Good morning, everyone, and welcome back to For Starters. Today, I want to drop a quick note on not screwing up your pre-sales and post-sales onboarding process. You all spend a lot of money acquiring new customers, burn a lot of calories on LinkedIn talking about acquiring new customers—only to mess it all up during the handoff.
Recently—this week alone, in fact—I’ve had three abysmal experiences where we were ready to buy something from a company, and they completely botched it.
Take Brex, for example. It’s a fintech and banking company. We did a lot of research to find banking services that could meet our needs across multiple entities. We were excited to get started. But then, they involved three different people across support, some startup consultant/advisor thing, and sales. None of them coordinated. All we needed to do was upgrade our account to support more than two entities, but nobody could figure that out. Instead, we got dragged through their script of pre-qualifying questions that had absolutely nothing to do with our business. So, short answer: we’re taking that business somewhere else.
The same goes for online support. We’re trying to embed support into our platform to create an elegant, world-class customer experience. But the company we approached started reading off their list of questions about who we are and how we do things today—which isn’t what I want. I want them to focus on who we’re going to become tomorrow and the level of support we aspire to deliver. When you ask the typical SDR or BDR to reframe their questions or guide them toward how you want to buy, it seems to short-circuit their script. Short answer: I’m not sure we’ll go with that company either.
Another company—this time for payroll—couldn’t even manage to respond about how to get a demo.
The moral of the story? Sit down and figure this out. Your onboarding and initial experience are your first impression with a client. If you can’t get that right, you’ll lose them. Retention will be horrible. Ironically, one of these companies is out there flexing about being in “founder mode.” My advice? Just focus on executing and delivering the type of customer experience you’d want yourself. Do that, and people will pay you—and stick around.
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