The best onboarding plan for a B2B SaaS company

Highlights:

• The Significance of Onboarding in B2B SaaS
• Different Approaches to Onboarding B2B SaaS Users
• Designing a Customer-Centric SaaS Onboarding Experience
• 5 Steps to Create an Exceptional Onboarding Experience for B2B SaaS Products
• Wrapping Up

Nobody should assume that onboarded customers are users who just logged in or finished the onboarding process. Only in case your customers have benefited from your onboarding and understand that your product can solve their problems, you can be sure that you have done an excellent job and your onboarding is genuinely useful. 

The Significance of Onboarding in B2B SaaS

The B2B onboarding process plays a critical role in the success of B2B SaaS companies. Let's explore why effective onboarding is so crucial in this context.

1- Managing a Challenging Learning Curve

SaaS product onboarding often has a steeper learning curve than a consumer-oriented one. This necessitates comprehensive onboarding to help users understand the intricacies of the product and maximize its value.

2- Maximizing Average Revenue Per User (ARPU)

Effective onboarding contributes to higher Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) in B2B SaaS. By guiding users through the product's features, functionalities, and benefits, onboarding helps them fully leverage its capabilities, leading to increased customer satisfaction and potentially higher revenue.

3- Catering to Unique User Personas

B2B SaaS onboarding products typically serve diverse user personas with varying organizational roles and responsibilities. Tailoring the onboarding process to address these user personas' specific needs and pain points is crucial for successful user adoption and engagement.

Different Approaches to Onboarding B2B SaaS Users

You can take several approaches to onboard users effectively in the B2B SaaS space. Let's explore three popular models that work great to build a B2B Saas onboarding:

The White Glove Model

The white glove model emphasizes personalized, high-touch onboarding experiences. It involves dedicated support and guidance throughout onboarding, ensuring users receive tailored assistance to navigate the product effectively.

The Hybrid Model

The hybrid model combines elements of self-service and personalized onboarding. It allows users to explore the product independently while offering additional resources, such as tutorials or webinars, to facilitate their learning and adoption journey.

The Product-Led Model

The product-led model focuses on delivering a seamless, intuitive user experience that enables users to explore and understand the product independently. It relies on user-centric design, in-app guidance, and self-service resources to facilitate onboarding without extensive human intervention.

Designing a Customer-Centric SaaS Onboarding Experience

There is no “one size fits all” for SaaS customer onboarding. But the best plan is one that: 

• shows value as quickly as possible 
• empowers the customer
• evolves along with your product and user base
• remains scalable for you

To plan your onboarding right, you should first of all care about your customers and their success. All right, first things first.

Think hard and try to answer the following questions: Why should your customers use your product? What does success look like for your customers? What do they want to achieve in their own business and how your product can help them to do it? The onboarding experience can have any set of these elements: 

Signup 

Don’t make this page too cumbersome and incomprehensible. Signup form should be easy-to-complete. Literally, Customers should see what button to press and what information to fill. Sometimes product companies use this page to convince their customers to fill in the form once more time. Especially if it consists of many form fields.

Welcome message 

After your customer signed up, send him a welcome email. But don’t burden your new user with lots of unnecessary information on this step. Keep it simple. Thank him and submit some useful content from your blog (if there is one) or provide him with some valuable tips that will help him during the onboarding process. Also, you can send him the link to your academy, and it will definitely increase a conversion. So did one of our customers and increased conversion by 38%.

Product introduction 

This is probably the most crucial primary element in your onboarding. Remember, high-quality content is essential. You should provide your users with a clear path from setting up your product to the moment when they will realize that their problems could be solved.

There are a lot of varieties of tools for creating an onboarding. Some of them are tutorials, academies, walkthrough tools, etc. You can choose the one that best suits your product. 

Break your onboarding into the workflows. It will help you focus users’ attention on the main and sufficient moments. Don’t disperse on everything at once.

Telling customers that your product will solve all their problems — empty promises. Show them! Fill your onboarding content with visual elements. The information will be better retained if you create an interactive tutorial with some videos, diagrams, etc. instead of writing a lot of complicated instructions.

The best ways to make SaaS user onboarding successful you can find in one of our previous blog posts: What are the best ways to make SaaS user onboarding successful?

The main thing which customers want from your product is a success. To maximize the value you provide with your product, you have to show different ways of how using it can help customers succeed. 

Notifications

This is an important contact point that may also help re-engage disengaged users. Let your customers see that you don’t forget about them. You can fill these reminders with some useful tips or suggest your customers take the next step after completing a certain action. 

Successful conclusion

Show your learners that their achievements and efforts are appreciated. We at AcademyOcean chose a certificate as the most appropriate way to say learners “We are proud of you.” You can read about certificates in more detail in our blog post: What are the benefits of getting the certificates? 

5 Steps to Create an Exceptional Onboarding Experience for B2B SaaS Products

To ensure a great B2B SaaS customer onboarding, follow these five steps:

Gain an In-Depth Understanding of Your Customer Base

Thoroughly research and analyze your target audience to understand their pain points, motivations, and specific requirements. This knowledge will inform your onboarding strategy and enable you to tailor the experience to their needs.

Align All Teams Involved in Onboarding

Collaboration between cross-functional teams, such as product, sales, and customer success, is crucial for a seamless onboarding experience. Ensure everyone is aligned on the goals, messaging, and processes to deliver a cohesive onboarding journey.

Select the Right Tools and Technologies

Leverage appropriate tools and technologies to get the most efficient and best B2B onboarding. This includes onboarding software, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, analytics platforms, and communication tools. Choose solutions that enhance the SaaS customer onboarding process and enable effective tracking and measurement.

Wrapping Up

Onboarding is a continuous process. Once you planed and organized onboarding process, don’t put it into action and forget about it. Onboarding needs constant revision. Make sure that you continue showing the value of your product by announcing new features and their capabilities on a regular basis. Keep in touch with your customers and be always available. 

“Always make products that are the best in the world and anything other than this is a recipe for mediocrity.” — Sridhar Vembu, co-founder of Zoho.