Evaluating now, learning later.

This is the part four 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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here B2B SaaS is concerned, one critical mistake many product owners make is to assume their users are eager to learn all about their tool the moment they get their hands on it. But this fundamentally misunderstands the user’s journey: learning happens after conversion, not before.

The more prompts a user sees, the more steps they have to go through at the set-up process, the higher the volume of distractions, the slower it is for the value to appear. Peter Ramsey calls this the 'noise' in a product’s design, and he argues that it’s a major cause of churn:

“what I've observed in my consulting career is that reducing noise can have a real impact on the underlying business.”1

Since we’re talking about a business product, it’s fair to assume that most people will try it out during working hours – and they’re probably evaluating multiple tools in a given day. Some of those tools are probably competing with each other. So right away, the clock is ticking: you’ve got a limited window of time to make a good impression.

A strong first impression is key

Making that strong impression starts with having a razor sharp focus on the real value your product delivers:

• Why are people signing up for it?
• What do they want to do?
• Are there multiple things that your tool can do?

People’s time isn’t free, so using the product shouldn’t feel like work at this evaluation stage. The less effort they need to expend, the faster they can understand what’s in it for them – and the sooner they achieve the moment of value.

Match interactions to user intentions

A great way to fast-track this is by speaking to the prospect’s use case, almost from the moment they start interacting with the product. When this is done right, a user should be able to open up the software and quickly start doing the task that matches their intentions, whether that’s writing a blog, sending a mailshot, or working with a new CRM tool.

We believe the UI should be the tutorial, and onboarding influences how people perceive your product, so everything’s in play: even dismissible tooltips.

Guide users towards the product value

Instead of throwing the kitchen sink at the user, guide them towards value. Reduce the number of steps they need to go through to understand this. Provide examples related to what they’re looking to accomplish.

Typeform: so seamless, the onboarding is invisible

There’s no fluff, there’s no ‘here are our prices’, just a smooth transition between evaluating and actually using the product. In fact, you don’t even realise you’re already using the product as part of the onboarding experience. That’s how seamless it can be.

But before we continue...

Let’s stop for a moment and pause for breath. The reason why many companies get the onboarding process wrong is because it’s difficult. They need to think about the messaging to the user at each point, whereas it’s way easier just to put in three standard marketing messages and bingo, that’s your onboarding process which doesn’t need to change if you update the product.

In fact, our research found that users directly correlate their objectives and goals with the benefits of using the product in our tests.

But to stop your onboarding process from getting messy fast, you need a holistic view of the user’s goals and how you want them to get there. Which leads us on to the next two articles, where we’ll look at discovering features and, to wrap up, personalisation.