Don't waste cycles optimizing activities that were never meant to scale
A busy, fast-moving founder, understandably frustrated by some recent no-shows for onboarding calls, asked:
When someone doesn’t join their onboarding session **I get soooooo pissed.** How do you deal with it? Are there any tactics to get people to show up?
The goal of these non-scalable, early activities (which also includes customer discovery and the first few sales) isn’t to maximize the conversion rate as if it was a repeatable/essential business process.
The goal is to fumble and grasp through a set of inefficient, temporary activities on the expectation/hope that you’ll end up with some insights that will help you to build the thing that actually does scale (product/processes/positioning/etc.).
So it’s less about what % of onboardings happen (or what % of customer conversations go well), and more about whether you come out of the ones that do work with some meaningful data/insight/whatever that can move the business meaningfully forward.
It’s a binary outcome, not a percentage-based outcome, like finding the right person to marry. The “conversion rate of dating-to-marriage” is an irrelevant (and absurd) metric. In the long term, it doesn’t really matter whether that ratio was 100% or 10% or 1% or 0.1%. So long as you end up with what you were looking for, the whole process was a success.
Or in other words: don’t waste your mental cycles trying to over-optimize an activity that was never meant to be scalable.
Comments (6)
I think if you make the time available for a one on one call you should follow up and ask what happened. I think it's worth sending one or two reminders in advance and asking for prep work or some other investment of time in advance to match the time you are investing.
A fair point, especially if the costs are high (individual prep or commuting, for example). And a very low % rate is probably a sign of something being broken in the setup (bad expectations setting or comms, weak framing, etc.).
But I sometimes see founders who want to get everything to 100%, where it's ultimately a low-value optimization relative to other stuff they could be working on.
The setup I normally use for the hands-on customer learning is to keep a drip running at all times, and then "open the tap" during weeks where we're missing critical insight or are uncertain about next steps. So I might have 20 calls in 2 weeks, at which point it's really no harm if only half of them prove useful, as long as I end up being able to make that next crucial decision. (Especially since the costs can be further reduced by either quickly wrapping up a nonhelpful call or doing small filler tasks for no-shows.)
If it was part of my ongoing sales funnel, then I would absolutely be optimizing it as much as possible, though, since that's a core piece of business process as opposed to a bit of temporary scaffolding.
So I might have 20 calls in 2 weeks, at which point it's really no harm if only half of them prove useful, as long as I end up being able to make that next crucial decision.
In my experience it's hard to tell what will prove useful immediately after an initial or early conversation. I try to see that everyone interaction provides some value to the other person. You never know who they will talk to and especially in a get acquainted or an early conversation there is a real possibility for miscommunication / misunderstanding by either party.
I don't understand why you would not always want talk to at least a certain percentage of newcomers (so you can gain an appreciation of how you look to them from a "newcomer's eyes" perspective). I may not understand the context of what you are trying to accomplish.
I do strongly endorse (and use) every-week contact with some small subset of customers, which is what I was (not very effectively) trying to refer to with "keep a drip running at all times."
But that might be, e.g., 2-4 conversations in a week (and 5-10% of my time) as a background activity, just to stay grounded.
But in times of critical product design or decisions, I crank up the customer contact to be 50%+ of my time (whether that takes the shape of onboarding, customer discovery, sales, user testing, or whatever else is relevant, depending on where the business is at). That helps make the critical decisions, but comes at a very high opportunity-cost in terms of founder-time, so I dial it back down to the drip level once the "crisis" moment is through.
sounds like we are more or less in violent agreement. I think this ongoing "handcrafting / personalized interaction" is true even for billion dollar firms. I had this epiphany when I was at Cisco that the CEO was personally involved in "hot sites" and "major opportunities." I have the impression that Bezos is still reading a certain amount of customer email and trouble tickets.
Obviously, you need to strike a balance. You have to delegate effectively but you cannot be hands off on critical aspects of business related to prospects and customers.
I think "violent agreement" is my new favourite phrase ;).
Semi-related, I've found the modern tooling has helped a lot with distributing direct customer insights beyond the person having the conversation. E.g., I previously had to write and recount detailed notes, or drag folks with me to meetings, whereas now we use a combination of brief highlight clips from the convos (just the crucial moments with the key quote or emotional outburst), plus scheduling inbound support/onboarding stuff via a round-robin calendly (with the option for team members to temporarily remove themselves from the rota if they're in a squeeze). So everyone on the team gets at least a bit of default/direct exposure, without too much admin overhead or time cost.