Join us for an insightful webinar on "Optimizing Customer Onboarding: Risk Management Strategies and Key Metrics" where we dive into the critical performance risks and indicators that drive successful customer onboarding. We will explore metrics such as Time to Onboard, Customer Activation Rate, Velocity and more.

Additionally, we’ll address common onboarding risks, from misaligned customer expectations to support capacity issues, and provide management strategies for overcoming these challenges. Whether you are a leader in customer onboarding, success, sales, or product management, this session will equip you with the knowledge to enhance your onboarding processes and maximize customer satisfaction.

Key Takeaways:

  • Gain insights into mitigating common onboarding risks and ensuring smooth cross-departmental coordination.
  • Understand crucial onboarding metrics like First Time to Value and many more.
  • Learn how to optimize resources and reduce onboarding costs.
  • Discover strategies to enhance product adoption and reduce churn early on.

Transcript:

00:00 -00:29

Joseph Knecht: Introduction

So let's get started. So obviously, you're here for optimizing your onboarding process. So a couple of things to help frame, because on this call and webinar, I know we have different levels of experience in onboarding and leadership. And then also, I want to kind of frame this correctly for those who consume this later on, that aren't here.

[00:29] Screen showing slide: Two-Way Environment

0029 – 3:05

Joseph Knecht: Two-Way Environment

So let's jump in. So the first slide I like to always start with is the unfortunately, the environment you're all probably very familiar with. Okay. So, as I start here, let's find what onboarding is today, right? And what are the challenges that have really metastasized over the last couple of years.

Specifically, I've been in this environment for 25 years, but for sure, in the last 5 years there's been a lot of movement related to, obviously, the number of people. So each one of your businesses is going to be a little bit different. But I think you can map this to kind of your environment.

So the left hand side here, is going to be your team, your company. Okay? So your company and on the right, is going to be the client prospect or the group, obviously, that you're onboarding. As you guys all know, the sales process now for many, is very, very complicated and has a lot of stakeholders.

So you got your original sales team members. You have SME’s (subject matter experts), other folks, obviously, from sales leadership. And then, of course, many people are including onboarding people, in that last 25% of the sale because they're qualifying the deal. There's just a lot going on. So on the left hand side, you got quite a few people from your team on a deal. You can do the math, but I guarantee it's more than 4, right?

And then on the right hand side, it's camp-run-amuck, depending on what industries you're in. It's a lot of people. We have a lot of clients in healthcare, finance, complicated manufacturing, professional services, any of these groups on the client side or the new client side, you can have 10, 20, 30, 40 different individuals. It's not a fret that we have some prospects that have literally 40 people on a deal when it's a large deal. So inherently, you've…we got a problem here Houston, right?

Ultimately, just like a rocket on the launch pad, it's very hard to get it started and firing because you’ve got so many people going on. So you got a lot of risk on the handoff process, the onboarding process itself and trying to get this, you know, over the line ultimately, right? And so we're going to build more on top of this. But I always like to start with kind of the why, or the environment…is a big, big problem around this. And of course, for today's purposes, injects a tremendous amount of risk to successfully onboarding, right? So ultimately, that's one of the biggest challenges.

[3:05] Screen showing slide: Seamless Information

3:05 – 4:52

Joseph Knecht: Seamless Information

So let's also layer on top of that, a lion's share of you listening to this call. Obviously, if you're in B2B onboarding, it requires a lot of information to be going back and forth. So we not only have a mega ton of people, a lot of questions—all this stuff. We need to be moving a lot of information back and forth and expectations back and forth, meaning mutual action plans to checklist items, moving data, filling out forms, uploading templates. Right? I mean, you guys know the hustle you're here because you do this, right? But ultimately, that creates a lot of risk.

And so you got a lot of people and you got a lot of things that have to happen. It's like the old Super Bowl commercial, of herding cats. Right? Like literally, this is what is going on. But again, related to the purposes of this one, what does that do? Injects a tremendous amount of risk, right? And so this is a huge challenge. And this is what's keeping you up at night. And oh, by the way, you’ve got to do more of this with less people, and you want to onboard them faster. Okay? And many of you might be in the business of, you onboard them once, but then, later on you're selling them another module and you’ve got to onboard them again and again and again. And so this is repeating over and over again. And that's very common in software sales or other kind of services like that, or professional services. This is not a one-trick pony. You're going to do this 10 times with the client. Okay? Lots of risk right on the table here. Do you think I'm building up enough to this whole risk and measurement concept?

[4:52] Screen showing slide: Challenges for Onboarding Leaders

4:52 – 7:32

Joseph Knecht: Challenges for Onboarding Leaders

So ultimately, because it's real, I always like to kind of frame it—because it gets you in the right mindset to do it. So many of you are here because of these, right? So the real world—and I mentioned at the beginning of the webinar—one of the things we pride ourselves on, not only this product line…but other things we've done as a group…is ultimately we can only solve problems when you have a candid, transparent relationship.

And so one of the things, as you see with these webinars is, we're not really “sham wowing,” you our product. Clearly, we have a solution that brings all this together and attacks these problems and allows you to measure it. But a lot of you are in different phases of your onboarding journey, meaning, you don't…you might be a super small company, or you're just looking to solve an existing bleeding point. So we like to share from just the real world perspective, what's going on and then you'll self-select accordingly.

So some of the things when you wake up this morning that you're challenged with, obviously, is  many of them, and it's handoffs—you still have a handoff issue, and/or the customers, kind of pissed off because they're restating everything, right? Are you matching the expectations of that delivery? Consistency of that? You can read the screen. These, I'm sure, resonate with you. These are challenges that all onboarders face. It’s one of the reasons why our platform Engage, is so successful, is because we take these head on with proven processes and ecosystems and tools, to basically make these successful. But ultimately, the goal here today is for me to hopefully open up some Johari windows on the risks you need to be concerned about. Obviously, we've stated some of those already, from an environmental perspective, which only amplifies these challenges.

And then I'm going to get you to some of the measurement things, and I'm going to kind of, “Kia Camry, Cadillac” you, meaning start pretty simple. And then I have some advanced metrics to really drive this forward and don't fret—as I mentioned, depending on when you're getting in and listening—all of these at the end, I will package up all of this, plus additional resources that have lower level details on these. Today, I'm going to stay at about 25,000 feet, because, not individually knowing each one of the companies, I try to give a broad…so everybody gets a value nugget. And then, of course, you can drive down into specific things.

So one obvious big problem we have is that conference table has a gigantic hole in the middle, (referring to picture on slide) so there's a lot of risk there of somebody…I just noticed, that has nothing to do with this webinar…but I was just thinking from a risk perspective that—kind of—and has anybody actually been in a meeting where everybody's that attentive and really listening? I don't think so, either. But let's tackle the challenge we can here, all right?

[7:32] Screen showing slide: Onboarding Risks

7:32 – 12:35

Joseph Knecht: Onboarding Risks

So let's get into it—let's have some fun. Onboarding risk, Johari windows right? The stuff that you don't know that is happening, right? You can Google that, Johari window. So Johari window is some of the things for you to be thinking about, or elements that are contributing to it. So the first one. And again, I'm going to kind of go briskly through these. I'll be providing this detail because I do want a little bit of spread here, because everybody is in different environments, different things.

“Failure to Demonstrate Value Quickly”

So, failure to demonstrate value quickly. This is very, very interesting. And we have a lot of clients who actually don't start making money until the client is actually using the tool. So you might be in an environment where there's a big upfront. And you're charging, you know X to install or Y to do da..da. So there's a ton of companies if you're in, which, of course, is fine, still, there's a risk to demonstrate that quickly. But then, also, there's a lot of technology players or hardware players or other groups that we work with, where they actually don't start making money until the thing is fully deployed in there—getting transactional (excuse me) income off that. So one of the big risks, it's just taking way too long, and the customer loses faith in what your product offering service is doing. And they're going to turn out, or you've just completely missed their expectations, and they're only going to use you for a small, contracted period, turn out within a year, etcetera.

So really understanding your clients’ needs and their problems and making sure you're working against those correctly. Just a risk to be aware of, not going to solve everybody's problems on this. But frequently, if clients come to us…and that's one of the things we're trying to stage—the launches—so that very quickly they can start to see real economic value, or you're helping them connect the dots of real economic value extremely early in the onboarding process—and not 2 years from now, 15 months from now, 12 months from now because you need momentum and you need spirit. You need positivity. I know it sounds…but you need momentum…because you need the client to help propel this along internally, right? To get it over line.

“Cross-Departmental Coordination”

 Second, one huge…if you're dealing…I don't care how big your company is. This is more, who the hell you're selling into and obviously onboarding in. Of course, this could affect both ways, but it's cross-dependent on coordination, herding the cats. We've already talked about that—extremely important on your side, but then extremely challenging on the onboarding side—and so making sure there are proper mutual plans, concepts like that. But you have to analyze your risk of how many people internally you have to herd, or be involved, to successfully onboard this…you need to kind of define those out. We're going to talk about that a little bit later. I did a webinar about this also, of role assignment and making sure you have a clear battle plan of the different types or roles of people inside the client you're trying to onboard in, to really solve that. I can include that resource, obviously, here.

“Incomplete or Inaccurate Customer Data”

But that's a huge risk that you have to kind of think through, because frequently it's not done well, and that trickles down into a whole lot of problems doing that. I did allude to again—these are the risks. And then we're going to get into measurement. So another risk for you to consider is obviously, “garbage in-garbage-out,” GIGO, and this paralyzes and can paralyze any onboarding experience for clients because of poor data collection, poor validation of that data. So let's role play. Just a common use case that you can think about to just solve on your end, right? “It’s great, everybody's excited .”

Many of you might have, What we need from a client list. Right? Okay, great. Well, that's just on your side of the equation. Again, remember, successful onboarding is really about you internally, the client internally, and you guys working together, right? There's really 3 relationships here. And so when you think of everything as having multiple relationships, your team by itself, the clients team by themselves, and then what you're working on together, right? Data collection and clean data are obviously mission critical to that. So them just getting you data doesn't mean it's good data, right? So what falsely happens, a lot of the time, is that data is sent, but no one reviews it on your side. Or the client doesn't know really what you're asking for, because they don't know your business at all. That's why they actually hired you. And so these all kind of bring up pretty important risks and areas where things can drop off, stall, really, really get you into a bad shape…again, fJohari Window…think through those. And then, of course, we're going to show you how to measure that.

But these are areas that frequently you feel like, Oh, we have a good onboarding process in place, but the reality is, is unfortunately the devil is in the details. Right? And so just think through that a little, a big risk. These are kind of what I'm sharing with the high risk areas, the things that bubble up that when you do a post review basically, and this is where you're going to start to see the common areas that are leading indicators or elements that contributed gigantically to the risk or the loss of the client. Okay?

“Customer Engagement and Participation”

Next one is customer engagement. You’ve got to measure, How actively are they working with your teams? Are they going dark right away? Are they actually progressing at a rate? Now, if you don't have the infrastructure in place and a solution like Engage, obviously this is what we help clients with. But I don't care if you're doing this for whatever you're doing, your kids lemonade stand. Just make sure that people are engaging in their transacting in a process that is obviously, you can have a leading indicator—are things trending well or not, right? Ultimately, that's a very big piece of all this. Don't operate blind, you know, just don't operate blind. So, customer engagement and participation, again risks—these are things that you can self-analyze yourself.

[13:35] Screen showing slide, Onboarding Risks – Continued

13:35 – 20:29

Joseph Knecht: Onboarding Risks—Continued

There are 3 more and then we're going to kind of switch into basically the toolbox. There's a lot of ways of managing in the risk and the math. I'm going to share with you basically what I believe and what our clients believe, get you the highest, “bang for buck.” And that's what I'm trying to do with these risks also. So next couple of things that kind of, again, if you do a post-mortem, these are going to kind of be what happens. I'll come back to that boredom stuff here in a second, but timeline and resource management.

“Timeline and Resource Management”

So this is interesting because you're like, “Timeline resource man, of course, Joe..” But what we have found and to be a very problematic, is when you're onboarding a company, their resources, and of course, for you to be efficient, you want a time band, obviously, onboarding—you can't just have your resources onboarding somebody forever. And that timeline needs to be mutual. And a lot of times what we've seen is companies are saying, “Oh, we're onboarding this client. We're going to tell them here's the timeline. It's X. “ But they're not openly in communicating and setting the right expectations on the new client side of, again, who they need, what data they're going to need, coaching them through that and managing the resources and making sure they have everything on their side aligned and committed on them, and then they execute the onboarding.

It's very interesting, and this is a tough challenge here, because if the client isn't committed, right, to the timeline, then the chances of this is super high risk of going south. So in some use cases, some…I'm being very transparent…you're better off not onboarding them today. You're better onboarding them 30 days from now, because they'll be committed, and they'll actually get it over the line which attributes to all of the other risks that I have in here. Think about that. I know there's going to be pressure for revenue if that's the case. But ultimately, if the onboarding goes wrong, you're not going to be generating that revenue for them at that point in time, anyway. And it's going to cost you twice as much to get them out, and they're not happy. And there's burnout on their end. You get it?

So that has to be a mutual action to get that over the line, and also from a resource management perspective, and quite frankly—insider secret—by doing that, they really—the customer then—really commits their resources to your onboarding plan to make it timely because you've established the rules of the road in a positive way. “We don't want to waste anybody's time. We want to make sure you're able to be focused on this, and we want it to be a home run for us and for you.” Hence, the mutual…okay?

“Unclear Roles and Responsibilities”

Next item…unclear roles and responsibilities. I had kind of touched on this. We have additional resources on the site. We're dumbfounded by how many times nobody knows who owns what, when, where, and who's responsible? Not even on, literally, even on the internal side, meaning your company and/or on the customer side. Okay? So on the customer side, we have a couple of resources for this, but it's ultimately like an accountability chart. And when you…the kickoff meeting with your client, you have to establish all these rules, roles and responsibilities, right? And get commitment, again, mutual, very, very important.

“Customer Expectations Misalignment”

Again, a lot of this is, is just controlling the narrative and doing it in a way that is mutual. So both parties benefit and then managing, obviously the expectations and misalignment, if there are any, and getting that out on the plate sooner. Which is the last item, which is, if you're going to have a problem during onboarding, let's have it happen right at the beginning, whether that was something that was misspoke from sales, basically, like complete expectation management. Like, “We're not getting this accounting module with this, or we don't get  X or Y” or you know, whatever it is. But ultimately you want to surface that in the beginning, or they can't commit to the timelines. Again, you're getting the idea…is watching out for those misalignments. So these risks are basically a catalog of the things that clients had come to us, Engage with, and obviously our platform and services help resolve these. But for your own onboarding, these are the kind of takeaways to go back. And as you're doing those post-mortems, you know, kind of think about this. So to kind of shock the system a little bit before we jump on how to measure all this.

You can also flip the script. So you can do your post-mortems, and obviously, I hope you're talking with your team and your clients, but for fun, the next onboarding you do, which hopefully, is today or tomorrow, that you're kicking off, right? Just do a pre-mortem—so you, and your team—before you even talk to the customer. Identify the top 5 reasons why this project is onboarding—is going to go sideways. I think you know the answers already. I just gave them to you. But now you can try to address those with your team, as a team project, to help resolve them and do it as a group for buy-in, pre-mortem.

Why would this onboarding with client ABC, fail? What does anybody see? And hopefully you discover a couple of other nuggets within your group that might be there, that you can, you know, also solve, of course, clearly this is what Engage helps with. But again, we're here more to help the greater good of the onboarding community, and just, “rising tide moves all ships,” right ? (So JFK). So pre-mortem if you can, manage your risks that are here. Okay?

So we know the environmental problems, we already talked about it, “camp-run-a-muck,” a  lot of people, lot of stakeholders, lot of interest, need to manage all this, need to do it obviously, in a centralized environment.

Now, you know what kind of the common areas of risk are. There's more clearly, you might be saying, “But, Joe, what about?” Yeah, I get it, I agree. But it's the old bell curve. 80% of the problem, if not 90% of the problem, is going to be right in these areas. And so for the biggest bang of buck, basically go after these. Also, if you can, do a pre-mortem on that, all right?

I'm going to shift gears now because we talked about the environment. And we talked about the risks. Now, let's get into a little bit more of, “Okay, if we're doing this, how do we get better?” And so, going to switch to this.

[20:29] Screen showing slide: Onboarding Metrics

20:29 – 30:22

Joseph Knecht: Onboarding Metrics

Now, so there's a lot of math here, not so much on this one, but the next, I'll be whatever…I'll give you a preview is…pretty heavy math because let's just be frank, depending on your role within the organization, there is substantial pressure on onboarding departments, or onboarding in general meaning, where the economy is at, or other things. There's very strong downward pressure to do more with less, less team members…fire team members…if your department can't prove the value that your team members are providing to the organization, right?

Or if you're scaling and you're growing and you want to be able, for budgetary reasons, be able to get more budget to obviously secure more clients or not secure clients, not sales. You know, we're going to secure more team members. Then ultimately, you’ve got to bring some meat with the potatoes so that you can fight to keep your team members—to grow your team members—and then also provide very strong rationale that if the company is scaling that with my team members, we can do X number of this with great confidence, and the clients are happy and all sorts of things like that. Right?

So I want to contextually prepare you for why I'm presenting what I'm presenting. Because we have seen these elements—these basic ones, and then some more math ones—really help in all those different use cases to make you, if you're the leader, look like a rock star. If you're an onboarding associate or a customer success associate, you can start tracking this for your own purposes, which help measure your personal development and performance.

Because, unfortunately, if there is a need or something of downsizing, you're able to defend your role. So this is in general, no matter who's on this call today, I think these are very, very important. For an individual level, and then also from a C-suite level, all right?

So again, I'll…I'm going to talk about these at 30,000 foot or 25,000 feet—at the end of this webinar, like I do on every webinar—If anybody has any questions or things, not a sales meeting, I'm not going to demo you our software, unless you ask me to. I'm literally…you could call me and we can go through a session on these or any problem you have. And I can give you just candid recommendations with massive levels of experience in different verticals and industries, right? Just being transparent. So let's get started on these. I'm going to move quick for obvious reasons. But again, we have more resources on our site, and of course I'm available to help you break these down.

“Time to Onboard” (TTO)

Simplest one: time to onboard. How long does it take? Now, again, if it's super fast and they're mad at you, which is the last one on the screen, (you might want to look at that) speed isn't King. We want to be good, but not stupidly fast, and people are pissed, or they don't know how to use the tool or service right? You get it. There's a healthy balance here, so don't just reward on TTO. It can be a very false narrative there, right? So time to onboard…but you should be tracking that, clearly. Don't want to operate blind.

‘First Time to Value”  (FTTV)

The second one: first time to value—ah a little bit different, all right? So you might be asking yourself, First time to value…Well, obviously, it's when they're starting to see all the promises that your sales team has made. So how can you quickly get them to that right? Again, some tricks of the trade to think about on your end, depending on what product or service you have. You can phase the launch or phase the onboarding. So you can get to something of high value, relatively quickly. It's a nice snickerdoodle to basically get them excited—demonstrations to the leadership team who pay you, who cut the contract with you—sort of like, “Holy cow! Look at this momentum we have…this is extremely valuable!” You get my point? Like you can create sometimes a first time to value, just because of a process change, or how you phase it, or some other things. So think about that…it's worth it…if you're asking yourself. So time to onboard…

“Task/Checklist Completion Date”

So time to value, TTO, FTTV, obviously, we're very strong in the environment for us of using mutual plans, checklists, but other experiences around our platform. So just again, I talked about it in the risk---is completion rate like, how are we progressing well, right…like, just, “Are we progressing well?” I think you know what that means. You should be tracking it, and obviously by individual level, etcetera. And also, it gives you some, from the Johari window standpoint, expected…kind of are our people flowing at the right rate—what we would call kind of predictive analysis of whether or not this is trending. For you as leaders, you want to know yet, red, yellow, green. Of course, those kinds of things. You can do this with the combination of these, of course, that’s what our platform does. But again, you can do this on whatever way you're doing it.

“Onboarding Completion Rates”

Onboarding completion rates some of our clients, you know, maybe have smaller systems or stuff like that is—it's just some of them are exiting during the onboarding. If you're having that a lot, it's probably related to the things that we…the risk we just talked about...some expectations really off.

“Churn Rate During or Immediately After Onboarding”

But some clients come to us, and they’re having a pretty big problem there. We're able to help dramatically change the outcomes of that—just through the processes we've been talking about. Again. This is kind of churn rate during, or immediately after. So it's…they're kind of related, and everybody has different terminologies. When does churn really happened? I don't know. You guys know the hustle…Ford/Chevy conversations like blue truck/white truck. I…whatever…I don't care who's involved, and reality is ultimately, you know, Ford/Chevy conversation there. And so churn rate, you’ve got to watch out for that. And when it's happening again is typically related to that again, you should be measuring these, right? And by quarter typically, is obviously…by month is good. But sometimes there's not enough throughput for that.

“Customer Engagement During Onboarding”

Also, the customer engagement during onboarding, again, these are leading indicators. Are they actually consuming? Are they signing up for the trainings correctly, if you're a software? or Are they logging into your tools? Like, you know, there's a lot of things. Are they on pace with everything that you're asking them to do? So Is the customer doing a lot of the stuff they need to be doing? That's going to be a red dot, kind of that item, red dot, just meaning…there's a threat to the opportunity. Right?

“Net Promoter Score (NPS) Post-Onboarding”

And then Net Promoter Score (NPS). This is again kind of a debate. We actually use different type…we leverage and our clients leverage on NPS’s. But I also like temperature checks throughout the process. And again, this is more if you have a larger solution or a larger, more complex deployment is, why wait to the end? You should be kind of checking the temperature throughout the relationship. And there's some really cool things we help clients with on how to do that, whether it's a combination of not only the people intently on the onboarding, but then also the leadership on both sides, making sure that everybody's Namaste and that things are progressing well. So it really just isn’t a net promoter score, per se. It's…we believe, in a little bit more temperature checks again, it depends on the complexity of your product. But start with the simple math. Right? A lot of these here are, you know, really simple things that you can start measuring for your team on an individual level meaning each team player, which if you're, you know, really small and just getting started, you can do this on an Excel spreadsheet.

Obviously, clients come to us because we systematize this for scale, and there's infrastructure and reporting and analytics on everything, to kind of guide this and…but every business and services is at different stages. So these are the initial ones. These are some in the sphere, let's just say, of measurement. These are probably really good ones, if you're really, you know, just coming out of the gate or trying to learn, I'd start here. These are, going to get you for some table stakes, basically for internal meetings and areas of improvement and coaching opportunities for you. If you're a leader on this call, you're going to want to start here because they're logically building blocks to help with your onboarding, managing the risk like we talked about. But then, also being able to prove basically, areas of opportunity, areas of success, “kudo-ing,” all of that around this. And then, of course, you're doing this on every single onboarding so that can be woven into whatever weekly meeting structure you have or whatever to, you know, up level stakeholders on both sides. Because again, it's a 3-person group: It's you guys internally, the client internally, or the new onboarding. And of course, you guys working together that mutual ecosystem needs to all 3—all 3 pieces need to work well, okay? So apply those. You probably have some of them, apply more, of course we can help and brainstorm more, if you like,

[30:22] Screen showing slide: Advanced Onboard Metrics

30:22 – 38:30

Joseph Knecht: Advanced Onboard Metrics

I'm going to kind of jump to what I would think, for some of you, a little bit more advanced and it's not advanced in a negative way. It's just, you know, you’ve got to kind of start…and a then lot of our clients, they don't know how to address these just as of yet, because it—they just think of them as advanced, as you continue to grow your team, and some elements of the team and other things, again, there are different hats here. So if you're in the operational side of onboarding. Obviously, the previous slide really helps you start to, you know, bring your value around that. Then, working on these with your leadership team, and if you are a leader here, a Director or a VP, like some of these are again, for those strategic decisions that you're in in charge of making and budget acquisition and all sorts of things to obviously drive value and demonstrate the value of a team.

“Onboarding Cost Per Customer”

So one is, onboarding costs per customer. Of course this is dual-sided one…one is looking for efficiencies on onboarding. Obviously, that has to be connected with customers being happy, though, right? Like again, if you “Sham Wow” me, with a really small number, but then you have a high churn, or the customers aren't happy, or whatever it is, like—that doesn't work. So you want, if we were the bears—the 3 Bears, you want the porridge that is just right. And then once you figure out that porridge, then you got that kind of scale engine that you can kind of put around that which is then working to justify those other resources or budgets. Or…because I can share with you like our infrastructure Engage, we, help operationally, literally, 30% more efficiency and way more engagement from the customers. But just from your team's perspective, we easily get groups to 30% more efficient, based on the platform, our systems, our products built into it, our automations, our dynamic customer experiences or onboarding experiences we do. So we can shave a lot of time per customer, allowing your individual team members to do more. Obviously, they get your onboarding cost per customer to us at a healthy level. But it's not just a healthy level, it's a scalable level, meaning you're able to do more with less. So very, very important. Each company is a little different, obviously of calculating the math, but you can just get started, and of course we help our clients.

“Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) Post-Onboarding”

Customer lifetime value…so this is kind of interesting. So post-onboarding for some of you, you might envision, obviously, onboarding is just being a one-time dance and it might be for your organization, but for a lot of orgs, it's not. And there's kind of 2 ways of looking at this.

It's one, so if the client you onboard them X, but the LTV’s (Is Lifetime Value of the Customer) is measured on a 4 or 5-year cycle…just to keep this math very simple for you, let's say they onboard it for $20,000, 5-year cycle, $100,000, right? And so that's important, but then also right, that math… and then also a lot of times these customers buy more stuff. So contract value year one, 10,  year two, 20, year three, 30, year four…It's way more than 100 grand now, right? I kind of gave myself bad math, cut me some slack, but it's way more…it's way north of $150,000 now, right? Again, in some of those use cases, you also are doing smaller micro-onboardings, meaning of specific modules or other things, or just in general. These are very important to help justify the value and the credibility of your onboarding team, okay?

“Referral Rate Post-Onboarding”

Another one, which is a pretty strong dotted line to revenue, net new revenue is, referral rate post-onboarding, because what this allows you to do is to justify your expense on the onboarding, because again, you can't sometimes just make onboarding super cheap…you can't…right? Like that’s not…it’s porridge that’s just right. And then that just right makes a happy client, and that happy client also, then will give you referrals. Okay, so think through that one, If you got a friend in the sales department, they might be able to help you figure this out real quickly. But you, if you're a leader listening, you definitely could figure this out pretty quickly, which, again, is the sphere of your role—is helping impact those direct revenue numbers. Because again, I think, let's just be transparent here, it's all business. In business, if you can show your relationship to revenue, whether dotted line or straight line, you're in real good position during growth of the company, for budget and other things, and you also can be protected on, obviously cuts, if the company isn't doing well, because you're directly connected, whether that's a straight line or just a dotted line, like I'm saying, okay?

“Upsell/Expansion Rate Post-Onboarding”

Last, but not least, on the more complicated advanced metrics is the upsell expansion rate. So again, if you have a product or service that you know, is around that sphere of things, you want to basically de-couple that. So you might have an onboarding experience that costs X. So X…What I mean by this is like, we were literally just having a call with a client last night, and so, their first onboarding is pretty substantial. It's a larger product, and then they have kind of micro-onboarding after that. But each one of those micro-onboardings is for a new module or configuration. Even professional services, like they're doing a lots of different things with the customers, even hardware, they got hardware professionals or whatever it might be, to the LTV (Lifetime Value of the Client).

They're also providing additional experiences, obviously, because they might not be as complex as the original. But they're equally as important to all of these other things that are going on, and you might have different costs for those, too. Right? So again, keep it simple at the beginning, but depending on the complexity, or the type of onboarding experience, you might want to classify them as initial setup.

And then maybe it's module setup only. I think you're getting the drift of where I'm going here. You can get more complicated when you need to. But ultimately, they all can help you make more effective decisions and make sure that the environment is up to snuff. Because maybe those experiences are very costly, and you didn't know that you can unpack. And obviously, you need the analytics and insights to do that. Obviously, that's why platforms like ours are extremely popular. But I do like to share the concepts because you can use these at all varying levels.

So let's recap a little bit here. So successful onboarding, right out the gate—the risks, you’ve got  massive environmental risks. Right? You’ve  got too many people, need centralized information, a lot of cats. Right? You need to move a lot of data back and forth. And then I shared with you. If you pre-mortem or post-mortem on any of your onboarding experiences fairly, not just internally for you, but also candid conversations with your customers. They're probably going to bubble up around those risks that I walked you guys through. And then if you're wanting to measure this, which you know you should, can't transparently, this side, basic metrics get you over the line, get you started, allows you to have effective communication and collaboration with your own team and also clients, right?

And then, as you want to ratchet it up to more advanced, you can get into elements like this which really help them provide you the purview that is needed, or you know, the continued growth and defense of your team and the value of your team right?

[38:30] Screen showing slide: Resources to Help

38:30 – 40:59

Joseph Knecht: Resources to Help

So I'll wrap up here. I appreciate everybody's time, as usual, as many of you have done…is we got many ways to engage and many of you are in different phases, it’s not our first rodeo. The idea here is you can go to our website. Obviously, you can get our white papers and insights. I'll include some in this email based on the topics that I'll do a follow up, obviously email out to everybody. Obviously, we got mega ton of other webinars that relate to many of these topics that I talked about.

If you're ready to engage, and you're actively looking for a solution to help take your organization to another level. You can just go to Proteus slash schedule and meet with members of our team that are going to help you with that. But a lot of you, because you're in different phases of that, just want a personal, one-on-one brainstorm literally with me, Joey. That's my email there, hit me up with an email. My assistant will follow up with you also, just to see if you want a one-on-one. I'm not going to demo you the product, you're going to tell me a problem you have and ideas you have or whatever. If you tell me to demo the product. Of course, I'm not going to demo you the product. But it's not a sales process. We're here to help solve problems. We are solving problems for tons of people. But we know everybody's at different phases of their business journey and product journey and everything. Of course I'll end with clearly, I think many of you know, because you've been on our website. We do have an unbelievable platform called Engage, which is heavily used in complex sales, the last 25% of the sale, where there's a lot of communication and collaboration, the handoff, onboarding and obviously account growth. So we cover those mission critical revenue areas for organizations.

We also layer on top of that, not just platform, we also provide many of our clients coaching and optimization to help guide them rapidly through to success—also because we have a lot of experience. So it's just not platform. It's also industry, vertical specific, experience and growth plans to help you move fast.

So I appreciate the time. Please consume all of our other resources and things. And again, if you need anything or you want to again, just brainstorm just email me there and look forward to continuing the conversation. Hope all of you have a good rest of your day and attack the rest of the week. Thank you

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