4 things to teach SaaS customers now

Of course you need to teach customers how to use your product. They cannot derive value from it unless you do. Product training (however you define it) is a necessary condition, but it is not sufficient. When you think more deeply about the day-in-the-life of your customer, you see what their real-world challenges actually are. And these challenges have little to do with your product features.

In this playbook, I offer a solution to helping customers with these real-world, day-in-the-life challenges that most software companies avoid. The long-term success of your software company depends on you confronting these challenges and helping customers overcome them.

Play #1: Teach Implementation Methodology

70% of enterprise software projects fail to live up to expectations. You cannot afford to leave it to chance that customers will roll out your software out successfully. The evidence is overwhelming, and you must do everything you can to mitigate this risk of failure. If you succeed at this, you win. McKinsey found that for every one-point increase in customer onboarding satisfaction, there was a 3% increase in customer revenue.

If you are beyond any of the earliest stages of your customer onboarding maturity, you have developed a reasonably successful method for implementing your software. Your professional services and/or customer success teams are likely walking customers through this process. They should be. But they probably should only be doing this for high segment tier customers and those customers should likely be paying for it.

Since you cannot afford to do this for small and medium-sized customers, you need to create live and self-paced training to help your largest customer segments (SMBs) implement your software successfully.

Why teach implementation methodology?

1. Successful go live
2. Minimize time to value
3. Give smaller customers help who can’t pay for professional services
4. Communicate you care about their success

Play #2: Teach process methodology

Your software was created to change the way people work, and no matter how easy your software is to use, customers still need to learn your new way of working. Help them work in that new way. Consider the example of a company buying Atlassian’s Bitbucket. Bitbucket helps software teams use the git version control methodology to manage and share their software code repository and collaborate better as a team to build and ship software.

Software developers know what version control is. There are many different version control methodologies. Git is one. A new Bitbucket customer may be switching from a legacy version control methodology (subversion, for example) and is not familiar with git. They see git as a way to improve results, so they switch.

If a customer is new to git AND new to Bitbucket, teaching features is the last thing you want to do. It doesn’t make any sense to show new customers how to submit a pull request if they don’t know what pull request is.

Customers are buying your software as a means of implementing a new way of working in order to achieve some new level of performance. Ask yourself, “What new way of working does our software offer and how can (or should) we help our customers learn that new way to work?”

Examples:

1. If you sell version control software (based on git), teach your customers git.
2. If you sell agile software, teach your customers agile methodologies like kanban or scrum.
3. If you sell project management software, teach your customers project management.

Whatever job your software seeks to transform, teach your customers that job.

Why teach process methodology?

1. Help customers work in a new way
2. Build trust with customers
3. Grow your thought leadership
4. Communicate you understand your customers’ industries and domain

Play #3: Teach sticky features

Presumably, your software allows customers to perform various tasks. Yet, your product team is left to wonder why customers don’t use more than one or two main features. “Most customers don’t use our most valuable features,” product managers complain. The only thing worse than a customer using very little of your product, is the customer’s CFO looking at the expenses and saying. “We’re paying $100K for “To Do List” software? Cancel it.”

According to CIO.com, the cost of under-used software would shock you. It’s in the billions. No wonder CFOs are scrutinizing software spend like never before. In March 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight, tweeted that CEOs and CFOs all over the world are making a list of software they buy and drawing a line. Software above the line is software they need. Software below the line are not needed and will be cut. Mehta’s advice to software vendors was to make they they are above the line.

The value line.

Software companies need to figuring out which high value use cases customers are not using and teach customers to start using them. This won’t be easy. It requires an intimate relationship with customers and a deep understanding of your value proposition. Go back to your value proposition canvas (from Strategyzer) and match up your gain creators and pain relievers with your customer jobs, gains and pains. Then teach your customers how to gain more value out of your products.

Why teach sticky features?

1. Grow customer lifetime value
2. Help customers see around corners
3. Challenge customers to stretch themselves to create value in their businesses
4. Communicate that your care about customers’ long term success

Play #4: Teach report results

Running reports might just be the ultimate social “job to be done.” Look up “jobs to be done framework” to learn about functional jobs, social jobs, and emotional jobs.

Running reports is a social job for two main reasons. First, as soon as your customer implements your software, some VP is going to start asking for reports. Everyone is going to panic because no one knows how to run reports. People are afraid to look bad in front of the boss and their peers, so they avoid the question. Second, the person who gets assigned to run reports will be stressed continuously while they figure out how to extract data from your product and present it to the VP.

If you a) understand this very real social job to be done; and b) possess any amount of empathy, you will teach your customer how to deal with this stress and make them a hero. You will teach your customer how to:

1. Understand the data model
2. Create reports
3. Anticipate report requests they might get
4. Create the slides for their reports
5. Tell the right story with their slides
6. Explain each report and data point and what they might mean (insights)
7. Anticipate questions from management about the reports (possible drill down requests and how to address those questions)

Your goal here is not so much to teach customers how to run reports, it is to help customer look good in the management meeting every week because they “really know the numbers.”

Why teach report results?

1. Without showing data, customer can’t know if your software is working
2. Take a personal interest in the actual people on your customers’ teams
3. Make your customer the hero of their journey, especially in front of management and peers
4. Communicate that you understand what their job is really about

Help customers overcome challenges

Well, there it is. Four things you should be teaching SaaS customers now. At first read, this playbook might seem overwhelming. Indeed, teaching all of the above to customers is overwhelming. If you start from scratch. Just know that you shouldn’t bite off more than you can chew.

It is cliche advice to say, “start small and start with one thing.”

Cliche, yes.

But true, valid, and smart.

Don’t leave to chance that customers will magically excel at using your product. If you learn anything from this playbook, it’s simply this: “Be proactive” is the first habit of highly effective people for a reason. Be proactive and teach your customers these four things now.