How to set up personalized onboarding flows in Unless for new B2B customers

If you’ve ever signed up for a SaaS tool and immediately felt lost, you know why onboarding matters. But doing it well—especially for B2B customers who have their own quirks—takes more than tossing in a welcome email and hoping for the best.

This guide is for product folks, marketers, and anyone else wrangling onboarding in Unless (see [unless.html]), and tired of generic advice. We’ll walk through how to actually set up personalized onboarding flows that make sense for your customers and your team—without falling into the “just add more tooltips” trap.

Why Personalized Onboarding (Usually) Beats One-Size-Fits-All

Let’s get real: Most B2B products are complicated. Your customers might be coming from different industries, have different job roles, or need to see different features first. A single onboarding flow won’t cut it.

Personalized onboarding means:

  • Showing the right steps to different users (admins vs. end users, small teams vs. enterprise, etc.)
  • Highlighting the features that matter most for each customer segment
  • Skipping irrelevant stuff so people don’t get annoyed (and churn)

Unless lets you do this, but you have to set it up thoughtfully. Otherwise, it’s easy to end up with a confusing mess that’s “personalized” in name only.

Step 1: Map Out What Good Onboarding Looks Like—for Your Customers

Before touching any software, sketch out what a successful onboarding looks like for your different B2B customer types. Don’t overthink it—index cards or a whiteboard work fine.

Ask yourself:

  • What does a new admin need to do in their first session?
  • What about a regular end user?
  • Are there steps everyone must take, and some that only matter for certain roles or company sizes?
  • Where do people usually get stuck or drop off?

Pro tip: Actually talk to a handful of recent customers or your support team. Odds are, your assumptions about what’s “obvious” will be wrong.

What to skip: Don’t try to map out every possible path. Focus on the 2–3 most common onboarding scenarios.

Step 2: Segment Your Users in Unless

Unless can personalize onboarding based on user data—if you feed it the right info.

Here’s what you’ll want to do:

  1. Sync user attributes from your app into Unless. Bare minimum:

    • Role (admin, member, etc.)
    • Company size or plan
    • Industry, if relevant

  2. Set up segments in Unless:

    • Go to your Unless dashboard.
    • Use the audience/segment builder to create groups based on your user attributes.
    • Example: “Admin users at companies with more than 50 employees.”

What works: Start with broad segments. You can always refine later. Over-segmentation = more maintenance, more headaches.

What to ignore: Don’t bother segmenting on data you’re not sure about. If you’ve got sketchy industry data, skip it for now.

Step 3: Design Your Onboarding Flows

Now, for the actual onboarding flows. In Unless, these are usually built as “experiences”—walkthroughs, checklists, tooltips, and modals.

Here’s how to design them without making users hate you:

  1. For each segment, plan a short sequence: 3–5 key steps is plenty for most B2B apps.
  2. Mix and match formats:
    • Tooltips for showing how to use a specific button or feature
    • Modals for key “welcome” messages or critical setup tasks
    • Checklists for multi-step processes
  3. Personalize the content: Use dynamic fields to drop in company names, user roles, or other details.

What works: - Keep it contextual. Only show tips when the user is likely to care. - Make it easy to dismiss or skip parts of the flow—nothing kills goodwill like being trapped in a modal.

What doesn’t: Don’t try to teach everything at once. People forget (or ignore) long onboarding tours.

Step 4: Build the Flows in Unless

Let’s get practical. Here’s how to actually set up your onboarding flows in Unless:

  1. Create a new experience:
    • From your Unless dashboard, pick the type (walkthrough, checklist, etc.).
  2. Set triggers and targeting:
    • Target the segment you defined earlier (“admins at large companies”).
    • Set triggers (e.g., first login, visiting a specific page).
  3. Add steps to the flow:
    • For walkthroughs: Add each tip or modal in order.
    • For checklists: List the tasks and link them to in-app actions.
  4. Personalize copy: Use Unless’s dynamic variables to pull in user/company details.
  5. Test as a real user: Use a test account in your app to see how the flow looks and feels. Fix anything clunky.

Pro tip: Unless’s preview tools are decent, but you’ll catch more issues by running through the flow with a real, non-admin user account.

Watch out for: Overlapping or conflicting flows if you have lots of experiences targeting similar users. Keep it simple at first.

Step 5: Measure and Tweak

You’re not done when the flow is live. Most onboarding flows need real-world tweaking.

  1. Check the metrics:

    • Completion rates for each step (Unless tracks this)
    • Time spent in flow
    • Where people drop off

  2. Gather feedback:

    • Watch for support tickets or chat logs mentioning onboarding confusion.
    • Consider a tiny feedback prompt at the end of the flow (but don’t overdo it).

  3. Iterate:

    • If everyone drops off after step 2, maybe step 3 is pointless—or confusing.
    • If admins keep asking support how to invite teammates, add that to the checklist.

What works: Ship something basic, then improve it every couple of weeks. Don’t wait for “perfect.”

What to skip: Don’t obsess over micro-optimizations until the big stuff (like people not completing onboarding at all) is working.

Step 6: Handle Edge Cases Without Losing Your Mind

You’ll run into weird cases—users who get stuck, companies that don’t fit your neat segments, etc.

  • Fallbacks: Have a generic onboarding for anyone who doesn’t match a segment.
  • Manual triggers: Sometimes you’ll want to manually re-trigger onboarding for a user who got skipped or needs a do-over.
  • Don’t over-engineer: Resist the urge to create a new flow for every “special” customer. Most can live with a little generic onboarding.

A Few Honest Tips

  • Templates are fine, but don’t expect magic. Unless’s templates are a good start, but you’ll need to edit them for your product.
  • Don’t annoy power users. Let experienced users skip or disable onboarding.
  • Content > bells and whistles. Clear instructions beat fancy animations every time.
  • Keep your segments manageable. More segments = more maintenance.

Wrapping Up

Personalized onboarding in Unless isn’t rocket science, but it does take some up-front thinking. Start simple: plan your main flows, set up a couple of key segments, and get the basics working. Then, watch what real users do and fix what’s broken.

Don’t chase “hyper-personalization” or try to automate away all human support. The best onboarding flows are clear, helpful, and—most importantly—easy to change as your product and customers evolve.

Get your flow live, see what works, and keep it moving. That’s how you actually help customers get started.