Happy Customers

In this episode we’re joined by Jerry Henry to uncover the lessons he and his onboarding team have learned during the rapid growth of Sendoso.

Show Notes

Adopting new software is a big business decision for any company. You’re likely investing considerable time, money and effort to get it up and running.

Having a partner that is aligned around your goals and expectations of that investment can be the difference between a prosperous long-term relationship and a spiral into frustration and ultimately an expensive break-up.

Our guest today is Jerry Henry, Director Professional Services and Onboarding at Sendoso. In this episode you’ll hear how he:
  • Defines 4 pillars of onboarding at Sendoso
  • Empowers his team to get creative helping customers
  • Reports on the business impact of onboarding performance
  • Maps the journey for customers from closed won to successful
  • Ensures a smooth handoff from sales to onboarding for customers
Enjoyed this episode? Connect with Jerry on LinkedIn and let him know, or subscribe for future episodes of Happy Customers.

What is Happy Customers?

Happy Customers is about why making customer successful - and ultimately happy customers is more important than ever before.

Over the course of this series we’re going to explore what people inside some of the world's top companies are really doing everyday to go beyond the metrics and numbers on the balance sheet, collaborate across their entire organization, and truly invest in making their customers successful.

Jerry Henry (00:09):
If you're trying to start to really scale onboarding, is listen to the onboarders. They're the ones that are in the trenches. They know what is working, what isn't working. And at the end of the day, their morale and how they feel in their day to day work is going to show to the customer. So if they're doing the same task, where they know I don't like doing this and you could tell, and they're not going to be happy doing it, the customer's going to know. So I think that's one of the things is, we meet as a team weekly, where we have a workshop and say, hey, what's working? What's not? What do we want to try? My previous leader here at Sendoso had a saying of, let's get weird. Of let's try something new. Let's think outside the box. And if it doesn't work, let's figure out what didn't go well, what went well and then continue to change it as we go. So I think really empowering the onboarders themselves, to have a lot of say into what the team can be doing moving forward.

Stuart Balcombe (00:55):
Hello and welcome to Happy Customers. The show where we're exploring what people inside some of the world's top companies are really doing every day to go beyond the metrics and numbers on the balance sheet, collaborate across their entire organization and truly invest in making their customers successful. In this episode, the first in a new weekly segment on onboarding operations, we're talking to Jerry Henry, to uncover the lessons he and his team have learned during rapid growth of Sendoso. I'm Stuart Balcombe, and I'm excited you're here. Don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts. Okay. Let's get into the conversation.

Jerry Henry (01:36):
So, I'm director of professional services and onboarding here at Sendoso. So oversee our solution architects, team professional services, and then our onboarding team. And what I really think onboarding to me, what it means, especially here at Sendoso is really being the first face of a new customer and really building that trust on why they went with a big business decision to bring on a new software. As there are so many softwares out there in the world, including competitors, we have. So really being that trusted advisor, getting them up and running. And more importantly as well, if there are any issues or any things that come up, being that voice of reason or ways to alleviate that frustration at the start of a relationship with the new customer.

Stuart Balcombe (02:17):
Love it. So we were just chatting before we hit record, that the onboarding team and the CX org is growing pretty rapidly at Sendoso. How does onboarding fit in the customer experience for the customer? Does everybody talk to the onboarding team? Where do you fit in, in their journey from first touch with the company to getting in the conversation with onboarding?

Jerry Henry (02:37):
Yeah. So all of our new customers go through an onboarding journey. So we've broken up into segments. So we have our SMB team, our mid-market team, and then the enterprise team. The overall gist of onboarding is the same, really getting a new customer up and running in the platform, helping set up any integrations, get any items that they want to send, order and things like that to our warehouses across the world. Really the only difference by segment is there's a lot of more moving parts as we go more upmarket. So the timeframe within onboarding fluctuates. So with our SMB space, we try to get customers done within 30 to 40 days. Mid-market 45 to 60, and then enterprise 75 to 90 days, depending how large they are.

Stuart Balcombe (03:21):
Gotcha. And time to value is always a thing that people talk about in onboarding and those timeframes, totally make sense that they are different for different segments. How much does the experience within that time period change for a segment, versus it just being a factor of, they are a more complex business, there is more stuff on their side? How do you balance that? Ideal scenario, everybody's seeing value on day one, right? But that's not the case.

Jerry Henry (03:44):
Very true. And I wish everyone saw value day one and became happy campers right away. Really where I think the difference is, is more upmarket. There are more champions or there's more people that need to be involved to get things set up. So that's, where we're see a little slower time to value, where it's really setting up the architecture of, what do they want to send? Who's going to be using it? Whereas I see more in the SMB space, the person we're working with is also primarily the marketer, who's doing a little bit of everything. So they have more inclination or ability to say, "All right, I want to do this. Let's do it now."

Jerry Henry (04:18):
Whereas, in the enterprise space or some of our commercial mid-market it's, "Hey, we want to send this, but I need to make sure our bribery team's okay with it. I need to make sure our sales leadership's okay with it. Our marketing and VP's." Things like that, where there's some check boxes that need to be done. So, that's where we'll see a little bit slower time to value of actually getting things out the door in the larger customer space. Whereas SMB, we've had customers sign up and the next day, they've sent 200 things out. Where it's a lot more visibility internally, with who we're working with.

Stuart Balcombe (04:46):
Yeah. That totally makes sense. The sign-off process gets a little more complex as you talk to larger orgs and more complex orgs. So one thing that I'm always really curious about and I think is such a huge value add of having a human in the loop, in onboarding, and you mentioned this already. There's a ton of competitors out there. It's a big business decision to onboard a new tool and a new piece of software. How do you think about the gap between, or is there a gap between what the software itself does and what customers are trying to accomplish? How much is there... Is that being bridged in onboarding? How much strategic work is there in the onboarding process?

Jerry Henry (05:21):
Yeah. So we break our onboarding into four principles or methodologies and within it depends on... And to backtrack, it depends on the size of the company again, but we really focus on that discovery in the first initial weeks, where we really try to bridge that gap between functionality, what they actually expect out of Sendoso, versus what we can actually deliver in onboarding. So once we've identified, what are their key metrics? Why did they go with Sendoso? We then tailor what their onboarding experience is going to be from there. Especially with Sendoso, we're a gifting platform. You can send anything from branded whiskey, to E-gifts, to a branded swag item. So it also really depends on what they want to send, to achieve those goals.

Jerry Henry (06:04):
And then that's where, once we've identified their discovery, what they want to get out of things, we then tailor that onboarding experience. And then we put them into the activation stage, where we then start doing some of those test sends, whether it's internal or a small group of ones, so they could see what the flow looks like, and then we'd scale it from there.

Stuart Balcombe (06:22):
Gotcha. So, that gets into a little bit of one of the big ideas that I want to explore with you. I'm curious to hear how this has shifted or is shifting as you mentioned, looking to triple the size of the onboarding team in the next year. How do you go about designing that onboarding program and making sure that the onboarding program that you have in place today is the one that meeting the needs both today, but also looking to the future as well?

Jerry Henry (06:48):
Yeah. Definitely a great question. And we definitely have changed our onboarding process numerous times, more than my team probably prefers. But we leverage a few things. So we use a learning management platform and we call it Sendoso University. That is a lot of self-training. We've recently brought on senior manager, Kelly who runs our customer education team. And she's started looking at analytics and seeing, what are these courses are being taken, when do they drop off? So from there, we can notice, all right, these things aren't really being valued or aren't taking advantage of, so maybe we need to tweak some of this to meet where our customers are and what they need.

Jerry Henry (07:23):
We also rely heavily on data. So we use Tableau, we use Salesforce, onboarding records, where we keep track of days in a certain stage in onboarding. So we have kickoff, configuration, integration, enablement, things like that. So we can see, are we noticing one stage is taking longer than the other? Are we losing momentum during that stage that's taking longer? And then at the end of onboarding, once it's marked complete, we send a survey out, captured some CSAT from our customers and we have a thing. What would you recommend that's different? And what did you really enjoy? We then have a Salesforce report. We review it every Thursday with our onboarding managers and my boss, our VPCS Inge, where we start going through, all right, we've noticed that this is a common trend where we're missing this, or maybe we didn't have enough content that we leave as takeaways, things like that. And then we use that to change how we're doing things moving forward.

Stuart Balcombe (08:16):
Gotcha. So, interesting. So you mentioned Salesforce is a tool where you're running reports and you have Tableau as well. What are the tools that your team are living in day to day, during the onboarding process? How are you managing at the customer level, where is somebody in this process? What is the thing that they have to do next?

Jerry Henry (08:32):
Yeah. So we're currently evaluating through project management platforms so we can live there and see a lot more metrics, but currently our team lives and dies by Salesforce. So we've created a new object on the account level. That's an onboarding record. It auto populates a lot of stuff on the opportunities. So what plan do they have? How many user seats? What departments are we working with? And then in there we have different timestamps of, right, when did you guys have this call with them? The kickoff call or configuration.

Jerry Henry (09:00):
There's a spot that tracks any bugs or tickets, any milestones that we're looking for, how much have they been spending on gifts, things like that, that are leading indicators to potential risk and churn, things like that. So I'd say they probably live the most in Salesforce. We also leverage the G Suite. So we share a kickoff deck with a new customer, where we go through what to expect and label what are the metrics that they're tracking. And then we have a fun graduation call once onboarding's done, where we bring in their CSM and go through memory lane of, here's everything we accomplished in onboarding. So the CSM can take over with this new transition, and making customer repeat everything.

Stuart Balcombe (09:37):
Gotcha. So the onboarding team is working with the customer specifically during that onboarding period. Then there's this handoff to that ongoing CSM, everything after that point.

Jerry Henry (09:46):
Exactly.

Stuart Balcombe (09:47):
So you mentioned a couple of things, like there's a deck in there, you're using G Suite to share things with the customer. What does the customer see? And what does their journey through onboarding look like? Are they talking to humans all the time? You mentioned the university that's sort of a self-serve place that they are going. What does it look like from the customer side?

Jerry Henry (10:05):
Yeah. Great question. So as soon as an opportunity goes to close one, we automate sending a, welcome to Sendoso. Here's your onboarding checklist, prior to onboarding. Within they say, hey, here are the seven things that you should know ahead of time. What is your budget? Who's going to be using it? Things like that. And then the account executive will introduce the onboarder to our customer. Within there, we use Groove for our CX emails. So we have templates of, super excited. Here's our kickoff information. Here's a link to my calendar, through Calendly. Please book time for our one hour meeting.

Jerry Henry (10:39):
That's where we do the kickoff. We share our template for onboarding journey, where we go through those discovery stages. Once that's been completed, we use our next template. All right, here's going to be our next call. Here's what's to be covered. And then we keep going through each of those stages, really with four main stages. So the customer really works that onboarding strategist. And then we'll also work with a solution architect, within onboarding where we'll get all their integrations set up, up and running, make sure everything looks right. And those are the main interactions that a customer have. I'd say probably mid-market's our bread and butter. We probably will have four or five overall calls that are 45 minutes to an hour each.

Stuart Balcombe (11:18):
Gotcha. And that onboarding journey template is in the email that you're sending through Groove. Is that correct? And then you're including any additional materials or links to the university, or all that kind of stuff is within those emails.

Jerry Henry (11:30):
Exactly. Yeah. So we have two parts of our Sendoso university. We have a catch all, that has all of our lessons, all of our trainings. And then we have onboarding specific that's, right, here's the courses we recommend post our kickoff call, post our configuration call. And then Kelly, who I had mentioned is new to Sendoso, who's our senior manager of customer education, set up a Salesforce sync. So we can also start pushing into the onboarding record. Here are the courses that have been taken, here's who's taking it. So we can start identifying who are champions that are really self-learning, and maybe who are the ones that aren't doing anything, that might need their hand held a little bit more.

Stuart Balcombe (12:03):
Gotcha. Yeah, that was going to be my next question actually. Was, how many folks on the customer side are typically in this onboarding process, especially as you move to mid-market and the enterprise level? You mentioned already, there's potentially decision makers or other people who need buy, who is involved and at what point do you typically think about when to bring in the right person to make progress?

Jerry Henry (12:24):
Yeah, I'd say on average, we probably have three to six main point of contacts that we work with, in the mid-market enterprise space. For SMB, it's normally one or two. Normally, it's a form of a marketing or sales ops person that's helping with integration, some of the dashboards ROI tracking. We'll normally work with a sales enablement person on how do we want to roll this out to your sales team or your individual users? And then we'll have most times a marketing member who's going to be leveraging Sendoso for a lot of their marketing activities, things like that.

Jerry Henry (12:54):
And we really focused on working with them for the first two to three weeks and setting up everything. And then what we'll do is, once we know what they're going to be sending, how they're sending it, what integrations, we'll then host an end user enablement training session. So we did one yesterday where we had 1100 people on it, that were all going to be the sales reps leveraging Sendoso, where we went through, hey, here's what we've done with your team. You guys are able to send an Amazon send, an E-gift, some swag. These are those options. Here's how you're going to do it. So we really don't try to bring any end users in until everything set up.

Stuart Balcombe (13:27):
Gotcha. Gotcha. So, that's very much a... You've already gone through the why and the high level, strategically, this is how we're going to deploy this. And then it's more of a, how you actually do this at the end user level.

Jerry Henry (13:38):
Exactly. And what alerts are you going to get? And we used to try to bring the end users in earlier. And then there's just a lot of questions. It's like, oh, we haven't set that up yet. Or that's not an option. So we found it's better once we have everything ironed out, and go through with our main point of contact. Right, here's the flow of how the sales training is going to go. What do you want to see? What don't you want to see? Things like that.

Stuart Balcombe (13:58):
Gotcha. Gotcha. So I want to hop back to something you mentioned, you mentioned that everything is, and you are piping more data into Salesforce as the central place to manage and see the progress and see the pipeline. And then you have this review meeting. How do you measure the impact of our onboarding? What's the metric that you, in your role look at as, we are getting better at this. This is a thing that we report to the business as the impact of what we're doing.

Jerry Henry (14:22):
Yeah. Great question. So we have three main things that we track and measure against. So the first one's time to complete, which I know you'd mentioned earlier, the time to value. So I think those tie in together. If we're seeing an onboarding and SMB's taking 160 days, they're probably not going to get the value that they should be seeing. So we really track from the moment we have our first call to our graduation call, what is that time to complete?

Jerry Henry (14:44):
The second one we go off of is also CSAT score. So really making sure we're having happy customers and are we really listening to their feedback. Myself and our VP, if we get a detractor, then we personally reach out and try to identify, what did we do that was wrong? Was it platform expectations? Was it who you worked with? Things like that.

Jerry Henry (15:04):
And then the third one that we track is, account balance. So with Sendoso, we are a sending platform. So you have to load funds into the platform to be able to ship things, send E-gifts out, bottles of whiskey, wine, things like that. So we track to see how much money are they putting into the platform, which is showing their intent to send. So our goal there is, anywhere from 10 to 15% of their SaaS contract, for them to load within the first 90 days.

Stuart Balcombe (15:27):
Interesting. So that's really an ROI type measure for them. Are they actually getting the value that they're paying for? Are there specific things that you would do or specific thresholds that you look at as, oh, this is... Something that you mentioned there, the percentage there. What would you do if somebody was below that threshold? Do you have an action plan or how do you think about making sure that everybody is happy and successful?

Jerry Henry (15:50):
Yeah. So we've continued to evolve of looking at our churn analysis. I think that's one thing where we really focus on why did we lose customers? And then from there each department reverse engineers goals to achieve what we could prevent. So there are some things we have in place. So if you notice, all right, you're two months in, you haven't spent anything yet, we might reach out and say, "Hey, is there a budget at reason? Are you frozen on budget? Have you not allocated it?" If you know that it's a heavy sales user, we'll actually say, "Hey, we'll pilot. We'll give you a thousand dollars to go ahead and do sends now." So their team starts seeing success. And all of a sudden when you have success, budget magically shows up.

Stuart Balcombe (16:26):
Right.

Jerry Henry (16:27):
So those are some of the ones that we'll do. We'll also try to reach out saying, "Hey, I know you guys signed with Sendoso to maybe help your demand gen team, but do you guys do webinars and events that we can also show you different use cases?" So we try to then show them different options that Sendoso can do, that maybe wasn't an original use case that they wanted, to then try to get them to start seeing some of those successes and wins.

Stuart Balcombe (16:50):
Gotcha. I love it. So you mentioned here that you look at this churn analysis and then backtrack or reverse engineer. How can other teams, or how can everybody help prevent those failure modes? You mentioned on the graduation of onboarding, you're handing off to a CSM and you obviously have sales pre-onboarding, or the entry point into onboarding. How do you, as an onboarding team collaborate with those other functions or other stages in the journey to make sure that you avoid the, this is a handoff, this is clearly a handoff. There's a gap in between.

Jerry Henry (17:23):
Yeah. So we have from the sales process, an intake or more an intake section in an opportunity that a sales rep has to fill out the questions before they can close an opportunity. So they literally have to put in, what are the teams? What are their use cases? Do they have a budget defined? Have they done direct mail previously? A lot of things that we found were leading indicators that if they were no's, we had a harder time in onboarding. So we try to get ahead of those. So, that's where we get a lot of that initial information. And then same thing with our onboarding record, we just try to be as detailed as we can for the CSM, so they're aware of any potential hangups, hiccups. Do we have any people who are maybe not seeing the success that we need to warm up and send them things? Things like that, that bridge the gap between pre-sales, post sales and then end up onboarding.

Stuart Balcombe (18:10):
I love how it's so defined and a requirement internally to move on to the next part of the journey.

Jerry Henry (18:16):
Yeah. We initially had tried a Google doc that had these questions and we said, hey, sales guide, please go ahead and fill this out. And we just noticed it worked for about a week and then no one did it anymore. But as a salesperson, if you know you have to answer these questions to close a deal, you're going to. So it did a little bit of voluntold to get this information out.

Stuart Balcombe (18:38):
I love it. What is something that you do, to that point of learning and changing and updating a process, what is something that you have found that either you started, you implemented to start with and then you changed, or something that used to work and now just doesn't and you've had to sort of rebuild that as a part of your onboarding?

Jerry Henry (18:56):
Yeah. I think one thing that used to work that doesn't work so much now, was getting everyone in the same room together. Obviously with COVID, I know you and I are both working from home. So I think that was one big shift when we had originally started onboarding was, we would send everyone lunch for one big onboarding kickoff. We would have that. Well, obviously now everyone working from home, that's not as feasible. So I think really shifting to branching out unique calls based on, right, you're marketing, let's focus on marketing on this call instead of one big call that we had, where we try to touch marketing, sales, different things, that some things got lost. So I think that's something that used to work that we've just had to shift with current events.

Jerry Henry (19:34):
But I think the second one that didn't work so well that I think works now too, is true segmentation. We used to just round robin accounts to the onboarding team, where they might have an SMB, mid-market enterprise, but these conversations were so different. So we've really specialized each of our segments, where really know the common pain points for company sizes, whatever that size is broken off by, all right, I know your sales teams here, what we see working in your space. So we've really fine tuned and specialized via segmentation.

Stuart Balcombe (20:06):
Gotcha. Gotcha. And what's something that you think that Sendoso does particularly well in the onboarding. What is the thing that if you were to, giving advice to somebody else in a similar role as you, or if you are working at a... You are implementing a new onboarding program? What's the one thing that you would be like, I have to do that because that's the thing that is stand out at Sendoso.

Jerry Henry (20:26):
Yeah. I think one's very specialized just to Sendoso, where we really practice what we preach. So we make sure that we send our new customers things, and we show them different use cases by actually doing it. But I think as a whole, if you're trying to start to really scale onboarding is listen to the onboarders. They're the ones that are in the trenches. They know what is working, what isn't working. And at the end of the day, their morale and how they feel in their day to day work is going to show to the customer. So if they're doing the same task where they know I don't like doing this and you could tell, and they're not going to be happy doing it, the customer's going to know.

Jerry Henry (21:00):
So I think that's one of the things is, we meet as a team weekly where we have a workshop and say, "Hey, what's working? What's not? What do we want to try?" My previous leader here at Sendoso had a saying of, let's get weird. Of let's try something new. Let's think outside the box. And if it doesn't work, let's figure out what didn't go well. What went well and then continue to change it as we go. So I think really empowering the onboarders themselves to have a lot of say into what the team can be doing moving forward.

Stuart Balcombe (21:27):
Gotcha. Along with that, how do you document the standard pathway through onboarding? Is that a documented thing that you are updating experiments in a document somewhere? How does your team know, this is the way that for this segment, we should approach the process?

Jerry Henry (21:42):
Yeah. So we have a deck that we work on as a team during our, okay, our planning, where we went through and said, all right, what is valuable and important in onboarding? And start documenting a lot and then, what do we do today that isn't so valuable, and what can we help automate? So once we had that in place, it became like our golden truth of onboarding. And then we've built like 30, 60, 90 day game plans for new hires. And their first two weeks is really going through that deck of, here's what we're doing. And then as we revamp, we break into first half, second half of the year, we go through, all right, based off of the data from the last six months, how are things going? Do we still think these are the right steps? Is this the right materials we're sending? Do we need to change any of this out? If we need to make changes, we make changes, everyone has access to that document. So they see any of the live changes in real time.

Stuart Balcombe (22:32):
Gotcha. I love it. Tied to that, you mentioned 30, 60 to 90 day plan for new hires. We already talked about how you're looking to triple the team in 2022. What is top of mind for you when it comes to hiring, A, finding people who are going to be a good fit at Sendoso but also ramping up that team, that's a pretty significant jump in team size. What's the top of mind for you on the hiring front?

Jerry Henry (22:56):
Yeah. That's a great question, as yeah, we're looking to yeah, go from 12 onboarders to 27 by the end of this year. So a big increase. I think one, the skillset we're looking for honestly is, coach-ability and people who have done it in the past, whether it's direct onboarding or just customer facing, but we really pride ourselves on who you are as a person. I know that a 30 minute interview, you can't really see someone's work, but it's more like, how would you fit with the team?

Jerry Henry (23:26):
I had chatted with someone who brought up, would you have a beer with this person after work? So, that's what we look at, if it's someone that you would enjoy hanging out with outside of work. And then from there, really identifying, do they know marketing? Do they know sales? What is their industry knowledge, is the second factor. And then the third one is really based on multitasking. How do you prioritize? Are you someone that can stay organized? Things like that, are the three things I look for. And then as far as ramping up, I want to say we have it pretty dialed in now. We've recently brought on a handful of people who are up and running in about 30 days.

Jerry Henry (24:03):
So we go through, all right, here are the things that you need to know about Sendoso, here's what you need to know about our industries, our personas, the talk tracks, our integrations. And then, we have an onboarding buddy that you have, that shadows your calls, you shadow their calls, to really get you caught up to speed on the conversations we have. And then we have one mock call as your graduation of a new employee, where we put you through the wringer, where the rest of the team is a customer and we have you walk through what you would do with the customers. And we grill each other. We ask questions that we know we're going to stump them, but something that they should know. How do they handle those objections? Things like that.

Stuart Balcombe (24:41):
I love it. So there's obviously a lot of stuff that's happening in your world. You have your scale on the team pretty rapidly. There's, different segments that you're working with. If you had a magic wand, what is the one onboarding problem or one onboarding challenge that your team faces that you would just wipe away, and just get rid of?

Jerry Henry (24:58):
Oh man. Magic wand. I think one is just in today's times, everyone's so busy. So I think if I could have people show up to all of their scheduled calls and things like that. Where we don't have to figure out, oh, what was missed, or hey, this one person couldn't join our configuration call, but now we need to catch them up to speed, so now we're really having two configuration calls. So I think just people's bandwidth is something I would change. And then I think too, I know it's cliche and everyone talks about it, but COVID. Coming back from the holidays, we've had so many customers, unfortunately have come down with COVID or things like that, where a lot of things have just been paused or derailed. So then, we have that fear of losing momentum and things like that.

Stuart Balcombe (25:41):
Gotcha. That's a good way to use a magic wand, right?

Jerry Henry (25:43):
It is. Yeah.

Stuart Balcombe (25:44):
Wipe out a pandemic. Cool. Hopefully this has been fun and not too much a grilling for you. And then actually, final question for you. Who would you want to hear from, or what are the companies that you look to, who you think are doing onboarding well, who would you want to hear from? Hear about their process for scaling onboarding?

Jerry Henry (26:01):
Yeah. I think from just my experience with other partners we've worked with and companies, I think Marketo would be very interesting to me. They have a pretty complex platform and a lot of things they can do. And there's so many different use cases there, that if I can figure out how they simplified their onboarding and get people caught up to speed pretty quick would be neat. And then I would probably say Salesforce, just because they do it so much. I would love to see how they fine tune things. What are of their pains that they've gone through? And then I think companies who have recently gone IPO. I'm always curious on how they made that big shift, from being a private company to a public company. How's that changed onboarding? And obviously if you're going public, you've done some right things. So also trying to see how to identify some of their failures and move forward and be more successful.

Stuart Balcombe (26:51):
Awesome. Well, thanks so much for joining me. This has been a lot of fun. I really appreciate it.

Jerry Henry (26:55):
Yeah. Thanks for having me. It was great course.

Stuart Balcombe (26:57):
Of course.

Stuart Balcombe (26:59):
Thanks so much to Jerry for a fantastic conversation. Here are my top three takeaways from this episode. Number one, build short feedback loops driven by data. Jerry and his team are constantly looking at the progress of customers during onboarding and measuring their satisfaction with the experience. This data is then reviewed weekly with both the onboarding team itself and CX leadership to quickly identify and implement improvements.

Stuart Balcombe (27:25):
Number two, be intentional about what you want customers to achieve during onboarding and get creative to help them get there. If a customer is not adopting the product as expected, the Sendoso team will send items themselves. So the customers can experience the value of the product, of their own customers. Or they'll preload their accounts, so they can start sending before they have to go through a long and arduous budget approval process.

Stuart Balcombe (27:49):
Number three, invest in the experience of everyone who interacts with customers. In onboarding, employee success really is customer success and ensuring that everyone is actively involved in providing feedback and making changes to processes, helps feel happier and ultimately be more successful.

Stuart Balcombe (28:08):
In our next episode, I'll be chatting with Donna Weber, author of the bestselling book, Onboarding Matters, about the components of a successful onboarding plan and some common misconceptions she seems to fall prey to as they design their own onboarding programs. Thanks for listening.