How to Create a B2B SaaS Customer Onboarding Checklist
HOME / / How to Create a B2B SaaS Customer Onboarding Checklist
Guest blog by Reena Aggarwal, Director of Operations and Sales at Attrock.
Why do you need a B2B SaaS customer onboarding checklist?
SaaS stands for Software as a Service.
As an example, Websand is a SaaS platform that enables businesses to connect with their target audience through email marketing automation.
A well-executed customer onboarding process can make or break your relationship with your SaaS customers and more importantly, impact their lifetime value.
Lifetime value refers to the amount of revenue an individual customer will generate over their entire relationship with your company.
What’s more, great user onboarding can boost customer retention and reduce churn (the number of customers who stop buying from you or choose not to renew their subscription), thus increasing revenue for your business.
According to the 2022 Customer Onboarding Report by EverAfter, 69% of companies said that successful customer onboarding boosts customer retention.
However, good user onboarding for SaaS is an art and science. This is where leveraging a B2B SaaS user onboarding checklist becomes helpful.
"With an onboarding checklist, you can track the essential tasks that you need to complete from the moment a new user signs up for your product to the moment they start using it.
A SaaS customer onboarding checklist can also help users see the results of your software faster while avoiding any potential friction that could result in early churn."
Read this B2B SaaS customer onboarding checklist to understand how to execute a successful customer onboarding process.
1. Welcome new users
Who doesn’t like greetings?!
Greetings create great first impressions. And since that’s the first interaction the user has with your software, it’s a great idea to welcome them warmly.
When a new user creates an account for your software, welcome them with friendly greetings.
The welcome message should let the user understand how to navigate around your software and what they should expect from the onboarding process.
In your welcome communications, you can also provide the user with links to handy resources like your site’s FAQ section or company blog. Younium, a subscription billing and management software, has mastered this by creating a knowledge base. They also have a guide on subscription billing to help users understand everything about subscription management before purchasing their software.
As well as Websand, which we mentioned earlier, you can use good email marketing automation tools like Mailchimp and Brevo to create and send automated greetings.
2. Arrange a time to call new users
Now that you have created a rapport with the new user, the next step is to schedule a call with them.
Calling the new user helps you to understand them better and introduce yourself. This is also a great opportunity to understand what made them sign up for your software and address any concerns they may have.
To arrange a call with the new user, you can use the following tools.
A scheduling tool and calendar platform like Calendly
An email service provider like Gmail (get a free 14 day trial of Google Workspace here!)
3. Understand what users want to achieve
Understanding and defining your target audience can help to create a successful B2B SaaS startup sales strategy.
This post by Attrock is a good read if you’re looking for actionable strategies for your SaaS startup.
Equally, understanding what they want to achieve can help you optimise the onboarding process and also tailor your sales and marketing efforts appropriately.
When you call the customer, find out what they want to accomplish with your SaaS. Ask them as many questions as possible so that you can customise the onboarding process to the needs of their business.
The more optimised the onboarding process is, the faster they will be able to achieve results and achieve success using your software.
Once you have understood what the customer wants to accomplish with your software, create a list of onboarding processes. This is to guide them on how to best use your software to achieve their specific goals.
You can use a good project management tool like Asana to set goals and manage your client projects.
4. Appoint a Customer Success Manager
So you have understood your customer’s goals and objectives of using your software. What next?
You need to assign someone who can keep track of their progress as they work to accomplish those goals.
This is like assigning a mentor to help them learn and continually build their skills.
The customer success manager will offer guidance to the customer on how to effectively use the software so that they can achieve their goals.
A customer success manager will usually be a team member who understands your software well an who is committed to nurturing customers’ progress.
5. Select Your Onboarding Model
Choose an onboarding model based on your business’s and customer’s goals. This may be ‘high touch’ or ‘low touch’ depending on how much human support is required.
Low touch SaaS onboarding might include the use of a chatbot for customer support.
High touch onboarding could require a customer success team to answer support questions and proactively reach out to customers.
Selecting a suitable onboarding model is a great idea to prevent your customers from churning. It must also help you achieve your company goals.
If you find a suitable model when forming your business, you can leverage business formation services to help you through.
To ensure a smooth process, you can settle for services from Incfile or you could check out these Incfile alternatives by SmallBusinessHQ.
You can decide whether to use self-serve onboarding where the customer gets started using the product without your assistance.
This is especially important for easy-to-use software.
You can also choose a low-touch onboarding model where the customer has to figure out things on their own while you offer them some assistance.
If you deal with complex software solutions, you’ll need to use a high-touch model. In this case, you need to offer the customer significant assistance to help them understand how to use your software.
Maximising value for the customer
Effective user onboarding is the key to increasing customer retention while helping your customers derive value from your software faster.
It can also help you obtain valuable insights into your customers’ goals and expectations. If you found these insights to improve your product and marketing campaigns, please let us know!
Reena is Director of Operations and Sales at Attrock, a result-driven digital marketing company. With 10+ years of sales and operations experience in the field of e-commerce and digital marketing, she is quite an industry expert. She is a people person and considers the human resources as the most valuable asset of a company. In her free time, you would find her spending quality time with her brilliant, almost teenage daughter and watching her grow in this digital, fast-paced era.
"We’re delighted to be the 2000th loan recipients!"