A challenge of being Built to Serve is that your good intentions often take over.

When you bring a new customer into your world, you might feel compelled to show off every single feature and function of your product to every possible stakeholder on the customer's side. You're doing your best to deliver value and get buy-in, but this nearly always backfires.

In most processes, but especially in onboarding: less is more. More stakeholders, more features, and more functions mean confusion, a diluted message and a lower likelihood of Customer Success.

Fight the urge to share the onboarding process with everyone in the company of the client and instead, focus your onboarding process solely on the use-case they bought your system to achieve. Then, partner with your customer and share more of what your product does throughout the course of the year. The distinction is that you meet your first commitment of helping the customer achieve what they paid you for in the first place. If you do overload them with information, they won't care or remember what you walked them through.

Note that your onboarding process is the prime location for expectation-setting and demonstrating your expertise. Remember, you are the expert, because you have a field-tested, proven way to get them from zero to value as quickly as possible. A component of this expectation-setting is as follows:

• Define what you need to do (actions)
• Define who from each side will do it (people)
• Define when it's going to happen (timelines)

Our favorite onboarding artifact is the Customer Roadmap to Success. It's our proven, best practice process of getting our clients from zero to value as quickly as possible. If you're interested in creating one of your own with our help, send us an email.

This simple document gives everyone a clear picture of what you will work on, plus it also a handy tool for your sales process. It will help you to prepare your customers for the resources and input they need to provide after they sign up. Customers feel more at ease when they understand what happens after the sale.

Each stage of the Customer Roadmap to Success has a particular set of objectives, processes, and sub-processes including timelines. You can measure each part of the process, then optimize it by introducing different resources and looking for opportunities to shorten timelines.