3 Tips for Speeding Up SaaS Customer Onboarding

As many SaaS entrepreneurs know all too well, the time it takes to onboard new customers and get them up and running can vary significantly. For some companies, that implementation could take two months. For others, it may require little more than a two-hour phone call.

“The length of the onboarding process is really dependent on the business and its customers,” says OpenView senior advisor Chuck Linn, who served in various executive-level professional services roles for Hewlett-Packard and Oracle. “There’s no true median number, and there’s no right or wrong answer to the question of how long should it take.”

That being said, Linn argues most SaaS companies could speed up their onboarding processes if they knew which buttons to push.

Ultimately, that improved efficiency wouldn’t just save money (by way of lower professional services costs) and increase margins — it would also allow businesses to create happier, more productive customers sooner. And as Linn explained in a prior article for OpenView Labs, that almost always equates to larger volumes of organic, inexpensive customer references — aka SaaS gold.

3 Ways to Improve the Efficiency and Speed Up SaaS Customer Onboarding

So, how can your SaaS business deliver a faster, more efficient onboarding experience, without removing the essential services necessary to ensure client success?

For Linn, that process starts with defining what “onboarding” really means to you and your customers.

“If your software and the customer’s associated business processes are relatively complex and you’re selling it to larger enterprise clients, then onboarding could mean having to commit to a two-year implementation,” Linn explains. “But if your software is relatively straightforward and can be implemented in just a few steps, then why provide services that make onboarding more complex than it needs to be?”

Regardless of your situation, Linn says there are three key things SaaS companies can do to improve the efficiency of their onboarding and implementation processes:

1) Create a Standard Implementation Approach

While onboarding needs will inevitably vary by customer, establishing standard implementation processes and timelines, and specific responsibilities during the implementation will allow your company to set customer expectations as well as provide a framework for building your services group. If a particular customer wants more than those services, you can then negotiate with them.

“Basically, you want to say: Here’s what we’re willing to do, here’s how long it will take, and here’s what these services will help you do,” Linn explains. “If a customer wants more, you need to make a decision about whether it’s worth it to extend that timeframe on your own dime, or to make the client pay for additional services.”

2) Leverage Partner Capabilities

In many cases, a SaaS business will sell its software through various partners who can help build the economy around the product (i.e., licensing, support, external integration, time-to-value capabilities, etc.). But those partners aren’t just valuable sales channels, Linn says. They can also be excellent tools for improving the efficiency of implementation.

“From an expansion-stage perspective, the issue with onboarding isn’t just getting customers live and reference-able, it’s also having the manpower to do it,” Linn explains.

“If your typical implementation takes 100 days and you’ve got 10 professional services people, what happens if your sales team goes on a tear and starts signing 20 new clients a month? It’s almost impossible to scale professional services fast enough to keep up, and you really don’t want to do that anyway. Having partners take on a specific aspect of onboarding can be a great way to distribute the responsibilities of implementation.”

3) Conduct Product Reviews

The goal here, Linn says, is to take a deep dive into your product to see if you can create new features or functionality that make it more of a self-service solution. Ultimately, if you can make it easier and more intuitive for customers to onboard themselves, then you can naturally scale back professional services and save a significant amount of time and money.

“This step could involve developing more pre-defined configurations or parameters, but the idea is to invest time into building a product that’s more ready-made,” Linn says. “Ultimately, that investment will pay for itself very quickly if you can drastically reduce the need for an intense implementation process.”

Outside of those three things, Linn also suggests that SaaS companies lean heavily on internal customer-focused groups to determine how exactly each of them can play a part in improving customer success.

“For instance, if sales and marketing can better educate prospects and customers about what your product is designed to do and how it can be used to solve their problems, that’s a step that you won’t need to take during implementation,” Linn says. “Similarly, if account managers and customer service reps notice that clients are consistently getting hung up on the same issues, you may be able to address that issue with product management — asking them to alter the product in a way that makes it more intuitive or easy to use.”

Why Onboarding Isn’t About Holding Customers’ Hands

At the end of the day, Linn says that SaaS founders must determine the appropriate amount of implementation services that can be offered to make their customers happy and successful.

While that may mean sticking with your existing onboarding commitment, it might also mean committing to much less than what you currently offer.

“Most customers don’t really need or want their hands to be held for any longer than is necessary,” Linn says. “They want to be able to extract value from your product as quickly as possible, and use it in the right way. In that sense, limiting initial implementation to the core services necessary to achieve quick wins with your product is mutually beneficial.”