Not every SaaS company charges for customer onboarding.

They should.

There are a number of benefits beyond adding revenue. If you don’t currently charge for onboarding, have a read and then discuss the opportunity with your team this week.

In my experience, not only do customers willingly pay for onboarding, but they also seem more committed, more engaged, and less likely to churn.

We're going to explore why charging for onboarding might be the key to reducing churn and increasing customer lifetime value.

Don’t stop here, keep scrolling. ↓

🧪 The Project: The Strategic Onboarding Fee Initiative

We’re going to use this project to implement a paid onboarding strategy to increase customer commitment and reduce churn.

1. Conduct a pricing analysis

Review your current onboarding costs and customer lifetime value.

Determine a pricing structure for onboarding that balances profitability with customer accessibility.

Put as much effort into this as you do for your software pricing. Picking a number out of the air may cause you problems later down the line.

1. Consider how many team members are involved in an average onboarding.

2. How much time is spent onboarding one customer per person?

3. How much automation and self service action is there?

2. Track your onboarding ROI

Find an easy way to track the ROI of paid onboarding including factors like time-to-value and projected productivity gains.

You can start this prior to charging to have a good comparison.

Use this to prove out the process to internal stakeholders. It helps to elevate the onboarding process within your company.

1. Include costs like software used, and time spent per person on tasks. These ideally should be balanced out with the cost of an onboarding.

2. Number of internal team members involved throughout onboarding. The more individuals that are involved, the more the cost goes up for your company. Consider where you can improve this, add automations, and make the process more efficient.

3. Time-to-first-value. The goal is to reduce this time after you start to charge customers. The customer should be more invested and you can move the process along more quickly.

4. Length of onboarding. If the TTV happens earlier on then the onboarding completion date should as well.

3. Develop a tiered onboarding structure

Create multiple onboarding fee tiers (e.g., Basic, Premium, Enterprise) with increasing levels of support and resources.

This allows customers to choose their level of investment.

Design tiers that make sense for your project and your knowledge of how invested previous customers have been.

4. Don’t discount the onboarding fee

It can be tempting for teams to discount the one off onboarding fee to get a customer over the line. DON’T DO THIS.

It undervalues the onboarding process for customers.

You’ll notice that they are still not fully invested despite the idea of paying for onboarding.

Start the experience off by highlighting what they are paying for and why they need it to be successful.

You can look at ways to add value to their experience that doesn’t involve reducing the fee.

You can offer additional things at no extra cost like extra office hours or access to exclusive content.

🤓 The Analysis: Better Customer Outcomes

This isn’t just about increasing revenue. You're creating a strategy that increases customer commitment and encourages long-term engagement.

If customers choose their level of investment it caters to different needs and also alerts you to any red flags early on when it comes to adoption.

The goal is to align incentives so that customers who invest in onboarding are more likely to fully engage with and benefit from your product.

What to expect by implementing this project:

• Increased customer commitment post-onboarding

• Reduced churn, especially in the early stages of the customer lifecycle

• Additional revenue stream from onboarding fees

• More successful customers due to comprehensive onboarding