Most enterprise software companies do one-on-one onboardings by either going onto the client site or by hosting a training via a web meeting. When I talk to our enterprise customers about using documentation in their onboarding they think that I am talking about replacing their current onboarding practices.
I'm not. If you are selling software that costs $20,000 or more your customers are going to want some personal
So you probably need to have those personal interactions that a live onboarding can offer. But augmenting those events with great documentation can make the events so much more effective.
Use your documentation to create a pre-assignment for your customers to complete before the training. You see a huge impact in the effectiveness of the session.
Provide follow up documentation to help your customers remember everything they were taught. That will result in fewer follow up questions and more confident customers.
The employees at your client companies are going to turn over from time to time. If you are completely relying on live training then you will have to host another webinar training session whenever someone new comes on the customer team. But by providing great documentation you give your customers the ability to train their own teams when their team members come and go. You create fewer support and training headaches for yourself and for your customers.
If you are selling enterprise software then there is a good chance that there is a lot going on with your product. Having great documentation can dramatically decrease the time it takes for a new sales rep to become confident when talking about your product. You will still need to train them on a lot of aspects of what your product does, but when you have great documentation they don't have to check with you for every little question.
It works even better for scaling your customer support and customer success teams. If you don't have great documentation then you will do a lot of "standing over the shoulder" training which can really kill the productivity of your team.
Enterprise software companies often neglect documentation because they are so used to having more personal interactions with their customers. But what you need to understand is that great documentation can enhance all of those interactions and make your entire team more productive.
If you need help getting determining a strategy for what you need to document or how to document then please get in touch. We would be happy to help you create a plan that will have a major impact on your business.