Customer Onboarding for MedTech: Your Most Valuable Opportunity

It’s a bold claim to state that for MedTech companies, customer onboarding is the singular most important customer interaction. But hear me out.

We all know how important first impressions are, right?

Well, your onboarding process is your first interaction with your customer. Getting this interaction right enables your organization to solidify trust, accelerate your customer’s ROI, and reduce ongoing support costs.

But hold on a second… marketing and sales teams already had dozens of interactions with these customers before they purchased—so how can onboarding be the first customer interaction?

Your sales and marketing teams represent your brand, it’s true—but those interactions were largely transactional, focused on motivating a prospect to purchase. Your onboarding process is where your prospect becomes your customer. As a customer, they are emotionally and financially invested in your business and trying to realize your promise of a future reality.

The customer onboarding phase is a new paradigm in your relationship together. Getting it wrong will set the tone for future engagements and erode the confidence earned during the prospecting phase. This is why onboarding is the centerpiece of an effective customer experience.

Customer Onboarding in B2B and MedTech

I have spent the better part of a decade building onboarding processes for business models and industries with complex buying journeys and large adoption curves. In these environments, onboarding is a defining moment for customers and decides whether this new relationship will be successful and profitable.

This is particularly true in MedTech, where end-users and teams impacted by onboarding and adoption are seldom involved in the buying journey.

Why Is Customer Onboarding So Critical For MedTech Organizations?

In MedTech, customer onboarding programs are critical to success and outcomes due to the nature of healthcare work. In these sensitive environments—regulation, human impact, and complexity are high, leaving little room for distraction. If a process or a solution is too cumbersome to engage with—or it is difficult to achieve results—healthcare providers will quickly discard it and attend to more pressing matters.

What’s more, onboarding and implementation involve multiple stakeholders, some of which will meet your organization and its solutions for the first time during onboarding. In other words, it’s a perfect storm of complexity and urgency, leaving little room for mistakes and patience.

For your customers, onboarding is a time of uncertainty, disruption, and anxiety. Easing them through this phase builds trust in your organization/brand, solutions, and support staff. Ensuring they achieve results engrains your organization into their lives and creates advocates.

Your customer onboarding process represents the perfect opportunity to set a great first impression. You will never have a better chance to connect with and delight your customers. If you can ensure your customers achieve results in an effective and pain-free process—you will solidify the relationship and secure future revenue potential.

The stakes are high. Get this right.

A Well-Executed Customer Onboarding Program Is A Strategic Advantage.

As stated, an effective onboarding process is a competitive advantage for your organization.

When you have a well-organized and branded onboarding experience that can ensure results, you can leverage it in your buying journey.

Frequently, as deals approach closing, customer concerns arise. Anxiety about achieving outcomes, disruptions to the business, and fear of change often slow down progress and elongate the sales cycle. Often these are overcome by influential stakeholders who make demands of their organizations or use their authority to push down everyone’s concerns. Those worries and fears don’t go away—they transfer from the sales process to your onboarding teams.

With a well-defined implementation process, your sales team is equipped to address the emotional blockers during the sales cycle—easing concerns and outlining the path to outcomes. This makes implementation more manageable and creates a significant advantage over any competitors who can only offer platitudes and promises.

A repeatable onboarding process is an asset that your marketing teams can advertise, your sales team can leverage, and that your customers will spread through word-of-mouth.

The Power to Scale

Most MedTech customer contracts have a payment provision that ties a payment percentage to successful delivery and implementation. Streamlining your onboarding process enables your business to recognize revenue quicker. Furthermore, when you operationalize and simplify your implementation process, you increase your capacity, lower cost, and remove bottlenecks to growth.

Delight Your Customers

To create customer advocates who engage with and share your brand—you will need to ensure their outcomes. Advocates are more likely to spend money with your business and will be less likely to leave. Look at advocates as your best source of stable growth. Your best opportunity to create advocates is to ensure they achieve their first success quickly during onboarding.

Credit: NeilPatel.com

When a customer achieves their first success—their natural reaction will be to engage with your brand more fully. They’ve now experienced the benefit—it’s time to turn up the reward dial.

When customers successfully achieve value and benefit from your solutions, they are less likely to churn and more likely to become loyal. In other words, ensuring your customers achieve results will keep your customers longer and integrate your solutions into their lives.

Grow Your MedTech Business With Effective Customer Onboarding

Want to expand your revenue, increase satisfaction, and lower cost-to-serve? Create a customer onboarding process that removes hurdles, teaches your customers how you do business, and optimizes chances of achieving results.

Don’t leave this critical moment of success up to chance.

Get your marketing, sales, AND service teams involved. Leverage their expertise to provide a seamless experience that’s easy on your customers.

The truth is… healthcare providers have enough to worry about—make it easy for your customers to succeed.

A seamless and effective customer onboarding process in the world of MedTech doesn’t have to be elusive.