Emotional Disconnect During Customer Onboarding

Theres one major reason your Customer Onboarding sucks and it is something you can easily fix with little to no engineering or overhead.

Fix the Emotional Disconnect that happens during Customer Onboarding.

You see, Sales and Marketing create connections with prospects on an emotional level by focusing on the customer’s goals rather than on their product or service.

We tell prospects, “If you do business with us, you will become a better version of yourself.”

Prospects become customers because they emotionally buy into what this product or service is going to do for them.

Even in B2B, customers buy emotionally and back that up with facts and data.

Don’t lose sight of this.

Oh wait… that’s the problem with your Onboarding… you DID lose sight of this.

Your Onboarding, for lack of a better word, sucks (takes too long, fails to set customers to get value from their relationship with you over the long-term, etc. ) because you failed to maintain the emotional connection between the customer and their goal.

Prospects buy emotionally – and Sales builds and uses that emotional connection to move the prospect through the sales process to become a customer – and as soon as they become a customer, all of this emotional stuff goes away and you move directly into functional or technical onboarding, ignoring everything that got the customer to this point!

If you want your customers to actually go through your onboarding process in a way that sets them up for future success (and expansion!), your focus cannot simply be on getting them to use your product or consume your service.

Instead, your focus should be on setting them up to – and guiding them along the way as they – achieve their goals, so that the emotional connection remains intact.

Create an emotional connection between them and their goal with your product or service as the catalyst and you’ll get them to do what they need to do to get value from their relationship with you.

Of course, the onboarding process necessarily requires new customers to take certain functional or technical actions, obviously, but these must be positioned in a way that aligns emotionally with why they bought if you want a higher percentage of customers to do the things they need to do in a timely manner to get value from this new business relationship.

If you simply take over from the salesperson and jump right in to dry, unemotional functional or technical onboarding, you get customers ghosting you, losing interest, making excuses, etc.

You know exactly what I’m talking about.

About Lincoln Murphy

I invented Customer Success. I focus primarily on Customer Engagement. Learn more about me here.