B2B onboarding tends to follow a universal script. The opportunity closes. The system’s provisioned. A ‘welcome email’ goes out — and this might the first of maybe two, or even three. Someone schedules a kickoff meeting and … maybe implementation stays on track, maybe it doesn’t.
For most organizations, the problem is in that very first welcome email. Take a look at this example — farcical, but reflective of what we see in the wild.
Dear Customer,
Welcome to M6 Advisory! You’ve acquired unmatched customer success advisory capabilities, and we’re excited to get started. Take the following steps to enable access for your account:
- Log in to this link, using this temporary account and password.
- Go to Settings, and do this and that. Oh yeah, there’s a lot of data upload we need to work on.
We will schedule your kickoff call here. Prior to that call, you should review the following —
- This onboarding guide
- This site
- Five separate webinars
- This other site
- This customer testimonial video
- Etc.
Now, a few more paragraphs about everything we think you should know.
It’s information-dense (everything we think you should know), and that’s the problem. In the customer’s mind, (everything we think you should know) becomes (all this extra work I have to do, probably in my off-hours). A B2B solution that purported to make my life easier has, at the first point of post-sale contact, made my life harder.
We’re not going to pretend that implementations can be complex, that tasks like bulk data uploads aren’t necessary, or that admins and users may need a lot of training. But the first point of welcome needs to reinforce value and enthusiasm for change. Welcome shouldn’t translate to ‘all the things.’ It should, instead —
- Headline why the customer purchased the solution, and the value they can expect. Add a link to a testimonial from another customer to help reinforce that message.
- Define the minimum viable step(s) for the customer to activate the solution and see value. What’s the one feature a customer can use, with the smallest number of steps, to see a demonstration of value?
- Equip the customer to take the next step(s) on the onboarding journey. Here, the focus should be on progress without friction. That may mean giving the customer a project plan template so they don’t need to build their own. Or a progressive series of educational resources — offered multi-modally — that take the user from fundamentals to more advanced usage (and here, you may just want to start with a small set of ‘takeoff’ resources).
This reframing should push teams to look at the ‘welcome’ as a critical point of customer experience and change management. Some will object that this slows onboarding. But talk to an implementation specialist or a CSM, and you’ll find that it’s the vast minority of customers that show up to their first call knowledgeable and prepared. Chances are that more are showing up overwhelmed (or at least nervous) at what’s ahead of them. They may have watched a video or two, but that’s it. And their why — along with their earlier enthusiasm — is slowly drowning under the weight of the how. You’re trying to welcome them, and they’re getting smothered.
Here’s something we’d write instead.
Welcome to M6 Advisory! We’re looking forward to helping you hit your customer retention targets. We’ve outlined three steps to get started, in advance of our kickoff —
- Set up your account here — it should take about two minutes.
- Build your one-page success plan template here — it’s where most customers start, and you can try it without needing any data uploads.
- Download a copy of our recommended implementation project plan here, including change management templates and suggested training plans for your team.
Is there anything else we should know ahead of our kickoff call?