Convert More Profitable Customers With This Checklist Approach To Onboarding

Take these extra steps to promote adoption, engagement, and success

If you’re releasing a new product to a market, and you want it to be successful with it, one rule of product theory is more critical than the rest:

The more innovative the product, the more onboarding is necessary.

Onboarding is, to put it simply, the introduction of a product to a customer. But trouble begins where that simple definition ends. Proper onboarding should be happening both before and long after the sale.

Pre-sale onboarding begins before the customer even becomes a customer, promoting awareness and education. Pre-sale onboarding has to answer the question: How do we make a customer prospect aware of the benefits of the product, and educate them on why they need those benefits?

The tools associated with pre-sale onboarding are growing in prevalence and maturity — and these include free trials, self-driven demos, newsletter campaigns, and even webinars (still). I could write multiple deep-dive posts on the pre-sale phase of onboarding, and I have.

What I want to talk about here is what happens after the sale, because when that onboarding phase is skipped, and it…