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CHAPTER 3: Product-Led, Sales-Led, and Hybrid Onboarding StrategyStrategy is about making choices, trade-offs; it’s about deliberately choosing to be different.- Michael PorterWhen software first hit the mainstream market, it was unheard of to receive almost-instant access to a product with the simple click of a button; shoppers had to rely on a salesperson to learn about it. In recent years, the market has shifted considerably. Each category has hundreds of competitors, which means buyers can be picky and choose the solution that best fits their needs. With so many options available, shoppers would rather try a product on their own terms than learn about it through a sales representative. SaaS businesses are adapting to this new way of selling. They want to deliver an exceptional user experience without the need to talk to a salesperson. This includes guiding new users through features and use cases with a streamlined onboarding process.This self-serve, product-led onboarding strategy is how companies like Slack, Dropbox, and Notion have grown to become behemoths in their industry.The concept is simple enough. First, offer users a free trial or a free version of a product. Second, help them perceive, experience, and adopt a product’s value on their own terms. Finally, with regular use of the product, they naturally turn into paying customers, all thanks to a brilliant onboarding strategy.This all happens without any humans involved; the product sells itself.In a product-led world, who needs salespeople, right?But nothing is ever this simple. Let’s look at Slack, a classic example of a product-led company. If you think they don’t have a sales team, you’d be wrong.In 2019, 40% of Slack´s revenue came from their sales team closing deals with larger organizations (companies making more than $100,000 in annual recurring revenue). As a result, they experienced a 66% surge in marketing and sales expenses from 2018 to 2019.As Slack proves, there’s room to employ both a product-led and sales-led growth strategy to onboard new users. This approach is known as sales-assisted or hybrid onboarding. Before diving into the framework to improve user onboarding, let’s look at each of the three user onboarding strategies a little more closely.  Sales-led approach Product-led approach Hybrid approach How do these methods compare in this new environment? Choose Your Hunting StrategyIn a classic blog post titled, The 5 ways to Build a $100 Million Business, Christoph Janz explains the number of potential customers in your total addressable market. He describes how your business’ annual contract value dictates your “hunting strategy,” a.k.a. how you acquire, onboard, and retain new customers.TTo build a $100 million business, you can hunt for: 1,000 “elephants,” or enterprise customers who can each pay $100,000 or more per year. 10,000 “deers,” or medium-sized companies that each pay $10k or more per year. 100,000 “rabbits,” or small businesses that each pay $1k or more per year. One million “mice,” or consumers who each pay $100 or more per year. Ten million “flies,” or active users that you can monetize $10 or more per year each. What you end up “hunting” for largely dictates whether you should adopt a sales-led, product-led, or hybrid approach to user onboarding.Sales-Led OnboardingMany large B2B companies like Workday, Cisco, and Salesforce became $100 million businesses by intentionally hunting for “elephants,” or large enterprise customers.This required a dedicated internal sales team with heavy financing of the enterprise sales cycle. They relied on high-touch human interactions; sales representatives, account executives, and customer success team members played a crucial role in converting leads into active, paying customers.A typical sales-led onboarding process might look something like this: A lead books a call or demo with a salesperson. A salesperson qualifies the lead via a call or email. If they’re a good fit for the product, the salesperson presents a demo of the product. The lead tries out the product if there’s a trial available. If there’s no trial available, the lead signs a contract and becomes a paying customer. A customer success representative onboards the new customer, which might involve upfront costs to create the new account.  This process might change depending on the sales or marketing funnel, but the gist is along the same lines: real people drive leads to perceive, experience, adopt and purchase your product.If you’ve been following along with product-led growth, I can hear some of you thinking, “Why would anyone want to use a sales-led approach to selling and onboarding? It’s so outdated!”Well, it’s simple – the sales-led approach is proven, predictable, and repeatable. Salesforce grew to become a $100 million a year business with this method. It’s also a numbers game. The more calls or emails you make, the more sales you generate. You do this by segmenting your market, forming both an inbound and outbound lead generation strategy, along with a convincing and constructive sales script. This sales-led approach is not a good fit for every type of business. After all, can you imagine Netflix or Facebook employing salespeople to close deals?That’s why sales-led onboarding is more effective in situations such as: The product is complex and requires a helping hand Multiple stakeholders are involved in the purchasing process The creation of a new and disruptive product category The market is small but consists of large contracts The annual contract value is typically more than $100,000 Product-Led OnboardingIf you’re hunting for “flies” or “mice,” where the annual revenue per user is between $10 to $100, consider using a product-led onboarding approach.This process is where new users perceive, experience, adopt and purchase a product without the need to interact with a team. The primary objective is for users to self-onboard themselves (even though the rare few will need help from a support team). A typical product-led onboarding process looks like this: Users try a product for free, either with a free trial, free account, or free sample, which happens without interacting with sales. Users onboard themselves to the product. They achieve their desired outcome with limited communication between sales, customer success, or support. They purchase the product on their own. The product-led onboarding process is low-touch, little effort, and has minimal overhead for your business. It’s an effective approach in certain situations such as: The product is simple and easy to understand. The market you serve is well established. Buyers prefer to self-educate instead of talking to sales. (Yes, there are still some people who like talking to salespeople!) The product solves a problem a lot of people or businesses have. The annual contract value is low enough for customers to pay for it on their own using their credit card or PayPal account. Hybrid or Sales-Assisted OnboardingMany businesses feel the need to lead with either a sales-led or product-led onboarding strategy. But this is a big misconception. As Slack illustrates, you can have success from merging both. There’s a middle ground between both pure sales-led and product-led strategies. Most product-led businesses like Slack, Dropbox, and Drift hire salespeople to assist in onboarding new users. They adapt as they start pursuing larger deal sizes. The opposite is true as well. When moving downmarket, sales-led businesses shift their sales team to help new users find additional meaningful value with their product. HubSpot, Salesforce, and Vidyard are good examples of this approach. It’s also worth pointing out that hybrid onboarding has a 3.5 times higher conversion rate than low-touch, product-led onboarding. Surprisingly, this is across all ranges of deal sizes for free trial B2B products.To be successful with a hybrid approach, it’s important to have a strong sense of your market. The sales team needs to know which users to focus on, where in the user journey they should start the sales process, and perhaps most importantly, how they should do it. Will your salespeople start calling users the moment they achieve their desired outcome with your product? Or should they be more passive and wait until users request a demo or hit a usage limit with their account? (I’ll discuss this in detail in the third section of this book.) For now, we’re going to focus primarily on how to improve your own product-led user onboarding experience. Putting It All TogetherImplementing a product-led, sales-led, or hybrid onboarding strategy will largely depend on the complexity of your buying process, along with your product’s annual contract value. To help visualize this, here are these two factors on a two-by-two matrix:Here’s a little rundown on when to use each approach: Suppose you have a high annual contract value (typically over $100,000) as well as a complex buying process with multiple stakeholders and a long sales cycle. In that case, consider onboarding new users using a sales-led method. Cisco and Marketo are good examples of companies using this approach. If you offer a low annual contract value where users use a self-checkout process to purchase your product, then onboard new users with a low-touch, product-led process. Netflix is an excellent example of a company that employs a purely product-led onboarding approach.  If the annual contract value ranges anywhere from $2,000 to over $100,000, then you should consider a mix between the two. In this case, the buying process complexity can vary from a simple self-checkout to complex multi-week sales check-ins. A company that transitioned from a sales-led to a hybrid onboarding approach is Hubspot. They moved downmarket and released a freemium product for small and medium-sized businesses (SMB). Slack also transitioned from a product-led to a hybrid onboarding approach when they moved upmarket to sell to enterprise

Hey, there it's Ramli John. And if you're listening to this, that means that you've generously taken the time to peer review my upcoming book, EUREKA.So from the bottom of my heart, I just want to thank you.There are three things I'd love to hear from you: stop, start, and change1. Stop - what should I remove from this book?2. Start - what should I add? Is there something missing, whether that's a section or a topic about onboarding that I missed?3. Change - what should I change? Is there any part that I can do a better job of explaining or rephrasing?Also since this book will be evolving in the next few weeks, every recording after this is actually not my voice. It's an AI voice. I used a tool called Descript to learn my voice. So if there's any mispronunciation, please forgive my AI voice with that. :)Another thing, my AI voice is a little slow, so I would suggest you turn your speed for your podcast player to 1.2 to 1.5 times. And that sounds about right to my ears.  Other than that. I just want to thank you again and hope to hear from me soon. See ya.  

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Transcript: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1A3HHVeZjE3zIjUvqcDcOPSWmE0rmU5ZtFAlro2ydwrs/edit#heading=h.jco5qalut5epCHAPTER 2: The Crux Of The Product-Led Growth StrategyFree the child’s potential, and you will transform him into the world.-Dr. Maria MontessorriThe first few years of a child's life are crucial. They are the foundation that shapes children's future health, happiness, growth, development, and learning achievement. Children need proper nourishment, care, and love to blossom into their true potential. After all, these early years lay the foundation for future success and prepare them to become contributing members of society. This is what Dr. Maria Montessori discovered in 1907 when she opened a school in a slum-ridden district of Rome. Montessori’s “school” was just a few rooms in an apartment building intended for poor families. Her students were a group of three to six-year-old children who had never stepped foot inside a classroom before. Most expected her to fail.Montessori got to work to implement the educational materials and methods she developed. She replaced the heavy furniture with child-sized tables and chairs light enough for the children to move. She brought in low shelves so the children could access educational materials on their own. Montessori also gave her students the freedom to choose and carry out their own activities at their own pace and following their own inclinations. Thanks to her methods, the children started showing extraordinary understanding, activity, and confidence. By working independently, her students became autonomous and self-motivated. News of these remarkable children began to spread. People around the world began to visit the classroom. No one could believe the children’s transformation until they saw it in person. Even Queen Margherita of Italy’s royal family made her way through the slums of San Lorenzo to see them! And it all started with Dr. Montessori’s belief that a child’s potential can be unlocked early on with the right methods and materials in place.Much in the same way, the earliest stages of the customer journey are crucial in setting new users up for long-term success. By treating them with intentional care during the user onboarding, you lay the groundwork for everything to come. As discussed in the previous chapter, user onboarding directly impacts the future growth of a product, and it starts during the first steps in the Pirate Metrics Framework.In this chapter, you’ll learn the three reasons why user onboarding is so important in a product-led growth (PLG) go-to-market approach and why it’s often overlooked and neglected by companies. We’ll also look at the five signs of bad user onboarding experiences.Three Reasons Why User Onboarding Is Important Data doesn’t lie – user onboarding is the crux of the product-led growth strategy. It’s where it all starts. Here’s why. 1. User onboarding is a retention leverNo matter what industry you’re in, the best customers don’t abandon you after their first purchase. They come back time and again for more. Though it’s an often overlooked metric, retention plays a significant role in boosting revenue. That’s because it increases the customers’ lifetime value (CLV). Retention starts with user onboarding – and the numbers prove it.ProfitWell studied about 500 different software companies spread between business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) companies. They found that customers with a positive onboarding experience were more likely to stick around than those who weren’t happy with it. Hubspot saw this first-hand with Sidekick, an email tool for salespeople. After making positive changes to the way they nurtured new customers in Week One, they saw a 15% lift in retention during that week. This catapulted into a 50% increase in retained users after ten weeks. What happened at HubSpot Sidekick is not an outlier.InnerTrends saw similar data points: users who completed the initial onboarding process were 38% more likely to return one week later. But it goes even further than that. The effects of user onboarding are even more pronounced once users hit Week 12. For those who completed InnerTrend’s onboarding process, the retention rate is almost three times higher. When someone first signs up for a product, they’ll either love it or leave it. Those that are successfully onboarded see the value from it and are more likely to stick around, even years later. This is especially true for SaaS companies: In working with a number of SaaS portfolio companies, I have found that there are two causes of churn that occur more frequently than any others. They are: failure to successfully onboard the customer and loss of the champion who drove the purchase.- David Skok, General Partner at Matrix Partners2. User onboarding is a revenue multiplierA truly fabulous user onboarding experience converts to a revenue multiplier. This is a direct result of improving retention. We have the numbers to prove it (get ready for some math!). Let’s go back to the example from HubSpot, where they saw a 15% increase in retention across ten weeks as a direct result from improving user onboarding. How much did their revenue increase because of this change? Let’s say they started with 1,000 users and charged each user $5 per week without a free trial period.Here’s how the original retained users and revenue would break down (assuming user retention is proportional to revenue retention): If you add up the revenue across all ten weeks, it adds up to $21,275. Assuming the revenue and retained users remain the same for the rest of the year at $750 each week after Week 10, the revenue totals $52,775 in 52 weeks.Now let’s compare that to what happened when they nurtured new customers properly with an improved experience:Revenue from Week 0 to Week 10 adds up to $26,425.Even more remarkable is if the number of retained users and revenue remain the same for the remainder of the year after Week 10. That’s $78,925 in annual revenue, which is a striking 50% increase.All thanks to a better onboarding experience!Imagine this is for one cohort of 1,000 users. Let’s assume that they can consistently get 1,000 new users to sign up each week for the rest of the year. If we assume their new signup growth remains flat at 1,000 new customers per week for one year, the improved user onboarding experience would account for a massive increase of 49% to the monthly recurring revenue (MRR)! So you see, small improvements in treating new customers with care can result in enormous growth.Plus, those who have a positive onboarding experience are more willing to pay.The point? User onboarding really does set the stage for future success and has a huge impact on your revenue growth.So it comes as no surprise the biggest weakness in growth stems from that initial first impression:The real growth problems start when people land…and leave. They don’t stick. This is an onboarding problem, and it’s often the biggest weakness for startups.- Casey Winters, Chief Product Officer at Eventbrite3. Good User Onboarding Leads To Lower Customer Acquisition CostsIf having an incredible user onboarding experience is a retention lever and revenue multiplier, bad onboarding can lead to higher Customer Acquisition Costs, or CAC. The CAC is easy enough to calculate. Divide all the costs spent on acquiring customers (a.k.a. marketing expenses) by the number of customers acquired in the time period the money was spent. For example, let’s say a company spent $100 on marketing in one year and acquired 100 customers in the same year. Their CAC is $1.Let’s revisit the previous example of Hubspot Sidekick. To recap, here’s what the number of retained users look like in the first 10 weeks for each experience:Let's assume it costs $2,000 to acquire 1000 new users and, in this scenario, there's a seven-day trial.After one week, they have 600 paying customers with the original onboarding or 750 customers thanks to the new onboarding. That amounts to a CAC of $3.33 for the original onboarding or $2.67 for the improved onboarding.A 15% increase in retention means CAC went down by 20%.Which one would you prefer to see in your company’s own metrics? Alright, let’s put this another way.Perhaps you spend $1 to acquire new signups, converting at 1%. That CAC is $100. But, if you optimize onboarding and increase the percentage of active users who become paying customers from 1 to 2%, that CAC cuts in half to $50. Excellent onboarding has an abundance of payoffs: it leads to higher activation rates and, subsequently, a lower CAC. If you’re losing 60% of your new users after the first session, it doesn’t make sense to spend a ton on acquiring signups or your CAC will be high. The unit economics will not work out. - Francois Bondiguel, Growth Lead at CanvaThe Ugly Duckling of Growth – User OnboardingHelping new users to perceive, experience, and adopt a product’s value is critical to long-term retention, revenue, and profitability. This doesn’t just appear out of thin air. It takes a well-thought-out strategy to make the magic happen. User onboarding is often treated like the ugly duckling of growth. It’s largely ignored or assigned as a low priority task to the product or customer success team.But if it’s so important in a product’s growth story, why don’t the majority of teams invest their resources to improve it? After working with several dozen product-led companies, we’ve found a few answers to this perplexing question. The ProductLed team has identified five challenges you might face when trying to improve this experience. Note: In a later chapter, I’ll provide a framework to help you overcome these challenges.1. No clear ownership of user onboardingWho is responsible for the user onboarding experience? Is it the product team or the customer success team?If no one owns it, then it won’t be prioritized and falls through the cracks. As a result, it takes weeks or even months to see any boost

CHAPTER 4: The Framework to Improve Your User OnboardingBuilding a good customer experience does not happen by accident. It happens by design.- Clare MuscuttAll users are lazy, vain, and selfish.It sounds harsh. But I didn’t say it. Scott Belsky, Chief Product Officer at Adobe, did.It’s an observation that before users feel invested in a product, they’re all looking out for number one first – themselves. Think about the last time you tried out a product. What thoughts and questions came to mind first?  “How will this product help me?” “How is this product better than what I’m doing right now?” “How will I look if my friends or colleagues found out I’m using this product?” “Why would I want to drop what I’m currently doing and replace it with this?” First, these questions show we are lazy. We don’t have the time or energy to figure out what a new product is or what it’s not. We want to know now. We have no patience to read long directions. We have no time for steep learning curves. Our default is to find the easiest and quickest path to what we want.Second, we are vain. We care about how our friends and colleagues perceive us. Once our physiological and safety needs are met, we look for ways to feel loved, connected, and accomplished by others. Whether it’s social apps like Instagram that help us receive more “likes” or a visual reporting tool to help us create presentations at work, products tap into our social needs.Finally, we are selfish. Even when we’re trying out a product that could help the team be more productive or protects the environment, we want to make sure we’ll be rewarded immediately. That’s why assisting new users to achieve quick wins is critical, regardless of a company’s long-term vision.That’s the real challenge with onboarding—we’re dealing with lazy, vain, and selfish new users. They want to know how a product can solve their problem. And they want to know now.Time-to-ValueFor this reason, one of the most impactful tools at your disposal to improve user onboarding is to minimize the time-to-value (TTV). This is the amount of time it takes a new customer to realize value from a product. In a sales-led business model, you can get away with a longer TTV since, in most cases, the customers paid upfront, and they’re usually stuck in an annual contract. If something gets delayed with the deployment and implementation, it may take a considerable amount of time from purchasing the product to experiencing its value.In a product-led world where users are easy-come-easy-go (because there is usually no upfront cost), the tolerance for delays and frustrations is much smaller. If your TTV is too long, new users will leave… for good. Process over PrescriptionSo, how do you improve a product’s user onboarding to reduce the TTV?To make it very simple, I could give you a list of best practices and attributes of bad versus good onboarding, like below:But adopting the wrong best practice could do more harm than good. Being too prescriptive dismisses how unique a product, market, team, and users are. For example, some users love heavy-handed product tours, while others find it annoying. Some might feel overwhelmed with too many onboarding emails, while others might want more tips and resources. Instead of explaining what you should and should not do with user onboarding, my goal is to provide a framework and process to help your users perceive, experience, and adopt your product. The EUREKA FrameworkAlong with Wes Bush and the ProductLed team, I’ve worked with dozens of organizations to improve their user onboarding experience from the very first touchpoint. Called the EUREKA framework, this six-step process will shorten the TTV for more new users to be successfully onboarded to your product:  Establish your onboarding team: To deliver an effective, immersive, and seamless onboarding experience for new users, your approach needs to be collaborative across functions and departments. Onboarding can't just be quilted together from the work of different teams. It must be holistic. If it's not, users will receive a fractured experience. In the next chapter, I’ll help you form an onboarding ‘A’ team. Understand your user’s desired outcomes: The best way to successfully onboard new users is to figure out why they signed up in the first place. Particularly, you need to know what value means to users. In Chapter Six, I’ll help you figure out how to do that using the jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) framework.  Refine your onboarding success criteria and metric: Your team needs a clear picture of what it means to successfully onboard new users. In Chapter Seven, I’ll help your team identify the onboarding success metric using data. We’ll also define Product Qualified Leads (PQLs). Evaluate and optimize your onboarding path: To minimize the time it takes for new users to experience a product’s value, you have to map out the user’s journey to discover which steps should be delayed or eliminated. In Chapter Eight, we’ll do just that with Wes Bush’s Bowling Alley framework. Keep new users engaged inside and outside of your product: To help guide new users to experience a product’s value, consider using triggers both inside and outside of the product. These could include product tours, welcome messages, progress bars, onboarding emails, SMS, and in-app notifications. In Chapter Nine, I’ll help you determine which “Product Bumpers” and “Conversational Bumpers ” to use for user onboarding using the BJ Fogg Behavior Model. Apply the changes, analyze the results, and repeat: User onboarding is a continuous process. In Chapter Ten, I’ll help you analyze the results and apply the learnings into the next iteration of your onboarding experience.  Ready to experience your own EUREKA moment? Let’s go! 

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CHAPTER 6: Understand Your New UsersMake the customer the hero of your story.- Ann HandleyThere’s a saying that “hope is not a strategy.”It’s actually unclear where this phrase originated, but it’s been popularly exclaimed by leaders such as Barack Obama, James Cameron, Vince Lombardi, and many others.Regardless, if you’re like me, then this feels pretty intuitive. Well-planned and thought-out action is often the best strategy… not hope.When you hope for something, it feels like unfounded wishful thinking, with no action or a plan to back it up. Any of the following sound familiar? “I hope my teacher gives me a better grade this semester.” “I hope my boss won’t get mad at me for coming late again.” “I hope traffic won’t be bad this morning.” Hope is not a strategy.But, it’s such a powerful force to bring about change. Hope is a belief that your current situation can get better, no matter how big or small.This is the reason why signing up for a new product is an expression of hope. When users sign up, they’re opening themselves up to the possibility that things could be better.Whether that hope ends in disappointment or excitement ultimately boils down to how well you understand what exactly they’re hoping for: what is it about their current situation that motivated them to sign up for your product? What were they hoping to achieve with your product that they couldn’t already do? If you fail to realize this, that sense of hope can result in disappointment. You’ve lost a potential user. With each churned signup, your overall CAC increases. And for users, they’ve just wasted their time and effort trying out your product. For this reason, it’s critical your onboarding team has a crystal-clear picture of what exactly your users’ desired outcomes are. This is the second step in the EUREKA framework.If you get this step wrong, everything else will fail. Because once you’re able to fully understand what users truly want, you can design a reliable onboarding flow that turns hope into excitement.Before you think about an onboarding redesign by adding another product tour or rewriting your onboarding emails, you need to first understand your users.A Better LifeWhen you boil it down, onboarding is really about changing someone's behavior so that they can experience a better life. Users are frustrated or annoyed with something, and they sign up for a product to make their lives easier.Remember, the primary goal of user onboarding is to help users become better versions of themselves. If we go back to the Super Mario analogy, onboarding shouldn’t focus on the product (the fire flower) or its characteristics (green stem and easy to pick up), even though they are important. It should focus on creating a better life.It doesn’t matter if you sell lip gloss, copywriting services, or software; people are buying a better version of themselves. Let’s say your phone is a distraction during the day, to the point work is placed on the back-burner. To combat the intrusion on your productivity, you buy a timed lockbox to keep the phone hidden. What you’re really buying is a better way to avoid distractions from your mobile phone during work hours.Another way to put it:Upgrade your user, not your product. Don’t build better cameras – build better photographers.- Kathy SierraYour Product’s “Job Interview”The idea of “upgrading” a user’s life is at the core of the Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) theory by Clay Christensen, innovation expert and bestselling author of The Innovator’s Dilemma. JTBD is the process consumers go through whenever they aim to transform their existing life-situation. To enable a life transformation, customers “hire” products to solve a problem or to satisfy a need. This is known as a Customer Job.For example, a Customer Job could be: “When I’m hungry, I want to cook raw chicken so I can eat it and satisfy my hunger.” So, you could “hire” a stove to make fried chicken or a grill to barbecue it. Or you could “hire” an oven to bake it. There are three implications of the JTBD framework.1. Customer Jobs are solution agnostic. Notice how with cooking raw chicken, the Customer Job is independent of the solution (the stove, grill, or oven). When thinking about a product’s Customer Job, make sure it focuses on users’ needs and problems instead of the solution. You can’t start by looking at the product or what they’re currently using. You have to dig to the root of the problem that caused them to start looking for a solution in the first place. What were the circumstances around a person’s life that led them to start looking for a solution?2. The circumstances in people’s lives lead to “job openings.”In the JTBD framework, understanding the circumstances and pain points in users’ lives are more important than the product features and customer characteristics.For example, after several comments from my wife that I looked like a high school student with my current laptop bag, it was time for an upgrade. So, I bought a professional bag to bring to conferences and client meetings. You could say the reason I started looking for one was to impress clients and people at conferences. But in actuality, I started to think about leveling up my wardrobe soon after I received a promotion.While out shopping for it, a lot of information was thrown at me, ranging from the durability of the materials to the ergonomic qualities and features of the bag itself. But what actually sold me was the marketing message. This bag was made for “my grown-up work self.”So what’s the point here? To build a great user onboarding experience, it’s important to know: What are the circumstances in users' lives that triggered them to start looking for a solution like yours? What is their desired outcome? What does success look like? What’s holding users back from achieving their desired outcome? What else did they consider or try, and why didn’t it work for them? In other words, people try out products because there is a gap between their current circumstances and their final aspiration. Successful onboarding experiences are like a sturdy bridge between that gap so users can safely cross over to their desired outcome.3. User onboarding is the Customer Job “interview.”If users are hiring a product to do a Customer Job, then the user onboarding is the “interview” process. To nail the job interview, you have to first know what job you’re being interviewed to do. Do you think you’d be successful if you prepared yourself for a product management job interview if the job posting was actually for a sales development representative? I think not! To nail the job interview with users, you must first know what job a product is being hired to do. For that, it’s essential to understand the three interconnected reasons users could be signing up for a product. The Three Components of Customer Jobs1. Functional When someone talks about Customer Jobs, they’re usually referring to the functional component of JTBD. Functional jobs involve specific outcomes the users experience after working with a product. Back to the example with Super Mario: the functional job of a fire flower is to make it easier for Super Mario to destroy barriers by using a new fire-spitting ability.Another famous example is from Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt: “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!” The quarter-inch hole is the functional job the drill must do.We can take that analogy even further by describing the purpose of the quarter-inch hole. Maybe it’s to hang a photo or build a shelf. That would be the true functional job of the quarter-inch hole. It’s important to look further than what appears on the surface.Here’s another example with a SaaS business, Canva, a graphic design platform that's great for making invitations, business cards, Instagram posts, and more. At the surface level, Canva’s functional job is to help people easily create custom designs. At a deeper level, it depends on who is using the product: For a paid ads marketer, Canva’s functional job is to quickly create high-converting, on-brand visual assets for a social ad campaign. For a teacher, Canva’s functional job is to create engaging visual aids that help teach abstract concepts to students. For a local coffee shop business owner, Canva’s functional job is to create, download, and print flyers to help drive foot traffic. Functional jobs are as complex as the number of market segments served. Segmenting and personalizing the user onboarding experience for different customer jobs is one of the low-hanging fruits of improving onboarding. This is exactly why Canva asks new users what they’ll be using the app for during the user onboarding:Segmentation is an important concept for the remainder of the EUREKA framework. But for now, think about the desired outcomes that users want to receive when they sign up for your product.2. Emotional The second component of a Customer Job is emotional: how users feel (or what they want to avoid feeling) after they’ve accomplished their desired outcome. Products meet an emotional need for people who use them, and it’s a big reason why they end up purchasing.You can see this idea front-and-center in one of Revlon’s breakout magazine advertising campaigns from 1952, Fire and Ice. The brilliant ad campaign makes it clear that Revlon isn’t selling lipstick or nail polish; it’s selling a “better you.” The ad barely mentions any product. Instead, it prominently features a picture of model Dorian Leigh. You need to look closely to notice lipstick and nail polish, both located near the bottom of the page.This ad was designed on purpose to amplify the emotional component of Revlon’s Customer Job. In the factory we make cosmetics; in the drugstore we sell hope.- Charles Revson, founder of RevlonWhen it comes to your product, what emotions do you want your customers to feel or avoid feeling as a result of using it? For Canva users, it could be to stimulate c

CHAPTER 7: Refine Your Onboarding Success CriteriaIf you do not know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere.- Henry A. KissingerGoogle Maps can be quite a marvel. The vast majority of the time, it gets us where we need to go without having to think about it. We just plug in our destination, and boom, we’re there. So many of us have become so reliant on it that when it fails, everything goes awry.I experienced this firsthand with my wife Joanna on a road trip from Toronto to Montreal. Unfamiliar with the streets of Montreal, I relied heavily on Google Maps to find our hotel. Low and behold, my phone lost signal after exiting an underground tunnel, and I received that unbearable error message, “GPS lost signal.” We ended up driving over a bridge that led to the US-Canada border. That’s not so bad if we both had our Canadian passports, but we didn’t!Immediately, we both started freaking out. How are we supposed to explain to the Canadian Border Agents that we’re not illegal immigrants trying to sneak into the United States of America, a.k.a. the land of the free?Of course, we completely overreacted. The Canadian Border Services Agency officer we spoke with was understanding. After showing him our Ontario driver’s license and explaining the Google Maps failure, he laughed it off. All we had to do was exit on a ramp that led us back to where we needed to go. This is a harmless story, where not knowing your destination can lead you down the wrong path. But it doesn’t always end well, especially with the cross-functional, highly-visible effort of improving user onboarding. By now, you should have a clear picture of what your users’ desired outcomes are along with the functional, emotional, and social jobs they are hiring your product for. You should also now know the four progress-making forces that influence the decision to adopt or drop the product. The next step is to define what success looks like for your user onboarding experience. There are two moments that matter the most to measure onboarding success: When users experience the value of a product for the first time When they begin to use it consistently These two success criteria are tied to key milestones in the user onboarding: the Moment of Value Experience and the Moment of Value Adoption.Success Criteria #1: The First StrikeThe first onboarding success criteria is helping users achieve their desired outcome, or Customer Job, as quickly as possible. In Wes Bush’s Bowling Alley framework, this event is called the “First Strike.” In 10-pin bowling, this happens when all ten pins are knocked down with a bowling ball. (We’ll go in-depth into the Bowling Alley framework in the next chapter.)In user onboarding, the First Strike is a necessary product action users must take to accomplish their desired outcome or Customer Job. Let me give some examples. For Canva, it’s exporting or sharing a finalized design  For Zoom, it’s hosting or attending a Zoom meeting For eCommerce stores, it’s the first purchase of a product  For some companies, this First Strike isn’t so obvious. Think about Facebook. What’s their First Strike? Is it a user liking, sharing, or commenting on posts?Since those actions require users to have a few Facebook friends, the most important product action is to add a friend. That’s why Facebook prompts new users to connect with friends as quickly as possible. This happens early on in their onboarding process.For “all-in-one” products that solve many problems, recognizing the First Strike is even more tricky. Imagine identifying the First Strike for a Swiss Army knife. Is it the knife, pen, screwdriver, compass, scissors, saw blade, fire starter, or laser pointer?Many all-in-one B2B SaaS products can essentially be considered digital Swiss Army knives. How do you determine the First Strike in these cases? This is where context and segment matter. Depending on the context of use and the segment, there could be different First Strikes. For example, users can accomplish a lot with Intercom:  Guide customers through their first steps, as well as highlight what's new with product tours Build mobile carousels to onboard new app users Create smart bots to qualify visitors on a website Connect with website visitors and answer their questions in real-time Manage customer support requests and questions Make it easy for customers to serve themselves by sharing relevant help articles  So, what is Intercom’s First Strike?It’s hard to decipher at first glance. But by segmenting Intercom’s users, you learn that users hire Intercom for three core Customer Jobs, all aligning with their three product lines:  Conversational Support product: provides human, self-serve, and proactive support to increase customer satisfaction. A possible First Strike for this Customer Job is the first time users respond to and resolve a customer request. Conversational Engagement product: increases the engagement and product adoption with targeted in-app and outbound messages. A possible First Strike for this Customer Job is the first time users respond to an in-app or outbound message. Conversational Marketing product: acquires new customers quicker by responding to questions from prospects in real-time. A possible First Strike for this Customer Job is the first time users respond to a question from a website visitor. As you can see, the First Strike is closely tied to your product’s Customer Job (or Jobs, for more complex products). It’s the first measure of success that new users are on the right track.Success Criteria #2: The Product Adoption IndicatorThe second measure of success is the moment users start using a product consistently. One of the end goals of onboarding is helping users embrace new habits with a product. Habit-forming user onboarding requires users to experience the value of a product more than once. If new users have used the product enough times, they’re more likely to continue with it going forward.For Slack, a team is not successfully onboarded until they’ve sent not one, not 10, but 2,000 messages. It’s at this threshold where they’ve found the teams who are likely to continue using it.Since this onboarding success metric is a leading indicator of user retention and product adoption, I call this the Product Adoption Indicator, or PAI for short. It’s an early but strong signal that users are likely to continue using a product going forward. They have embraced the product and are very unlikely to return to their old habits.This concept is not new—others call this the “magic number.” Here are some well-known examples: At Facebook, users who add seven friends in 10 days are more likely to continue using Facebook  In the early days of Twitter, the rule “Users who follow 30 people” was a retention and growth driver  At Dropbox, users who added a file in one Dropbox folder on one device were more likely to add more files to their Dropbox Notice that the PAIs for each of these products are closely tied to retention.Once users reach this point, you’ve set them up for success. They’re now ready to take the next step in the product’s customer journey. They’ve completed the initial loop of the user onboarding process: they’ve perceived, experienced, and adopted your product for the first time.Good PAIs have a few common characteristics: PAIs should be leading indicators of user retention: The PAI is the onboarding team’s “canary in the coal mine,” which means it provides early warning signs for miners of dangerous gases in a coal mine. With PAIs, you can predict with some confidence early on of the likelihood of users sticking around to continue using a product. In other words, they’re a strong signal that users have started forming a habit of using the product.  PAIs should focus on the repetition of one key product engagement action: One of the goals of user onboarding is to help new users build habits using a product. Since repetition is key for building habits, users need to use the product a few times before it finally clicks for them. The PAI is tied to the product’s desired outcomes or Customer Jobs (i.e., when a team has sent 2,000 Slack messages).  PAIs should be easy to understand and communicate with others: PAIs should be simple enough to remember and communicate with the entire company. Facebook employees “talked about nothing else” but seven friends in 10 days; it was their single, sole focus. Instead of layering several user actions into the PAI, such as the number of likes, comments, and status updates, the company emphasized simplicity so it’s easy to remember and share within the organization. PAIs should be time-bound: Ideally, you want users to complete the PAI within a specific timeframe. With Facebook, it’s adding seven friends in 10 days. Slack’s and Twitter’s PAIs are not time-bound. But, having a timeframe can help your team identify if new users are off-track so you can adjust the user onboarding accordingly.  PAIs should come early in the user’s journey. You want the ability to identify whether new users are on the path to success as early as possible. Ideally, users should be able to achieve the PAI on the same day they sign up for a product. If the PAI occurs weeks later after signing up, you’ll have fewer data points since many of those users will have already churned.  The Five Steps To Determine Your PAIThere are five steps to establishing a company’s PAI. I’ll be using Whatsapp as an example for this exercise. All data used below are fictional and used for instructional purposes only.1. Get a baseline measurement of your retention.As previously discussed, one result from good onboarding is a lift in retention rate. Before making any changes to the user onboarding, you’ll want to first define what retention looks like. One way to do this is to perform a cohort analysis using a retention chart and curve. This reflects the percentage of users who come back and perform any action with a product several days or weeks after si

Transcript: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1A3HHVeZjE3zIjUvqcDcOPSWmE0rmU5ZtFAlro2ydwrs/edit#heading=h.3x1wa7tarrfiChapter 08: Evaluate Your Onboarding PathClutter is the official language used by corporations to hide their mistakes.- William ZinsserOne of my dream cars is the Porsche Carrera GT. It can go 0 to 100 km/h in 3.57 seconds, all thanks to its 603 horsepower engine and curb weight of about 3,000 pounds. Compare that with my current car, a Toyota Corolla, which has a 132 horsepower engine and weighs about 3,100 pounds. Not only does the Porsche have four times more horsepower than my Corolla, but it also weighs almost 100 pounds less!The Porsche Carrera GT is a perfect example of how to make a car drive faster. First, increase the power the engine produces. Second, remove any unnecessary items to make the car as light as possible. The second option is often the easiest, fastest, and cheapest way to speed up a car. Rip out the sound system, remove the bits of junk from the trunk, and (if you really have the need for more speed) pull out the rear seat. The 100-pound weight loss will make the car accelerate a tiny bit quicker.The same can be said of user onboarding. When it’s bloated with too many unnecessary steps, new users will abandon an app and leave it for good. Users have little to no patience to read long directions and no time for steep learning curves. The default is to find the easiest and quickest path. That’s why the First Strike needs to be hit as quickly as possible. In this chapter, we’ll map out and evaluate the path for new users to ensure every step in the early stages of your customer’s journey is as efficient and effective as possible.The Straight-Line OnboardingIn the previous chapter, I introduced Wes Bush’s Bowling Alley framework and the concept of the First Strike—when first-time users achieve their desired outcome. In 10-pin bowling, that’s when all of the pins are knocked down with a bowling ball. Sounds easy enough, right?In reality, it’s really hard. The narrow oiled bowling lane is 41.5 inches wide, and the ten pins are 60 feet away. On both sides of this lane are gutters. The goal is to roll a heavy ball straight down the lane to knock down as many pins as possible. A “strike” is when all of the pins are hit on the first try. A “spare” is when no pins are left standing after the second round. If you’re new to bowling, you’ll quickly realize how hard (and frustrating!) it is to hit any of the pins. Chances are, the majority of your balls will end up in the gutter. That’s where gutter bumpers come into play; they block balls from falling into the gutter to give you some assurance some of the pins will actually be hit. When it comes to user onboarding, bumpers help new users achieve their First Strike. Bumpers include conversational triggers (such as onboarding emails, SMS, browser notifications) and in-app triggers (such as welcome messages, product tours, and progress bars). I’ll be covering these bumpers more in the next chapter.For now, it’s time to identify the path that will help users achieve their First Strike. If you’ve watched professional bowlers, you’ll notice how they curve the ball down the lane. This allows them to find the sweet spot that results in a strike. This is for pros, though. Beginners need to learn how to roll the ball straight down the lane first. In user onboarding, this is called Straight-Line Onboarding. It’s the minimum number of steps users need to take to achieve their First Strike. In my experience, most onboarding experiences are anything but a straight line. Well over 30% of them are superfluous and end up creating more friction for new users than necessary. Creating a Straight-Line Onboarding experience is critical in getting more users to experience a product’s value. You’re in a race against time. The goal is to decrease the time-to-value (TTV), the amount of time it takes a new customer to realize the value of a product. A short TTV means customers receive a faster return on their investment of time—and that means they are more likely to stick around! With this in mind, here are three steps to building your own Straight-Line Onboarding experience. How To Build Your Straight-Line OnboardingTo help you visualize this, I’ll be going through the steps to develop the Straight-Line Onboarding of a fictional online party invitation tool that I’ll call PartyParrot. 1. Map out your onboarding pathThe first step is to sign up for your own product as if it’s your first time. It’s probably been a while since you’ve done that. More likely than not, it’s been a while since anyone in your company has done that.The goal is to come in with a fresh perspective and map out each step in the user experience before they become highly-engaged users. To do this, you’ll want to go beyond filling in the form on your site. Go through the motions of signing up to study the first impression of your product, whether that’s a Google search, paid ad, blog post, or email invitation. Since PartyParrot is a non-existent tool, let me give an example with Canva. Someone might discover it by Googling “Instagram post design template.” The very first result on the search engine results page (SERP) is a landing page dedicated to Canva’s Instagram post templates. This link leads to a page with several Instagram post templates.From there, users can select a template, edit it, add their own photos and then download their masterpiece. And voila, just like that, they’ve achieved their First Strike. These first few touchpoints are key for users to experience the wonder of Canva for the first time. Here’s the entire onboarding path from a Google search: Search for “Instagram post design template” Click on Canva’s landing page Select an Instagram template Edit the Instagram design template Add your own photos Download the image Notice how the first two steps aren’t even part of the website; they both occur on the SERP. Don’t forget that user onboarding doesn’t typically start on a website. It begins with the very first touchpoint.Another remarkable aspect about Canva’s onboarding path is that users don’t have to sign up at all to experience Canva’s First Strike; their growth team has clearly optimized their user onboarding experience. Now it’s your turn: document every step that’s required for users to achieve your product’s First Strike. Be sure to reference every field that you’re asking users to complete, including each button they need to click. I also recommend taking a screenshot of every step so you can refer to it later (you’ll need this for later steps in the framework). If you’re doing this with the onboarding team in a room, you can use sticky notes and markers. Write down each step in one sticky note. For this exercise, consider each field a user has to fill out as an onboarding step. So if there are ten fields on a signup page, that’s eleven steps, including clicking on the submit button.If your team is remote, you can use tools like Trello, Notion, or Miro. I’ve listed out every step in Canva’s onboarding process with Trello at bit.ly/canva-path. For the remaining steps, I’ll use PartyParrot as an example. Let’s say the current onboarding path from their website looks something like this: Enter email address Enter name Enter password Click “Create Account” Confirm email address Sign back in Click “Create New Invitation” Select a party invitation template Add an image for the party Add the description of the party Add the date and time for the party Add the location of the party Save the online invitation Add each email address of your friends Send the online party invitation 2. Evaluate each step.The next step is to evaluate each onboarding step for three components: Necessity  Ease Simplicity A) Necessity: remove or delay any steps that don’t lead to the First StrikeEach step in the onboarding path is yet another opportunity for users to drop off. Go back to your onboarding path and evaluate if the value of each step outweighs the risk they pose of a drop-off. Any steps that add more friction for users to achieve the First Strike should be removed or delayed. Use green, yellow, and red labels to easily identify where each step falls in the onboarding process:  Green labels are steps that are absolutely necessary for new users to achieve the First Strike. I.e., asking for an email address during the signup process.  Yellow labels are steps that can be delayed after the First Strike, like setting up an advanced feature or running split tests.  Red labels are steps that can be removed completely. This could be adding a backup email address or asking for a nickname when setting up their account.  Do this step collaboratively with the onboarding team.Ask each team member to label every step on their own. Then, go through each step together to identify which ones are necessary. Removing the red and yellow steps are imperative to building a Straight-Line Onboarding experience so more users achieve the First Strike. Let’s go back to PartyParrot and evaluate each step.Does step five–confirming the email address–help new users accomplish their immediate goal of sending online invitations?This step is one of the biggest onboarding conversion killers. Working with Snappa, we discovered this firsthand. About 30% of new users never confirmed their email addresses. Once we did some simple math, we realized that with the removal of this activation step from the beginning of the onboarding flow, we'd be able to generate a 6-figure annual recurring revenue (ARR) outcome. In less than a week of implementation, we started to see their monthly recurring revenue (MRR) grow substantially.For those who still require new users to activate their email address before logging into the product, check your product analytics and see what percentage of new signups never touch foot in your product. Chances are 10% to 30% of new users never see the product because of this step. So, let’s get ri

CHAPTER 9: Keep New Users Engaged Inside And Outside Your ProductThe mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.- William Arthur WardDo you remember a teacher who made a difference in your life?Even though you may not remember all the teachers you've had, I bet there were a few who made a lasting impression. They might have even influenced your career today. For me, that was Mr. Drmanic, my physics teacher during high school. He was funny, brilliant, and explained complex physics concepts with a ton of energy. Above all, he cared about his students. At the start of the year, he’d always ask everyone what they wanted to be when they grew up. He then made a point to relate his lessons to the professions we announced to the class. He inspired me to major in math and computer science in university. Mr. Drmanic’s teaching approach is exactly what user onboarding needs – to educate, explain, and inspire users. It’s crucial to find the right balance so that users are not too overwhelmed or get too bored.Once you’ve created your Straight-Line Onboarding, the next step is to add “bumpers” so users remain engaged and eventually adopt the product into their life or workflow. So... how do you immerse new users into your product so they feel motivated and inspired?This is where a useful framework called the BJ Fogg Behavior Model comes in.The BJ Fogg Behavior ModelThe BJ Fogg Behavior Model is the key to unlocking behavior change and product adoption for new users. Dr. BJ Fogg, behavioral scientist and founder of the Behavior Design Lab at Stanford University, created this model to facilitate behavior changes by adopting positive habits and letting go of unfavorable ones. It emphasizes three elements that must converge simultaneously for a behavioral switch to occur: Motivation (M): The desire or willingness to do the new behavior Ability (A): The ease in doing the new behavior Prompt (P): The cue or trigger to do the new behavior Together, these elements form the BJ Fogg Behavior Model.If you plot Motivation and Ability on a graph, you’ll see a curved smiling shape called the Action Line. Behaviors that ultimately become habits will reliably fall above the Action Line. For example, let’s say you’re training for a marathon and aim to wake up at 6 a.m. every morning. Even with no running experience, you set an unrealistic goal of running a 10-mile run that first morning. It’s a sure way to fail because this behavior falls below the Action Line.But, let’s say you sleep in your running shoes and reward yourself with a chocolate banana smoothie after the run, all while setting a realistic goal of running two miles on the first day. Since you’ve increased the motivation and made it easier to get started, you’re more likely to accomplish it. Now, how does this help improve user onboarding?Ultimately, you’re not onboarding people to a product. You're onboarding them to a new way of accomplishing something, a new way of life. In essence, it’s a behavioral switch for users. They have to let go of their old habits and adopt new ones.If users are falling off during the user onboarding, the BJ Fogg Behavior Model provides a framework to boost those numbers: Is the new behavior as easy to do? Are users motivated to perform the behavior? Are there prompts inside and outside the product to help users perform the desired behavior to complete the user onboarding? In the Bowling Alley framework, the Product and Conversational Bumpers should contribute to one or more elements in the BJ Fogg Behavior Model to either make the onboarding experience easier, increase the motivation of new users, or prompt them to do something.This chapter focuses on how you can use the BJ Fogg Behavior Model to keep users engaged both inside and outside a product. It’s divided into three sections: Section 1: Learn how to use visual cues, empty states, and content templates to make user onboarding easier. Section 2: Discover different ways to increase your users’ motivation inside and outside the product. Section 3: Create behavior-based prompts for user onboarding If you’d like to see an overview of the different types of Product and Conversational Bumpers, see Appendix I and II. Section I: Make It EasyIf you want to change the behaviors and habits of users, you need to make the behavior as easy as possible to do. One useful concept to measure how easy (or hard) user onboarding is for new users is cognitive load– the mental effort required to learn new information. You can think of cognitive load as the mental processing power needed to learn how to use and interact with a product. If the information exceeds the user’s ability to handle it, it results in a cognitive overload.From my experience, most user onboarding overwhelms new users with signup fields, product tours, pop-ups, in-app messages, checklists, tooltips, and more. If users feel overwhelmed, they’ll experience cognitive overload and likely abandon the app altogether.So, how do you avoid overloading users?With Straight-Line Onboarding in place from the previous chapter, you’re already halfway there. By now, you should have: Removed or delayed any unnecessary steps that don’t lead to the First Strike Reorganized the onboarding steps from easiest to hardest Simplified the onboarding by showing fewer options, while breaking down complex signup and setup processes into multiple steps You can take additional steps within your product to make for a remarkable first-time experience for new users that’s both easy and effective. 1. Provide visual cues to guide them to the next onboarding stepAt times, new users need a small clue on what to do next. Little cues or context changes can encourage users to make a certain decision. This can be as simple as an image that points users to the next step. Basecamp adds some fun to their onboarding by using a cartoon character to point out where users complete the signup form. Visual cues can also be Product Bumpers that guide new users to achieve their desired outcome. Here’s what a Product Bumper could look like: Product tours orient new users and help them find the fastest path to their first moment of value. Tours often walk users through a critical workflow or point out a few key steps that users might otherwise miss.Tooltips isolate elements such as form fields or buttons to guide a user through the account setup. Once a user completes a step, they are referred to the next one.Hotspots are often used to give a bit of contextual help to encourage new users to activate certain product elements or features. They can have unique pulsing animations to catch a user’s eye. Hotspots are a nice alternative to tooltips because they are less invasive to users; they don't open automatically and can be easily ignored.These are just a few examples of Product Bumpers. Others include checklists, progress indicators, and welcome messages (more on those later).When using Product Bumpers, tours are usually a better bet than an unending blast of tooltips. They help users achieve the desired outcome through action instead of memorization. Canva does a good job of this by guiding users through four steps to download their first design.Be careful of using Product Bumpers as a band-aid for bad user experience. Often, when they’re added on as an afterthought, they detract from the onboarding experience and become momentum interrupters. Regrettably, they have become deeply associated with user onboarding, to the point where many companies believe adding them will automatically improve it. This is flat-out wrong. Ironically, it’s often a sign someone slapped on the onboarding experience without much thought or strategy.2. Show a helpful empty stateWhen users are just starting out, they’ll often see pages within a product without any activity, history, or data because it’s their first time interacting with it. These moments are called empty states. Empty states are often overlooked as a helpful way to guide users to achieving their First Strike. This happens because interfaces are typically designed with data already in place, so the layout looks clean and organized. So when users sign up for the first time, it can be disheartening to see a bunch of zeros and placeholder images on the main page, which is what you see when you sign up for Mailchimp, an email marketing platform.Instead, you want to paint a picture of what it will look like once the user is actively using the product. Emphasize the value of taking action. Go beyond showing users the benefits of your app. Direct them to the desired action as well. Take a look at Dropbox Paper’s empty state. It describes how it can help you “brainstorm, review design, manage tasks or run meetings.” There’s a clear, primary call-to-action to direct users to begin using Dropbox Paper.A word of warning: avoid using “dummy data” to generate fake activity and statistics in the empty areas. While it’s tempting to cover empty states with fake data to bring the dashboard to life, it presents an entirely new problem of overwhelming users. You’re opening up the door to questions such as: “Am I supposed to do something here, or should I just look at it?” “Where did this data come from?” “Where do I put in my data?” “How do I know it’s my stuff that I’m looking at?” There are times when “dummy data” can work: when it actively instructs instead of merely being seen. Basecamp does an excellent job of doing this to explain how their product works. Each piece actively guides you through using the product.3. Provide templates, cheat sheets, and other resources Content is like cheat codes to your onboarding. Templates, cheat sheets, and educational articles are often overlooked as a way to make it easier to onboard new users. They can help speed up the onboarding process because users don’t need to start from scratch. Let me give you an example of how powerful these resources can be.Let’s say I gi

CHAPTER 10: Apply the Changes, Analyze the Results, and RepeatI have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.- Albert EinsteinA few years ago, the designer and engineer Peter Skillman held a competition to build the tallest possible structure in 20-minutes with the following items:  20 pieces of uncooked spaghetti One yard of transparent tape One yard of string One standard-size marshmallow The marshmallow had to be placed on top to win the competition, and the entire structure had to remain motionless for three seconds. After running this challenge with more than 2,000 people from various backgrounds (from some of the top universities like Stanford, the University of California, and more to boot), Skillman was surprised by the results. Business school students performed the worst. What was even more shocking was that the best performing group were not engineering prodigies or physics majors. They were kindergarteners. What happened?The business students were talking and thinking strategically. They examined the materials. They brainstormed ideas, debated the best options, asked savvy questions, and honed in on the most promising ideas. It was professional, rational, and intelligent. The process resulted in a shared decision to pursue one strategy. Then, with five minutes left, they divided up the tasks and started to build. The kindergartners took a different approach. Instead of strategizing, analyzing hypotheticals, debating, proposing, and asking questions, they simply start building. They rarely spoke to each other, and when they did, it was in short bursts, “Here! Now, here!” By the time the 20 minutes were up, they had experimented with 8 to 10 different structures before landing on the most stable one. Figure 10.1 The kindergartners in Skillman’s design challengeIn dozens of trials, kids built structures up to 26 inches tall, while business school students built structures less than 10 inches (on average). Kindergartners also beat out teams of lawyers (who built towers that averaged 15 inches), as well as teams of CEOs (22 inches).The lesson here: multiple iterations usually beat a commitment to the first idea and making it work. It’s best to learn by doing.This is an important principle to apply to user onboarding. From my experience, most teams do big launches to improve their user onboarding. Then, they iterate just once or twice a year. It’s much better to analyze the results, reiterate and implement changes quickly than to overthink and strategize about it for months. We’re now at the final step of the EUREKA framework. It’s time to apply changes to your onboarding experience. In this chapter, we’ll discuss how to run rapid-fire experiments that will produce compounding wins.The Growth ProcessCompanies that grow the fastest are also the ones that learn the quickest. They use this as a massive competitive advantage. That’s where our “Triple A” sprint comes in. It focuses on rapidly identifying problems, building solutions, and measuring impact. The process follows a one-month sprint cycle to identify and deliver an improvement to a product. It consists of three A’s: Analyze: Identify inputs that drive the outcomes you want for your business Ask: Answer these three questions: Where do you want to go? Which levers can you pull to achieve the desired outcome? Which inputs should you invest in? Act: Choose an input and implement it.  Then, you go through the Triple A cycle again, considering any learnings from the previous iterations to future ones.I use this process when working with ProductLed clients. But you can use any iterative growth process such as Sean Ellis’ high-tempo four-step process, Brian Balfour’s six-step growth machine process or Growth Tribe’s G.R.O.W.S. process. You’ll notice that most of the work you’ve completed for the EUREKA framework contributes to the Analyze and Ask steps of the Triple A process.By now, the majority of the ideas to improve user onboarding should have emerged from the previous steps in the EUREKA framework. Those steps are focused on holistically analyzing your data and gathering insights as a cross-functional team. Prioritizing Onboarding ImprovementsFrom my experience, the problem in the growth process doesn’t lie with Ideation but in the Prioritization of growth ideas. For that, I use the Action Priority Matrix:Here’s what this means: High-impact, low-effort are low-hanging fruits and quick wins. Start with these ideas. High-impact, high-effort could be big swings and transformational. These are major projects that require assessment and planning.  Low-impact, low-effort are momentum builders. These ideas are good as morale boosters but result in incremental improvements. Low-impact and high-effort ideas are ones to avoid. Split Testing Growth IdeasIdeally, you want to split test any onboarding changes. Let’s say you want to validate that your Straight-Line Onboarding performs better than your current onboarding experience. You can send half of your new users through the new onboarding and the other half through your current process. After a few weeks, compare the week-to-week retention rate to determine if the retention curve has improved. At this stage, it’s critical to iterate quickly. If you’re stuck at this step due to engineering bandwidth, consider tools like Appcues, Pendo, and UserPilot to implement Product Bumpers. Userlist, Intercom or Drift can enact conversational bumpers.Socializing Learnings Another step that teams often miss is ensuring the learnings from each growth experiment are shared across the whole organization. Since changes in the user onboarding impact so many teams, it’s really important to share the process, progress, and learnings with them.Sharing with teams needs to become a habit. Doing this will accomplish a few things. First, it excites your teammates (and the executive team) about onboarding. It’s also a great way to create teamwide empathy to remind everyone that their work has a real impact on everyday lives. Finally, sharing the successes and impact of onboarding will ensure that you can continue to dedicate company resources to the project.How you communicate this is entirely up to you, but here are a few things to try: An “Onboarding Wins” email that’s sent out to the onboarding team and other coworkers who have expressed interest in the process A dedicated Slack channel where you share test results and discuss upcoming tests  A slide deck in a shared folder (or in your company dashboards) An ongoing lunch-and-learn program Monthly or quarterly meetings Beyond The Initial OnboardingAt this point, I want to stress once again that improving user onboarding is a continuous process. As your product evolves to the market it serves, the user onboarding experience must adapt to those product changes. To that point, the process of onboarding users never ends.As new users complete the initial onboarding and become regular users, your onboarding team can (and should) help them adopt new capabilities and use cases of the product. You can apply the same EUREKA process to various steps in the user journey. Here are some common places to consider: Different entry points to your product will require a different onboarding experience. The journey and knowledge of someone who signed up from an ad will likely be completely different from someone who signed up through a Google search or a webinar campaign. Different Customer Jobs will also require personalized onboarding.  Invited users should be treated differently. You’ll need to give them more information about why they’re being invited and why they should use your product. New UI and product changes for existing users should be communicated thoughtfully. You’ll find the most engaged users will be the most resistant to change. How can you implement the principles you’ve learned in the EUREKA framework to help them adopt those new changes? Generally speaking, after the initial onboarding is completed, you can onboard users to go deeper or wider with your product.Going DeeperFirst, go deeper by educating new customers about advanced configurations and features to help them do a Customer Job more effectively. For example, for sales executives who signed up for Calendly to meetings with prospects, the First Strike occurs when a prospect schedules a meeting using their Calendly link. For the next onboarding iteration, you could inform them about advanced features that would help them close more deals, such as: Embedding Calendly on a landing page Sending SMS notifications to prospects so they don’t miss meetings Automatically distributing meetings to their team based on availability, priority, or equity Integrating Facebook pixel code to the Calendly page to launch retargeting campaigns for those who viewed the Calendly page but didn’t book a meeting Going Wider The other option is to go wider by introducing solutions to different problems that your customers face. For example, there are many reasons why people sign up for Hubspot: To generate leads with landing pages Nurture and close leads with email workflows Set up a company’s website  Manage social media Track the ROI of Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Google Ad campaigns with precision Create and share links to book meetings with leads Make, log, and record calls Manage the sales team Live chat with website visitors with a chatbot Let’s say you know that a new customer signed up for Hubspot specifically to generate leads with landing pages. After achieving that objective, you can educate them on using social media to drive traffic to that landing page. If they have a sales team, you could also let them know about the benefits of subscribing to Hubspot Sales along with Hubspot Marketing.What’s Next?Before we wrap up, some final thoughts. So far, I’ve covered the steps to improve your user onboarding without any assistance from anyone in your team. But sometimes it’s best to have some help. Next, we’ll look a

CHAPTER 11: Sales-Assisted User OnboardingApproach each customer with the idea of helping him or her to solve a problem or achieve a goal, not of selling a product or service.- Brian Tracy“What do I need to do for you to try out a car today?”That sentence makes me cringe. It’s the stereotypical sales tactic of the used car salesperson. A few years ago, my wife and I were shopping for our first car together. We headed to a local car dealership. When we arrived, I made it clear to the sales rep that we didn’t intend to buy anything that day. But the salesperson persuaded us into his office with free popcorn and mochaccinos (who can resist!). Then he showed us the best deals of the day. We sat in uncomfortable chairs for the entire afternoon while this fellow disappeared, emerging time and again with a new, lower price written on a sheet of paper. After several rounds of this, we thanked him for his time and reminded him that we didn’t intend to buy a car that day. We excused ourselves, with a piece of paper in hand, sealed with a promise that the price was good for the next few days.Well, you can imagine what happened next.A couple of days later, we caved. I phoned him up to tell him I was ready to buy and would be over shortly. I believed it would be an easy transaction, with my shiny new car waiting for me! No more need for haggling. or so I thought.But when I got there, the same salesman told me the price was no longer available! Apparently, the manager who approved it made a mistake—at that price, the dealership would be losing money. I left furious over the bait-and-switch and arrived at another dealership that offered the car the price I wanted. Chances are you’ve also run into a bad experience with a salesperson as well, whether it’s buying a car, furniture, or even software. We often remember the bad experiences more than the good ones. But not every sales experience needs to be painful.Good salespeople can add a ton of value to the buying process. As we’ve seen in Chapter Three, when compared with a low-touch, product-led onboarding approach, sales-assisted onboarding can increase conversion rates by 3.5 times. Surprisingly, this can be true across all ranges of deal sizes for free trial B2B products.In this chapter, we’ll look at how the sales function can complement a PLG approach to user onboarding. My intention isn’t to provide an in-depth focus on sales in a PLG model. I’m sure someone could write an entire book on that topic. My goal is to show you: How adding salespeople benefits the user onboarding process How the role of a salesperson differs in a PLG organization When and how a sales team should reach out to users Just a quick note—if you don’t think you could ever benefit from a sales-assisted onboarding approach due to your product, target customer, or the market you serve, feel free to skip this chapter. Can you imagine Netflix hiring a bunch of salespeople to sell subscriptions? Me neither!How Sales Can Complement Self-Serve Onboarding"But we’re product-led. Our product is self-serve. Visitors can sign up and purchase it without the need of any salespeople, right?”I’ve heard this too many times to count. This isn’t always the case. Let me be clear—being product-led doesn’t automatically mean you’re anti-sales.In this product-led era, we have a desire to move away from sleazy sales tactics, don’t we? But good salespeople don’t use unscrupulous methods to manipulate someone into buying something they don’t need. When done correctly, they can add a ton of value to users in a PLG model. They make the product experience better.In general, there are three primary reasons to add salespeople to self-serve onboarding: 1. Direct users to experience the value of your product Sometimes even supposedly simple products have hidden hotspots that make it difficult for users to achieve their First Strike. This is where the “sales” team can be helpful. I place quotes around the word sales because this frequently looks more like support and customer success than sales. But the goal is the same: get the user to experience the value of your product, so they purchase it.In a PLG model, salespeople act more like coaches. Going back to the analogy of the bowling alley, coaches guide users to hit more strikes consistently. Above all, coaches identify where users run into limitations and find a solution to overcome those challenges. When free trial users get stuck installing the Appcues code snippet on their website, they don’t talk to support on the phone. They speak to an account manager, who connects them with the right people to solve their issues.2. Facilitate product penetration or expansionThis is the approach in the early days of Slack. Their sales team didn’t send out cold emails that tend to pile up in an inbox: “Hi, if you need intra-organizational communication assistance, you should check out Slack.” Typically, one team within an organization first adopts Slack into their workflow. The role of the “Account Manager” (pssst...it’s a salesperson) is to help get other teams within that organization to use Slack.This is an example of the “land and expand” strategy. After you “land” a few users within a large company to sign up for a product, you “expand” by selling more seats and additional features for the organization. Often, this requires a sales team to make persistent, deep connections with high-level decision-makers. Salespeople work at the account level, not the user level.3. Guide users in the buying processFor mid-size and enterprise companies, the buying process isn’t always straightforward. For large companies, barriers often exist to purchase a product. This could include security audits, sign-offs from the procurement team, and requests for customized Service Level Agreements. Whatever the reason, some users may want to talk to someone from your company. You could wait for them to schedule a meeting or book a call with prominent CTA’s like “Contact Us” or “Contact Sales” on various pages on your site. But smart product-led companies anticipate the needs of certain customers. They have sales teams armed and ready to reach out to these users before they run into barriers. Product-led onboarding is not about removing the sales function. It’s about supporting new users. They don’t badger, nag, or hound users with phone calls, emails, and text messages. Instead, they’re consultative and helpful.How The Role of a Salesperson Differs in a PLG OrganizationConsultative selling (also called needs-based or solutions-based selling) is the key to how a sales function can complement a PLG approach. This approach shares many similarities with a product-led mindset. Both practices: Put the needs of users front and center throughout the customer journey, instead of running through a list of the latest bells and whistles, hoping that something grabs the prospect’s attention Maintain a clear focus on helping users achieve their desired outcome instead of trying to close a sale at any cost Deliver a purchase experience that’s more about being heard than about being sold to You’re probably wondering, “How is this different from what good salespeople do in a sales-led organization?”Indeed, PLG doesn’t upend everything we know about sales. Many parts of the sales job remain the same. A deep understanding of the different stakeholders in the buying process remains important. There are still budget discussions to be had. And, of course, there is still a quota to hit.But there are some subtle yet important differences in the sales process of a PLG model:1. The salesperson shifts from chasing leads to coaching users In a traditional sales model, the salesperson explains, shows, and demonstrates the value of the product or service. Prospects might not even have a clear understanding of their problem and your solution yet. In a PLG model, users have already shown interest in a product. They’ve tried and tested out the product already. Hopefully, they’ve experienced the value of it. In this case, salespeople act more like coaches. In the analogy of the bowling alley, users are now familiar with the mechanics of bowling. They’ve achieved their First Strike and desired outcome. Coaches guide users to hit more strikes consistently. Above all, coaches identify where users run into limitations and find a solution to overcome those challenges. 2. The salesperson needs to frame the product in different ways to different audiences. In a PLG model, salespeople need to reframe the product’s value and benefits for the end-user and the department heads and executives. This is a subtle but important difference. What end-users value might be different from what executives value. To the end-user, they might be using the product to save time and perform their job better. For department heads and executives, they’re likely looking at the expected ROI of the product. Salespeople need the ability to pivot from one frame of reference to another quickly. They need to understand the pain points and opportunities for different stakeholders.3. The salesperson has to leverage product engagement data in the sales process. In a traditional sales model, salespeople usually qualify leads based on two factors: High-value interaction with marketing materials where leads become a Marketing Qualified Lead ( MQL) Customer or company fit based on a checklist of the most common attributes someone needs to embody to become a successful customer for your offering. If they meet this requirement, leads become a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)  After leads pass the qualification process, the sales process begins. It finishes when the prospect becomes a paying customer. Soon after, the user onboarding process starts.In a PLG model, an MQL could still exist. But since there’s a lower barrier to product-entry, the primary CTA for an MQL is the signup. Once users achieve meaningful value in the product, they become a Product Qualified Lead (PQL). Based on product engageme

CHAPTER 12: Where Do We Go From Here?Retention is the most important thing for growth.- Alex Shultz, VP Analytics and CMO at FacebookGreat businesses are built on high customer retention. It’s not about everyone hearing about a product—it’s about those who use it successfully. A great onboarding experience is a foundation for high customer retention.I had to learn this the hard way while consulting for a SaaS company a few years ago. Maybe you can relate?My team and I were spending thousands of dollars on ads and taking hours (and even weeks!) to build content for SEO.We were getting a ton of signups, which was awesome.But very few signups converted into paying customers. (So few that it was downright embarrassing.)I started digging into the data and realized that new users were getting stuck… but where?In the onboarding!That’s when I immediately started to optimize it as best I could. And, surprise, surprise, as soon as I was done, we saw a HUGE uplift in free users turning into paying customers. Not only that, I realized that users who completed the user onboarding process stuck around much longer than those who didn’t. I had to know if I could carry out the same optimization process for other companies and achieve the same excellent results. That’s when I started working with Wes Bush at ProductLed to see if this was a repeatable framework. Sure enough, it was!One of our clients doubled their trial-to-paid conversion rate. This drove a 315% increase in MRR in six months, just by removing one step in their user onboarding!It was clear Wes and I were onto something. And after seeing the results from our techniques time and again, I started documenting them so that I could share our discovery with others one day.That’s how the EUREKA framework was born:   Establish your onboarding team: To deliver an effective, immersive, and seamless onboarding experience for new users, your approach needs to be collaborative across functions and departments. Onboarding can't just be quilted together from the work of different departments. It must be holistic. If it's not, users receive a fractured experience.  Understand your user’s desired outcomes: The best way to get users to perceive, realize, and adopt the value of a product is to figure out the reason they signed up in the first place. Particularly, you need to define what value means to your users. Refine your onboarding success criteria and metric: Your team needs to have a clear picture of what it means to successfully onboard new users.  Evaluate and optimize your onboarding path: To minimize the time it takes for new users to experience a product’s value, you have to map out your user’s journey and determine which steps should be delayed or eliminated.  Keep new users engaged inside and outside of your product: To help guide new users to experience your product’s value, consider using triggers inside and outside your product. These could include product tours, welcome messages, progress bars for in-app triggers and onboarding emails, SMS and app notifications.  Apply the changes, analyze the results, and repeat: User onboarding is a continuous process and you need to continue to iterate on the onboarding experience. Congratulations! You’ve made it through the EUREKA framework to improve your user onboarding. One final tip: the most successful teams don’t look at improving their onboarding as a one-time action item. It’s a cyclical process that becomes vital to the success of your product. That’s why the EUREKA framework must become part of your product design and development process.When the onboarding experience is seamless, it feels like magic. It’s hard to revert to the way tasks used to get done. Get user onboarding right, and new users experience a “Eureka!” moment and embrace the product into their lives. All thanks to a better onboarding experience!