The push for scale goes by many names
If you lead a post-sales Customer Management team you are likely looking for ways to improve the ROI on your operation. Your strategy could be an automation project, an AI experiment, a self-service content push, or a re-segmentation of your customer base and your team’s book of business size.
Or, rather, maybe you’re staring down the barrel of a hard cold RIF. Whatever the reason prompting the need for scale, it can be proactive or reactive. Regardless of where it comes from or what we call it, we’re all looking to do more with less, to deliver more value at less cost.
When you’re growing, solving scale problems sounds fun. I used to tell my teams that scaling was all about figuring out how to get better as we got bigger.
For a lot of customer teams at companies today, the “get bigger” part is on hold until we’ve proven out the “get better” part. That’s not always quite as much fun, nor is the path forward as full of clear options.
Coverage tends to be the stumbling block
Coverage tends to be the stumbling block. C/S and Account Management teams are typically staffed to a book of business size measured either in dollars or customer count. Onboarding team staffing tends to be pegged to the rate of incoming projects and the expected completion time. Staffing, in short, is a math problem with very clear inputs and outputs, including how much work is coming in, how long it takes to complete, and how many people there are to do it.
As long as you’ve got everything covered, you can squeeze these variables a bit in your spreadsheet and make the model more efficient.
Sometimes. Maybe. More likely your team is already cutting corners with customers and spreading them thinner comes at the expense of your customers. When we solve for coverage in our quest for scale, we make tradeoffs that have costs:
- Efficiency at the expense of effectiveness
- Task completion at the expense of outcome achievement
- Project focus at the expense of customer focus
- Time saved at the expense of value delivered
Far too often, it’s only in hindsight that we see the shortsightedness in coverage stretching approaches. Results such as Revenue Retention, Renewal Rates, or even CSAT/NPS, are lagging metrics when it comes to managing our customers.
Except in purely transactional business models, less time spent with customers will produce less satisfied customers who spend less money with your company over a shorter customer lifetime. Spread out your coverage model today and you might get a P&L win for the next 12 months, but the piper will demand to be paid next year.
When solving for scale, prioritize leverage over coverage
If we want to do more with less, when we sit down to re-think our models for scale, don’t start with coverage. Start with leverage. There are lots of vendors, including OnRamp, that sell software that propose to increase productivity and thereby produce leverage. But let’s not even go there yet. Let’s move up a level or two and look at the big picture of the full customer lifecycle.
The most impactful leverage point in your customer lifecycle is right at the outset: Onboarding. The entire post sales game is substantially won or lost in the way we handle our Onboarding. A customer that rapidly integrates the value from your product into their business is the most efficient customer to manage no matter which CSM model and tools you choose to use.
A customer that exits onboarding still not yet receiving the value they signed up for is a customer where you will always be forced to make tradeoffs between what’s best for your expense budget and what’s best for the customer. You can roll out late stage tools and process changes all day long, but the momentum has been lost, and it’s far harder - and much more costly - to rebuild that momentum once it’s lost than to simply maintain it at the high level it was at immediately after the initial sale was inked.
New customers are handed to us from Sales having bought into a narrative of value. The job of all post-sales roles falls under that single objective: Maintain momentum, and don’t lose control of the narrative. You don’t have to talk to too many CSMs to validate the truth of this assertion.
Assuming that your product actually does provide value (a prerequisite that shouldn’t be taken for granted), 9 times out of 10 CSMs will cite two common challenges:
- Premature handoff of customers from sales, from implementation, or from both
- Lack of sustainable customer engagement
With all the attention on customer lifecycle management and a myriad of high quality customer success platforms that allow you to implement a variety of models for managing customers, why are we still blocked on fundamental table stakes?
It starts with the fact that internal pressures cause us to look inward, and when we are focused on ourselves, we are by definition not focused on our customers. Spend enough time optimizing your processes for your benefit at the expense of your customers and their inevitable falling off of engagement shouldn’t surprise you.
Let’s also look at the tools we are using during onboarding. There are lots of great tools that manage projects, tools that organize tasks, tools that track time, and tools that help you allocate resources and manage schedules.
Where is our customer and the value we promised them in all of this? If we allow our choice of tools to focus us on a project full of tasks to be completed, then our onboarding narrative becomes one of work we’re asking our customers to perform instead of valuable outcomes we are helping them to achieve.
To the same extent that onboarding is the high leverage point in the customer lifecycle, focusing on orchestrating outcomes instead of completing tasks is the way to gain leverage in your onboarding.
Establishing a relationship built on better outcomes
A strong outcome-focused onboarding experience provides customers with the support and guidance they need to achieve success with your product, and put their trust and confidence in your brand. When we get it right, we are no longer just a vendor, but a partner.
On top of all that, the process will scale. The cost required to focus new customer onboarding on value based outcomes is tiny compared to the cost of trying to back solve for adoption and engagement across your full customer base after they have lost momentum.
Once the narrative changes to “Why did I do this?” or “Maybe this wasn’t worth it?” you have no cost effective paths left open to you.
Onboarding is the pivotal stage when proactive businesses become the natural extension of their customer’s team by delivering value based outcomes before momentum and enthusiasm wane. It’s the milestone when a mutually beneficial relationship is built, and both parties combine their strengths and resources to achieve shared goals and drive greater value than they could independently.
Locking in the narrative: driving adoption & retention for the long haul
We believe a compelling narrative during onboarding lays the foundation for the customer journey, setting the tone for the entire lifecycle and providing the leverage you need to scale.
We’re on a mission to help companies shift gears on how they bring on new customers, by equipping them with read-to-go, yet configurable plans, for differentiated white-glove onboarding experiences—at scale.
As a purpose-built onboarding platform our customer portal empowers an engaging and personalized experience for your customers, while our orchestration and automation capabilities enable you to effectively and efficiently manage any onboarding scenario and seamlessly integrate your results into the systems of record in your company.
Keeping everyone aligned and on track for success, OnRamp gives businesses a strategic advantage to steer the narrative early, to earn the right to form long-term relationships.
