How to ensure adoption for Enterprise SAAS Products — 4 Crucial steps
The biggest challenge for an enterprise SAAS company is always going to be about bringing in adoption. It is a lot more complicated and difficult compared to a consumer product. Strategies which work for a consumer product may not be well suited in an enterprise setup, for example, in one of my last posts I talked about how ‘Exclusivity’ is a great strategy for consumer products to bring in adoption. ‘Hey’ has successfully used that just last month to bring in insane amount of new users to its email offering.
Enterprise software is a different ball game. Given the number of decision makers, sensitivity to budgets, concerns over data and security involved, the decision to adopt a product has many moving parts.
In this post, I want to talk about ways of ensuring adoption. To increase adoption — there are often advocated techniques like ‘socializing product, nudging users into using it, webinars, free trials etc. among many. Sure, these are important ways of bringing in the much needed visibility and awareness to the product, but in my opinion some of the aspects that are truly important for adoption and reaching the pivotal ‘Product Led Growth’ trajectory are:
1. Living within an ecosystem: How well your enterprise product fits within their existing ecosystem is crucial. Often, in an enterprise setup there are going to be multiple products around functions like HRM, Finance, Project Management, Product Management, Communication, Document Management etc. Adopting a product that readily talks to my existing systems is a far more enticing deal than taking in a product that works in isolation. So having ready integration or adaptors with popular enterprise products is a must.
You may argue, that this is more a feature that a strategy. I would argue that it is both. To decide whether to interface with other systems and what systems to interface with should be part of your product adoption strategy.
Slack for example is a great proponent of this — slack talks to almost every enterprise product out there. Slack talks to JIRA, Trello, Freshdesk etc. When I am deciding on which communication Product to adopt, would I be enticed in choosing Slack or a tool that works in isolation. From the other side, if I am a looking at a Product Management Software like Jira or Aha — assuming I already have slack, it makes all the more sense for me be attracted to a product that already talks to slack from the get go.
So your strategy here should be to identify the target enterprise market, identify the functional areas within the enterprises, identify the top SAAS products that the market already uses within these functions and chalk out an integration roadmap.
2. Creating an app marketplace: With the Gazillion enterprise products out there it is impossible for your to create custom interfaces with each of the products. Once you have done the integration with the leading players, it is important to plan the long term model for integrating with other products. Creating an app marketplace and enabling developers would help you scale quickly and support far greater applications. You may already find each of the enterprise products follow this. Zoom for example has this
3. Easy Onboarding: Often it is said that the ‘Aha’ moment that the customer gets when they use your product the first time is critical. As they evaluate the product, how easy we make the onboarding of users and the enterprise data is going to be as important as anything else. Can I get a one click export of my transactions from system A — to new system B? Can I onboard my existing users to new system in one click? This is crucial if you follow the ‘Trial Period’ model for your product. On the other hand, if you have already made the sale, even if your onboarding is a bit sloppy you still have time to play catch up while they use your product.
But if there is a trial period, I do strongly believe easy of onboarding and setting up first time use is crucial as there is no time to play catch up and you may lose your adoption even before they experience that ‘Aha’.
4. Easy Offboarding: We never want out users to leave our system. As much as we would like to believe that we can always address any of their concerns and convince them to stay, enabling easy ways for the users to offboard from the system is one of the most crucial aspects of enterprise SAAS product management. Let me explain why — As a senior executive deciding to trial an enterprise product that is yet to prove its worth to me, one of the risks I need to address is vendor lock in. If I don’t like the software or in case of dissolution what are my exit options? Mitigating that is a crucial piece in assuring the user to adopt your product.
Providing a seamless exit strategy should therefore be an indispensable part of your entry strategy into customers lives.
With that oxymoronic last strategy, I end my 4 pronged strategy for ensuring adoption.
