How can I stop doing trainings?
I have a fairly complicated process to onboard a client. They have to add products, commission plans, bonus plans, learn about payroll, assigning and creating team members... etc.
It normally takes around 1-2 hours. It's the biggest bottleneck with my current business. I am wondering if you guys have any ideas on how to make this time go down?
I was thinking of building a wiki of videos to tell them to go to? Though, I don't know how I feel about them just watching a video. Maybe some type of walk through software? Any ideas?
What service are you providing that takes so long to set up? It sounds like some sort of sales team recompense software from what you have written.
Regardless of what it is, the obvious thing to do is to break your process down into visual sections that the client can see on the left hand side.
Each section should be complete in itself such that, when I have completed it, I never need to go back to it as part of the onboarding process.
Show an estimated duration for each section. This will help your client to estimate the time he needs to devote to you.
Give a visual indication - e.g. a colour-coded icon - at the head of each section of whether the client needs to gather data to complete this section.
Have a "Before you start" link at the head of each section. This will, when clicked, tell the client exactly what information he needs to have to hand to complete the process. If he needs documents, tell him in advance via the "Before you start" link.
Defaults: default as much information as possible, especially information that is repeated either for different purposes or because there are a number of similar entities (e.g. team members) to be added.
Look at "range inputs". what I mean by this is that many forms only let you add one "thing" at a time. Where there is a lot of information that must be captured per "thing", this might be unavoidable. Where, however, relatively little information needs to be captured but for many "things" of the same type, consider presenting the input forms in more of a spreadsheet layout so that data can be entered more quickly.
Allow a copy feature whereby the client can simply press a button to copy the previous record and then edit for the differences. Team members might be an example. They may all belong to the same department or live in the same country or be on the same payscale or whatever it is. I don't want to keep entering the same information.
Silently capture previous entries for particular fields and present that data as the default for the next record of the same type with a free-form drop-down to select a previously used value or allow the entry of a new value.
Create drop-downs, check boxes, radio buttons as often as possible where the client has only limited choices.
If there are any difficult, technical or potentially ambigiuous terms or implications of making one choice rather than another, set those out in the "Before you start" section and, if possible, show what happens if you make one choice rather than another so the client can see for themselves. People "see" better than they "read" so letting them click a demo button and seeing a statement of the implication of the the choice they have just made is better than writing it all down in two or three paragraphs.
Keep a running checklist of progress and items still to be done.
For onboarding, concentrate only on those items of data which are vital for onboarding. It is important to have at least one product for onboarding ... but the fact that only one product exists should be shown prominently on a dashbaord, not be something which impedes initial set-up.
At the end of the process, congratulate the client and tell them they have done the minimum necessary to get going - then refer them to the dashboard for more information. They can then see everything at a glance and either confirm that everything in a section is complete or go and add more data where they can see it is needed.
Thank you man, will be looking back at this as I build some of it.
wait a minute. it takes you 1-2 hours to onboard a client - are you sitting down and going through this with them? because I'd argue, for someone who will provide a long stream of revenue, 1-2 hours is nothing.
That said, you can also raise the floor. Have more clever defaults, or more ways to choose defaults.
And yes - self help is important. Have resources available so that people can figure it out on their own. But it's also a great place to lose new customers, so push training if they get stalled out.
I tend to agree - but it does make scaling so much more difficult. If I could get 10 clients a week, that is 10-20 hrs of training. It seems to be the easiest way to get some time back in the week.
I could default some areas and demo others, dropping the time down 10-20 minutes. Hmm, thanks.
Hey Philip,
I don't think you're going to like my answer, but I'll try anyway:
Increase your trainings/onboardings.
Charge more. Much more.
That's it. You make more money, have to do fewer onboardings and - because you're really doing the onboardings well - your customers are less likely to churn.
Failing that, I have a few other suggestions:
Create a concierge onboarding plan (which costs, obviously). Take care of the boring stuff for them and only have them involved in the 'magic moments' of setup which will make them use and keep the product.
Create a video series/course (eg the ultimate guide to agency sales compensation) and let visitors watch it as a drip course (eg via email). Sneak in a lot of the onboarding stuff there (alongside genuinely useful stuff as well of course)... By the time they have finished the course, it should be easy to win them as a customer and they should be ready to go!
If you're doing outbound sales, be sure to set up a timeline (with deliverables, goals, deliverable-date and responsible party) which makes it clear what they need to do and by when. If possible, make sure their boss has a copy.
Parcel the setup up into different stages. Let them see progress in between.
Good luck!
It it all happens within your own application, I recommend a dedicated onboarding flow.
Check out the approach done here, by clicking on the Demo button: https://introjs.com/
(I am not vouching for this website by no means and I have no affiliation to it, only using it to illustrate an idea)
Maybe look at turbotax.com - they have eased the tax filing a bit with a step by step workflow type of thing.
Any way to package it into a straight forward wizard flow? With the same steps you are currently asking them manually...
I would set up as much as possible some defaults. Anything else should be done easily, without any training, videos etc. - so don't use many different forms for entering data, use one, very clear and compact.
Options:
Recallable online tour that is shown initially per use. Users should be able to recall this tour by clicking a button or other navigational element. Treat users who are coming back after a long time as needing on-boarding and offer to show the tour again. Users should be able to click out of a tour midway. Add analytics to steps. My teams have used: https://introjs.com with success. We evaluated a bunch like bootstraptour.com/ and others listed here: https://ourcodeworld.com/articles/read/328/top-10-best-tour-website-guide-javascript-and-jquery-plugins
Instead of pointing people what to do with tours sometimes it makes sense to add a wizard, that walks the user and does the works for example in your case: add products, commission and bonus plans, understand payroll, manage team membership. Remember you need a wizard for first time users or when you are re-onboarding them. Experienced and pro users prefer to navigation versus wizards. You have to maintain two paths but you nail both first-experience and repeat visitor satisfactions. If you make the investment to do a wizard, make it recallable.
Create a sequential task list in the user interface with the items you want your users to perform. As users perform the tasks show a check mark next to task list item. This is particularly useful if the tasks can be performed out of order, or you are customizing the product for customers.
Create a visual flowchart of things you want them to do. Make the flowchart elements clickable to online help entries telling them how to perform the task. Instead of online help you can show short 1 minute videos that play in the UI without your product. A|B tested: People don't mind watching 1-2 minutes videos as long as the script is provided alongside. You can always put a page linking the videos with text.
Note the applicability of options depend on your product. Make it about the user and suggest they follow the steps to get the most of their investment. Don't give up on training completely, you learn a lot about how to improve you product based on first reactions and questions.
you can check out bubble.is tutorials. it tells you what to do and then waits until you click it or enter it etc.
or why not add training videos and then charge for live the training.