Setting engagement goals to drive increased product adoption
Have you ever taken a hike with a destination in mind only to encounter a cliff that was impossible to pass without an alternative path or bridge? Remember that sinking feeling in your stomach when you looked down? That’s how many users feel after finding and subscribing to some software (SaaS) applications. At some point in their buyer’s journey, forward-motion slows down or abruptly stops and that’s bad for customer experience and product success.
Lead Scoring Ideas to Consider
Let’s apply this cliff and forward-motion metaphor from a lead scoring perspective. For years, scoring leads before customer acquisition has been a key practice in establishing an effective marketing and sales process. The idea is simple — you assign lead scores to determine which leads are ready to go to Sales. Equally important, you identify leads that aren’t ready, so Marketing can continue to nurture them. Marketing’s goal is to provide Sales with better, qualified leads that have a higher propensity to convert and close.
While at Marketo, our team pioneered multiple scoring models to move leads through various development stages and qualify them as Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs). But what’s a contemporary view of lead scoring and how can product leaders and cross-functional teams apply this discipline for their product adoption and success arcs?
Scoring on Marketing Activities
Marketing lead scores are usually determined by tracking a specific web activity, such as visited page, title, downloaded content, or filled out form, to determine a prospect’s engagement and propensity, based on the company’s segmented demographics.
To determine a scoring model, the Sales and Marketing teams collaborate to define the ideal customer attributes that best determine propensity. These attributes are usually the most important ones for a given target audience, and are used to assign scoring weight based on them. They can include company location, size in revenue, industry, and the like.
Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales ready leads at 33% lower cost.
– Forrester Research
Scoring After Sales Converts a Lead to a Customer
Current lead management systems normally stop the scoring and engagement process after a lead is converted to a sale. However, as Forrester Research states, “Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales ready leads at 33% lower cost.” So, why aren’t these principles being used to drive increased product adoption?
Typically, after customers complete their purchases, they are handed off to Customer Success teams. That means that onboarding and customer setup goes back to a manual effort, and customer results and success will vary widely depending on the effectiveness of the individual success practitioner.
This doesn’t make sense, does it? During one of the most important engagement stages the customer has with the business — using a SaaS or mobile product — we as product, marketing and sales leaders stop understanding customer engagement and revert to manual processes. As a consequence, the customer’s forward-motion dramatically slows or comes to a complete stop. That’s bad for business!
Understanding Product Activities
Just like on your website, your software products generate activities with important moments — in many cases, micro-moments — that occur for each user. Product activities are a bit harder to capture than web interactions, but understanding in-product user behavior is critical to knowing which segments of users and industry are consuming which product features. This is a key aspect to understanding and driving adoption and retention.
Traditional activity tracking and analytics systems tend to be too granular and rarely, if ever, present data the way product leaders visualize their products. To effectively execute on product activity scoring you should map the pertinent product activities to the features that product leaders understand about their products.
Today’s lead management, CRM, and product success systems were not designed for this kind of nurturing and adoption after customer acquisition. Today’s success/analytics tools, at best, analyze data forensically, after users have moved on. But, to create user goals based on activities, you must be able to act on product events and track them in real-time, while the customer is using the product.
Adoption Goals and Personalized Journeys
After you’ve designed a map of features and are tracking usage of pertinent product interactions, you can form a mental map for what journey you’d like to take your users on. As I noted in my blog post, “Why a personalized user experience is intrinsic to product success” you first determine the optimal onboarding experience for each cohort using the system (admins, practitioners, executives, etc.). Then, you map a set of features that create initial value realization for each cohort. Finally, you nurture each cohort from beginner to intermediate to expert level user for the intended feature sets.
While your users are on this journey, you need to create goals for their progress to understand where they are in the journey you defined for them. This is where mapping product features to usage events comes in.
Counting these behavioral events is also critical. For example, you may not want to set goals for a feature as being used if it was exercised only once by a user. You want to guide the user to the feature, show how to use it, and then track how many times the user exercises it. For example, you define a journey that says, if a customer uses the email client’s “send email” feature three times in the last two weeks, that translates into adoption of this feature and a goal is achieved.
Setting a goal for this event also helps you understand where customers are on their journey. You can see quickly who’s not getting there and spend your success team dollars more efficiently by focusing on the customers that need the extra help.
Colleagues at several successful SaaS companies complained to me that today’s success managers tend to get involved after an escalation to support. It would be much more efficient and effective if they could proactively reach out earlier to the customer that needed help.
Key Takeaways for Product Leaders
Scoring of leads has been around for quite some time. Forrester says that companies who put scoring models in place can generate a 50% increase in lead generation. Often, after a lead turns into a customer, the customer must navigate through various teams (marketing, sales and success) within your organization to find product knowledge and support.
We posed an alternative, which automates the customer journey inside the application, guiding each cohort to find the intended value prescribed by product leaders. These journeys are action-based, contextual, and personalized for each user. This requires a purpose-built platform, such as Aptrinsic, to map, orchestrate, engage, and analyze user behaviors.
With such platforms, understanding user behavior, goal setting based on it, and predicting propensity to adopt together will deliver increased customer loyalty and retention. More efficient and effective onboarding leads to higher conversion, which positively impacts customer acquisition costs and overall customer experience while growing your customer base.
At Aptrinsic® we believe your product is your best sales tool and marketing channel. We also believe using a product-led GTM strategy will help companies acquire, retain, and grow customers by creating realtime and personalized experiences driven by product behavioral data.
Read the full “Mastering Product Experience: How to Deliver Personalized Product Experiences with Product-led Go-to-Market Strategy”
In this book, we share what we have learned about what it takes to succeed with a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company. We explain how to deliver a winning customer-centric experience strategy to your customers throughout the customer lifecycle, from acquisition to up-sell/X-sell. We show how to implement a faster and more effective product-led go-to-market strategy to meet changing customer expectations. And we share how to optimize Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and increase Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) by building better contextual relationships through personalized product-driven engagement.
