Customer Onboarding Collateral Examples

As soon as the deal is closed, onboarding assets should come into play. Ideally, your sales and CS teams coordinate a clean handoff and introduce onboarding collateral during the kickoff call—or even before.

Well-timed onboarding materials help maintain momentum after the sale and reduce confusion for both sides. They also help your internal team stay aligned around the customer’s goals.

There’s no one-size-fits-all format, but most strong customer onboarding assets include the following:

A step-by-step implementation plan

This is the backbone of your onboarding process. It outlines the major steps your customer will go through to get fully set up and using your product. Think of it like a project plan—but simplified. It should include phases (e.g. kickoff, configuration, testing, training, go-live), along with a general timeline for each. When customers know what’s coming, it helps reduce friction and prevent delays.

Roles and responsibilities on both sides

It’s not just about what gets done—it’s about who’s doing it. Clearly define which tasks your team owns and which tasks the customer needs to handle. Include job titles or names when possible (e.g. “IT Manager to configure SSO,” “CSM to lead training session”). This keeps accountability clear and avoids the “I thought you were doing that” moments.

Milestones, timelines, and expected outcomes

These are the signposts that let everyone know you’re on track. Milestones might include things like “Integration complete,” “First user login,” or “Team trained.” For each milestone, include target dates and define what success looks like. This gives both sides a shared definition of progress and helps build early momentum.

Product training content

Every onboarding process should include a way for customers to learn how to use your product. This could be a live walkthrough, a recorded demo, short how-to videos, or a searchable knowledge base. Tailor your training to the customer’s use case—nobody wants to sit through a generic 30-minute demo that doesn’t apply to them.

Helpful links and support resources

Customers don’t always ask for help when they hit a roadblock—they’ll often try to figure it out themselves first. Make it easy for them by including links to your documentation, help center, community forum, or support ticketing system. The easier it is to find help, the less pressure on your CS team.

Names and contact info for key team members

It should always be clear who’s involved. Include contact details (email, role, maybe even a headshot) for your onboarding lead, the customer’s main point of contact, and any specialists like solutions engineers or implementation managers. If there’s a shared inbox or Slack channel, include that too.

Centralizing all these onboarding assets in a shared workspace or portal helps keep everything organized and easy to access. It also ensures that nothing gets lost in email threads—and that your team can make updates without sending around new versions every time something changes. 

A tool like Dock can help streamline this process, but even a well-structured shared doc is a good start.

A few things we’ve seen work well across teams:

• Personalize the plan: Tailor onboarding assets to the customer’s goals and use case.
• Make it visual: Use diagrams, timelines, or flowcharts instead of big blocks of text.
• Keep it simple: Share just enough to move the process forward—don’t overload them.
• Standardize where you can: Create templates so your CS team doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel.

A shared workspace tool like Dock helps teams organize and scale onboarding collateral without losing the human touch.

Common ways onboarding content can go off track:

• Overwhelming the customer: Too many documents too early = confusion.
• Lack of alignment: Sales and CS should be working from the same plan.
• Scattered files: When assets live in ten different places, things slip through the cracks.
• No clear timeline: Customers need to know what happens next.

Your onboarding materials should help customers feel guided, not lost.

Internally, make sure everyone involved in onboarding—sales, CS, implementation—is working from the same set of tools and templates.

You can store internal-facing onboarding assets in a shared folder or workspace, organized by customer segment, product line, or deal size. This helps teams stay consistent and saves time.

If you're using a tool like Dock, it's easy to create internal templates and track what content gets used the most.

Customers shouldn’t have to search through emails to find important onboarding info. Ideally, you’re sharing all onboarding materials in one easy-to-access place—like a shared workspace or portal.

Some quick tips:

• Walk through the workspace during your kickoff call so customers know what’s in there.
• Keep updating the content as the customer progresses.
• Avoid sending files as attachments—link out to live documents that are always up to date.

Whether you call them onboarding assets or collateral, the key is to make things simple, clear, and easy to follow.

Here are a few ways to know if your onboarding content is actually helping:

• Time to first value: Are customers seeing results faster?
• Customer engagement: Are they opening and interacting with your onboarding assets? (Tools like Dock can help you track this.)
• Support ticket volume: Fewer questions early on = better onboarding.
• CSM efficiency: Are your reps spending less time repeating basic training?
• Post-onboarding satisfaction scores: A strong start sets the tone for renewals.

Keep an eye on how your onboarding materials are used, and refine them based on what’s working.