Why You Should Be Onboarding (and How We Go About It at Foleon)

Onboarding, who has time for that, right?

It’s true; we’re all short on time. But when you’ve chosen a new marketing software, you need to take the time to understand how it’s going to slot into your strategy, deliver results and achieve your marketing goals.

I’m Lars Steffen — Team Lead Customer Success at Foleon. In this blog, I’m sharing why you should be onboarding and how we go about it here at Foleon.

You can’t manage what you can’t measure

How do you go about defining success? Of course, success looks different for every client, but one thing we think you’d agree on is that you can’t manage what you can’t measure.

The biggest part of success is looking at onboarding as the start of a partnership; it’s not just training for the tool. But to become a true partnership, we need you to share your goals and understand your next steps from the beginning.

Onboarding at Foleon opens the door to more efficient content creation. And to unlock this, we need to leverage all the different features we have to offer.

So, what does onboarding look like?

The kick-off call

We start with a kick-off call to discuss the process and learn more about you, the customer. Then, we need to use this time to fill in any gaps, i.e. learning about your goals/KPIs, whether you have any campaigns coming up, and how you define success.

Design training

We offer two design training sessions with our amazing Professional Services Team — a basic one and a more advanced one where customers can learn how to navigate the backend and pick up some tips and tricks. Along with your design training, you also receive a custom template design consisting of 8 pages built by our internal design team. This template will be customized for the type of content you plan to create in Foleon and will utilize elements of your company's brand.

In addition, the customer will learn how to connect their Docs via CRM or Google Analytics (we integrate with CRMs including HubSpot and Salesforce). 

We run through everything you need to know before you hit that publish button.

Together we analyze your Foleon Doc

We sit with you and review your Foleon Doc. We want to check how it’s looking; after all, you want it to look flawless before you hit publish, and we do too. We give you the confidence you need to press publish.

Three weeks after you’ve published your first Doc, we meet with you again to assess how it’s performed against the goals and metrics we’d previously outlined. 

 

We set up a quarterly call to keep tabs on your progress and map out the next steps. We want you to succeed using this tool — if you succeed, we succeed; it’s that simple.

You want to be more efficient in your content creation process; you want to increase productivity to create content that elicits that ‘wow’ response from your audience. And we can help you deliver this. We can help empower your team through our tool.

But measuring results is a two-way process; we want to measure your campaign/Foleon Doc to check you’re on track and using the software as intended, but it’s essential you also hold us accountable for the action items we’ve outlined together.

The relationship doesn’t end between us at onboarding — it’s just the start of our journey together. 

Red flags when onboarding

Clear communication is key to making this relationship work, so we need that from the start. Therefore if the team is non-responsive, it’s a red flag.

Sometimes, those present on the kick-off call aren’t the same people who initially signed up for the software. They might not even realize what the tool does — it’s our job to educate whoever is on the call about the tool and the possibilities that lie within it.

It’s our job to motivate and excite your team into using the platform. My favorite part of the job in customer success is building and nurturing those client relationships from the very beginning, opening their eyes to the cool features built within the platform, and showing them how it will change their strategy for the better.

We want all customers to leave the onboarding process feeling pumped, confident, and ready to explore.

After the kick-off call, we monitor how the team uses the platform. Are you creating templates? Are you logging in regularly? To adopt the tool, you need to understand its value, so if you don’t log in, you don’t create templates, etc; these are all red flags. 

A successful onboarding example — Dice

If you currently use PDF downloads for your eBooks, guides, and long-form content, you’re in a similar situation to Dice. Like many, they were being prevented from measuring true engagement because of the static nature of PDFs.

In their kick-off call, they were very open about their internal problems and were excited about changing their processes and becoming more efficient.

Learn more from their short video below.

About to go through onboarding? Here are my top tips 

#1 Be as open and honest as possible

Be honest with yourself and us about your internal struggles. For example, what are you doing now that you think is inefficient or just isn’t working? The more open and honest you are with us, the better our relationship.

From the get-go, we need to deliver value. This means setting realistic goals and KPIs — for example, instead of ‘let’s deliver five awesome pieces of content as fast as possible,’ the goal becomes ‘let’s focus on delivering one perfect Doc, refining the process and learning as much as we go on.’

#2 Ask A LOT of questions

Not sure about something? Ask. Think it’s a stupid question? Ask anyway. It’s not just you learning in these calls; we’re learning from your questions too. We want to help you get the most out of the platform and to do that, you need to tell us what you’re thinking.

Don’t worry, though, if you’ve got questions after your initial onboarding session, reach out to one of the three teams working with you — professional services, customer success, and our support teams — we’re all here to help you at every turn.

#3 Give critical feedback

Creating a feedback culture is vital for our growth as a company. What kind of feedback do we mean? Well, is something missing? Do we need to develop something better? Do you have any feature requests? We can’t continue adding value to your platform experience without feedback like this.

Did you know? We’re recognized as a category leader by G2. 

To sum up 

I hope this blog has given you an insight into our pretty comprehensive onboarding process. 

We take onboarding seriously, and you should too. It’s the place where you’ll learn all about the tool, how to squeeze every last cent from it, and set yourself up for success. 

Interested in seeing our platform in action? Book a demo. 

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