Does your customer onboarding process sometimes feel like a frustrating choir practice?

Where you can’t align the teams to execute the performance properly. Everyone is off key and you realise that no one can actually read music? 😅

It can look something like this with cross-functional teams in B2B SaaS:

• Marketing sells the dream

• Sales makes a promise

• Product delivers functionality

• Customer Onboarding resets expectations

• Customer Success tries to keep everything from falling apart for the rest of the contract

The customer is often caught in the crossfire and wonders if they made the right choice. This creates frustrated customers, stressed teams, and missed opportunities.

Why? A lack of process and communication between cross-functional teams during customer onboarding.

If that resonates with you, let’s get everyone to sing their parts in tune, shall we? ↓

🧪 The Project: Internal Team Alignment

These steps show you how to get on the same page with important internal teams for excellent customer onboarding experiences.

In order to get buy in from these teams, be sure to highlight what is in it for them when they attend and participate.

Step 1: What is your promise to customers?

You can't fix what you don't understand.

We tend to make assumptions about other team processes or expectations. We think they know what we know and vice versa.

Gather representatives from your cross-functional teams and arrange an “expectation mapping” session.

The idea of this is to get everything laid out on the table for all to see.

This is not a finger pointing exercise, just a recognition that processes can get convoluted over time. It is normal. But it’s important to reset when needed.

In this session create a list of:

• Current sales pitches - ask sales to come prepared, have some call snippets available to view, share their slide decks, or bullet point notes they cover.

• Marketing messaging - ask them to provide their most up to date marketing messaging and assets. Check if sales are using these or outdated ones!

• Actual product capabilities - what can the product do right now? Not what do we hope it can do in the future.

• Customer onboarding milestones - what are the tasks and milestones that we expect customers to complete and reach during onboarding? What do they need to achieve to be successful using the product?

You can give everyone post-it notes to add their thoughts and arrange it in order of the customer journey.

Identify every single discrepancy or inconsistency, no matter how small. Mark where teams have differing views.

Make it a collaborative task.

You want to remove any fear of being wrong. It’s about aligning and learning.

Read more about creating safe spaces for progression in my previous newsletter. ↓

Step 2: Get honest with product capabilities

It’s true that honesty compounds customer trust.

There is nothing that erodes trust more than a customer who discovers that what they were told the product could do, is not the case.

Rate every product feature with your cross-functional team on:

1. What we say it does

2. What it actually does

3. What customers expect it to do

Go a step further.

Get each team member to rate it themselves before discussing as a group.

This will highlight any discrepancies in product knowledge that should also be addressed. It can be anonymous to get more honest participation.

Once everyone is on the same page, create a standardised language for describing current features.

This should be shared with all teams. Hold people accountable to this document.

This process must be updated with each new feature release. Don’t be complacent about it.

Work with the product team on who should be responsible for this task.

Step 3: Make it a productive monthly meeting

Continuous improvement and staying on top of the process will become your competitive advantage.

Start a monthly meeting with representation from all teams.

Discuss the following:

• New product capabilities & upcoming releases

• Potential marketing messaging adjustments

• Updates to sales pitches

• Successes/failures from customers in onboarding

Create a "single source of truth" document that gets updated in real-time that everyone can refer to going forward.

Step 4: Update new team members

New team members join, people change roles, and people leave companies.

Have internal documentation for this process available to all internal team members.

Make sure that new team members are up to speed with this project and the importance of attending when changes in personnel happen.

This is a prime area where information gets lost, balls get dropped, and things start to unravel over time.

You know my thoughts on documentation from my previous newsletter!

🤓 The Analysis

Breaking down silos isn't about creating more meetings.

It's about creating more understanding within your company to reduce the need to firefight problems.

Your customers don't care about your internal structures. They care about the seamless journey they were promised.

Implement this project and you can expect:

• Dramatically reduced early-stage churn

• Increased trust & transparency

• Improved cross-functional collaboration

• More accurate sales forecasting