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Water Cooler

What's a community without us having random conversations? Let’s gather around the water cooler to get to know each other and chat about random stuff!

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Intimidating Customers

Hooray!!! Your sales team just closed a massive deal! (Somebody sound the gong) This deal has been months in the making and they just graduated from the buyers journey.Time to start the onboarding experience! Sales sends you an email with the customer’s list of expected outcomes. It’s game time! What do you do to show up prepared and ready to show the client the best onboarding they’ve ever experienced?

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What is your record for most calls in a day?

When I worked at a hyper-growth company I would often have calls scheduled from 8am-5pm. Literally back to back - a couple times I had (18) 30-min kickoff calls! Then I got to work from 5-whenever to write recap emails 🫠Finally I had enough and started scheduling lunch into my day!What is your record for most customer calls in a day?

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Times have changed!

When I was a brand new onboarding manager I used spreadsheets to track my customers’ onboarding progress. Then I leveled up to Trello, then Asana, but now I use GUIDEcx. I definitely relate to this meme! I love how far we’ve come and now we have purpose-built solutions! Who else remembers what onboarding used to look like?

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What is something weird you do that you wonder if other people do as well?

Do you have a million voices inside your head? Can you talk and see subtitles in your head? If you were having a sleepover, could you not move until other people started moving around? We’re here for each other! Comment below!

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How I feel after the latest round of interviews…...

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Ever heard of vaporware?

Happy Friday everyone! We’ve all been there and wow. I think these interactions with customers are what truly refines your soft skills as an implementation specialist. I remember at my first onboarding gig the customer THOUGHT the sales rep promised that we’d ship out hardware free of charge. What a conversation that was. Thank goodness for call recordings. Luckily the customer misremembered and we didn’t have a sneaky sales rep on our hands. Unfortunately the customer canceled immediately. I guess my takeaway is - build strong relationships with sales early on. The more they know about accounts that churn the more they can tweak their talk tracks. They want to sell more. We’re all on the same team. Let’s level each other up!

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What was your favorite thing about the place you grew up?

Was there a sweet nickel arcade down the road? Was there a forest nearby? Was it in the heart of a busy city where you played marbles with your friends in an alleyway?I want to hear about it!

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What was one of your favorite gifts growing up?

Was there a birthday present or holiday gift that you remember receiving that you still remember to this day? Maybe it was a hot wheels set, a remote control airplane, an easy bake oven, the list goes on!Let me know in the comments below!

Sara FowersEmployee

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Unexpected Use Cases

Face it - as common sense as your product may seem and no matter how much documentation you have - someone WILL use it differently than you anticipate 🤣 Use your customer’s onboarding to get ahead of common (or not so-common) mis-uses by teaching best practices and making sure that the basics are being communicated in a clear and consistent way! SHARING TIME 🎁: Tell me about a time where someone genuinely surprised you, or caught you off guard, with how they were using a product Food For Thought 🤔: While they can be amusing, remember that an unexpected use case can help pave the way for an untapped market and growth opportunities for your company. We can always learn from our customers :)

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Onboarding Expectation vs. Reality

HOT TAKE! Ditch the pitch decks and show the reality of your onboarding experience. The nice thing about pitch decks is they make the onboarding journey look easy and super consumable, the downside is that they set the wrong expectations.Start off on the right foot by setting the right expectations out of the gate. It’s like if my friends invited me to go on a hike and said the views were stunning, but didn’t tell me that the hike was incredibly hard. If I blindly trusted them and went then by the time the going gets tough then I’d start giving up (this is usually when customers would start ghosting you because the level of effort is way more than anticipated.) So long story short - communicate clearly with your customers upfront and before the going gets tough (i.e. The next milestone is a doozy so I’ll need everyone’s full commitment especially your IT managers! If we don’t keep up our pace we’ll fall behind schedule!)

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What is the best thing about the place you live?

If we were to visit where you live, what would you recommend we do/see/eat???

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Has this ever been you?

This hits too close to home when you’re ready to get your long weekend started, but then a customer who you haven’t heard from in weeks emails you and wants to meet at 4:30pm. . .Time to put on the happy face, right?

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DID YOU KNOW: Adding 3+ customers to a project will increase your on time completion rate?!?

Want to get more projects done on-time? The secret isn’t to send more emails, start a slack channel, or even send a gift basket. The secret is to invite customers to the project! The magic number is 3. GUIDEcx did a study where on-time completion rate jumped to 91% when 3-5 customers were invited to projects.Who was being invited??? I’ll tell ya!The Executive Sponsor (check signer aka the person who can get their team back on track if they fall behind schedule) The App Owner (this is your main point of contact aka the person who owns the day to day task completion.) A Power User (this is someone who can help share the load or even step in for the App Owner if they leave) Their IT contact (This person may be responsible for helping whitelist things, send data, etc)Comment below if you have any other pro-tips of who to invite!

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Water Cooler Wednesday: If you could visit any place on earth where would it be and why?

Are the snowy mountains calling? How about a nice tropical beach? Maybe you’re a city person and want to experience the hustle and bustle there? Imagine you have an all expensed paid vacation, where are you going and what are you doing?

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What is the most memorable meal you've ever had? (It can be good or bad.)

What made that meal so memorable?

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What scientific or technological advance blows your mind?

Is there any technology that seems so futuristic and advanced you're surprised it actually exists?The internet? The fork? Sliced bread? Let’s hear it!!

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When you redesign your onboarding experience from the ground up.

Onboarding experiences aren’t perfect after the first go around. They take time to perfect. The unfortunate thing about designing your onboarding experience is it’s easy to get lost in theory and if you don’t get your customer’s feedback (CSATs anyone?) to help design it then you may end up with an experience that is less than ideal. How do you like to collect feedback from customers to revamp your OX?

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How it feels when a customer demands features that don't exist.

Sometimes you get a customer that was either overpromised something or they feel like they run the town. Even if you’re a seasoned onboarding pro this can be tricky to navigate, but it seems a whole lot worse when you’re new! I’ve had my fair share of demanding clients when I first started! So… how do you handle a customer with high demands?What I like to do is set clear expectations about timelines and features. If there is a feature that they feel needs to exist and is a dealbreaker if it doesn’t (classic overpromised situation), then I kick them back to sales to figure out if they were oversold on something. How do you handle those escalations??? Comment below!

posted in Water Cooler

There's an Onboarding Platform at home.

This hits too close to home. Once you’ve experienced the power of a real onboarding platform *cough cough GUIDEcx!* it’s impossible to go back. It’s like riding a bike, then finally driving a car. It’s hard to go back for getting around town. I’m not saying you can’t do it, I’m just saying it’s harder to.

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The modern kickoff call is worthless

The modern kickoff call is worthless. I’ve seen way too many companies make the same mistake which is doing the kick off call because “that’s what you do.”Not understanding the why behind kick off calls will cause those companies to start off on the wrong foot.So why do we do kickoff calls?Kickoff calls should be used to instill confidence in your new customers that you are a trusted advisor/guide. The more confidence you instill the more your customer will do what you ask them to do during their onboarding experience. Now what?Get rid of all the fluff. Cut back on intros. Come prepared to kickoff calls so customers aren’t repeating what their desired outcomes and and who they are. Spend more time in outlining the journey they’re about to go on and plan for resources. If you mess it up, you’ll spend a lot of time making up a lot of ground that 30 minutes of preparation could’ve prevented. Check out this episode of our QOTW livestream below to learn more:

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What is your secret talent?

Everyone has that one thing that they are abnormally good at. Some of these talents can be monetized and others are party tricks. I’d love to know what hidden talents you have!

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Water Cooler Wednesday: What do you get the most compliments about?

Humble brag time! Let’s hear it below 👇👇👇

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Transparency increases trust

If you build a strong relationship with the check signer or what I like to call the executive sponsor, then when your onboarding stalls (and it’s in the customer’s court) you can have them put some fire under your point of contact’s pants!Here are my two top ways to build a strong relationship with the executive sponsor:Share weekly updates Provide easy access to the onboarding project so they can access it whenever they wantAs you increase transparency it will increase trust!

posted in Water Cooler

Water Cooler Wednesday: Do you have any conspiracy theories? If so, what are they?

Is bigfoot real? Have we made contact with extraterrestrial beings? Can a human eat 6 saltines in 30 seconds??? If you have any conspiracy theories, I want to hear them!

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Your customers are evolving so your OX (onboarding experience) should too.

When I'm emailed a spreadsheet or sit through meetings where I'm talked at, I know it's going to be a bumpy ride. More often than not, an onboarding process is born, but never enhanced. Usually v1 is good enough, but good enough isn't good enough. Your customers are evolving so your OX (onboarding experience) should too.My secret to designing enjoyable onboarding experiences is putting myself through the onboarding experience every six months. I do my best to put myself in my customer's shoes to see what the experience is like. In order to be really objective, I ask myself: "Is this onboarding a chore?"The perfect OX is out there. It will take time and lots of iterations to get there, though. Here's to not giving up! 🥂What secrets do you have up your sleeve to design a solid OX?

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