The IPOP - The Implementation Process Optimization Plan

The other day I logged into 2 of the Customer Success communities I belong to and saw these similar questions posted within an hour of each other:

"I need your suggestions on setting up a new onboarding process for an SB SaaS product. "

and

 "We are working on revamping our customer onboarding strategy"

It's no surprise to see the attention in this area recently, as CEO's and Boards are now starting to realize that this area is the most critical post-sales process to get right. If your shiny new customer has a terrible launch experience, it’s almost a given that they will switch out and you will be dealing with a churn issue. I answered some of the tactical questions and realized that it would be nice to point to an article that covers the area in more depth. While this could be a topic for a whole book, it's at least a starting point for some must-have areas to put into your process. Each one of these points can also be an article in the future.

Two points of reference:

• Onboarding and Implementation are often used synonymously but are different. For the sake of this article, Onboarding is the ENTIRE customer journey post-sale, including training, and ensuring that your customer is seeing the value that they thought they would. Implementation is the process to get your customer set up on the software, integrating, and launching.

• I tend to organize the implementation process flow from sales through go-live. In the below example, this company has a rather complicated implementation, so requirements are gathered at the 75% of the sales process. You will also see a 3-4 month process. These can be as short as 2 weeks, but as you get to more enterprise SaaS implementations, they tend to run longer.

Must Haves:

- Outline the roles and responsibilities of your Customer Success team. Tip- do not have 1 CSM role responsible for implementation, training, support tickets, account management, and renewals unless you want high churn and employee burnout (more here). I call this Project Pangea, and it will take some time to pull apart each of those continents when they become pain points. Will the CSM do the implementation? Are there configuration specialists? Project Managers? You may need none or all of these. A quick RACI chart can help you see the bigger picture here. My preference is to have the CSM oversee everything post-sale from a strategy perspective but to have trusted resources (implementation managers, PM's, training, etc) as part of the onboarding "team.

- Have a standardized "project plan" that is the foundation for implementation. These are the tasks that are needed to launch each of your customers. List who is responsible for what on the customer and your side. Add dates when needed. Implementing all of your customers in the same way will give your entire company the consistency needed. It can really impair everything from Product, Dev and Support if Zoe implements customers one way and Max implements it in a different way. This may eventually change as your start servicing enterprise customers and need to do custom tasks. That being said, there will still be a baseline foundation that is needed.

Baton Schedules

- Use a collaboration tool. It could be as easy as Google Sheets, but I prefer tools like Baton and Rocketlane that allow you to collaborate and communicate, as well as assigning tasks and dependencies. The main reasons why some implementations go sour are on expectations and transparency. These tools can go a long way to solve those issues if used properly. They also track key metrics on your projects that obviate the need for a separate system.

Rocketlane Dashboard

- Start implementation conversations in the late stages (75%) of presales. Basically, they want the software, and now is the time to involve the CSM's walk through the process to get them launched and onboarded. This makes the deal more real for them. Your team can also sniff out the gotchas. 

- Have a standard SOW that is attached to the main software license. Outline the tasks you will do and not do, and the expected duration. 

- Charge for implementation - they will value it more. I am passionate about this, and will include a link to my thoughts here

- Have a kickoff with your key stakeholders from your side and your customers. Make sure you have a joint success plan from the kickoff and that everyone is onboard with it. Keep it documented and an artifact of the implementation. Outline who does what, when the project is expected to finish/launch. Walk the customer through the customer journey, and when they are transitioned to different points of contact, if that is your model.

- Does your customer have roadmap dependencies to go live? Track these on your plan, and make sure that you are aligned with the product and development teams that are responsible for them. A clear owner must be identified.

- Have weekly meetings with the customer to communicate status. Be transparent in these meetings and outline where things have or could go awry. Highlight where the customer may be causing delays, and point back to the joint success plan to show that you are just trying to make them get the value from the product they are paying for.

- Draw the line between CS and Support. Train the customer to use the support team, even if it’s from Day 1. This will stop the post-launch support requests that can drown a CSM.

- Celebrate your launch and have clean transitions internally and externally.

- Remind the customer of the value that you are providing them with QBR's, even if they are still in implementation.

- Track your Customer Satisfaction scores from Day 1.

What did I miss? As always, if you need any assistance in these areas, please feel free to reach out!