Don't Miss An Opportunity For Customer Interaction
For most companies the key focus is about sales, getting new clients in the door. But for companies with a SaaS model, looking to build their annual reoccurring revenue, it is important that those companies stay customers and continue to use the tool, platform, or technology. You want customers who come in the door, but who also grow with your company and continue to use it day after day, month after month and year after year. This is done not through sales, but through adoption.
“Product adoption is not about day one. It’s about week one, month one and year one.”
Most small to medium technology companies do not have the time or resources to focus on adoption. Their technology developers are working to keep the platform running and developing a host of new features and content to keep customers coming in the door. Sales colleagues are working to bring in new customers and hoping that the tool is good enough that customers stick with it or can’t find something better.
The focus on supporting customers is usually in the first stages of interaction during the sale. While this is the first step it is also the place where you have the least impact on whether your customer is adopting the product. During the sales-cycle your interaction is focused on guiding key decision-makers at your client’s company and while you may highlight all the benefits of the tool or platform it is not impacting the client colleagues who will be the actual users. Many companies stop here and miss huge opportunities for client engagement during the onboarding and adoption phases.
The second stage is customer onboarding. In this phase you provide a subset of colleagues with tools to get them started using the platform. For many companies this is the only time they teach their clients how to use the platform or tools. Onboarding can range from a quick guide to full scale training, but it usually only impacts a few of your clients’ employees. It is important that you use the onboarding cycle to make sure you are highlighting content that is relevant to the client and to learn about their needs.
The final stage is user adoption. At this point many companies have stopped interacting with their clients. During adoption, the users are teaching themselves how to use your product to accomplish daily tasks. Clients are now taking the 1-2 people you trained and having them communicate on your behalf to train their entire organization, communicate the value of your product and integrate it into their daily work routines. This is the point of highest impact, where the most of you users are involved and you are removed from the process.
The average large company adds approximately 6.2 new applications every 30 days, with 55% of SaaS applications inundating employees going regularly unused1. This is the place where adoption tools can be so impactful. How do you enable the client to share the type of messages and content that increase productivity, drive feature adoption and streamline daily use?
This can be done by the creation of a comprehensive set of adoption materials that you can hand off for your client to use. Presentations, emails, guides, videos each of these allow you to define a clear message, set of benefits and tools to support adoption and make sure that those reach every end user. By partnering with your client, not only do you save them time and resources by providing them with these materials, materials that you can use over and over with each new client, but you are also able to engage each employee directly in adoption.
By making sure that client one and one hundred learn the same things about the benefits of your tool or platform, how it applies to their job and how they can move from an average user to advanced as they grow and explore new aspects of your tool. Good adoption leads to more depth and breadth within the tool, which in turn mean more renewals for your company.
When done right the final two stages of onboarding and adoption create a faster time to value for your clients, as they have the resources they need to reach the “Aha! Moment” with your product and see its value. You will be doing a service for your clients by creating a streamlined implementation, where you have made sure your customer has everything, they need to be successful.
1 Zylo 2023 SaaS Management Index Report