Onboarding Therapy #1: Improving Customer Onboarding Through Sales and Onboarding Alignment

Customer onboarding in B2B SaaS is changing fast, but the resources for onboarding teams? Not so much. That's why we're kicking off Onboarding Therapy, a weekly video series that tackles the real challenges onboarding teams face every day.

We've got two onboarding experts ready to share their insights and get real about what's actually happening in the world of customer onboarding:

→ Shareil Nariman is our Head of Customer Experience at Arrows. He's built onboarding programs for big companies like Booking.com and Sprout Social. Now, he's helping Arrows customers fine-tune their onboarding with Arrows and HubSpot.

→ Kim Hacker, our Head of Business Operations, has built a customer onboarding team from the ground up at a Series A SaaS company. With her experience on both the sales and customer side, Kim brings a fresh perspective to the onboarding space.

Together, we've talked to thousands of onboarding teams at Arrows, and we're turning those conversations into weekly topics. It's all about creating a space for honest discussions and practical onboarding tips. Struggling with sales alignment? Running low on resources? Trying to scale your onboarding without losing your cool? We've got you covered.

Our goal? We want customer onboarding managers to know they're not alone in their struggles. Plus, we're sharing actionable advice to help you clear those hurdles.

So, grab your coffee and join us each week for a dose of Onboarding Therapy. Let's make customer onboarding better, together.

Now, let's dig into one of the topics we hear about most: getting your sales and onboarding teams on the same page.

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By now, we all know that customer onboarding is a critical phase in the customer journey. It sets the foundation for long-term success, impacts retention rates, and influences overall customer satisfaction. However, many companies struggle with the transition from sales to onboarding, creating friction that can derail the customer experience from the start.

This post explores those challenges, focusing on the crucial alignment between sales and onboarding teams. We'll dive into strategies for improving the sales handoff process, fostering better collaboration between teams, and ultimately delivering a seamless customer experience that drives growth and retention.

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The Sales and Onboarding Disconnect

Effective client onboarding goes beyond simply introducing customers to your product or service. It's about setting them up for long-term success and ensuring they realize the value they were promised during the sales process. However, this transition from sales to onboarding often faces significant challenges:

1. Misaligned incentives: Many sales teams are incentivized to focus on just closing deals, while onboarding teams are responsible for customer activation and long-term success. When theres absolutely no incentive for sales reps to close customers that actually retain, it often sets onboarding teams and their customers up for failure.‍

2. Communication gaps: Without a strong process in place, vital information that was gathered during the sales process often fails to reach the onboarding team, leaving onboarding managers with little knowledge of their customer's unique use cases or specific requirements.‍

3. Expectation mismatches: Customers may have different expectations of the product or service than what was communicated during the sales process.‍

4. Lack of product knowledge: Sales teams may not have in-depth knowledge of all product features, leading to misaligned expectations from your customers once they actually get into the product during onboarding.

These issues can result in a poor customer onboarding experience, potentially leading to early churn and missed opportunities for growth and retention.

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The Impact of Sales and Onboarding Misalignment

When sales and onboarding teams operate in silos, the consequences are often easy to spot:

1. Customer frustration: Clients may feel like they're starting from scratch with the onboarding team, repeating information they've already shared during the sales process.
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2. Delayed time-to-value: Lack of a proper handoff can slow down the onboarding process, delaying the time it takes for customers to see value from the product.
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3. Increased churn risk: If customers don't see value quickly or feel the product doesn't meet their expectations, they're more likely to churn early.
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4. Missed upsell opportunities: Poor onboarding can lead to underutilization of the product, reducing chances for upsells or expansions.

As Shareil Nariman, Arrows Head of Customer Experience, notes:

"The customer experience is what takes the biggest hit at the end of the day... If you can proactively build that bridge between sales and success, the ultimate value is that the customer experience remains intact."

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Strategies for Improving Sales and Onboarding Alignment

To address these challenges and improve the client onboarding process, companies need to focus on aligning their sales and onboarding teams. Here are some key strategies to consider:

Foster Cross-Functional Empathy

Encourage sales and onboarding team members to shadow each other's roles. This exposure builds mutual understanding and respect, helping both sides appreciate the challenges and priorities of the other.

One effective approach is to have onboarding specialists sit in on sales calls, and vice versa. Shareil recommends having each team member follow one deal through the entire sales and onboarding process, so teams can experience what the full customer journey looks like.

This cross-functional exposure can help break down barriers and foster a more collaborative environment between teams.

Align Incentives

Incorporate retention metrics into sales goals. It sounds simple, but it's still tough for many leadership teams to prioritize. This shared responsibility ensures both teams focus on long-term customer success, not just closing deals.

Consider implementing a commission structure that includes post-sale metrics, such as successful onboarding completion or 90-day retention rates. This approach encourages sales teams to focus on quality deals that are more likely to succeed with the product long-term.

Implement Ongoing Feedback Loops

Establish regular communication channels between sales and onboarding teams. This could include:
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→ Shared Slack channels for quick updates and questions
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→ Giving sales reps visibility into their customer's onboarding progress inside their CRM (shameless plug for Arrows 😉)
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→ Monthly reviews with sales leaders about onboarding success across sales reps and opportunities for better alignment between the teams

These feedback loops can help to identify trends over time, address specific concerns, and continuously improve the sales handoff process.

Standardize the Sales Handoff Process

Create a structured process for transferring information from sales to onboarding.

If you're using HubSpot, we've got a ton of tactical tips for managing the sales to success handoff, but at a high level, your handoffs should include:

→ Standardized handoff notes that capture key customer information
‍We typically recommend setting up required fields or properties in your CRM so that your sales team has to fill out the most critical information when they close a new customer.
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→ A "warm handoff" call where sales introduces the customer to the onboarding team
‍We certainly wouldn't recommend this for everyone, but if you're onboarding enterprise customers with a high ACV, adding this extra step is going to be critical.
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→ Clear documentation of the customer's goals, use cases, and any promises made during the sales process
‍These could potentially be included in some of the required properties we mentioned above, but you can also add them as a separate note inside your CRM

Provide Ongoing Product Training for Sales Teams

Look, most sales teams are just not going to know the ins and outs of your product in the same way that onboarding, success, and support teams do. Any honestly, that's okay.

But, if you're noticing that there are certain features or use cases that are constantly getting misunderstood by your brand new customers, it's time for you to be proactive about making sure your sales team is explaining them correctly.

Regular product training ensures that sales teams have up-to-date knowledge about features, capabilities, and common use cases. This helps them set accurate expectations with potential customers and improves the quality of information passed to the onboarding team.

One successful approach that Kim suggested:

"We implemented monthly 30-minute-long product trainings with the sales team where we'd cover different features or use cases during each session. It was a deep dive into the things we'd been hearing from customers and what we wanted our sales reps to watch out for when talking about each feature. We loved getting to share what we were learning. The sales reps loved digging deeper into the specific use cases. And overall it helped us create a stronger environment for collaboration between our teams."

Share Common Customer Questions and Pain Points

Onboarding teams: this one's on you.

You're likely getting feedback about your product on every. single. call. Sure, it can feel overwhelming, but nothing's going to change if you're not sharing that feedback.

Make sure you set up a process that makes it easy to regularly share insights about customer challenges, frequently asked questions, and common misconceptions.

This information can help sales teams address potential concerns earlier in the process, leading to smoother onboarding experiences, and again, better customer retention.

⭐️ Pro tip: this play extends beyond sales. You're talking to your customers at the most critical point in their customer journey. The insights you're gathering are incredibly valuable for everyone at your company, especially your product and leadership teams. Make sure those insights are getting back to them too.

Keep Your Sales and Onboarding Data Connected

Silos between teams are inevitable if you're both using tools that are completely disconnected from each other. This disconnection can lead to information gaps, miscommunication, and a fragmented customer experience.

At Arrows, we're huge advocates for running customer onboarding in your CRM for this very reason.

When sales and onboarding are running their processes out of the same tool, it ensures that all customer information, from initial sales conversations to onboarding progress, is centralized and easily accessible by anyone.

This cross-team connection offers several key benefits:

→ Seamless Handoffs: No more data loss or manual re-entry when transferring customers from sales to onboarding.

→ 360-Degree Customer View: Both sales and onboarding teams can access all customer history, from first contact to pricing discussions, to current onboarding progress.

→ Real-Time Updates: Sales teams stay informed about their customer's progress and can spot upsell opportunities.

→ Consistent Messaging: Shared access to data helps maintain a unified voice across teams.

By keeping your sales and onboarding data connected, you're improving your internal processes and your customer's experience. Customers won't have to repeat information they've already provided, and they'll receive a more personalized onboarding experience based on their unique needs and goals discussed during the sales process.

Remember, the goal is to create a seamless transition from prospect to successful customer. By breaking down data silos between sales and onboarding, you're setting the foundation for long-term customer success and more efficient internal operations.

Measuring the Impact of Improved Sales and Onboarding Alignment

Alright, maybe you've implemented some of our suggestions. But how can you prove the value of your process changes to your leadership teams?

Here are some of the key onboarding data points that you should be looking at to understand the impact:

→ Time to first value: This measures how quickly customers start seeing benefits from your product after signing up. You'll want to clearly define what that value moment is and then start tracking how long it's taking on average for customers to reach that point. A shorter time to first value often leads to higher retention rates.
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→ Onboarding completion rates: The percentage of customers who successfully complete all of your required onboarding steps. Higher completion rates typically indicate a more effective onboarding process.
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→ Early-stage churn rates (e.g., within the first 60 or 90 days): This tracks how many customers leave within the crucial first few months. Lower early-stage churn rates suggest that your onboarding is effectively setting customers up for success and that the product met the expectations that were promised during the sales process.
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→ Customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores post-onboarding: Surveys or Net Promoter Scores (NPS) collected after onboarding can indicate how well the process met customer expectations and prepared them to use your product.

‍⭐️ Pro tip: If you're tracking these metrics over time, make sure you note when you made the updates to your processes so you can point back to the impact they had.

The Role of Leadership in Fostering Alignment

And now let's address the elephant in the room: successful alignment between sales and onboarding teams requires buy-in and support from leadership.

Most of what we suggested here will simply not be possible if the company as a whole does not deeply understand and value customer onboarding.

Executives must prioritize customer success and retention, creating a culture where cross-functional collaboration is both valued and incentivized.

Shareil noted this:

"I've been fortunate to work at places where there is a lot of buy-in from senior leadership on retention, onboarding, and customer success. It drastically changes how teams interact."

Getting buy-in about the importance of onboarding is a whole other issue that we'll get into in another post.

But if you're an executive leader and you're reading this, here' are some good starting points:

→ Set clear expectations for open communication and collaboration between teams
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→ Invite your customer success and onboarding leaders to executive meetings (they're not just for marketing, sales, and product anymore 😉)
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→ Recognize and reward cross-functional successes (ring the metaphorical gong for every customer that's retained after their first 6 months? 🤷)
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→ Regularly review and discuss customer onboarding metrics in leadership meetings
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→ Proactively ask your onboarding and customer success teams to share their insights

Embrace Continuous Improvement in Client Onboarding

Aligning sales and onboarding is an ongoing process. It requires regular evaluation, open communication, and a willingness to adapt. By viewing this alignment as a key business strategy rather than a one-time fix, companies can create a culture of continuous improvement that benefits both employees and customers.

Consider implementing:

→ Quarterly reviews of the sales handoff and onboarding processes

→ Regular surveys of both sales and onboarding teams to identify pain points and improvement areas

→ A/B testing of different onboarding approaches to identify what works best for each of your customer segments (bonus points if you're also measuring the impact each approach has on the sales team's metrics so you can show how your improvements makes their lives better too)

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Wrapping Up: Solving Client Onboarding Through Alignment

Bridging the gap between sales and onboarding is essential for delivering exceptional customer experiences and driving long-term business success. By fostering collaboration, aligning incentives, and prioritizing open communication, companies can create seamless customer journeys that begin with the first sales interaction and continue through onboarding and beyond.

Remember, the goal of client onboarding isn't just to familiarize customers with your product. Good onboarding sets your customers up for long-term success and ensures that they achieve their business objectives. When sales and onboarding teams unite around this shared purpose, it creates a powerful foundation for customer success, retention, and growth.