Transform Customer Onboarding with These Practical Steps

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Hey everyone, Eric here for CSM Practice, the podcast that's here to give you all the tips and the advice that you can implement as fast as tomorrow if you wanted to. to get your customer success practice a whole lot better And we aim to give you practices from every phase of the customer journey, including onboarding. And so today I have Christy Feltorusso, the very, very famous Christy.

who works at client success. Yes, that's the one that we all love and appreciate. And I enjoy every single thing that this lady does. Christy, thank you so much for coming to my show again.

And I thought, well, well done, Christy. I expected nothing short of this. Before that I've never seen anything that how you navigate as a customer success executive and I think a lot of people that are gonna listen to this podcast episode are gonna be A blown away, B inspired and three, maybe even make some changes in their own organization, hopefully.

and renew and grow, hopefully build some advocates. And so we know that this is a core area of how we can get our customers well established into the partnership. But what we have found is that so many of our customers struggled because of their maturation. So we're talking about companies who just don't have well built out processes and infrastructure.

As you mentioned, so I'm building this out at client success, which is a customer success management solution. So we help our customers manage their customers from new to renew. So our objective is helping customer success leaders. Operationalize their customer success programs through our product. But what we found, Areed, is that so many of our customers coming into the partnership didn't have a strategy in place.

They almost purchased us as if we were the strategy. And because so many of the leaders were either new or coming from different parts of their organization, maybe a sales leader that was put into customer success. or somebody from marketing or just another role, they didn't have that foundational customer success experience. And so giving them access to a solution like ours raised a lot of questions. They didn't know what they didn't know. And it wasn't just about the product.

It was about this space. And so we recognized early on that we needed to be more consultative with how we onboard our customers. It was no longer about training them on the product and helping them with configuration. It had to anchor on education. And so we knew that that was gonna be the difference maker for us, especially in our space. So if we could help educate our customers and help design their programs with them in our product simultaneously.

they were gonna be able to see more value and then ultimately get onboarded more effectively, get them onboarded faster, and then get more value, ultimately stay and grow with us over time. So that was kind of the core driver of why we decided to make some of the changes.

retention, growth, and advocacy. So they're doing it all. And listen, there's pros and cons to that. I wish I did have a team to help us build out and operationalize this and structure it a little bit more. And maybe that's on the horizon for us. But right now our CSMs are responsible for that.

auditorily gives them all the resources, has a project plan in there. And so for each stage of the journey, they're getting all the resources that they need to be the most successful through this process. And honestly, building it in Google Sites was super easy because it's part of our stack. So YouTube integrates in there our Google Sheets, our Google Docs. So it was an easy way to build a nice place, a repository for all of our customers.

And the coolest thing, I read, we have had many of our customers love this so much, they went out and built their own Google sites for their onboarding.

And so we knew that there was a real need for us to reduce the time that they were spending in onboarding. So that was a big driver of this because my CSMs needed to free up time to manage the rest of their book because they are full stack. So

understanding that my team was struggling with their own capacity, I had to be thoughtful about where can we drive some efficiencies and make some changes. So that was a core driver of that. The second obviously being our customers and them getting value from our product.

We knew that because they didn't have the knowledge and the experience, their own resources to do this, we had to lean into that education. So what we were able to do is obviously drastically reduce a lot of their onboarding time because it took the work that they were doing during onboarding, we kind of gave it to them.

We built out workbooks, we gave them templates, we gave them a ton of resources to say, you know what, let's start here. This might not be perfect, but it's something. And it facilitated the right conversations. And what we'll tell you, and I think this is true for everybody.

It is very overwhelming to start with a blank sheet of paper. But the minute you give somebody something to build off of, the ideas just start flowing. And it became so natural for them to just start to understand these are the things that we need. This is what we're looking for. This is how we have to think about it.

So that was the second driver was helping our customers reduce the time. And like I said, and then going back to the business, most of our customers were primarily on a twelve month subscription, which means if you're eating four to six months in just onboarding.

That's half the contract. We start our renewal process at 120 days out, which basically means you're onboarding for like 50% of it. You're in the journey for like, I don't know, a month or two. And then before you know it, we're starting the renewal. And so that wasn't a great experience for our customers.

And it didn't allow them the opportunity to get the value and to make an informed decision based off of real KPIs to say, yes, this platform provides value to me and my team and my business and I want to keep it. And so because of those three drivers, we knew that something had to do.

Three things that made this approach work. What were like the key components of the approach that you took to accelerate, sounds like the onboarding phase.

Because not everyone starts in the same place. But what we realized is that very early on, majority of our customers, it was just their maturation, their knowledge, and basically what they had designed coming into the partnership. So those gaps were where we started. The second thing was anchoring on content creation. What we realize is that again the

Our customers didn't have the knowledge, they didn't have the experience, and they didn't have the resources. So in order for us to scale delivery model that would help accelerate this for them, we wanted to remove a lot of that heavy lifting from them. And so we needed to design content.

So we built things like workbooks. Our workbooks have all of the things that you would configure in client success, pre built, pre designed. And they can kind of pick from like almost like a buffet and say, like, yes, I like these and we'll configure that and do that.

And it gave them a place to start. We've created so many new video shorts. We created written content. We launched the boot camps back in twenty twenty one, the C S Leadership Bootcamp series that client success does. So we anchored that in. We launched a customer success master class webinar series, which is just for our customers and focuses on different parts of our product and how our customers can be using it. So content. We went heavy in thinking about

Where do they want it? How do they want it? What's the best way to deliver it? How can we package it up? Where can we leverage what we already have? What needs to be like net new? And so what heavy on content creation. And the third thing was del the delivery mechanism. How were we able to package this up? and help guide our customers through this in a way that was gonna be able to follow a framework that was repeatable.

And give them access to resources so that they can also independently manage their onboarding. It couldn't be something that was heavily reliant on just our one to one meetings. And/or the CSM guiding them. I wanted to empower them through these frameworks to basically take ownership of their onboarding so they can accelerate that.

Alright, let's get back to it. This is where the good stuff really kicks in.

the first step that you've done is this gap analysis. So what I'd like to do with your permission is actually go through each one of these components and understand sort of like the do's and don'ts. What are some of the lessons learned. What would you recommend yourself to do if you had to do it again?

Were they first time leaders? Was this the first time that they ever led a C S organization? So what was their maturation professionally? We looked at things like have they deployed a customer success product before, whether it be like a gain site or Totango or something else, just understanding have they been here before? Or if they haven't deployed it.

at any point in their professional career, even as an IC, how do they used a customer success platform? Because that would help us understand, do they have a familiarity with our product and what it can offer? So we started to assess that. Do they have access to their CEO? So the leaders that we're working with, where do they roll up into the organization? We started to do a deep dive on that. So a lot of the gap analysis started with who we're working with.

because that allowed us to kind of drop these individuals into different categories, which said, okay, you were either kind of in this educate, enable, or empower. And those are kind of the three buckets that we designed for this framework. If you're early stage, let's say this is your first time you're leading a CS team, you've never deployed a CS product, you don't have a real strategy, you don't report to the CEO, your limited resources.

Guess what? You're gonna be in the educate bucket, which isn't bad. It just helps us understand what you need as a professional to be successful in this partnership. On the other side, if you are a seasoned leader with lots of experience, you've done this 10 times before, you probably don't need us the same way that earlier leader does. So we want to put you in that.

empower bucket where we're here to just help you understand how to best leverage client success. And then you can hit the ground running. You can just go and take off. So the needs are very different. So we started with the who. Then we started to figure out, well, what were the gaps that existed? Majority of these customers, because we had built a framework of this success probability score, which I could talk about in a bit, allowed us to understand who was coming in with a pre-designed

program. Who already had a strategy defined and designed? Now what we found is that majority of our customers coming in, I'm talking like well over 50% of our customers coming in did not have a pre-designed customer success strategy. Now when I say that, I'm talking things like how they segment their customers, their customer journey, their engagement model, all of the things, those bits and pieces that go into that entire post-sale journey.

Did they have that designed? Did they have it defined? And are they able to use a solution like ours to operationalize it? Meaning did they have the right KPIs in mind? What are the metrics they want to measure against it? Majority of our customers just didn't have that. Which means we had to give them the tools and the resources to go and build that out. So that was the second part of the gap analysis. So we had the who, then we had this like we'll call that the what.

And then we had the how. We had to understand what are the resources? Like how were they going to get this done? We know that at client success, we're a SaaS product, software as a service, not service as a service. So they need to be able to use our software independently.

to get the value that they need from it. So how were they gonna be able to do that? Did they have the right resources? Did they have the right tech stack to integrate with us? Did they have the right data? So how they were going to be successful also told us a lot. So The gap analysis, it went much deeper than that, but I think those three anchor points are enough to get people to conceptualize and say, okay, these are three areas that we looked at to say there was a clear gap.

But now these are the areas that we want to spend a lot of our time figuring out how do we solve that for them.

and put them in a specific category that dictates what are you going to give them next. So if they already are very mature, they know what their framework is for the customer success team, they don't necessarily need to define it. But if they don't have the basics, you're there to help them. And I think that the goal is to get customers to a higher success probability score, meaning a higher maturity over time. So

If I'm already coming in and I'm in empower, what is the focus exactly? Is it to automate the things that you already have on a manual basis at the moment?

So in that sense, automation is a part of what our technology offers for our customers, but it's not what our customers are anchoring on. When we think about that empower, it's how do we help get our customers' programs built into client success quickly and creatively. At the end of the day, usually the folks that are in that kind of higher end of that probability score, they have a lot of predefined ways that they want to deliver their customer success program.

So this is where we have to creatively come up with like the how can you do it through our solution, right? We're not a custom product. So we always tell our customers, come in very clear with the what you want to do and allow us to tell you how we're gonna do it. So that is where we focus on that empower bucket. It's about understanding what their specific business needs are, why they're doing that, what they're trying to drive. And so it's all about creative.

product design and solutioning in that bucket because we just need to get them configured in a way that's gonna allow them to achieve what they need to using our product. So that is the core focus of that. And then obviously the iteration of that over time. So the conversations in that category are heavily based on like product and the creative use cases around it, more than the education around traditional just customer success best practices.

create a transformation for them. And is it the right transformation at the right area of the journey? It's so well structured. And then on top of that, you created all the content and delivery motions to uh not only empower them quickly and give them the right tools to accelerate their thinking, but also put it all on a simple website, Google site. Everybody has access to that. If you're a Google shop,

And go to park. Go as fast as you like. I'm not stopping you. My resources don't stop you. You could go as fast as you feel like it. And if not, if we feel like you're stuck, we have a very clear next step for you. Brilliant, brilliant stuff. Simple but brilliant and not easy to create in a way that's effective actually.

of what we've already designed that we're getting ready to release in twenty twenty four.

journey, right? Like with all the infrastructure, right? Customer segments, playbooks, all those things. So like we've got great criteria that helps us understand where our customers are and who they are so we can best support them. I think What I would have started with, while I love that probability score, the way that we were having it calculated is that the sales team was creating the score.

As they passed it over to our customer success team as part of this Alice to CS handoff, which is okay. But there is a little bit of this like, Yeah, they have this, like they have bits and pieces, so they were giving them a yes. So some of our scores were overinflated coming from sales.

I think what I would have started with is instead of having sales do the probability score, I would have just originally started with customer success doing this score. Because I think that that would have empowered our team to be thoughtful because we know what we're looking for. I think

the sales team was hearing certain things. And I think that that was okay. They weren't hearing wrong things, but I think there was a level of depth that we would get into from customer success that would help clarify a lot of those points. So some of the scores were overinflated early on. And we're working to normalize some of that data. The other thing is We didn't have a great plan on like how and when we were gonna rescore people.

So the success probability score was helpful coming into the partnership and helped us understand how we were going to leverage that for onboarding, but we also are leveraging that as part of how we segment our customers. So just the fact is those eleven points of criteria, they change, they evolve. we don't have a great way today of like how are we going to continuously keep that up to date and when do you make changes to either how you segment or what you offer.

Based on the score change, if it is a big leap or a little leap. So there's still some things that need to be ironed out. And I think I would have just spent a little bit more time up front, giving more thought to the probability score, just cause now understanding how impactful that is to everything we do, I would probably have invested more time just to be more creative with it and have a more structured

use case for it throughout the entire customer journey, not just specifically for onboarding. Oh I have

Because some of the questions we asked at the beginning are no longer even important for after the onboarding. And so that's kinda like where I was thinking we were going.

Again, I mentioned, is this a first-time leader? Does the leader report to the CEO? Do they have a built-out strategy? Are they based in the US? Do they have access to clean, accurate, and current data in a CRM? Do they have a Salesforce admin? Do they have an operations team? So while those things are important up front for onboarding, those things are still applicable to us in the ongoing how we engage and through the partnership. So it's just a matter of like

Do I keep that score? Or should there be a different score? Like, I don't know. We're flushing through some things, but I think our V three will have some new creative ideas on how to approach this.

Our customers have different priorities and different needs. And we want to be very vigilant about helping our customers get to a first win and a key result. So we know that there are seven reasons why anybody buys our product. And I know this because we've tested it time and time again. There's not So there's seven. So it's like mitigate risk, identify growth, increase visibility, operationalize process, right? There's seven of these things.

So what we do is in our initial conversation or engagement with our customers, we do offer a survey and the survey captures a wealth of information. One of the things that we say is like, these are the seven core business objectives. This is why customers like yourself purchase a product like client success.

Of these, we believe that all these will be important to you at some point in your journey, in your organization. Let's stack rank them. So of these seven, tell me what is most important in order from one to seven. So what it does is it allows us to focus on the one core objective and onboard them strategically on that first one because it gets that first win. Now what it does now is that now we know what the second thing is. So after you're out of onboarding.

How our team engages you is now on that second objective. So we're going to work with you on configuring the product that way and working on different cool use cases and getting continuous value. So this actually builds out a framework for not only how do we engage during onboarding to get you to that first key result.

and get some real material win, but then also what is the framework of engagement look like from that point forward? So there's always a need to engage, but it's value driven based off our customers' priorities because of what they told us.

And we've designed it so that we know what areas of the product to cover, how to configure it. And so that will be the shift for how we're moving into the future is kind of this objective focus framework. But we're giving customers options. We're gonna say to customers. Well, as long as they're not at the bottom end of that score, I will say if you're in the educate bucket, you're in the educate, we're gonna do one pathway which is gonna be the objective, start small and then we'll build out.

But if you fall in the kind of like the middle or end tranche of those scores, we want to give you the option. Do you want to focus on building out this product through an objectives focused motion? And this is how we do it and these are the results that we're gonna drive together. Or do you feel like for your organization and where you are today that we need to fully enable you on all of client success, get it configured and then roll it out using a traditional change management framework?

And so the customers will have an option. Which path do you want to choose? And going the objectives route is definitely going to be focused on being able to have some value realization up front and real tangible results. The other way is gonna be a little bit longer to get there, but it's gonna give their team a full robust suite of tools to leverage to drive success with their customers. So but we're giving them choices. We hadn't offered that before.

And um I wish more companies, more software companies would do that. I think that's an area where a lot of companies just don't invest enough in it to make it easy to go through a specific track to get to a specific outcome. And you know what? It's just not easy to do. So all the power to you, Christy, for diving in on it and

It's hard, but it's beautiful because it encourages and pushes us to think differently. And so we love that we've been able to be so creative and come up with different ways of offering our customers a path to success.

to the next step and clearly articulate the next step. There's always should be the next bucket, the next step. I think that's what's brilliant about this approach. I actually covered this in other videos as well. I'm gonna put them in the link to these. the description of this video just in case if you want to learn more on how to do this. But I'm so so thrilled that you've done this. I wish I could show that the Google side is so great. If you're a customer of Christy

You're so so lucky, you're in such good hands. And so thank you, Christy, for joining us today and sharing all the goodness that you do.