Demystifying data onboarding with Osmos Head of Customer Success, Sandy Daniels

Nothing is worse than getting blocked.

During onboarding, that means your #1 priority is ensuring customers both: know the right steps to take AND are empowered to complete them.

Despite the improvements in product design today, data migration challenges are not different today than they were 20 years ago.

As a result, when data is a dependency to see value, customers get stuck, and products struggles to get adoption or show real results.

This week we’re breaking down 3 tactics to improve your data onboarding with Sandy Daniels, Head of Customer Success at Osmos.

1. Identify the first use case

When new customers signup, they inevitably come to you to prove out the hardest scenarios upfront that take the most time, have the most complex data, and have the greatest time to value.

Sandy suggests enabling the customer to make realistic progress by resetting expectations:

”How do we start by resetting and saying, Hey, let's do this as more of a crawl walk, run, and help make you amazing moments. Then you can continue to have really crisp 12 step plans versus 100 steps to one long outcome at some point and instead you can have this wonderful iterative approach.”

It might seem appealing to sell breezing through the crawl and walk stages and get to the running part with the product up and running, but if that's not the experience your customer is having you need to understand why they're stuck in crawl before they churn.

2. Focus on the key milestones

Just like trying to jump to running with the most complex use case on day 1 it’s equally important to identify the waypoints and milestones along the path to success.

Data onboarding often requires action or approval from other parties than the end user of your product or the buyer so laying out at which point in the overall implementation plan you need support and buy in helps break down the complexity into more approachable chunks.

“identifying the milestones and then the core dependencies and assigning a champion or a sponsor to those key milestones. So you're saying, we're working towards operationalizing this use case, data migration is part of this process, but the whole project team doesn't need to know all 35 steps, you're statusing on key milestones, where we're at, and where you need help.”

This is where having a mutual action plan can be really beneficial to ensure the right people know what they need to do, when they need to do it and help everyone connect the work they need to do with the ultimate goal of implementing your tool.

3. Empower your champions

You likely have a champion in your customers organization who can see the big picture of how your product will unlock a new business outcome, make their life easier, and have a big impact.

Not everyone you might need to take action will necessarily have that context, so finding ways to empower your champion to “sell” internally can be the difference between a successful implementation and a failed onboarding.

“If you've got a champion at your new customer organization tied to data, they understand the value that they're going to get from that data back in the pre-sales side and set some timelines to, to those use cases and tie it to outcomes. You're empowering everyone in the project plan to get to that value quicker and get to that larger outcome"

This is where having a mutual action plan can be really beneficial to ensure the right people know what they need to do, when they need to do it and help everyone connect the work they need to do with the ultimate goal of implementing your tool.

4. Remove friction with data templates

Data by nature can be complex and overwhelming, both to aggregate and import. Being prepared with answers to common questions and clear parameters for the data you need can help smooth out frustrating experiences for new customers.

“The first things new signups will likely ask CS is all about how they are going to get implemented, how they are going to, what information is required to get that first use case operating. And often this new user is faced with needing a set of data to get that into their product, to help get that use case operationalized. And, that becomes their first challenge, because they're trying to understand how much data do I need? Where can I find the data? Do they have to go through different teams to get that data?”

Providing a template import file for customers to use (or using a data onboarding tool like Osmos) to ensure you’re able to successfully map customers data into your product can save hours, or weeks of headaches later.

Building an effective process for data onboarding isn’t a volume game, it’s a value game.

Spend the time to truly understand what your customers are trying to achieve, and what data they actually need to get started and you’ll build trust and momentum in onboarding.