Smarter Customer Onboarding on Salesforce
Salesforce has become industry standard for high growth sales teams.
Increasing transparency between Sales and your Customer Onboarding and Implementation teams is a smart place to start when looking to improving your process.
The handover from Sales into Onboarding is often seen as a challenge. Both the notification of a new customer and the information exchange if very often the cause of this break down. Tools that keep teams at arms length and discourage collaboration due the access and license requirements are a common cause of problems.
Anything that you can do to align Sales and Customer Onboarding will improve this but working to the lowest common denominator is a lousy choice, the lowest common denominator is usually spreadsheets or email. Both mean that you lose context of the Customer in terms of information captured in Salesforce and both are impossible to aggregate into useful KPIs and dashboards.
What this could look like?
You must add your Customer Success and Onboarding Services teams onto Salesforce. Just do it. Without any other changes just having access to the same Customer records (Account and Contact) along with Chatter (Comments & Notes) and Attachments will make all your teams more informed.
Adding teams to Salesforce is not as expensive as some think. Salesforce offer Platform Licenses at a fraction of what your Sales Teams will be paying per license that offer everything you need — you just miss out on Opportunities and other Sales functionality that’s often not necessary.
Now your teams have access to Salesforce you can make some minor changes Salesforce. Try adding an expected kick-off date on the Opportunity. A report can then be created to show Opportunities in Commit Pipeline Stage grouped by “Expected Kick-off”. You now have an Onboarding Pipeline report providing a view of anticipated workload. Combining win/loss ratios gives you a good forecast for what the future holds.
An Onboarding Forecast report is just the beginning. The Salesforce platform provides the essential components required for managing customer onboarding: customer integration, customizable reporting, files, collaboration. Where you may need more help to track tasks, stage and track customer actions then you can extend with purpose built apps to manage customer Onboarding, like Taskfeed.
Drive Customer Onboarding Metrics
Salesforce provides a far more capable reporting engine than many of the go-to project management solutions which focus on fixed views and tables. With Salesforce you can segment reports based on the context of the Customer. Here are a few examples:
- Onboarding Project Forecast, Opportunities in Commit Pipeline Stage grouped by “Expected Kick-off”
- Onboarding Success vs. Customer Lifetime Value
- Time-to-value by customer segment or industry
The importance of having analytics aligned with your customer data is critical — if it takes integrations and syncing to make this happen then it just won’t happen. With reports at your fingertips, you will spend less time guessing or collating data and more time making decisions, coaching your team or working with your customers.
When you use Taskfeed to manage customer Onboarding you’ll also be able to learn how much time you spend in each stage, the time the team is spending and individuals capacity vs the plan.
With all this information summarised succinctly on your own Dashboard you’ll have the answers immediately and will have a love view of critical KPIs.
Evolve your process as you mature
Using Taskfeed and Salesforce for managing Customer Onboarding and Implementation projects means you are setup to scale.
As your process matured you can:
- Create new Task Templates in Taskfeed or
- Setup role based assignments to assigning the team based on people already assigned to the Account, or
- Share your Onboarding plan with your customer live!
With Salesforce as the underpinning of Taskfeed you can use the thousands of other AppExchange apps to extend your Customer Onboarding and Implementation Project just as your sales teams can. Each of these are examples of extending Taskfeed with the thousands of partners available on the AppExchange:
- Create onboarding plans automatically from an Account or Opportunity — along with an onboarding plan — all within Salesforce using Taskfeed.
- Automating project status reports, or kick-off presentations with a document generation app like Conga
- Automating project status reports with a document generation app like Conga
- Formalizing project intake or request forms with a connected forms app like FormAssembly
- Integrating a survey tool to collect information from the customer prior to kick-off or solicit a satisfaction survey once the project has completed.
- Triggering a notification to Slack when a project is created using Zapier
The ways customers continue to extend Salesforce and Taskfeed are endless. If you have a specific requirement we have seen it all so try us and we’ll let you know if its been done before and if we can offer any advice, or if its new to us we love the challenge of making it possible with you.
So what is right for me?
If your teams are already using a disconnected project management app such as Asana, Wrike, Basecamp, Smartsheet, Jira or the thousands of others then I would recommend exploring Taskfeed for managing Customer Onboarding.
If you just starting out with Salesforce and have started down the road of building a solution and not sure if its really working then speak to the team and we can advise on how Taskfeed could expand and augment that existing process or where Taskfeed can take over.
To learn more check out our customer stories, watch a 2 min demo, or book a session to see what’s the best approach for your business.
Originally published at www.taskfeedapp.com.
