5 Basics of Scalable Growth That No One Taught You In Business School
Client Onboarding Isn’t Just About Getting Started
If you had to describe your client onboarding process, what would you say?
Flawless?
Adequate?
Generally rocky?
We all understand that first impressions are important. Your marketing gets you noticed, and your Sales team gets your product in the door. The sales process articulates the benefits of the product and the ROI the client can expect when it is fully implemented.
But onboarding is where your organization is exposed to the client's entire workforce.
And if that experience isn't striving for flawless, the risk to your organization can be the difference between a customer who realizes the value of your product and one who never does.
At the beginning of an onboarding process, everyone is excited. The customer has made the decision to buy, your team has closed the deal, and everyone is ready to get started.
Onboarding is responsible for maintaining that momentum. But it isn't only the responsibility of the onboarding team to do it.
Onboarding turns projected revenue into realized revenue.
This is the part of onboarding that doesn't get enough attention.
A customer signing a contract creates projected revenue.
A customer successfully implementing, adopting and using your product creates realized revenue.
If the client doesn't adopt the product as defined in the contract and Statement of Work, the revenue projections aren't necessarily going to be realized.
So what does the Onboarding team know that Sales and Product may not?
Did you know that 62% of onboarding professionals say their company has lost at least one customer early because of a poor onboarding experience?
Are the promises made during the sales process actually resonating with the client as implementation progresses?
How easy or difficult is it to train users on the product?
Where is the client experiencing friction that wasn't apparent during the sales process?
This is why it is critical to pay attention to how your onboarding process operates—and to have visibility into that process across the organization.
Final Thought
Don't toss the customer over the fence.
The worst thing Sales and Product can do is toss the client over the fence to Onboarding and assume everything is good.
The customer doesn't experience Sales.
Then Onboarding.
Then Product.
Then Support.
They experience one company.
The better these functions communicate during onboarding, the better the experience for the client—and the greater the likelihood that projected revenue becomes realized revenue.
Your company doesn’t scale because someone works harder. It scales because everyone works together.
Your onboarding process is giving you three critical forms of intelligence.
Market Validation
Is the marketing and sales messaging accurate? Are the capabilities that were promised actually working as described—and are they delivering the value the client expected?
Usability
When actual users get access to your product, can they learn to use it effectively? Training becomes easier when the product is intuitive and users perceive it as easier or better than what they were using before.
Adoption
Market validation and usability ultimately lead to adoption. When implementation and rollout occur on schedule, it provides greater confidence that the revenue projections associated with that customer can actually be realized.
So what drags when Client Onboarding and Product don't talk?
The most obvious drag is revenue.
The less obvious drag is your ability to scale the onboarding operation itself.
When onboarding is successful, the risk of missing revenue targets is reduced.
But consider what happens when a single client onboarding is delayed.
The onboarding team now has resources committed longer than planned. That impacts the team's ability to schedule the next customer. One delayed implementation can create a backlog of customers waiting to be onboarded—and a backlog of revenue that remains unrealized.
Now you have a scaling problem.
And this is where the ecosystem matters.
What should you do?
Sales and Product need visibility into what is actually happening during onboarding.
Ask:
Are the planned onboarding steps being delayed? If so, why?
Is the client participating in the onboarding process as expected?
Is the client pushing back on the expected ROI?
Is the onboarding team having to pull in resources that weren't originally planned?
Is training being consumed—and is it translating into competent users of the platform?
This information shouldn't stay inside the onboarding team.
It needs to move back into the organization so that Sales can refine the promise, Marketing can refine the message, and Product can improve the experience.
