The Most Overlooked Stage of Your Brand Is the One That Decides if You’re Remembered

We talk a lot about brand awareness. About getting on the radar, getting into the conversation, getting on the shortlist.

We talk about conversion. About landing the deal, signing the contract, making it official.

…all while we’re really hoping to be talking about retention and advocacy.

But there’s a moment between decision and advocacy that gets glossed over, if not ignored entirely.

A moment that determines whether you deliver on the brand promises you spent months and millions building.

Onboarding.

Onboarding isn’t a support process.

It’s not a cost center.

It’s not a glorified checklist.

It’s your brand’s first real chance to prove it meant everything it said.

Most Onboarding Is Built Like a Manual, Not a Memory

Most companies treat onboarding like they’re writing a technical manual:

• Step 1: Confirm login

• Step 2: Watch training

• Step 3: Meet your CS rep

• Step 4: “Let us know if you need anything.”

It’s linear. Transactional. Soulless.

Which is strange, because this is the moment your customer is most open to you, the moment they’ve been waiting for.

They’re curious. Hopeful. Excited. Nervous.

They want to feel something.

Instead, they get a drip campaign and a support doc.

The Brand Doesn’t End at the Sale. It Begins.

Your brand is not your ads.

It’s not your pitch deck.

It’s not your font, your colors, or your elevator speech.

Your brand is the experience your customer has when they choose you.

Therefore:

• If your onboarding is forgettable, your brand becomes forgettable.

• If your onboarding is chaotic, your brand becomes untrustworthy.

And if your onboarding is cold and mechanical, your brand becomes… just another vendor.

What If You Treated Onboarding Like the Opening Scene of a Film?

What if onboarding wasn’t a step-by-step to-do list… but the opening scene of their transformation, where their real story begins?

What if you:

• Scripted it like your brand voice depended on it (because it does)?

• Resourced it like it was your greatest opportunity to differentiate (because it is)?

• Optimized it like your future advocacy, referrals, and upsells depended on it (because they do)?

Because here’s the thing:

You don’t win customers at the close. You win them in the first 90 days.

In the Next 18-36 Months, Onboarding Will Be a Key Differentiator

It’s already happening.

As product parity increases, marketing noise grows, and people seek out connections and community, experience is becoming the new moat.

Companies that understand onboarding as brand infrastructure will:

• Reduce churn without slashing price

• Create loyalty without gimmicks

• Activate advocacy without having to “ask for it”

They’ll win because of how it feels to become a customer. Not in spite of it.

So, Ask Yourself:

• Does our onboarding feel like us?

• Are we making new customers feel smarter, more confident, and genuinely excited?

• Or, are we just moving them through a system?

Because, in the story of your brand, onboarding isn’t a transition.

It’s the transformation.

A Quick Exercise

Want to evaluate your onboarding through a brand lens? Here’s a quick exercise.

Gather your leadership, CX, and marketing teams and ask:

1. What does our customer feel in their first 7 days with us?

2. What do they say to their team after their first onboarding session?

3. Where does the onboarding experience currently break the narrative we sold them?

Then go fix it.

Not because onboarding is broken, but because your brand story deserves to be complete.

Is Attention To Detail Your Competitive Edge?

We are moving so fast we aren’t noticing the cracks forming under their feet.

Projects are launching half-baked. Content is flooding inboxes. On the surface, this all looks like momentum. Underneath, however, the cost of missed details starts compounding, having very real impacts via errors, rework, and reputational hits. What looks like “speed” today becomes tomorrow’s mess.

The problem isn’t that we’re not doing enough. It’s that we’re doing too much, too fast, with too little care.

The Psychology of “More, Faster”

Our brains aren’t wired for this volume.

• Cognitive load theory shows humans can only juggle a limited amount of new information before performance collapses (Sweller, 1988).

• Stanford research on multitasking found heavy multitaskers are actually worse at switching tasks and filtering distractions than people who focus (Stanford, 2009).

• University of California research on attention span shows the average person now pays attention to a single screen for only about 47 seconds, compared to ~2.5 minutes in earlier eras (University of California, 2024).

Pile on AI and automation, and the problem only accelerates. We start trusting machine outputs without scrutiny, diving further into a bias called automation bias (Parasuraman & Riley, 1997). That’s how small errors slip through and snowball into expensive failures and it dates all the way back before the turn of the century … what’s old is, sadly, new, again.

The New Scarcity: Quality

The irony of the AI era is this: as output explodes, quality collapses.

Which means the rarest thing in the market is no longer speed. It’s precision. It’s trust.

Consumers and businesses are already reflecting this shift:

• Edelman’s Trust Barometer reports people reward brands they believe are consistent and reliable over those that just move fast (Edelman Trust Barometer 2024).

• McKinsey’s 2024 survey found that while 75% of companies adopted AI since 2020, only 23% reported actual quality improvements, most cite inconsistency and rework (McKinsey, 2024)

• And while younger generations (Gen Z, Millennials) value flexibility and digital-first experiences, they are fierce judges of quality. A brand that feels careless or sloppy loses them instantly (Deloitte Global Gen Z & Millennial Survey 2024).

In other words: the market is drowning in “good enough.” What people will pay for, what they will return for, is what’s done exceptionally well.

Doing Less, Better

This isn’t a call to abandon progress. It’s a call to cut ruthlessly. Do fewer things, but with deeper attention.

Because in a world where AI can generate 10,000 words in a blink, the human edge won’t be speed—it will be the judgment to know what matters, and the craft to deliver it without compromise.

The companies, teams, and individuals who thrive won’t be the ones producing more. They’ll be the ones whose work people actually trust, remember, and return to.

So here’s the challenge: What could you strip away this week, so the work you do actually lasts?

My First Step

For me, it’s meetings. Specifically, meetings without a clear agenda and defined outcomes. They’re speed disguised as progress. By stripping them away, I’m freeing time and focus to do fewer things, but with the depth and quality that actually move the needle.

Why Your B2B Stories Need Rounded Edges

You know how rounded buttons just feel friendlier than sharp-cornered ones? How certain websites feel instantly trustworthy while others make you want to click away?

(Dive much deeper on rounded v. sharp design here: Journal of Consumer Research)

The same principle applies to B2B brand narratives. Stories have sharp edges are more likely to make buyers pull back. Stories that have rounded edges are more likely to make them lean in.

…and most of us are telling stories with way too many sharp edges.

Stories Have Edges Too

Think about the last sales deck you saw. Was it packed with "cutting-edge solutions" and "best-in-class platforms" and enough acronyms to fill a dictionary? Every one of those phrases is a sharp edge. They poke. They prod. They create distance.

It’s quite ironic. B2B loves to talk about "cutting-edge" when people instinctively prefer rounded edges.

Now, think about the time someone told you a story about Sarah who used to spend her Sundays catching up on work but doesn't anymore. Something different happened, right? You relaxed. You pictured Sarah, maybe you saw a bit of yourself in her story. No poking. No prodding. Just curiosity about what changed for Sarah.

That's the difference between sharp and rounded narratives. One makes your brain work. The other makes your brain care.

Sharp vs. Rounded: A Tale of Two Pitches

Here's what sharp looks like: "Our AI-powered solution delivers operational excellence through advanced automation capabilities."

Did you feel that? That's your brain working overtime to decode what this actually means for you. It's all edges and they are abstract, aggressive, and alienating.

Now here's rounded: "Remember when your team had to manually process every invoice? That's gone now."

You had a different feeling, right? It's a question, not an assault. It’s an invitation to see yourself in the story.

That’s the power of smooth edges. They draw you in rather than sharp ones, that push you away.

Why This Matters More Than Ever

You're not selling to spreadsheets. You're selling to humans who happen to use spreadsheets. And humans, whether they're CFOs or interns, are drawn to what feels safe, approachable, and familiar.

When you round your narrative edges, something measurable happens.

• People actually finish reading

• They move through your sales process faster

• They share your story with colleagues because stories travel while specifications are archived in your inbox

The companies winning complex B2B sales aren't the ones with the sharpest edges. They're the ones who figured out that "cutting-edge" is exactly the wrong metaphor when you want someone to come closer.

The Rounded Revolution

So how do you know if your narratives have too many sharp edges?

Here's a simple test: Would your customer say it that way? If not, you've found a sharp edge.

"We're leveraging synergies" is sharp. "We're working better together" is rounded.

"Best-in-class solution" is sharp. "The thing that actually works" is rounded.

"Digital transformation initiative" is sharp. "Finally fixing that annoying manual process" is rounded.

The beautiful thing about rounded narratives is they're actually easier to create.

You don't need a thesaurus or an MBA. You need to listen to how your happiest customers describe what you did for them.

They never say "operational excellence." They say "I get home on time now."

The Question That Changes Everything

Every piece of content you create, every deck you design, every email you send has edges. The question isn't whether you're telling your story. The question is whether you're telling it in a way that invites people in or keeps them at arm's length.

The reality is sharp narratives feel like work. They require decoding, translating, and processing … and no one has time for more work.

They exhaust buyers before you even get to the value.

Rounded narratives feel like conversation. They flow naturally from problem to solution to transformation. They create connection instead of distance.

So, What?

Take a look at your latest sales narrative. Count the sharp edges. Get a notepad and put a tally down for each piece of jargon, each abstractions, each aggressive claims. Then ask yourself: Would Sarah tell it this way?

In the end, nobody wants to grab onto something with sharp edges. Not buttons, not brands, and definitely not B2B solutions.

Companies that understand this aren't trying to be cutting-edge anymore.

They're too busy closing deals with their well defined rounded stories.