Smart Idea 3: Focus on optimising your onboarding process
8th March 2016
Our recently published white paper: 7 Smart Ideas to Grow your SaaS Business contains leading edge information on how to grow your SaaS business. Here we look at one of the ideas:
Smart Idea 3 : Focus on optimising your onboarding process
It is likely that a lot of your marketing effort will be focused on lead generation. However once you’ve got that lead – be it a free trial, or booking a demo – how do you convert them into a paid customer?
The success of this onboarding process relies firstly on you determining what success looks like for both your business, and the prospect in the onboarding process. To your business it’s likely to be they become a paid customer. For the customer on the free trial, or in a demo it’s worth asking: If the trialist used one feature that would mean they would start paying money; what is that one feature? For example, if you have accounting software it may be when trialists start sending out invoices that you know they will sign up to be a paid customer.
Once defined, your nurturing process should enable prospects to understand your key selling points to the point where trial customers will sign up. Identifying your key selling point will enable you to frame business conversations around best-selling capabilities rather than focusing on benefits that prospects don’t value as much. Work closely with your sales team on this as they are gathering feedback day in, day out.
With your selling points established, you then need to support prospects through the journey to
purchase, to make it as painless as possible. As we’ve mentioned already, a free trial is a very effective way to show people first-hand the value that your solution can bring. However, if you’re not ready to give prospects that much access to your software, a complimentary demonstration can also work well. We also find that supporting free content with marketing techniques that add value to the experience, such as instructional video guides or industry insight papers, work well.
The objective here is to create a lead-to-customer workflow, that helps your business to increase the number of engaged prospects becoming full-time clients. Enhancing this process is critical to growth. Using software like Intercom can support the work you do in the onboarding process.
Constantly reviewing the success of both your marketing content and your conversion workflow will help you to refine the process, to give customers a better all-round service and increase your retention rates post-trial.
Do you want more smart ideas? Simply click here to download our free guide.
