Customer onboarding is a critical phase in the B2B journey. It sets the tone for the entire relationship, yet many businesses struggle with creating an environment where all stakeholders—both internal teams and the customer—feel a sense of accountability. This gap often leads to delays, unmet expectations, and ultimately, customer dissatisfaction. When accountability is lacking, onboarding processes can become disjointed, with teams working in silos, communication breaking down, and the customer left wondering if they made the right decision.

To prevent these pitfalls, it's essential to create an environment where accountability is embedded in the onboarding process.

Key Topics We'll Cover:

  • What is a complex b2b customer onboarding experience
  • The High Cost of a Poor Onboarding Experience
  • 8 Effective Ways to Improve Mutual Accountability
  • Creating a Culture of Accountability in B2B Customer Onboarding

What You’ll Learn:

Actionable Tactics: Gain specific strategies to enhance your onboarding process accountability and reduce the workload on your onboarding team.

Transcript:

00:00 – 01:45

Joseph Knecht: Introduction

All right, we're going to get started well, good morning everybody, Joey, Knecht here, one of the senior leaders with Proteus, Proteus Engage, one of our flagship products. We're…if you're wondering, we're based out of the Omaha Lincoln area. I've been with the Enterprise, 20 some odd years and Engage is about 6 years old as a product line. So what we're sharing, we do a lot of research and analysis on our data, of course, and looking at different approaches and strategies to help our clients win in customer onboarding. And so today's conversation is kind of an epic conversation as you're obviously attending or listening to this recorded here, is ultimately, how do we in complex B2B onboardings, hold people accountable? The great accountability question.

And so a couple of things we'll kind of go through here today. I'll go through obviously, each of the 8 ways that we see, and obviously our platform helps support deploying this. But also just candid use cases and other things. Just to bring to light maybe “little bit tweaks” that if you're doing—and of course our platform supports all these—but ultimately it's about sharing successes that we have and whether you're interested today, tomorrow, 2 years, or you're just manually doing it, that's awesome. Take it. Take what we share today and hopefully improve your results and your team's results. So I appreciate that and so let's get started.

So quick introduction like I said, Joey, Knecht, one of the senior leaders with Proteus and Proteus Engage, and we're going to unpack these 8 elements.

[01:46] Screen showing slide:  The Struggle

1:46 – 6:00

Joseph Knecht:  The Struggle

Now, the first part we have to kind of look at the “why” and so we share this slide quite often and talk to our clients and partners quite extensively about this.  So one kind of framing…and looking at some of the bios of people joining today…and also, just in general, our massive client base is in B2B sales.

The environment has dramatically changed over the last 5 years, and so on a B2B sale—and then you're like,” Joe, this is about onboarding. Why are we talking about sales?”  Well, I think many of you know, probably where I'm going. Onboarding basically happens in the last 25% of the sale for many, many of our clients. If their software, they might have software, hardware, professional services, on-prem installs—like, there's a lot of things that are very complicated in sales.

And so many of our clients with their SME’s (subject matter experts) or their onboarding team, CS—everybody has different names, obviously. But ultimately, this environment really is starting at that last 25% of the sales. So your company is starting to have anywhere from 5 to 7 people on each transaction, right? And then same thing on the client side. They're getting serious. We always like to say it's the difference between dating and looking to get married, right. There's a lot more questions, a lot more things need to be answered, so you now are creating an environment of multiple people on both sides.

And for many of our clients, that's 15-20 plus people on enterprise deals, on just the client side alone, right? So the struggle is that the environment has multiplied, right? So there's tons of people involved in this. And so for our clients, we see that not only the last 25% of the sale, then the handoff, and then the actual—what we would all call the onboarding experience—the true onboarding experience, right? And making that happen. So you can map that to kind of your environment, and quite frankly, many of you also aren't just onboarding once. You're cross selling and upselling, so you're going to be onboarding the client 3 times in the next 5 years, or something of that nature. Right? So everybody kind of knows where I'm going there.

So the spirit of onboarding is really across multiple functions of the enterprise… less per sale, handoff, onboarding, and then continuous, right? And now you got a crap ton of people, right? And so many of you are leaders and involved in these processes. You know what happens. You know, I'm 46, So it's big…Biggie Smalls. More people, more problems. That’s what starts to happen here. So in accountability, you got a massive amount of players on this transaction, and this can cause a lot of problems here. Right?

And so this environment is now everywhere. And so it's very, very challenging to pinpoint, basically, accountability during each of these phases of that and having visibility to that, which we're going to talk about. And how do you create success around an environment that, unfortunately, is leaned upon by a lot of groups— either an Excel spreadsheet, or just emailing people back and forth. But how can you have that many people, and really get to the most accurate and attainable information and really project-manage this out.

So from that perspective, I always like to level set—is that this presentation here today is obviously for environments where you have a lot of people. It's a complicated product, service, or offering. And there's just a lot of talking heads that need to be involved in this. And within this, there are different layers of people, the people actually doing the onboarding, configuring all the way up to leadership.  And how do you create and leverage them to help keep these things on task?

So environmental struggle is really what permeates the problem, let's say, and then, of course, we need to now have an antidote to do that. So what we're going to be going through here are 8 things.

Now again, nothing here is in essence magical, right? But it's the execution is really where the rubber hits the road. Right? So let's kind of break down each one of these, and we'll then kind of go through, obviously, some tool kits that you can apply immediately today. If you get off of this webinar, and when you listen to this, you can literally, in the next meeting you have, basically execute these things to just improve your process in general. All right? So let's jump into it.

(Sorry…clicked the wrong button.)

[06:04] Screen showing slide: 1. Establishing Accountability from the Start

6:04 – 9:29

Joseph Knecht: 1. Establishing Accountability from the Start

So, okay, so step one…wait for it: Planning, right? So how do you get accountability from the start? So what we've seen is, a lot of times, accountability only becomes something people care about when the project or the onboarding is starting to go wrong.

Then everybody seems to know who owns stuff. But that really wasn't mentioned at all during the actual sales process, handoff and the actual onboarding experience. Right? And so for many of our clients, this was kind of the level set of them getting started is…because if you start fresh, we call it GIGO, “garbage-in-garbage-out.” If you start fresh and accurate, and everybody has good expectations here from the start, then it's going to go a lot smoother. Is it going to be perfect? Hell, no, right? But it's going to be a whole lot better.

And it's easier, as we always like to say, and you all know, there's no magic pixie dust here. What you're trying to do is create an environment and a relationship with the client where there's a mutual accountability. And basically, you can openly communicate about stuff and expectations. Right?

There are going to be problems, we all know, there are no perfect clients. You…your company is not perfect, right? Nobody's perfect, right? You got a lot of people, and you're doing lots of different things. And so with that, said…

(Yep, I will be sending out the PowerPoint after the call, you bet. Somebody just asked, so thanks for the question, yep.)

…and so establishing accountability from the start. This is really key. And there's many ways of doing that. We have some resources on our website. But you can really just think about—it's—okay by person, who owns what during these experiences, and I'm going to share with you how our, obviously, platform Engage, with a lot of our tools, help you do this and help you do this at scale when you have, obviously, lots of clients being onboarded. But ultimately it's about level setting and setting the expectations.

 And we call it like a Responsibility Matrix. There's all fancy names. We also use Mutual Plans, other concepts, but it's basically in the initial handoff or early in the process. Quite frankly, it's most of the time for a lot of clients, actually, in the sales process because you're trying to say who's going to own what, and is the client willing to allocate those resources to make your onboarding successful? Because that's what we find out a lot of times—is everybody's loving what's being said, but then, who's going to do it over the next month we're onboarding you, or 2 months, whatever. Everybody has different onboarding cycles. But you know what I'm getting at.

So it's making sure the right resources are there, and the clients really appreciate this because it helps you, again, establish that trust—that I need these people, these resources, for this period of time, can you commit them to making this happen—to leadership. Yes, great where they're going to be owning this.

Now you can kind of see sometimes, why this is shied away from…is because it's a tough conversation, right? And—but we like to help our clients have tough conversations before they become problems, and any client prefers tough conversation, and they're not necessarily tough. But you know what I'm getting at, like everything is a hunky dory, let's figure this out so that we're teeing ourselves up for success.

And so there's many different ways. You can rip off and duplicate, like I said—each one of these slides has basically some takeaway items and some elements to help you and your team be more successful. But this is really early in the process, aligning everybody and making sure we have great accountability from the start. And then, of course, we're going to show how you have to back this up, right. How do you measure it? How do you have all this stuff? Because just saying it, everybody can talk a game, but now you got to execute, right?

[09:29] Screen showing slide: 2. Checklists-Keeping Track of Every Detail

9:29 – 12:23

Joseph Knecht: 2. Checklists-Keeping Track of Every Detail

So number 1, establishing accountability from the start there. So then, that kind of transitions to keeping track of everything so obviously…selfishly, obviously, we have a platform that we've been testing and validating different customer onboarding experiences, techniques of capturing data, collaborating on that data, tasking out that data.

And what we have found is when you're onboarding clients and working through these experiences, they were truly our experiences. It's not just a checklist, because if it was, you would just use Excel. It's much more complicated than that. They're actual experiences. They're dynamic. Certain things have to happen before other things. And so you're basically guiding people that know nothing about even your product or service, or even your team members, you have to provide them a very easy way to understand what's going on.

So one of those elements or tools in the toolbox we use are client onboarding checklists. Now, you might be having a, you know, a vision of this like 900 element checklist again, these are client facing checklists. You can also have internal facing checklists. But ultimately these are helping create a reproducible environment or repeatable environment for you. And you're not missing anything, because a lot of the times we have seen customers when they're onboarding new clients, they're not giving the whole picture to the customer yet. So it's like a moving target, and things just keep coming up. And the client is like, I didn't know I needed to get you this. I would have started working on that, you know, 2 weeks ago, or Bobby's going to be in Cancun for 3 weeks, so we're stuck now with Bobby not being able to get us stuff right?

So you can kind of see you want to forecast out to the client an expectation over the next “X” period of time, from a high level checklist perspective. But that checklist then needs to matriculate into obviously actionable items. And I'll talk about that in the next one. So as you think about your process, think about not just one checklist, but through experiences, there are different data collection points, education points, so they know what's coming and basically helping guide them for success. And so there's a balance there right out. You don't want to show them like I said, 900 items.

But ultimately it's kind of providing an experience. And we have seen that this, when you set that expectation, you have the people committed to their time, effort, and energy. And then you show them this is our roadmap over the next 90 days. Here's what people are going to own, and then break that down even more. It's not crazy level of project management. What they are is pretty predictable things that you're going to want to get from the client, obviously, to help them get across the line. All right.

So you got holding people accountable and understanding that accountable matrix. Who? What? Right now we're starting to get to When? Where? kind of elements of this. So you got checklist level, high level, 30,000 foot. This is our experience, everything that's going on there. So think of that again, mapping to your environment. Simple exercises.

[12:23] Screen showing slide: 3. Tasks: Breaking Down Responsibilities

12:23 – 14:17

Joseph Knecht: 3. Tasks-Breaking Down Responsibilities

The next one is, obviously, breaking down those responsibilities. So simply put, each checklist obviously has a checklist item in it. But then, ultimately, you might want to task that out to multiple people. Not only on your internal team, but then also on the client’s team. So if it's we're looking to secure some marketing assets like logos and brochures, or whatever it might be to anything you're doing, or you know, or data files, stuff from the IT department. Many of our clients are using resellers or channel partners. So there's just a ton of people kind of going on that, especially like if they're doing on-prem installs or other stuff like that. There's all these sign offs and processes there. But ultimately those have to be broken down. So you have a checklist item, but then, ultimately, there might be 2 or 3 people that have to contribute to that, to kind of get that one item over the line right?

And that's the key—is you're starting to unearth potential roadblocks during your onboarding process by simply taking your customer through these kinds of processes because it's high level—we want to achieve this—we agree, yes, we want to achieve this by, when, this—great. All right now, we need these items. Who on your team can get us these items? And then, of course, that's going to loop back to the next couple of items that I talk about here. Right? So people on responsibility, high level view, checklist, high level roadmap. And then each one of those items might have 1, 2 5 tasks depending on whatever it is. But it's going to give you that visibility you need in order to get your onboarding successful, right?

And again, we have clients that onboard their customers in 10 days, we have clients that onboard them in 6 months to a year, right? Complicated—government, or we're a lot in regulated industries. So everybody's got a little bit different shtick or need set there. But ultimately, you can see how this is very repeatable and set up once, obviously like in our tool, with templates, etcetera. So you got tasks, right? So checklist tasks, right?

[14:17] Screen showing slide: 4. Document Collaboration: Ensuring Everyone is on the Same Page

14:17 – 21:28

Joseph Knecht: 4. Document Collaboration: Ensuring Everyone is on the Same Page

The next one is collaboration. So what I mean by collaboration here is, we don't have a single client that isn't needing to extensively share data and information back and forth. And what I mean by that is, configuration files, information about users or anything on the configuration side. Or I mean you guys are all—I’m speaking to the choir here—for modern onboarding, as specifically in many of the industries we're in tech, professional services hardware, that kind of ecosystem. There's a tremendous amount of information having to go back and forth, not only in the early stages, about environment and prep.

And then you’ve got obviously, configuration elements, or professional services, bespoke activities going on. And then you got all the way to actual on-prem installs or testing periods, validation periods. I mean, there's a lot of pieces, obviously, to getting things live. Quite frankly, we have many clients that installers can't even, you know, get planes or go anywhere until certain checklists and tasks are completed to confirm consistency of engagement there. Right?

So we have a lot of tools inside, and you need to be thinking about, How do people share files with you? How do they share documentation? We have like a form system for data collection inside. So it's clean data. So there's a tremendous amount of data collection we do. And again, the point of all this is, you have the accountability. You’ve got the right people. And now you're making it very efficient for them to get and share information with you and make sure it's the most current information and accurate. Right?

So now you're kind of flipping from, I want to hold you accountable—but how I hold you accountable is by providing an optimal environment for us to do things together, right? And so this is another thing to consider and make sure everybody's on the same page, because that's where we see a lot of failure—let's just be honest—starts to creep in right at this phase, where you're starting to ask them for more things, and they're needing to rely on other people to get them those things. And so you’ve got to have really quick visibility on if things are on track or off track, and if they are, how do we remediate those with additional leadership support from the customer you're bringing on, right. But you got to team up for success, sending a thousand emails back and forth with excel files, word docs and other things like that are just there—that's the recipe for failure. So collaboration. So think about that on your end as a major piece, ironically, for accountability. Right?

[16:47] Screen showing slide: 5. Centralized Environment: Single Source of Truth

16:47 – 21:28

Joseph Knecht: 5. Centralized Environment-Single Source of Truth

Okay, next, one: single source of truth. And so this is where it also gets camp- gone-amuck and where we've helped, a ton of clients is obviously, using email. And you know, stuff like that is just never going to work. Those aren't tools, right to manage these things across the line with clients. And again on the client side, there might be 20 or 30 different people in involved in this.

So in our platform, we call them workspaces, which is one centralized environment, but we also know which we integrated with everything. But what we also know is sometimes our clients are using like Salesforce or other CRM’s to track this process. So we're pushing all of our data into those ecosystems, too so that there's a single source of truth. But most importantly, that's not only for your teams. It's also for the customer, as they are transient. They're kind of coming in and out of this process. And so how do they find the pertinent information—up to date where we're at, etcetera—all in one environment, right? And that's very key.

And we're seeing this in a lot of industries just…and you…some of you might be experiencing this also. Email is dying in corporate America. So if you're selling into hospitals, banks, finance institutions, many of them are not accepting external emails. And then it's a very complicated process to maybe get white labeled. And so our workspaces are that secure environment that they can log in and keep track of everything. So there's a big push there.

So centralization is now becoming even more prevalent, to provide these new customers a great experience. And so these are some things to think about. And we've really seen an uptick in that security side—no email kind of ecosystem—and really needing an efficient way to communicate and collaborate, you know, with those with new customers there. Okay, so think about that: How are you not only communicating and collaborating with them, but how are they getting the most up to date information, and resources there?

So we have, like I mentioned, we have a lot of clients in regulated industries, and one of their challenges, or one of many, is basically, yes, there's the day-to-day onboarding, like, obviously, all the stuff that I've been talking about here to help with accountability. But then, also, you have to balance that card of showing enough visibility to the leadership—again, so the people who sign the contract, or the leaders’ leaders. You guys all know there's kind of a tiering there, and so a lot of times it's properly communicating to them. We're trending good, right? Because they don't want to be blindsided at the end that something isn't going well, right? So there's a balance of providing some information, and then too much information. And so, by having everything centralized, you can effectively measure everything and then have different communication strategies for those different persona types. Right?

You're not going to talk to a VP of Operations, or a COO, or whatever, about some minutia element, right, of X and Y. No, they want a kind of a high level summary, and they want to just be able to get to that when they want to get to that. And that's the other big thing about centralized environments we see is, with modern hybrid work, plus if you're dealing with C-suites or larger organizations, a tremendous amount of time is done outside the normal business hours.

And so they're wanting the most updated centralized place to get the current news. Let's just call it that, right. And so, having an environment to effectively do that is very, very mission critical, plus it makes the people you're working with look like rock stars, right? So if you're onboarding and you got it all centralized, and you're doing all the other things we're talking about, then the primary people doing the onboarding, are now being able to showcase to their bosses and folks of how well this process is going and where they are at with that.

It also can be used in the reverse way. If we're a little bit off, then we can work together with the onboarding team and the client and communicate maybe some needs we have from leadership, to allocate more resources or to do other things. But it's not an emotional conversation, it's based on facts and information that has been tracked the entire time, right? Basically protecting everybody. Because again, everything does not go perfect. It's…but knowing it early and getting early detection of that and knowing that, really helps everybody course correct and get over the line, when you need to be over the line, right? And no surprises—no one wants surprises. Right? I mean, that's just reality.

Okay, next one.

[21:28] Screen showing slide: 6. Automations: Streamlining the Process

21:28-25:38

Joseph Knecht: 6. Automations-Streamlining the Process

Okay, so another big thing with accountability is—I call it the force multiplier effect. Right? So when you're using email or other resources, there's no, again, centralized environment like the previous one. But you have to think everybody is, of course, very busy, and there's a lot of things going on in your side and the client side. And so leveraging technology and automations and reminders and all sorts of forecasting, and all sorts of other things to basically help guide users across. And for instance, I mean, you know…like in sales, you got to call a customer 6 times, maybe even just to get a sales meeting. It's the same thing when you're working with individuals on their own checklist or tasks, or things you're asking for them. You have to consistently follow up with them. And when we say automations and following up and streamlining things, of course—one, we're obviously looking for efficiency for your team right?

And we see when we're fully deployed, 25% plus efficiency, just on your side. But then, also on the client side that you're onboarding. How do you create efficiency for them when they need to get resources from other people internally? So following up, reminders, all sorts of things. And again, sometimes the word accountability has a bad PR rap, because it sounds, you know, negative, or you know, some clients initially are like, “Well, we don't want to harass or interrupt them.” But the point is, when you do the other pieces, where you have that accountability, it's been discussed. Then the expectations are there. You're not blindsiding them.

And so by creating an environment where you're able to automate, follow up, basically check in with them on a higher frequency, plus you give them the option to say, you know what, I'll just say, you know, Tiffany's like, “Hey? You know what, Tommy, we're a little behind…we had something happen…big client, something went on. You know, we're going to need an extra 3 days.” Great, that's all you guys want, right? Open communication, not missed expectations. And then you guys can adjust things accordingly.

So being able to do that force multiplier, we like to think for every one thing somebody does inside the tool, the tool is doing 6 to 10 items for them automatically, which is great efficiency. It's great touch. It's just all sorts of things that create that consistency of engagement.

And again, if you have kids, I have a kid—I have a son—l like, you know, how you follow up, and all of those things really helps people get across the line—like just own it. Right? I mean, like that's just reality. But you don't have to be mean about it. It could be just a simple touch point, “Hey, Tiffany, I see you got a couple of items due next week, and of course this can be automated, or “I see you have a couple of items due next week—just want to check in,” or “Is everything all right?”

Or if the customer downloaded a template, like our system knows they downloaded a template. It's just going to say, “Hey, Tiffany, I saw you downloaded the template. Does it make sense? Do you have any immediate questions?” And if they say a question or something, obviously, that can go to your Slack, Teams or an email. So it's connecting that experience to just keep people on point, moving forward in a positive, graceful manner to get these things over line—and when things do pop up, they're able to communicate it to you effectively. And then you guys can make changes, right?

So you first have to get of course, agreeance, obviously an environment, and then you can start to hammer down with some…in a good way, hammer down… automations right? Efficiency guys, right? Like everybody is an adult here. Right? So how do we achieve that? And we see a lot of clients right now, obviously, who have some downward pressures with the economy, a little bit in shaky ground like, how can they do more with less? How can we be more repeatable? And again, we have clients who are enterprises. We also have clients who are basically startups. And they're looking, how do we scale? So as you start to bring on more talent to your teams by plugging them into, or a highly reproducible , gives not only your team members accountability, but again, also the accountability on to the customer side. Right?

So things to think about. Obviously, it's not just one phone call. Or “I sent Bobby an email last week and haven't heard back.” Those are just excuses—that's not really executing right? And I think everybody here has probably had that conversation…so automations

[25:38] Screen Showing slide: 7. Reporting and Follow-up: Keeping Everyone Accountable

25:28 – 27:14

Joseph Knecht: 7. Reporting and Follow-up: Keeping Everyone Accountable

Next one, obviously, you gotta know what the hell's going on. And so progress reports, reporting, tracking early detections—you know all of these things you have to have in your pockets—so that you can be, obviously, identifying troubles or issues predictably, before they happen. I think this is one of the greatest benefits of having everything in an optimal experience environment for the customers. You actually can click a button and see where everything is at and identify where there potentially could be problems. And again, there are problems—they're going to happen.

And so by being able to do this, this extremely helped with accountability, because again, you can do accountability in a soft way, following up. And you hope you don't ever have to get to that massive escalation that in some cases, you know, has to be done—poor performance, or not enough resources or somebody just isn't doing their job—just real world things you need to know about that sooner, rather than later. And again, stop the conversations that sound emotional and have the conversations that are factual.

 And I think that's the most important thing, because that kind of conversation is open and transparent, because if you did number one where you establish the rules of the game, and who's doing what, it's a lot easier to have these conversations. And now you have actual data to support that. And of course you're going to get people over the line accordingly. Right? So these are pretty big things to think about there.

[27:14] Screen showing slide: 8. Feedback Loop: Continuous Improvement and Accountability

27:14 – 33:34

Joseph Knecht: 8. Feedback Loop-Continuous Improvement and Accountability

And then last, but not least, is feedback loop. So this is very interesting.

So if you score your own onboardings, meaning internal score—like in our enterprise., when we have sales calls and onboardings, both sides of the house—we ask our clients to score us. So if we're doing a sales call, you're like “One out of a 10, How do you see this as a fit?” You know, or XY, right—same thing on customer onboarding, it's good to have your own team score themselves like, “How well do you think this onboarding went?” Maybe in a 7 to 10 functional areas of the onboarding and have them score themselves. And then a lot of our clients also use inside our tool, you can do surveys and other things to kind of score your onboarding process and deltas or areas of opportunity, because internally, you might think it was a 9 or an 8, and the client’s like “It was a 5.” And you're like, “Whoa! What happened?” So that's one thing we do. Especially if you're using channel partners or resellers where the people may be installing or doing stuff.

Or maybe not your team, or it's a remote install team, and you want better feedback there. Sometimes, if our clients are doing installations of stuff, they're taking photos of the deployment and in sharing that with the client, like lots of things to again elevate that feedback loop. And did we do what we said we should do. But it's a very important process. Sometimes people don't want to open up their own kitchen, you know, drawers, right? They just want to talk about everybody else's.

But you can incrementally deploy some strategies around this because the accountability matrix around this, it basically allows you to use real client information to help you have conversations with your teams on areas of improvement, of accountability, process, visibility. But all of these typically interconnect around the same exact stuff, right? Timing. We didn't know we needed to do this, or was very confusing of what we were doing, who, what, when, and where, I was lost. I couldn't find information, right…that you're going to start to unearth kind of symptoms around the lack of accountability, right?

Because it's the old joke of like Eastern and Western medicine like Western medicine solves the root problem. Eastern, we're very good at just you know. “I'm sorry. Yeah, yeah…other way Yeah.” But you get it, like, just, you know, covering it up. Covering up the pain, not the real problem. And so ultimately, that's the same thing when you're doing these feedback loops, is you'll hear things, “Oh, we didn’t get a…” But ultimately that was probably more an accountability issue at some phase of the process that unlocks basically opportunities to fix that for you.

So it's not just about creating accountability, it's figuring out how to optimize that accountability over a period of time. And so the last 2—the reporting from an operational perspective of those types of things, And then 8,being kind of the feedback loop, this really helps you put the fuel to the fire because you can do 10 customer onboardings and then candidly review, you know what's going on? And that really, really helps.

The other concept we have used, I…this was…this is something an associate of a friend of mine in Chicago one time we were meeting, and she came up with kind of this, “Everybody likes to do post-mortems. But I think for this call, the problem with a post-mortem is, it's too late.” And so what she did with her teams is basically, when they were onboarding they would do pre-mortems.

And so the pre-mortems would be more about if this is going to fail, or there's going to be a problem with this onboarding, what's going to happen? Because a lot of times their teams might know more than the manager or the leadership, right? And so there were…immediately…are concerns about like “Well, I don't know who's going to own this.” And all of a sudden you get a pretty long list—of what we would call—red dot items—that might come about with this client onboarding and then attacking those.

Then, of course, with this number 8, this is basically, obviously, confirming whether or not those happened. Or are there additional things like that to take into consideration? So that in those accountability meetings, number one from this presentation, basically, can you address more things in those meetings so that less of those problems happen? You see where I'm getting at there, team?

So it's basically sometimes the candid feedback can then unlock, obviously the areas of accountability gaps, and then those accountability gaps can be attacked, not only in number 1 from this presentation, but also obviously all the other pieces there.

So that's how it kind of comes full circle. There's the expectation setting. Then there's actually the execution of it, which we went through. And then, of course, last, but not least, it's not just moving on to the next one. It's looking at, what did we learn from that—from ourselves internally—and then also from the client side, how did they score us on this?

Because again, as I alluded to many of you on this call, or who listen to this, many of our clients, they're not just onboarding a client once, they're onboarding module one, or deployment one, or phase one or whatever. And so there are going to be many onboardings after this. And so it's very key that, you know, you address these things and don't just sweep them under the rug, and then ultimately, for all of our clients speaking for us, and Engage, and how we help our clients is, we want you to be continuously improving.

And then we're optimizing this. And for most of our clients they want to scale. They want to launch more customers. They want to have happier customers. They want great referrals, right? And so it's the multiplicative approach of the value chain can get pretty high, and customer onboarding is now directly connected to revenue, which is a great spot to be. That helps you get more resources and help you scale your teams and do even more.

So that's it. Those are the 8 and so, from a high level perspective, I always like to game plan these out with our customers, of course. And there's certain areas you can do, obviously, immediately. I gave you tips and tricks on all these. There's more resources, of course, on our corporate site—elements like that. But one thing we do, let me get to it here.

[33:34] Screen showing slide: Resources for Alignment

33:34 – 38:51

Joseph Knecht: Resources for Alignment

Okay, so a couple of things I will throw out for anybody on this call or who obviously consumes this, is many of you are obviously looking for some ways to create better accountability, or you wouldn't be here. You're a leader. You're not going to waste your time. But that doesn't mean you're interested in buying Engage now, or 2 years from now, whatever. I do consultations because we have a lot of—it's not a sales demo, nothing like that. You basically tell me your problem and I can give you years and years of experience, of how we help all types of companies basically solve that problem and become more efficient and more accountable in their onboarding process.

We're not a fit for everybody, that's great. We're not designed to be as a company and Proteus Engage, our platform, but we do help a lot in complex onboarding environments and success. So helping you unpack and solve any of your problems personally for your group, I'd love to help you.

I will obviously be sharing out, as requested, this video. I encourage you to watch some of our other webinars. I'll share out this deck. You can steal anything you want and I'll send additional resources, even just a demo to the product. So you can kind of see how the methodology works.

But if any of you want to have a conversation, I will include in that email my personal calendar, not like a sales rep calendar—it will be my personal calendar, and you can grab 30 minutes, and I can help you, brainstorm, because we've just seen it all. I just got to be candid, we've seen a lot of things, we're in a lot of different industries. And so couple of degree changes, you know. I always think like ships on the ocean—you know, a couple of degrees change can really help the trajectory in your group in the next 6 months to 2 years, because if you make it now, they'll actually hit shore and not get stuck in the ocean and drown, right?

And so those are the things we like to help at. So I will offer that to anybody who's been on this call, or scheduled for it, or whatever for the webinar, and please leverage it. I love to conversate. I love to help people solve their problems. That's ultimately how this product was created. We didn't come up with the product. We have thousands of customers on our other products. And they basically complained to us about this problem. And then we said, “Okay, we'll build one.

And so we actually directly used our clients to build this solution out. And it's been very successful. So side bit for Proteus Engage, but I hope the information and resources I shared with you today, you stole at least one nugget. And please, do, we call that R&D, and that's rip off and duplicate. So please do take it with pride and I look forward to if any of you would like to have a private conversation around this—would love to obviously follow up with you and do that. So again, appreciate the…we do webinars and I do them—a lot of them. Because I just I love solving problems. And that's what we've been doing.

And so please check out some of our other webinars, “garbage in-and garbage- out,” many of the other ones which are all intricately related to this modern onboarding experience that is mission critical. Because again, it's the whole experience, not just one single thing. So again appreciate the time today. Everybody kudos to you on—if you're in North America, come into a webinar and learning and extending the success of your firm the day after the holiday. So big win there—way to be accountable, and to those of you who weren't able to meet and are listeners at a later date, look forward to chatting with you, so again appreciate the time, everybody…thanks

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