It's time to transform your onboarding process. Join us for an exclusive webinar designed to transform your approach to complex customer onboarding! Discover the secrets to seamless onboarding, reduce customer churn, and enhance satisfaction with expert strategies and cutting-edge tools. Our industry leader will share their insights, real-world case studies, and actionable tips to help you navigate and conquer even the most challenging onboarding scenarios.

Key Topics We'll Cover:

  • Complex Customer Onboarding: Factors that make a customer onboarding complex and require extra attention
  • Close of the Sale and SMEs: Learn how onboarding should start at the sale close.
  • Better Handoffs: Improve transitions between teams for a seamless customer experience
  • Onboarding and Mutual Plans: Develop effective onboarding strategies and mutual plans
  • First 120 Days: Focus on the critical initial period to ensure long-term success

What You’ll Learn:

  • Common Pitfalls in Customer Onboarding: Understand why most onboarding efforts fail and how to avoid the "Garbage In, Garbage Out" (GIGO) syndrome.
  • Empowering Customers: Discover how to help your customers build their own success using customer onboarding checklists for visibility and accountability. 
  • Actionable Tactics: Gain specific strategies to enhance your onboarding process, drive customer success, and reduce the workload on your CS team.

Transcript:

​​​00:00 – 1:13

Joseph Knecht – Introduction

Thank you so much for your time. Quick introduction: Joey Knecht, one of the senior leaders with Proteus Engage. If you're wondering we're based in the Lincoln Omaha area of Nebraska--but obviously, we work with clients all over the country.

My goals for this session:

My assumption here is, many of you are leaders doing implementation, onboarding new customers; maybe you're in some regulated industries. It's tough out there. There's a lot going on.

So we’re going to go through a couple of areas of this and also share some approaches that have worked very well. I'll be very clear.  A lot of these approaches,  obviously we're in the business of a platform called Engage for onboarding, But also a lot of these things you can take as nuggets to apply to other ways that you might be doing it—even manually today.

So really look forward to sharing just what we've learned over the last 5 years, working with clients and scaling with great success. Any questions during the session, don't hesitate to pop them in there. I'll try to address them at different interactions here. I appreciate your time.

Okay, so unlocking, obviously complex. So everybody here, I want you to kind of level-set yourself here, or do you see these things happening?

1:13 - 1:48

Joseph Knecht – “Challenges for Onboarding Leaders”

Okay, so unlocking, obviously complex. So everybody here, I want you to kind of level-set yourself here, or do you see these things happening?

1:17      Screen showing slide: Challenges for Onboarding Leaders

Because these are going to be the areas that I focus on. And there's a root cause to a lot of these things, right? It's not that they're just happening. There's kind of a big shift going on, obviously in the world of customer onboarding, and quite frankly, just straight-up the complexity of it. Right? So a lot of leaders are really struggling in many of these different areas.

1:48 – 2:57

Joseph Knecht: “Successful Handoffs”

So successful handoffs. I cannot…one of the things we're preaching, and I’d love you to digest this and think about it within your own enterprise. But a lot of the times we're seeing onboarding and other people of the implementation team, joining even during the last—what I, we would call in our world—the last 25% of the sales process so that the implementation and onboarding teams are helping to qualify the deployments, especially a lot of our tech clients. They're needing to qualify that even before the proposal is finalized, because the cost and the investment, you know, can change.

And so we're seeing onboarding literally start in the last 25% of the sale. Think about that for a minute. And if that is happening, or you're like, yeah, we're leaving money on the table or sales promised X, and we're delivering Y, or there's a rough handoff, you know, all sorts of things kind of coming about a lot of times. The root cause of that is because it's just been dropped on your team and the team wasn't part of the relationship, development and trust, especially in any kind of longer sales cycle. You know anything over 3 months. There's a lot of rapport and things going on there.

2:58 – 3:43

Joseph Knecht: “Fulfilling Client Needs”

The second one I put is fulfillment and promises and expectations. Right? We've all been there—sales or somebody said, “Yes, or this, and well, sure, we have an integration with D”…and you're like, “No, we don't—we don't have that.” And so managing that risk is a real big part that leaders like yourselves are concerned about.

The other one is for many of you. You want more business right? And you want to grow. And so how do you do this in a high engagement way, and in essence herd the cats? And we're going to talk about that in a little bit here. Many are also looking for repeatable infrastructure, because unless it's measured, you're not going to be able to get better scale and really grow. So again, think about these within your own ecosystem.

3:43 – 5:28

Joseph Knecht:  “Slow Time to Value”

Slow time to value for new customers. This is very interesting. So the reason why I have this on the slide, obviously there's more challenges out there, but this one's pretty important to many of our clients that are technology based.

So if you're a tech company, your CAC (customer acquisition cost) is going to be most of the time high—if it's a high dollar amount product—$100,000 or more, $50,000 or more. Your customer acquisition cost is going to be pretty North. And so what happens is, even if you secure a client, a lot of you, and you probably know this, if not, but the company really isn't making money until year 2—year 2, or even maybe hopefully, after a cross sell. Maybe there's a lost leader to get started.

So this slow time to value—if the onboarding is not optimized—one, you're just going to turn the client right out the gate and really be upside down, or you're just dragging out that time to value, which obviously is really dragging down your revenue and your growth opportunities.

And so time is a killer and it’s not just when it’s being sold. Time is a killer when you're onboarding equally as much as time kills on a sale. And so these are really big concerns that a lot of onboarding leaders, implementation leaders talk to us about and challenge us, and so that's why I'm bringing these up here for you to kind of digest. Think about that. Analyze your own environment.

I'll share some resources, and at the end I'll pull it up on how to audit your onboarding experience and other resources of “garbage-in, garbage-out,” with GI-GO, which we'll talk about here in a minute—that's on the handoff side. Just a lot of areas where small little things can really dramatically offset and create big, big problems for you and your team.

5:28 – 6:43

Joseph Knecht:  “Aligning Accountability”

Aligning Accountability is another thing, especially for growth companies or any company. But a lot of the times we’re hearing that, you know, they want to be able to hold their reps. more accountable, and also the customers more accountable. And they're seeking an environment to help with that. And I'll talk a little bit more about that later,  because accountability is a key element to success. And then again, we talked about, you know, optimizing at scale.

So let me kind of step back for a moment I want you to digest these things, right? Apply them to your own, write them down. (Sniffing…Sorry my nose has got…I’ve got something on my nose, so I keep scratching.)

But basically think about these in your own environment, and you might have some others. Please put them in the comments, and I'll take a look at them, and of course, on our website, there's a lot of examples of these things and tools and resources that you can consume that, you know, go deeper into each one of these concepts, because obviously they're not just bullet points.

So let's step back for a second. These are the challenges that leaders are having. Right? But that old adage of Eastern and Western medicine, you know, covering up the problem or really getting to the root cause. Well, the root cause--there's a method to the madness here—and why this is affecting you and your teams so much now.

6:43 – 12:35

Joseph Knecht:  “Environment”

[6:43] Screen showing slide: Environment – The Need: Continuous and Connected Experiences

And it comes down to this. It comes down to the environment has dramatically changed. And this really, as some of you might know, our product is used in complex sales, handoffs, onboarding, cross selling—CS activities, many, many different use cases to our platform. But whether you're using our platform or not, this is really the underlying challenge of that. So, let me help frame this a little bit and then think about it, right? Because email is not an onboarding solution, right? And transient communication is not an onboarding solution.

And so how do you herd the cats? So let's just kind of role play for a second, and again apply this to your enterprise accordingly. But on the left hand side of this equation is your team, right? So if you are again, selling, you know B2B—obviously this webinar is about complex sales. So we're going to make some broad assumptions here: If It's a B2B, or a high dollar B2C sale, that's going to involve anywhere from literally 5 to 10 people in your organization. That's going to be the original sales rep., that’s going to be a leader, a sales leader, maybe a subject matter expert, contracting—all sorts of different folks to be on your side of the equation right?

And then on the client side, you all know this is…that as you penetrate the account, you started that sale with just one person on the team and then from there you have to do all this consensus decision making. And there's a big decision making team on that side—10 to 15. Many of our regulated industries, like we have many clients who are selling into healthcare and finance, and you know all sorts of stuff. They have 20 people plus, on the actual onboarding side, right? And so the numbers just start to get very, very substantial.

And so, in order to attack this problem. You know, email, instant failure, Google, Doc, instant failure, excel spreadsheet, instant failure. Because all of this is over time. And how do you properly communicate and collaborate with both sides of the equation, right? And this chasm, this delta, is really one of the big driving areas of where visibility, management, expectations, risk, all permeates—it’s because there's a lot of people involved in this process over a period of time. And how do people create visibility and optimization of their relationships during that. So it really is a multiplier game.

I'm 46 and it wasn’t this way, 10-15 years ago—literally, not being “Old Timer Joe,” but literally the number of people involved in both sides of the equation. The actual sale-to-hand off-to-onboarding-to the actual consumption of the people on the right hand side, is crazy, right?

And that's why companies are reluctant to onboard new platforms, if they feel like there's going to be a lot of risk and disruption. So having a really strong onboarding process is really critical to your organization's success. Because it's the first opportunity they're working with you, the bulk of the team, and then also their judgment of how organized and optimal your group is going to be with them moving forward, is heavily judged on those, you know, “You never get a second chance to make a first impression.” That's real. That's real in onboarding. That's real in industry, right? Especially if you have a cross all upsell methodology that most of your revenue is coming later. Yeah, it's even more critical, right? So again, stepping back.

It's an environmental challenge, right? And so you've done good selling. Now, you got this awkward scoping issue. If you have some PS or app wrapped around that, that's another thing I didn't even talk about. Many of our clients have not only a product or a service they're offering, they also, in that service, might have Professional Services that are being layered over that. So that's a whole other team, right? You got the product people. You got Professional Services people. I think I'm beating this to the ground enough…(Thanks, that’s funny!) …you know, you get it. It's “Camp-Run-a-Muck, right? And so this environment then permeates a lot of the problems that we just talked about. If you don't wrap your hands around that. And for many people, the current way they're doing that is through email. And you know, loose, loosely organized materials and information—no way to consistently get visibility, measure that, etc.

So takeaways for you, no matter what. Think about this to your environment and see how you can kind of bring this all together to live. I put there the need—continuous and connected experiences—it truly is that. When you're onboarding, it's pretty intense, it's continuous for X number of, you know, 30 days to onboard, whatever it might be. Obviously, for a lot of partners there's the initial onboarding, maybe some testing and things of that nature, you know, Alpha testing and then scaling it out. And then the first 120 days are really risky, “post” live.

There's lots of different areas here. But one of the key underlying drivers is the environment. So with our experience and obviously repeatedly proving this over our clients and seeing massive results, I kind of summarize this in in kind of 3 distinct elements to help drive this forward. And again, these are things for you to think about, related to your own organization, and I'll point you to different resources that you can consume and obviously reconstruct at your leisure. So again, the environment here.

[12:22] Screen Showing slide:  People-Information-Process: Connect Your Team with Clients & Prospects

12:35 – 16:04

Joseph Knecht:  “People”

So for us it really comes down to kind of 3 key pieces that you can again analyze as you're auditing your environment, looking for a way to optimize that moving forward.

The first is people right? So we kind of alluded to this. The old proverbial herding cats—getting everybody together. Very, very critical—that all of that is  organized. And do you have an environment where you can create visibility, where all of these people can be seeing information passing back, passing back and forth. A Sharepoint document—Not going to do it. Pass back, Google, Doc, right?

Like, it just doesn't work because there's so many stakeholders. You need to be providing updates. People are missing meetings quite frankly, in some clients where their deployment is a year, people are turning, right? Like people are leaving their job, there's new people coming in—very transient right?

And so this also applies to on your side if you're hiring a lot of new onboarding people in your team, you want to plug and play them into a consistent environment, so that they look like an A player, even though they just started. Well, how you do that is, you kind of organize all these people, and then you can share information, resources, all sorts of things based on who they are and all these elements. So again, one of the big things you need to think about is getting everything centralized so you have visibility on all the players and all the information and can create a repeatable environment or not, because the sheer number of people is a very, very big problem you know, with this.

And like I said, we have clients in regulated industries. It's always way more people. You also have…remember, when you're onboarding, there's also you’ve…originally your sales team has probably originally sold this potentially to C-suite individuals within the company. Vice presidents, directors, COOs, right? Those kind of folks. But a lot of times those people are not actually involved in the actual onboarding. They're bringing in their team again—more  people on the right hand side here. But you still want to keep those individuals up-to-date, because they've just signed a contract with you for $152 million, whatever it is—you want to keep them integrated into the progress, the expectations, everything there.

So you have a couple of different communication styles and/or stakeholders within, that it's not just purely the onboarding folks. So again, step back on your side, map out kind of who are the players typically in your onboarding experiences. And again, don't forget typically for great success, we're seeing that might need to be drug into the sales side a little bit. Okay? So that last 20%, 15%--whatever you want to kind of—yeah, everybody's product services are different. It's not one size fits All right. But just think about that. Are there ways you can improve the overall outcomes by maybe being a little bit closer to the tip of the spear? Okay?

So the first is people—we talked about that at the top. You can see people…then you got your data, and then you got to wrap that around process. So that's why I broke these out for you—so you can kind of think about: Okay, who are the people involved? What is the data? We're moving back and forth and all the needs and wants around that, okay. And then: How do we package that up for success? And of course, by doing that over time, you're going to get, you know, incremental feedback there. All right…okay, makes sense? Any questions about that?  Don’t hesitate—pop them into the to the comments. Many of you giving me smiley faces. Yeah, thumbs up. Yeah, I mean, this is just the brutal, real world we have going on here.

So we're going to progress here forward. So you got your people, you understand that. It's you know, matrix-based organizations. You're trying to de-silo individuals to make sure there's all visibility, etcetera, etcetera. You got it.

16:04-22:38

Joseph Knecht: Information

[16:04] Screen showing slide:  Seamless Information

All right, the next one is basically information. So what you're going to see here, and of course, this says Proteus Engage, our product on the side, but one of the considerations you need to think is, how are you going to seamlessly work this into the ecosystem of your group? Because you want to limit how much behavioral change you're going to have to have your teams do in order to be successful. Plus, how do you create visibility onto a lot of the data that's being captured during the onboarding experiences. And let me park here for a second and just bring this to life for you guys.

Many of our clients, and I'm sure yourselves, in order to successfully onboard the customer, you're needing to pass back and forth tons of documents, file sharing. You might want them to fill out questionnaires for configuration; you might want them to fill out excel spreadsheets that are going to be imported into your tool. Right? All sorts of things, user account onboarding or scope of work documents, contract, right? So start to identify what are the elements that you're needing to effectively go back and forth with your customer. And then it's not only getting data—I mentioned it earlier. It's “garbage-in-garbage out,” which we call GI-GO. And so even if you get to this stage, sometimes, the data you're getting is just garbage, and that's going to slow everything down.

So you’ve got to remember you know more than your customer knows about your product. So you can't make any assumptions during, or your service, during the onboarding experience. You got to lay out real clear expectations, provide them, maybe really smart templates or forms like I mentioned—all these kinds of things wrapped up into the environment again to best guide them to success. So many times it’s not well thought through…you know…Wow! If we just send them random things, and they get us random things back. How much more time that adds, and delays and frustrations and all sorts of things!

I'll put another note at the bottom of this. We have a great insight on “garbage- in-garbage-out” that I really recommend, because just that audit of yourself of what really you need back and forth, and are those correct? Where, let's say, your client… I'm making this up…integrates with an ERP…and so it's oracle, or whatever—you might have different questions and data needs collected there. Or it's integrated to salesforce—different data and information there.

So how do you create kind of these templates and processes around, not only asking the client for the data in an efficient way and teeing them up for success, but then when they get it back to you, you know the old, “trust, but verify,” because I'm sure you guys have all been there as the client sent you something. Nobody looked at it, it just sat in everybody's email. And then the day you need it, you realize it's junk and that person's now on vacay for 10 days.

Yep—everybody's been there, not against vacations, but that's the “trust, but verify” right? And so you can see how each one of these things starts to create frustration, elongation of the actual onboarding experience. And again, just leveling your team up for obviously, we know what we're doing, and creating that consistency that is needed.

And so that's one piece. It's getting the data and all of that. But then there's a tremendous amount of two-way collaboration on things. And so that's where a lot of groups missed the ball, too, is it's not just a one-time volley. It's a collaborative experience to work through iterations on things, and then also making sure it's seamlessly integrated into your environment. Because again, you want to reduce the number of steps internally to make these things come to life. So as you're looking at your own onboarding experience, especially in complex—look at your templates, look at the expectations of the customers, look at how you're providing an environment for them to effectively communicate and collaborate with you guys in between the meetings.

Too many clients rely on the meetings to actually do the onboarding where great onboarding happens in between meetings and for many organizations that’s a jump for them, because they always want to be in front of the customer. But you cannot ask for 98 meetings with the customer, right? And so you got to create an environment where they can communicate and collaborate with you, ask questions, do all sorts all sorts of things. You're setting the expectation correctly—there's an environment to do this—but then, also making it really easy on your team side to be able to access the data, get to it, share it, provide feedback, those types of things.

So you're definitely going to want to look at, you know, integrations to optimize that…you know, we obviously as Engage, we have integrations with salesforce, HubSpot, all your email messenger tools, all the things to create that connected experience on our end. But wherever you're at in your journey, just make sure you're thinking through that, because it's a critical piece of it, right? We talked about the people. You got a lot of them. Then you got a lot of information going back and forth, and people got to get to it and do stuff with it, and all sorts of things right? And then, ultimately, you know where I'm going here. You want to then wrap that in some sort of repeatable manner. Right? So again, in complex offerings and complex expectations, you want to own the conversation of the onboarding, meaning your team.

And so again, your new customer doesn't know what they don't know. They have no idea what's coming. So, being able to provide them a clear roadmap, clear expectations, an environment of accountability to keep things on schedule and a way that when they do stuff, you respond. And also, you're fact checking stuff, so that if there are challenges you're immediately keeping them and making them look like rock stars, right? That's the whole key. Maybe I shouldn't say that rock star thing if you see those commercials for what is it? What is that? What is that? Yeah, that's one of those, if you, if you know, say it in the chat but one of those ERP programs that's there. There's that whole joke about rock stars. Workday. Thank you. (chuckles)

But you know, you guys know what I'm talking about like—that's the whole ecosystem around this. So there's got to be a good, concise way of moving information and then the last piece…again, so you got your people. You got to really get your templates, your processes laid out, again you might bifurcate that process based on what modules you're selling or services you're selling or based on the clients environment. Those are the initial questions. And then, of course, you're going to build out a couple of little journey paths. Right? All of these things come into play. But you only can do that once you get that good intel. And hopefully, that was done, you know, towards the end of the sales process, right? That last again, 20%, etcetera there.

[22:32] Screen showing slide: Goals of Engagement

22:38 – 28:49

Joseph Knecht: Goals of Engagement

So then, in the process side of it…and I'm not getting into like builders and workflows and all that stuff. Of course, our platform has those types of things, but really trying to keep it a high level for consumption purposes. And I'm going to point you to resources and tools that you can do additional auditing, but kind of thematically, these are the things that you're…that every typically growth leader is looking for your onboarding team. Right? You have the environment, complex environment, many people, both sides. Now you got your people identified. Now you got your onboarding process somewhat documented, somewhat figured out of what you have to collect.

Then, how do you wrap that around with a great experience? Because again, it's not about just punching out emails right? It's leveling up the customers, you know, expectations on where things are at, how things are going and meeting them—where they want to be met—all the time. An old adage, I always say to everybody is, “Right now you can go spend $12 at Dominoes, and you can actually watch that pie being made the entire time. And you know, when it's 50 feet from your building, and that's on a $12 purchase.”

Now you're going to chuckle. Many of you are selling stuff more than $50 grand and a lot of times your customer has no idea what's going on. How is that acceptable, right? How did it become that way? It's because of the environment and all the different stakeholders and all the different things. So you need to create that centralized environment. So again, centralized environment—now you have an ecosystem to be able to communicate, collaborate, and repeat processes so that your team—and I'll talk about this a little bit more—over time can continuously improve. So a lot of times there's paralysis for perfection.

“Transactional vs. Continuous”

“Environment of Accountability”

And even in clients we've…our current clients of ours…they're like, “Joe, we don't want to get started until we have everything figured out. The problem is in onboarding—it’s living and breathing—it's never figured out. It's continuous, especially as you add new features, products, services, everything you're doing. It's a live experience. It's a live, living journey, it's always evolving. But underneath that there are kind of core principles, right? You don't want it to be transactional. You want it to be continuous because it's a relationship. And so that's where a lot of times having that environment is very, very important—an environment for accountability.

So, there's some fear out there that you can't ask customers to do things, or, you know, is stuff…and that's false. Actually, customers when they're being onboarded, want to be provided a clear path for success. And that’s where, like our tool, we have checklist systems and tasks and other experiential based collaborative kind of tools to guide those customers, based on expectations, timing follow ups, keeping everybody on the same page. You need to have an environment of accountability.

Now, sometimes, if you have newer team members, or younger team members, junior team members, they're not as confident making demands for stuff. And so those are the things you’ve got to kind of figure out. And then what are your, “must haves” and what are “nice to haves,” in that accountability thing. We help a lot of our partners with that and it really changes the trajectory of expectations, growth, timing, and of course, reporting analytics. Right? All those things then become what's not measured is, junk. There you go.

“Repeatable and Scalable:

The other one is repeatable and scalable. So you, as you're looking at things and creating your resources and your materials and stuff, you want to look at how we can be doing this for scale. And that scale, obviously is, very, very important. As I just talked about hiring new people, you can plug them into repeatable processes. Right? Everything is about kind of harmonizing that experience to do that.

“Tools to Drive Engagement”

Tools to drive engagement and communication, again, is what we're talking about, you got to bring everything under one roof so that there's visibility stuff, whether that's commenting or the documents, or, you know, checklists, or whatever it might be. You want to drive that into an ecosystem that is completely measurable, and in a lot of our cases clients want to push that back to their CRM, again, depending where you're at in your journey—if you don't have a CRM, just think about these things on how you can do that. Very simple little things can create big, big, big returns for you. Okay?

“Connected and Smart”

For some of you who are looking at a more sophisticated or kind of next-leveling-up stuff, is that connected and smart experience, like, we have intelligent automations, AI, other things that you can start to use your data because it is centralized and everybody's involved. You can start to use that data to do more advanced targeting, based on personas, based on use cases, like all sorts of things, can then be unlocked.

“Analytics”

But again, respect your journey. Respect where you're at and understand that: Don't worry about that now. Let's just incrementally start to get our team optimized and analytics, of course, for you—for processes as a leader. These are all the things you should be looking for because that's going to be the difference of…you know…onboarding plans are like business plans—a lot of them are on shelves, and they're never brought to life. There's actually a great resource we have about that: Just because your process is documented doesn't mean it's being done, right? And that's another thing, that for another webinar, I think we have one coming out soon related to that which is, “just because it's documented, doesn't mean it is.” And that's a big Johari window for a lot of leaders…who are…Well, we…it's that's part of our process. But there's no way to actually audit the process or see the process or measure the process. And quite frankly, if you have more than two onboarders working on stuff, the chances that they're actually following that without an environment or an ecosystem to do that is slim to none, and it's nothing against them right? Just all being honest here. Right? So I appreciate it.

[28:49] Screen showing slide: Results of Engagement

28:49 – 34:52

Joseph Knecht: Results of Engagement

All right. So, goals of this. So you might be saying, “Okay, Joe, I get it like problem environment—I see that there are three distinct pieces of that I need to take into consideration.” And you might be wondering, “Well, how is that going to how's that going to benefit our organization?” Right?

Well, I'm just sharing with you. These are a lot of our numbers that our clients see—but again, depending on where you're at in your journey, and again, in a complex ecosystem, a complex onboarding—these are things we see relatively quickly in in that journey.

“Operational Benefits”

“Engagement”

So one is just full blown, operational benefits. You know, 25% plus of scale, meaning team members can do more. Or you can have less hires, those types of things, because they truly become repeatable engagement around 30% plus improvement and engagement. And you got to understand, it's a different world—especially with certain different types of stakeholders on the onboarding experience. Some people will be in the platform heavily during the day, others at night, off hours weekends and that engagement, you know, you want to meet them where they want to be met. I don't have to ask all of you who are on here today…all of you have Netflix or Apple TV. And the reason why is you want to consume information on demand. Again, why wouldn't your new customer want to check in on what's going on just like that Domino's pizza?

“Visibility”

So providing that centralized environment of updates, recaps, progresses, things that are open, follow-ups, right? All these things that are needed to make sure your group looks its best, and the customer is happy. You want to kind of think again through all those little pieces. Start simple and then get more visibility. I think this is a no brainer. This is kind of one of those things that… (how do I…)

Basically. it's a big, big difference when you can start to see what's going on, right? Besides just having milestones, and in your team meeting saying on-track, off-track this, by having your processes in place, and a lot of the things we've talked about already today, really unpacks a lot of visibility for you, for capacity management, expectation, (Excuse me) Expectations on customers, expectations on your team, bottlenecks, right? Like, Why is everything getting stuck here? Or Why is this phase taking longer than others? That switches from hunches to facts. And so, as you think through your process, that's something you want to think about.

Again, for us, we have a tremendous amount of intelligence checklists and tasks, and all sorts of libraries of things to help optimize the client journey, obviously of a customer onboarding journey. And that again is intelligent. It builds over time as you continue to do it, so you can start simple and then eventually scale out. And for every client that's typically the best because you're going to get these other benefits immediately. Like that's a huge benefit.

Think about for your team…that's 1 out of 4, right? That's a free rep. out of every four at the top there,  25%. That's a huge thing in your budgets. And then you as an implementation leader, what you want to be able to do is fight for budget within your company, and you want to be able to demonstrate why, or based on capacity planning, this is what I need, right? And so it's no more hunches. It's deployment plans and growth plans and everything with proven data and interactions, and how that ties to optimized revenue for the group.

And so for a lot of our leaders, that's a big piece when they're a growth company and they have a 2-member team now, or a 5-member team now, but in their head they're like, I need to be at 15 to 35 implementation and onboarders now. How do I build that business case to my own company, that I need to start hiring people, or I need failover and doing that, and how for every single time I do that we're getting strong ROI on that?

“Training and Consistency”

That's what we're talking about on the screen here again, whether you're us or not. These are things that you can use to help kind of grow, obviously your business model. We've talked about it a little bit, but training and consistency…so by optimizing your environment like I described here, that's going to allow juniors to look like senior reps.., and that's going to allow them to be more effective. Handle more accounts, right?

The benefits get pretty extensive here, even if you have a 2-person team. I think you can figure out the math very quickly for your own business case. So it's important.

“Time to Value for Customers”

And then time to value for customers. (I did see it. That should be customers with a capital C, yeah, thanks.) But time to value for customers—ultimately, that's why we're here. Right? We're here to provide value to them because people who see value buy more and so ultimately we can't lose sight of that, even though we're here to get them on. We want to try to do that in the fastest effective way, humanly possible to do that.

And, by the way, that makes you guys more money, and that's usually important to implementation teams—many of our implementation teams or CS teams—everybody has different names for these things. Sometimes onboarding is CS, you guys all know CS implementation. But we see a heavy trend of incentives being kicked in for delivery ahead of schedule, on schedule, over schedule—departments being managed against that because it's so critical to the satisfaction of the customer and the expectations there. Right? So again,30,000 foot, you got an environmental problem. Fundamentally, it's really focused around 3 distinct areas: the people, the information that you're going back and forth on and then wrapping those into consistent, easy to digest processes, right? And then these are the benefits of that.

[34:52] Screen showing slide: Onboarding Experience Progression

34:52 – 37:41

Joseph Knecht: Onboarding Experience Progression

So I alluded to it a couple of times already…it’s: Be gracious to yourself. You already are onboarding clients, unless you're like a really, really, really, new startup and you're onboarding client one, that's fine. You can download a resource and be on your way. But what it really comes down to is addressing your bleeding points based on everything we were just talking about and incrementally building it out over a period of time.

A lot of our customers to get to the full run rate of like full automation and all sorts of crazy fun, impactful, meaningful things can take anywhere from six months to a year. Because we start simple. We might, you know, benchmark and prototype against a couple of things, and then prescribe that recipe—we frequently call a recipe—prescribe that recipe out continuously after that. And so these are just…whether you use 4 phases, 80 phases…I don't give a crap. The point is, set the expectations of your team correctly. Don't try to be perfection out the gate and communicate as a change manager, as a leader. Communicate your goals in a clear way to your team so that they're not overwhelmed.

And it's about incremental progress. And we're going to get better every single onboarding, every single time we onboard a new client. But when you can put that into a centralized environment, measure it, get better. They're going to see the benefits of doing that. And you're ultimately going to move the needle for your entire team and quite frankly get the buy-in you need as a leader to win. Okay?  

And so that's a real critical part of this process is the communication and the getting your team members to align with this process because many of you probably have. If your company’s been around a little bit, you got junior people. You got OGs—original gangsters—that have been onboarding clients for a long time, and they got their way of how they do it. And all this is the same. Everybody knows the same thing with sales, right?  Like, “Oh, Bobby, does it this way,” or “Tiffany does it that way.”  Everybody's got their story, right?

But incrementally for you as a leader and for the success of the organization, and for scaling and all the other benefits from 2 slides ago, in order to do that, you need your own teams’ buy-in, and so how you can do that is, it's not a full swoop, do everything in day one. “It's over the next 18 months team, this is what we want to get to. And here's why.” So the communication of that, like this, and these phases or other phases, you can grab other resources on our site. But a lot of it is just a communication strata around setting the expectations, ultimately making the clients more effective. All right?

37:41 – 46:58

Joseph Knecht: In Summary

So just to summarize again, this webinar is really around just these high level concepts and things. We'll be breaking these out, obviously in more depth. But I do have—WE have—not me. We do we have a lot of resources kind of related to this that I wanted to share.

And then for some of you, I…multiple people have asked me to just…can I maybe show our product here a little bit—just to bring it to life for some folks, so I'll do that. But if you want to skip out now, please do, because I'm going to go to our resource center. And then I'm going to go, obviously show a couple of just things of our platform—just to wet the whistle.

And again, would we like you as a client? Of course, but there are so many companies that are in different phases of their journey. We work with many small companies. We work with many enterprise companies wherever it fits, love to have an additional conversation and unpack these things more with you, for you, whether it's just, “Hey…We have this idea,” and you never become a customer…Hey…that, you know, it's a long life who knows? Right? But ultimately, I think you guys know we'd love to obviously have customers.

But I feel like sharing a lot of these challenges and what to look at in your own enterprise is really, really important in this journey. So with that said…Let me kind of show you. I think the screen is still being shared. Yep.

“Resources”

So if you go out to our, this is our corporate site. Many of you obviously have been there because you signed up for this, and maybe you've been to some of these resources. But I would really pay attention in this resources area.

We have this templates, and just information related to a lot of the elements that I was talking about today. Of course, we also have--those are actually downloadables and other things, and then we also have quite a big thing of insights. I mentioned this, the “garbage-in garbage out” earlier. We actually do a lot of stuff in hospitals and Fintech, so there's some intricacies or unique things related to them. We work with a ton of nonprofits. So we have different engagement onboarding for nonprofit ecosystems. But a lot of these…here's our audit of helping you kind of unpack that…I encourage you to consume these.

They're great cheater things that for your own internal meetings, and as you're working on stuff, they're simple to consume, the approach and strategy is very similar to how I'm talking to you guys here today, we're very…one of our values in our company is candid. So we're always openly dialoguing and really not trying to sell anything. We just have learned a lot, have seen a lot of the problems. Obviously, we have a great solution to solve those, but everybody's at a different part in their journey. So I encourage you to download these resources. I'll link these resources, obviously, or quick links to here, so that it's real effective for you to, you know, be able to get the information and continue your journey map.

All right, with that said, appreciate a lot of everybody's time. Of course we'll be sharing out the deck and anything else that that you might be needing—quite a bit of the homework assignments I talked about linked to the resources here. Many of you…I’ve been asked, “Hey? Can you just, you know, for 3 min or so, just share a little bit about engagement.” I'm going to shift to that now. Obviously, I encourage anybody to stay on, accordingly. But let me…so this is our platform.

I’m going to have to shift modes here a little bit into kind of explaining platform, so you understand all the problems, Right? We just went through a lot of the challenges. So obviously, we have a solution to that. That's how we know what we're doing and how we've created a lot of success for clients. So this is what we call a workspace environment. This is actually client-facing, how this is created is typically automatic off of your CRM, Salesforce or HubSpot.

And you also can just do it manually—there's still a lot of automation. But manually…and what this creates is a centralized ecosystem for you and one client, one client that you're onboarding. Again, a very popular use case, as you might guess, based on the presentation earlier, is that a lot of companies use us for the last part of their sales process—their demo. There's meetings, contracting, the definition of scope, etcetera and then the handoff, and then all the way through to onboarding.

So this environment here is a client-facing workspace, secure where these people here would be your new customer. And then these people down here, of course, would be members of your team. More people can come in and out throughout the entire journey. But everything is done in a centralized, secure environment for all of the data collection, communication, commenting, document-sharing, everything, within what we call a workspace ecosystem.

These can either be accessed through a link or the customer logs in like an extra node, a secure portal for them. I alluded to a lot of the things already in the other part, but we do tremendous amount of document-sharing and collaboration all through the tool—back and forth—obviously templates, integration with your team's calendars for meetings and stuff. This is very popular because it again, herds the cats.

This is an example of a sales mutual plan. I'm going to jump forward here a little bit into some of the onboarding phases of this. But as you might imagine this, we have a template library, and all sorts of things behind this, and how to do this overall. And then each one of these checklist items can have different tasks.

 It has videos or content inside them—all sorts of things to help guide that customer through the onboarding process, plus a ton of automations for follow-up, escalation, reporting, all sorts of things obviously in here to do this, and we have many, many, many other module types as I alluded to. A lot of our clients…any of your marketing materials, of course, can be shared with clients. We talked about for onboarding, a lot of discovery questionnaires. This is very popular where you're able to collect repeatable information from customers, and then based on how they answer this, different checklist items or other things were automatically loaded to the workspace. So there's a tremendous amount of intelligence here.

This also, it can be based on the client type, like, if you're selling into hospitals, different than banks, different than a manufacturing, obviously, these experiences can be catered to each one of those, accordingly. Also that comes back to that efficiency quality of delivery, setting the right expectations, etcetera. So there are libraries, and templates all built in here to make it very, very fast for your team to engage with these, and obviously deploy and manage.

And again, this is seamless with your email, seamless with Slack and Teams. So if a customer comments here immediately the rep. Slack channel lights up, they can answer back in Slack, and it will go through the tool and right back out to the customer. So creating that connected experience is very, very critical in the overall process.

And like, I said, each one of these checklist items depending on you—some clients have 20 different kind of checklists. Some clients only have a few checklists, but within each checklist item (There's a guy you know). Each checklist item allows you to have instructions, video download—relate them to other modules that are in the tool again, bringing everything to light, but ultimately accountable for delivery of when it's supposed to be delivered, completed, obviously, quality of work auditing it all—all of that happens within the ecosystem of the product. And obviously this is just a high level demo. But if any of you want to, you know, explore more, love to have a conversation, and mind map your environment to how our system and everything drives that forward. And then, on the back side of the equation, you have (Excuse me) on the back side here, this is that demo site we were just looking at.

This is again for your website. Now you have all of the analytics and everything to understand what's going on with every single account. And then, of course, any of the rolled up, based on team members, all sorts of operational reporting. And again, if you're using a CRM, this is all being piped back also for voice of the customer and system of record, within your ecosystem.

This is how we help solve all of those problems that I believe you're having, especially many of our clients, or for complex ecosystems. And of course, all the benefits I shared, and ROI, again, we can start simple and then scale it out accordingly. So I appreciate everybody's time today. As a recap, Joey Knecht. Obviously, we have a great team. So if you're interested in learning more, please apply on the website. Just sign up for a one-to-one demo or a group Demo.

For everybody who signed up here today, we'll send out a video of this in case you didn't make it and obviously, please check out our resources. That's—those are really actionable turnkey elements that you can use today to really optimize your complex onboarding environment. So again, appreciate it. Thanks for everybody today and I'll answer some of these questions offline because I can then do one-to-one on some of these. But I appreciate it. And again, thanks for the time today.

Dive in to Engage