The not-so-secret to high product adoption

Hi, I’m Markus, and welcome to a 🔒 subscriber-only edition 🔒 of my newsletter. I help you to deliver, grow, and monetize customer value to improve your performance, accelerate your career, and build a profitable SaaS business.

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If you have been following me for a while, you might have noticed it already.

I don’t have much sympathy for most of the standard practices, metrics, and terminologies in Customer Success.

“Product adoption” is not an exception and the reason why is simple. It’s, once again, a concept built on an inside-out point of view. 

I’m not telling you something new when I say that your customers don’t care about your product with its features and functions.

What they care about is the value they get. 

And so - spoiler alert - the not-so-secret for improving your product adoption is to deliver more value (faster). 

• Customers will use your product regularly when they see value.

• Customers will use more features to grow their value.

• Customers will buy more features to further grow their value. 

This is very simple.

What’s not so simple, is to accurately and repeatably create value for your customers. 

One thing is certain - you need to work closely together with your product team to succeed.

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1. Translate features into outcomes

The first thing you need to do is to detach yourself from the product. Translate all the features and functions into what they are here for. How they contribute to creating customer value. 

Example: 

Your company is selling Employee Engagement software. It includes 3 features to get employee feedback. Customers don’t care about them. What they care about is getting insights for improvement. Your mission is not to show them how the features work with all 347 customization options. It’s to educate them on how to get the results they want. 

It looks like there’s little difference but it’s not. Customers don’t want to watch 60-minute tutorials until they might find what they are looking for. They want 3-minute tutorials that give them the exact solution for their specific need.  

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