Why you need a complex
on-boarding for your B2B service.
In B2C, you want to make things easy
While easy on-boarding might be the key to a successful user acquisition strategy for B2C companies, this isn’t necessarily the case for B2B SaaS. Indeed, when you look at how easy it is to get started on Airbnb, Uber or Homejoy, you might be tempted to reproduce the same flow for your B2B service. Trying to on-board B2B prospects the way B2C sites are doing, is not the right strategy. It will inevitably lead to designing landing pages with too much information (due to the complexity of your offering); and because it’s easy enough to complete, you might end up getting signups, but not from your ideal customer.
One of the reasons for this resides in the nature of the service itself. It’s hard to communicate all the offerings of a highly valuable service / software / platform / product to SMBs or Enterprise, and summarize it in two sentences. This is in contrast to what you’ll find on something like the Facebook homepage:
“Connect with friends and the world around you on Facebook.”
With B2B, it’s another story
Now imagine a SaaS that is made for Enterprise, to help them do X and Y, improve their R.O.I, with features 1 / 2 / 3, to be implemented in department Z. Indeed, very hard to make it short and to the point.
At DOZ, we’ve decided to go from an easy on-boarding to more complex one. Here are some insights into what we’ve recently implemented.
Quick note: DOZ is a curated marketplace of digital marketing experts. We help brands and online stores to get more visibility through organic marketing (Search/Social/Content), by assembling unique teams who have skills (experience, knowledge, location) to perform online marketing campaigns.
As you might already know, DOZ is not really a SaaS, because what we deliver is not only a software —it’s an experience: running a marketing campaign through curated and vetted marketers globally.
When we did the “easy” way
Since our service offering is a bit complex, we wanted the opposite for our signup process: our goal was to make it straightforward. In March 2013, when we launched our Public Beta, our signup process was what we thought would work best: 3 clicks (you know the golden rule of the Internet), 2 fields (email & password), and you were done.
The main issues with this first iteration:
- There wasn’t enough space to explain what we do;
- We weren’t capturing sufficient information to determine whether or not the client was a good fit;
- We were exposing prospects to pricing too fast (second screen) before even describing our offering;
- We had designed a minimalist on-boarding flow for a complex service offering.
While our metrics weren’t bad on the the surface (anyone with some curiosity will input a website URL, play with their pricing options and set up an account) our main issue was qualifying our clients. When we dug into the data, less than 20% of signups were actually potential clients. Not to mention, that we then had to manually qualify each lead before engaging conversation.
Based on this analysis, we had to rethink the way we were on-boarding prospects. For our next iteration, we looked at what could be improved and what we wanted from the ideal on-boarding flow:
- More information and context about DOZ;
- Better tools to discern whether a client was a good fit or not;
- A “soft landing” on the pricing page;
- Better qualified leads for the sales team;
- Product demo at the end of the flow.
And now with the “complex” way
We now ask for an email address first, so clients know they are signing up for something; and we’ve designed 8 steps to:
- Educate the client on what we do through product discovery;
- Get better information from our potential clients.
In the end, we “complexified” our on-boarding, to give better information to our sales team and to help qualify good clients for us.
During these 8 steps, the questions we ask clients often require a second thought, and this has been important in keeping them engaged throughout the on-boarding process. We now know that clients need anywhere between 4 and 5 minutes to complete our on-boarding flow, compared to less than 1 minute before. And that’s turned out to be a very good thing.
By asking precise questions, we make our prospects think of their own business needs. Some of them have had to ask internally for help to answer specific questions (e.g. What is your Cost per Acquisition?)
While I will agree that there is not one way to build a signup flow, for B2B, it’s very important to show your clients that they are not signing up for another Social Network but for an actual professional service. Think of this “in real life”: when you go to buy one pair of shoes in a public shop, you can go to the cashier and pay for your own pair. Now imagine you’re a professional wholesaler and need to buy a container of 100,000 pairs… everything is differenct: experience, sales cycle, volume and of course price.
So far, the results are confirming the theory that complexity is good:
We had +27% conversion rate — from qualified visitors to signups. Asking for the email instead of the website URL, indicates that visitors are signing up to a service. Having more information throughout the on-boarding allowed us to have a clearer landing page, with only 3 key value props.
- We are seeing 80%+ completion rate of the signup — out of 100 people who start the signup flow, 80+ are finishing it. So the drop-off is insignificant, even if we have 5xed the completion time.
Why make things easy when in fact they are complicated :-)
What are your thoughts on complex on-boarding?
