A study by Sixteen Ventures Research found that 80-90% of customers who unsubscribe within the first 3 months cite lack of perceived value as the reason for leaving. Onboarding is therefore key in our SaaS environment, as it defines the success and adoption of the solution by the customer.
Onboarding must lay the foundations of your relationship and confirm the customer's choice of your solution, over and above the promise made through digital interactions (website, webinar) and/or exchanges with the Sales team. It guarantees long-term retention, but can also be the starting point for future churn.
To find out if this article might be of interest to you, ask yourself this question:
Is your product user-friendly and self-explanatory enough for your customers to adopt it instantly?
If the answer is No, stay with me!
Note that these tracks are adapted to mid/high touch contexts.
Tip 1: Sales handover ➝ Customer Success
Upstream of onboarding, there's a step that's ESSENTIAL to guarantee its success. This is the handover between the Sales and Customer Success teams, but also with the customer. Onboarding must be punchy, full of glitter, and the customer must follow a seamless path.
A study by Salesforce found that 70% of customers say that aligned processes are very important to winning their business (such as seamless handovers between teams, or contextual engagement based on past interactions).
From an internal point of view, Sales and CS must be aligned with the customer's level of knowledge. The sale may have been going on for some time, during which a great deal of information has been captured by Sales, and if a CRM is in place, it's all there for the CS to pick up. If this structure doesn't yet exist, a GSheet/Notion/Excel form may be all that's needed to get the right information in the first place.
In all cases, a handover must be organized between the parties involved to validate the transmission of the information necessary for the customer's success. A good handover will also help avoid a bad image vis-à-vis the customer by asking the same questions twice.
From an external point of view, an exchange must be organized with the customer to present the next steps and also to explain the change of contact. It is during this exchange that the customer moves from a Sales contact (remaining available for sales issues) to a Customer Success contact who will oversee the deployment, training and long-term use of the solution. The latter becomes the customer's privileged contact.
It's vital to be clear with the customer about this transition, so that they understand that the time for negotiation is over, and that they are moving forward on their journey towards implementing the solution.
Tip 2: Understand customer objectives
Now you have all the information from Sales and the technical levers ready to deploy. Now you just need to connect with the customer and accompany them on their journey.
One of the actions will be to confirm objectives and define expectations.
Initial contact with the customer will enable us toestablish a Success Plan that we can follow over time, for example when preparing QBR/EBR or approaching renewal.
In a nutshell, the Success Plan will contain your customer's key information and will evolve over the course of your partnership to follow :
- its objectives
- its challenges
- the milestones you'll pass together
- the criteria for success in its activity and use of the solution
- indicators to measure success
When we talk about the objective, we're referring to the customer's final goal (e.g. to centrally monitor the accounting of its 20 subsidiaries). But it may be achievable in several months, depending on the technical implementation, the support of the customer's teams and the take-up of the solution.
This initial contact phase should enable us to define a path towards the final objective, which would be made up of a set of sub-objectives, the first of which must be achieved very quickly in order to demonstrate to the customer that he has made the right choice by committing to you. In our example, the first sub-objective could be the deployment of the solution in 1 or 2 subsidiaries, in order to identify the process best suited to your customer and then replicate it, rather than iterating on 20 subsidiaries in parallel, wasting both your and your customer's time.
More generally, the SaaS market is very fast-moving, and the unit of measurement is the month (or even the week). Onboarding should not exceed 2 to 3 months, hence the need to identify the sub-objectives that will ultimately guarantee customer adoption.
Tip 3: Timing onboarding and visibility
Guaranteeing good onboarding means giving it a rhythm, and right from the start the customer will need visibility. You've confirmed their objective, defined sub-objectives with them, and now they'll need projections and dates. Your customer needs to understand the path that awaits him between the first contact and the achievement of the various objectives.
This is crucial at this stage, because a number of actions are going to be his responsibility, and if he doesn't take them, there could be a direct impact on the implementation time. Avoid at all costs the "tunnel effect" where your customer doesn't hear from you for several weeks.
Here are a few levers to frame and help customers with onboarding:
- The use of the first email for Login is sometimes followed by automated email sequences to engage the customer in actions to educate them in the use of the solution;
- The main page of the application coupled with a presentation of the solution (pop-up video, product tour, etc.);
- Communicating the FAQ ;
- Automating actions with no added value for you or your customers. High touch doesn't mean handling everything manually, but rather making human contact more qualitative by letting technology help you do this for certain targeted actions.
But I'd like to focus on 2 other levers:
- Support through calls and points in general.
- Indicators to measure the effectiveness of your onboarding and act accordingly.
Support
Depending on the technical nature of your solution and your approach (in this case, more mid/high touch), you'll need to schedule milestones with your customer. In this way, you'll be able to emphasize the functionalities and the link with the objectives they wish to achieve.
Ensuring that the customer understands the value of what they are receiving through the solution by providing them with support will help to ensure their retention. Initial contacts tend to be more frequent during onboarding, and less so when customer adoption is reached.
Indicators
Indicators will enable you to measure the impact of your onboarding and act accordingly if you don't achieve the expected results. In particular, these indicators enable you to focus your efforts in the right place, by taking action on customers whose indicators are not at the expected levels.
Here are a few that may help guide your actions:
- Time to Value (TTV): despite its position in this list, this is the one that can be measured last. It measures the time between the launch of the partnership and the provision of value from the customer's point of view.. This is sometimes referred to as the Aha! moment. This is when the customer realizes the value of your solution. It's the listing of your customer's objectives and sub-objectives that guides you to this moment. Your goal here is to minimize this TTV.
- Daily/Monthly Active Users (DAU/MAU): This indicator is first and foremost purely volumetric, and should not be studied on its own or without context. It measures the number of users on board, but not how long they stay on. Their frequency of connection can complete the picture and be monitored by the DAU/MAU ratio.
- Completion Rate & Time: This allows you to track the customer's completion of simple actions or the use of defined functionalities (filling in information in a file, creating their first action with your solution, inviting other members of their team to collaborate, etc.). You can even guide customers to take control of the solution via notifications or a progress bar (gamification). Analyzed a posteriori, this indicator will enable you to understand at what level and when successful onboarding is guaranteed, and to act upstream (e.g.: onboarding is validated if my customer uses 2 specific functionalities every 3 days).
Tip 4: Control your availability
In applying the previous tip, you can quickly find yourself overwhelmed by the things you need to do. It' s important to manage your time in relation to the customer, because very often it's not just one customer you're working with.
Segmentation and playbooks are the keys to controlling your availability. The 2 together will enable you to carry out the right actions at the right times according to the type of user.
Segmentation
Segmentation comes up again and again during the sales process (by sector, size, etc.), but it's just as important after the sale, and it's often not the same segmentation that's used again, because the objectives (yours this time!) are no longer the same. To simplify, at the risk of caricaturing, the Sales team's objective is to get a customer to sign a contract, whereas the role of the post-sales team, and in particular Customer Success, is to keep that customer, thanks to the levers partly mentioned here. The difference in segmentation can also be explained by the fact that you don't generally talk to the same people between sales and support.
You have free rein to create segmentations specific to your business, but here are 4 that come up frequently:
- By stage in the customer journey: Trials / Expired trials / Paying customers (Basic / Business) / Discontinued subscriptions. A specific Playbook will be played for each category. We won't guide each category in the same way.
- By customer type and characteristics: Sometimes close to or even identical to the Sales segmentation if we refer to the market (Industry, Pharma, etc.) it can also be based on the characteristics of the domain. In other words, you're going to support a tech company that knows SaaS differently from a greengrocer who may have other priorities than IT. But in both cases, you'll be working with them to demonstrate the value your solution will bring them.
- By product: you offer several products, and your customers are seen across this spectrum. In this scheme, Customer Success Managers may specialize in one or more of these products.
- By value: the latter can be interesting, but has the drawback (in my opinion!) of keeping a Sales vision of the Success function. Whether you're tracking MRR, ARR or LTV, you mustn't stop there, as you may miss out on the Capacity to evolve aspect of a "small" customer, which may be the subsidiary of a large group, for example. It should also be compared with the profitability of the account, in short, the time spent with a customer VS the sales it generates.
Playbooks
Now that the segmentation has been established, it's time to talk about Playbooks. In concrete terms Playbooks are processes that can be activated depending on the situation, to provide the most coherent support possible.. They can take the form of a To-do list to guide the CSM through a specific situation.
In the context of onboarding, here are some Playbooks:
- New customer
- New user
- First use of the solution
- Defining the customer's Success Plan
Playbooks will make it possible to standardize your actions and onboard new CSMs more quickly. The instructions for use are available, and all they have to do is (almost) roll out the existing process. They need to be kept up to date, because just like your products, your processes evolve and are refined to be more efficient.
Tip 5: Onboarding is continuous
To put it more succinctly, educating the customer about your solution is a constant process, and onboarding is not a stage reserved for the beginning of the customer journey. On the one hand, new users may arrive at your customer's premises, enabling you to spread the solution and increase penetration.
But also because your solution is necessarily evolving, and your customers need to be informed so that they can open up the up-sell/cross-sell subject jointly with Sales. This then leads to training on these new functionalities, enabling customers to achieve their objectives thanks in part to your solution.
From there, the process loops back to the onboarding you defined.
