410 | 5 SaaS Onboarding Mistakes Killing Your Growth | Claire Heginbotham

Speaker A: The future doesn't wait for founders to feel ready. Markets shift. Technology accelerates. Teams evolve. The founders who win aren't the ones hoping for calm water. They're the ones who learn how to captain the ship no matter what the sea looks like. And that's exactly what we do here. Every week, without exception, we bring you the real conversations with founders who've been through the fire and the experts who know how to build what lasts. Founder stories every Tuesday. Expert strategy every Thursday. The intelligence you need to build bold, scale, smart, and stay Future Proof this is Future Proof Founder with your host, five time founder and globe trotting adventurer Jeff Mains.

Speaker B: Welcome back to the Future Proof Founder podcast, where every founder is one good night's sleep away from realizing the crisis wasn't actually a crisis. Hi, I'm uh, Jeff Manes, five time founder and your guide for the messy, magnificent climb from startup to $30 million and beyond. Here's what I believe you can build a company that lasts and live a life worth remembering. Anyone who tells you to sacrifice one for the other is just selling something. Building a business of significance while living an epic, adventurous life. That's the whole game. So let's get into. Tell me if this sounds familiar. Someone signs up for your product, pokes around for a few minutes and then nothing. No login the next day, no response to your welcome email. They just quietly disappear and you're left wondering whether it was the product, the price, the timing, or some combination of all three of those. Most of the time, it really wasn't any of those things. They just never got to the moment where your product actually meant something to them. It's not a churn problem, it's an activation problem, and it's probably costing you far more than your acquisition budget can cover. The obsession with getting people through the door? Totally understandable. We all have that. But what happens in the first 10 minutes after they walk in is what actually determines whether they stay. Most onboarding experiences are the digital equivalent of handing somebody a 47 step instruction manual like Ikea, when all they wanted to do is just check and see if the thing worked. Checklists that nobody completes. Welcome emails nobody opens. Empty dashboards that tell a new user absolutely nothing about why they should care. Flashy lights and maybe it's pretty. What is it telling them? Why does it matter? Today we're digging into what great onboarding actually looks like, and why the companies with the best retention aren't necessarily the ones with the best product. You'll hear about the micro Aha Uh-huh. Moment. And why getting a user there fast changes everything. How a tiny bit of friction in your signup flow can actually increase commitment. And while you're offboarding, experience might be the most underrated growth lever you're completely ignoring. And that's right, I did say growth lever. Your best customers are trying to tell you something, and this episode will help you finally hear it. Let's dive in. Most marketers will tell you how to get someone to sign up, and our expert today, Claire Hagenbotham, will tell you why they're leaving and what to actually do about it. She spent the better part of a decade in B2B SaaS. Growth. Not theorizing about it. Writing the emails, fixing the onboarding flows, tightening the messaging that turns a curious click into a paying customer. She's done it for enterprise AI security, LiDAR tech, and lots of competitive products in between, where the margin for, uh, a bad first impression is basically zero. Welcome someone who closes the gap between they signed up and they stayed. Claire Higginbotham. Hey, Claire. Welcome to Future Proof Founder.

Speaker C: Thank you so much. Great to be here.

Speaker B: You've built your career making B2B marketing actually interesting, which is really refreshing because a lot of it out there, it's generic and boring and honestly, forgettable. Tell me about that.

Speaker C: Yeah, sure. The main thing that makes things forgettable is when they're unclear. Right. Everyone's seen the headline. The easiest solution to your problems. That means nothing to people. So I find that the more specific you are, the more fun you can have with something and the more interesting things get. And as, uh, everything is starting to sound more and more the same, thanks to good old ChatGPT and Claude and their. Their addition to our workforce. Yeah, it's just being able to have personality and come across as a human is it becomes your brand's moat.

Speaker B: That's really good. And you're right, that AI is certainly helpful in a lot of ways, but it does push everything to mushy, middle, beige, boring, uninspired.

Speaker C: Yeah, you don't want to sound like Barge.

Speaker B: No, definitely not. We started in conversion copywriting and moved deeper into onboarding. What made you realize the real growth lever isn't just acquisition? Just getting this to say yes. But what happens after.

Speaker C: After that sign up, we're all obsessed with getting new customers. And you can't grow if you're not getting new customers. But you can't in revenue if you're not actually doing something with those people who signed up. And that's why the focus on, on activation. Getting people actually to use a product through onboarding, whether that's an app in email or just continuously being useful, I think that it is the most under looked at growth lever for retention as well. So onboarding emails really tie into the lifecycle marketing. Right. The bigger the company, the bigger the teams. And some companies have entire teams dedicated to lifecycle marketing because it's understood that's very important in order to keep a company growing and profitable. I'm sure everyone's done a few numbers and seen like a 5% lift in retention could have huge impacts for you revenue wise. So that's a big focus on onboarding.

Speaker B: That's good. Tell me about lifecycle marketing. That's a term the audience may not be as familiar with. What do you mean by that? And what do we do to continue to market throughout that the journey and the entire life cycle?

Speaker C: Yeah, most people think that marketing is just that. First get them to the website and get them to Clickbook a demo.

Speaker A: We're done.

Speaker C: Yeah. Next, which it is. That's obviously the big pot cycle. Marketing is about guiding someone through the lifecycle of their customer and that includes your onboarding. How you say, welcome to this new store. Here's how you use everything and getting them to uh, see value. So that would be a value, I guess, a promise of value. That's why they came to you, helping them realize that value. So actually delivering on your promises, which often requires a lot of customer interaction, they have to spend a lot of time on you in order to get to a point at which they're actually seeing, I guess the return on investment of their time. So now that you've given them some value, you want to expand that value. That's also marketing's job. Right. So how can we get them onto new features? How can we get them to use all the stuff that we know is really sticky? Maybe how can we get them to add in more integrations? Now we start thinking about team members. I think that's the key. And then at some point they're going to leave you. Right. You can also manage that part. That is not something to overlook. How do they leave you? How can you optimize how you retain them? And how can you leave a good taste in people's mouth and get the most out of understanding them as a customer? Why they came, what their journey was like and why they left, all could be happening over a couple of months versus a couple of years. Depends on your in your market. B2C. B2B. All very different. But marketing, understanding the life cycle is really important and it's something that marketing can really help you optimize and I guess just make all of that acquisition work, all of that ad budget work harder at the end of the day.

Speaker B: Without a doubt. Uh, that's really helpful to think about that. That the marketing job doesn't stop just when they say yes. But it's through the entire life cycle and even offboarding when you can make the off boarding experience really good. That's the opposite of what most companies do. They want to make it painful, they want to make it bad, they want to. You're going anyway. So I'm going to make it expensive and difficult and you know, not be nice.

Speaker C: I think audible is the perfect example of the worst offboarding experience in the world. Borderline legal. I don't know if you've heard about the audible side of things, but yes, yes. Okay. Yeah. For those of you who don't know,

Speaker B: once you sign up, I've experienced it.

Speaker C: Yeah, it's an experience. I think I have spent a ridiculous amount twice. They catch you. Yeah. For those of you who don't know, you sign up, you get a credit every month that you're, you signed up and you could spend your credits and then if you decide to cancel your, your subscription, your credits that you have saved up will be cancelled. So all the money you spent is wasted. So they'll say, oh, don't you want to just pause your account? And you go. It's taken me three months to get to the point where I've remembered to unsubscribe subscribe. But sure, I'll pause my account, use my credits because who knows, I might be a better person next month. It rolls around and guess what? You spend another three months before you remember to go ahead and cancel that subscription again. Could they make that experience better? Sure. They're not motivated to, I don't think. I think it's very, uh, lucrative.

Speaker B: No, no, not at all. I'm actually in a pause right now and I have seven credits I've got to use in the next 14 days.

Speaker C: True. Go spend them.

Speaker B: Yes. And so I've got got them on my wish list and I know what I'm going to use them on. And that's the hard part too is do I use a credit or do I just pay for it? Because some of them are just right there on the borderline. It's so dumb. Yeah, I should have just used the credits and been done. They know how to retain and it's not Necessarily always in a good way.

Speaker C: Yeah. I think there's a few course court cases going on with them and this business model of this. But anyway, that's, uh, an example of, I would say, a, uh, predatory offboarding experience. But one thing that people don't always think about either is the experience downgrading to free. So if you have a free trial as your signup experience and you get like, all of the features, how do you get people to stay involved when they downgrade? And that is important because you want to.

Speaker B: It's really smart.

Speaker C: Yeah, thanks.

Speaker B: Instead of them just going away, you're keeping them in your world, at least, uh, on some level. And I think that makes it a whole lot easier for them to say yes and upgrade again. Because it's not a big switch. It's not coming back to something new. It's something that's familiar. And maybe it's as simple as a button click, hey, do you want to upgrade again? And now. But keeping them in your world, keeping them connected, continuing to deliver value, I think is so important in that.

Speaker C: Vital. Yeah. Especially if you're selling something that, if you haven't quite worked out what good retention looks like. So there's been a few companies that I've worked with, and this is not necessarily a marketer's job. This is sort of more related to positioning and strategy, uh, in the marketplace. But there was one company, a podcast. You pitch people with a podcaster pitch thing. I might have even used it for this. And what they found out was that it was just too successful. Right. Someone would sign up, they'd go pitch with AI and it would write a whole bunch of stuff and it was just really successful. And then the person would get flooded with requests for podcast bookings and stuff and then would inevitably cancel their subscription because they only needed it for that one point solution.

Speaker B: Got what I need.

Speaker C: Got what I need. Bye. So they hadn't figured that out. Now their offboarding process should become very important in that case, because it's how they're going to pull people back to them when they finally figure how to launch tiers that are perhaps giving a little bit less of a result. Really affordable tier that gives you one opportunity or one response a month or something. If they haven't offboarded you, well, they're going to lose you and their acquisition dollars of, uh, wasted.

Speaker B: That's unfortunate. And most companies just their acquisition cost, it takes a certain amount of time before they recoup that and start making money. So that could really put you upside down in the acquisition because you're spending more to acquire them than they actually bring in through their lifetime. Because the product in this case is so good.

Speaker C: Yeah, Yep, exactly. It's always a balance, especially if you got investors.

Speaker B: Always. If you had to call it bluntly, what would be the biggest mistake that SaaS companies make in their onboarding experience today?

Speaker C: Biggest mistake. You know, it really does depend on the size of SaaS company. That is certainly important. If you're smaller and, uh, you're thinking about onboarding, great. I think lots of people don't even think about it at all. They slap up some kind of empty dashboard and that's it. I think empty states are the biggest mistake that anyone starts off with. Yes, Empty states. Shoving people through a predetermined checklist that doesn't really suit them. Um, all these things aren't great. But if I had to really drill down and say, if you're not collecting any information from people when they sign up, you're making life hard, really hard. Because the information you collect during onboarding could tell you a lot about your customer that you can't discover programmatically. You can ask them what kind of buyer they are. For example, let's just use a use case. Let's say we're selling to restauranteers who, who are looking for a new POS system. So point of sale.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker C: And we're selling a POS software then. And if you sign up and you don't ask me what kind of restaurant, um, I am, if I'm a sushi restaurant, you could give me all sorts of sushi templates versus if I'm a cafe. Just that, um, yeah. So simple. Such a quick one. And you force people through two or three steps during the onboarding that are very quick based on research that you've already done. M. And you just gather so much more insight and you onboard people so much more effectively. You can start dabbling in things as you scale as well. You don't have to personalize or segment your onboarding emails and in app stuff from the start, but when you are ready to, you've got the data. It's right there.

Speaker B: How do you know what to collect at that stage? Because I think companies will collect data or the onboarding is fill out this giant form and then they don't ever do anything with the data. How do you know what to collect, what not to collect, or maybe the order to collect it in? Because you don't want resistance at the beginning.

Speaker C: Absolutely, you don't want resistance. But I Would always say to someone who's worried about resistance, you don't want to make it too easy either. You want to enjoy the IKEA effect. So you may or may not have heard about that research. Yeah, so it's a great bit of research just basically saying that people need to have a little bit of skill in the game in order to keep staying committed. So I think my favorite example is the baking one. When they invented a cake mix, right, they sold it. You just added water. Really did not sell because adding water is too easy. So they took out the powdered eggs. Now you got to add in your powdered. You've got to add in your actual eggs and your oil so it's less efficient. The system is worse than it was, but it was successful because of the IKEA effect.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker C: Yeah. Housewives wanted to feel like they were making a cake still, even if it

Speaker B: was, they actually made something.

Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. So that would be my first thing. Don't discount. Don't be too scared of friction. Consider how friction can add. Right. If you've ever signed up for, uh, a project management tool like Monday.com or Asana, you'll see they, they give you a very good onboarding that gets you into the right track. So they use your data in order to help you get started. The other big mistake I see people do, which is such a classic one, is demographic data is not helpful in marketing. It is helpful maybe in sales, maybe I'm not in sales, so I don't know how that data is used. But in marketing, knowing that someone is a senior manager, uh, at an enterprise with 10,000 employees, that's in the agricultural sector, uh, doesn't really help me. What really helps me is knowing what they want to achieve. If you've ever heard of jobs to be done theory, this is where that comes in. If you're going to ask an onboarding question, first figure out what kind of jobs people have and then craft an onboarding question around those jobs. That means that your onboarding question could be centered around the problem that they're trying to solve or the motivation as to what's pulling them towards a solution or, or the end outcome. Let's just carry on with our coffee pos restaurateur example. Yes, a job to be done could be, I want something that is easier. Or it could be, I'm so sick of all the faulty pieces of junk that keep crashing out when I have too many covers. That could also be one of the things. So generally the statement is, when this problem occurs, give me this kind of a solution so that I can achieve this outcome when my restaurant is busy as hell. Give me an easy POS that I don't have to take hours to train people on so that I never have to call the tech guy and close the restaurant down.

Speaker B: That's a big one, right? Yeah.

Speaker C: Yeah. I don't know why I chose restaurants. It's so far away from what I usually do. Maybe that's why I chose it.

Speaker B: It's relatable because we all go to them.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: We've all had the experience.

Speaker C: I was a waitress back in the day as well, so I remember using those annoying systems. So many clicks. So when you're asking your onboarding question, you could focus on any of the problems and motivations or outcomes that I just mentioned and maybe you have. Generally, companies will have two or three clearly identifiable ones. Yeah.

Speaker B: And we should know what those are because we built a solution. Yeah. We shouldn't be building things, guessing what the outcomes are looking for. Uh, we should have a really good idea of what those outcomes are and be driving toward those in the marketing and the sales process and the onboarding, they signed up for a reason and so figuring out what that is in the onboarding and make sure we're delivering and meeting that expectation.

Speaker C: Absolutely. When I was earlier on in my career, I was a little bit more optimistic about how much data we can get from people, how many interviews we can do with people, like how sure are we? But especially with early stage startups, if you're looking at under a thousand users and uh, you're trying to get data on your users, it might be a bit of a chicken and an egg kind of situation. Sure. Um, whereas if you're looking at, you got a bigger audience base, you've asked some questions, it's iterative. Right. So you've built on this. So I'd say if you've got nothing like scratch data, you got a good idea, you got a good idea, then you're gonna go validate that idea. However you validated that idea should help you to find some jobs to be done with that simple, straightforward, um, formula, problem, motivation, outcome, that should be your focus. When you have a few more customers, a little bit more budget, then you start doing surveys, interviews, talking to people, chatting to sales and going, hey, are you noticing trends? Are people coming to you and talking about this? Yeah.

Speaker B: So yes, you're a big advocate for customer interviews and what's the right way to run those so that you get good insights instead of polite. I'll Say useless answers.

Speaker C: One of the things that I've learned is that when they're not talking to someone who works at the company, they're a little bit more free in their answers.

Speaker A: Ah.

Speaker B: Uh, that's good. Yeah.

Speaker C: It's a bit self serving to say because obviously it'd be great. Yeah. Hire me to run your interviews. I'll be better at it than you are. But yeah, they are a little bit more open. Can you say, feel free to be as honest as you want to. I'll share the results with the team. This is how we're using what you're giving us. We really just want you to share your thoughts, like good, the bad, the great, the ugly. Let's go. Generally people are pretty accommodating of that. The other thing is to ask pointed questions which don't lead. I think that is something that is nearly impossible to do if you're close to the product.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker C: The longer you work with it, the worse you'll get at not, uh, asking leading questions because you know where you want it to lead subconsciously, even if you're trying not to. You're digging into like all the things that you're like, oh, yeah, that's the thing that I've been thinking of the last few weeks. Then you'll ask a follow up question around it. You are leading in a way. So running the interview is very important to ask questions. What led you to sign up to this tool or what was going on in your day?

Speaker B: That's good.

Speaker C: Not why did you sign up to this? Like, why are we on a podcast? Oh, feels, uh, a little. Are you attacking me or something? That led you to go to start a podcast? Is it just so much more approachable?

Speaker B: It invites a story.

Speaker C: It invites a story.

Speaker B: It's not trying to justify why we're doing something. It's what led you here. You, uh, want to hear what's the story that led up to this moment? And I think that puts people in a different frame of mind.

Speaker C: Yeah, I haven't thought about it that way before. That's great. The stories are what you want. That's where the gold hides. When someone goes on a rant. Perfect. I'm just there with my highlighter. Uh, good stuff. So the other little bit about interviews is to structure them. Um, so I'll ask kind of journey questions. We'll want to talk to people who are relatively new to the product. Their journey is still fresh in their mind, but they've had a little bit of time to get on it. So using it so at least a month of use. And ideally, you want to talk to your best customers. A lot of folks want to focus on everybody or a random person. And I think that you're going to get the best insight from people who actually already find value rather than those that don't. You can get inside, but it's just not the most impactful place to put your time. I think knowing where to spend your time is really paramount these days because you could do anything.

Speaker B: Yeah, uh, it makes a lot of sense.

Speaker C: Thanks. The other thing for interviews would be, I guess my little template that I have myself is pain. What's pushing you towards finding something new? What's your current way of doing things? What's pulling you. What imagined future is pulling you towards a possible new solution? So we're asking the customer to go back in their buying history. Right. What other options they were considering, what they were doing. People often think that your competition is another app or something. It's usually laziness and spreadsheets and then the outcome. I guess it's the five feet versus five mile analogy. Like five feet, that's a benefit. Five mile, that's an outcome.

Speaker B: Oh, uh, that's good. And it's easy to visualize too.

Speaker C: Yeah, it's just further out, timeline wise. What vision did you have when you signed up for this thing again?

Speaker B: And that's where the real value is. What is the problem that is so big that you're trying to solve, that we can solve for you? And that creates that longevity. It creates value. And as you understand what that goal is and they're moving toward it and, uh, keeping that in mind is so important, sometimes they'll forget we've had those conversations with, with clients. What are you working on this quarter? What's your goal for the year? And then you get six months down the road and you're like, how is it going with that? And they're like, the what? Oh, yeah, we are supposed to be going that direction. And so it's funny. Is it really that important or is it not? Did you just get busy and forget that this was a goal or is it really not the goal?

Speaker C: That's interesting. Yeah, I find it's. Usually there's quite a lot of depends on the audience, but there's quite a lot these days of just make it easy for me to convince my boss that I know what I'm talking about. Make it easier for me to do my job. Please. Like, yes, can we report on this? Can I just have peace of mind that I'VE set everything up right and it's gonna work and I'm not gonna get into trouble.

Speaker B: That's so big. Yes.

Speaker C: So big. And marketers ignore that.

Speaker A: Why?

Speaker C: Why ignore it? Why not build for it?

Speaker B: Yeah, that's good. And then building for that, you talk about micro aha moments. What are they? And then why do they matter more than a polished onboarding flow?

Speaker C: Micro aha, uh, moments. How does someone understand your solution? And bearing in mind that most solutions have some kind of innovation aspect to them, especially when we're talking in tech. And it's a new way of doing something. Right. Even if your general new way is not innovative, it is still more innovative than their old way, AKA spreadsheets. Which means that there's going to be a learning curve on your learning curve. Way micro aha moments are the, uh, little bits of. Oh, I get it. I get how that little thing works, that build up to one big aha moment. So how I would map out your onboarding flow is to look at what are your big aha moments and what has to happen in order for those big aha moments to work. So rather than just checklist, invite your team, add your integrations and, I don't know, update your profile. Rather than that, what do they have to do in order to need to add their team? What do they have to do in order to need to add integrations? And what do they have to do in order to do their profile? Like, why are those things worth it, worth their time? You can't be like, well, once you've done all of them, then it's. Then you'll find value.

Speaker A: No,

Speaker C: deliver value in little bits beforehand.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: So have I explained that? Well, I think it's a framework of thinking rather than a hard concept.

Speaker B: Yes, I think so. That is one of my frustrations is signing up for something. Okay, now build your profile, upload your picture. Like, I don't want to do any of this stuff. I just want to see if this is even going to be something I want to keep.

Speaker C: That's it. Yeah, Uh, I recently had a huge internal discussion around. I won't tell you the company's name, but it was around pricing on the pricing page. They're a, ah, B2B company and they have a book, a demo request, a demo button. And there is no other way to get into their product. Right. They don't do freemium or anything like that. It's just demo. And they haven't had any pricing. They have a pricing page which does not have a dollar amount on it, which is pet peeve of mine, because it's what I like to call. It's a conversion checklist. Checkbox. Right. People, when they are looking on a website, they have a checkbox, checklist of things they have to find out in order to move forward. And one of those things that they have to find out is always going to be pricing. Is this thing too expensive or not? Right. They need to know. And to put the cherry on the cake, AI can now pretty realistically estimate how much your product costs.

Speaker B: Yes, I look at that all the time. Yes.

Speaker C: So do you want control of that narrative then?

Speaker B: Yeah. If you don't control, if you don't write the story, somebody else will. And so I think it's much better if you write the story.

Speaker C: So the pricing page is a micro aha moment. People need to see it before they can convert to booking a demo. Obviously, that's not in product, that's more on the acquisition side. But yeah. So we told the CEO to ask Chat GPT what the pricing was, and ChatGPT gave a very accurate number. And so everyone was like, oh, my

Speaker B: God, might as well put it out

Speaker C: there, get it on the pricing page. And we've created better.

Speaker B: Oh, that's funny. Yeah, it is. And I really hadn't thought about that. Just in those terms of. Yeah, they're going to find out. And it is part of the qualifying conversation of, does this even fit into our world? Is it going to be so ridiculously expensive that we don't even need to bother having a discussion? But I think from the company side, they're like, we don't want to tell them. We want to make them ask. So we get them into that conversation and then we can wow them with our stuff and then justify our price. But if we just put it out there, they're like, my gosh, that's expensive.

Speaker C: Yeah, Pricing's a whole game. That's a competitive game. It is like, how do you line up? But I would always encourage someone to think about the poor guy or girl woman who is sitting there with a spreadsheet, because it's probably still a spreadsheet. Trying to validate. Yeah, Trying to validate to their boss that they need this new tool to solve this, big problem that, uh, they've had for the last year or two. How can you empower that person? Because I guarantee you the company that empowers them the best is the one who they're gonna fight for.

Speaker B: That's so good, because they have to be able to go and say, I'm looking for a tool and it's gonna cost about this. And they're trying to put together the short list. And if you want to be on it, then you've got to make it easy for them.

Speaker C: M. Exactly. You can always add things that are making it that protect you. But also something that's on your website isn't like you're going to have to be held by it. And this is another kind of argument is like, oh, what if they hold us to it? What if someone requests this and it's like a huge lift for a sales team and they're not a good fit customer and blah, blah, blah. I'm like, sure, when someone requests it and this scenario occurs, then we can scale back.

Speaker B: When does that happen? M. Once a year.

Speaker C: Hasn't happened yet.

Speaker B: Twice a year. Maybe never.

Speaker C: Never.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: Yeah. It was a whole big internal discussion. Those kinds of things are, I think, the biggest. No, no. For me. Work hard to avoid sinking time in back and forths that just haven't been tested. You don't know the impact and you might be over inflating what could happen.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I think I've done that in the past and probably still do is I think that things are going to go a certain way or we need to do something a certain way. And without any kind of data, it's just anecdotal. And sometimes I'm right, sometimes I'm completely wrong. And it's the more and more I've had the conversation with the team of show me the data. What does the data say? And let's just follow that. And because it doesn't really matter what my opinion is. It's what data do we have? And we can start and we can. If we don't have any, let's go build some.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: And but testing those assumptions because I think the assumptions can get us in trouble.

Speaker C: Oh yeah. And we all make them. Yeah. Assumptions. I've got a. When I was a waitress. So it all ties in. One of the first things my boss said to me when I had made a mistake on something was assumptions are the mother of all f ups.

Speaker B: Ah, that's good for.

Speaker C: To live by.

Speaker B: True. When we think about onboarding, a uh, lot of times there are email sequences and sometimes they're packed with tutorials or feature lists or. Or it's the set. You get the welcome email. Then you get one a couple days later of hey, now that you've been in our solution for three days, what do you love? We leave us a Review and half the time I'm like, I signed up for it. I hadn't even logged back in yet.

Speaker C: Yup.

Speaker B: How to make those emails actually good and actually activate users and push them forward in a positive way.

Speaker C: Yeah. So those micro aha ah moments that lead up to bigger aha moments that we were talking about earlier. Once you know where people are finding value in your product and you can track it and ideally you can put it back into your email system, you can start tracking people throughout their customer journey. Traditionally, we'll look at activation. What is activation? Well, how do we define an activated customer? I think it was Slack. No, that's adoption. Sorry, no, I'll get back to Slack in a second. But on activation, it's usually like that first value moment when you've maybe done your first test with the software. So if we're doing the POS restaurateur system, it'll be like, oh, they've set it up and they've run a few tests and they're starting to see that this could work. And uh, maybe they've added their menu and that's a good sign that they're probably going to try it out. So until they've reached that point, you don't want to send them any emails about anything else. You don't want to tell them how to optimize their late night shift or anything. They haven't started. Focus all of your onboarding material on starting and if they don't activate, start sending them win backs that focus on that first step, the first hurdle that they have to get through. Once they have, you can start sending them. Some people blaze through onboarding. They're like, I don't, I'm just gonna set it up. I have an hour doing it. They blaze through. So you don't want to be sending them the same stuff that's basic and you want to be sending them decaded. Yeah, let's get you on, um, this.

Speaker B: Now you have a power user.

Speaker C: Now you got a power user.

Speaker B: They've unlocked the next level.

Speaker C: Yeah, they're just like, they're like linking up with Sapier. Yeah, they're spending AI credits. They're excited. Yeah. No, for them you need to send them totally different use cases. Here's what you can do with this thing. That's what you want to be sending them. And then if they drop out, your win backs are like, hey, we see you did this and you stopped using it. Do you want to connect support? Did you hit a roadblock? What can we do to help you, it's just so much more relevant to them than generic stuff. Yeah. So much more relevant. Never ask someone to just rate you what a useless piece of information. Five. Great.

Speaker B: It really is. Yeah, apps do that. You download a new app and it's. Do you want to leave us a review? I literally just downloaded this thing 10 seconds ago.

Speaker C: Yep. Set up your timing and your triggers. You can just set up. You can. So some, most people set this all up on time based triggers. Right. Maybe you only have one ability to get some piece of data in. I think I'll give you a real example. One of my clients does. They're in with agents like real estate agents. So when a real estate agent has posted a property and it's like a, uh, private membership thing. So once they post a property, one property or buyer need, we consider them activated. They've gotten to the first milestone. We're going to stop sending them information about the most basic thing. We're going to start sending them more helpful information or move them out of onboarding entirely.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker C: Yeah, so that's activated. Adopted is entirely different. So Slack's got the best adoption story. This is where it comes in. Slack doesn't consider you a user until, uh, you've sent a thousand messages.

Speaker B: Wow.

Speaker C: It doesn't matter if you're on free now.

Speaker B: It's become a habit.

Speaker C: Yeah. They're trying to see what makes it sticky. What is that? Point of stickiness. And you can check this if you have good data. If you don't have good data, you obviously might want to hazard a few guesses.

Speaker B: Uh, we've talked a lot about getting them across the line. A lot of deals today, especially in SaaS, end with no decision. And depending on the industry, sales team, 60, 70% go down that path. And it's not they lost to a competitor. It's just no decision. What have you learned from digging into why deals stall instead of close or churn or go to somebody else?

Speaker C: It's getting everybody on board. So you got to figure out. And this is where, uh, it's really important to start talking to your sales team. Right. And understanding the different personalities in place, also understanding your own process. Are you doing proof of concepts? Are you just doing a demo? Generally when we're talking about sales teams, we're talking about bigger, uh, deals. We've also got to understand the climate that they're coming from. What tools have they used before? They have absolutely been burned in the past.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker C: How are you positioning yourself against that fear of being burned again? I think Nobody wants to say yes to a six fig purchase decision that locks you in over the next three years that nobody uses or that has such terrible support no one can figure out how to use it.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: Yeah, that would be bad. That's big in marketing. Making sure that you're communicating how support after support is handled and treated. Sounding like a human helps with that. Obviously. I think the bigger and more well known you are, the harder a time you have in some cases. But it really is something that you can support, I think. And uh, not a lot of people consider how they support it. But you can support it by sending team members emails, getting on calls, analyzing those calls, seeing what people are saying. At the end of the day, if you've got a boss who's going to say no and it really is a budget problem, then it's. Then that is what it is.

Speaker B: Right, sure.

Speaker C: Which does happen. Yeah. In my mind, if they reach a no decision, then there's either too much internal politics for you to overcome. Right. And you weren't able to overcome the internal politics, which means that maybe your sales and marketing needs tweaking or it was never going to go anywhere or their current solution was deemed good enough. Very important. So that's when you start going, what was their current solution and why is it good enough and how do we position against that? Screw the competitors. How do we beat spreadsheets?

Speaker B: It's true though. It's really easy just to. It's familiar. And they may know that the solution they have is bad, but to take that leap into the unknown bad is not as bad as I thought. Other than I'm gonna take a giant leap and hope that it's better and we're gonna spend a bunch of money and I might get fired if it's things don't go well. So it's really easy and comfortable to stay with the bad solution than. Than to take that risk.

Speaker C: The devil I know of. Right?

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker C: Yeah, I think.

Speaker B: Unfortunate, but it's true.

Speaker C: It's true with the interviews. Actually, one thing I did skip over is I will always ask someone about their anxieties pre signup. So if you.

Speaker B: Oh, that's good.

Speaker C: Yeah. If you're talking to your best customer or customers. Right. Let's say you do 10 to 12 generally what I recommend and you're talking to someone, you say, oh, was there anything holding you back when you were signing up? They'll go, oh yeah, we just had some internal decision working. So I'm like, oh great, walk me through that. Explain more people will be very boarded off until you present to them friendly kind of curiosity, like yes. Gossip. And understanding from their perspective what was going on can be very helpful if you are struggling with people not converting.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's a really good question. And you're almost letting them do the hard work, you're letting them do the thinking and then you're able to take that language and put that into content or messaging or onboarding or figure out what are those anxieties likely to be. And we can head that off in the onboarding process or in the. Even the signup process.

Speaker C: Yeah, you could even ask people about it in the signup process. So, uh, yes, I think one of the recent. I'll, uh, use that property example again. One of the recent anxieties we uncovered was, oh, I am not confident that it'll be worth my time. So we saw that as it's getting ROI on the process. Right. Is this actually going to deliver a result? So what can we do to prove that you're going to get ROI is really something that we need to address in not necessarily onboarding, but it's something we need to address on the website and emails in app if we can. Everything has a subtle hint of, uh, this is going to be worth your time. Yeah, this is how much time you're going to put in, this is what you're going to get out kind of thing.

Speaker B: That's really good. And I think that makes it much easier to understand of, uh, if this is the time commitment, okay, I'm willing to do that to get the outcome that's promised. And we can't say it's going to take 10 minutes and it takes two hours, but making sure that the expectations are really met and they're like, okay, we're going to take that step and then have a win and take the step and have a win.

Speaker C: Yeah, I think you've just jogged me a idea on something. So a lot of AI product builders, like Lovable, for example, will not make any client claims on how quick it is to do something with their product. They'll just get you to type in a prompt and then force you through a quick login process and take you immediate to a result or to. Sometimes they ask some onboarding questions, but they just deliver. Uh, they don't over. So my anxiety is this thing's not going to work and they're like, oh, but you can just test it in a second.

Speaker B: That's good. Yeah, it is. Yeah. They don't have to make a claim, they just perform And I think that's the best proof there is.

Speaker C: Yeah. So product really does have to work with marketing and with sales in order to create a cohesive experience.

Speaker B: Yeah. Um, a founder wants to improve activation and conversion. We'll say in the next 30 days or what's the first thing they should stop doing and what should they do instead?

Speaker C: Give me a little bit more. At what point someone has clicked sign

Speaker B: up so they've signed up and so it's really activation conversion. And so uh, some of maybe getting the sign up but it's really more once they've done that getting them across the line to where they're activated and using and really engaging.

Speaker C: So look at your closest points to conversion. The first one is when they click the conversion button. Let's just say it's a sign up button and then it opens a form. What does that page look like? Do you have testimonial on that page? Do you have some social proof on that page? What do you. What can you say to help them already? What can you say to back up all your great promises that will increase your click to sign up conversion rate by optimizing that page?

Speaker B: It's really smart.

Speaker A: Thanks.

Speaker C: Your next. There's so many good examples. There's a tool called Mobin M O B B I N. They screenshot product experiences. So these will be apps but they also do screenshot the sign in pages. Go take a look at that, see what works. Well, adding a testimonial is bare minimum. Bare minimum I would say to your sign in page. Then they're in. Right. And we do two things immediately. They're in the product. So we show them something and they we generally fire off an email immediately. So that welcome email is the most opened email you'll ever send. Generally has an open rate of around 60%. If it does not, then you need to tweak your headline. Your subject line. Welcome to product name is generic but it works so I wouldn't mess with it too much. Okay, yeah, it could be a case study as well but uh, welcome to X is usually sufficient. Surprisingly, when it comes to initial experience, you don't want to be too unexpected. That's why all Apple products feel the same. You know how to use an app when you open it because that's a conscious choice. App design is consciously chosen to group standardize so that you know how to use things better. That's why most websites work the same. You can get a cool arty website but you don't know how it works. So they're in pop up some kind of pop up some kind of information, whether that's a chat, whether it's an actual pop up modal something, giving them a quick walkthrough to achieve their first best step. That ideally is close to value. So I'd also limit that to a maximum of three things. If you must have more than one, do not have more than three three links out to places in your product. You basically want to get them to do that first value realization thing immediately. And if they log out and they don't do that, then emails are uh, the next way to get them back in. So if you're sending three automated emails, welcome email and then two follow ups, welcome email is your biggest conversion lever and the next two are not to be ignored. Test stuff out a b Test your subject lines. Once you get a winner, you start understanding what people are after and you can start tweaking your content. Do not bother ab testing your content until you've got your subject line sorted. That's how I do it in 30 days.

Speaker B: Oh, that's really good. Where can people learn more about you online and Connect?

Speaker C: LinkedIn is pretty much where I am most of the time. My surname is quite exciting. Claire Hagenbotham so I just grabbed the link to that one and then on my website, copyisland.com although that is under um, construction at the moment. You can also just pop me an email. Claire copyaisland.com Fantastic.

Speaker B: We'll make sure and link all of that in the show notes. Claire, this has been super, super valuable today. Thanks for being on Future Proof Founder

Speaker C: thanks for having me. It's been a blast.

Speaker B: Thanks again Claire for coming on the show and sharing your insights and resources. You can learn more about claire@copyisland.com as always, all links, highlights, resources and full show notes are available at. Ah getfutureproof.com and be sure to check out our channel on YouTube as well. It's championleadership. We've got full video episodes, training shorts, outtakes. Lots more content over there for you on YouTube. Thought leaders share Share this episode with a leader who protects their own energy because they know it's the company's energy too. Yeah, uh, that's totally right. And we gotta hold onto that fuel in our own energy. Everyone who shares this week gets one clear headed decision. They would have messed up while exhausted. Want to build a future Proof business? Stop asking why did you sign up and start asking what was going on in your life that made you go looking? One is an interrogation and the other gets you a story, and the story is where the real answer lives. That's true for Onboarding, it's true for Churn, and it's really true of every relationship your business has. People don't leave a bad solution for a better one. They leave when they find someone who finally understands what they were actually dealing with. Ask better questions. Everything downstream gets easier from there. And that's my Future Proof takeaway. Coming up next Tuesday on our founder led episode. Did you know? Growth stage brands that are quietly winning right now. They aren't buying more ad clicks. They're doing something different. They are mailing something you can actually hold in your hand. We'll be talking with a sales leader on, um, why that dead channel of direct mail just isn't dead. And then one week from today, the playbook. What happens to branding when AI can write, design and target everything? And why the brands that win won't be the ones that let it do it? A professor who has built strategy for Hershey and P and G on the six things that can't be automated One week from today. I'll see you next time. Have a great weekend and enjoy the journey.

Speaker A: Build bold Scale smart. Stay Future Proof this is Future Proof founder with Jeff Mainnes.