S6E5 – Triple Your B2B SaaS Revenue with UX: How to Optimize Conversion, Retention, and Expansion with Peter Loving

Are you wondering how to triple your B2B SaaS revenue with UX? and how to optimize conversion, retention, and expansion? In this exciting episode of the “Grow Your B2B SaaS” podcast, hosted by Joran! tackles how to skyrocket your B2B SaaS revenue with one game-changing factor: User Experience (UX). The subject matter expert is a second-time show guest Peter Loving, founder of UserActive, a top-tier SaaS design agency that helps businesses grow through better UI and UX. In this episode, Peter provides the hacks on how to optimize UX to boost conversion, retention, and revenue like never before!

The Potential of UX in Revenue Growth

Imagine tripling your B2B SaaS revenue just by improving UX! That’s the kind of power Peter Loving is talking about. He breaks down how UX, when paired with smart marketing and sales strategies, can drive massive gains in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR). If your company has substantial traffic and a high Average Contract Value (ACV), UX can be the secret sauce to sky-high conversions.

Comprehensive User Experience Approach

UX isn’t just about the product itself—it starts the moment users land on your website. Peter emphasizes the importance of a holistic approach that includes both the website and the application. By delivering an outstanding experience from the first interaction, you can turn visitors into loyal, paying customers.

Enhancing Website Conversion Rates

Want to level up your website’s conversion rates? Peter shares practical tips to showcase your product’s value with visuals and clear messaging. He also warns against cluttered calls to action (CTAs) that confuse users. Instead, make the journey smooth and straightforward—especially for product-led growth companies.

The Importance of a Streamlined Onboarding Process

Great onboarding is like welcoming guests to a five-star hotel—it’s all about making them feel at home. Peter explains that understanding your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is key to creating an onboarding experience that meets their needs. A seamless onboarding flow not only delights users but also keeps them coming back for more.

Addressing the Empty State Challenge

Empty state dashboards are a huge challenge in SaaS. Peter’s advice? Offer demo data or guided setups to fill that void from the start. An empty dashboard can leave users feeling lost and frustrated, so make sure they see value right away to keep them engaged during the free trial.

Transitioning Free Users to Paying Customers

Turning free users into paying customers doesn’t have to be complicated. The trick is aligning your pricing structure with the actual value your product delivers. Peter gives a great example of how usage-based pricing can sometimes confuse users, especially in AI products. Keep it simple and intuitive to boost conversions.

The Role of UX/UI in Customer Retention

A modern, user-friendly design doesn’t just attract customers—it keeps them around. Peter highlights how a cluttered or outdated UI can drive users away, while a clean, intuitive interface builds loyalty. Focus on core workflows and make the experience enjoyable from start to finish.

Prioritizing Features for Retention

Not all features are created equal. To maximize retention, prioritize features that meet user needs and enhance navigation. A well-organized dashboard with quick access to key features can make all the difference in user satisfaction and retention rates.

Strategies for Revenue Expansion

Want to boost revenue? Peter shares proven strategies like offering premium features, increasing usage limits, and adding user seats. Present these upgrades in the right context to make users feel they’re getting even more value—and they’ll be more likely to buy in.

Encouraging Referrals and Testimonials

Happy customers are your best marketers. Peter recommends asking for referrals and testimonials right when users achieve major wins with your product. This is when their enthusiasm is at its peak, making their feedback more genuine and impactful.

Conclusion and Key Takeaways

To wrap things up, Joran recaps the episode’s biggest insights: UX should be an essential part of your go-to-market strategy. Focus on delivering value, designing user journeys with care, and making pricing crystal clear. Whether you’re a founder or a product leader, continuous improvement and a long-term mindset are your keys to success.

Final Thoughts and Contact Information

Want more insights from Peter Loving? Reach out to him for a UX audit at UserActive! Don’t forget to leave a review on Spotify and connect with Joran on LinkedIn if you’re interested in sponsoring or being a guest on the show. Your feedback and engagement keep this podcast growing!

Key Timecodes

• (0:00) – Introduction and overview of the episode
• (0:49) – Today’s topic: How to triple your B2B SaaS revenue with better UX
• (1:35) – Guest introduction: Peter Loving from UserActive
• (2:54) – Discussing the role of UX in increasing revenue
• (3:51) – The importance of website conversion rates
• (5:14) – Strategies for a clear call to action
• (7:06) – Product-led vs. sales-led approaches
• (8:05) – The value of user qualification and questionnaires
• (10:08) – Creating an effective onboarding flow
• (12:45) – Addressing user concerns during onboarding
• (14:15) – Handling empty state dashboards
• (17:11) – Framing the ultimate user result
• (18:56) – Designing a journey for developers
• (19:39) – Increasing conversion from free to paid users
• (23:00) – Impact of UX/UI on user retention
• (25:39) – Prioritizing features and enhancing user retention
• (28:03) – Effective navigation and feature set presentation
• (30:11) – Strategies for increasing user payments
• (32:49) – Contextual upgrades and expansion opportunities
• (34:52) – Timing user referrals and testimonials
• (37:27) – Best advice on UX in one sentence
• (38:04) – Advice for SaaS founders from 0-10K MRR
• (39:08) – Advice for SaaS founders aiming for 10 million ARR
• (41:39) – Summary of the episode
• (42:34) – Contact information for Peter Loving

Transcription

– Peter

If the product looks great, looks modern, has a good user experience, people enjoy using the product, they appreciate the product, they understand the value in it, they really benefit from it, as long as they have the need for this solution, they’re going to be a user. Your user is arriving with a problem. It might be difficult to solve. They might be frustrated because they’re looking around at different solutions. It’s not always easy finding a white solution to problem. You have to think about what makes sense to the user. Could it be the number of meetings that they have? Do they pay for number of meetings? Do they pay for memory or storage, or do they pay in credits? Ai is becoming a topic where we’re talking a lot about pricing, and it’s usually usage-based pricing in AI.

– Joran

Today, we’re going to talk about how to triple your B2B SaaS revenue with better UX.

– Joran

We will dive into how to optimize conversion, retention, and expansion using user experience. My guest is Peter Loving, which was the first guest on the Grow Your B2B SaaS podcast. In the previous episode, we chatted about the basics, importance, and some best practices regarding UX UI. Today, we’re going to take the conversation a lot deeper. If you aren’t familiar with the topic, listen to that episode first. For people who don’t know Peter, he’s the founder of UserActive, a SaaS design agency. They help SaaS companies on a daily basis to grow their SaaS by improving the UI and the UX. Welcome back, Peter.

– Peter

Thanks, Joran. Love your podcast and always good catching up, so happy to be back.

– Joran

The title of the podcast is How to Triple your SaaS Revenue with Better UX. Is that really possible? I guess that’s my first question. I guess what components of the UX would you need to improve to actually be able to achieve this result?

– Peter

Yeah, that’s a good start. We have worked with companies who have tripled their revenue while we’ve been working with them. You could argue, Oh, is that just down to UX or the cumulative effect of everything they’re doing? I would say that it’s important that you have all of the components working together. If you do have a substantial amount of visitors to your website and you have a high ACV and you have a lot of paying customers already, say you’re at 5 million ARR, when you make small adjustments that have what might seem like small percentage gains or increases that can actually It impact revenue quite a lot. I would say that UX does play a big role in impacting bottom line ARR. However, you want it to be part of your overall strategy, so it fits in with all of the other stuff that you’re doing, like you’re go-to-market, product thinking, and your general sales and marketing activities. It’s one lever in a whole range of things to increase your revenue.

– Joran

You mentioned marketing, go-to-market. When we talk about UX, we’re not just talking the actual application, but we also have the website sometimes. You really go from what do they see first to how they actually end up as a paying client.

– Peter

We’re interested in delivering an excellent user experience. If your product experience is amazing, that helps with converting paying users and retention. But we want to make sure that as many people can get value from your product, sign up as possible because we don’t want to miss out on those users’ users who are a really good fit from getting value from your product. That takes us back to the website. Are we communicating it effectively? Do we have the right mechanism to get users to convert, at least to get a demo or a trial? We work on that whole life cycle from the moment the user is aware of the product right through to the product experience itself.

– Joran

For people listening and they want to start tripping their revenue, we’ll start with website conversion rate. How can a company increase their website conversion rate?

– Peter

This can vary from product to product, but there are general principles that apply. One of the things I like to lead first with is show your product on your website and show off in its best light. Take it features or elements of the UI that communicate the value in your product. Usually, visitors are coming to your website looking for a solution to an issue or a challenge or problem that they have. It’s your job to present the benefits and how it solves that solution quickly and easily. I’d recommend showing the product, showing it in its best light, your best visual esthetics. If you need to create a graphic that has elements of UI and also communicate some other factors to give a better picture of the solution, then do that. The other thing I see frequently is not necessarily a very clear route to sign up. You’ll be familiar with this, Yohann. When you see software websites, they might have Book a demo, or at free trial, or you’ll see something like Book a demo or talk to us. We see that as giving too many options. There’s one route we want visitors to take, and that’s to trying product and validating, is this the product to solve my problem?

– Peter

We want to remove optionality so they don’t have to think about the right way to go and focus on one CTA. So removing conflicting CTAs, conflicting information. Sometimes there’s too much information in a hero section, too much messaging, ambiguous It’s messaging. We want to get it focused and have a really focused call to action.

– Joran

When you talk about reflecting CTAs, do you mean above the fold or do you also even mean in the header? If I look at our app, everybody wants to sign up right away. They might want to talk to me before they do so. What would still be?

– Peter

I recommend the approach of having one option. In the header, we’ll still say have that free trial sign up. Sometimes I got the impression that people are worried they’ll miss out. I’m talking about the SaaS founders or teams. They’re worried they’ll miss out on a visitor converting if they don’t have the right action. That’s where you get optionality coming in. What if they don’t want a free trial? What if they want to speak to us? Let’s put speak to us. Or what if they just want a demo? There might be the case they want a conversation, but especially if you’re product-led, lead with the free trial, get them in the product because they’re there at that moment. It’s contextual. If they want to speak to you, you’re postponing the interaction because now they’ve got to book time to talk, or student uniform. If it’s an important step, you can always have something in the onboarding flow, something in the product where you connect with them and see if they want to still book a call. We want to get them in the product. That’s what we advise. There’s not a one-size-fits-all. You need to understand the nuances of your user buying journey.

– Peter

We test things to see what works, but we tend to lead with this. Go straight for the thing you’re looking for, straight for the conversion.

– Joran

That’s super relevant for product-led growth companies, right? I guess maybe it even applies sales-led companies, then you would probably advise, have to book a demo, main call to action, and nothing else.

– Peter

Yeah, that’s what we do. Our job is to do the product justice. You have a great product. We want as many people to get the chance to see that as possible. If your route is a sales-led approach, we’re trying to convert that demo and remove any friction or reservation as to why they wouldn’t book a demo. We’re showing the product in its best light, helping them visualize their success and validating, Hey, this looks at At least one of the best options for us, we want to try this, I’m going to go straight for the Booker demo and make that as easy and quick as possible.

– Joran

It’s interesting because we did the opposite lately. We’re a small team. I still do a lot of the sales calls. My calendar gets filled up pretty quickly. What we actually did is we added a little questionnaire before people could book a demo. It allows me to book the demo with my right ICP, making sure that actually they’re a fit. What What do you think if you’re a small team, is that a good thing to do or you would just say, Keep it as simple as possible?

– Peter

There’s always good reasons to get more information. I’d be interested in how that worked. Do you find that helpful when they book a call and you have a bit of info about them and you just validated. I guess there’s another part of this question is, did you create this step because you were having a lot of unqualified demo calls?

– Joran

Yeah, it was a lot earlier. We had a lot of unqualified demo calls. What we did now is we created three pages. First, book a demo. They needed to add a couple of questions. If they’re unqualified, they would go to a page where we would give them a pre-recorded demo and an interactive demo. If they were qualified, they would see my calendar, and then we would have it embedded on our site with the values on why they should book a demo.

– Peter

I think that sounds like a cool approach. The people who qualify who are really good ICP fit for you, book a demo. The ones that you’re not quite sure of, you validated them and maybe not the ideal fit, they can go to a recorded demo. There is this nuanced approach. I think it’s quite good to qualify them. Can you speak more targeted to your ICP on your hero section in order that they can self-qualify? Is that worth trying? Ultimately, it comes back to finding the right fit. There’s a benefit to having one-step approach It’s easier to test. If you have two options, then sometimes you go, Oh, are we getting these results because of this option or that option? The UX is always the journey of iteration and improving to get to your best solution.

– Joran

I love that you say, have people self-qualified based on messaging on the site. We did a podcast with We brought Dunford about positioning. Then I did one with Diana, Weerado, which we met at Sasks & Local, which talked about messaging. We started to change these things to have people self-qualified. It makes sense. Everything is connected.

– Peter

That sounds good. The most important thing is iteration of improvements all the time. Each step you’re learning and each time you’re refining, it’s getting better. That’s pretty much the typical UX process, UX journey.

– Joran

Nice. Let’s assume we have one call to action. We remove all the conflicting CTAs, people sign up. How does a good onboarding flow look? How can we make sure people sign up and complete the process?

– Peter

This is a good topic to spend time thinking about and understanding. I think, first of all, you really want understand your ICP, know them well. Know the result that they’re looking for, know why they’re coming to solve that problem. Once we know the user and we understand their journey and we know how they want this product to work for them, we try to reverse engineer that. We build a journey that gets them through the steps that they want to see as quickly as possible. There are many different variations of product nowadays and approach. There was micro-SAS, there’s ERPs, which are huge products which still need training and onboarding. There’s sales-led, there’s product-led. What you need to do is really to focus on the best fit for your product and RCP. We’re starting to see more in the AI space of AI-assisted onboarding. It’s really worth taking the time to think it through, make it logical, intuitive. I always gave this analogy of onboarding that it should be like the experience of when you arrive at a five-star hotel. When you arrive at a high-quality premium five-star hotel, you are treated in a really special way, and all of your problems are taken from you straight away.

– Peter

You arrive tired, you have a luggage, you come to check in, they take your luggage, they check you in, they explain to you what you can expect in the hotel, where you can go, where the restaurant is, what’s for dinner, if there’s a gym, what the events are. They take your bags to your room. You feel well looked after, get a great idea of the facilities and what you can do at this hotel. Hotel. We try to do the same experience in the product. Your user is arriving with a problem. It might be difficult to solve. They might be frustrated because they’re looking around at different solutions. It’s not always easy finding the right solution to your problem. If they’re checking out Reditus, they might be thinking about all the elements uncertain about affiliate management and affiliate campaigns and what platform should I use and this Reditus to write ones. If you can put them at ease by giving them a great user journey me, addressing those potential concerns by knowing what they are, you can address them rather than taking an educated guess or showing them around things that you want them to see in the product or features you think are the best features, then I think that’s a good start.

– Peter

That’s a good approach to it. That’s how we tend to approach the task of creating a good onboarding flow.

– Joran

In the end, you want to get them addressing their concerns while doing the onboarding. In your opinion, we have an onboarding process where you go through the steps, where we ask them a couple of questions, like what are they looking for, addressing their concerns, then they will end up in an empty dashboard. That’s probably the biggest thing within SaaS. What are your thoughts about empty state dashboard?

– Peter

We do empty states. That’s a common problem, especially if you have a product that deals with data. Every new account doesn’t have any data until they start doing work or connect some integration where their data comes into your software. We want to give an experience that’s a representation of what it would What would it be like when they’re using this product for real. The very first time they use it, you don’t get that feeling because they don’t have the data. It’s almost like they’ve got to figure out what would this be like if we’re actually, when we’re in the process of using with our real data and with our real users and everything like that. There’s a number of ways you can approach this. One is quite a traditional way is to give some demo data or at least if you have a dashboard in your product, show what the dashboard looks like with dummy data. The other way is to populate your dashboard with a journey, get them started on the journey to getting their first data or information in that screen. This is quite good because what it does is it gets your user engaging in the workflow.

– Peter

We like to do that as soon as possible. The sooner the user is engaged in the workflow and they’re starting to do things, the more they get lost in the product, exploring and thinking, Oh, this is cool. And then you’re trying to activate them at that time. We like to get them involved in There’s no better time to do it than on the first visit because if they see an empty screen and it’s not very compelling, the risk is that they leave that free trial. Once they’ve left, I think the percentage that actually come back, they’re only 30%, something like that. You want to really keep them in that journey. Try to get them engaged, try to get them a really good sense of the ease of using your product, the value of the product, and some of the powerful features that you have in there.

– Joran

If If I pull things back to it’s quite challenging. For example, we help them to set up an affiliate program and an in-app referral program. Both are something where they need to install a track script, a snippet, connect Stripe, for example. It’s not easy to set up. They need to do a certain thing we struggle with. Do we need to start showing them dummy data? Do we want to get them to install things super quickly, but they’re not 100% sure what they actually get out of the platform.

– Peter

It’s tough. I can talk through how we’ve approached this before. One is, if I ask you, Joran, what’s the ultimate result your ICP is looking for when they sign up to Reditus?

– Joran

The total result is MR, like extra MR. What we do is we help them to create a word of mouth, either with users recommending them or affiliates recommending them. Both have to convert new signups, which convert into paid fines. Our pricing is based on MRR generated via Reditus.

– Peter

Yeah, that’s a great way to frame it because it’s direct ROI. They use Reditus, and ultimately, they can increase their MRR much more than what they pay for your platform. We understand what they’re looking for. We try to frame it this way, sometimes, especially when there’s friction, like a tricky integration, they land in the product. We know that they are looking for the result of growing their MRR, so we’re going to present them with that. Thank you for signing up for Reditus. We We are going to help you grow MRR. Here’s how. You could do this in a number of ways. You could show them just a light example. This company signed up for Reditus and in six months increased their MRR by 3X. Let’s get started to show how we can do this for you. And then they start on the journey. And you can explain the steps a little bit. And then the thing is, what you’re doing is you’re psychologically framing the result for them because we know that they’re about to hit some friction and we need the psychological advantage to get past that friction. If they don’t have it, they’ll hit the friction and they might leave.

– Peter

They might not really think, Is this going to be worth the effort to get through this? We hit them with that and help them appreciate that. Hopefully, that pushes them through, or at least it helps push them through that friction moment. What we’ve done in other cases is the user journey for product adoption, like I was talking about before, about how we want them to be involved in the workflow and engaged quickly. One thing that we can do is make the integration workflow enjoyable and impressive as possible. We’ve done it before. We said, We’re going to take you through a process of connecting your app. So whichever platform it is they connect, whether it’s a CRM or a billing platform or something like that. Here’s what we’re going to do, and here’s how we go. And we design a journey. They feel like they’re going through an experience, and we enable them to invite the people they need to invite onto that journey, and we guide them through it. If they need to input code, we show them how to do it. We’ve done this before where we onboarded a developer. So you invite the developer, the developer comes in, they have their own onboarding flow in the context of their journey, so it makes sense to them.

– Peter

Those things can help. And in the meantime, that might take them a little bit of time. In the meantime, maybe we do give them this demo dashboard of a good use case or some templates that they can work on to populate what might look like a good affiliate campaign for them whilst we’re waiting for the integration. We try to be creative and think of the most exciting, enjoyable, and engaging user journey, considering the challenges with this onboarding process.

– Joran

Yeah, it makes sense. I love that you keep talking about journeys, especially the developer one. We do have the invite developer in the app because they would need to get access, but we never thought about actually creating a journey for them. In the end, they land in the app, probably don’t know where to go. They have to click on settings, installations, get the script. These things make sense. You want them to receive the email on how to do certain things. But if they go to the app, then they just land in an empty dashboard without probably knowing what to do. So I love this. Thank you. When we talk about more journeys, we have people who went to the website, who signed up, went through onboarding. What are some ways to increase free users? Because we’re talking about PLG here, to paid sign up, increase the conversion here.

– Peter

Yeah, there’s sales-led challenges and the PLG challenges. One of the things I was talking recently with a friend about who has a legal tech SaaS is that they will do a pilot. Their free trial, essentially, it’s a free trial, but for a sales-led motion, they’ll get a number of users from their prospects Businesses, give them free accounts, give them coaching, give them guidance. Essentially, that’s like their equivalent of a free trial. It has a heavy human touch in there. For the product-led approach, we’re trying to validate this product as the solution of choice for the users, we want to deliver value in this free trial. During that period, we want it to be explicitly clear how the pricing aligns to that value. We need it to make sense for the user in terms of how they think of the value. One example I’ve seen of this is products built by technical teams and engineers. Sometimes you see engineering thinking coming across on the front-end of the product, so the UX aspect of it. It might be that there’s engineering or technical terminology that makes complete sense in the developer context, but for full-end user context, it makes no sense at all because they don’t think that way.

– Peter

They don’t have the skillset of the developers. One way I’ve seen this happen is for an AI product, the cost for the business is in how much time the user is engaging with AI. And then pricing presented to the user would be like, Okay, if you use this amount of time, you get billed $100 per hour or something. However, In this example, that could make no sense to the end user because they don’t care about the time. They just care about the result. So you have to think about what makes sense to the user. Could it be the number of meetings that they have? Do they pay for a number of meetings? Do they pay for memory or storage, or do they pay in credits? Ai is becoming a topic where we’re talking a lot about pricing, and it’s usually usage-based pricing in AI. But I just use that as an example. It about, the first thing is making the billing logical and tied to the value for the user so they understand what they’re paying for and why. I think that’s one of the fundamentals in that onboarding free trial to paid conversion.

– Joran

Yeah, it makes sense. In the end, they don’t care how many API calls you do towards an AI. They want to get value out of your platform.

– Peter

That’s a good example. You might pay based on API calls. It’s a cost for the business, but the end user doesn’t necessarily even know what that is.

– Joran

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– Peter

I think this is where UX plays a really powerful role. You’ve got the basics, the fundamentals, which are if the product looks great, looks modern, has a good user experience, people enjoy using the product, they appreciate the product, they understand the value in it, they really benefit from it. As long as they have the need for this solution, they’re going to be a user. Where UX can really hurt retention is it’s confusing. Navigation is not logically set out in the product. The user journeys, they don’t flow completely. The product looks dated or clunky. People that often show me the product and ask for pointers, these are the classic things that they always say, Oh, we don’t think our UI looks dated. We think it’s a bit clunky. We’ve got a few competitors who have a sexier-looking product, and we’re aware we’re probably losing customers to some competitors. So In its fundamental form, that’s the power of a great UX, differentiation for your product. If they enjoy using the product, they’re usually proud of that and they usually want to share it with their team or with other people. Oh, we found this great product. We really love this.

– Peter

I really helps. Ux becomes really powerful during that stage. I argue that onboarding is a retention aspect. Great onboarding promotes retention. If you get the onboarding right, you get that buy-in, you get that engagement, that lends itself to better retention once they’re in the product. I usually say focus on your core product workflow. Where do users spend the most time in your product What’s the most common task for them? What’s the common workflow? Where do they collaborate most with other people? Those are the areas where we spend the most amount of work on. Making that core workflow extra seamless, smooth, really great, easy to use, and enjoyable. They don’t even need to think, but they’re just navigating around and having a good impression of your product and getting the results they need.

– Joran

It’s really nice to brought it back to onboarding. If you onboard them like a five-star hotel, they have a really good experience from the beginning, which helps, of course, to convert them into paying client, but which also keeps them more happy once they actually start paying.

– Peter

Definitely.

– Joran

I guess you mentioned it already, how do you prioritize features or do you do certain things that drive customer retention, but you mentioned check common flows, focus on the apps, make it as enjoyable as possible. Is there anything else retention-wise we need to take into account?

– Peter

Yeah, definitely. When you’re talking about features, that relates a lot to product management overall. We want to make sure the right features are in the product, the features that cause users to stick are there within the product, and the necessary screens in the right order. I’ve seen this in products before. You might have the right screens in your product, but they might be mixed up in a weird order that’s hard to navigate. It’s not great for users. Of course, that’s going to be an inferior experience to another product that has the right screens laid out in a really logical order with good flows between them. The feature set is really important, and how you present that feature set is super important. One screen that I love to focus on is the main screen when a user logs in. I usually call this a dashboard of some sort or an account summary. I I really promote this idea, if it makes sense for your product, that a user, when they land in your product, should see a summary of their account. If there’s data in this account, a data visualization of the things that matter to your user on a daily basis.

– Peter

Users typically are doing three things in their account. They’re usually coming in to do work or check something, or they’re collaborating with other people, sharing things with other people. A good dashboard with navigation should enable them to start any of those three types of journey. Once they’re in the product, that first impression is that login. If that’s always a good experience, they’ll sometimes log in just to see the dashboard and just be like, Okay, where are we with these stats? Especially if it’s a sales or marketing-led product. Then where UX relates to the feature set is all about aligning with the business vision, product vision, and product management. If we understand our RCP well, we the features they need and what might be lacking in our product or what will bring more value to our user if we add this to the product. It’s all about making those decisions, evaluating them, and being sure that you are bringing in the most powerful features and positioning them in a logical place in your product. So just a couple of quick tips on this is, from onboarding, you want to quickly move into activation. If you have a good feature set, you be activating users on those features as quickly as possible.

– Peter

So what you mentioned earlier on empty states, that really helps. Each empty state is an opportunity to convert them into activation on that feature. And then also your navigation for your main nav for your product should lay out the most valuable features in order of how valuable they are to the user and how frequently the user uses them. You should also only have three to seven top-level menu items. You get some products that get really long, big, long NAV. Then sometimes when you’re adding new features, you’re thinking, Oh, my goodness, where are we going to add this feature? Because we’ve already got crazy menu here. I’ve even seen a company add really good features into the settings. I’m thinking, That’s crazy. This is a valuable feature. You need to be showing it off in the product so users can get activated. It’s important to categorize your navigation in a logical group elements, group feature sets together into common workflows and have that great experience when you log in and a strong navigation that promotes activation throughout your product. Those are some core things that we like to think about when we’re reviewing a product for improving and increasing retention.

– Joran

Nice. I love it. It all sounds super relatable. Many of the things you said, we had conversations in the last weeks regarding this, like how we’re going to deal with our navigation and the dashboard.

– Peter

Yeah, I try to talk about it in this top-level way because they tend to be common themes for most SaaS companies. Once you get into it, then it becomes nuanced. Then every product is unique and you have to make the right choices for that product team and the users. But the fundamentals apply for most SaaS.

– Joran

Yeah, as you mentioned, it’s I think one of the most common things you said, make a journey per user, make a journey what people are going for. If you keep that in mind all the time, what do you them to do to get value, you can figure out for the listener, how does it look like for your SaaS. So cool. So we now converted them into paid client. We retained them. How can we make sure that they start paying us more?

– Peter

You’ve got a happy user. They’re using the product, they’re getting value from it. Great. Okay, so we like to make sure that pricing is related to value. One principle is not giving away unlimited value to your most successful user. If you have your most successful user on a unlimited plan, you’re actually leaving a lot of revenue on the table. People getting the most value are effectively paying the same as somebody who doesn’t really get anywhere near the same amount of value. It’s important pricing structure. That is almost like a business thinking exercise and some of the UX because UX is all about how you present that to the user, their experience of understanding pricing. But expansion Function becomes really important where your users validate the product, they’re using it, they’re getting value from it, and they want to use it more, or they need to get more from the product. There are a number of ways to do this. One is usage. Do they need to use more? One is users. Do they need to collaborate or invite other users? A good example is Figma. We pay for Figma seats. Every time we add our clients to Figma, in order to give them an editable access, we’re paying for their seats.

– Peter

Figma has a really good way of doing expansion. It naturally happens when we need to… In our workflows, it happens naturally. The other way is to pay for more premium features they might need. These are the main three ways. We use UX to present these to the user based on two ways. One is interruption. When a user signs in, logs in, we might present them with a new premium feature notification in their journey, give them an announcement or a notification product of how they can get more value. The first one is about raising awareness. The second way is contextual. We want to give them contextual notifications or prompts on the upgrades. Let’s imagine you’ve got a user in Reditus. They have set up their affiliate, added a bunch of affiliates. They set up their first campaign and need to to set that campaign live. And at that point, give them an upgrade notification. So make this campaign live. At that point, it makes sense to do the upgrade. They know that they’re going to increase MRR if they activate these campaigns. And in order to get that MRR, they’re going to have to pay a little bit.

– Peter

That’s the ROI of the product. So we said, Okay, great. Let’s get this campaign live first. We need you to upgrade. We don’t want to give them too many options. We just want to give them the right plan for them. So we’ll make it easy by trying to give them the best fit plan and then they can upgrade. That’s one example of the contextual upgrade for expansion. The other way is seats. It might be based on affiliates. Okay, you’ve added 10 affiliates, but you want to add more, your account limit is 10. At that point, we’ll put them on the upgrade path. You can call those paywalls or paygates, but they’re important aspects of the products. We do them by interrupting a journey, but also contextually, on the affiliates page where they add affiliates or where you have affiliates, we might have tool tips saying your account has up to 10 affiliates and you need to upgrade to add more. It gets very specific for each software, and it’s really worth thinking through it carefully. Again, from the perspective of the user, not from the perspective of the business. So it makes sense to the user.

– Peter

There’s so many opportunities for expansion. Having those presented and communicated effectively within your product so that it raises awareness of the user and sometimes desire within them, too.

– Joran

You interrupt them at the right moment in their journey where it makes sense to upgrade them. Not too early, not too late, but at the moment they’re able to get value, you could interrupt them.

– Peter

Yeah, that makes sense. It’s good to do things that raise awareness. Sometimes they expect that, or when it comes, it’s not a surprise because they understand already. You might plant a seed for that, like an onboarding once they start to get activated. That’s the way you want to think about it. You could take it back to the hotel hotel analogy. Once you’re in a hotel, they might say, Would you be interested in booking the spot? It’s an example of expansion. They’re just raising your awareness of the great facilities. If you want to book something, you can Therefore, that’s an upsell for them to get more revenue. That’s an analogy for within your product, how you can think of it.

– Joran

Nice. One thing, for example, we’re working on, so it’s a bit of a selfless question. We’re now building an in-app referral program for SaaS companies where they can just click on a button, then a popup would open up. We generate a link for every user where they can recommend the SaaS. What would be, in your opinion, the moment to ask for a user to recommend them to somebody else?

– Peter

There is a lot of psychology in the UX, and one of those things is around awareness. There’s a general principle. They say you have to tell people something generally, like in a company context, seven times before they internalize it and remember it. We think way a little bit in the product. You raise the awareness a few times so that when they get to the right point for that thing, they can do it. The best time to get a testimonial is the moment your customer has really got a sense of value and they feel like, Oh, this was great. We’re really happy we invested in this thing. Bam, that’s the time to hit them with the testimony because that’s when they’re enthusiastic. If it’s too early, we don’t know if this is good yet. Once they’re really happy, if they’re really happy with the result, but you don’t ask them for a testimony. Later on, the enthusiasm just goes back down. It’s like a wave. A few months later, you could go back and say, Hey, can we have this testimonial? Oh, yeah, sure. It’ll be good, but it won’t be enthusiastic like it was at the highest point.

– Peter

So you wanted to ask, same for referrals. You want to do it when they feel, This is a great product. This helped me. I can think a few other people this would really help. I know it would because it’s just helped. So for affiliates, it might be after you’ve got your first affiliate your revenue for a successful moment with the product. You also want to incentivize that. So what can you give away? There’s two thoughts. They’re like, Hey, Reditus, this is great. We just got that first bit of MRR. That was the whole reason we signed up. We’re starting to get that. So this was a really good decision. And it’s also, oh, cool, we’re going to get a discount if we just refer this. I can think of a few people. Does that match up with how you’ve been thinking about it?

– Joran

A hundred %. We provide the embed towards SaaS companies. So we’ve been thinking about how can trigger it at their while moment or their value moment. That’s definitely something we’ve been thinking about.

– Peter

Awesome. There’s no reason why you only need to do that once. You can reinforce that message because sometimes it takes a few times seeing something for it to be internalized by a user.

– Joran

Cool. We are running to the end. Before we close off with the two famous questions, if you had to summarize your best advice on UX in one sentence, what would it be?

– Peter

I would say if you are a designing product, you should try the product, understand the user, but also be the user. That’s hard because sometimes you don’t have objectivity because you’ve been working in it. Getting inside the mind of your users is the most valuable thing you can do.

– Joran

Great. Eat your own dark food, drink your own champagne, however we call it. Cool. We’re going to close with the two famous questions. When we talk more general on growing a B2B SaaS for SaaS founders now on a journey from 0-10K MRR, what advice would you give these founders?

– Peter

The advice I would give is the mindset of 0-10K MRR is the absolute starting point. Probably you’re on running a marathon. The wonderful thing about getting some revenue in is you’re validating that, Hey, you’re onto something. People will pay for this thing. Just be aware it’s long term. Most SaaS founders that I’ve met and spoken to have estimated the journey, both in how long it takes and how difficult it is. Celebrate the win from zero to 10, but also have this mindset of you’re continuously improving. It’s a journey, it’s not necessarily a destination. You’re always working on one step to improving your product, improving what you deliver, offering more value and building your business. That long term mindset around bringing value to use is what I’d recommend.

– Joran

Guys, Let’s then assume we pass 10K MRR and we’re now making a huge step towards 10 million ARR. What advice would you give a SaaS founder here?

– Peter

That one’s hard for me because although I’ve designed hundreds of products and worked with a lot of SaaS companies for for years. I haven’t been a SaaS founder, so it’s hard for me to give the advice from that perspective. But if I just focused it on our theme of UX, I would argue the power of UX for I would argue that if you give two products all the same benefit, if they have the same marketing team, the same sales team, the same everything, the better product would win. I’ve heard this said in SaaS before. It’s like, you can succeed with an ugly product. And whilst I do know that to be true, I think the market is way more competitive now. And I think that if two products were given all of the same parameters, the better product will win. I would say, appreciate the value of design, appreciate how that impacts your users, and invest in good UX talent as your team grows. The people who have skills with B2B, SaaS are now to do it, hire them in your team, get advice from them where you can. I would just suggest that just simply because I come from a product and UX background.

– Peter

I’ve seen the power of it.

– Joran

Nice. Thank you. Let me see if I can summarize. The way we talk about UX, it has to be part of the go-to-market strategy. Make sure you communicate effectively some best practices with the website, show your product, communicate your value, present the benefits, have people self-qualify themselves when people sign up, build a journey through the steps they want to see, make it like a five-star hotel addressing their concerns. In the end, a great onboarding will help to boost retention. When we talk about dashboard, think about showing dummy data, populate a journey to get data, show the end result and examples. Really try to frame the result, make the integrations as enjoyable as possible, and again, design a journey per user, show how the pricing aligns with the value, focus on their goal with the product. When we talk about navigation, focus on the most important features and list them value-based. Check most common flows, focus on the UX, make it as enjoyable as possible. When we talk about expansion, what do they need to do? Is it inviting users, increases usage, more premium features? Really think about their journey, and then try to see if you can present it either via interrupting them or in a more contextual way.

– Joran

The moment of asking for a testimonial or a referral is when they actually achieve value, so don’t do it too soon. Some common mistakes on the website giving way too many options, so remove conflicting call to actions, not keeping them engaged in a free trial because if they leave, there’s less chance they would come back. Not thinking what makes sense for user, not keeping actual value in mind or having a retention-wise, having a clunky product, confusing journeys, is not going to help you. And then in the end, of course, don’t give unlimited value to the most successful user. So try to limit that. I loved how you said it. Keep thinking about the journey. Software is a series of user flows. Become your user, be the user, get inside the mind of the user, however it’s going to work for you. Then when we talk about 10K MR, celebrate the wins, it’s a journey. It It will take longer than you think and keep this long term mindset.

– Peter

Well, did I say all that?

– Joran

You did. If people want to get in contact with you, how can they do?

– Peter

Yeah, you can add me on LinkedIn, Peter Loving, or visit us at useractive. Io.

– Joran

Nice. I will do the pitch for you. I know you do free calls, or at least, how do you call them?

– Peter

Ux Audit.

– Joran

Ux Audit. You started doing that at SaaStock a couple of years back. I will add a link to the site. Keep this in mind if you’re listening because Peter We’ll be able to, and this team is able to give you good feedback in a really quick and easy way. For people listening on Spotify, please leave us a review, if you haven’t done so, and answer the poll we add on there. Always happy to hear what you think of it. Thanks again for coming on, Peter.

– Peter

Thank you. Really enjoyed it, as always, Jeroen.

– Joran

Cheers. Thanks. Thank you for watching this show of the Grow Your B2B SaaS podcast. You made it till the end, so I think we can assume you like this content. If you did, give us a thumbs up, subscribe to the channel. If you like this content, feel free to reach out if you want to sponsor the show, if you have a specific guest in mind, if you have a specific topic you want us to cover, reach out to me on LinkedIn. More than happy to take a look at it. If you want to know more about Reditus, feel free to reach out as well. But for now, have a great day and good luck growing your B2B SaaS.