3 Ways To Rally Your Company Around Product Adoption

3 Ways To Rally Your Company Around Product Adoption

Ross Blog (2)  Ross Palley

We invited three B2B tech startups in the Venture Lane community to participate in our Product Adoption Lab. Founders worked directly with a Mentor Committee of seasoned product management & customer success leaders to drive adoption across their customer base.

On the Committee, we welcomed Jackie Paulino (CPO @ Pixability), Lindsey Serafin (VP of Customer Success @ Snyk), and Jess Meschino (VP of Account Management @ Workable). Check out their key takeaways below!

Product adoption can influence variable compensation across departments…

  • Customer Success starts the fire & keeps it burning. CS owns onboarding and subsequent health checking with customers. Their comp can be tied to retention and expansion, but note that expansion compensation can also be shared with product managers who own the upsold product.

  • Product satisfaction ultimately falls to Product Management. CS might do the job of collecting satisfaction scores, but the scores themselves (e.g. product NPS) should influence variable compensation for product managers. 

  • Sales plays a role too. Your sales team is responsible for ensuring that customers' expectations of the product are realistic. Overpromising may win deals, but those customers are likely to churn. Adding a cliff to variable compensation for sales folks can help keep overselling to a minimum.

Onboarding is critical to adoption, so give every department a role to play…

  • Customer Success writes onboarding guides before anything else. CS will construct a massive library of how-to documentation over time, but onboarding guides should be the very first thing they add to your customer facing knowledge hub.
  • Product Management can contribute release notes. PMs should be writing clear and comprehensive release notes for every new feature, so CS can parse out anything that has to do with implementation and add that information to the customers' knowledge hub. 

  • Marketing is responsible for announcing those new features to customers, so it's important for marketers to meet customers where they're at. If your customers are software developers living in Slack, don't send new feature announcements through a newsletter. 

Everyone can empower end users to be their best selves…

  • Product Management can optimize roadmap for end users. If your buyers and end users are two different personas, PMs can maintain separate product roadmaps for each. So when your sales team starts closing a ton of deals, PMs can give roadmap items for end users a higher stack ranking.

  • Customer Success should know end users' north star metric. What's the one number that makes your end user look like an all-star in their role? With BDRs, for example, it might be demo calls booked. End users need to hear from CS that they can crank up those numbers by using your product.

  • Marketers can play off the same metric. Marketing materials can compare end users' industry average performance to the elite performance of end users that are utilizing your product. Maybe BDRs in your target market book 50% more demo calls than the industry average thanks to your product. 

    Want to take part in one of our upcoming Labs and get 1:1 time with Boston's best operators for free? Join Venture Lane Connex, Boston's highest quality network in B2B tech!

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