Unleashing the Full Potential: Advanced Analytics for Realized and Untapped Value in SaaS

As our SaaS business matured, we quickly realized that focusing solely on acquiring customers wasn’t enough. The real challenge was ensuring they realized the value they signed up for—and even more importantly, helping them unlock the untapped potential value that could take their experience to the next level.

I remember a moment during a QBR (Quarterly Business Review) with a high-value client. While they were happy with the product, their usage was limited to just one module. The customer success manager asked them, "Have you tried leveraging our analytics feature to personalize user onboarding?" Their response was eye-opening: "We didn’t even know that was available." That’s when it became clear—we were leaving value on the table, and so were our customers.

This is where advanced analytics stepped in, allowing us to predict not just how well our customers were doing today, but where they were poised to derive greater value, if we gave them the right tools and guidance.

Use Case: Transforming Customer Success with Realized and Potential Value Analytics

Instead of relying on basic usage metrics or focusing solely on churn prevention, we decided to dig deeper into how customers engage with our product—where they were seeing success (realized value) and where they could unlock even more (potential value).

Step 1: Mapping Realized and Potential Value Across the Customer Journey

Our journey started by analyzing the full customer experience, and we quickly discovered that many customers weren’t fully aware of all the product features at their disposal.

Take one of our enterprise clients using our unified endpoint management (UEM) solution. Their IT team had successfully deployed it to manage mobile devices and ensure secure access for remote employees. However, they hadn’t explored the advanced analytics and automation features within the platform, which could provide them with insights into device performance, app usage, and security risks. By leveraging these tools, they could have automated compliance policies and proactively identified potential security threats, saving significant time and enhancing their overall security strategy.

This was a clear case of high potential value going untapped. By guiding their IT team to unlock the platform's full capabilities, we helped them optimize operations and significantly reduce manual work.

We began mapping this out by:

• Product Utilization: Monitoring which features were heavily used and which weren’t touched. It turned out, many customers were using 40-50% of what they could be.
• Engagement Patterns: Analyzing which teams within the client organization were active, and which were silent—an often-overlooked signal of untapped value. We realized that cross-functional adoption was a key driver of increased value.

Practical Suggestion:

• Run Feature Adoption Audits quarterly to see where your customers are thriving and where they’re underutilizing the product. A simple report showing unused or underused features can spark important conversations with clients.

Step 2: Proactive Value Activation—Unlocking Untapped Opportunities

With the insights from our data in hand, we shifted our customer success strategy from reactive to proactive. Instead of waiting for customers to tell us what they needed, we were able to lead the conversation by identifying opportunities for them to gain more from our product.

I recall a moment when one of our Customer Success Managers (CSMs) reached out to a customer who had high potential but low realized value. The CSM walked them through how to leverage our automation tool to reduce manual tasks, and within a month, the customer’s engagement skyrocketed. What had once been a risk of churn turned into a success story simply by helping them uncover that hidden potential.

Here’s how we did it:

• For Customers Realizing Strong Value: We focused on reinforcing their success by showing personalized ROI reports that highlighted the direct impact our product had on their KPIs. This reinforced our value and made upsell conversations smoother.
• For Customers with Untapped Potential: We offered custom training sessions to walk their teams through features they hadn’t adopted yet. The key here was to make it personal—showing exactly how using more advanced features could solve their specific pain points.

Practical Suggestion:

• Host Quarterly Business Reviews focused on realized and potential value. Highlight untapped features and show exactly how they could solve customer-specific problems.

Step 3: Creating a Value-Driven Culture

What truly set us apart was embedding this value-driven mindset across the company. From product teams to marketing, everyone understood that our role wasn’t just to keep customers—it was to help them grow.

I remember discussing with our product team the gap between feature launches and customer adoption. It wasn’t enough to build great tools—we had to make sure customers actually knew how and when to use them. This feedback loop between customer success, product, and marketing was critical to ensuring customers reached their full potential.

Here’s what changed:

• From Churn Prevention to Value Expansion: We stopped thinking about churn as the goal and started focusing on how we could expand the value customers were receiving, thereby making churn a non-issue.
• Data-Driven Upsell and Cross-Sell: With data highlighting customers’ potential value, we could engage them at the right time with upsell opportunities that made sense for their specific use cases. This turned a traditionally awkward conversation into something natural and value-driven.

Practical Suggestion:

• Integrate Customer Success, Product, and Marketing Teams to create a cohesive value activation strategy. Your product team should understand which features are underutilized, and your success team should know how to drive engagement in those areas.

The Results: Unlocking Exponential Value

The results were transformative. By focusing on both realized value and potential value, we not only improved customer satisfaction but also increased customer lifetime value through upsells, cross-sells, and expansion. What’s more, our customers became advocates—because we weren’t just meeting their expectations, we were exceeding them by helping them unlock value they didn’t even know existed.

Final Thoughts: Turning Insights Into Outcomes

At the end of the day, building a customer success strategy that focuses on realized and potential value isn’t just about preventing churn—it’s about helping your customers reach their fullest potential. It’s about showing them how they can achieve even more than they expected by using your product in ways they hadn’t imagined.

By using advanced analytics, we were able to lead the charge in turning insights into outcomes. And as our customers grew, so did we.

What steps are you taking to help your customers unlock their full potential?

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