Customer Kick-off Call Template for SaaS

Client kick off call template to onboard new customers right

Your sales team has just closed a new deal and the customer is eager to start using your product to get the benefits that your sales have promised them in the sales demo. But a lot of the time, without proper assistance, new customers are often confused about how to get their team set up and how to best utilize your product features to help them accomplish their goals.

That’s why providing the right customer onboarding is the key to help your customer succeed and continue to use your product happily. Instead of completely relying on self-service support, a lot of SaaS will also assign dedicated customer success managers to bigger accounts to provide more personalized onboarding.

A kick-off call is often the first step of the onboarding journey and here, we will share some tips on preparing for your kick-off meeting with your new customers.

Schedule the kickoff call as soon as possible  

Your customer success manager should reach out to the customer to schedule a kick-off meeting as soon as the deal is closed. This way, your customer will know that someone is going to help them with the setup and minimize any possibilities of frustration and confusion about what to do next.

If your product requires help from their IT department to get set up, encourage them to include a representative from the IT department to attend the kick off call as well.

Use a tool that can share your screen during the kick-off meeting

Video conferencing tools like Zoom and BlueJeans allow you to share your screen easily with your customers during the kickoff call. It’s simply much easier to understand and walk through your product settings and important features when the customer can actually see you doing it step by step on the screen. That’s why even though most of these video conferencing tools support dial-in options as well, let the customer know beforehand that screen sharing is important during the meeting so they can ensure they have the right setup prepared for the meeting.

It will be useful if the tool allows you to record the call easily as well. This way, you can send the recording to the customer after the meeting for easier review, and it’s also particularly useful when you are doing training with a large team and not everyone can attend the training at the same time.

For more tips on using video conferencing tools like Zoom, check out our blog post How to use Zoom: 15+ Zoom tips and tricks.

Important things to go over during the kick-off call

To make sure you have the right information to help you plan for the kick off call, it’s important for the customer success manager to have a proper handover with the sales who closed the deal.

Understanding the challenges and goals of the customers before the kick-off meeting can help the CSM decide which areas are important to cover in the kick-off call because you are unlikely to be able to go over every product feature and setting in the first call (and it will be very boring for the customer as well and you will easily lose their focus).

The above template provides you a sample checklist of what to cover in the call:

1. Intro

Introduce your implementation team and also let customers introduce their PICs so everyone understands each person’s role and knows who to reach out to under different circumstances.

So give a brief intro about the expectation of the kick-off call and what the client can expect from the onboarding period.

2. Overview of the onboarding period

First recap on the challenges that the customer had before using your product and how your product can help. This helps to set the scene and also reminded the customers why it’s important to get the system up-and-running as soon as possible.

Then give a quick summary of the key settings and features of the product that are relevant to the client’s goals and explain what help your implementation team will provide during the process.

Don’t forget to show your customers how they can get help from you during the process. This ensures you will always be quickly informed if they encounter any issues to help minimize their frustration and confusion.

3. Key next steps

After confirming the implementation timeline with the customer, to keep the ball rolling, clearly lay out the next steps and deliverables from both you and the client and set deadlines.

Send a recap of the meeting and the recording of the meeting to the client after the kick-off call to ensure both parties are clear about what to expect next.

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