For years, long before the invention of SaaS, software vendors could make tons of sales by selling customers on the idea that software would solve all (well, most) of their problems. If you bought their system, all the great features and functions baked into their product would deliver exceptional results. Vendors had polished demos that looked great and made buyers salivate. And, in many cases, the software products did do some wonderful things.
Then along came the SaaS business model. The combination of cool functionality, a sleek demo (in a clean demo environment with pristine data), fast implementations, and cheap monthly pricing made sales take off. It was so easy to get started quickly and to switch from your current vendor. Everything was great and rosy. And then came renewal time and churn. Uh-oh!
Suddenly, SaaS buyers realized they were no longer stuck with software that didn’t live up to the hype and the promise. Buyers regained some power and quickly learned that if they didn’t get the results they expected from their SaaS purchase, they could just as quickly and easily move on to another vendor and try their luck there. And the vendor hopping began.
So, if companies are regularly switching software vendors, it begs the question, “is the software the problem, or is it the ability of buyers to get value in their organization that is the problem?“
What all of this vendor hopping has taught us is that most organizations are very good at getting a system live. Still, they struggle with knowing how to get their people to use it internally in a way that delivers the expected business value and outcomes. The reality is, introducing new systems and processes into an organization adds a massive amount of change and uncertainty to the organization. And most organizations don’t know how to navigate this change and drive success.
In many cases, the buyer’s ability to drive adoption and success within their organization that is the issue, not the software. This is the core issue that SaaS vendors need to solve to reduce churn and expand accounts.
At Success Chain, we have worked with many software suppliers and software buyers to help them figure out what they can do to help drive better software adoption, organizational change, and behavior change so that organizations realize the full value of their IT investments. When we work with these groups and train their teams, they are amazed at how many things they are doing wrong that prevent their success. And when they learn how to drive software adoption, they are surprised at all the small, easy changes (and some big ones too) they can take to improve software adoption and business results dramatically!
This realization has significant implications for SaaS vendors. Since the area where software buyers are truly struggling is with change management and adoption, this is where vendors need to provide help. Vendors need to shift their efforts away from narrowly focusing on their specific product and services; instead, they need to educate their customers on appropriate change management and software adoption tactics and techniques that buyers can apply within their organization. Helping buyers maximize user adoption and achieve business outcomes is absolutely on the critical path to renewals, yet SaaS vendors often ignore this critical area.
If you are a software vendor, consider this:
- How much easier would it be for you to reduce churn and expand your accounts if your customers were better able to accelerate and sustain the adoption of your software in their organization?
- How much time and effort would it save your customer success, training, and support teams if your customers could do more of themselves?
- How much easier would it be for your CS teams to have discussions with your customers about business outcomes and the adoption plans and activities they need to achieve these outcomes if your customer was already educated about the techniques they need to apply within their organization to achieve desired business outcomes?
- Where else could you focus your valuable time, effort, and resources to improve your product or grow your company?
The challenge is that change management and user adoption is not typically a core competency of SaaS vendors. Vendors are often experts on their product and have little or no expertise (or interest) in providing software adoption services or resources. And they don’t have the ability to deliver the tools and customer education needed to solve this problem in a fast, easy, and scalable way.
Recognizing the tremendous need and challenge here, Tri Tuns has developed a creative solution to this problem. We have taken our proven software adoption training and updated it to be delivered in a fast, easy, scalable way. Our success program, gives software buyers the knowledge, tactics, and techniques they need to drive effective adoption within their organization. And since it is delivered via an online learning portal, it is available 24 x 7, wherever the buyer is located.
Imagine the possibilities of including access to online software adoption training as part of your new customer onboarding process? How great would it be if one of the first steps when you onboard a new customer is for them to get educated about how to drive their success? And since it is all online, this step can even be automated!
Want to learn more? Contact us today to learn how we partner with you to include our online software adoption training in your customer onboarding program.
