Customer Success Tactics: How to Schedule Kick-Off Calls

*Important note here. This advice is for low touch products like ours. For enterprise or mid market clients, this is probably a non-issue as kick-offs are very commonplace.*

One of the first things our CS team decided was that we didn’t want customer to evaluate our product on their own. Once they had been sold on Proven as a SMB hiring solution to their issues, we wanted to make sure they used the platform in the best way possible and that we were their preliminary guide

We decided that we would do kick off calls with each new customer. There were a few common sticking points for new users and we felt we should navigate them through those as well as some best practices (lack of bandwidth did allow us to fix this with product design at first).

Ok great, people will get closed by our sales team, then we’ll email them and find a time to hop on a quick 10 minute call and set them up for success! Nope, not even close. Maybe 1/4 of new customers actually did the kick off call and lots of those that missed it didn’t use some great features like our app or interview scheduler.

Eventually we got enough that had missed the kick-off to respond to our emails or talk to us on the phone to get some good feedback. We found that they didn’t think the kick-off was important, and also felt that they were too busy for a call.

Our solution was to make scheduling the kick-off call part of the sales close. After setting up the account, reps would be clear that the next step of the process was to schedule a call with their CS rep. It was key to convey that the kick-off is a big part of the success they would have using us. We used Doodle for the scheduling to make picking a time easy.

The result was bringing our kick-off call success rate to 50%!

The takeaway: Impart the importance of the kick-off call during the sales close and make it clear that it is a step in setting up their account.

*These Customer Success posts are meant illustrate things we’ve learned at Proven, so they may not translate perfectly to your company / industry. For context, the majority of our Saas customers are low LTV “pro-sumers” who are generally SMBs*