At Touch & Sell, client onboarding is more like a honeymoon! Getting to know you, laying the foundations for a fruitful collaboration and above all… bringing our Growth Enablement platform to your business and boosting your performance as quickly as possible! Today, the Touch & Sell team is taking you behind the scenes of Touch & Sell’s client onboarding process!
Onboarding, a first step towards the Holy Grail of customer loyalty
If you are a frequent reader of the Touch & Sell blog, you know that we are data enthusiasts. And here’s an impressive figure to kick off our guide to customer onboarding: A Bain & Company study found that a 5% improvement in the customer retention rate could generate a 25% to 95% increase in revenue! Yes, prospecting for new customers remains a crucial driver of competitiveness and even durability. On the other hand, retaining existing customers remains the shortest path to maximizing the average ticket and increasing your business volume. There are many other benefits to focusing on customer retention:
- It is cheaper to keep an existing customer than to acquire a new one for 70% of companies;
- Your loyal customers can become your best ambassadors. They will give you feedback and recommendations and will actively participate in improving your company’s product offering. Ambassador status is the ultimate indicator of the success of your sales approach. A Nielsen study showed that 84% of buyers and consumers trust peer recommendations;
- Loyal customers are by definition satisfied… and they spread the word. With 87% of French people browsing rating platforms before buying, customer reviews matter A LOT.
Okay, so customer loyalty has a stratospheric ROI. But where do you start? The answer is quite easy: begin with your customer’s onboarding!
What should you say during the customer onboarding process?
So onboarding is the first step towards building a stickier customer journey. And because “the first impression is always the right one, especially if it’s a bad one”, you’ll have to do your utmost to set up a positive momentum in your relationship with this new customer who’s hoping to solve a business challenge.
At this stage, forget about automation and cost efficiency. You are expected to adapt your collaborative tools, communication methods, planning of follow-up meetings, etc. Personalization also takes the form of a tailor-made “onboarding pack” with the sharing of relevant content to enable the new customer to better understand the company’s services. This will incidentally prepare for a subsequent upselling. A few tips:
- NEVER keep a client in the dark, in doubt or on the fence. Your onboarding process will only be successful if your client has fully understood your value proposition and your ability to bring the expected value to their business.
- End every meeting by explaining the following steps (What’s next);
- Beware of giving your customers false hope. It may be rewarding at first, but the backlash can be (very) costly. Promote your expertise, but remain reasonable and measured. Read the insert below for more information.
- Encourage your new customers to give you any feedback they might have. If you can manage to include a satisfaction survey in every customer onboarding meeting, all the better. Make sure you spoon-feed your customer to encourage him to take part in the satisfaction survey.
| What you should “say’ during customer onboarding meetings |
|---|
| A study by The Marketing Practice (TMP) and B2B DecisionLabs revealed the best pitch to address prospects and new customers. Several variables were tested in order to come up with the optimal speech. Touch & Sell has summarized the conclusions of this unique experiment involving 500 B2B professionals. So the optimal pitch: • Provides quantitative data on the effectiveness of the solution you provide (customer cases, impact studies, etc.); • Use emotional rather than rational verbatim; • Put the advantages of the proposed solution into perspective and mention the possible risks of failure. |
Here’s how we kick off our customer collaboration!
At Touch & Sell, onboarding is the honeymoon of the customer life cycle! It’s an exciting phase where we get to know you and lay the groundwork together to deliver our value proposition in the best possible way: We’ll help you grow and generate more sales ASAP! We don’t see onboarding as a rigid, static and locked process. The Touch & Sell version of the onboarding process is more of an art.
This founding stage of our mutual relationship runs until the Growth Enablement platform we offer is made available to all users. But don’t worry: you’ll be able to master the platform in no time as it has been designed to be intuitive and easy to use. Your employees will be up and running in no time to stimulate your growth like never before!
In practical terms, Touch & Sell’s customer onboarding process paves the way for a relationship of partnership and collaboration rather than assistance. Here are its various stages:
- The Handover meeting. This is an internal meeting that prepares the actual onboarding process. Our Sales team (and possibly pre-Sales) passes on the information that matters about your company to our Customer Experience team. Your dedicated Customer Success Manager will know everything about your issues, expectations, aspirations, challenges, contact points, etc. Our goal is to NOT have you repeat what you have already said or written.
- The Kick-Off meeting. Led by the salesperson who introduces your dedicated Customer Success Manager, this meeting involves all stakeholders, including the decision-maker (ideally). A short discovery questionnaire is submitted to you to help us better understand your business challenges. The better we understand the specific usage of the platform, the more effective and efficient the follow-up will be. Yes, we offer an intuitive, powerful SaaS tool that can be used by everyone, but each customer has its own specificities (business sector, number of sales meetings, customer approaches, etc.). The Kick-Off meeting also leads to the setting of success customer KPIs.
- The online training is self-paced for maximum agility. Your dedicated Customer Success Manager will send you the training material right after the Kick-Off meeting. He will contact you at the end of the training to answer all your questions. We want to put your project manager in the best possible position to exploit the full potential of the platform.
- A meeting can be scheduled with your IT department to fine-tune the integration of our platform with your tools.
- Regular progress meetings are held with your project manager (once a week).
- We provide support for the project manager on the “tree structure”, “graphics” and “personal development” sections of the platform.
- The actual implementation of our Growth Enablement platform is a big moment for your employees but more importantly for your company. You will be able to align your teams with your internal processes, provide your sales teams with the right tools, better manage your profitability and develop your talents to drive your growth. Try us out, we love challenges!
