and keeps them excited, keeping the momentum going. We could, for example, have the customer spin up a smaller server in the short term while the architecture is being built out for the scaled-out implementation. Onboard a handful of pilot teams to the smaller architecture, then migrate those teams' data once the scaled-out implementation has been completed
Consider a dedicated onboarding team
Onboarding is a continuous process:
First you onboard initial teams, then additional teams; even after all users have been enabled and onboarded to the product, you will likely have additional users regularly onboarding due to reorganizations, employee turnovers, etc.
Existing users will also need to understand new features as they are released
Less mature groups might need initial onboarding of basics first, then more complex features once they have mastered the basics
If CSMs take responsibility for all of these onboarding scenarios, then they cannot take on more accounts as the company grows. They become a cost center for the company. As an alternative, consider building out a dedicated training team that understands the different user roles, maturity, and specific customer needs will allow them to create self-paced training, documentation, and other self-service reusable assets that align with customer adoption needs.
Effective customer enablement allows CSMs to be tour guides, pointing new users to training offerings rather than personally instructing each individual. - Donna Weber, Onboarding Matters, p. 83
Start with high touch, then enable tech touch learning pathways that customers can consume at their own pace. The people who have experience doing high-touch onboarding and have a deep understanding of customer needs and use cases should be heavily involved in the creation of low-touch, self-paced material. My light-bulb moment here is that it makes better sense in many cases for Education Services teams to be part of Customer Success, not Professional Services, even if paid training services are part of the offerings.
Avoid a content jungle
More does not mean better - customers get overwhelmed and struggle to find the right information for themselves; it’s also difficult to maintain content so customers end up with outdated content that they don’t realize is no longer applicable to them
Measure the impact
It all comes down to money. Customer Success needs to show the customer how they increase revenue, decrease spend, or meet compliance requirements with the product. They also need to demonstrate to internal stakeholders their impact on the company’s bottom line. Metrics are crucial for this.
Start with measuring a baseline before you implement new programs, then track metrics over time to show improvement. Leading indicators might be customer support tickets logged, product usage, or milestones achieved during onboarding. Lagging indicators are metrics such as renewal rates, net retention, and total lifetime value. Be cognizant of what metrics your executive team cares about most, and track those. Also, work with your customers to help them calculate their ROI for successful onboarding and use of your product.
As I’ve indicated in my previous blog post, most churn is the result of a lack of successful product adoption. A prescriptive, customer-centric onboarding approach that is a collaborative, cross-functional effort across customer stakeholders, helps customers successfully adopt a product and reduces churn.
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