3 Essential Product Flows To Grow Your SaaS- UserActive

In this blog, you can find three essential product flows you can introduce into your software that drive growth for B2B SaaS. We’ll show you the before and after of three interfaces that our Product Designers redesigned and the impact it had on our clients’ business metrics.

This post is jam-packed with value if you are a SaaS Founder or Product Manager, so keep reading! Alternatively, get all the information by clicking play on the video below!

The flows we will outline in this post helped our clients:

• Add $300K in ARR
• Increase free trial to paid customers rate from 18 to 25.5%
• Pre-sell a new feature to 40 users

What is a product flow?

First of all, let’s define ‘product flow’ in B2B SaaS. A product flow refers to the end-to-end process that users follow to interact with and utilise a software product.

It encompasses the user journey, starting from the onboarding phase to feature adoption, ongoing engagement, and potential upsells or renewals. A well-designed product flow ensures a seamless and intuitive user experience, leading to higher customer satisfaction and retention in the B2B SaaS market.

Aligning with the SaaS Customer Lifecycle

Aligning product flows with the SaaS customer lifecycle is vital to optimise user experience, drive adoption, and increase customer retention. 

A well-designed product flow tailored to each stage ensures users quickly activate core features, leading to enhanced adoption. As customers progress, the flow guides them through broader product utilisation, reducing churn and identifying expansion opportunities. Ultimately, this alignment empowers SaaS companies to meet evolving customer needs, drive growth, and thrive in a competitive market.

The 3 Stages of the SaaS Customer Lifecycle

We like to look at the customer lifecycle in three stages. 

Activation

This is the initial stage after a customer signs up or starts using the product. The primary goal is to ensure that users quickly and successfully activate the core features of the product. It’s about providing a smooth onboarding experience and helping customers understand how to use the fundamental functionalities to meet their immediate needs.

Product Adoption

Once users are activated, the next stage is to encourage broader adoption of the product. This involves helping customers explore and utilise more advanced features and functionalities. You want them to get into the habit of building adoption, so they’ve adopted your product into their regular workflow. 

Expansion

After achieving product adoption, the focus shifts to expansion. After that, we want to assist them to get as much value as they can by increasing the customer’s usage, engagement, and satisfaction. It may involve upselling additional features, encouraging premium subscriptions, or expanding usage within the customer’s organisation. The goal is to create long-term value, retain customers, and drive business growth.

3 Product Flows that Drive SaaS Growth

The first flow we’re going to look at is how to make a lasting impression on your users. The second flow we’re going to take a look at is how to optimise the core workflow in your product. When we did this for one of our clients, we increased free to paid user accounts by 127%.  Then, the third flow we’re going to look at is all about how to optimise the expansion and adoption for users with your product.

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Product Flow 1 – Make a lasting impression

How Prospect CRM added $300K in ARR

The first product flow we are going to break down is all about how to make a lasting impression on new users. When you do this, you really make an impact on the longevity of your account and it reduces churn. It’s really important to get that first impression to be really strong with your product.

This is the flow we designed for one of our clients, Prospect CRM. Once this was released into the product, we increased free trials to paid conversions by 26%, and it actually added 300K in ARR to their revenue. So what did we do?

Before the redesign

One of the first things that users see when they sign up to Prospect CRM is that they land in a dashboard. This dashboard gives them an overview of their accounts of all of the sales activity in their business. Prospect CRM had a dashboard which didn’t really show all of the information that was valuable to users to help them do their job.

After the redesign

Our Designers rethought this whole dashboard from the ground up. We identified three user profiles in their product and we designed the dashboards according to each different user profile to make sure that they had all the information and functionality that they needed to be successful with their jobs. 

That means that there were three personalised dashboards, so every user didn’t get the same experience anymore. It was really tailored, and this is what made a real impact for Prospect. 

Increasing free trial to paid customers rate from 18-25.5%

Here’s what the CEO Andy had to say about the impact that these dashboards made.

“Since we launched the new dashboards, our free trial to paid customer conversion rate climbed from 18 to 25.5%. A conversion rate like this is pretty astounding in the world of SaaS, especially in the middle of a worldwide pandemic.”

If you need help with your SaaS, particularly with UI/UX improvements that can drive growth, then book a call with us at UserActive by clicking here.

Product Flow 2 – Optimising the core flow

Let’s look at the second product workflow that you can work on to really improve and drive growth for your SaaS. In this second product flow, we want to look at optimising the core flow for your product.

How do you identify what is the core flow in your product?

This is a good question, you might ask yourself. The answer relates to the reason that users signed up for your product in the first place. So ask yourself the following questions to figure out your core flow:

• What’s the key problem or issue that they’re having?
• What’s the result that they’re looking for? 
• What is it that made them try out your software in order to achieve that result? 

If you can get quite clear about that, then you can understand, where in your product is the key flow that’s helping them get this result that they are looking for.

Alternatively, think about where users spend the most time in your software. Which flow is a very, very common workflow that users will use in most of their sessions and it’s where they log most of their time? That is your core flow.

How Summit Software increased paid users by 127%

Here is an example of a client that we worked with called Virtual Summits Software. Their software does everything that people need to run, host, and promote a Virtual Summit online. 

Since it’s such a holistic product, they have a lot of functionality, but we identified that the key workflow in their product is the Summit Creation flow. This is where users go from having an idea of what their Virtual Summit is going to be about and then building out the whole Summit, creating the topic, the date, the times, the schedule, adding speakers, sponsors, and promoting the Virtual Summit, and also reaching out to all of the attendees. 

We spent some time with Virtual Summit software redesigning this entire workflow to make it easy, intuitive, and enjoyable to do.

The result once this was released in the product, is that Virtual Summit Software saw an increase in paid users by 127%. That was a really great result. They came from some product marketing that they did, but it also came from users upgrading in their account because they saw all of the improvements that were being released in the product.

Product Flow 3 – Enable Adoption and Expansion with an Upgrade Flow

Lastly, the third product flow we are going to cover that makes an impact and drives growth for your SaaS. We’re going to take a look at how you can enable adoption and expansion.

One of the things that you can do is make sure that once your users have adopted your product and built some habits around using it in their daily workflow. Then, you want to make sure that they can get more value when they need to and add more users when they need to. 

In particular, one thing we do is provide a really clear upgrade flow that makes it easy to identify the features and the benefits that they could use, add those to their account, and upgrade quite easily. 

On top of that, another area we do this is by enabling collaboration. You can invite team members throughout different areas in your product, show them different functionality where it’s appropriate, and add calls-to-action to share and invite team members so that they can begin collaborating. We’ve done both of these things with Text in Church, which is a CRM based in the US.

How Text In Church pre-sold a new feature to 40 customers

We helped Text In Church to make their upgrade flow very clear, promote some of these premium features, and enable their users to invite collaborators, team members and their colleagues so that they could collaborate and use the CRM together. See how in the examples below.

In a nutshell, if you’re able to do this effectively, you can get to the point where you can start pre-releasing features or pre-selling them to your user base. 

Tyler, the founder of Text in Church, told us:

“We were able to presell our new Talking Church feature to 40 customers prior to release.”

The above result is really great because it was able to validate this feature and then also improve the product when they introduced it with a nice workflow to enable other users to upgrade once they had a successful cohort that already adopted that feature.

Improve your product, get more users, and grow.

In conclusion, implementing product flows aligned with the SaaS customer lifecycle is essential for driving significant growth in B2B SaaS. 

By understanding the three stages of the customer lifecycle – Activation, Product Adoption, and Expansion – and tailoring product flows to each phase, companies can optimise user experience, increase adoption rates, and reduce churn. Real-life examples of redesigning product flows for Prospect CRM, Virtual Summits Software, and Text In Church demonstrate their transformative impact on metrics, such as adding $300K in ARR, increasing paid users by 127%, and pre-selling new features to 40 customers. 

For SaaS Founders and Product Managers seeking growth, these product flows offer valuable insights and opportunities for success.

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