QOTW 8/7: When should you charge for you onboarding?

Such a great question. There are a number of factors that influence if and when a fee should be charged. I led a team where the industry standard was to not charge a fee for a specific product and if a vendor did, it immediately had an impact on their sales. 

A lot of this will depend on the market, company stage and growth, and the product. In early stage startups, there is often a token fee that is waived (often) by sales in order to incentivize clients to jump over to a new and untested product. As the company grows, they are able to increase their costs to clients by increasing the fees and reducing how much sales can discount. A lot of that really depends on the growth of the company and what market conditions allow. 

Regardless of where a company is in their growth, what the market is doing, and the performance of the product, my personal opinion is to always list out the onboarding or implementation fee, even if it is discounted to $0. You need to show that there is a value associated with the service (onboarding in this case) so it drives a relational attitude with the client. People treat things differently when they know there is a value associated with it, and if you are simply giving it away without associating a value it automatically becomes disposable.

@rondeaul What are your thoughts on having partners or system integrators perform the onboarding for a discounted price? I know Salesforce and HubSpot especially like to lean into their partner networks for this very reason. 

I have a mixed opinion on this. I definitely think it can be a good idea if executed properly. I think this is easier said than done 😅. 

Reminds me of a previous company I worked at where we purchased Salesforce CPQ and chose to hire external partners because Salesforce was charging an outrageous amount. 3 partners and 18 months later, our implementation still didn’t function well…

You could definitely argue we should have just gone with Salesforce’s implementation.

@ellibot it will have a lot to do with the service or product and the 3rd party’s experience in that arena. With very complex and time consuming onboarding and implementations, it can be a distinct value add, especially when you lack internal resources with the requisite experience. I’ve worked in a number of roles where 3rd parties came in and did the complex work (i.e. a Workday implementation) and brought significant value. They key with it as with any implementation is clarity in the goals and requirements.  In many cases the 3rd party can actually cost more than trying to do it yourself but the long term value can exceed the self-implementation.