Improve SaaS User Adoption After Sale: The Post-Sale Sale

The Problem No One in SaaS Wants to Admit

Your sales team closed the deal. The contract is signed. The customer is onboarded. And then—nothing. Users log in once, maybe twice, and quietly disappear. Six months later, your CS team is fighting a churn conversation they could have prevented on day one.

Todd Kirk has spent 25+ years diagnosing exactly this failure mode. As the founder of Brainstorm, a SaaS adoption platform built specifically to solve post-purchase activation, Kirk has worked with some of the largest software vendors in the world—including Microsoft during its seismic shift from perpetual licenses to monthly subscriptions. His core argument is blunt: most SaaS companies never solve the adoption problem because they misidentify who the actual problem belongs to.

“The person who buys the software isn’t ultimately the end user. And that end user never goes through a sales process. And that’s the problem.”

The executive who signed the contract had a business case, a champion, a sales cycle. The frontline employee who has to change how they work every day? They had none of that. Closing the deal is not the finish line—it’s the starting gun for what Kirk calls the post-sale sale.

Key Takeaways

Improving SaaS user adoption after the sale requires treating end users as a separate sales audience from executive buyers. The executive buys; the end user has to be independently convinced that changing their behavior is worth the effort. Standard product tours fail at a 98% rate. Effective adoption strategies deliver minimal, step-specific guidance that gets users to their first value fast—then repeat the process for each subsequent milestone.

• The buyer and the end user are two different people—and your onboarding ignores one of them. The end user never experienced your sales pitch and needs to be won over independently on the value of changing their workflow.
• Product tours are statistically dead: only 2% of users click through, and only 2% of those actually read the content. That’s a 0.04% effective reach on your primary onboarding mechanism.
• Overwhelming users with resources backfires. Dropping a knowledge center, CSM call schedule, and support hub on new users simultaneously is not onboarding—it’s noise. Users tune it out.
• The shortest path to first value beats feature completeness every time. Your onboarding goal is not to teach users everything—it’s to get them to their first meaningful outcome as fast as possible.
• Adults want direction with autonomy. Users respond to clear “do this next” guidance, but they need the freedom to branch off without friction. Forced linear tours generate drop-off.
• Channel partner sales create adoption inconsistency. Every partner delivers different onboarding quality, meaning customers downstream of partners receive wildly different activation experiences.
• Behavior change is the actual product you’re selling post-sale. Technical onboarding addresses the surface; behavior change management addresses the reason users actually adopt—or don’t.

Deep Dive: Why SaaS Adoption Fails and What to Do About It

Why Do SaaS Customers Not Use Software After Purchase?

End users resist adopting new software not because of technical barriers but because of psychological and organizational ones. The person tasked with using the software never chose it, never participated in evaluating it, and faces a real cost: changing how they work every day. Without addressing that cost directly, no amount of feature documentation or onboarding tours will move the needle. The adoption problem is a behavior change problem first, and a training problem second.

Todd Kirk has been working at the intersection of software and human behavior for over 25 years, and his diagnosis of why SaaS customer activation fails is sharp: vendors consistently skip the persuasion step and jump straight to instruction.

“We jump usually way too far down the road. We’re trying to teach them how something works and they’re not actually bought in yet.”

This gap is structural, not operational. The sales cycle built a business case for the economic buyer. The CSM inherited a user who has none of that context. That user is sitting in front of new software with zero emotional buy-in, unclear personal benefit, and a full queue of existing work to do. The instinct—to send them a knowledge center link and schedule a training call—treats the symptom while ignoring the disease.

The actual sequence that drives SaaS retention strategy looks different:

1. Sell the problem first — make the user believe their current workflow has real costs
2. Build belief in the solution — demonstrate that this specific tool addresses those costs
3. Only then teach the how — onboarding, features, workflows

Kirk’s Post-Sale Sale Framework formalizes this sequence. The executive buyer went through a version of steps 1-3 during your sales cycle. The end user starts at step 3 by default. That mismatch is where churn begins.

Why Do Product Onboarding Tours Fail?

Product onboarding tours fail because they reach almost no one. With a 2% click-through rate and a 2% read rate among those who click, the effective penetration of a standard in-product tour is approximately 0.04% of your user base. They are the most commonly deployed and least effective tool in the customer onboarding software stack.

The numbers here are not guesstimates—they come from Brainstorm’s platform data accumulated over 5-plus years of tracking software usage and adoption enablement at scale.

“Only 2% of the users are going to actually click through it and only 2% of the 2% who click through it are even going to read what it says.”

This has two implications. First, if your enterprise SaaS implementation strategy relies on product tours as the primary activation mechanism, you are functionally leaving 99.96% of new users without meaningful guidance. Second, the format itself—long, text-heavy, linear—runs directly counter to how adults prefer to receive information when they’re task-focused.

Kirk’s research points to what actually works: short, simple, action-specific guidance. A one-minute video outperforms dense documentation. A single next-step prompt outperforms a comprehensive feature overview. The format that gets used is the format that respects the user’s current cognitive load—which, in the first days of a new software rollout, is already at capacity.

What Is the Correct Post-Sale Adoption Strategy?

The Less But Better Framework

The correct post-sale adoption strategy is to map the critical path to first value, then deliver guidance for only the immediate next step—nothing more. Once a user completes that step, deliver guidance for the next one. This atomic sequencing prevents cognitive overload, builds incremental confidence, and shortens the time between signup and meaningful product usage. It directly reduces early churn risk by ensuring users experience value before they experience complexity.

Kirk frames this through a design philosophy he attributes to Dieter Rams: less but better. Applied to customer onboarding best practices, it means resisting the temptation to demonstrate feature depth at the expense of user momentum.

“The end goal should not be to give them everything they could know or that we hope that they know, but it’s what they need to know and only that—because the shortest path to get them to their first value you can give them, that’s what really matters.”

The Less But Better Framework in practice:

1. Map the critical path — identify the minimum sequence of actions to reach first value (e.g., login → add users → configure account → complete first action)
2. Identify the single next step — what does the user need to do right now?
3. Deliver guidance for only that step — text, a short video, or an inline walk-through
4. Advance to the next milestone once the previous step is confirmed

This approach directly counteracts what Kirk identifies as the default vendor behavior:

“We just say, ‘Let’s throw a whole bunch of crap at them. Here’s your knowledge center. Here’s your support hub. Here’s your CSM call.’ And we just throw all this stuff at them. And unfortunately, most of that stuff is actually not what they need at this exact moment.”

The adoption enablement platform built on this logic looks nothing like a traditional LMS. It’s not a library of content. It’s a sequenced delivery mechanism that surfaces the right guidance at the right moment—and nothing else.

How Does Selling Through Channel Partners Damage User Adoption?

The Channel Consistency Problem

Selling through channel partners creates adoption inconsistency because each partner designs their own onboarding approach, delivers different support quality, and sets different expectations. Customers who purchase the same software through different partners receive functionally different post-sale experiences, making it impossible to standardize software adoption ROI or measure product adoption analytics at the vendor level.

This is one of the least-discussed risks in enterprise software deployment via partner channels. Microsoft—generating billions annually through partner sales—confronted this problem when transitioning enterprise customers from perpetual licenses to $35/month SaaS subscriptions.

“Every single partner is going to have a completely different approach. They’re going to provide a different level of service. They’re going to provide a different level of support. And so each customer gets a very inconsistent experience when you start selling through the channel.”

The highest-risk segment in Microsoft’s transition: customers spending seven-plus figures annually. These are organizations with deep legacy integrations, complex user populations, and the most to lose from botched adoption. A partner who delivers poor onboarding to a seven-figure account doesn’t just create a support ticket—they create a churn event that takes millions of ARR with it.

The solution Kirk advocates is partner channel enablement standardized at the vendor level. Rather than leaving each partner to build their own adoption playbook, vendors should embed a consistent adoption framework that partners deploy without modification. This protects end-user adoption metrics consistency and makes churn risk predictable regardless of which partner touched the deal.

What Is the Directed Freedom Model and Why Does It Work?

Adults do not respond well to either extreme: total ambiguity (no guidance) or rigid linearity (forced tours). The Directed Freedom Model resolves this by giving users a clear recommended next step while making it frictionless to skip or branch. This mirrors how effective human instruction works—a mentor points you in a direction, explains why, and lets you make the call.

“I want to feel like you’re leading me and directing me, but I want to feel like at any point I can opt out to branch and go in a different direction.”

This principle has direct implications for how you build customer activation platform experiences. Forced linear flows generate drop-off at every gate. Pure self-serve exploration means users miss the critical path entirely. The Directed Freedom Model finds the productive middle: a recommended path that’s easy to follow and easy to leave.

In implementation:

• The recommended next action is always visible and one click away
• Users can skip, explore, or return without losing their place
• The system respects their choice without penalizing it
• Progress toward first value is tracked even for non-linear users

This is also the model that scales organizational change management SaaS across large user populations. You cannot mandate behavior change in adults—but you can make the right behavior the path of least resistance.

The Same Side of the Table Reframe

Kirk’s final structural insight reframes the entire vendor-customer relationship. Most SaaS companies implicitly position themselves across the table from customers—the vendor wants renewals, the customer wants features, and the CSM is the diplomat between them. This framing is wrong and counterproductive.

“The software vendor and the software buyer—there’s the person who bought your software—you both want the same thing. You want them to succeed with your software. You want them to get enough value out of it.”

SaaS customer success framework built on this reframe looks different in practice. Decisions about support resources, onboarding investment, and adoption tooling are made based on what drives customer success—not what minimizes CS headcount. This isn’t altruism; it’s the correct business model logic for reducing customer downgrade risk in a subscription economy where every month is a repurchase decision.

When vendor and customer share the same goal, the post-sale sale becomes a collaborative process. You’re not trying to convince a skeptical user to use your software. You’re partnering with a customer who already bought in at the executive level—and helping their team get to the value the executive was sold on.

About Todd Kirk

Todd Kirk is the founder of Brainstorm, a SaaS adoption platform he has built over 25-plus years of working at the intersection of software deployment and human behavior change. His work spans some of the largest enterprise software transitions of the past two decades, including advising on Microsoft’s shift from perpetual licensing to SaaS subscription models—a change that required driving behavioral adoption across millions of enterprise end users. Kirk’s platform has operated for 5-plus years, giving Brainstorm a proprietary dataset on what actually drives software adoption versus what vendors assume drives it.

Ready to Turn Closed Deals Into Activated Users?

The gap between a signed contract and a retained customer is a behavior change problem—and most SaaS teams are solving it with the wrong tools at the wrong moment. Todd Kirk’s frameworks give you the architecture to close that gap: win the end user separately from the executive buyer, deliver guidance in atomic steps, and build adoption processes that scale consistently across your CS team and partner channels. If you’re leading GTM or customer success at a B2B SaaS company and post-sale churn is compressing your net revenue retention, the next move is a conversation about where your adoption model is breaking down.

Talk to a Growth Strategist →

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do SaaS customers stop using software after purchase?

Because the end user—the person who must operate the software daily—never participated in the buying process. They weren’t sold on the problem, weren’t sold on the solution, and carry no intrinsic motivation to change their existing workflow. Todd Kirk captures the core tension precisely: “everybody wants to change, they just don’t want to do anything differently.” Without a deliberate post-sale adoption strategy that addresses behavior change before feature training, churn is the predictable outcome regardless of how good your product is.

What percentage of users actually complete product onboarding tours?

Only 2% of users click through a standard in-product onboarding tour, according to Todd Kirk’s data from Brainstorm’s 5-plus years of platform experience. Of that 2%, only 2% actually read the content—meaning roughly 0.04% of your total user base engages with in-product tours in any meaningful way. This makes product tours one of the least effective customer activation investments available. Short, action-specific formats—including one-minute videos and single-step prompts—consistently outperform comprehensive tours in driving measurable adoption.

How do you reduce SaaS churn through better adoption?

Focus on the shortest path to first value rather than feature completeness. Map the critical sequence of actions a new user must take to reach their first meaningful outcome, then deliver guidance for only the immediate next step—not everything they could eventually learn. Avoid simultaneous resource dumps (knowledge centers, CSM calls, support hubs) that overwhelm users at their lowest confidence point. Kirk’s Less But Better Framework argues that atomic, step-sequenced guidance dramatically outperforms broad onboarding libraries in driving sustained product adoption and reducing early churn.

How do you sell through channel partners without losing adoption consistency?

Standardize your adoption framework at the vendor level and require partners to deploy it without modification. The risk of partner-channel sales is that every partner builds their own onboarding approach, delivering wildly different support quality to end users of the same product. Kirk identifies this as particularly dangerous for seven-figure enterprise accounts, where inconsistent adoption experiences translate directly into million-dollar churn events. Embedding a consistent, vendor-designed adoption sequence into the partner delivery model protects end-user adoption metrics and makes churn risk predictable across your full customer base.

What is the shortest path to first value in SaaS, and why does it matter?

The shortest path to first value is the minimum sequence of actions a new user must complete to experience a meaningful outcome from your software—before they encounter complexity, feature depth, or advanced configuration. It matters because users make their first adoption decision—consciously or not—based on whether the software delivered something useful before it became overwhelming. Kirk’s framework requires mapping this critical path explicitly, then building onboarding that guides users through it step by step, delivering guidance for only the immediate next action and nothing beyond it until that step is complete.