FeedTheKids

Solutions Consultant

Help Preventing Churn

First Post - hopeful I get some quality engagement from those who work in SaaS. My product is similar to an ERP.

I find myself in an funky spot where I build great rapport, close a deal, then clients get stuck in this bottle-neck which is onboarding. (Typical onboarding should be 30-90 days, commonly goes over) I need them to survive 120 days or I get clawed back.

Our onboarding/support team makes up over 50% of our entire staff, yet somehow we are still churning out about 10% of clients. (KPI is >5%)

Some clients are complaining during onboarding and the Implementation Managers will loop me in and I will jump in to talk the client off the edge. Lately I find myself on 1-3 of these calls a week. Saving alot of deals, but not the best use of my time.

Question:

Who at your companies deal with these "save" calls?
How many days do your deals need to survive to prevent clawback?
For those who deal with ERPs or software that has an extended onboarding - do you find similar issues where people don't survive onboarding?

Appreciate the responses, need some help to prevent clawback so I can feed the kids ~

🤓 Sales Tech

7

16 comments

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UrAssIsSaaS

Arsonist

6

SaaS Eater

I have a couple thoughts on top of what @alecabral and @poweredbycaffeine already shared.

1) I am not familiar with baseline metrics for ERP services but 11 deals churned so far this year and a 10% churn rate seems insanely high. We have a 1.5% churn rate for our SaaS products. So... are you overpromising in your sales process and/or are you providing POC and tangible use case before closing?

Can you share some further insights on what the churn reasons are, is it because they arent getting launched in time? Is your platform missing a key feature? There has to be more to this, or you are just setting unrealistic expectations with your accounts that cant be upheld by your onboarding team?

FeedTheKids

Politicker

-1

Solutions Consultant

Thanks for the response!

I would say our team is pretty good about not over-promising. (We've gotten rid of reps who have done this in the past - onboarding comes back to us quick if we gave false promises) But a 1.5% rate is low - I've always thought 3% is great, 5% is standard, 10% is still figuring things out.

Someone else had mentioned POCs also - we do them rarely, but I'm starting to put more thought towards them...

I would say some deals that cancel were square-peg, round-hole type customers.

Others just get stuck in onboarding and get frustrated. - I need to dive deeper into specific reasons for getting stuck, but (from the little I've reviewed) seems like usually slow communication from clients/their partners = too much dead time, and just working through issues.

The system has a learning curve, but we have so many resources that we push that I feel like don't really get utilized.

Might put together a few use cases as a follow-up post and ask for feedback from everyone who responded to this post.

UrAssIsSaaS

Arsonist

2

SaaS Eater

I would definitely recommend POC's to get some of these issues out of the way before closing.

Why do you close the square peg round hole deals? Seems like you might be setting the client, you, and the CS team for failure there. Did you know it was a square peg in discovery? Or after closing?

We run into issues where people get stuck in onboarding and churn as well, so we put in a standard cadence where if an account in onboarding goes radio silent after 2 touch points from the OB team we loop the AE back in ASAP to get a call scheduled. Helps us keep momentum going and get accounts launched on time

FeedTheKids

Politicker

1

Solutions Consultant

Not all Customers can be an ICP - I would say we close a decent amount of square-peg customers who end up having success. The system is super versatile, so for a lot of them we solve a handful of problems - but they don't use all core functionality.

Also for some, we just want to get in the door and we can grow and do more in their tech stack over time. - this is pretty common. I use the term "path of least resistance" a lot when talking internally about closing some of these deals.

I like your idea about getting looped back in early to address "dead" time between communications.

UrAssIsSaaS

Arsonist

0

SaaS Eater

Ya makes sense. Can you put some guardrails on the OB process in those scenarios, so instead of showing ALL capabilities your team just OBs the parts they are buying for? Limit the desire to poke around as things are getting implemented and pave a path to expansion that way?

Just a thought.

poweredbycaffeine

WR Lieutenant

5

☕️

Does your onboarding/pro-serv team record churn reasons in your CRM?

I'd start inspecting your deals to find a common thread. If that thread shows that you can save the churn reasons in the sales process then you stand to avoid the song and dance altogether. This is where I would start since you have ultimate control over the front-end of the process and want to drive success over the first 120 days.

1) Depends on the client. Could be CEO/CTO or Dir. CSM
2) 60
3) I've worked at a company with a 30-day intensive onboarding process, essentially rip and replace their biz ops software. We had a structured OB template that was shared with the client via Basecamp that empowered them to take control and drive the speed of the implementation. I'd consider examining your enablement tools in this world.

FeedTheKids

Politicker

0

Solutions Consultant

We do record in CRM - I've done a good amount of this already, but I like the way you think. I preface the onboarding timeline/process and tie it into the different aspects of the system during the onboarding.

60 days sounds amazing, I think I could survive more deals! To be honest, I'm kinda a complainer - only lost 11 deals so far this year compared to the next sales guy who is at 17. But what sales guy wants their money taken back. Especially for clients that had a long sales cycle!

I like your thought for #3. I've used Basecamp in the past, my current company uses JIRA (same shit). But currently, it's only used internally - might be worth doing a shared onboarding checklist, and that way it holds everyone accountable.

alecabral

Arsonist

3

Director - Digital Sales Transformation

Quick one: how much deep dive gets done before closing / winning the deal? I'm asking because something I faced when dealing with core systems, the discovery process is critical. If done properly (usually not by the sales rep, but by either a SE or consultant), it can really help the delivery team later on.

The other thing is there has to be a reason why instead of 90 days this takes 120 or whatever it is beyond that point. @poweredbycaffeine is right, I think you should try and uncover a trend in those deals. Your part as a rep is to bring in the deal but as you're involved beyond that point, I think it is important to also focus on what's going on with delivery. Can you figure out a trend there as well? i.e.: do they proactively engage with the customer as much as needed?

butwhy

Politicker

3

Solutions Engineer

As an SE, that was my first thought too - is there validation of use case before close and onboarding? Is that validation or knowledge being transferred successfully to onboarding team to make that more efficient? (Very often is not, pet peeve of mine)

FeedTheKids

Politicker

-1

Solutions Consultant

I agree that the handoff from sales to implementation is always like a game of telephone.

I currently type up pretty in-depth notes (my notes aren't as good as others on the team), but we also do a handoff call to review notes, diagrams, setup, etc.

We are actually small enough (~100 employees) where our SE will even occasionally help out with some of the onboarding calls if they are deep in the tech.

As an SE, do you find yourself talking through a variety of use cases and possibilities (I hate the "what if" game) during the sales cycle?

We go pretty in-depth but never want to go too in the weeds since it makes it tougher to get back on track and get closed. That could be something worth speaking with my SE about...

butwhy

Politicker

0

Solutions Engineer

>As an SE, do you find yourself talking through a variety of use cases and possibilities (I hate the "what if" game) during the sales cycle?

Yep! And more importantly, ranking those use cases in terms of importance and priority for implementation. No customer is going to be using everything within 6 months of deployment, so you HAVE to go in the weeds at least on the priority use case because if you don't suss out the tech details and who has the administrative power to deploy (this ends up being a huge blocker and cause of shelfware ime), then you run the risk of running into a tricky situation during deployment like you are. If you are just selling to the single champion who has no power, or to the inspired leader with no technical understanding of their current stack - it's a "Danger, Will Robinson" thing

FeedTheKids

Politicker

1

Solutions Consultant

Interesting.

We do some of this today, but also avoid getting into some of the weeds. Def taking back to the team to review - Thanks for your input, super helpful!

FeedTheKids

Politicker

-1

Solutions Consultant

Our Sales Engineer is good.... better than most I've worked with in the past.

I would say we do a pretty good dive into their setup and really scope out the onboarding. Trends I see that slow things down are:

1. Delayed response times (usually from the client or their partners)
2. Some companies want to click every button and test things that aren't really in the scope of the project. - This one hurts but a lot of the clients who do this are ICPs and I don't blame them. Versatility comes with Complexity, so them wanting to learn isn't really a bad thing in the grand scheme of things.

I agree with a deeper dive we should be able to fine-tune and get to the bottom of this.

In your experience with core systems, (we integrate with SAP, Oracle, etc) how long was average onboarding? I feel like onboarding a core system can take a year+ - people have to get frustrated at some point and try to put the cart before the horse?

alecabral

Arsonist

1

Director - Digital Sales Transformation

It seems that point 1 should be easier to fix, meaning that maybe your team can get a faster response from customers by reviewing existing SLAs on both sides. In my experience if that doesn't help (which is sadly more common than not), champion building within the customer becomes more and more important. You kind of need someone that acts as point of contact through the entire implementation and just to keep things running, make sure to engage with that person as much as needed.

On point 2, do you guys run pilots or POCs? Sometimes that gets the whole "uh, I want to touch that thing too! and what does this other one do?" thing out of the way and it gives you a ton of info on their behavior as well as giving the customer a fair idea on what implementation can be like.

To your last question, I'm more a infrastructure guy but my wife used to both sell and implement both SAP and Oracle's EBS but that was some 15 years ago. Back then implementations would take anything from 6 months to a full year. I don't think that's too bad but I'd assume it's faster now, so 3 to 6 months wouldn't be too bad in my opinion.

let me turn that question around: is there a reason why your company targets 30 to 90 days as implementation time?

FeedTheKids

Politicker

0

Solutions Consultant

do you guys run pilots or POCs? --

We only offer POCs on rare occasions. Mostly for our more tech-savvy or larger clients. Helps prevent the "gotcha" moment but requires more resources for support along the way. usually on POCs I act as the support guy and coordinate a training call or 2 for my SE to run with their team.

is there a reason why your company targets 30 to 90 days as implementation time? --

Every business does the whole "we needed to be live yesterday!" - which is fine, we do our best to lay out the onboarding roadmap and set realistic expectations so they understand.

I would say 30-90 days is just what makes sense for most businesses. Onboarding isn't going to be an overnight thing, depending on the project that timeframe has historically been on-par.

FWIW - You and the wife sound like a hell of a team!

alecabral

Arsonist

1

Director - Digital Sales Transformation

Got it, and I think you're right about the POCs. With solutions such an ERP, they are usually never free and take time and resource, so it makes sense that you only run it for big customers.

One thing I can share on the timeframe is that most customers want it done quickly but can rarely commit enough resources on their side to do so. That's where your project scope (including SLAs, deliverables and so no) needs to be ironclad and signed with blood in my opinion. Of course there's always exceptions but you can actually word those too and how they will be handled so if they end up adding days or weeks to the agreed time for implementation, the reason why is clearer. That saved my ass a couple of times back when selling cloud vs on premise was still a thing!

Ps: I'll capture your message and share with my wife lol, thanks for that comment!

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