How to Drive Product Adoption in B2B SaaS

Once a customer is onboarded, they should be adept at using your product to meet their needs. They understand and can see results from the value of your product. However, your job is not over! You have already invested in establishing a deeper, working relationship with the customer that now needs to be nurtured. The foundation of your continuing partnership is a mutual relationship and trust. As you continue investing in your customer relationship, the customer becomes fully adopted.

The definition of full adoption is when the customer has arrived at the promised land AND that the customer acknowledges it. Sometimes, customers have a hard time remembering the reasons they bought a product and whether other solutions might be better. The chaos of life creeps in and ushers them toward change. Your goal is to continue re-emphasizing the definition of the promised land that started in the sales process (and probably the pre-sales process) and migrated through onboarding and into adoption. When the customer reaches the promised land, they should know. If they don't know they've reached it, you aren't communicating well enough.

The impact: A fully-adopted customer pays dividends for your company. Once a customer is fully adopted, the likelihood of their churn decreases and their expansion increases. VC Tomasz Tunguz highlights the impact of churn: "A healthy, growing SaaS company with -5% churn has 73% higher revenue than one with 5% churn." This increase in revenue substantially adds to your top-line revenue without any increases in CAC. Moreover, a fully-adopted customer has the potential of becoming an advocate for your company.

The goal: Create a process to maximize the adoption of your customers.

How can Golden Section Assist?

Background:

At a high-level, the adoption process is relatively straightforward: deepen relationships and improve product value. These are your two goals. But in pursuing those goals, the customer needs to be aware of the definition of the promised land and their progress toward arriving there. Constant reminders are key.

Steps

Process Generation.

1. Person Accountable: You should always name a specific role accountable for the function of maximizing adoption. For ongoing customer relations tasks like these, you may choose someone from the sales team, such as an account manager.
2. Process Steps: Define each of the following processes that must be completed during onboarding.
   • Hand-off from Onboarding Team. We recommend having a specific process in place to ensure hand-off happens in a timely manner with sufficient transfer of knowledge. Specifically, we recommend the hand- off process be triggered when the adoption metric is met (see Onboarding Play).
   • Support. What is the process for a customer to get product support?
   • The support process needs to be extremely fine-tuned to maintain customer trust and goodwill.
   • How does a customer request support? (This needs to be extremely simple and easy to figure out. One recommendation is to get a specific phone number for support-related needs and include that phone number in the email signature line of every person in the company.)
   • Who responds?
   • What is the time frame for response and completion?
   • How is a support ticket tracked?
   • What is the process for communicating bugs and product fixes to the development team?
   • How is a support ticket marked resolved?
   • Is there an SLA in the contract? Does this customer have a specific SLA or custom SLA that differs from the norm? This SLA check must be in the final process.
   • Ongoing Communication / Relationship Building: In a busy start-up, this important component will not happen without intent. What process can you set in place to ensure it happens? Some considerations:
   • Set a quota. Each account manager needs to meet a weekly quota for number of meetings with current customers. Get current customers talking with these four questions from Verne Harnish's book, "Scaling Up":
3. How are you doing?
4. What's going on in your industry/neighborhood?
5. What do you hear about our competitors?
6. How are we doing?
7. And, of course, a reminder of the promised land and the progress toward it.
   • Proactively identify customers who are not spending sufficient time in your product. Reach out to them to schedule time to help them more fully utilize the product and become an expert user. This will proactively help manage churn also.
   • Set aside regular time for team members to share the insights they have gleaned from customer conversations and discuss how to make these insights actionable. Without a defined mechanism to share these insights, they get lost in the daily workload.
   • Your process here needs to be able to identify:
8. Customers who need to be re-onboarded (turnover).
9. Customers who need to be resold (excessive turnover or acquisition).
10. Customers who have outgrown the original promised land or customers who's needs have migrated since the initial sale.

1. Customers who have forgotten about the promised land and need a reminder.
   • Expansion. Upsells and account expansion will only come from strong relationships. To this point, you have proactively detailed processes to establish a foundation of trust and relationship. What process can be employed to capitalize on those relationships?
2. Concluding Event: What is the final outcome of the process that signals it is complete? We don't want any processes to be left in limbo.

1. Timeframe. How long should this process take? It is important to keep a steady cadence to these processes to maintain momentum.
2. Leading Indicators (KPIs): What metrics can be tracked to indicate the efficiency and effectiveness of this process?
3. Codification. Create supporting documents (checklist, workflows, support ticket system, etc.) to make sure the processes that have been designed are implemented

Iterating.

It will be an on-going process to drive improvements in customer relationships, product, features, and user interface with the goal of full customer adoption.

Some considerations if the KPIs start showing signs of process weakness:

1. Weak Customer Engagement: did you lead the customer to the right features? Did you understand their needs appropriately? Does the customer lack the resources or capacity to use your product? How can you better align perceived value to experienced value?
2. Declining Engagement: Why is a solid user falling off? Did your champion leave or get promoted? Bigger company changes (acquisition, new focus), personell issues?