How to Increase SaaS Adoption?

         As technology continues to evolve at an exponential rate, the software industry has witnessed a paradigm shift. Gone are the days of bulky, on-premises software installations and their associated maintenance hassles. In their place, SaaS has emerged as a beacon of innovation, empowering organizations with cutting-edge solutions delivered directly through the cloud. The SaaS offers a compelling value proposition—seamless accessibility, automatic updates, and affordable pricing models—all while removing the burden of infrastructure management.

Alright, SaaS is good and SaaS is great. I would like to explain the two most important pieces of the SaaS Journey – Adoption & Consumption. Let us try to understand what is the difference between Consumption & Adoption in SaaS World. Let me walk you through simple analogies to help you understand better what is what!

Consumption: In Simple Terms “to make use of”. So Consumption is the process of making use of something. Let’s say, we have a finite set of resources that can be used, and consumers will pay for that finite resource. For example, if You switch ON a Fan, Light, or Grinder: then you are consuming electricity. In the SaaS world, the finite resource is nothing but the LICENSE (either monthly or annually) is finite in duration. Hence, Consumption can be said to take place during the said contract duration.

Adoption:  You may feel that Adoption also conveys a somewhat similar meaning, but with a very slightly different interpretation. In Simple Terms “to pick or take by choice”. Let’s say: for example if you “adopt a pup” you decide to choose or pick that pup over all other pups and make it your pup. In the SaaS world, customers have a free choice as to which products and services need to be purchased for their users to use.

But in the Real World: However, “adoption” has a deeper contextual meaning than described above. It is the process of preparing the entire organization and its users for using a particular product & its services. This process includes identifying which users will be impacted, communicating information to them, training them beforehand, and providing continuous support.

This extensive sense of “Adoption” sees ‘Adoption’ as a Process whereby the customer and its users start in a State of not being ready to consume to product and they go through an “Adoption Process” to ready them for Consumption. 

So in a Nutshell, you need to Adopt first, so that you can then Consume!

Various Stages of the SaaS Journey!

How do we Increase our SaaS Adoption?

We have already heard many of the following keywords MRR, ARR, Churn Rate, Retention, Time to Value, Customer Life Time Value, Product Activation Rate, Feature Activation Rate & Customer Engagement Score, and whatnot! I am not going to talk about any of these. I will just put myself in the shoes of the Customer. What would I think if I need to decide to purchase a SaaS Offering which Solves my Problems? What are the possible scenarios in which a customer decides to move away from the SaaS offering? What are the retention challenges? Let me try to put different perspectives into the following buckets :

1. Cost: The Customer has decided to purchase the SaaS Offering considering ROIs, TCO, and CAPEX vs OPEX, etc. Whether the customer has complete visibility into their possible OPEX costs?
   1. Customer subjected to Overage / Increased spending on SaaS which customer never anticipated.
   2. Does the customer have complete control to tune the SaaS Offering so that he will not get into an overage situation?
   3. Does your product offer functionality to control the usage of the product to be within the limits of Licenses purchased?
   4. Have you published a detailed public-facing document with various scenarios concerning licensing and possibly overage scenarios and how to control them?
2. Onboarding: The customer has purchased a product and you have a qualified team who provides a personalized onboarding experience that is highly subjective and relative to the customer’s environment. Is that enough? What are the challenges that customers face today?
   1. Typically there is a list of prereqs that need to be met with for any customer to get onboarded. Such as URL Whitelisting, Service Account creation, etc. Have we ever thought can URL Whitelisting can be done by all NGFWs out there? Can we create those service accounts in our family of products, which will be readily available for customers to use?
   2. Are you focusing more on what the customer intends to achieve out of the SaaS offering or You are pitching about your software and product features?
3. Product Capabilities: The SaaS Offering can become a mission-critical workload or a value-added service. It depends on what is the customer requirement, and how it will be positioned in their environment. How sensitive you are to the product feedback from the field?
   1. To what extent customization is allowed in your SaaS offering? The customer has to be felt that he is fully empowered!
   2. Are we tracking Time-to-First-Value? Which feature or capability made the customer experience WoW moment? (This is highly subjective and varies from customer to customer, track them and emphasize and improve upon those features a lot)
   3. Does our SaaS offering have a nearly zero-touch or single-click configuration when it comes to integration with the existing ecosystem of Products? If not, have you asked yourself, why not?
4. Feedback / Critique: I am sure, you have a fleet of teams who are constantly pushing product teams on what features should be there and not! which one should be priortised etc. It is important to note, we should prioritize from where the feedback is flowing rather than through whom? Or are we all passing feedback from the same segment of sources?
   1. Are we collecting feedback from customers who did not even attempt a Trail/PoC?
   2. Are we collecting feedback from customers who did PoC/Trail but did not get converted to a Purchase?
   3. Most of the time we end up collecting feedback/critiques from customers who are already made a purchase and have started to use the product.
      1. Honestly, I would prioritize the feedback from (a) & (b) segment of customers as they had requirements that our product could not meet. What is that I am missing here? (Eureka moment )
      2. From segment (c) of customers: Are you prioritizing the feature requests or feedback?
   4. Are you listening to the community/bloggers/reviewers?
5. Important Questions to ask ourselves while offering SaaS
   1. We are effectively taking away Infrastructure & Platform Management, which is good. Are we introducing new challenges to customers? such as indirectly forcing them to use other tools for Cost Management?
   2. In an on-premise world, Security is a different ball game. The customer Environment could be an isolated, or dark site or there could be an air gap between different systems that are internal and external in nature. With SaaS, are we seamlessly addressing security concerns in an effective trustworthy way? Is our SaaS offering to pave the way for security concerns that did not exist in the on-premise world?

I would now advocate trying to address the above challenges: I could call them low-hanging fruits, which we can reap faster and improvise Adoption! If you are able to relate to the questions I have asked above, then Congratulations! You have taken the first right step in improvising SaaS Adoption.