Adoption

Roughly ten months sit between signing and renewing, and for a long time nobody had a name for them. The calendar on the vendor side held two dates — the day setup finished and the day the contract ended — with nothing in between. So when customer onboarding wrapped up, the owner crossed that account off the list and moved to the next one. Onboarding is the stretch right after signing when accounts, data, and training get prepared until the customer is able to use the product.

The trouble surfaced two months before renewal. Someone would open the account for the first time in a while and find 50 accounts provisioned and six people who had logged in last week. The completion report said every setting was finished, so on paper nothing was wrong, while the contact at the customer said their team was still working the old way. There was nothing to build a renewal case on, and two months was far too short to build one.

Adoption names that empty stretch and turns it into something an owner can work on. It accepts that being able to use a product and actually using it are different states, and it makes crossing the gap somebody's job.

Setup is finished and the users are missing. Accounts exist, data has been migrated, nothing looks broken — and people keep going back to the tool they used before.

Two things get measured here.

1. Breadth — the share of provisioned accounts that anyone actually uses. Six out of 50 is 12 percent. A low figure usually says less about the product than about the customer's meetings and reporting, which the product hasn't been written into yet.
2. Depth — how much of the product one person touches. Someone who opens documents to read and someone who writes, shares, and hands off work in comments both register as one login, and they behave nothing alike at renewal.

The two move independently. Breadth without depth leaves everyone opening the product once and never returning; depth without breadth leaves three or four enthusiasts whose usage disappears the moment they change teams.

The person who owns this stretch is the customer success manager (CSM), who works alongside the customer to get results out of the product. The work here looks less like feature training and more like rearranging how a team works. At Pagedeck the first goal is moving a customer's weekly meeting notes into our documents. As long as that meeting happens every week, people come back every week, and once one person writes their part there, the person next to them follows.

This stage is easy to lose track of because nothing about it is an event. Onboarding has a start and an end date, renewal has an expiry, and adoption has no date at all. Nobody measures it, and ten months go by. The account that shows up on the renewal forecast as a surprise is almost always one that spent those months unwatched.

Next comes expansion, and getting there takes visible results inside the current footprint first. Expansion is the stretch where usage or headcount grows — spreading to another team, adding accounts, or moving up a plan.

Three conditions usually get checked together.

1. The ratio holds — weekly users against provisioned accounts should stay above the target line for several weeks running. Pagedeck draws that line at 40 percent and wants four consecutive weeks. A single week's spike means someone ran a training session, not that anything settled.
2. The work depends on it — the product has to sit inside a recurring commitment such as a weekly meeting or a monthly report. Without that, the numbers fall the week the CSM stops prompting.
3. Someone inside explains it — a person at the customer walks new colleagues through the product without being asked. Past that point, usage survives turnover, which is the only version of adoption that outlasts the people who championed it.

Selling seats before those three land is the most common mistake in this stage. Twenty unused accounts become the customer's argument for shrinking the deal at the next renewal, which is the stretch where the contract ends and a new term gets agreed.

"Fifty accounts, six weekly users. They're still in adoption."

The stage gets judged on usage rates, not on how many accounts were handed out.

"Don't sell more seats into an account that hasn't adopted yet."

Whatever gets sold now comes back off at renewal.

"Their weekly meeting runs on our documents. We can start the expansion conversation."

Usage is embedded in the work, so the conditions for the next stage are met.

At Pagedeck, Sofia lays her accounts out by stage every Monday. Sorted by onboarding, adoption, and upcoming renewal rather than alphabetically, the list shows where the week should go.

Last month 40 accounts sat in adoption. She pulled the twelve below 20 percent and contacted each customer directly, and nine of the twelve were still running their weekly meeting the old way. So instead of scheduling more feature training, she started by moving one set of meeting notes across with them. One meeting is small enough that a customer will agree to it in the same call.

The frequent misread is treating a rise in logins as adoption, since it's the first number on the dashboard. But showing up is a visit, not a habit. The count climbs the week a CSM sends a nudge and sinks the week after, and reading that wobble as adoption promotes accounts where nothing actually changed into expansion candidates.

The other misread leaves adoption to the customer, on the theory that a good product gets used and an unused product is the product's fault. In practice this is work that changes how people do their jobs, so product quality alone doesn't move it. Changing how a weekly meeting gets prepared means convincing whoever runs that meeting, and that starts with getting time from one of the busiest people at the customer. Left to the customer, most accounts stall at 12 percent and arrive at renewal that way.