Many businesses think the sales process ends when they’ve successfully closed prospects. They couldn’t be more wrong.
There’s no end to the sales process. This doesn’t mean you have to constantly sell them; what you need to do is solidify the relationship from the very beginning. A well-planned customer onboarding process makes this happen.
Why Customer Onboarding Matters
Onboarding is the starting point of your customers’ experience. It helps them navigate your products or services while getting more insights about the brand beyond what you’ve marketed to them.
Customer onboarding serves more than just a formal digital handshake. If executed seamlessly, it has a significant impact on your business:
- It minimizes your customer churn — in fact, resolving customer issues on the first interaction helps reduce customer churn by 67%.
- It helps in cultivating a long-term relationship while maintaining costs.
- Customers are inclined to stick with a business that can provide a personalized experience. Your onboarding process takes care of that.
With a well-defined B2B customer onboarding process, your business can set clear expectations and provide a more solid foundation throughout the customer journey.
How to Plan Your Customer Onboarding
Customer onboarding isn’t a “do it and set it aside” aspect of your business. You need to refine the process to align with the goals of your business and match the behavior of your customers.
1. Set clear objectives
Your customer onboarding process should be engineered to achieve specific objectives for your business. Do you want customers to subscribe to a new tool? Looking to increase the number of appointments with customers?
With clear objectives, you can set up different touchpoints throughout the onboarding that prompts customers to take certain actions. This helps your customers see the value of your products or services.
2. Create customer profiles as a guide
The entire onboarding process revolves around the customer — not on your business. This is why you need to design it based on your customer. A customer profile or persona can be useful in this case.
Your customer profiles allow you to integrate the motivations, pain points, and solutions they’re looking for in your onboarding. This makes their experience more personalized.
3. Provide value in every message
The onboarding process reinforces the idea that your customers made the right decision by signing up with your business. This is why every message you send should have value.
One of the best ways is to provide them with supplementary content to address a pain point. For example, sending a short demo can help them better understand how your product can help them with their problems.
4. Measure and adjust
Customer onboarding is a strategy. Just like any other strategy, it requires measuring key metrics to determine if what you’re doing works. Churn and retention rates are the two important metrics you can tie to your onboarding process.
Treat every message as an opportunity to improve relationships with your customer. The more value you provide them, the more likely they will stay with your business. So, brainstorm with your team on how you can further improve your onboarding process.
