You’ve made a sale! Congratulations. With many of our partners converting over 83 percent of deals coming in the door by educating prospects with penetration tests and sticking to a process that quickly helps them move through the sales cycle, the next challenge was how to onboard these brand new happy clients in a way that wouldn’t create what I call customer terrorists (aka, the very unhappy client that doesn’t mind expressing their opinions of you to anyone who will listen).
You’ve just WOW’d them with your knowledge, expertise, and ability to aggregate reports in a way that virtually no other MSP in your area (nor internal IT departments) can produce.
You’ve earned their trust and are excited to get your relationship off to a good start.
The problem: how do you communicate expectations AND implement an extremely successful onboarding process WITHOUT pissing clients off and losing that trust capital you worked so hard to get?
I’m sure something top of mind while onboarding big new shiny clients is to avoid creating a worse user experience than they experienced before.
I want to talk about some key steps that you want to make sure you have in your client onboarding process (we will be discussing this very topic in our partner Security Operations (SecOps) call this week).
I wanted to share with all my MSP friends 3 secrets I learned growing a $10 million MSP that ensure exceptionally happy and engaged long term clients.
Secret #1 Create a roadmap that they can understand
If your team isn’t using a standardized process, don’t worry about putting together a roadmap. First, start coming up with the steps they will need to do every single onboarding and make sure you have a way of tracking that they were done.
When it comes to communicating expectations, you’ll want to lay out specific milestones you will accomplish. With preliminary you’ve received from your initial sales meetings, come up with a plan to get some basics in place. For an initial onboarding I strongly recommend keeping your project simple and communicating a relatively short timeline that you confidently can stick to so that your team can adequately support them. Make the milestones relatively painless on your end so that you can build up a reputation of sticking to schedules and getting work done.
Secret #2 Do not overpromise during onboarding
One of the biggest mistakes I see MSPs making (including my team when I ran my MSP before selling it) was that they overpromise what onboarding is going to be. Many MSPs commit to completely renovating their network infrastructure to get it in tip top shape with no user issues, etc. How well does that end? Not very…
Think about the last house remodel you had. I’m going through one right now, so it’s top of mind for me. I signed the papers and wrote a big check way back in April of this year. The contractor told me they were all set and to expect a completely redone house by the end of August.
When I checked back in two months later, I was told we’d be lucky to move back in sometime in October. I was completely astounded. I made it a point to get checks cut as quickly as the invoices came in, had picked out all the materials and finishes (AND compromised on materials that were out of stock so that we could stick to original deadlines).
When hearing that our project was delayed months, I was not a happy camper. The contractor had overpromised on our outcome even though he’d been in the business for nearly 20 years. The project was complicated, had many moving pieces and dependencies. We needed electricians, plumbers, city inspections, let alone approvals from our HOA. If our contractor laid out the different hurdles and got us to understand that the project was going to be broken up into pieces and that he was going to tackle critical or time-sensitive portions first, I’d completely have understood and accepted that an end date would be hazy until we got some of the critical initial pieces ironed out.
As IT teams, we often do that very same thing. We create complicated onboarding projects with multiple dependencies. On top of relying on vendors to pull through with service and support (which at times may be spotty), we’re expected to deliver projects that may pull a variety of expertise from overworked members of your teams that happen to be subject matter experts on very specific pieces of your complicated onboarding project.
Word to the wise. The simpler you make your initial onboarding (meaning less cooks in the kitchen and less work being done), the easier it will be for you to deliver an expected outcome and consistently please your new users.
Secret #3 Communicate and set expectations
I like to go by the motto of under promise and over deliver. If you communicate and set clear expectations slightly under what you can confidently deliver in your onboarding, clients will be happily surprised at the outcome, rather than underwhelmed.
As you set out with your onboarding roadmap, continue to communicate when pieces are complete. Maybe you have built in update meetings. Maybe you just check in with updates (this may depend on the size of the client and nature of your engagement with them) but providing some communication with updates will be critical for them to realize your team is doing a great job and give them confidence that your service is worthwhile.
I want to be crystal clear here that setting expectations that there occasionally will be hiccups as your team learns their business, its processes and establishes a cadence with them is critical in setting a reasonable bar with your team to mess up occasionally.
