The concept of “onboarding starting in the sales process” only truly applies to a SaaS company that has a sales team, and a product that requires an onboarding process. Many SaaS products are “sign and go,” and there is no setup or formal training needed. Think: Slack, DropBox, etc. Those types of SaaS tools are designed for product-led growth, versus sales-driven growth.

We should all be striving to be more like Slack to align with the way modern customers want to buy. But, most of us aren’t there yet, and many SaaS companies rely on a sales team and a customer success team to acquire and retain new customers. 

For these SaaS companies, the onboarding period is one of the most crucial times in the customer journey. We all know this to be a fundamental SaaS truth. Onboarding can make to break your customer retention and LTV. If the customer doesn’t adopt the product, use it and get value out of it, they won’t stick around. A great onboarding experience theoretically ensures against that. 

…user adoption is the foundation to driving long-term revenue, and successful onboarding is an essential part of that journey.” OpenView

Rethink what onboarding is

Onboarding is usually referred to as the time span between when the customer signs up and when they “launch” or meet some specific product usage milestone.

But I don’t think this is the right way to view onboarding for a sales-driven SaaS company.

In most SaaS organizations, sales lands the customer and then passes them over the fence to customer success. Sales and customer success are considered two discrete functions. One responsible for winning the customer, the other responsible for retaining the customer.

As someone who led both sales and customer success, I saw how intimately linked these two functions really are. Over time, I came to view onboarding as something that started very early in the sales process and continued fluidly as the customer moved from “sales” to “customer success”. I fostered a culture that understood and respected this dynamic, making sales & customer success collaboration a given. 

Here’s why I think sales & customer success teams need to step back from their respective functions and work together to onboard customers.

* The buyer journey merges into the customer journey, and these two periods aren’t as separate as we imagine they are. To the customer, they are just points on a continuum of interactions with your company.  * If the handoff transition from sales to customer success isn’t fluid, accurate and complete, onboarding will be filled with friction as customers have to backtrack or re-explain things to bring customer success up to speed. * No matter what a great fit the customer is, and how much they can benefit from your product, if the wrong expectations are set during the buying process, the customer is likely to have a tough onboarding experience. * If the customer isn’t prepared for what role they need to play in onboarding, or what resources will be required of them, onboarding is likely to be rough. * If the customer doesn’t fit your ideal profile (ICP) or doesn’t have a strong business need for your product, onboarding will likely not go according to plan.* If the sale happens with a decision maker(s) who then hands the whole thing off to imple...