SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Tips for Creating a $1m Customer Onboarding Experience
26 Jun 2023
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I'm very excited to share this recording with you guys, which happened at our conference, sasopen.com, with over 100 speakers, all founders of B2B SaaS companies. We have a very high bar for what speakers share on stage, so you're going to enjoy this episode where we dive deep into revenue graphs, real tactics, and real growth metrics.
You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
We've published thousands of these interviews, and if you want to sort through them quickly by revenue or churn, CAC, valuation, or other metrics, the easiest way to do that is to go to getlatka.com and use our filtering tool. It's like a big Excel sheet for all of these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com. Hi, everyone. So I'm Alex.
I'm the founder of a company called Collect. So it's usecollect.com. So we started as a document collection platform, pivoting, slightly pivoting, to a customer onboarding platform. And today I'm going to talk about the customer onboarding. So let's go. During the next 20 minutes, we will talk about how to improve your customer onboarding.
I will try to explain what is customer onboarding and why it's different from user onboarding. Then we will go through how to reduce the friction during your onboarding process and also how you can improve the process by itself. But first, I want to talk while I'm French, and you know France is supposed to be the country of love. So I will start by talking about love.
And when you go into a relationship with someone, there is sometimes, not to say often, a difference between the reality and the expectation. Basically, you're dreaming about something crazy, always dreamful, but in the end, sometimes it looks like more on the right. And guess what? It can be the same business-wise.
Sometimes you think you will buy a new software, it will be perfect, it will bring your company to the next level. But in the end, going and starting using the product is quite a nightmare. And you don't understand why. And this is why we will talk about customer onboarding today. So customer onboarding is critical in SaaS. But maybe first, what is customer onboarding?
So customer onboarding is all activities involved in helping new customers to reach value of your product, to get the AI moment. But I mean, this is one of the difficulties with this kind of conference. We all have SaaS. Well, I guess if you are here, it's for this reason. But there is a high chance that we don't have the same type of SaaS. So maybe you have product-led growth SaaS.
So in your case, customer onboarding will be very similar to user onboarding. But if you are selling to an enterprise company, there is a high chance that your process looks like a few-month process, and it's a project management thing that you need to go through. So what we've seen is most of the time, it's directly correlated.
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Chapter 2: What is customer onboarding and why is it important?
You need to improve the communication during this step. Now, how to reduce the friction of your customer onboarding process. Well, the good news is we've got something to help you doing that. We put together what we call a customer onboarding framework. I will give you the link right after to use it if you want.
So basically, the idea with this framework is you will break down your current process. You will list all the steps of your customer onboarding. be the most granular as possible with this file. Don't forget all the steps that are not official, and also include the steps that are not visible by your customer itself, but that are on your side. Maybe you can improve that too.
For each step, the idea here will be to use what I call the AIM method. So basically it's assess, improve, and measure. First step, assess.
Chapter 3: How does customer onboarding differ from user onboarding?
Is this step important? Maybe it's not. How difficult is it to achieve? What type of difficulty there is at this step? Then improve it. What type of solution can we imagine to improve this step? You will also detail the improvement that you can make and then ideally measure. How can you measure that what you've done is effective?
You can also imply your customers in this process and I will encourage you to ask them feedback about how they felt the process when you onboard them. So you can just go use another template which is in the same file, just to send them to your client, say, okay, how did you filter the different steps? Do you felt any friction? What could you improve?
And then using this feedback, you can improve your process. If we focus on the different types of difficulties that you can have for each step, it can be time consuming. People are busy, so it's hard to make them do the work. They need data, they need people inside the company. Maybe there is a lack of integration or a lack of templates.
And the last one, and I would say it's probably the most difficult one, is lack of meaning. You are asking your customer to do something, but they don't understand why they need to do that. So you need to explain why it's important for you to make them do something at this step. The good news is that we've got, I would say, a big toolkit to fix those different difficulties.
Lots of different ways to do that. You can remove the steps, you can split the steps. We will go through with different examples right after. You can also customize the process. You can offer templates, do it for them, and so on. If you want to download the file, just scan the code and you will get access to it. I'm pretty sure that also you will be able to get it later. Well, I guess that...
all these files will be shared later. Now, let's try to do that in practice with different examples. First example, and I'm pretty sure that most of the SaaS have these kind of steps, invite your team. Pretty easy. But it's easy, but it can be time consuming, especially if you've got lots of users that will have access to the tool. How can we fix that? You can do it for them.
You can ask your client, just send me the list of all the users we need to invite and we will do it for you. This is a first fix that you can offer. Another one, you can improve the product. Maybe you can allow your users to upload a list of users, or you can do LDAP and single sign-in, so it's pretty easy for them to invite their users. Second example, internal communication.
So it was an interesting client. So it's a SaaS, and they are doing a platform to have volunteer work inside a company. So basically the platform is pretty simple. You just tell, well, so as an employee, you will just tell when you are available. And there are different associations where you can spend time with. And so you just need to register somewhere and go through.
The main difficulty in their case was internal communication. Basically, their buyer, they bought the software, but then they need to communicate around the initiative internally. So what they did is they create, so first they create something to teach and train their users, but then they also created a ready-to-use communication kit. So basically, as a customer of this solution,
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