How not to onboard & train customers | Brian Balfour (Reforge, HubSpot)

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Brian Balfour is the ex-VP Growth at HubSpot and founder of Reforge (on-demand and live learning for product leaders and teams). He has experienced HubSpot’s growth from the early days and in this Churn.FM episode, he offers valuable insights on how teams should think when it comes to customer onboarding.

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1. Why customer training fails to match the key moments

According to Reforge, products should focus on 3 key moments in a customer journey:

• The setup moment

• The aha! moment

• The habit moment

Source: Georgian VC fund

To understand those moments, you need to do qualitative analysis for being able to answer:

• What the habit looks like?

• What that journey to reach the habit is?

🚨 Most customer success teams don’t have the resources and/or processes in place to think and act in that way.

They deliver initial onboarding materials and 1-2 calls and they consider the customer onboarded, when in fact they are not there yet.

Working from a conversion point forward doesn’t allow you to understand the destination you’re trying to get the customers to. Because of that, customer training is often focused exclusively on setup and not on activation.

✅ The successful way to approach this is to work backward by looking at successfully activated customers and understanding what events led to this. This way the customer training can focus on the series of events and behaviors customers need to go through.

“In the early days of HubSpot, it would take months for people to get to that established habit as the tool needed extensive setup.”

Brian Balfour, ex-VP Growth at HubSpot | founder of Reforge

2. Train customers by leveraging their existing habits

There are products where you’re tapping into a pre-existing habit and products where you’re creating a new habit. The latter is very difficult as generally humans and organizations stick to their existing behaviors.

Ask your customers about their behaviors in relation to the value you’re aiming to offer them and map the customer training onto the habit pattern that makes sense for your team: Daily → Weekly → Monthly → Quarterly → Every 6 months → Annually.

Source: Conifer Research

“The Calm meditation app team nailed this by tapping into the daily habit of sleep”

Brian Balfour, ex-VP Growth at HubSpot | founder of Reforge

3. Train customers with the right use case(s)

If you look at customer training where the customer ended up churning fairly fast, you’ll realize that some of those failures happened because the customer’s use case wasn’t the right one for your company at that given time, and some were because customer onboarding failed.

Every product and service is built for a specific type of use case. Customer success teams as well as other teams in the company need to be aware of who that is.

Each use case is pulling the customer onboarding and activation flow in different directions and it creates chaos. You’ll be able to layer additional use cases on top of the main one over time.

“At HubSpot we had 4 different use cases at first, the super technical marketeer, the enterprise marketer, the SMB owner, and the Mid-market VP Marketing, and we had to double down on only one”

Brian Balfour, ex-VP Growth at HubSpot | founder of Reforge

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See you at the next one,

Akis 👋