The 6 Stages of the SaaS Customer Lifecycle
The customer lifecycle refers to the process people go through to learn about, engage with, and buy from a company. Its stages fall under the processes of attracting, engaging, and delighting customers, and the specific steps involve awareness, conversion, purchase, activation, renewal, and referral.
1. Awareness
Your customers realize that they have a problem needing solving, and they become aware of your solution or your brand by doing online research.
2. Conversion
Your customers have learned about your solution and have signed up for free resources to learn more -- like an ebook, a webinar, or a free trial or free version of your product. At this stage, lead nurturing with targeted offers relevant to their needs will help push them closer to purchasing from you.
3. Purchase
The sales team has done its job! Now it's important to keep proving and demonstrating value by providing dedicated onboarding and customer success management.
4. Activation
You want your customers to become weekly or daily active users. Make sure to provide outreach, education, and resources to prevent common roadblocks that lead customers to churn.
5. Renewal
After months or even a year of successfully using your product, your customer has to renew to keep using it. Before these times, it's important to maintain close communication with your customer to make sure you know if there are any possible objections that could cause customers not to renew.
6. Referral
At this point, not only have your customers renewed their subscription and joined your customer loyalty program, but they're such happy customers that they're power users who tell their friends and colleagues about your product.
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Happy customers become your SaaS product's best sales rep!