Are You a Horror or a Hero? How Customer Onboarding Makes or Breaks Your Revenue Growth Engine

Your company pours time and resources into winning deals, but what happens after the contract is signed determines whether customers become lifelong advocates or quiet churn statistics. While customer onboarding is the most critical part of the customer journey, it’s often the most overlooked. Over the years, I’ve helped dozens of companies unlock meaningful value during this pivotal stage, and clear patterns have emerged: companies fall into one of two camps—onboarding horrors or onboarding heroes.

Most companies start off in the horror zone. Some stay there. But others do the hard work to transform, align their teams, and deliver real revenue impact. My question for you is, are you a customer onboarding horror, or a customer onboarding hero? Let's find out. I’ll share real-world examples to show you the difference, and what it takes to transform.

The Horrors of Customer Onboarding

When implementations drag on and hard-won customers lose momentum before they see value, you are in the customer onboarding horror zone. The result? Frustrated customers, burned out teams, and customers leaving before they have a chance to renew.

A few years back, I worked with a company that was stuck in the onboarding horror zone. With a disengaged sponsor and countless iterations of onboarding programs in their archives, their great intentions were never executed, so nothing changed.

Here are patterns I see when companies struggle:

• Lack of executive sponsorship: Without an accountable leader, momentum stalls, and the new approach isn’t prioritized.

• Siloed teams: Without cross-functional collaboration, each team pulls in different directions to achieve their separate priorities and metrics.

• Too many people involved: When responsibility is spread too thin, accountability disappears.

• Constant redefinition without action: Teams repeatedly design and refine, but don’t execute. 

• No rollout plan: There’s no plan for piloting the new approach or integrating it into daily work.

• No measurable outcomes. Without clear baseline metrics or program metrics it’s challenging to know the impact of the new approach
  

The Heroes of Customer Onboarding

Now, let’s look at two companies that turned onboarding and growth around, and why they succeeded.

Hero Story #1: From Chaos to Control

When I started working with this company in the health-tech space, their sales reps were heroes, knocking sales goals out of the park every quarter. But there were huge costs to their so-called success. While the company celebrated countless new logos, the implementation specialists were pulling their hair out. Poor fit customers were a struggle to implement. Onboarding became a long and painful process leaving implementation consultants burned-out and demotivated. In addition, customers were so frustrated they paused and canceled their subscriptions, leaving sales reps to frantically re-negotiate with at-risk customers rather than selling to new customers. All the extra work to onboard unsuitable customers cost them upwards of $500,000 a year on top of delayed revenue recognition.

It was a true horror. But they were open to change. Together, we:

• Implemented an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP): Selling to customers who could realize value more easily reduced the implementation time and costs

• Defined an optimized onboarding framework: Leveraging my Orchestrated Onboarding® framework we built an onboarding program that delivered meaningful value, not just a login.

• Clarified swim lanes, roles, and responsibilities: By keeping the sales reps in their selling “lane” and the implementation consultants in their implementation  “lane” they avoided gaps and overlaps when working with customers.

With dedication and strong leadership, onboarding time and costs dropped by over 20% in the first year alone. They delivered faster value without burning resources internally or exasperating customers.

Hero Story #2: Full Organizational Transformation

Another company didn't just fix onboarding; they embraced full change management.

When I first assessed this company’s onboarding, I was baffled. I had never seen so many different roles engaged during the onboarding journey (over ten!). Processes at this practice management software company were chaotic and confusing to me, internal teams, and customers alike.   Throughout the onboarding assessment, 150 employees read and discussed my book, Onboarding Matters: How Successful Companies Transform New Customers Into Loyal Champions,  chapter by chapter over eight weeks. They discussed insights, and built understanding and buy-in across the company for the new approach. During my Keynote at their Customer Experience Kickoff, I shared industry best practices as well as key findings and recommendations from the assessment to further win the hearts and minds of customer facing teams.

As we built a new optimized onboarding framework, we also defined a new Onboarding Specialist role to conduct the onboarding journey. We built out frameworks and swim lanes for each role that engaged with customers, while also reducing the number of “cooks” in the onboarding “kitchen.” Next, they launched a formal training and certification program to uplevel existing team members and onboard new employees. They built the new processes into their existing onboarding software tool to ensure everyone consistently followed the new process. They treated change management as a serious priority—and it paid off. They are the biggest onboarding heroes in my book.

What Separates Heroes from Horrors?

Successful customer onboarding heroes:

• Secure strong executive sponsorship

• Align teams around customer value and a clear north star metric

• Take change management seriously—not as an afterthought

Commitment to customer value

Customer onboarding doesn’t have to be chaotic, costly, or confusing. Whether you're stuck in the horror zone or on the path to hero status, the key is recognizing that onboarding is not a one-team effort, it’s a company-wide commitment to customer value. Heroes align around clear goals, empower the right roles, and embed onboarding best practices into their culture, systems, and metrics.

If you're unsure where you stand or how to move forward, I can help. My Customer Onboarding Assessment uncovers where you're strong, where you're stuck, and what to prioritize next across five critical areas: people, processes, technology, scalability, and customer experience. Don’t wait for churn or chaos to be your wake-up call. Let’s turn customer onboarding into your competitive advantage.

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DONNA WEBER is the world’s leading expert in customer onboarding. For more than two decades, she has helped high-growth startups and established enterprises turn new and existing customers into loyal champions. Her award-winning book is Onboarding Matters: How Successful Companies Transform New Customers Into Loyal Champions. Learn more at donnaweber.com.