The average employee goes through five times more business changes than they did in 2016. Understandably, they’re also far more resistant to those changes. There’s even a name for it: “change fatigue.”
But, if you’re in the SaaS business, then you’re in the business of selling change — to people who may well already be sick of it.
So, one of the core roles of SaaS customer success teams is to create a change management process that makes your customers eager to embrace new ways of working.
This article will break down the tools, techniques, and best practices that top SaaS CS teams use to promote behavioral change, user adoption, and enthusiastic renewals.
What is change management (in a SaaS context)?
Change management is a structured set of systems and practices that help people navigate organizational changes.
For software-as-a-service companies, change management is the process of guiding your new customers through the adoption of your new technology.
Effective SaaS change management has two main goals:
- To make sure that your new customers get through all the technical tasks involved in getting started with your software (such as completing training programs, setting up the necessary integrations, and so on)
- To guide your new customers through the psychological process of adapting to change (such as overcoming internal resistance to using a new solution or making sure employees have enough time to spend learning a new tool)
Why change management is so important for SaaS
Change management is crucial for SaaS companies because we’re in the business of securing recurring revenue.
It’s not enough to capture new logos — for SaaS applications to make money, we need those customers to stick around. And customers don’t keep paying for products they aren’t using.
The whole mission of change management is to encourage adoption (and, therefore, renewals and retention). It’s about getting your users to stop doing what they’re currently doing and start doing something entirely new.
If you take a proactive approach to change management, you can:
- Close more deals by reassuring leaders and the IT leads department about what the process of introducing your solution will look like.
- Increase product adoption by making sure that every potential user is aware of the benefits of your product and familiar with how to get started.
- Reduce change resistance by improving the user experience and making it low-lift to use your solution.
- Avoid overwhelming your customers by staggering the onboarding process.
- Increase the likelihood of renewals and expansions by helping your customers get to value more quickly.
- Reduce churn by creating a better customer experience.
6 ways your CS team can nail change management
In top-down sales (in particular), leaders want to know how change management will happen.
- What impact is this new software going to have on their business processes?
- Is it going to cause disruptions and downtime?
- How will it integrate with their IT infrastructure?
- How will it impact their business operations?
Having clear and compelling answers to these questions is as important as having strong messaging and a great product.
Here are a few expert tips on how your CS team can lead the SaaS change management process effectively, create a smooth transition, reassure leadership, and secure greater adoption levels:
1. Consider a separate onboarding team
The beginning of the relationship is “unarguably the most important moment in the customer lifecycle,” says Gillian Heltai, former Chief Customer Officer at Lattice.
“It's like we're selling them the dream. If you don't deliver a great onboarding, it's a trough of disillusionment where it's like, ‘Oh, I thought it was going to be this. And now this is so sad.’"
For Gillian, the importance of the onboarding experience was one of the main drivers behind creating a separate onboarding team at Lattice. She realized that her CSMs didn’t have the bandwidth to handle both the heavy lifting of onboarding new logos and the ongoing support to existing customers.
Plus, the onboarding team needed a slightly different skillset, with more technical integration and data transformation skills than a pure CSM role.
So, if you have a tech-heavy or somewhat complex onboarding process, it may well be worth putting together a separate team to help customers navigate it.
Just to add some nuance here, though — if there’s significant skill overlap between onboarding and CS, and/or your product isn’t very complex or comprehensive (or you aren’t working at the enterprise level), you may not need a separate team.
“If you're hiring the same profile and ask them to do the same thing, that's probably a good signal that you don't need a separate function,” Gillian explains.
2. Empower the customer to lead the change process
Your customer must be able to lead the change management process themselves, rather than experiencing the change as something imposed upon them from the outside. Otherwise, the momentum to change will disappear as soon as you aren’t there to guide it.
In CS, then, your role is to empower the customer to lead their own change process by giving them all the resources they need.
To quote Brittany Soinski, the Manager of Onboarding at Loom:
“We want to make it really easy for our admins and champions to tell our story. It's much more effective coming from them than it is from us. So during onboarding, we're very focused on enabling them to enable their own teams.”
For example, at Loom, they give their customers a ready-made communication plan, with touchpoints and templates they can use internally:
- Here are the five times you're going to communicate at your org.
- Here's who should send the message.
- Here's what it should say.
- Here's the channel you should share it in.
- Here's how long it should be.
- Here are some really effective talking points when you are introducing Loom to your organization and this new way of working.
- Here are some values and benefits to communicate.”
3. Build relationships by understanding the customer’s world
Empathy is fundamental to change. If you want to persuade someone to try something new, you have to be able to show them what’s in it for them and that you understand where they are right now.
Change management expert Erika Andersen calls this process the Change Arc. If you want to persuade a person to change their behavior, you have to start by explaining what’s changing and why it needs to be changed (the old “What’s in it for me?”).
Getting to that place of empathy starts by understanding the customer’s whole world, not just the corner of it that relates to your software.
At Loom, for instance, Brittany explains that they start with a “casual discovery chat with the VP of sales [or other team lead]. We don't want to talk about our tool at all. Our goal on this call is just to get them talking as much as possible.”
Her team starts by asking general questions, like "What does a day-in-the-life look like for somebody on your team?"
Then, they’ll narrow it down to the specific context of their product but still keep the conversation broad (instead of moving right into a pitch):
"'Wave a magic wand. What should look different?'
They say, ‘Well, we'd get a lot fewer no-show rates for the demos that we're scheduling. That would help us close more deals.’
Then we say, ‘Well, that sounds awesome. Why can't you do that? Where's that magic wand? Why aren't you waving it? What are the blockers?’
This is when we get a lot of really helpful information, and we learn a lot of the pain points that that customer is uniquely experiencing. We keep these in the back of our brains so we can throw these in later when we position our tool as the magic wand that they're looking for." - Brittany Soinski from Loom
Instead of starting from the point of view of persuading the customer to use the tool, the Loom team starts by understanding the customer’s context and challenges (why the change needs to happen) and then positions their tool within that understanding.
4. Partner with Sales to create a seamless handoff
Per Andersen’s framework, if you want your customers to change their mindset (and thus behavior), you need them to see the change as easy, rewarding, and normal.
To quote Gillian, that means you need to “do a great job getting them to value and keeping the level the same as they experience in the sales process.”
What you have to avoid at all costs is a clunky, effortful sales-to-customer success handoff, where they’re forced to repeat the discovery process all over again with a new team.
Brittany recommends that you stop thinking about it as a handoff altogether and start thinking of it as a partnership with the sales team. At Loom, for instance, they ask AEs to add specific information into Salesforce to help them post-sale. But in exchange, they created “a bunch of resources from the CS side that sales could leverage pre-sale, such as, "Here's some pre-recorded Looms talking about the value of customer success. Use these to help close your deals.”
Additionally, she recommends that CS join the pre-sale conversation well before the deal closes to help the customer understand what the change will look like and what customer support they’ll receive.
📖 For more details on a seamless transition from Sales to CS, read our guide to nailing the sales-to-CS handoff.
5. Have a plan for each stage of the onboarding journey
You’re going to need a change management plan for each phase of the customer journey:
- Admin setup and implementation
- Integration with existing tech
- Onboarding employees
- Driving and monitoring continued adoption
For each stage, you’ll need to define what the customer needs to know, what milestones will indicate that meaningful change has taken place, what new competencies or new processes they’ll need, and what resources they’ll need to help get them there.
To figure out what should be included in your change management plan, Eloise Salisbury, the Chief Customer Officer at AutogenAI, recommends that you start by thinking about customer value and build toward that value:
“At the end of the day, you should be asking yourself, what does a customer of ours need to be doing to ensure that they are sticking to the product, that they see value in the service that we provide, and that coming out of the implementation, there is a likelihood for them to renew?”
6. Address the needs of each persona
In addition to breaking down your change management process by onboarding stage, you should also make sure you segment and address the needs of each of your buyer personas. For most SaaS products, you should consider at least three different personas:
- The economic buyer
- The admin(s)
- The end user(s)
For each persona, consider what they’ll need to make the change feel easy, rewarding, and normal. What’s changing for each of them, why does it need to change, and what impact will it have on their day-to-day?
Then, develop a change management strategy for each. Start with a kickoff call where you identify the key stakeholders and set KPIs and/or success criteria for each persona.
Eloise recommends taking a “triple metric” approach to establishing onboarding KPIs for each persona:
“Think about a pyramid. There are three different layers of that pyramid.
The day-to-day users of your tool are at the bottom. You need to identify the KPIs they're tracking and that they care about.
Then, you do the same for that mid-layer of management at the company.
At the top of the pyramid are the execs.
Then we link how the KPIs from the day-to-day users would roll up to the middle management and up to the execs.”
Finally, build a change management program to help each persona hit those desired outcomes. For instance:
- Set up a schedule of regular updates for the economic buyer to reassure them that the change has had a beneficial impact on the bottom line.
- Act as a partner to admins using your customer onboarding hub to provide them with all the resources they need to successfully roll out your platform.
- Create a communication schedule with templates, videos, and slide decks that admins can use to inform and engage the end users.
Assets you’ll need for change management
To lead the change management process, your CS team will need a robust toolkit of assets that includes:
Customer success/change management plan
Every change management plan starts with a great customer success plan.
Your success plan should be broken down into implementation phases. Then, create a roadmap of the tasks that the customer needs to complete to fully integrate your solution at each phase, with associated deadlines and milestones.
For instance, with Dock, we have three phases of implementation.
- Phase 1: Upload content and create templates
- Phase 2: Set up integrations and dashboards
- Phase 3: Launch
In our onboarding hub, we break these down into separate tabs so the customer doesn’t get overwhelmed by TMI.
With Dock, you can even hide each tab and unhide it when the customer is ready for it.
On each tab, we add the tasks they need to complete during each phase, together with embedded videos explaining what they need to do.
Centralized customer onboarding hub
To keep things easy and effortless, don’t send your new customers a bunch of links or a Google Drive folder.
Instead, use a central onboarding hub where you can house all the information the admins need — and, just as importantly, a platform they can use to communicate internally.
“One of the secrets to effective change management is communicating early and often,” says Brittany from Loom. “Our job in customer success is to package everything up really easily to help our admins, champions, and stakeholders to communicate this change effectively. It's so important to create something that is shareable.”
Customer enablement assets
In terms of what to include in your onboarding hub, you’ll need two sets of customer enablement assets:
1. “Train the trainer” assets
These are the resources that your main point of contact can use to “sell” the change internally, such as a communication plan, training resources, implementation resources, and so on.
For instance, when we onboard a new customer at Dock, we’ll include:
- A training agenda where we explain what they should cover during internal training
- This article on how to introduce Dock to their customers
- A training guide they can use internally
2. Shareable assets for their team
Instead of forcing customers to look for the right tutorials and guides to help their team get started, add them all to the onboarding hub. Assets to include here include onboarding videos, webinars, articles, forms, links, and slide decks.
How to measure change management in SaaS
How can you know if you’ve successfully driven organizational change in your new account? Here are a few key metrics you should track to measure your change management effectiveness:
1. Product adoption rate
If change has really taken place, then you’ll be able to see it in terms of user adoption. Have users changed their behavior and started using your solution?
The simplest way to measure product adoption on larger accounts is license allocation, says Brittany. If the customer purchased 100 seats and allocated 50 of them, then they’ve allocated 50%.
2. Utilization rate
Brittany points out that the new product adoption rate on its own doesn’t paint the whole picture. To really understand whether or not you’ve driven change in your new account, you need to measure what she calls “utilization rate.”
Utilization rate reflects whether or not your new customers are where you need them to be in terms of adoption at any given point in time.
Brittany explains, “If you have 73% of your licenses allocated, and you're only one month into your contract — let's say, you're about 10% into your contract — that is awesome. If you have 73% of your licenses allocated, but you are a year into your contract, that's not great. We want you to be at 100%, 120%, so we can upsell you.”
To calculate utilization rate, you simply divide the percent allocation by the percent through time into the contract.
3. Learning adoption
In addition to product adoption, you also need to make sure that the end users are accessing onboarding resources and really learning how to use your solution. There are many potential options for metrics here, including:
Enablement asset usage
Dock lets you see who is looking at your learning resources, and how often. That’s a great way to make sure that people are really engaging with your solution and trying to integrate it into the day-to-day.
For instance, Ingrid Murra, the CEO and Co-Founder of Two Front, uses Dock’s people analytics to make sure that customers have used their learning resources.
“It’s been tremendously useful because we can kind of call them out,” said Ingrid. “We're like, ‘Oh, of course, you're not getting any results. You haven't even looked at this. You’ve gotta go into your portal and get rolling. Take a look at what we've provided there for you to get onboarded.’”
Training session attendance
Did training sessions take place? Did people attend?
4. Onboarding completion
Have your admins completed the onboarding task list you provided? How long did it take them?
You may also want to measure milestone completion here. Were customers able to solve their problems using your product? How much money or time did they save?
Here’s a simple example:
For a full list of onboarding metrics, check out our guide to customer onboarding experiences.
Change management software
Change management is all about empowering your customers to lead their own change. That means you’ll need the tools to provide them with the resources they need.
Spoiler alert: emails and Google Drive aren’t going to cut it.
The goal is to reduce friction and make the onboarding experience as seamless and enjoyable as possible. That means not digging through your inbox to find that email with that link to that Drive doc with the instructions for that thing they mentioned in that meeting.
Here are the tools you’ll need for effective SaaS change management:
Customer onboarding portals
Your customers need a single, easy-to-navigate resource hub, where they’ll find everything they need for onboarding — from tutorials to communication resources to a timeline to a mutual action plan to meeting recordings.
With Dock, you can create customized customer onboarding workspaces with just a few clicks.
Here’s our CEO Alex explaining exactly how:
Dock is the perfect tool to help you with change management. It makes it easy to get your resources into the hands of your customers. It also lets you support the customer through the project management aspects of the change with embeddable mutual action plans, checklists, and timelines.
👉 Learn more: For more insight into customer onboarding tools, check out our customer onboarding software guide.
Knowledge base software
As well as a personalized resource hub, you’ll usually want a knowledge platform for more general use.
In this space, check out WorkRamp (a learning management system or LMS where you can store and share learning resources with employees and customers) and Skilljar (a customer training platform).
Messaging automation software
Most modern CRMs have at least some messaging functionality, but you might want a more comprehensive solution, like:
- Intercom: a communications platform for chat, in-app messages, and customer data
- Twilio: an engagement solution with SMS automation, personalized interactions, and more
- SalesLoft: mostly for sales, but it also supports CS and account management use cases for onboarding and renewals
Customer success enablement software
CS enablement is just a catch-all term for the tools that make it easier to support your customers. Things like:
- Cloudapp, Loom, or Wistia for recording videos and product walkthroughs
- Sendoso for sending gifts to your new customers
- Gong for sharing successful onboarding and training stories across the team
Customer Success platforms
These tools help ensure you're successfully managing change and seeing adoption metrics move in the right direction. Some options here:
Lead the SaaS change management process with Dock
The key to successful change management is to empower your customers to lead their own change processes.
Dock can help. Use our customizable onboarding workspaces to share useful resources like onboarding checklists, communication plans, training resources, and implementation guidelines — all in the same place, with one link.
Ready to lead your customers through the process of change? Try Dock today for free.
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