The Ultimate Buyer Enablement Guide for SaaS

Buyer Enablement is a crucial pillar of the growth strategy for any SaaS business. Gartner states, “Enablement and advocacy programs increase customer stickiness, lower churn, and improve the likelihood of referrals.”

Empowering buyers to achieve more success with your software can reduce friction and build trust, resulting in higher customer satisfaction, retention, and growth.

To build an effective buyer enablement strategy, you need to think like a buyer and identify all the information and resources that would make them successful users of your product. This includes onboarding resources and training materials for sales tools, community forums, and best practices for customer success. When done right, buyer enablement can transform customers into product evangelists, accelerating your company’s growth.

The key components of a good buyer enablement program for SaaS companies are:

Onboarding Resources

Onboarding resources are critical for new customers, setting the stage for long-term success with your product. Some common onboarding resources to provide include:

Getting Started Guide: A step-by-step checklist of tasks for customers to perform after they’ve purchased your software. This can cover account setup, configuring settings, and activating essential features.

Quick Start Videos: Short tutorial videos walk customers through your interface’s basics, common workflows, and how to get up and run. Videos are a convenient format that some learners prefer over text guides.

Activation Calls: Proactive phone or video calls led by your customer success team to walk new customers through their personalized onboarding plan. This ensures they have their key questions answered and avoid any early frustrations.

Sandbox Environments: Provide demo or trial accounts where customers can experiment freely before integrating your software into their live production environment. This reduces the risks and pressures of the initial setup process.

Implementation Templates: Example templates, checklists, and best practices your customers can copy to configure your software for their specific use case properly. Tailor these specifically to different industries if applicable.

Newsletter: Send a targeted newsletter to new customers with essential tips, integration tutorials, and links to useful onboarding content. Keep the tone helpful and begin building customer rapport early.

Feedback Surveys: Periodically survey new customers to assess the quality of your onboarding resources and user experience. Gain critical insights that can be used to improve the onboarding process over time.

Training Resources

In addition to onboarding, ongoing training and skills development is critical for buyer enablement. Some common training resources to provide include:

Video Training Library: Host a collection of 1-5 minute tutorial videos covering your software’s main features and functions. These bite-sized clips make it easy for users to learn specifics on demand.

Full Course Modules: More in-depth video courses organized by role or use case, walking customers through end-to-end workflows and best practices. Course modules give customers flexibility in structuring their learning.

Online Classroom: Host live virtual training led by your product experts. These scheduled sessions allow for real-time Q&A and interaction among participants.

Administration Guide: A detailed guide for customers’ internal administrators, outlining how to manage user permissions, set policies, and handle advanced configuration. Supplement with video tutorials when needed.

Power User Guide: A parallel guide explicitly geared towards power users and supervisors, showing best practices for optimization, troubleshooting, and scaling up the use of the software.

Certification Program: For customers wanting to verify expertise, offer official certifications upon completing your training courses. Certified badges can boost customers’ confidence and credibility.

Continually expanding training resources gives customers autonomy in developing their skills over time and keeps new features top-of-mind. Training and onboarding should be complementary and cyclical parts of the buyer enablement process.

Leveraging the Right Technology

While the above mentioned strategies are critical, they rely on effectively creating, managing, and delivering the right product enablement resources to customers. This is where the right technology platform becomes indispensable.

A robust product demo tool like Folio can take your buyer enablement efforts to the next level by:

• Allowing your teams to quickly create and organize all types of content - from text guides and checklists to video courses and webinars. Having different content types in one place streamlines the enablement process.
• Giving customers a centralized hub where they can access all relevant resources in one login - from onboarding materials to training courses to knowledge base articles. This simplifies the customer experience.
• Tracking customer progress through built-in analytics shows which resources are consumed the most. This provides insight into effectively expanding and improving materials over time.
• Integrating with other tools your customers already use - like your main app, CRM systems, helpdesks, etc. This removes friction and makes the enablement resources more actionable.
• Facilitating content review workflows that leverage inputs from different teams and power users. This ensures materials meet quality standards before publication.

By choosing the right enablement technology platform, you can supercharge your buyer enablement strategy and derive more value from the resources you create. Look for a tool that integrates smoothly into your existing tech stack, scales to support your customer base, and offers insights to continually optimize the program.

With the right combination of strategy, content, and technology, you can build an enablement operation that empowers buyers and turns them into product champions.

Knowledge Base

Building a comprehensive knowledge base or help center with detailed answers to common questions and troubleshooting guides is essential. Consider adding a search feature, topic index, and FAQ section to make content accessible for buyers to find and consume.

Detailed how-to guides: Text-based walkthroughs of everyday tasks and troubleshooting issues. Structured with headings, images, and tables for easy scanning.

Topic index: Organize content by topic or feature for easy browsing. Allow users to filter by common use cases or roles.

Search functionality: Add a search bar to help customers quickly locate relevant information. Consider adding related articles and synonyms to improve search results.

FAQ section: Maintain a list of frequently asked questions with associated answers. Make this visible on the knowledge base homepage.

Feedback survey: Periodically survey users to gauge knowledge base satisfaction, usefulness, and areas for improvement.

Success Metrics:

Define key metrics: Identify 3-5 important metrics that indicate customer success, such as new users onboarded, features adopted, tasks completed, or goals achieved.

Measurement templates: Provide customers worksheets to track their metric data over time, along with examples of “good” and “great” metric targets.

Data analysis guides: Explain how customers should analyze metric data to identify areas for improvement, optimization opportunities, and goals for the next reporting period.

Benchmarking: Allow customers to anonymously compare their metric data and progress against industry benchmarks or peers of similar size.

Best practice guides: Share guides focused on optimizing specific metrics, covering strategies like configuration changes, workflow adjustments, and feature adoption plans.

Success Metrics

By providing success metric resources, you ensure customers have the tools and understanding to continuously monitor and improve their results - becoming more self-sufficient users of your product.

Define key metrics: Identify 3-5 critical metrics that indicate customer success, such as new users onboarded, features adopted, tasks completed, or goals achieved.

Measurement templates: Provide customers worksheets to track their metric data over time, along with examples of “good” and “great” metric targets.

Data analysis guides: Explain how customers should analyze metric data to identify areas for improvement, optimization opportunities, and goals for the next reporting period.

Benchmarking: Allow customers to anonymously compare their metric data and progress against industry benchmarks or peers of similar size.

Best practice guides: Share guides focused on optimizing specific metrics, covering strategies like configuration changes, workflow adjustments, and feature adoption plans.

Community Forums and Customer Success Teams

Community Forums:

Forums allow customers to support each other and stay up to date:

Topic categories: Organize forums by major topics, features, industries, or use cases to help customers find relevant discussions.

Moderation: Assign community managers or moderators to monitor forums for spam, rule-breaking, or unhelpful posts. They can also provide authoritative responses when needed.

Product announcements: Create a “News & Announcements” category where your team can post about new features, software updates, and upcoming changes. Customers will appreciate the transparency.

Q&A database: Keep an archive of common forum questions and answers. This builds a searchable knowledge base over time.

Feature voting: Customers can upvote forum posts suggesting new features or improvements. Your product team can then prioritize the most popular ideas.

Customer Success Teams:

Assigning customer success managers or account teams provides 1:1 support:

Health assessments: Conduct regular “health checks” using a standard survey to proactively gauge customers’ satisfaction, pain points, and goals.

Advocacy: Become an active advocate for the customer within your company, interface with other teams on their behalf, and escalate issues quickly.

Progress tracking: Check in regularly to ensure customers are on track to meet their goals and Key Performance Indicators that your product is designed to improve.

Coaching: Provide guidance, recommendations, and challenges to help customers optimize their use of the product and processes. Act as a trusted advisor.

Issue resolution: Troubleshoot problems quickly and effectively. Escalate unresolved issues to the appropriate teams to minimize customer impact.

Feedback collection: Regularly collect customer input to identify gaps in product documentation, training, or enablement resources that need improvements.

When supplemented by the other elements of a buyer enablement program, community forums and dedicated customer success teams can drastically improve the customer experience, enable higher self-sufficiency, and maximize the value customers realize from your software.

Continuously improving enablement

The final component of an effective buyer enablement strategy is continuously improving based on customer feedback:

Feedback surveys: Routinely survey customers on the usefulness, quality, and accessibility of all enablement resources. Ask for specifics on what is working well and what could be improved.

Support tickets: Monitor technical support tickets for common questions, pain points, and resource gaps. Flag issues that could be addressed by improving enablement resources.

Forum discussions: Read community discussions to identify multiple customers’ enablement-related pain points. Customers may also suggest their ideas for helpful resources.

Success manager feedback: Leverage insights from your customer success managers about what is hindering or helping customers achieve their goals. They have a front-row view of enablement resource effectiveness.

Roadmap reviews: During product roadmap reviews, evaluate how proposed changes or new features will impact customer enablement needs. Plan for additional resources customers may require.

Test new resources: Pilot tests new enablement resources with a subset of customers before a full rollout. Refine based on their feedback and reactions.

Evangelists program: Partner with your most engaged customers to develop, review and test new enablement resources. Treat them as partners in the process.

By continually evaluating your enablement against customer realities and needs, you can maintain a dynamic program that empowers buyers and fuels growth. Look for opportunities to:

• Expand training on new features
• Improve the organization/searchability of knowledge base content
• Add new guides based on common questions or use cases
• Refresh outdated materials to reflect interface changes
• Solicit ideas for resources that would genuinely help customers succeed

The journey towards a best-in-class buyer enablement strategy never truly ends. The most impactful programs are constantly evolving based on real customer input.

Conclusion

A comprehensive and customer-centric buyer enablement program goes beyond providing initial resources and training. It involves:

• Setting customers up for success from Day 1 with onboarding guides, checklists, and activation calls
• Expanding training resources as new features are released to keep customers up to speed
• Building a knowledge base and documenting success metrics to foster self-sufficiency and continuous improvement
• Facilitating peer-to-peer learning and community through online forums
• Assigning customer success managers to monitor progress, answer questions and resolve issues proactively
• Continually improving enablement resources based on customer feedback and identifying gaps

The key is adopting a customer-first mindset and thinking holistically about all the information, tools, and resources that would empower buyers to achieve their desired outcomes using your product. With the right enablement, customers can become advocates who accelerate your company’s growth through referrals, renewals, and high satisfaction scores.

An effective buyer enablement strategy relies on customer inputs and insights at every stage, so soliciting and acting on that feedback should remain a continuous process. Ultimately, your goal should be to make buyers self-sufficient and successful - which reflects positively on your product and company.

Cover Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash