The Post-Sale Customer Journey for Enterprise SaaS

Length: About 600 words/2-3 minutes reading time

A common mental model for product adoption is the S-curve, derived from the classic book Diffusion of Innovations.

Diffusion of Innovations describes how different types of users, such as innovators and laggards, embrace technologies at different rates, giving the adoption curve its non-linear S-shape.

If you are selling a SaaS solution, you want this S-curve to be as steep as possible. The faster product adoption proliferates throughout an organization, the faster a customer achieves value.

If you sell an enterprise SaaS solution, however, you might notice something different customers' adoption of your product - in the beginning of the curve, a ‘flat’ period of limited to no adoption.

So, what’s going on here? Are end users slower to adopt in the enterprise?

To understand exactly what’s happening, we need to look beyond the process of end user adoption described in Diffusion of Innovations and examine the complex organizational process an enterprise undergoes when deciding to roll out a new technology. In fact, there are three distinct phases to this process which we will refer to as the “post-sale customer journey”.

The first phase is organizational adoption. Business decision makers must validate the value that a product brings to their organization. Does it solve a critical need or pain point? Does it make things faster or better? Deploying new software comes with operational challenges and risks as well as hidden financial costs. Before moving forward with a new technology, leadership must determine that the value overcomes not just licensing costs, but also these secondary factors.

Note that this phase should be heavily emphasized in pre-sale conversations with customers, but still needs to be addressed post-sale, particularly if a customer is doing a staged or departmental roll-out.

The second phase is IT prioritization and deployment. Modern IT roadmaps have long time horizons, frequently 18 months or more, and include dozens of technologies. Any new technologies, aside from those that are strategic imperatives, must battle for finite IT resources and time.

Every company has a different process, but IT prioritization is often influenced by two things: the business priority from Phase 1, and the complexity required to roll out a solution. Is the solution technically challenging to deploy? Is heavy integration work required? How difficult is it for employees to learn?

If a solution is not prioritized by IT, or is too complex to deploy, it runs the risk of being sidelined in the IT plan, making it low hanging fruit for the next round of budget cuts.

The third phase is employee adoption, which follows the adoption S-curve. This is a complex topic covered by the broad discipline of change management.

Accelerating adoption and time to value

Here’s how you can use the post-sale customer journey to accelerate the adoption curve and get customers to value as quickly as possible.

A.     Shorten the “limited adoption flat line” by accelerating the organizational decision-making process from Phase 1 and Phase 2. Help customer leadership recognize the value your product can bring. Ensure a smooth deployment and rollout.

 B.     Increase the slope of your S-curve by making good change management, training, and onboarding a core part of your solution.

 C.     Increase the upper bound of product adoption by increasing awareness, excitement and network effects of your product.

In a future post, I’ll be outlining some specific tactics marketing can use to address each of these areas.

In the meantime, I’d love to hear from you. Agree? Disagree? Questions?

All opinions are my own and do not represent the view of any of my current or former employers.