From Handoffs to Happy Customers: The Playbook for Success and Onboarding in HubSpot

Customer onboarding is a critical part of delivering value to your customers and building long-term trust.

At NYCX 2024, I shared a playbook for running customer onboarding and success programs directly in HubSpot.

For teams struggling with messy handoffs, siloed processes, or a lack of visibility, this framework provides clear steps to align teams, simplify onboarding, and drive results.

Below, I’ll share key strategies from the talk and practical tips to help your team get started.

Why Run Customer Success and Onboarding in HubSpot?

HubSpot has grown beyond its roots as a marketing tool. With robust CRM capabilities, Service Hub, and new customer success-focused features like health scoring and the customer success workspace, it now offers pretty much everything you need to manage success and onboarding programs effectively.

For SaaS companies, this eliminates the need to use separate tools for success, which often create silos and limit visibility across teams. Running success and onboarding in HubSpot ensures your marketing, sales, and CS teams are aligned around the same data, reducing friction and improving customer outcomes.

Understanding Your Customer’s Journey

Before diving into the nuts and bolts of onboarding, take a step back and think about what your customer’s experience looks like.

The ideal journey is smooth and builds excitement at every stage—from marketing and sales to onboarding and becoming a happy, successful customer. However, many companies create a much different experience. Customers often start strong during the sales process, but quickly feel nervous, frustrated, or unsupported after signing the deal.

Ask yourself:

• Are your customers clear on what happens next after they buy?
• Do they know what’s expected of them during onboarding?
• Does your team have the information they need to support customers effectively?

If the answer to any of these questions is “no,” it’s time to evaluate and improve your process.

Step 1: Nailing Your Sales-to-Success Handoff in HubSpot

Misaligned handoffs are one of the most common challenges in onboarding. When sales fails to provide complete information, customer success teams are left guessing, leading to repetitive questions and frustrated customers.

Where Handoffs Go Wrong:

• Sales teams don’t transfer critical customer information.
• Onboarding experiences are generic rather than personalized.
• Customers don’t know what happens next after paying or signing the contract.

How to Fix It:

→ Set Up Required Properties in HubSpot
Use required fields to ensure sales captures critical customer information before closing deals, such as:

1. Key goals and pain points.
2. Relevant stakeholders.
3. Industry or segment.
4. Keep these fields concise and actionable to avoid overwhelming sales reps. Dropdown or multi-select fields work best to standardize data and make it usable for CS teams.

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→ Automate the Process with Workflows
When a deal moves to “Closed-Won,” trigger workflows to:

1. Notify the onboarding team with key customer details.
2. Create and assign onboarding tickets.
3. Route customers to the right CS team based on their segment or goals.

→ Introduce the Onboarding Plan During Sales
During the sales process, set clear expectations for onboarding. Avoid over-promising timelines and be honest about the effort required to achieve success. Customers are willing to invest in the process when they understand the value they’ll gain.

Step 2: Building Effective Onboarding Plans in HubSpot

An onboarding plan is your customer’s roadmap to success. The best onboarding plans are clear, actionable, and tailored to the customer’s specific needs.

What Makes a Good Onboarding Plan?

• Start with Simple Tasks: Begin with quick wins to build momentum and keep customers motivated. For example, start with tasks like scheduling a kickoff call or uploading documents.
• Make Tasks Action-Oriented: Every task should start with a verb, such as “Sign your contract” or “Upload your logo,” to ensure clarity.
• Provide Clear Instructions: Assume your customer is brand new to your product. Include step-by-step instructions to avoid confusion.
• Set Due Dates and Owners: Assign due dates and ownership for each task to keep things moving forward.

How to Create Onboarding Plans in HubSpot with Arrows:

Arrows, integrated directly into HubSpot, allows you to build and manage onboarding plans that customers and teams can collaborate on.

• Start with templates for common onboarding workflows.
• Automatically create and assign plans based on customer properties.
• Track progress and sync all data back to HubSpot for full visibility.

Example Slide: Highlight a sample Arrows onboarding plan, showing task lists, due dates, and progress tracking.

Step 3: Measuring and Improving Onboarding with HubSpot

You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Tracking onboarding performance is key to identifying bottlenecks and ensuring customers reach value quickly.

Key Metrics to Track:

• Time-to-First-Value: How long does it take for customers to complete their first success milestone?
• Onboarding Task Completion: Are customers completing the tasks assigned to them? Which ones are causing delays?
• Overdue Tasks: Use dashboards to monitor overdue tasks and re-engage customers who may be stuck.

Building Dashboards in HubSpot:

HubSpot’s reporting tools allow you to build dashboards that provide real-time insights into your onboarding process. For example:

• A list of all customers with overdue tasks, showing how long they’ve been stuck and who owns the next step.
• Average onboarding duration over time, helping you track improvements.
• A progress gauge to see how many customers are completing onboarding within your target timeline.

Final Reflections on Your Onboarding Process

Take a moment to assess your own onboarding program:

• Does your customer success team have the data they need to personalize onboarding?
• Can internal teams and executives easily see where customers are in the process?
• Are you tracking the right metrics to improve over time?

If you answered “no” to any of these, HubSpot and tools like Arrows can help you create a more streamlined and data-driven onboarding experience.

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