User activation isn’t just another metric. It’s the backbone of sustainable growth. And one of the biggest drivers of activation, especially in B2B SaaS, is onboarding.
When onboarding falls short, users fail to see value fast enough. They drop off, disengage or never come back. That’s why poor onboarding is often the silent killer.
TLDR
- By zeroing in on our real “aha moment” and reshaping our onboarding to guide users straight to it, we cut Day 1 churn by 20%.
- We replaced our feature-focused onboarding with a step-by-step checklist. We also defined a clear PQL (Product Qualified Lead), which helped our sales team focus on the users most likely to convert.
- The result? More users hit activation, sales spends less time guessing and we grew our monetizable user base without touching marketing spend.
Why Onboarding Matters More Than You Think
As a B2B SaaS company with a hybrid go-to-market motion (product-led, sales-assisted), our free trial is the backbone of our conversion funnel. Like most companies at our stage, we run multiple campaigns and landing pages.
But there is one universal touchpoint every user experiences: the onboarding.
A well-optimized onboarding process can make or break conversions. It is the difference between users dropping off and users experiencing real value. So we set out to improve ours and unlock more conversions from our existing trial users.
Finding the Aha Moment
We began by diving into our product usage data with a clear goal: identify the pivotal moment when trial users truly grasp the value of our product. The aha-moment (aka eureka moment or first strike) that signals they’ve experienced the core benefit.
Like most SaaS platforms, we serve multiple jobs-to-be-done. Our users come to us for a range of in-product communication needs. But as the Pareto principle suggests, one job consistently rises above the rest—helping their end users quickly understand core product functionality through interactive product tour.
The data made it obvious. Users who created a product tour within 24 hours of signing up converted at 3.5 times the rate of those who didn’t. This wasn’t just correlation. It marked the moment users clearly understood how our solution could solve their problem.
The goal of user onboarding is for someone to experience that first ‘Aha’ moment. It’s this magical moment for new users when the clouds open, and a realization hits them like a gorgeous ray of sunshine from the heavens.
Ramli John, Author of Product-led onboarding
Key takeaway: Don’t showcase everything. Focus onboarding around the single action most correlated with conversion.
Diagnosing the Existing Flow
Our onboarding was built to give users a broad overview of the platform. This is a common mistake in feature-rich SaaS products. We assumed that showcasing everything would keep users engaged. After all, users come to us with a wide range of jobs-to-be-done.
But the data told a different story. We had fallen into the feature tour trap.
Users who explored multiple features didn’t convert at higher rates. What moved the needle was guiding them to the one action that delivered immediate value.
Lesson learned: Feature exposure is valuable for LTV expansion, but not for onboarding. New users come in with a specific job-to-be-done. Address that first.
Designing the New Onboarding Flow
Once we identified the aha-moment, everything else snapped into place. Instead of trying to explain the entire platform, we shifted our focus to a single goal: guide users from signup to tour creation as quickly and clearly as possible.
The simplicity of this approach was its greatest strength. By optimizing for one high-impact action, we reduced cognitive load, minimized distractions and gave users a clear sense of progress. Every screen, prompt, and interaction was designed to reinforce that momentum.
Choosing the Right Onboarding Tool
We chose an in-app onboarding checklist over an interactive product tour for two key reasons:
1. Checklists offer persistence
Unlike product tours, which often disappear once dismissed, checklists remain visible and actionable. Users can pick up exactly where they left off. This is critical when onboarding spans multiple sessions or involves multiple stakeholders.
2. Our onboarding depends on extension installation
Users need to install a browser extension (that’s where the magic happens). But it’s also a friction point we can’t fully control, especially in corporate environments with IT restrictions. A product tour that depends on a successful install would break too often to be reliable.
This is what our onboarding checklist looks like. You can see it in action when you activate the free trial.
Pro tip: An embedded checklist feels native. It sits inside the product UI, not on top of it. That subtle shift improves engagement and makes onboarding feel like a natural part of the product, not an add-on.
Implementing and Launching the New Flow
Once the new onboarding flow was designed, execution moved fast.
Using our own product adoption platform, we built and launched the embedded checklist in under five hours, including QA.
Engineering support was minimal. All it took was a small update to the post-signup page to accommodate the embedded checklist and ensure it loaded in the right context. From there, just a few lines of CSS were needed to align the styling with our native UI. No complex backend work. No sprint planning.
This rapid turnaround gave us the freedom to test and iterate without heavy development overhead.
Sounds too good to be true? Check out our technical docs for embedding a checklist, it’s simpler than you might think💪.
Measuring Success: A/B Testing and Results
We didn’t rely on gut instincts. To measure the impact of our new onboarding flow, we ran a controlled A/B test. There was one challenge however: selecting the right metric.
Because revenue conversion plays out over months (think mid-market ICPs), we needed a fast, reliable proxy metric. We identified Day 1 retention as our leading indicator. Data validation backed it up. Users who don’t return after their first session almost never convert. That made Day 1 retention a strong predictor of long-term outcomes.
The results were clear. Day 1 retention improved by 20%, effectively expanding our monetizable user base without increasing acquisition costs. Once we confirmed statistical significance at the 95% confidence level, we rolled out the winning flow to 100% of our traffic.
How This Impacted Sales: Introducing PQLs
Because we operate a product-led, sales-assisted model, optimizing onboarding had ripple effects across our GTM (Go To Market) motion. The sales team felt it most.
Previously, sales consultants engaged every lead that matched our ICP (Ideal Customer Profile). But many of those leads weren’t ready for a sales conversation. Outreach was often premature, leading to low response rates and inefficient use of sales time.
With the new onboarding flow in place, we introduced the concept of a Product Qualified Lead (PQL). A user who’s crossed a specific milestone that signals strong intent. This milestone typically sits between the aha-moment and the habit-moment.
In our case, that milestone was installing the code snippet. Unlike the browser extension (ideal for exploration), the snippet shows clear intent to implement the platform in their own environment. These users aren’t just curious, they’re serious.
To make this actionable, we integrated the PQL signal directly into HubSpot. This allows the sales team to engage in real time, as soon as a lead demonstrates readiness.
The result?
A significant improvement in pipeline quality and sales efficiency. By focusing outreach on leads who’ve already experienced product value, we’ve shifted away from a spray and pray model to a more efficient sales motion.
Final Thoughts
Optimizing onboarding is one of the highest-leverage moves any B2B SaaS company can make. By focusing on the aha moment and simplifying the user journey, we unlocked a 20% lift in our monetizable user base. Without increasing acquisition spend.
Ready to do the same in your product?
Book a call with one of our onboarding specialists.
