Fix Your Salesforce Onboarding Gap
Is your team struggling to track customer onboarding timelines directly inside Salesforce?
While Salesforce is an incredible platform, managing the full onboarding journey—from kickoff to go-live—isn’t something it handles naturally out of the box!
In this video, Katie McAtee from Cloud Adoption Solutions breaks down how to bridge the Salesforce onboarding gap by looking at three distinct operational layers: Strategy, Execution, and Alignment. She compares three top-tier tools solving different parts of this puzzle—Gainsight, ChurnZero, and Retentional.
Watch now to discover which onboarding layer your customer success team is missing and how to choose the right platform to eliminate tab clutter, automate CSM workflows, and drive long-term client retention! Ready to fix the onboarding gap in your Salesforce instance?
Let us know if you have any questions or if you have any requests for our next CAS Come and See Video!
Watch now!
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
The Onboarding Gap in Salesforce
If you have ever worked on a Salesforce implementation or customer onboarding process, you know that Salesforce is amazing at a lot of things. However, tracking a customer onboarding timeline right out of the box is not naturally one of its strong suits.
You have Salesforce on one side and your onboarding journey—kickoff, setup, training, and go-live—on the other, leaving a real gap in between. Because Salesforce does not natively give you full visibility into where a customer actually is in that process, teams are left managing it manually or searching for external software to close the gap.
When teams search for solutions, they typically evaluate three main categories:
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Customer Success Platforms
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Onboarding Execution Tools
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Alignment & Planning Tools
The key realization is that these tools do not solve the exact same problem. Onboarding exists in three distinct layers: strategy, execution, and alignment. Each tool specializes in one of those layers rather than all three at once.
Comparing the Three Onboarding Layers
1. Strategy Layer: Gainsight
Gainsight focuses on strategy because it is built around the entire customer journey, not just the onboarding phase. It tracks health scores, churn risk, retention, and long-term customer value. It shifts the focus from simply asking “Did onboarding get checked off?” to asking “Is this customer going to stick around long-term?”
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Integration: Gainsight installs directly inside Salesforce as a native AppExchange package. It lives inside your org rather than just connecting from the outside.
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Core Capabilities: Provides a Customer 360 view with overall health scores, account timelines, renewal dates, a daily action “cockpit view” for Customer Success Managers (CSMs), and structured onboarding success plans with Gantt-chart-style objectives.
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Trade-off: It is a complex, enterprise-level platform. For smaller operations, it may offer more complexity than is actually needed.
2. Execution Layer: ChurnZero
ChurnZero focuses on execution—running onboarding workflows, automating tasks, firing off alerts, and driving outreach to ensure onboarding gets completed.
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Integration: Connects to Salesforce via a bi-directional API sync. While it is a separate platform outside your org, it seamlessly displays dashboards and data inside Salesforce.
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Core Capabilities: Tracks churn scores and relationship health over time, displays engagement trends, and provides automated sentiment analysis on emails and support tickets to highlight immediate action items.
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Trade-off: It excels at immediate execution and workflow automation, but it does not go as deep into long-term lifecycle strategy as enterprise platforms like Gainsight.
3. Alignment Layer: Retentional
Retentional centers on alignment—defining goals, timelines, and ownership, and sharing them directly with the customer so both teams stay aligned around the same outcomes.
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Integration: A lightweight, standalone tool designed for fast setup and ease of use.
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Core Capabilities: Focuses on clarity and shared success plans, allowing teams to build clear objectives, assign owners, and track progress toward completion in a clean, straightforward interface.
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Trade-off: It is built for mutual alignment rather than heavy background automation. It functions as a shared success planning tool rather than a fully automated workflow engine.
Choosing the Right Tool for Your Onboarding Need
The choice of tool ultimately comes down to identifying which layer of onboarding your team needs to strengthen:
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Strategy + Long-Term Lifecycle: Choose Gainsight for a comprehensive customer success platform.
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Execution + Automation: Choose ChurnZero to automate workflows and drive task completion.
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Alignment + Transparency: Choose Retentional to keep internal teams and customers on the same page with shared success plans.
These platforms are not strictly competing with one another; rather, they are solving different layers of the exact same onboarding challenge.
Have questions about which onboarding layer your team might be missing in Salesforce? Reach out to Cloud Adoption Solutions today to help optimize your customer success tech stack!
