Onboarding Success Milestone

Enough product utilization data will reveal trends that differentiate strong customers from weak ones. Ramli John in Product-Led Onboarding describes these inflection points as the Onboarding Success Milestone.

For Slack, customers that send more than 2,000 messages in their first 30 days stick with the product. For much of Facebook's growth, they observed that users who connected with seven friends in their first ten days were unlikely to churn. And with Dropbox, uploading ten documents from two or more devices signaled a fully activated user.

Without a clear Onboarding Success Milestone, every function makes different guesses as to what will generate and sustain customer engagement. When your team has a consistent view into what a successful customer looks like, every function can get smarter about driving tactics to generate greater adoption and sustained engagement.

They can also provide unique insights into points of friction that Product should address in the solution to unblock adoption and drive retention.

Uncovering this milestone is a mix of art and science. Doing so requires fluid collaboration between Product and Customer Success to understand:

• The buyer's use cases the product can service
• How often those use cases emerge
• What success looks like for navigating those use cases
• How the product’s utilization compares to other alternatives in their workflow

• Gain clarity of what customers value, from the perspective of your actual customers:
  Your team will have a consistent, quantitative way to measure new customer health, allowing your team prioritize limited customer success resources most efficiently.
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• Optimize user experience design and customer success tactics to drive adoption and sustained engagement more intentionally:
  Observing each activated customer relative to their Onboarding Success Milestone enables targeted interventions that maximize the impact of every action.
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• Rapidly identify points of friction in the product:
  In driving towards clear success metrics that signal product adoption, the team will naturally identify friction points in the experience that the team should resolve immediately.
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• Determine what parts of the product are not as valuable:
  Every product feature has a carrying costs. Understanding what customers don't value about your product gives you information you can use to prune the product, lowering your total cost of maintenance.

• Evaluate your customer and the use cases your product can service for them.
• Define what we understand success to look like for your customer when they navigate those use cases
• Gather insights from your customer functions (sales, marketing, customer success) about the state of current customers
• Inspect your product utilization data to uncover the Onboarding Success Milestone
• Gather feedback on these findings with key internal stakeholders

Assumptions:

• Average Contract Value: $20,000 AAR
• Current customers: 20
• Customers to be implemented and onboarded in the next 12 months: 5
• Percent of current customers who achieve product adoption (baseline): 60%
• Likelihood of churn for a current customer who does not achieve product adoption: 50%
• Average time to full product adoption (baseline): 6 months
• Customer success burn rate per month: $10,000

Benefits: $230,000

• Percent of new customers that achieve full product adoption: 100%
• Improved time to full product adoption for new customers: 50% (3 months)
• Costs avoided by improving product adoption for new customers: $150,000
• Net-gain percentage of current customers who achieve product adoption: 20%
• Reduced churn risk by current customers that achieve product adoption: $80,000

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