If you work in B2B SaaS, you know customer onboarding is never simple. There’s always a pile of to-dos, stakeholders pinging you for updates, and a nagging feeling something is slipping through the cracks. This guide is for folks who want to actually see what’s happening in onboarding, automate away the grunt work, and stop losing customers to messy processes—all using Make.
Whether you’re in customer success, onboarding, or ops, you’ll learn how to set up tracking, automate reminders, and keep your team (and clients) on the same page. No hand-wavy “best practices”—just clear steps and real talk about what works.
Why track onboarding tasks at all?
If you don’t have a system, onboarding gets ugly fast. Here’s what happens:
- Tasks get missed, and customers notice.
- Your team spends more time chasing updates than helping customers.
- You scramble to answer “Where are we at?” for every new account.
A tracking system, even a basic one, means:
- Nothing slips through the cracks.
- Everyone sees progress—internally and externally.
- You can spot bottlenecks before they become angry emails.
Manual tracking sort of works, but it falls apart as soon as you get more than a handful of customers or tasks. That’s where Make comes in.
Why use Make for onboarding workflows?
Make (formerly Integromat) is an automation tool that connects your SaaS apps—think Airtable, Google Sheets, Slack, Trello, HubSpot, whatever. It’s like Zapier, but with more flexibility and less hand-holding. Make is great for:
- Automating repetitive onboarding steps (assigning tasks, sending reminders, updating CRMs).
- Routing notifications to the right people.
- Keeping data in sync across tools.
- Building dashboards or reports without hiring a developer.
But let’s be honest: Make won’t fix broken processes or magically make onboarding “delightful.” It’s a toolkit, not a silver bullet. If your onboarding checklist is chaos, automate after you’ve cleaned it up.
Step 1: Map out your onboarding process (seriously, do this first)
Before you touch Make, do a quick audit:
- List the standard onboarding steps for a customer (kickoff call, integration setup, training, etc.).
- Note who’s responsible for each step.
- Decide where you want to see the status (CRM, spreadsheet, Notion, etc.).
- Figure out what you want to automate versus what needs a human touch.
Pro tip: Don’t try to automate every edge case. Cover the 80% of standard new customer journeys first.
Step 2: Choose your “source of truth” for tracking tasks
Make is flexible, so you’ve got options. Your source of truth is where you’ll track onboarding tasks and their status. Common choices:
- Airtable: Great for structured task tracking, custom fields, easy filtering.
- Google Sheets: Simple, fast, but gets messy with lots of data.
- Trello/Asana/ClickUp: If your team already lives here, stick with it.
- CRM (HubSpot, Salesforce): If you want onboarding status tied directly to customer records.
Pick the tool your team will actually use—don’t add another app “just because.” If your onboarding is a mess in spreadsheets, it’ll be a mess in Airtable, too.
Step 3: Build your onboarding task template
This is your checklist for every new customer. At minimum, each onboarding “project” should include:
- Customer/company name
- List of tasks (with due dates)
- Responsible team member(s)
- Status or progress field
You can make this a row in a spreadsheet, a record in Airtable, or a card in Trello. Keep it simple. Fancy automations can come later.
Step 4: Set up Make to automate the basics
Here’s where Make earns its keep. The goal: set up automations that save time and prevent dropped balls, not just move data for the sake of it.
Common onboarding automation recipes in Make:
1. Create a new onboarding checklist when a customer signs up
- Trigger: New deal marked “Closed Won” in the CRM.
- Action: Create a new record (or row, or card) in your onboarding tracker with pre-filled tasks.
2. Send reminders for overdue tasks
- Trigger: Scheduled (daily or hourly) search for overdue tasks in Airtable/Sheets/Trello.
- Action: Send Slack/Teams message or email to the task owner.
3. Update onboarding status in CRM
- Trigger: Task marked “Done” in tracker.
- Action: Update the customer’s onboarding status field in HubSpot/Salesforce.
4. Notify internal teams or the customer
- Trigger: Key milestone reached (e.g., kickoff complete, integration live).
- Action: Send internal Slack/Teams notification or automated email to the customer.
What to ignore: Don’t bother automating stuff you do once a year, or steps that always need a personal touch (like custom training calls). You’ll waste more time debugging than you save.
Step 5: Build your first Make scenario
Let’s walk through a basic example: creating onboarding tasks when a deal closes.
Example: Automate onboarding task creation
What you need: - Your CRM (e.g., HubSpot) connected to Make - Your task tracker (e.g., Airtable) connected to Make
Steps:
- Set up a trigger: In Make, choose your CRM module (e.g., “Watch Deals” in HubSpot) and filter for new Closed Won deals.
- Add an action: Add an Airtable module to create a new record in your onboarding table. Map fields like customer name, owner, and kickoff date.
- (Optional) Add a loop: If you want to create multiple tasks per customer, use an array/list of tasks and have Make create multiple records for each one.
- Test it: Run the scenario with sample data. Check your Airtable (or whatever you use) to make sure tasks appear as expected.
- Turn it on: Set the scenario to run automatically.
Pro tip: Spend more time on testing than you think you need. A small mapping error can spam your team or worse, confuse customers.
Step 6: Keep everyone in the loop (without spamming them)
It’s easy to overdo notifications. Before you hook Make up to Slack or email, ask yourself who actually needs to know, and when.
- Daily task digests: Send a summary of overdue or upcoming tasks, not a ping for every single update.
- Milestone notifications: Only notify when big steps happen (kickoff scheduled, onboarding complete).
- Custom dashboards: If you’re using Airtable or Google Sheets, let stakeholders check status themselves. Don’t clog inboxes.
What to avoid: Don’t set up “notify everyone on every change” automations. That’s how you end up with notification blindness—and people ignoring what matters.
Step 7: Review, tweak, and don’t automate yourself into a corner
No onboarding process is perfect. After a week or two, check:
- Are important steps getting missed?
- Is anyone getting too many or too few notifications?
- Are manual “workarounds” popping up?
Update your Make scenarios as you learn. Sometimes it’s easier to remove an automation than fix a broken one. And if you find yourself building a Rube Goldberg onboarding machine, step back—maybe the process, not the automation, is the problem.
Honest takes: What works, what doesn’t
What works
- Automating obvious, repetitive steps (task creation, reminders, status updates).
- Using the tool your team already likes (don’t force Airtable if everyone loves Trello).
- Keeping onboarding templates simple and iterating as you go.
What doesn’t
- Automating for the sake of it (“look, it updates three systems at once!”—so what?).
- Over-notifying people, which leads to everyone ignoring the system.
- Complicating things with hundreds of fields or edge cases in your template.
What to ignore
- Fancy dashboards no one looks at.
- Automations for rare exceptions—just handle those manually.
- One-size-fits-all onboarding flows. Most SaaS onboarding is 80% standard, 20% weird.
Final thoughts: Keep it simple, iterate often
Don’t let perfect get in the way of “actually works.” Start with the minimum onboarding tracking you need, use Make to automate the boring parts, and tweak as real-world problems come up. The best onboarding systems are usually the least flashy—they just help you and your team keep promises to customers, without a lot of fuss.