In this webinar hosted by Emanuel, founder of How About Some Marketing, special guest Ramli John, an expert on B2B onboarding, shares valuable insights and strategies on improving the onboarding process to enhance user experience and achieve customer success.
Emanuel introduces How About Some Marketing as a hub for marketers to hone their skills, especially in the fast-paced world of digital marketing influenced by AI. Ramli John, author of Product-Led Onboarding and Eureka, emphasizes the importance of understanding users’ functional, emotional, and social success to create a smooth onboarding journey.
The session covers the three dimensions of user success, detailed through the User Success Canvas, and provides actionable steps for segmenting and personalizing onboarding experiences. Ramli also discusses the importance of maintaining a human touch in SaaS platforms to build trust, especially as AI increasingly dominates the future.
The webinar concludes with a discussion on common onboarding mistakes and practical tips on creating effective, user-centred onboarding experiences.
Key Takeaways
Onboarding is everyone’s job. Great onboarding connects marketing, product, and customer success.
First impressions define trust. The early moments shape long-term loyalty.
Success has three parts:
- Functional success: what customers can do now.
- Emotional success: how they feel about that success.
- Social success: what others say about their achievement.
Emotional connection drives retention as much as product performance.
The User Success Canvas helps teams visualize what success looks like from the user’s perspective and align on shared goals.
- Personalize onboarding for different customer segments.
- Simplify complexity with small, guided steps that build confidence.
- Show your human side through tone, visuals, and personalized communication.
- Avoid generic tours. Tailored experiences create real loyalty.
Episode transcript
How to Turn First Impressions into Long-Term Customer Success
Emanuel: And welcome. Good evening, good afternoon, or good morning everyone who’s watching us. My name is Emanuel, your host for How About Some Marketing? It’s my pleasure and privilege to have the Ramli John as a special guest tonight for this upcoming webinar.
My name is Emanuel and I’m the founder and your host tonight of How About Some Marketing. Many ask: what’s How About Some Marketing? – How About Some Marketing? It’s a hub. For marketers to get better at their marketing. I started this project sometime, I thought about this project sometime around 2018, and it’s a place that I wish I had to turn to, to ask all my questions and to connect with my peers and to essentially get better at what I do, because marketing, especially digital marketing tends to change quite fast. You wake up and in the morning the game is completely changing. And especially now with the AI paradigm, and I wouldn’t be much of a marketer. If I want, encourage everyone to go to howaboutsomemarketing.com and subscribe to the newsletter and make sure that you are, keep in touch with us and that’s where you’ll see the upcoming webinars, the recording of this webinar.
And essentially all the information that we are trying to put together. That being said, I think we’re good to start. Ramlili, it’s a privilege and a pleasure to have you as a guest. As I’ve told you this before and told in the newsletter the first saw you at a workshop that you hosted in Toronto and I’ve been following your activity throughout the years and, I think that many people are actually not aware of the the positive impact their activity have in other people’s businesses, lives, and so forth. And let me tell you that you are one of those people because I have here two, two books. You’re the author. And appreciate I’ve successfully applied many of your strategies, many of your frameworks.
Many of the things that even in this new book, Eureka, and I won’t be spoiling more, I’ll let you share more of the information, but I’ve successfully applied in different endeavors that I was involved in different projects, different businesses where I was consulting, and sometimes just a different perspective and just a small tweak can mean a difference and can break those pain points.
That being said, I won’t do any justice if I won’t pass the virtual microphone to you. And if you wanna do just a brief introduction, and then take it over completely. In the meantime, reminder to put the comments here. And hello everyone. Hey, Elena from Toronto. Kevin from Arkansas. De are from Toronto.
We have a bunch of people. Ramlili, the virtual stage is yours.
Ramli: Thank you. I appreciate you. Let me share my screen and introduce myself here. Share share screen.
Awesome. Awesome. There it is. My, my gift of me celebrating. Welcome to today’s session. Emanuel, thank you so much for the invite here. How about some marketing? And I’ve been following a newsletter for some time now and I’m excited to be here to really take the stage and kinda share a little bit about onboarding and how one key takeaway that you can apply to your, wherever you’re working at, whether you’re in marketing or product marketing or even product. A little bit about me. Emanuel’s already shared a little bit about the books that I’ve written. My name is Ramli John. I’m the father of Delight Path. I help B2B companies with their onboarding experience.
It’s a critical part of the journey that I believe even marketing has a huge role to play in. I’ve also ridden. A couple of books like Emanuel mentioned The product led onboarding and as well as Eureka, which just came out in June. So I’m excited to be sharing with you a little bit about that book.
Before we get started, I love asking interactive questions. I love to hear if on a scale to one being bad, to 10 being the best, how would you rate your onboarding experience? And if you’re a consultant, maybe pick a product. Let’s say whatever product that you have, that you use, a software product, so to speak.
Whatever that is. Maybe I can put a Emanuel on the spot and ask you a product that you’re working with or a company that you have seen. How would you rate their onboarding experience?
Emanuel: I would put our thank Kevin on the spot. But we have some people in the in the chat, seven, six to seven. So I would say it’s fairly, the industry average would be between six and seven.
Ramli: Yeah. You can also think about the onboarding experience for a community. That’s actually something that people don’t think enough about, which onboarding for communities is such a critical key moment of that time. And I’m really, cool to see a lot of six and sevens here. That means you guys are doing a well good job.
So good to hear. When people think about onboarding, they make a mistake, and I shared this on LinkedIn that this meme of this guy who skips several steps way ahead of everybody else. And what happens here is when they skip ahead they go right into, oh, let’s launch a product tour, or for marketers, what can they control?
Let’s send another onboarding email. Or tweak something. And they keep all of this important stuff that is important to really get the foundation right. And what is that foundation? And I wanna share with you a little bit, one tactic, one approach, or one framework that I use, I share with this with all my clients, anybody that I work with.
It’s something that I really define user success, and there’s different things that you skip, like user research, drop off analysis, user journey mapping, all many different things. Let me give you one takeaway for this evening or after wherever you’re at. Before I do this, one thing I’m gonna share with you is part of this framework, the book, Eureka, this book that I, that Emanuel shared, this book that I’ve written here.
Aha. Emanuel also bringing it up. It’s exactly a framework. It’s a acronym for five things. And those five things are first of all, establishing a team; that means that you’re, I really do believe, especially in B2B the biggest barrier to success, to customer success, to onboarding success is not the product.
Friction is actually team-wide friction. What I mean by that is often the journey from marketing to sales. To product and customer success is often disjointed, and that’s why the experience for the customer is oh my goodness, what’s happening? What I saw earlier is totally different from what I see in the product.
Or maybe you’ve seen this before where you’re getting a bunch of emails and you’re getting annoyed because you’ve already done some of them already. The actions. That’s why first step, the E is establishing a team. Because I really, truly believe that it takes a cross-functional team to fix a cross-functional problem, which is onboarding.
The second is to understand success. That’s what we’re gonna be digging into today. That means understanding what success look like for users and customers. The third is reverse journey mapping. That’s the RE of the Eureka, and I dig into that in the book. And then. Fourth is keeping the users engaged, the customers engaged in the product and outside of the product.
And finally, is to apply, analyze, and repeat. What I mentioned. I’m gonna be focusing on that understand user success piece. And I like to think about onboarding as this. People think what is onboarding? How do you understand success? I like to think of onboarding actually like a coach or a mentor or a teacher.
And if you. Stop for a moment and think about the best teacher, mentor, or coach you’ve ever had, what did they do differently? I’d love to see that in, in the chat if you can. What did, they do differently? And sorry to put you on the spot against Emanuel. What did your, oh, I see some. This is, yeah.
Take your time. Take your time. Take your time. Yeah. I’ll put you on the spot, Emanuel. What did, please, what does your, a good coach or mentor or teacher you’ve had before what did, they do differently than the other ones? The other teacher mentors and coaches you’ve had?
Emanuel: I would say a successful one had a long-term vision and trusted probably the process more than everyone else.
And including myself.
Ramli: Yeah. Yes. I see I see what is that,
Emanuel: Delia? Give proper feedback.
Ramli: Yep. Give proper feedback. That’s good. And what you mentioned is giving you a long-term vision, Emanuel, that’s what you mentioned? Yes. For me, it was a teacher in high school, actually a physics teacher. I grew up in Brampton.
I went to Brampton Centennial, and my physics teacher was name was Dr. Dermanic. I remember him starting off the class and asking everybody what did they wanna be when they grow up. And he tried to tie everything, all the lessons about that to the class. And so if he’s talking about force, he’s talking about it in terms of, oh, you want to be a businessman.
Think about the force of the, markets or like the, for if you wanna be a police officer, the force of your punches. I’m not entirely sure, but he always tried to tie it back to what is the end goal? And that’s what I truly see what great onboarding does. If I had to begin an analogy to what it is, onboarding is really a journey.
A journey for our users. For your customers to go from their struggling moment to becoming to achieving the desired outcome. And somebody shared this to me once and it’s perfect. Where you’re bringing your users customers to is towards their promised land. The pro, what is their promised land? What is their land flowing with milk and honey?
But the challenge here is there’s this chasm, there’s this big divide between them. It’s a ocean full of fear and doubt and maybe lack of skills and lack of time. And a lot of this emotions and barriers really block that from truly happening. And what onboarding is: a sturdy bridge that makes them feel secure to cross over towards that promised land and the key to every beginning of building a great onboarding experience it’s really about understanding what is that desired outcome, what is that promised land? What is that new way of being with your product? And I would argue that this is really where. And we need to start here. And onboarding is just a key there. So that’s where I wanna share a little bit about in the next, I’d say 15, 20 minutes to talk about understanding success.
Because if somebody asks you what is success for your users, they usually focus on only one out of three things here. And I would argue there’s actually three components, three dimensions, as I described in the book. Two user or customer success. And there’s three components. Starts off with the one that, that, Hey, if I ask you right now, what is your product’s user success, or what is, how would your customers describe your product success?
They would usually go up and describe it in this first way, which is the functional outcome. And this is what I described this as feeling and touching, and usually functional outcome can be described as seeing what do your customers or users see themselves being able to do that they couldn’t do before.
And a really great product that describes this in the signup and even onboarding process is a product called Wave. And they got, they’re Toronto based company that got acquired by. Into it. And during the sign of flow, they have this microcopy here it says, we’re designed to get you paid three times faster.
And that really gets to the functional outcome. And often when people describe the functional success of their product, they describe it in, oh, we help them give beautiful invoices, which is what Wave does. But at the core of it, it’s really talking about, what is the core, what is the deeper layer outcome of that?
And that is getting paid three times faster. That’s what entrepreneurs want, and this is what their product is built for. If you’re an entrepreneur, you want to get paid three times faster. Cash is the lifeblood of a business, and they’re really describing to you your functional outcome. If you’re an entrepreneur and you would get excited about this. That is the first one, the functional outcome.
The second it’s about emotional success. People don’t think enough about this. I understand that in the B2C world, in consumer apps, emotional success is important, right? But in the B2B world I would argue that emotion plays a bigger role because when your average value for contracts could be up to a hundred grand.
I recently helped a company purchase a product and they paid $350,000 for a year access for our product. And that might not be unheard of, but if you’re the one who brought that product in and it fails, now think about the fear of being possibly laid off because you chose a product that didn’t bring the outcome you suggested, and that’s why often I think about outcomes or emotional success as negative emotions that your product is helping your users avoid, or positive emotions that your product is trying to bring into that specific experience there. And what are those emotional description or journey or that promised land emotion that they might feel because the people who are buying your product are not B2C or B2B. They’re human to human. They are human and humans are emotional being as much as a human being, and that’s why we have to play into that as well. A great way to really tap into emotion is by social proof, so few ways to do social proof. Another way to that Wave does it with the same example a little bit later in their micro copies is over $24 billion in invoices sent.
And I really love that because when I hear that and I’m an entrepreneur. Money is, cash is the lifeblood of my business. I wanna feel safe. I wanna feel secure. I wanna feel confident that when I use a product that’s dealing with the lifeblood of my business, that is gonna work. And that’s why I, to me, this is a very emotional play.
When you’re describing social proof, you’re actually playing into that emotion of that person. Obviously, you can call it out to feel confident with your product. We can see in that a little bit. That’s a second one that we often don’t think about. The third type of success is social success. This is another one that’s often, has a huge myth and often misinterpreted or misunderstood as a success because when you think about social success and you hear the word social, the first thing that comes to mind is social network. And you’re thinking my product is not a Facebook or Instagram or a LinkedIn. But once again, I ask you, if you are selling to humans, you are selling to a person in a company, let’s say B2B, though, that human isn’t just an emotional being. They have a social structure, they have a boss, they have a colleague, they have a friend, and the way that your product actually comes across has huge impact, especially if they have to share something created by your product.
And I can give you an example. So social success is about what your user or customer wants to hear from their colleagues, friends and family to that say about them. A great example I found is with Canva in their ad, and I really love this and I know there’s a lot of marketers here, of course, maybe it’s exclusively marketers, but this ad from Canva, I love it because they really play into emotion.
But in, in also social success, it says, no design experience, no problem. Canva makes it easy for anyone to create professional designs, feel professional; designs that are sure to get you notice that last part, I highlighted it because really what that’s calling out is you’re gonna be making designs that your bosses, your colleagues will say, wow.
I can’t believe that Emanuel designed this, or I can’t believe Ramli designed this. They didn’t take any design courses and that kind of thing. You describing that and calling that out helps your users, your potential prospects, see that they are having social success.
And that’s why I would say that this is often forgotten and not tapped enough in terms of onboarding emails or onboarding screens or copy and anywhere else.
And just to put it all together, the three parts of success is functional success. That is, what do you see themselves being able to achieve Emotional success, which, what does your product help users or customers feel or avoid feeling? And social success is really about what do they want to hear their friends, colleague, and family say about them?
I wanna share this tool that can really help you bring this together. I call this the user success canvas. I’ve also been described this as Customer Success Canvas, and I’m happy to share a link to it right now. And I’ll drop it in the chat for you to download and take with you. But what this does is there’s a human in the middle and if you know anything about design workshopping, you might have seen this before.
But I have tweaked it to align with this framework that I’ve created around this three dimension of success. On the very far right is the eyes of this drawing, and it’s what do they see? What do your users see after they’ve achieved their desired outcome, your product, what couldn’t they do before that they could do now?
And you’re, describing the end, the promised land. They have now used product successfully. What do they see themselves doing? Feeling at the bottom is where the heart is. So what emotions do they have? Feeling after, what emotions do they avoid feeling as a result of this hearing is? What do they hear their colleagues say about them and what did their friends say about them?
And I’m gonna walk you through this. This is something often when I work with a clients, I would actually bring in that cross-functional team to workshop this together in Miro or Canva. Or even in Fig Jam. So whatever collaborative tool you have or mural, if you’re in person, you can use sticky notes and you would bring them all together in different teams, somebody from product, somebody from marketing, somebody from customer success, and somebody in sales, even if that’s part of your company. And we would workshop this together and ask them to put down the sticky notes. And let me give you an example of what this looks like with Canva. Of course, Canva’s an easy way to create anything, any kind of designs, and you can create presentations and slide decks.
And you can create ads with this as well. And they’ve really called out what their, personas are because part of this Canva is that you get to call out specific personas or user segments that you have. They have six segments that they target, Canva, and we’re gonna focus on the small business here.
So for small business owners, what do they care about? What is their success? So at the very top, I would put in the name camera for small businesses I put in this session. How about some marketing? and the date and the different version of it. And then in terms of what do they see? I would put in, and this is very important, I would actually, every sticky note has to be from the perspective of the customer.
So in this case, you would say it from the perspective of your customer really, truly builds empathy. Says, I want to be able to create ads and visual slides without bothering my designer again. Second could be I want to see, have speed from idea to design. Third could be I have no design skills and I wanna see beautiful templates that I can choose from.
That is the functional success. These are and outcomes for our use of success dates. In terms of emotion, I wanna feel empowered to create anything. I wanna feel like a design pro without being one terms of social success. It’s slightly different here. I would actually call out who the character is.
That’s saying this specific phrase, so for example, my coworker, that my coworker could be saying, wow, I didn’t know you have design skills. That’s amazing. Or your customers could be saying, wow, your website ads and social posts are beautiful. So now you’re truly getting into the mind of that specific customer and kind of describing this and this now this end outcome, Canva.
What’s powerful about it’s not just powerful for onboarding. So we saw with Canva, you can apply this to ads and content and blog posts and marketing, right? Because now you are really describing what the end goal and outcome is, and that gets them even more excited to sign up and actually get into the product as quickly as possible and get activated.
So that’s, what this canvas does. The two magic is when you bring different people and different voices into this mix from your team and you would have maybe opposing or even conflicting voices around this, especially if you have data from user research and anything else you have. This would be even more so powerful when you have that as well.
Of course, you can repeat this process for other ones. So let’s say if you wanted to do teachers, right? If you wanted to do Canva for teachers, it would be a totally different success. So a different segment, different success. And going back to the bridge analogy, different segment, you might have a totally different bridge or onboarding experience for them.
And so for, this feature. It might be totally different. You might have, in terms of what do they see, maybe it’s, I wanna see myself create beautiful presentations that truly wow my students. Or I want to be able to create slides that takes minutes instead of hours with PowerPoint, where I wanna see templates that truly empower my students and feeling I, I want to, as a teacher, I might wanna feel less overwhelmed. I’m overwhelmed with creating educational content and teaching plans. I don’t want to go through so much work to truly create some slide decks, and I want to feel empowered to build those designs. And of course, in terms of what I can hear, I wanna hear my students say, wow, this is the best class I’ve ever taken.
This is the most engaging class I’ve ever had, and maybe other teachers are like, how did you create those slide decks so quickly without having to stress out about it so much? So now you’re truly describing. End success stayed there. And that’s the power of this user success canvas. Like I mentioned, I dropped it in the link there.
And that is just one out of many steps that I wanted to share with you. I truly wanna make this practical for you to take home and not necessarily give you homework as a teacher, but to have you take away something that could be powerful and, you can apply to anything that you’re working on right now and really level it out.
That’s all I wanted to share for today. And in terms of q and a, we have some time for questions, but I do wanna share that I’m running a course this coming up next week. And if anybody wanted to join, I’m happy to share this VIP 15 code that you can use and join the course if you do work in product onboarding, if you know anybody who does, we are starting next Tuesday, so I’m excited for, that.
Just drop the link in the chat and that’s all I wanted to share with you. And Emanuel, thank you for you. If you have any questions, I’m happy to answer them. And if you came up with a question, come up with a question after the session, you’re like, oh, I should have asked that question. It is also my email address is on the screen, and feel free to also connect with me on LinkedIn as well, so I’m happy to do that.
Emanuel: Thank you. Thank you so much, Ramli. Yes, I do have a couple of questions and I was taking notes and I hope everybody did. Definitely. I’ll turn back to this this recording and I’ll also follow the book -pro tip that I, I’m gonna share some insights. Ramli has been sending his newsletter and.
Many of the frameworks shared here are included in his newsletter. One thing I’ve noticed right now, and I wanted to, not the question, but something to state, it’s important to differentiate and have different journeys, different stories for different users. Not so many actually do this, and it’s, there, obviously there’s many things that overlap, right? But a teacher is not the same as a business owner, as we have seen in the case on Canva, have different problems and maybe they, don’t even know what actually the solution can make or break essentially a business. So that’s something that I wanna highlight from what you said.
And does anyone have any questions for Ramli right now? And in the meantime, I’m just gonna also drop a couple of my personal notes because obviously I’m a user. I use probably too many tools like everyone else, especially in the AI paradigm. We sign up, we’ve seen a lot of things and many are, essentially a frustrating experience overall and I wouldn’t say I’m, I will drop completely, but I get discouraged when the onboarding process is doing friction, and even after the initial interaction with the tool overall and case in point, this StreamYard all of a sudden after a couple of months, and I’ve been using it for a while, they think tend to show more popups, more information, more features that may or may not be of interest of me.
But even now they have this tool in beta show comments on the stage that was turned on. And I am not prepared and sometimes the problem is, it is not just one feature. There’s like plenty that you need to go through and it’s similar to workplace. So not necessarily related to today’s topic, but what are, what’s, what are your thoughts and a couple of things that you share based on that?
So what’s happening after the initial onboarding?
Ramli: Yeah, you’re right. I think there has been a lot more popups recently. So really making sure that it’s contextual. That’s a word I think that’s gonna be super powerful in terms of making sure you’re showing it at the right time. And great analogy I have is when you go shopping, right?
You’re shopping, you enter into, let’s say Walmart or some other store. The person greeting you won’t suddenly grab your hand and oh, here’s the bread, here’s the cheese, here’s the chicken, and here’s the clothes at Walmart. They’re gonna ask you, Hey what are you here for? But here to get bread to make some sandwich or a year to shop for the fall at tire because it’s getting cold in Canada.
And that is now, that they know that, okay, hey, let me bring you the best deals about that. So it feels less intrusive and more actually higher conversion potentially when the prompts the, upgrade questions and direction is really. catered towards what the user truly, what the customer truly is looking for, and so they don’t feel overwhelmed and they get directed to what they truly want.
Emanuel: We do have a question note here from Delia. I like how you mentioned the emotional aspect for the customer. That is a must for services too. As we know that people make decisions based on emotion. A hundred percent. What little touches would you say go the long way in building trust right away?
Ramli: Ah, man Services is really all about trust.
It’s about the emotion is do I feel safe? That I can commit my resources and my finances to you doing what you said that you’re gonna, the service that you’re gonna provide for me. And so it’s all about that human touch because small human touches like the first email that you sent and the thank you email and the thank you page.
Like it’s how do you build and amplify for in multiple ways. And a few things you can do is I show gifts. That’s the one way do it. Like in emails and the thank you page when they book a service with me a service call in terms of oh, I wanna work with you this, confetti page.
Even the tone that you use when you send a confirmation email matters a lot, because like you’re making them feel assured that they’re making the right choice. And obviously content marketing and the really building trust through mastery and education is gonna be super important because that, once again, it’s all about trust.
It’s how do you make them feel secure that they, that even before they have that first on onboarding call with you, that they already feel like they know you and they already feel secure that they’re with the right person who can help them achieve their outcomes?
Emanuel: That’s a great question. I personally would love if they’ll be less rude, of this services because I don’t know, in the AI paradigm, I’m still amazed how many are still not doing that.
One more from Kevin in SaaS platforms, which are increasingly common interactions, feel somewhat impersonal. How can trust best be nurtured in such an interaction?
Ramli: Yeah, SaaS platforms. How do you cultivate that trust? I think that’s true. I think SaaS, especially as they go enterprise, I feel like they lose their personality a little bit.
And I, think that’s a few, some of the stuff I mentioned is really a great way to make that feel more secure and feel more trustworthy that they are actively feeling more connected with the product a few ways. It’s cheesy, but having, a mascot helps a ton.
When Reddit came out with their cute robot. I see a lot of company B2B companies have this, they have a mascot. I think that helps. A MailChimp, you ha used to have Freddie, the MailChimp, or Freddie the Chimp as their mascot. It’s one way to do it. Another way is more human.
Have a face of the company or even show the humans behind your company. If it’s email from customer success. Don’t just say customer [email protected].
It would be [email protected], and you’ll have your face on the avatar of that email. And it just really makes it more human. And I think Emanuel, you’ve been talking a lot about the AI paradigm that we’re in.
It’s gonna be a differentiating factor to be truly be working, knowing that you’re working with a human, you’re like, oh, I’m not working with an AI chat bot or an automated email or in another AI guest wizard. There’s a human behind this. And I value that more. because I think the world we’re going to towards is going towards more automated AI driven, AI powered AI future. And that I would be interesting to see the differentiating factor of being human is once again a competitive advantage, which would be interesting. So we’re showing human or having a human touch would be very powerful.
Emanuel: That’s all that’s gonna be left of us in case we don’t have a Matrix scenario where we turn to batteries.
That’s why I try to build this community amongst other people, other marketers together. As Alexandra has another question. Most of our team is very technical. What’s your top tip for simplifying SaaS onboarding so clients actually understand and use all the features?
Ramli: Yeah, I would say think about it like so how would I do it if the pro product is very complex, so they use all the features.
I would think about it like a video game and obviously I’m a big fan of Super Mario. You can see behind me there’s the Super Mario Star, the Super Mario, and then there’s obviously an image of Super Mario. I do that because I truly believe one of the best onboarding experiences is Super Mario. And if you started off that game at the very last stage, you’re finding the bad guy.
Bowser, you’re gonna be overwhelmed. And the way that I think about it is I would chunk or segment or split up my onboarding into stages. I would go with easy mode. So World one dash one is easy. You just running on the right and the enemies are easy. The challenges are easy. The leaps are easy. World one dash two.
Now it’s a little harder. You’re underground and there’s new enemies. So that’s how I think about onboarding complex products is what does your world one dash one look like? The easy mode, and then what does the intermediate mode look like and what does the hard mode look like? And like segmenting the experience so that they progress like a game.
And that the first one is easy and it’s short, and it’s compelling, it’s addicting. And the second one is slightly more challenging. And they get more hooked and they get deeper. And then the last one is a truly deep in there. So that’s on a very high level, not knowing your product, the philosophy and the approach that I usually take, obviously segmentation, like Emanuel mentioned earlier, is gonna be important because segmenting customers and users on what they truly care about is gonna be super valuable. because like my world, one dash one and your world might be totally different. So that’s the approach I would take in that situation.
Emanuel: Gamification.
Ramli: Yeah.
Emanuel: Thank you so much. If there aren’t any other question, I just have one more and probably I should keep this for my therapy session, but there’s, right now, recently I’ve been experiencing in, even before getting to know the user and one of the most popular CRMs out there, I signed up for a new account that I want, I had to set up and all those things and they, before even being able to play around with it and it’s new feature, they pass me for a verification and very fairly unnecessary complex process where I had to show, fill in with my information, my id, a picture and all those things sending me from mobile scan, the QR code and all those things. I don’t know. Is that what, are your comments Ramli in, this and I was so close of actually not proceed.
Ramli: Yeah. And they’re asking for your email they’re asking to verify email or phone number, is that what
Emanuel: no, the ID itself. So there’s they’re, sending sending me to another app with the QR code to securely obviously and privately upload my, my documents in order to provide a real human to sign up for that interesting.
Ramli: Is it like a finance tool or is it like some other thing? because that would be interesting.
HubSpot. HubSpot. HubSpot.
HubSpot. Wow, that’s weird.
Emanuel: Yeah. Yeah I was surprised because obviously I signed up and I’ve been using it for different clients for many times. So I kinda felt that it was a natural process, right?
So I’ve okay, let me do this. Let me set up everything. And all of a sudden we need to verify your credential. I think I’ve deleted the app right now, but it was one of those third party apps that actually connects you, submit your data your, a picture of yourself, a picture of your ID, driver’s license and all those things.
Then. That seems a little bit too much for yeah,
Ramli: that is weird. I would agree with that situation. Usually I only suggest that harder route. For two reasons. First reason is it’s a it’s the industry standard finance. Is one of them where you wanna secure that. Tax filing anything that deals with money or government id, I would expect that.
So I had to do that when I sign up for my business bank account. I had to verify my id. Because that’s important. They don’t want, they could be, in trouble if they’re, they don’t verify the ID for several reasons around gambling or something like that, or bad actors or by people that taking advantage of the bank.
The second reason is if there’s a company that gets a lot of spam signups. So when they’re getting a lot of abusive behavior, maybe that’s reason why, but obviously there’s workarounds and software around that can, it can challenge us. So that is a weird experience for HubSpot, which I don’t think they’re either or they wouldn’t be finance and I don’t know if their product is being abused as much.
Emanuel: Perhaps. Yeah, because they have actually, there’s a total different experience right now. They’ve released tons of features. It’s a great tool. It always has been very complex. But right now, and especially in the AI paradigm, I’ve been amazed. So that’s why I recommended it to someone and I wanted to set it up and I say, oh, come on, I don’t want to get loan. I’ve not financing anything. Yeah. But it is what it’s, and one last question from Delia. It’s, what’s the most common mistake you’ve seen in onboarding?
Ramli: Yeah, I would say the common mistake often is as the product matures, I would. Really advice towards a more segmented experience where you ask users what is their goal?
What are they trying to achieve? That makes it a ton easier to bring people to what they truly value, their promised land, their success state, their aha moment, whatever you wanna call it. And like them calling out what I think is my success and bringing me there is important. I often sign up for products and that’s not the case, and they don’t get there with that.
So that’s one thing. The other thing and, that solves a lot of problems, I think often people think about onboarding as product tours and people think about oh let’s, just over point out everything. All of that can be solved by segmentation, right? When you’re truly pointing out what they care about rather than what your product or engineering cares about.
Because at the end of the day, value is not defined by your CEO. It’s defined by a customer. It’s what they care about. Value is what your customers care about, because they’re gonna, they’re gonna be the one who’s gonna pay for it. And so I would say that is if one biggest mistake it’s, that really, truly kneeling.
What are your, if you’re familiar jobs to be done, what are your success states, your user success dates for your product. And once you get that, everything becomes a little bit slightly easier.
Emanuel: Jobs to be done. That’s where I am with I’m halfway through your book right now. I was hoping to have it done by, today, but I’m taking my time and implement the things you share. So it’s not that. Since we don’t have any more questions, Ramlimi, I wanna thank you again so much for agreeing to do this tonight.
Hope to get a chance to do it again. I will reiterate one more time the links that you’ve, shared here, and we’re gonna include them in the show notes, in the YouTube description and in the newsletter. And if you are not sign up then how about the marketing.com is the place where you can sign up.
You should see a popup or a button that says newsletter over there, and you put in your information to make sure that you don. This night’s recording and the upcoming announcements, and of course other informations and resources that I’m sharing with you basically, I’m a marketer. You’re a marketer and that’s why we’re here to become better at our marketing.
And Ramli is running currently a promo again, with a discount that I’ve been putting I’ve put now on the screen. How long is the promo going until?
Ramli: Yeah, it’s until this weekend. So if you wanna sign up, that’ll be awesome.
Emanuel: Excellent, And the link is on screen. If anybody wants to reach out, is on LinkedIn is a good place to start and your website.
Ramli: Yes. Thank you. Yeah my, my LinkedIn I’ll drop it in the chat. Feel free to go there as well.
Emanuel: It’s been a pleasure and a privilege. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you all for being here tonight with us, for interacting and engaging and I took some notes, hope you took some notes, and of course, just once small tweak can actually make a significant impact.
Ramli, thank you so much. Awesome. Thank you. All the best everyone. See you next time. How about marketing.com
Ramli: Awesome. Bye for now.
