The Onboarding Choke Point | TDSU Ep. 13

Dillon: [00:00:41] What's up, Lifers, and welcome to The Daily Standup, your daily

destination for

just a skosh

of customer success

content. We've got our man, Rob here. Rob, do you want to say

hi?

Rob: How

you doin' lifers?

Dillon: We've got JP here. JP, do you want to say hi?

JP: you doin'?

Dillon: And we've got Rupesh here. [00:01:11] Rupesh, do you want to say hi?

Rupesh: Hi everyone.

Dillon: And I am your host. My name is Dillon Young. Rupesh, thank you so

much for being here. Do you want to introduce yourself?

Rupesh: Sure. Thanks Dillon for having me here. Uh,

so I'm Rupesh Rao. I'm the founder of CogniSaaS,

which is

a customer onboarding tool for enterprise SaaS and services companies.

Yeah. Excited to be here.

JP: before

this. I'm

Dillon: Yeah. And thank you for being here. So

Rupesh, you and I had a chance

to speak before this. I'm really excited to,

uh,

[00:01:41] talk a little bit more about CogniSaaS and what it's trying to solve for. So why don't you tell us, you know the concept

of the show. We want to hear what's

on your mind when it comes to customer success.

So please tell us.

Rupesh: Okay. So customer success, right?

Every B2B SaaS company knows what customer success is about, and they have different

metrics they

use to measure customer success. The

typical metrics

we hear about

are retention,

NPS, product usage, customer health score.

The interesting [00:02:11] thing is these are all good metrics, but these are all lagging indicators

of customer success.

So the

true leading indicators of

customer success starts right from the sales and pre sales stage, especially in the case of enterprise sales. So the promises we make to the customer and

how you deliver on those

promises during the customer onboarding and implementation stage

actually become

the leading indicator of customer success.

So we

at CogniSaaS, we are on this

mission to help B2B SaaS companies

get this

early

[00:02:41] leading

indicators of customer success right,

set the stage for a strong foundation for customer success when the customer goes live, and then your

adoption, NPS,

retention, kind of fall in place. So that's the

objective we are solving for.

Dillon: So, you know, when I think about leading indicators, my mind immediately goes to whatever expectations were set in the sales process are likely... the leading indicators would be whether we're meeting those expectations as the customer understand them. [00:03:11] Is that kind of, am I speaking your language, Rupesh?

Rupesh: Exactly. Spot on.

Right, so...

I think everybody talks about time to

value. Everybody talks about value delivery. So I

think in this time to value most of the companies are good in measuring time, but I think this "value" bit

is very subjective and everybody has

different

definitions of value in their

mind, right?

So how do you measure this value? So the way we like to think about this [00:03:41] one is, again, going back to the sales stage,

right? What did you promise to the customer? So

if you are an enterprise SaaS company, you would have promised certain

products or certain use cases or certain modules to implement as part of your onboarding.

So during onboarding and implementation, are you actually measuring those exact things? So are you able to plan and

... execute on your customer onboarding at every module-wise

basis or every use case-wise basis? Unlike where today

most of the companies [00:04:11] just get into the weeds, they start doing project management with task tracking tools and

they start going into Jira product management tools

with a bunch of product

tickets and whatnot. But this whole value that was promised, what modules we are implementing, what use cases we are solving for, that somehow gets lost

in translation between

sales, solution, implementation, product, engineering teams. So we

believe that tracking that throughout the

customer life cycle, what we are delivering for the [00:04:41] customer, is important.

Dillon: Rob, what, what do you want to add to that?

Rob: Well, just to reflect on what you said,

I think you're correct to say that driving that through line from the sales process, obviously super important. I'm curious to get your take on something, which is the challenge I've run

into before. Where you have to,

where you have different values at different levels of the organization.

So for example, imagine you sell to a 50 person organization, hundred person organization. So not that [00:05:11] massive of a company.

but the economic buyer, maybe as the CEO, let's pretend the CEO had a certain value,

the day-to-day manager, maybe doesn't even really know what the solution is and has a different perception of value.

Maybe value for them is even just like, "Hey, you know, I don't really need my day-to-day to change, but I'll do it because my boss said so." And then value to the end user, somebody on the ground. How do you, how do you multi thread value delivery?

JP:

Rupesh: Okay, great question. So you're right. Different stakeholders in the [00:05:41] organizations have different needs when it comes to

value what it means for them. Right? A CEO might be looking for a high level dashboard, which answers the business questions for him or her in terms of

the top line, the revenue, the cost, the P& L, that's what value is for them. Uh,

for a manager level, this is more around, "Can I get some analytics to

make decisions for my day-to-day operations?" And

for a user, it's just, "Can I get my task-- I've got 10 things on my plate. [00:06:11] Can

I just close my tasks, right? Get it done and move on."

So I think as a, as a solution provider, we have to address the needs of each of these

stakeholders. You need to solve for the day-to-day person for the

daily task tracking.

You need to solve for the meaningful...

dashboarding and reporting and give some intelligence to it, right? I mean not just

be a system of record,

also have some intelligence. "Okay, what

should we do? Why should

we do? What should we prioritize?

That kind of things

makes it really very compelling right [00:06:41] during onboarding and implementation.

Dillon: JP, what do you think?

JP: Yeah, definitely. I mean, onboarding is one of the most important, uh, critical parts, right, in, in the customer journey, And I think that you brought up something great with, with the promise,

right? There's always like

this promise or this expectation of what, you know, the customer is, is going to get delivered.

And I like to think about... of course, there's so many

great things, but where are those boundaries?

Where are the boundaries of the customer's [00:07:11] expectations

and what the company can deliver?

I feel like there's

this opportunity to turn that boundary into-- like, how

do you turn that boundary

into a value for the customer?

I think that that's something that a lot of CSMs

end up doing later down

in the line when you, say, have to explain the difference in... maybe someone's got one type of support and

they're trying

to get the most white [00:07:41] glove level of support, but you know,

maybe they haven't paid for that tier or maybe that's not something that's sustainable for the company.

And that's where the

relationship begins to experience a fracture.

So I like to see that

that onboarding is a

great opportunity to sort of have those boundaries there, but in a way, you don't want to tell someone, "No," you want to find a way to tell them "Yes." And

of course that boundary is a value.

So,

I think it's, obviously, onboarding is really

a crucial time and I'm sure you're aware of that at [00:08:11] CogniSaaS and you're able to really, help a lot of companies out through that process.

Rupesh: Absolutely. You're right. I think expectation setting

is super important, right?

From the early stage in the relationship. And

this is a common challenge, right? Sales team has a different way of

managing expectations and setting expectations, but just a little bit

more on the "optimistic" side of things.

And when it comes to delivery teams, they are more realistic on the ground

kind of, you know, so it's always a challenge.

Yeah, I [00:08:41] think you have to get very good at stakeholder

management, understanding

their... personal

perceptions and their motivations and personal goals and company goals. And if you can align yourself with those, then it becomes a mutual benefit.

Dillon: Well, that's our time, Rupesh.

I want to thank you so much for bringing this topic to us and sharing it with the community. We would definitely love to have you back and maybe do a deeper dive into CogniSaaS next time. So thanks again.

Rupesh: Thanks for having me here and hope this was helpful.

Dillon: All right, Rupesh.

Rupesh: Thanks, [00:09:11] everyone.