Project Tour: In-App Onboarding at Salesforce
Content strategy for a product experience that helped customers find value, at first login.
Salesforce was growing continuously. New customers were spinning up Sales Cloud trials every day, and not knowing what to do with them. The problem wasn't the product. It was the onboarding experience surrounding it: scattered, generic, and built around what a Product Team knew, rather than what customers needed to know.
As a veteran customer advocate and content expert, I was brought in as Content Strategist to diagnose the problem and build something better.
The Problem
When I audited the existing onboarding experience, the issues were consistent and interconnected. Onboarding didn't start in earnest until after the sale, missing a crucial moment to make the right first impression at Trial. The content customers had to learn from wasn't segmented by audience: an admin setting up a new instance and an executive evaluating a purchase were receiving the same guidance, written for neither. Resources were scattered across Help, Trailhead, and product marketing making navigation and context setting between options nearly impossible. And none of it was oriented around value. Customers were being told how to use features before they understood why those features mattered to them.
The result was predictable: slower time-to-value, higher drop-off, and a gap between what the sales team promised and what customers experienced.
My Strategic Role
My job wasn't to write better tooltips. It was to define what the content experience should be and then advocate for it across a complex, multi-stakeholder product team.
That meant working across three layers simultaneously:
User journey : determining which onboarding steps were actually essential, in what order, for which customer types. I mapped the full journey from trial through active use, identified where customers lost momentum, and built a content architecture around the moments that mattered most.
Experience design : deciding how and when to give customers information. Not dumping a static list of resources on them, but delivering the right content in context: inside the product, at the moment of first login, with context that matched where they were in their journey.
Cross-functional alignment : getting executive sponsors, developers, designers and project managers onto the same page about what content-led onboarding actually required. I created briefs, ran reviews, and held the strategic thread across an 8-month build.
The Solution: In-App Checklist
The culminating product was the In-App Checklist. An interactive feature built directly into Sales Cloud that guided new customers through the steps that would get them to value, and allow Salesforce to know where they are in the journey to step in and help as needed.
Each item in the checklist was written for and delivered to a specific audience through automation (admin, executive sponsor, end user), oriented around a clear outcome rather than a feature description, and connected to the most relevant resource from Help, Trailhead, or the product itself. Customers weren't pointed to a library and left to search. They were met where they were and given exactly what they needed.
Alongside the checklist, I designed In-App Prompts that surfaced contextually relevant guidance as customers moved through the product, and pre-configured dashboards that reduced the overwhelm new users face when they first log in and see a blank screen.
The experience was also extended into an integrated omni-channel campaign: email, webinar, video, and print, so that content worked with customers between sessions, not just inside them.
Scaling Across Products
Once the In-App Checklist proved to add measurable value to the customer experience, I scaled the product across Salesforce Products. Using the same content strategy but applied to each product and market audience, the results scaled across the Salesforce cloud quickly.
What started as a single project became a repeatable approach.
Advocating for the Discipline
One of the most valuable outcomes was the opportunity to shape product around content, not the other way around. Advocating for content strategy from as the solution enabled this to be a customer-first experience.
From the beginning content was more than copy that would be dropped into a UI. The checklist design, the information architecture, the user experience were built to support the right content for each audience. I was the point person to advocate for the right approach with stakeholders, backed it with research, and worked to create a shared understanding that content strategy and product design were the same process.
That shift in how the team thought about content was, in some ways, the most influential outcome of the project.
Results
The onboarding experience launched in Sales Cloud and produced measurable results across every goal:
+78% in-app engagement
4.6 / 5 CSAT
+7% increase in valid lead-to-opportunity conversions
Skills: Content strategy · UX content design · In-product onboarding · Content architecture · Cross-functional advocacy · Omni-channel journey design · Stakeholder alignment · Performance measurement
In-App Checklist helps demo and new customers make the most of the product faster with interactive product feature.
Process from conception to launch for Sales Cloud spanned 8 months before scaling to other products.
Once proven in Sales Cloud, experience scaled to other products. In addition to Checklist, in-app features connected customers to contextually relevant resources.