15+ Common Goals SaaS Users Have
What’s the point of it all? That sounds like such a dramatic existential question, but it’s one your users are asking (consciously or not).
Smart researchers have estimated every person makes upwards of 35,000 choices a day. THIRTY-FIVE THOUSAND.
SaaS products can be powerful tools for getting more done in a day, but geez do they have a lot of noise to contend with. Therefore the first step in creating a successful onboarding series is understanding user goals.
You have to understand why they could care if you’re ever hoping to have a share of their daily mental pie. Your job is to help users accomplish something by way of your tool — so you need to clear useless clutter and show them the straight path to enlightenment/making their lives better.
If your onboarding ain’t sparking joy you need to Marie Kondo your SaaS.
How do you dive deep into the psyche of users and understand what they actually want?
In a perfect world, your customer success team is asking each new client about their goals. Then you would compile those learnings into broad categories or segment-specific.
But we’re going to do it the gotta-get-started-today handmade version. Getting real insights from customers is always better, but sometimes you have to start somewhere. I’d rather you have a strong base to test and perfect from than to not have any sense of direction at all.
Common SaaS User Goals
Tools (which I consider software to be) are meant to make life easier. This can happen across a few different categories — increasing something, decreasing something, or changing something. (I can feel my middle school English teachers cringing at my excessive use of the bland word “something”).
These goals will be made more specific depending on your product and industry, but these are good places to start.
Increasing Something
First up is growth! Think about the areas you’d like to have growth in your personal life or business. Increasing your income or sales, increasing the amount you travel, increasing your public speaking skills.
Some routine customer goals in this category are:
Increase sales or revenue
Increase traffic or leads
Increase work output
Increase their real or perceive worth at work (hello boss, meet my tangible ROI)
Increase financial security
Increase skills or knowledge
Decreasing Something
Next up — it’s time to let that ish go. We all have little monsters in our day we’d love to banish. For your users, this could be in the form of:
Decreasing redundancies or clutter
Decreasing business costs
Decreasing mistakes
Decreasing uncertainty
Decrease the number of tools they have to use (AKA consolidate)
Decreasing the number of useless meetings they have to sit through each day
Changing Something
If you’ve been awake during the month of January then you know people have pleeenty of resolutions and things they’d like to change. And remember, the people using your B2B product are people too. Whether your product helps consumers or businesses, they may be looking to:
Change their work process
Change their communication methods and organization
Change how they relay information to customers or superiors
Change how they promote their own product
Change the community they’re a part of
Change the way they present themselves or their brand to the world
What do you notice about these goals?
They overlap. The tangible outcome of increasing work output is the same as decreasing redundancies is the same as changing workflows. A single feature within your app can wear a lot of different hats for different people.
The difference? How they feel. How they motivate. How they resonate.
In the meantime — are there goals your users have that aren’t on the list? Sharing is caring, so pop them down below.