The Journey: #77 Onboarding Isn't a Phase, It's a Subscription
So here's the thing about the accounts that kept showing up on my red account list, they weren't new customers. These were year two, three, four and beyond, customers who had poor adoption, who were struggling with change management, who just weren't realizing the value we all promised them on the way in.
And we'd have the meeting. Same questions, same nodding, same 30 day plan that everyone knew wasn't really going to happen. Rinse and repeat.
At some point I got so tired of the mundane conversations that I stopped asking and started actually looking. I built an audit, and I mean an actual audit, not a survey where you ask a customer to rate their own satisfaction and hope for the best. I wanted to know what was really happening inside their tenant. How were they using the product, did that match up with the goals they'd told us mattered, what was underutilized, what had never been touched once, were they missing insights they didn't even know existed, were they taking the right actions or just sitting on a pile of data doing nothing with it.
And listen, audit after audit, it was the same story. SO much underutilization. Entire parts of the platform just sitting there collecting dust while we were all in meetings talking about churn risk. The opportunity was staring us in the face the entire time and nobody had bothered to go look for it.
So we built something around it, and here's what that actually looked like.
We turned the audit itself into a customer facing exercise, because let's be honest, nobody wants another internal deck reviewed at them. We made it a value add, something customers actually wanted to sit through, with a real asset behind it and a pitch that got people leaning in instead of dreading the calendar invite.
Then we layered in a scoring benchmark, so customers could see exactly where they stood against best in class deployments, not vague feedback like "you could be doing more," but an actual number, a real gap, and a list of recommendations they could choose to act on.
Then came re-onboarding as the next step, a real sequence of meetings and actions designed to move them from stuck to their next meaningful value, not just a one and done reset.
And we tracked every piece of it. How many audits we ran, the scores, the top three gaps per account, who opted into re-onboarding, how far they got, whether they finished.
And the results were not subtle. Customers who went through this had a measurably higher probability of retention and growth. Full stop. Direct correlation, not a coincidence, not a nice story I'm telling myself in hindsight. This program changed our revenue trajectory.
The Takeaway: Onboarding isn't something you do once and check off a list. Your customers keep changing, their goals keep changing, their teams keep changing, and your product keeps changing too. If nobody's going back to reintroduce them to what you've built, with intention and a plan, don't be surprised when they stop getting value from it.
The Field Reality
Here's what was actually going on underneath all of it. Customers changed their goals, their teams, their entire use case, and their usage of our product just never moved with them. Nobody was watching for that drift, so it just kept happening quietly in the background. New leaders would show up with a completely new strategy and it would never occur to anyone that maybe the platform needed to evolve alongside it. Nobody even thought to ask the question. Meanwhile our own product kept shipping new capability, new workflows, new ways to actually drive value, and the customer was still using it exactly the way someone trained them in week one of year one. Call it re-onboarding, call it a jumpstart, call it Project Surge if you need something with a little more swagger to sell it internally. Doesn't matter what you name it. The point is customers need an intentional realignment to your platform on purpose and on a schedule, not one “stage” at the beginning of the relationship that everyone forgets about the second it's over. Status quo is the death of value, it just takes a while for anyone to notice the body. If you're building this out, a few things you'll want to actually decide instead of figuring out as you go: 1. You can charge for this if it becomes a proactive, recurring motion, or you can treat it as an investment if it's really just there to mitigate risk on accounts already drifting. Either is fine, just be intentional about which one you're running. 2. You also need to decide who owns it, your onboarding team or your CSMs. There's no universal right answer here, pick whoever actually has the credibility and the bandwidth to make this land as value instead of homework nobody asked for. 3. And if you're using AI to run the audit, ask yourself if you can productize it. Automate it to fire every six months on its own, and suddenly this isn't just an internal efficiency win, it's something you can put in front of the customer as a value add they're getting from you. As always, start small. Build it, run it on a small cohort, actually test whether it moves the needle before you roll it out across your entire book.
The Re-onboarding Trigger List You don't need to wait for an account to go red to run this. Audit anyone where you see:
A new economic buyer or exec sponsor in the last two quarters
A stated goal that's shifted since the original success plan was written
Usage concentrated in under 30% of licensed functionality
No new feature adoption across the last two major product releases
A renewal inside 6 months paired with a flat or declining health score
One trigger is worth a look. Two or more, and this account should already be in your re-onboarding pipeline, not waiting for a swarm to tell you what you already know.
Closing with Kristi
Swarming red accounts feels productive. It feels like urgency, like you're doing something. Most of the time it's just what you think is the right thing to do, and the real work was sitting there months earlier in the accounts that looked totally fine on the surface while quietly drifting further from what your product could actually do for them. Go find your version of the audit. You already know which accounts need it, you've probably known for a while. If you're sitting there thinking you know exactly which accounts need this and just haven't built it yet, that's usually where I come in. I've built this exact motion before, more than once. Happy to talk through what it'd take to stand yours up. Work with me here.
See you next Tuesday,
Customer Success. Revenue Follows.
