Customer Success Ideas

[chriscardone]

Hi friends,

I run Customer Success at Unstack.com, our main goal is leading customers through the onboarding process then getting them live and keeping them renewing.

Anyone have suggestions for successful configs within HubSpot they've seen.

Right now, we're tracking this through deals with little customization, but don't exactly know where to customize which would be benefitial.

Thanks!

[stuartbalcombe]

Hey @chriscardone love this question. Huge proponent of using deals for onboarding and renewals here as they reinforce running an outcome oriented process.

Below I've tried to lay out how we use deals to run our onboarding and renewals processes at Arrows - with the related workflows and reporting around them.

1. How to smoothly handoff closed customers to start onboarding

There’s often plenty of confusion surrounding the sales handoff, and it doesn’t always happen cleanly. Part of providing a great customer experience is your customer feeling like the sales team listened to their needs and clearly represented what your company’s solution could do.

Here’s a deal configuration and handoff work to help align expectations and nail down responsibilities, so that it’s clear who’s managing what.

Use required deal properties - to ensure any required customer information is complete when moving a deal to “closed won”.

Required fields for moving deals to "closed won"

Use a workflow to automate the details of handoffs - I’d suggest creating a workflow to handle as many steps related to handoffs as possible to ensure they happen repeatably and without things falling through the cracks that impact the customer experience.

In this example triggered when a deal moves to the stage “Closed Won” in our sales pipeline the workflow will:

• Create a record in our onboarding pipeline (explained in more detail in the next section)
• Copy relevant information from the sales deal to your new onboarding record
• Set a renewal date
• Assign an owner to the new onboarding ticket using a “Rotate record to owner” workflow action. If you have multiple people or teams who work with customers during onboarding you could also add branching logic to route new customers based on specific properties (that you make required to close the deal) such as products/services purchased or persona.
• Create a customer facing success plan (more details below)
• Send a welcome email to the customer from the new owner based on a template
• Create internal prep tasks in a task queue for the onboarding team.

Sales <> Onboarding Handoff Worflow

2. Build a repeatable onboarding process with pipelines

I Would absolutely recommend this approach vs adding onboarding data in custom properties on a contact or company record because pipeline movements will always be timestamped making reporting much easier and you’ll have a visual way to see the progression of companies through onboarding and quickly identify bottlenecks.

We wrote a pretty complete guide on setting up HubSpot pipelines for onboarding including some common workflows and reporting.

Here’s a example deal pipeline for onboarding:

Example onboarding pipeline

3. Give customers a clear view of “what’s next” with a success plan

One thing to think about when it comes to running your process in HubSpot (or really any customer success tool) is that it's internal facing, so as much as you get setup your customer doesn't have visibility.

To improve transparency and help everyone get a better understanding of what needs to happen next we recommend using customer facing action plans attached to each deal or ticket you create.

This way you can collect any information you need that would block getting accounts setup and customers up and running while also laying out the success roadmap that will lead to stress free renewals.Here's an example of what a customer facing plan might look like, and also how it would show up in a deal or ticket to enrich your data and make it easy to see what's happening.

Example customer facing plans

Example customer plan

Besides providing a clear next step for customers you could also use the plan to:

• Share files
• Collect form submissions
• Accept file uploads
• Engage with comments
• Set due dates for tasks and target dates for onboarding
• Assign onboarding tasks to specific people (eg a technical person might need to install a snippet vs legal might need to sign a contract)
• Embed 3rd party tools (Calendly, Drive, YouTube etc) in a shared experience
• Automate reminder notifications to customers for next steps

With Arrows this customer facing plan would be attached 1-1 to a deal or ticket and plan data is synced into HubSpot properties allowing you to use it in workflows and reporting.

Customer facing onboarding plan in a HubSpot deal

4. Understand customer adoption and drive renewals

No matter whether you use a dedicated CS platform or HubSpot to manage your customer onboarding and renewals process, the chanes are at somepoint you'll want to be able to see what customers are doing in your product and how engaged they are to identify churn risks and ensure you have all the information you need for renewal conversations.

One thing that is often touted by dedicated customer success platforms that seems less common in the HubSpot community is pull product usage data into the CRM for reporting and/or driving behavior based actions whether automated or manual.

This isn’t as hard as it might sound using reverse ETL tools like Hightouch (example below) or Syncari. These tools make it possible to query your app database or really any other data store and pipe and map that data to HubSpot properties.

I’d suggest product usage from external systems in custom properties on company records and then using a workflow like the one below to copy it to associated tickets or deal in your onboarding and success pipelines whenever it gets updated. If the data is user specific you could of course do the same thing with a contact record.

The example below shows how we pull customer product usage data from our software product into HubSpot company records and then push it into deals (which would work the same way for tickets).

We use Hightouch to pull data from our software’s Postgres database into HubSpot.
Sync product data to HubSpot

Another workflow I really like for managing onboarding is to set thresholds for ticket property values and then send alerts or assign tasks based on them.

Example 1: If you are using a customer facing plan with due dates, you can sync the due date of the current task from Arrows to HubSpot and then if it is past due kickoff reminders to the customer and/or your team to follow up.

Example 2: If you know that users taking a particular action in your product correlates to increased change of upgrading their account you could create a HubSpot workflow that sends a Slack notification to the CSM or Account Manager responsible for renewals to follow up and close the deal.

Example 3: You could also use a similar workflow based on the time since the customer was last contacted or if they are within a certain number of days of the target date and have not completed specific required steps to see value.

Depending on the parameters you could assign to the ticket owner, escalate to additional team members or kickoff a whole new playbook as needed.

5. Report on onboarding performance

A huge advantage of running onboarding and renewals using HubSpot ticket pipelines is you can drastically simplify the work involved in getting all your data together for reporting.

Here are a few onboarding specific reports I'd suggest setting up:

Onboarding report examples

Example onboarding dashboard

1. Total tickets/deals in each stage of onboarding

This report is really helpful for quickly identifying bottlenecks and potential problem steps. For example do you have a lot of customers in a stage that requires a file upload? Are there many tasks in one stage? Is the point
person for the customer not the right person to complete a task in this stage?

Identifying the bottleneck is the first step in improving the process to remove it.

2. Total tickets/deals in onboarding by rep

Quickly see workloads and assignments to current onboardings/renewals. If you have a known threshold for the number of accounts a rep can handle this can also help predict hiring needs or the need for improved routing.

3. Incomplete tasks by rep

If you are assigning internal tasks for onboarding and renewals - this report provides a centralized place to see things that might be slipping through the cracks and impacting the customer experience.

Bonus

1. Reporting on onboarding progress vs team activity

HubSpot Custom Reports that combine data from both your team's activity and your customer's behavior during onboarding are a really powerful way to get insight into your customers progress and how effective your process is at making them successful.This video shows how to setup an onboarding dashboard that also surfaces at risk onboarding's based on a threshold level of progress you set.

2. Segmenting onboarding/renewal performance by team memberI recorded a video here of how I would think about setting this up to show the impact team members have on the velocity and success of customers during onboarding.In summary - running onboarding and renewals in HubSpot using ticket pipelines is absolutely possible and has a ton of advantages.

If you have questions or want to dig into anything here in more detail I'm always happy to chat and we have a ton more free resources for building onboarding programs too if you're curious.

[kvlschaefer]

Thanks for sharing, @stuartbalcombe! 

[GuyTaylor · Accepted solution]

Hi @chriscardone, Unstack looks like a quality product!

I don't have much expertise on this topic so at the risk of sounding obvious I'll share my one workflow. Within the HubSpot deals feature you can customize the columns to represent levels of 'stickiness' - how likely is a customer to stick around and not churn.

Stage one (least sticky) might be persons who did not finish the in-app onboarding while the most sticky stage might be customers who are paying for a multitude of your products. This is just a example,  whatever indicates stickiness for your product is what can be used.

Figuring out all the little things that increase stickness and tracking it via deals is one way to go about it.  Very basic advice, I realize, but figured I throw in my two cents since I was tagged : )

Guy | linkedhub.io

[chriscardone]

Hi @GuyTaylor,

Thanks for the kind words and this advice!

I never thought of that, we measure the points of contact but stickiness is a great approach!

Thanks again.

[sharonlicari]

Hey @chriscardone 

This is really interesting! I'll tag a few experts that can share their thoughts with you-

Hey @Josh @StefaniUAT @GuyTaylor could you please share your knowledge with @chriscardone?

Thanks

Sharon