The hidden onboarding friction
Like a game of Broken Telephone, miscommunication between teams can break your onboarding.
This is a preview of my new book, EUREKA: The Customer Onboarding Playbook for High-Growth B2B Companies (coming June 2025).
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Enjoy the preview!
Growing up in the Philippines, birthday parties always followed the same recipe: sweet spaghetti with hot dogs, a karaoke machine for the adults, and, most importantly, parlor games for the kids. These games were the heart of every celebration, but none created more laughs than "Pass the Message" (known elsewhere as "Broken Telephone").
The game starts with a complex message like "Every morning before school, I eat three yellow bananas and two sweet mangoes while watching cartoons with my little sister." By the time it reaches the last child, it might become "Every monkey at the zoo eats bananas and dances with mangoes while watching TV!"
While this communication breakdown is hilarious as a game, it can have serious consequences in building a seamless onboarding experience. When departments don't communicate effectively during onboarding, it creates a fragmented and frustrating experience for new customers.
In my experience working with hundreds of B2B companies at ProductLed, Appcues, and Delight Path, miscommunication between departments is often the biggest hurdle to successful onboarding. I've seen companies invest heavily in beautiful UI designs, write comprehensive documentation, and build sophisticated product tours. Yet their customers still struggle to get started.
While most resources focus on improving the visible parts of onboarding—the UI, documentation, and tutorials—the hidden friction often lies in how teams work together behind the scenes. The product team might solve interface problems by simplifying the UI, while the customer success team focuses on building trust through high-touch support, and marketing tries to boost confidence through case studies. Without coordination, these well-intentioned efforts create a jarring experience for customers who receive mixed messages and inconsistent support.
There are three common symptoms that indicate your organization has an onboarding coordination problem:
1. No clear definition of onboarding success
Ask different departments in your organization, "How do you know a customer has been successfully onboarded?" If you get wildly different answers or blank stares, you have an alignment problem.
Without a shared definition, your company is like a boat in which each department is rowing in a different direction. The sales team rows toward closing deals, Product toward feature adoption, Customer Success toward customer outcomes, and Marketing toward engagement metrics.
2. No single source of truth for customer data
Sales data lives in the CRM, usage patterns in product analytics, support tickets in the help desk, and implementation notes in project management tools. With each team using its own preferred systems, getting a complete picture of a customer's onboarding progress becomes nearly impossible.
Most critically, there's no single system that definitively tells everyone, "Yes, this customer has successfully completed onboarding."
3. Inconsistent messaging across the onboarding journey
Each team develops their own way of explaining the product:
Marketing writes about "streamlining workflows"
Sales pitches "operational efficiency"
Product tutorials focus on "task automation"
Support documentation uses "workflow automation"
Customer Success talks about "process optimization"
While these terms might mean the same thing internally to customers, this inconsistent messaging creates confusion during the critical onboarding period when they're still building their mental model of your product.
4. Unclear handoffs between teams
The journey from prospect to successful customer involves multiple handoffs: Marketing passes to Sales, Sales hands off to Implementation, Implementation transitions to Customer Success, and Support weaves throughout. Without clear ownership and coordination, three problems emerge:
Customers drop off because they're unsure of the next step
Customers receive duplicate "just checking in" messages from multiple teams
Customers have to repeat their goals and challenges to each new team they meet
The result? Customers feel like they're starting over with each new team they encounter—another game of "Pass the Message" that drains their momentum and enthusiasm.
The bridge from selling to success
Successful onboarding is the bridge that takes customers from starting with your product to building habits around it. This bridge requires three key supports:
Positioning and messaging (Marketing)
Sales pitch and promises (Sales)
Product education and guidance (Product, Marketing, and Customer Success)
Each of these three inputs must work together seamlessly. If Marketing sets different expectations than Sales, or if the Product doesn't deliver what was promised, the bridge weakens. That's why onboarding must be a cross-functional effort—it's the crucial connection point between what you promised and what you delivered.
That's all for now, folks!
I'd love to hear your unfiltered thoughts about this preview:
Which of these symptoms do you see in your organization?
How do you handle cross-functional coordination for onboarding?
What else should I discuss in the book?
Leave a comment below.