The guide to onboarding your clients with Storyblok
Storyblok is the first headless CMS that works for developers & marketers alike.
We set up our Partner Program with the intention of building strong and long-lasting relationships with our partners. In order to do so, we have developed and continue to build an exceptional Content Management System (CMS) that meets the needs and requirements of our partners and your clients. In addition, Storyblok’s Partner Program offers agencies the support to expand your business through unique benefits like partner listings, co-marketing budget, learning center, an app store, revenue share, etc. All of these benefits serve a joint purpose of helping you, our partners, identify new leads, acquire new clients, and most importantly, create long-lasting relationships with them.
To help you, our partners, create these long-lasting relationships with your clients, we assist with many aspects of the process, one of which is client onboarding. Simply put, client onboarding is the first step of the client journey, and, arguably, the most important since it sets the stage for your relationship with them. Taking a client-centric approach to onboarding will increase the client lifetime value and might transform new users into brand advocates. As with most things, this is easier said than done, but worry not! This article is meant to help you set up a client onboarding process for using Storyblok.
)
Why is it so important to have a successful onboarding process?
Client onboarding is the process of welcoming new clients and ensuring they have a clear understanding of the services available to them. Having an efficient onboarding process will help you:
- Retain your clients: Continued service from your client means higher revenue.
- Get referrals: When your clients are happy with the service you provide them, they are more likely to refer you to others, which means higher revenue.
We asked our certified partner The Bigger Boat about their opinion on the importance of having an efficient onboarding process. Here is, in a nutshell, what they told us:
“*Customer onboarding is very important to us. Although we need to learn a lot about a client, their products and customers to be able to make recommendations that have the highest chance of meeting their business and marketing objectives, we still complete a fuller onboarding process with every client when they become a customer. Onboarding is our way of ensuring they feel The Bigger Boat is an extension of their own team.*”
Building a customer onboarding strategy
Step #1: Create specific goals
The first step in setting specific goals is knowing your clients and their distinct needs. Do they have a content creation team? Are they externalizing these types of tasks? Do they have the resources for maintenance and development tasks? By asking the right questions, you will be able to pinpoint clear objectives and start working on an onboarding plan according to how they will use Storyblok and their business objectives.
Step #2: Establish an onboarding team
Ideally, in your relationship with the client, you already have a customer success manager or an account manager. Having a pre-existing relationship built on trust with the client, this person can further guide them into the next steps with the help of a subject matter expert, an instructional designer, and depending on the project size, a project manager. Each of these roles can be performed by more or less people. It is not uncommon that one person from your team can have two or more roles.
Step #3: Align the process to milestones and metrics
When setting up the onboarding plan, it is important to also set some milestones, metrics, and even deliverables, like course materials. Our recommendation is to discuss these with your clients and make sure you come to an agreement on what is considered a successful onboarding.
Step #4: Generate learning content
Best practices dictate that the documentation will contain detailed instructions and a custom step-by-step guide for each page and field. You can also rely on a more visual approach, using visual aids like video materials and click-tutorials of the actual project.
Step #5: Implement the onboarding program
Now that you have prepared a theoretical and practical approach, you can start implementing the onboarding program according to the established milestones and schedule. Our recommendation is to stay flexible during this process. While it is vital to keep the milestones and stay on track to reaching the objectives, the onboarding process can be fine-tuned during its run. Be an active listener in the relationship with your customer and adjust accordingly to their feedback. This can also be helpful for future onboarding processes to make note of errors and achievements, a type of “lessons learned” list.
Step #5: Follow up
During the onboarding process, it is important you check-in with your client at regular intervals to see if any new pain points have arisen.
How can Storyblok help in the onboarding process?
To begin with, Storyblok helps you generate leads through our Partner Listing, through our Sales and Partner teams, and via partner marketing initiatives. To find out more about these options and the benefits you can enjoy, read our article on How your agency can generate leads through a Storyblok partnership or reach out to one of our Partner Success Managers.
Once you have landed your client, we are here to help again. We understand how important the onboarding process for your clients is and for that reason, we offer all the support you need to create a strong relationship with your clients from the get-go. Therefore, we offer the following aids:
- Partner Portal:
As our partner, you can join the Partner Portal and benefit from access to our Learning Center. You will be the first to know when a new learning opportunity is available and have access to educational & promotional materials, white-label sales decks, as well as technical implementation guides to enable faster selling. Most importantly, you will have access to classes that you can use to educate your teams and client on editor basics, content migration, Storyblok’s functionalities, etc. - Youtube channel:
On our youtube channel, you will find a number of short editor guides that you can use both as they are and as an inspiration for your own tutorials. We recommend you to keep them as short and as simple as possible, give clear titles for easy referencing, and to focus on one thing per video. - Editor Guides:
You can use our guides and tutorials to create your own onboarding documentation or simply refer your clients to Storyblok’s Editor Guides, where they will find detailed instructions and videos on editor basics, content authoring, etc. - Partner Success Managers:
Your dedicated Partner Success Manager will always be there for you and your clients to guide you to the right lesson, tutorial, point of contact, etc.
Even after the onboarding process for our partners is finished and the Partner Success Managers have made sure you have all the resources you need, they continue to stay in touch. In addition, our sales team continues to be supportive and transparent with our clients. Therefore, if our Sales Representatives identify a need at any point of the client’s project, they are ready to make the connection with the partner agency that can best address that need.
When asked about how Storyblok has impacted their relationship with their clients, The Bigger Boat’s team told us the following:
“*From a client service perspective, training and support for CMS has never been easier. Everyone finds Storyblok very intuitive to use. It makes supporting clients a much more efficient process*.”
In fact, onboarding your clients on Storyblok is going to be an easy and straightforward process. In our case studies, we often hear partners say that client project handovers take very little time and effort, some as little as 1 hour of training. To give you an idea, here is a quote from one of our certified partners Efiware on their experience with Storyblok:
I find that Storyblok is the perfect combination of simple and powerful. It plugs right into an existing headless setup. This allows us to get going within a few days. Once configured, the customer can, with almost no training, navigate within the intuitive editor and begin producing content.
Key takeaways
We can conclude that client onboarding is a very important step in creating long-lasting relationships with your clients in order to generate more revenue. There are certainly steps that need to be taken when creating an onboarding strategy and Storyblok has the tools and team members who can help. Moreover, our team of Partner Success Managers are available to support you and your clients at any time after the onboarding is complete. So, buckle up and let’s go create some amazing relationships together.
