Why product-led onboarding isn't enough in B2B
It's only one out of three components of successful B2B onboarding.
This is a preview of my new book, EUREKA: The Customer Onboarding Playbook for High-Growth B2B Companies (coming June 2025).
Subscribe to Delight Path to get exclusive resources, snippets, and bonuses from the book.
Enjoy the preview!
When I wrote the bestselling book Product-Led Onboarding four years ago, I focused on how software companies could create self-serve onboarding experiences that guide users to value.
The problem?
It’s great for simple products with straightforward use cases and quick time-to-value. But, pure self-serve onboarding experiences fall short for high-growth B2B companies.
While working at Appcues, a product adoption and user engagement platform, I witnessed firsthand how B2B companies struggled with just product-led onboarding. Even with robust product analytics, in-app guidance tools, and onboarding emails, customers often needed human intervention to achieve their desired outcomes.
We saw this internally as well. Appcues’ trial users often struggled to see the product’s full value through a pure self-serve approach. Despite powerful automation tools and in-app tutorials, our customers usually require personalized guidance to experience the platform's capabilities fully.
The complexity of B2B customer onboarding
A pure self-serve onboarding experience is often insufficient for high-growth B2B companies because their products have multiple layers of complexity, such as:
1. Multiple stakeholders and decision-makers in the onboarding process.
Most B2B products often have a “multiplayer” component where different users within the same organization must collaborate and coordinate their efforts. Each stakeholder may have other priorities, technical expertise, and requirements during onboarding.
2. Company-wide product adoption challenges.
Related to the previous point, multiplayer B2B products often require coordinated rollouts across different departments and teams. This creates additional layers of complexity regarding training, change management, and ensuring consistent adoption throughout the organization.
3. Complex implementation requirements and technical integrations.
B2B products often require extensive setup processes to align with existing workflows, including data migration, API integrations, security configurations, and customizations. These technical aspects frequently require human expertise and guidance.
4. Extended implementation timelines and long time-to-value.
Unlike B2C products that can deliver immediate value to users, B2B products often require days or weeks of setup and configuration before users can realize their full potential. This extended timeline makes it crucial to maintain engagement and momentum throughout the implementation process, which self-serve onboarding alone cannot effectively manage.
5. A wide range of customers, from small startups to large enterprise companies.
As B2B companies scale, they often move upmarket to serve a diverse customer base with varying needs and resources. Small businesses might prefer self-serve onboarding options, while enterprise clients require high-touch, customized onboarding experiences. This diversity makes creating a standardized product-led approach that effectively serves all customer segments challenging.
The three pillars of successful B2B onboarding
The solution is finding the right balance between product-led and human-led interactions—what I’ll call “hybrid onboarding” going forward.
A hybrid approach allows companies to scale while maintaining the personal connection that enterprise customers expect. It's about leveraging technology and customer education programs where they make sense and human expertise where they add the most value.
From studying how scaling product-led B2B companies onboard their customers, I've identified three pillars that form the foundation of successful B2B customer onboarding:
1. In-product guides
These are interactive walkthroughs, tooltips, and contextual help that direct users through key workflows and features. This automated guidance helps users navigate the product independently while reducing support tickets.
2. Educational content
These are courses, video tutorials, webinars, and knowledge-base articles that provide comprehensive product training and best practices to quickly get users up to speed. These resources enable self-paced learning and serve as ongoing reference materials for teams.
3. Human touchpoints
Human touchpoints through customer success managers, onboarding specialists, and technical support teams who provide strategic guidance, troubleshooting assistance, personalized recommendations, and support for company-wide product adoption.
These three pillars work together to create a comprehensive onboarding experience. While in-product guides provide immediate assistance, educational content builds deeper product knowledge, and human touchpoints ensure strategic alignment and success for enterprise customers.
Best-in-class product-led B2B companies like Slack, Asana, and HubSpot exemplify this hybrid approach. They combine intuitive in-product experiences with comprehensive learning centers and dedicated customer success teams.
For instance, Slack's interactive tutorials and templates make it easy to under core functionality and help new users quickly experience the product’s value.
Their Slack Certified program provides deeper product mastery for power users and Slack administrators of enterprise customers who need comprehensive knowledge of advanced features and integrations.
In their Slack Success Hub, they have detailed documentation, best practices, and implementation guides for different team sizes and use cases.
Meanwhile, customer success teams can focus on strategic initiatives, ensure enterprise-wide adoption, and maximize customer value through personalized consultation and support.
The key is finding the right mix of these elements based on customer segments and product complexity. For smaller customers, you might lean more heavily on automated guidance and self-serve resources. Enterprise clients typically require more human interaction and customized support.
How do you balance these three pillars effectively in your customer journey?
That’s one of the goals of this book—to help you understand how to create an effective hybrid onboarding strategy that scales with your business. We'll explore specific frameworks, tools, and methodologies that successful B2B companies use to balance automation with human touch.
That's all for now, folks!
I'd love to hear your unfiltered thoughts about this preview:
What do you think about the three pillars of B2B onboarding?
What questions come to your mind when you read it?
What else should I discuss in the book?
Leave a comment below.
And, of course, you can get exclusive updates, resources, and snippets from the book by subscribing to Delight Path.