5 SaaS Onboarding Best Practices to Ensure Your Customers' Success

关于客户成功的许多文章都集中在结构和招聘团队，保留客户以及交叉销售和销售。尽管所有这些领域都很重要，但几乎没有提及一个关键主题 - 登上客户。

当公司意识到它对短期和长期用户保留产生的巨大影响时，入职是一个热门话题。对于更高的客户成功团队而言，这种重点不应该有所不同。

在这篇文章中，我将重点介绍五种方法来为入门成功做好准备 - 以及为什么这些步骤如此重要。

5 SaaS Onboarding Best Practices to Ensure Success

1. Align with Sales

出色的客户入职经验始于销售。销售团队对购买后的最初几天，几周或数月内将发生的事情设定的期望可以极大地帮助或阻碍入门进度和时间，以证明您的客户价值。

不一致的期望可能很简单，就像客户在购买后会与某人交谈的速度，这是在入职期间所需的投资时间的巨大投资。加入行动的一个主要原因是应许，客户期望和现实之间的脱节。

为了确保这里没有断开连接，我倡导花时间在销售前内容，与潜在客户交谈，定期培训并提醒销售团队有关您的入职和客户成功计划的样子。听起来很简单，但是需要一致的时间和精力，随着成长和扩展，它会变得更加困难。

Create Content

设定有关入职和客户成功服务的期望的可扩展方法是创建解释它的网页，下载和工具。公司投入大量时间和金钱来销售其产品，这对于您的入职过程应该没有什么不同。

If you are creating content, my advice is to keep the resources as visual as possible. GANTT charts, timelines, or other visual resources will avoid any wrong interpretation your team or the customer.

与潜在客户交谈

我总是惊讶how little I see this happening in the customer success world. Speaking to potential customers before they even sign up is a great investment of your time. It builds credibility, helps set the right expectations, and gives onboarding teams a greater sense of the concerns and hesitations customers have before they sign up.

但是，销售也可能会犹豫，邀请面向客户的团队参加与潜在客户的会议和呼吁。有一种感觉，您可能会分心结束对话或“太诚实”。这里有一条精美的路线，所以我建议事先与销售代表开会，以探讨策略和您定位入职的方法 - 在销售结束之前。

Build customer success modules into your sales training

Your new sales hires should be exposed to the work your onboarding teams do. Training doesn't need to be formalized, but reps can join or shadow meetings and calls with the onboarding team.

Balance the training with the types of conversations your team has, success stories, and roadblocks and problems you run into early on. If you position your onboarding services as a value-add that sales teams can lean into to help sell, you're much more likely to build their trust.

2. Optimize for Time

When a customer makes a purchase, we'd like to think that they're happy and excited about that decision. To capitalize on this excitement and keep momentum going post-sale, you have to make some sort of connection with the customer within the first 24 hours. Otherwise, that motivation can dwindle, and other projects and priorities may come across your customers desk. In the worst case, that customer may even experience buyer's remorse and start to question their purchase decision.

在您的CSM或实施团队的时间表中构建“新客户欢迎时间”

Initially, this requires digging into numbers. By looking at the trends and numbers of customers you sign up each month or quarter, you can predict how much time needs to be put aside on the teams' schedule to welcome new customers.

Where possible, always default to prioritizing new customers. With existing customers, there's at least some level of trust and they may understand if you need to reschedule. There's zero trust with new customers, and if you let them down early, it can take twice as much effort to get them back on track later on.

Automate some of the process

Scheduling calendars across your team and your customers' teams can be time-consuming and an unproductive way to spend time early on in your customer's lifecycle. When a deal closes, an automatic welcome email should be sent to the customer that includes: next steps, their points of contact, and information about how to book time them.

那里有大量工具可以帮助进行这种自动化。如果您的营销团队使用某种自动化工具，请查看您是否可以利用它并创建自己的客户入职活动 - 或尝试使用HubSpot Meetings.

3. Do Your Research

When I started working with customers I received some advice that has stuck with me since: Whatever amount of time you plan to spend with your customer during your first interaction, spend an equal amount of time preparing.

New customers haven't built up a trust in your service in the early days. By researching their business, industry, and team, you can ease any concerns or doubts by speaking their language, showing you understand their business, and relating to the people on their team.

With the rise of professional networks like LinkedIn and company profile sites like Crunchbase, it's easier than ever to quickly get detailed information on the companies and people you're working with:

• 详细浏览客户的网站
• 研究团队在LinkedIn
• Look out forcrunchbasepages or similar profiles for their company
• Do a Google News search for their company
• 使用<<SimilarWeb<

Use this information to prepare an "ideal world plan" in advance of the meeting in case things go off-course or you need to be more prescriptive.

4.快速创建价值

当我们讨论免费增值世界中的入职时，我们经常谈论the "aha moment"并尽快使您的用户到达那里。

This shouldn't be any different with higher-touch onboarding. It might not possible to arrive at the full "aha moment" when working with more complicated tools or enterprise software, but you need to look for opportunities to show "micro-value" as quickly as possible when your customer signs up.

我见过太多的客户成功团队口头的d their first onboarding sessions simply welcoming the customer, discussing goals, and scheduling next steps and calls -- without getting something tangible done. Those topics are, of course, important, but even if you can complete something as simple as turning on one tool or ticking off one basic task, the feeling of making progress can put the customer at ease.

5. Reinforce Goals

This one sounds obvious, but when a customer starts working with a new tool, it can be confusing as to why they are doing certain things in a certain order. Without a lot of context, it can be difficult to see how everything ties together when you start using new software.

另一方面，客户成功经理通常确切地知道为什么他们推荐某些任务或行动计划 - 因为他们知道使客户成功所需要的是什么。考虑到这一点，您在入职期间分配或与客户一起处理的每项任务都应备份“为什么”。

This is why it's so important to understand your customers' short, medium, and long-term goals and priorities. The ability to justify your actions by falling back on those goals helps build trust and reduce a lot of anxiety in the beginning of your customer's lifecycle.

此博客文章的一个版本最初出现在Keep | Grow.