Your Customer Signed. Do They Know What Happens Next?

Your customer signs the agreement, forwards it to their operations team and asks, “What do we need to do now?”

The proposal describes the product, pricing and support. There’s a launch timeline and a reference to onboarding. But nobody can find who arranges the kickoff, what information the customer needs to provide or when the timeline actually starts.

Those details may be familiar to your team. For the customer, this is the first time through.

Where the confusion starts

Take a hypothetical software purchase. The proposal includes “guided onboarding” and a six-week launch timeline. The buyer expects a kickoff invitation after signing. Sales expects the onboarding team to make contact, while that team is waiting for an intake form the customer hasn’t received.

Configuration also depends on a data export from the customer’s operations lead. That requirement came up during a call, but it never made it into the materials shared with the rest of the customer’s team.

The offer sounds straightforward until someone tries to act on it. “Guided onboarding” leaves the first step unexplained, and “six weeks” means little without an agreed starting point.

Interactive figure: who is waiting for whom

Read what the customer actually receives

Pull together the proposal, welcome email and onboarding instructions for one offer. Read them in the order a customer would receive them, without filling in the gaps from memory.

Could someone who missed the sales calls work out:

• Who will contact them after signing?

• What their team needs to provide, and to whom?

• Which steps must happen before launch?

• Where to go if something is missing or delayed?

Then compare the answers across the documents. The proposal may promise a dedicated contact while the welcome email directs everyone to a general inbox. The onboarding guide may ask for information that the buyer didn’t know they would need to gather.

Interactive figure: read it like the customer

These are specific things a communications review can identify. They also give the business a more useful starting point than a general request to “improve onboarding.”

Find out whether the answer exists

Before rewriting anything, speak with the people who sell the offer and those who help customers get started. Ask them to walk through a recent account, using the actual emails and records where available.

What happened after signing? Who contacted the customer? What did the customer have to ask for? Was a delay caused by missing information, an unresolved decision or something else?

Sometimes the process is agreed and the explanation is missing. In that case, the materials can be corrected. If nobody has decided who sends the intake form, that responsibility needs to be settled before the welcome email promises a handoff.

This is why the research matters. A clearer sentence should describe something the team can actually deliver.

Make the next step easy to follow

For the software buyer, the revised materials might explain that the onboarding coordinator sends an intake form after signing, the customer’s operations lead provides the required data and the launch schedule is confirmed once those inputs have been reviewed.

The exact sequence will depend on the business. Once it’s agreed, the proposal and onboarding materials should describe it consistently, with enough detail for the customer to prepare.

There’s no need to put every implementation task in the sales deck. A brief explanation of the first steps, responsibilities and timing can answer the questions a buyer needs to discuss internally before committing.

If your team keeps explaining the same steps after every sale, it’s worth checking what customers received in the first place. Sirotin Ventures reviews sales and onboarding materials, speaks with the people involved and rewrites the parts that leave customers guessing. To discuss your materials, email angelica@sirotinventures.com.