8 advice to successfully onboard new customer with a SaaS solution
By: Artem Gurnov
Tags: Customer Onboarding, Customer Success, Wrike, SaaS

Here at Wrike, I work with a large number of customers in the SMB segment. Successful onboarding plays a critical role in SaaS product adoption. And many problems our customers have after several months of using our solution is caused by the lack of proper onboarding.

Why is the initial stage of using a SaaS solution so important? Because it involves a lot more than a training session like many tend to think. It’s also about setting and validating company goals, determining milestones to track the progress toward these goals, building new habits for the team (and this is a large issue on its own because it’s related to change management), and more.

In this article, I share advice that was useful when I onboarded clients. I hope that they’ll help you jumpstart your customers with your product or service and contribute to long-term relationships.

Set clear expectations

It’s well known that we evaluate our experience with any product or service based on our initial expectations. So even before the beginning of the onboarding process, it’s very important to manage customer’s expectations with your product. It all needs to start with the goals that the customer sets when they decide to purchase the product. The first step is to evaluate these goals and check whether they’re achievable with your solution. If not, it’s best to be honest with your customer. A lot of managers are afraid to tell their customers what their product can’t do. In my personal experience, customers respond positively in most cases. I’ve heard phrases like, “Thank you for confirming that. You actually saved us a lot of time trying to find out how exactly that could be done with your solution.” But, of course, if there’s a workaround that you can offer, make sure that you mention it.

The next step is to set a realistic timeframe for your customers. For example, a technically complex solution can’t be rolled out in a couple of days — it usually takes time and effort. Try to be as realistic as possible when sharing your estimate on when certain things can potentially be achieved. It’s great if you already have experience with a customer from a similar industry; you’d be able to name the rollout duration more accurately and share the roadblocks that other customers have encountered.

Finally, all of these goals need to be transferred to a shared document. It’s very important for several reasons. It would be easier to address the goals and the company’s progress if these goals are easy to access. And any progress could also be visualized in the document for reference. Secondly, the person who made the decision to purchase your product or service may leave the organization at some point. Their successor would evaluate all of the existing solutions and decide whether or not to continue using them or terminate the subscription. The document would be very useful in this situation because it would answer why the solution had been purchased and what value it brings.

Training is a must

One of the worst assumptions when implementing a SaaS solution is that the team can learn how to use it on the go. In most cases, it won’t happen. Even if the developer says the solution is simple, it may not seem that way for everyone, especially for those who aren’t tech-savvy.

It’s important to set aside enough time for the training. Everyone needs to see that management is treating the new solution seriously by dedicating the necessary amount of working hours to get started. The pace of the training needs to be moderate and flexible to ensure everyone has enough time to get comfortable with the new solution. Also, don’t forget to consider the time necessary for the Q&A session. Sometimes it’s better not to interrupt during the training and have a lengthy Q&A section in the end, but in other cases, it’d be a good idea to break the training into logical blocks and do a small Q&A session after each. I personally prefer the latter approach. And don’t forget to record the training, so your team members can revise the material later.

Plan quick wins early

Even though it’s important to set clear and realistic expectations, it’s also critical to plan one or several quick wins that the client’s organization gets from your solution not long after the onboarding process. These wins don’t have to be major, but they should be visible. It’s difficult to commit to something without results on the horizon, so make sure that these results are part of the plan you come up with during the onboarding process.

Let’s review the characteristics of a quick win. It needs to be:

Easy to implement: It shouldn’t require too many resources spent by the management and/or by the team members.

It shouldn’t require too many resources spent by the management and/or by the team members. Available out of the box: It should be a quick rollout without any tricks and workarounds.

It should be a quick rollout without any tricks and workarounds. Address one of the company’s pain points: This can be anything that’s irritating for the team and will bring positive results when resolved.

This can be anything that’s irritating for the team and will bring positive results when resolved. Not time-consuming: We’re talking about quick wins.

We’re talking about quick wins. Described in detail in your help resources: Your team members should be able to implement it without your help if needed.

Quick wins keep the team motivated to continue using the product or service you’re providing because they’ll see the value of the solution and understand that there’s more to come.

Don’t assume

One of the worst mistakes you can make during the onboarding process is to make assumptions about what the team is already familiar with. The best assumption you can make is that the team has zero understanding of your product or service and you need to explain the essentials in such detail that there’s no room left for misunderstandings. Every time you start the training without explaining the basics you risk ending up in a situation where the team doesn’t understand any of the advanced concepts, which decreases the value of the training to zero.

If the team already had time to familiarize themselves with the essentials, they’ll tell you about it. And then it would be OK to skip the initial part and move forward to discuss more specific use cases and best practices. In my experience, team members who are familiar with the product in general (for example, those who have used it at their previous job) often enjoy reviewing the basic materials to make sure that they didn’t miss anything earlier.

Prepare a list of habits

Using a new solution is all about building and maintaining new habits, and it’s definitely not something that happens overnight. Because of that, you need to carefully plan all the new, daily routines for the team and have a good reason prepared for why they should be doing these routines.

There’s an approach related to change management that I described in another article called “What’s In It For Me” (WIIMF). According to this approach, every time the management team makes a decision to implement a new solution (or, speaking more generally, a major organizational change), a question needs to be asked: How would each team member personally benefit from the solution and what value would the solution bring? Here are some common examples:

The solution can save time.

It can help the team avoid mistakes that lead to double work.

It can help the team eliminate (or at least decrease the amount of) boring work, so they can focus more on the interesting parts of their jobs.

It can help the team earn more money (which is caused by increased efficiency).

…and more!

Once you’ve agreed with the decision-maker in your client’s organization on which arguments would work for their team members, prepare a list of habits required to use the solution on a daily basis efficiently (e.g., spend 15 minutes at the end of the date updating the information) and share that list with the decision-maker so they can use it for reference later.

Take baby steps

I’d like to state that this recommendation isn’t applicable to every scenario, but sometimes it’s the only way to get things going. Rolling out the solution to the team or organization often takes a lot of time and effort from the whole team. And sometimes it isn’t possible to get everyone through the onboarding process simultaneously So, in certain situations, it’s good to start small. Brainstorm with the person who made the decision to purchase the solution on what kind of results could be achieved quickly without investing too much of everyone’s time. It could be a small process in which only a few team members are involved or an activity that every employee performs on a daily basis that should’ve been automated a long time ago, no matter how minor it is.

After you achieve results here, you could move to the next area and keep rolling out the solution by building on that success. As you can see, this advice actually resonates a lot with another one provided: plan quick wins. When you have specific and successful cases that worked for the organization, it becomes much easier to get other team members involved.

Do a health check

Improvement starts with measurement. To validate that the onboarding process has gone smoothly, I recommend calling the customer at the end of onboarding. Ask your customer how the solution is helping their company move toward its goals. It’s important to look at the progress from different perspectives — both from the side of specific and measurable metrics that show how the customer’s processes have been improved with your product — and to listen (or read) to the feedback that the decision-maker and team members provide. Sometimes the perceived value is bigger or smaller than the results, so after you gather all the information, make sure that you identify the reason for the misalignment.

Doing a health check soon after the end of the onboarding process also gives you the opportunity to provide additional recommendations to the customer, correct common mistakes, and learn more things you can add to your list of what could potentially go wrong during the onboarding process to avoid those problems in the future.

Share resources

To make the results you’ve worked hard for during the onboarding phase last, the customer needs to have all the necessary resources on your product available. Nowadays companies providing SaaS solutions prepare educational materials in all kinds of formats: articles, tutorial videos, webinars, interactive courses, and more. The availability of a huge number of these resources creates a new problem: How should a customer navigate all these resources to find exactly what they need? To address that problem, you need to choose a list of help resources that are tailored to your customer’s needs and share the list during the onboarding process. It won’t be time-consuming to re-send the links several times so that all team members won’t have trouble finding them. Do that at the beginning of the onboarding process, re-share the links at the end, and do that again during the health check.

I hope that these recommendations will be useful to you. Remember that the effort you invest into the onboarding process will pay off, because it builds a strong base for active usage of your solution and, as a result, contributes to the chance that the subscription will be renewed.