Adoption Phase

Once you’ve finished your onboarding phase you enter the “adoption phase." This is the phase you enter after you’ve deployed your B2B SaaS product and your customers are up and running. Some SaaS companies also call this the “delivery" or "success phase” (usually done by SaaS companies with less complicated products). For the purpose of this blog post, we’ll just call it the SaaS adoption phase.

The so-called SaaS adoption phase really means: 'make sure you monitor the product usage phase'. All you need in this phase is to ensure that your product is being used and that your customers are getting the maximum value out of it.

You’d be in trouble if you have users that are not using your product at this point. That should trigger a big red alert in whatever CRM or CSM tool you're using. Why? Because there is a direct correlation between low product usage and high churn.

..and since you don’t want any churn in your SaaS business, here are three to do's if you have users that are not engaging with your product:

1. Train the users on your sticky features

First, do the obvious: figure out what your sticky features are and start training the user only on those features. Set up calls, meet the person face2face, send an e-mail to a training webinar online or do whatever you need to do to train that user on your sticky features.

2. Survey the user

If #1 doesn’t work you need to understand why the user isn’t using your product. Is there a technical issue that you don’t know about? No value? Difficulty logging in? Depending on your ACV (Average Contract Value), you should either speak to the user over the phone or send a short e-mail/survey asking for their feedback. This is a question you must get an answer on!

3. Identify super users and have them share their success stories

Identifying super users on the same account (or a similar type of client) and share their success story with your user. Get the user to attend a webinar or send him a case study or a success story. Something that triggers the user/client to take that step and invest her time in engaging with your product.

Most importantly, understand that:

The SaaS adoption phase is the phase in the client lifecycle that gives you the most important churn risk forecast. You have to set plays and be active at this stage - after all, your strategies and plays in this phase is the very essence of your churn fighting strategy!