First impressions count: why onboarding makes or breaks SaaS adoption
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Product-Led Growth and self-service have fundamentally changed the mechanics of SaaS adoption.
For many SaaS vendors, Product-Led Growth (PLG) is critical and it’s never been easier for customers to sign up for new software. So where enterprise software once followed a formal sales process, today’s buyers increasingly expect to trial, onboard, and evaluate products on their own terms. They want to sign up, explore the product hands-on, and reach value quickly, often without ever speaking to a sales or customer success team.
This isn't just anecdotal. Gartner previously reported that B2B buyers spend only 17% of their total purchase journey meeting with potential suppliers, but reliance on sales interaction has declined even further since. Recent data shows that 75% of B2B buyers now prefer a rep-free experience. By the time a buyer engages with a human, they are often 70% of the way through their decision-making process. When comparing multiple vendors, this leaves your sales rep with even less than 5% of their total time to influence the deal.
This shift has major implications for Independent Software Vendors (ISVs). You can no longer rely on a customer success team to drive adoption post-sale. In many cases, your product will be trialled - and judged - long before your team has a chance to influence the decision. You might see a signup, but you won't necessarily see the competitive context: often, buyers are comparing you against multiple other vendors simultaneously, and the winner is chosen before a single sales call happens.
In this new world, the "out-of-the-box" customer experience is critical. Customers won't always spend time configuring a product before they have formed a judgement on its value.
In this post, we’ll explore how buying patterns are evolving, why onboarding has become a strategic differentiator, and what ISVs need to consider when designing products for today’s self-service buyers.
The shift in buying patterns
Enterprise software buying used to follow a predictable, visible path: discovery calls, a structured sales process, procurement negotiations, and often a formal proof of concept, all guided by the vendor. Both sides knew they were engaged, and the vendor had visibility into the customer's progress.
That is rarely true today. Modern buyers run self-driven trials across multiple tools, often in parallel - frequently trialling your product alongside multiple competitors simultaneously.
This shift isn't just coming from buyers; it is of course the engine of vendors’ Product-Led Growth (PLG) strategies. ISVs are actively moving toward PLG to scale efficiently and reduce acquisition costs. However, PLG introduces a higher bar for adoption: your product must work out-of-the-box with the rest of the customer's stack.
If a user cannot integrate your product into their ecosystem independently, the PLG loop breaks.
Modern SaaS makes it easy to get started, but equally easy to walk away. Consequently, much of this evaluation happens "below the waterline" without a formal sales conversation, without customer success engagement, and without the vendor seeing how the product is being used.
Because these journeys are largely self-serve, vendors have limited visibility into success or failure. You may not be able to distinguish between a competitive trial and customer churn, nor understand why a prospect ultimately rejected your product.
The new onboarding challenge
In this environment, onboarding is no longer just about setup; it is about "wowing" the user. Buyers are deciding whether your product fits their needs, their workflows, and their expectations in real-time. The time it takes to reach that "wow" moment is critical.
How fast can you get the customer to say, "This is valuable"? If it takes too much effort, or the learning curve is too steep, they will move on to the next option.
This is especially true given that buying centres for B2B solutions can involve 6 to 10 decision-makers, according to Gartner. The value must be obvious and sufficiently far-reaching to immediately give the buyer confidence that the product will work smoothly for the wider business.
We see this shift first-hand in our work with leading ISVs. So, what do these modern buyers expect from onboarding?
Seamless setup
The days of expecting customers to endure lengthy setup processes before seeing value are gone. Initial setup must be frictionless.
Buyers want to be hands-on quickly, without spending hours reading documentation or wrestling with configuration. They expect:
- Clear, guided onboarding flows;
- Preconfigured, sensible defaults; and
- Minimal upfront configuration to get started.
While the ability to configure is important, it usually comes later, once they have experienced value and are willing to commit to continued use.
Great default dashboards
Too often, products leave users staring at empty states or require heavy configuration before anything useful appears. You cannot afford to make users work for their first insights.
Once users are in the product, they expect immediate visibility of value. That means:
- Thoughtful default dashboards that surface key insights immediately;
- Initial views that help the user understand the product's capabilities; and
- A clear path to "here is why this matters to me."
Easy integrations with critical tools
One of the most overlooked onboarding pitfalls is failing to integrate with the customer’s existing ecosystem. The product must fit like a jigsaw piece into their business, rather than forcing them to reshape their processes around your tool.
For many users, a missing or poor integration is a deal-breaker. Enterprise buyers have invested heavily in platforms like ServiceNow, Slack, Jira, or Salesforce. If your product cannot fit into the platforms that matter to your customers during onboarding, it creates immediate friction:
- Business workflows feel complex and disjointed;
- Data becomes siloed; and
- Widespread product adoption fails.
Minimal need for professional services
Finally, modern buyers expect self-service onboarding. For ISVs, this means reducing reliance on high-touch onboarding models. Self-service should be the default, with high-touch services reserved for the most complex enterprise requirements.
Your buyers want:
- To sign up, try the product, and see immediate value without a professional services engagement;
- To control the pace of adoption; and
- To avoid hidden costs and long implementation cycles.
The risk: poor onboarding = instant churn
The bottom line is simple: if onboarding creates friction, delays, or unmet expectations, buyers will churn. In today’s self-service environment, they will likely do so without ever contacting your team.
You won’t get feedback. You won’t get a chance to fix it.
That is why onboarding must be designed proactively as a core component of the product experience.
Why this matters to ISVs
For ISVs, this shift in buying behaviour demands more than small tweaks to the sales process. It calls for a rethink of how products are designed and adopted.
The traditional model - high-touch onboarding and heavy reliance on professional services - no longer fits the needs of the modern SaaS customer. It also undermines the efficiency required for Product-Led Growth.
PLG relies on the product proving its own value. If you need a human to explain why it matters or to manually configure the connections, you aren't doing PLG; you are simply adding friction to the sales process.
Beyond customer expectations, the economics of SaaS have changed. Margins depend on scale and efficiency. For high-growth SaaS companies, onboarding must be streamlined and optimised without sacrificing customer experience.
If onboarding is expensive and slow, acquisition costs rise and customer lifetime value shrinks. This is a dangerous combination in a competitive market. In this environment, winning on the out-of-the-box experience is no longer optional; it is a strategic differentiator.
As positioning expert April Dunford points out, customers need to understand two things quickly:
- How is this product different? and
- Why should I care?
Increasingly, that understanding must come through the product and its documentation, not through sales conversations.
Your buyers aren’t looking for the best onboarding service. They are busy professionals looking for the product that demonstrates the most value, integrates easiest with their stack, and feels easiest to roll out across the business.
Because the self-serve onboarding experience is the customer’s first real interaction with your product, it is where you must make your differentiation most obvious.
Conclusion: first impressions are everything
When buyers can trial, adopt, and cancel without ever speaking to a sales team, the onboarding experience becomes one of your most critical levers for driving adoption and retention.
It is no longer enough to assume a customer success team will bridge the gaps. ISVs need to rethink onboarding for a world of self-service buyers, where the product must stand on its own from the very first interaction.
In this environment, the winners will be those who make value obvious, fast, and frictionless:
- Products that deliver clear value on first use;
- Onboarding experiences that fit seamlessly into the buyer’s world; and
- Integrations that remove friction and support real adoption.
At Cloudsoft, we help product and engineering teams master this out-of-the-box experience, streamline onboarding, and integrate smoothly into customers' ecosystems. This translates directly to improved conversion and retention.
In today’s SaaS market, the equation is simple: if onboarding wins, the product wins. If onboarding fails, the opportunity is gone… often before you knew it existed.
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