The Blueprint for a Winning Customer Success Kickoff Call

The worst customer kickoff calls feel like the pilot episode of a new show: 

Too many introductions. An overload of background information. Either slow to get to the point, or trying to do too much in one hour. No true feeling of engagement.

The best kickoff calls feel more like the first episode of season two or three. 

Everyone’s already bought in. You get to focus on the plot, not every character’s backstory. Cliffhangers are resolved. New storylines can take off. The show has found its voice and momentum. You can hit the ground running.

So how can you run kickoff meetings that feel more like season two than season one?

Much of it comes down to a smooth handoff from Sales, a tight onboarding process (that starts even before the first call), and a centralized kickoff resource beyond a slide deck.

This article provides tips that will help your CSMs run kickoff calls that make your customers want to mash that “Next episode” button as fast as possible.

What is a customer kickoff call?

A customer success kickoff call is the first post-sale meeting between a Customer Success Manager (CSM) and customer stakeholders. 

This meeting is often the first direct interaction between the teams following an internal kickoff or sales-to-CS handoff meeting and a crucial step in any effective client onboarding or software implementation process. 

The primary purpose of this project kickoff meeting is to get everyone on the same page regarding project goals, timelines, and responsibilities. It’s where alignment is established.

The kickoff call sets the tone for the entire relationship, providing a clear roadmap and creating a sense of partnership. 

Customer Success teams use this opportunity to understand the customer’s unique needs and expectations while the customer gains insights into how the software will be implemented to meet their desired outcomes.

Which customers should get kickoff calls?

Not every customer needs an official kickoff call following the sales handoff—it’s a time-intensive process that can often slow customers down from getting their hands dirty with your product right away.

For most small accounts, it’s enough to onboard customers with low-touch resources like one-to-many webinars, training materials, and knowledge bases.

So when should clients get kickoff calls?

Complex implementations

If you have a product or service that requires a long and complex implementation with a lot of change management, then your kickoff calls should be highly strategic and project-management-focused. 

The kickoff is a great opportunity for your CSMs to showcase their knowledge and skills as well as their ability to collaborate with internal teams who may need to be involved, like Product and Engineering. 

Having a project team involved in strategic kickoffs can be a game-changer.

High-ticket customers

Customer Success leaders should make high-ticket customers a priority for kickoff calls.  Even if your solution may not be too complex to implement, these customers need the most care at the beginning of the relationship.

Customers who choose to invest a lot of money into the relationship should be treated with care during those initial kickoff calls so they know exactly how to get the most bang for their buck as quickly as possible. 

Regardless of how you do your kickoffs, the needs and desires of the customer should be at the forefront for all involved. 

Kickoff call best practices for CSMs

Now it’s time to dive into how CSMs can make the most of their time with new customers during the kickoff calls: 

1. Don’t use long slide decks

No one, and we repeat… no one wants to sit through a 20+ slide PowerPoint deck. Presenting to and “talking at” customers is not a good use of anyone's time, especially during kickoffs. 

CSMs should take this opportunity to really understand the needs and desires of the customer and the project details. 

This is their opportunity to learn what success looks like to the customer and what they, the CSM, need to do to ensure that the vision of success is met in real time. 

When it comes to the presentation itself, the CSM should prioritize the following:

• Kickoff meeting agenda and project background
• Action items they and the customer need to accomplish 
• Key information about the product or service’s initial use 
• Any follow-up or recap of items from past meetings

This information will set the stage of the overall kickoff experience and help the customer know what the initial steps of the implementation process will be like. 

It will also help them see what role they will be playing during this time. This level of alignment is key for an effective kickoff. 

2. Centralize the conversation with an onboarding hub

Instead of a one-time slide deck, have a central point of reference that your CSMs continuously refer back to with new customers.

A customer onboarding hub or portal will make the lives of everyone (including you) easier if all meeting notes, next steps, and project deliverables can be found in one convenient place. 

Not only that, but you can present directly from the onboarding hub during your kickoff call (instead of using a slide deck). Think of it like the command center for your kickoffs and your ultimate project plan that is written out for everyone to see and follow along together.

Rachel Jennings-Keane, Global Head of Customer Success at Assignar, uses Dock to do all of this. She said:

“There’s 100 sales enablement tools out there. But there aren’t as many client management and enablement tools made specifically for CS. I love Dock. I think every CS team should have it.”

Thanks to having everything in one place, they’ve been able to significantly reduce onboarding overwhelm for their customers and time spent in kickoff meetings by 25 minutes per call. Every successful project and kickoff is stored in Dock for future reference and use as well.

📘 Related reading: How Assignar reduced onboarding overwhelm with Dock

3. Reimagine the Sales-to-CS Handoff

Instead of having a traditional Sales-to-CS handoff workflow, include your sales team in the internal kickoff meeting. 

This makes for a seamless transition for the customer, stopping them from feeling like they are entering into a completely new relationship.

It will feel like your CSM team is simply joining in on an existing conversation with all the needed background information.

This icebreaker approach allows the Sales team to provide valuable context, including all the deliverables and project scope, ensuring that everything learned during the sales process is smoothly handed over to the CS team. 

It also eliminates the need to make the customer re-explain their needs and goals, which can be damaging to the initial customer experience. 

This will result in a faster onboarding process and set the stage for a stronger partnership with your customers. 

📘 Related reading: How to nail the Sales-to-Customer-Success handoff

4. Give pre-kickoff homework

Not every step of the kickoff journey requires a meeting. There are things that your CSMs and customers should do asynchronously, behind the scenes.

Meetings should be saved for high-value conversations, especially during the kickoff period. This helps set expectations for the rest of the project timeline and customer relationship. 

Customer tasks need to be communicated clearly and as quickly as possible and shouldn’t be held onto until the kickoff. 

Your CSMs can use Dock to share the overall scope of the project and kickoff process, as well as provide a checklist of tasks that the customer needs to accomplish. 

Having a tool like this during the initial phase of the customer journey will help your customers know what’s expected of them and how far along they are in the process. 

Rachel from Assignar attests to the effectiveness of Dock in preparing for meetings: 

“We share the Dock workspace before the call so the customer can start to get an understanding of what to expect with a video or visual of the five steps that we go through with them. 

“That way, the kickoff call is much more focused on ‘Here’s what you bought. Here’s why you bought it. What are your goals? And here’s what we need you to own for the next step.’”

Brittany Soinski, Onboarding Lead at Loom, has also seen her team significantly improve their customer onboarding process by integrating the whole process into Dock:

“We use Dock to onboard all of our new customers. We're able to launch a new onboarding for a new customer in about 10 seconds, and it's fully customized. It saves us a ton of time, and we're able to start working right away—whereas it previously took us 15-30 minutes to create a custom Notion hub.”

5. Break onboarding into manageable chunks

The great thing about onboarding and kickoffs is that it doesn’t all have to be done at once. You can make it work for your team and your customers’ busy schedules. 

Dock makes this a much easier process for CSM teams and customers alike. 

One neat feature of Dock is that it allows your team to have separate onboarding checklists for each phase and show the overall progress with the progress bar. 

You can also hide sections of a workspace and unhide them once the customer is ready for the next steps. This will help your team plan out the process on the backend while helping your customers stay on track and know their progress.

Having a clear path to success with your onboarding process that is broken into phases and tasks will help each persona stay engaged throughout the onboarding process. 

6. Consider multiple customer personas 

Understand that you’re speaking to multiple customer personas in your customer kickoff meetings. 

Buyers, managers, executives, and end users all have different goals and desires for the product or service. Knowing who of these personas will be on the call and what their desired goals are going into the call is key for kickoff success. 

Eloise Salisbury, Chief Customer Officer at AutogenAI, was recently on our Grow & Tell podcast and gave a great break down of how she handles three key customer personas during implementation.

“We rolled out the concept of a ‘triple metric’. So if you think about a pyramid and there’s three different layers of that pyramid, the day-to-day users of your tool are at the bottom. You need to identify the KPIs that they are tracking and care about.

“Then you do the same for the mid-layer of management. And then the top of the pyramid is the executives. And then we linked how the KPIs from the day-to-day users would roll up to the middle-management and up to the executives. 

“And we made sure that at various different touchpoints in the customer lifecycle that we were speaking to the relevant ‘triple metric’ depending on the audience.” 

7. Track post-call engagement

The question most CSMs ask after the initial kickoff call is, “Are customers going to do what they are supposed to do?” 

The answer to this question can and will vary. That’s just reality. 

Your Customer Success team should be trained to look for and track customers who aren’t engaging with the solution early in the onboarding phase. 

A lack of adoption early on means they are most likely not doing what they should be doing to onboard themselves and it can reflect their overall adoption throughout their lifecycle. 

Dock has a way of making this a much easier process for any CSM team. 

Dock’s workspace analytics gives your CSMs a clear view into the tasks assigned to new customers and the progress being made on those tasks. 

Many of our customers have reported a significant increase in early customer adoption due to their CSMs being able to track tasks and follow-up with customers in real-time during the onboarding process. 

The ideal kickoff agenda

What makes a successful kickoff call? A tight agenda.

Here are the seven key steps your team should consider when creating a kickoff agenda that will help your customers thrive in the long run:

1. Summarize the partnership: Begin by recapping the sales process and how the customer got to this point. Highlight the key outcomes from the sales process, including the client’s needs, expectations, and any initial solutions discussed.
2. Identify stakeholders and roles: Clearly outline who will be involved from both sides, including their roles and responsibilities.
3. Establish success criteria and KPIs: Define what success looks like for this project by agreeing on KPIs and metrics, setting measurable goals, and ensuring both parties are working towards the same outcomes.
4. Establish a communication schedule: Decide on the frequency and methods of communication. Whether it’s weekly check-ins, monthly reviews, or ad-hoc meetings.
5. Review the onboarding plan and next steps: Go over the onboarding process, including any documentation, tools, and resources the client needs to get started.
6. Set deadlines and an implementation schedule: Agree on key deadlines and the overall timeline for project milestones to keep the project on track and ensure timely delivery of results.
7. Address questions or concerns: Finally, open the floor for any questions or concerns the client may have. Addressing these early on helps build trust and ensures that there are no lingering uncertainties as the project kicks off.

Run smoother kickoffs with Dock

Onboarding doesn’t have to be as complicated as we make it out to be. 

Yes, many parties are involved that have conflicting views from time to time. But at the end of the day, it’s all about helping our customers see success as quickly as possible while setting the tone for a prosperous relationship. 

Dock’s customer onboarding hubs make this whole process much easier for everyone involved. 

Give Dock a try for free and see how your team can spend less time on kickoff calls and more time helping customers get to value.