Should You use Onboarding Software?

A few times a week, I am asked this question. Before last year, I used to say, "you are ok with a G Sheet template."
I have changed my recommendations and explained the reasons in today's video.
The big reasons are:

- Efficiency
- Customer adoption
- Ease of use
- Reporting

A reminder on these videos- they are tactical tips, like if we were having a cup of coffee. I am happy to go deeper on these with stats and charts, but I would not do that unless asked if I was providing you advice.

Here is the full transcript:

 Hey there. It's Jeff from infinite renewals. Another question get asked a lot. Like a lot. Is that, should you use. Project management software for onboarding and implementation or professional service, I would say professional services teams. Kind of have this down. What I usually see when working with startups is that.

They don't have any process. They're just kind of rolling it through. Maybe they're using a checklist thing. I've seen a lot of Trello boards out there. Which is, is fine. You do. I'm not, I haven't seen in or dived into a Trello as much or deeply. I can't even think of what the term is. I haven't taken a deep dive.

And to TRO oh, as much. Even though I use it to see, can I create templates from this or is it, they're just like a lot of copying and pasting. It just does not feel like a super sustainable way to, to launch customers. So let me pull up a few options. The first one I always say is, Hey, go, go use a Google sheet.

I say that to people. If they're cost conscious, I actually don't like it that much. I'm going to tell you a couple of reasons why I like it better than using nothing. I like it better using the new using Trello. I think it looks good in presales. But it's hard to manage moving forward. So if you're certainly selling into an enterprise, you're going to have some PMO group and they're gonna be like, tell us how you go live and you pull up this nice Gantt chart. And everybody's like, okay, fantastic. Right. You guys know what you're doing?

You get the gold checkmark. So. But if that's all that you can do and you can't get the budget, even though I believe software out there is pretty cheap these days, you can go in and you see here, I've got Google sheets. And I think this is actually from Smartsheet, which, I'm going to get into in a minute.

But, what you see here is you got to make a copy and then you start listing all your stuff here. And then you go from there. Does this work? Yes, it does. You would need to create a new copy for every project that you roll out. And then, you would. You know, move forward in managing that.

You can take each task and comment on them and assign them in a Google doc. Just no, not all organizations like using Google docs, so there's that. But I also just find it a little clunky. It used to work well before some of the better software, you know, there's a new world of. Software out there with rocket lane and Bhutan and arrows and on-ramp, and they're really geared towards using, a little bit better process. And I'm going to show off one of them today. I I'm, they're all great. I've used all of them and you know, I basically tell them our customers try them out.

You know, they all work. They have things that work differently for you. But, I'll show off one. That we're using with one of our customers today. But as you see here, it's a regular old project plan. And, I started using base camp back in. 20 or 2006, seven or eight, right around time.

And I really liked that because it was, it was easy to use. You could show it off to a non-technical customer. And they would understand what's going on there. You could see a calendar, you could see a schedule. This kind of confuses people. People don't like Excel that much. And unless I hear.

Unless you're an accountant. And it, it just doesn't feel, Like you can grasp what's going on. Sometimes where's the things that I just want to see. What's assigned to me and I got to filter and do all of these other things. Whereas you sort of make the next step up. Now, let me take a quick break.

Some people will then move into like Smartsheet or Wrike. It's the same thing. It's a, literally, I definitely have seen some customers that did some real complicated stuff where they got Zapier connected and pushed all these workflows out there. And I'm like, It's still doesn't look that great. And that's a lot of stuff that you've got to manage and if somebody is API changes or whatnot, but it's just always been cloogy. When I've seen people try and write all those workflows, people will ask them about Monday.

I just had a hard time using it. I'm going to be honest. I think Monday is great if you know, you know, Monday really well. But when I tried to go in and write rules, like for alerting and everything, it was all from scratch and I would have to go do that again. Everybody that we're usually dealing with their hair's on fire, and they're trying to figure out how to roll out something that's easy to use, and get customers, onboard, no pun intended, but how to get them using the software for onboarding really fast.

And not make it complicated and confusing for them. So I feel Smartsheet and Riker, kind of the same thing. They're actually also kind of expensive for what you get out of there. You don't really get this feel of like a client hub where you get a logo up in the corner. And if they've instituted that in the last year, I apologize, but that I've just not seen that.

Whereas all the other software that's out there, you know, you upload the logo and you invite the team members in there's certain privileges. And things like that. Some of the other things I'm just gonna switch over. In a second to, to the Taiwan, which is what I happened to have opened today. As I said, I've got another customer is using other stuff.

But you can also create a lot of tasks and then hide them from customers. You can have internal tasks versus external tasks. You have reporting. You know, one thing that I tell people for KPIs, for onboarding as managers go in and spot check. Their projects and see if their staff is actually using the templates because that's another thing.

You got to get people to use these things. Some people still like to re you know, roll their own, you know, like it's the wild, wild west, and we're, I'm gonna, I'm gonna roll this project out. Like I know how to, and, and it just doesn't work out that, that great. So a quick note. And while I using.

And as I said, this is Baton today. You use a template, you have you figure out what works well, and then you, you know, this is a crawl, walk, run, sort of mentality that's going on here. And all the tasks are in there. And, and then from there you can assign tasks to people. You can, another really important thing.

I like here, you can go onto a task. And you can have a conversation about it. And ever since the days of base camp, it's been super, it's been super helpful. Regulatory. I'm not quite sure, but like, you know, you've all been in those meetings where somebody made a decision a month ago and then somebody else comes in classic seagull management. And they're like, who made the decision to make this thing purple and.

Everybody's looking around and then suddenly you're pulling up emails or you're looking through slack, but then SWAT slack gets archived after 30 days and all that fun stuff. And then suddenly you're like, I don't know. And they're like, well, you got to go change it. Right. But if you say, for example, had that, you know, as a task here and I'm not going to do it here, cause I don't want to expose customer information.

But, if you went in and clicked on that task, you would see in there a discussion area where maybe the onboarding manager, the project manager said, what color do you want to make this? And somebody said, let's make it purple. And you're like, great. And then you can go into that meeting. You're like, oh, look.

Joe Bob said, this should be purple. So we're going to make it purple. And then in then go from there. And so, and so that's always been super helpful. And then do I, okay. I agree. I get. Otherwise you're doing, you know, suddenly scope starts moving. You got to change stuff. Those are the things all add up. As I know, noted reporting is great. A lot of things that, executive teams and boards are looking at these days is how much money is in implementation.

How much ARR is sitting there, especially if you're a company that does not start. Charging the monthly invoice until customers go live, which is not recommended. But, if you're the type of company that does that, then suddenly you're like, oh my God, we've got, you know, millions or, or whatever I've seen, definitely have that number, been in the millions where they're just sitting in implementation.

Waiting to go. And then the finance team's like. What's going on here. So, you know, from a higher level of reporting, you can see what's red, what's yellow, what's green. You can see tasks that are assigned to yourself as an individual. As a manager, I've got five projects or three projects,

What are the things that have to be done today or this week? You can create status reports right. Out of all these tools as well too. And it'll show like what's been accomplished what's what's not been accomplished. What's next on the task. And then you can go in and add your notes there as well, too. So.

So I'm a big fan. As I said, go out there and try any of them. They're they're all great. I, I listed the names off earlier there. I've just seen a tremendous amount of adoption versus say, using a Wrike or a Smartsheet or a Google sheet, ease of use the templates, several different templates, tracking.

How your teams. You know, following proper policies and procedure. Just all around. I feel for the low dollars that these pieces of software costs that it's a tremendous value, especially getting your customers to go live fast. If you're an onboarding, a time to launch is a huge factor and a, this is a definite way that you can increase it and also show the visibility to the customer and, to your exec team and board, if you need to.

All right. Any questions. Let me know. Thank you.