Discovering features.

This is part five of our six-part series on optimising onboarding for B2B SaaS. Have a look at the other articles in the series:

Part 1: B2B SaaS Onboarding - an intro

Part 2: Delivering value, fast

Part 3: Showing, not telling

Part 4: Evaluating now, learning later

Part 5: Discovering features

Part 6: Personalising the process

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If they’re faced with a dashboard that gives them access to every single feature in a product, that’s information overload at a point when they’re still evaluating. They want to know what’s there, but they don’t want to be forced in the early stages.

"it's almost like, you know, learning how to use different excel sheets... you don't learn pivot tables from day one."1

(Let’s remember, although someone may have signed up for a trial, they’re not a paying customer yet. Give them reasons to stay, not reasons to leave.)

Then, once people are more familiar with the tool, and have decided to become customers, you still need to follow the same good practice that brought them here. Avoid showing all the features at once. Let them follow their own learning curve.

Discovering the product for themselves

Our onboarding research tells us that many users prefer tier-based rollouts, such as basic and advanced levels – TikTok, for example, does this very well:

As part of the guiding process, you could greet them with a message like:

Hey [NAME], you’re new here, so these are the 5 things to focus on since you’ve started your account.

Straight away, you’re giving the user a sense of progress and goals achieved by having items to tick off a list.

Videos and ‘how-to’s

Our studies also found that many users prefer video content for training and learning something new. They appreciate ‘how to’ content in particular. In fact, we heard this a lot when doing our study; people really enjoy going into a specific section, accessing those articles and videos. With video, they can watch and consume at their own place and in their own time.

When users decide that this particular software is right for them and their business, their time commitment increases. Users expressed a preference for side-by-side guidance they can reference as they’re going through the steps themselves.

Having a repository of this help content also increases the product’s stickiness, since it saves the user from going looking for third-party resources. In fact, we’d urge companies to develop this content in-house themselves if possible – don’t leave it to the community to open source this.

Identify points of drop-off to generate help content

If you don’t have the resources to optimise your onboarding, it’s a good idea to look at your funnels and check where you are losing users, then create content to tackle that specific issue.

But now, it's on to the final part of our onboarding series: personalisation.