The Onboarding Cycles Custom Object allows you to track information about the post-sales process in Salesforce. We suggest tracking this information separately from the Opportunity for a few reasons:
Data Cleanliness: You can keep your data clean and clear by having Opportunities represent a sales process and Onboarding Cycles represent the post-sales process.
Clear Ownership: Sales team can retain ownership of opportunities after Closed Won, and Customer Success can own the Onboarding Cycle.
The standard fields for the Onboarding Cycle custom object are:
Account
Opportunity
Onboarding Start Date
Onboarding End Date
Stage
You can create additional custom fields in the Swantide App. You can also view all Onboarding Cycles from an Account's record page.
Additionally, we suggest using an automation that will create the Onboarding Cycle automatically when an Opportunity is marked as Closed Won. This will pull in the associated Account and Opportunity as well.
Some customers want to create an Onboarding Cycle earlier in the sales process (i.e. prior to Closed Won) to track information received during the sales process. The downside to this approach is that there will be Onboarding Cycles that are not currently live and are tied to Accounts that don’t ultimately become customers, which can cause confusion about where the Customer Success team should focus their efforts.