How to showcase value to your customers right from the very beginning

Congratulations on closing that deal! You’ve bagged another paying customer for your product, and it’s time now for your Customer Onboarding or Customer Success team to step in and make sure they remain your customer for a long period.

Your customers expect to derive value from your product as early in their journey as possible, so you don't have a lot of time to showcase the ROI on your offering.

The fact that customers have many options these days doesn’t help your case. Many vendors out there probably offer a product/service similar to yours, and your customers can pick one of them quite easily if you aren’t delivering value soon enough.

Given that the annual churn rate in the global SaaS industry is around 30%, it's all the more critical that you ensure continuous value delivery, especially in the early stages.

All this would naturally lead you to ask…

How do you showcase your product and team’s value right from the get-go?

‍It’s easier for customers to justify their purchase if the value you provide is quantifiable, but this is not always possible in the early days. It takes a journey of sorts towards them unlocking value from your offering.

There are two ways you can unlock value quickly.

1. A well-designed customer onboarding process

According to Donna Weber, a customer success thought leader, one of the leading causes of churn is a poor customer onboarding process.

A solid onboarding experience can positively impact a customer and make them stick around for longer. A comprehensive customer onboarding and implementation journey—one where your customers feel cared for while they learn the ins and outs of your product—goes a long way in ensuring customer satisfaction.

We’ve put together the ultimate SaaS onboarding guide to help you deliver a smooth and delightful experience for your customers. You can find it here.

2. Thinking about 30-60-90-day value delivery

‍Customers want to see fast results. The window you have to achieve this is quite small. You either guide them to first-value quickly or they leave.

It makes sense then to think in terms of what value can be unlocked in 30, 60, and 90 days from the kickoff date that’ll ramp up usage from your customers’ side.

You have to show your customers that they’re on course to achieving their stated goals.

It’s not easy to measure ROI in monetary terms early on in the journey, but at least some value-based metrics can be established and measured in the 30-60-90 day interval.

For instance, let’s say you’re offering an AI-based support automation tool. The value you can showcase in the initial part of the journey could be:

1. In 7 days: 5% of tickets could be deflected by using your tool - maybe just reducing the junk queries that the support team gets and spends time clearing out
2. In 30 days: 15% of tickets could have a smart first-response sent by your product, which could potentially solve some customer problems, and buy time for the support team to engage or collect more information from the customer to get more context
3. In 60 days: Reduced human bandwidth from your customer’s team by 20-25%
4. In 90 days: 20-25% of tickets deflected, 40% of initial responses automated, 30% of issues have more context provided for human agents, and overall 50% human bandwidth saved for the team
   

That’s actual dollars saved on every interaction, and budget saved for the company annually for the support team - leaving your customers with real measurable ROI.

These metrics can change depending on the product. But the point is that you have to consider having milestones and deliverables that can help you quickly demonstrate value to your customers - in dollar terms if possible. That’s the best way to ensure your product will never get “fired” by the company, i.e., the customer won’t churn.

Even if your product involves a complex customer onboarding process, you need to think in terms of quick wins. A way to approach this is through phased deployments:

Incorporating a solid onboarding process and breaking it down into manageable chunks (phased deployments) as shown above ensures your customers realize value quickly.

If you’re eager to showcase value to your customers early on and looking to significantly improve the onboarding experience for them, give Rocketlane a try!

Rocketlane, with its purpose-built customer onboarding platform, enables businesses to accelerate the time-to-value of their products, achieve faster go-lives, increase renewals and boost customer satisfaction. It brings the focus back to the customer in customer onboarding through a fully collaborative experience. Rocketlane replaces general project management, communication, and document collaboration tools with a unique, unified workspace that improves communication, collaboration, and project visibility for teams and their customers. With insights from trends and benchmarks across projects, teams can develop and optimize playbooks and best practices with continuous improvement.

More resources

1. Creating Early Wins with The First Value Delivery Framework 
2. Value Realization for SaaS Businesses: Framework and Tools