How a push-pull learning approach increased Activation Rates by 23%.
Project
Stack Sports is a fast-growing SaaS company that provides management tools for youth sports organizations, including its flagship product, Sports Connect.
As Sports Connect sales continued to rise, activation rates remained flat—particularly among smaller customers that relied on self-service onboarding. Despite strong product adoption at the enterprise level, where customers received 1-1 training, many smaller customers struggled to get started, slowing their path to success.
Approach
To uncover the cause, the leadership team asked me to lead a cross-functional research project to understand why some customers were successful and others weren’t. I started by analyzing historical activation data, CSAT and NPS scores, and product usage trends, and by mapping the sales-to-onboarding handoff and customer journey to identify potential friction points and opportunities for improvement.
What we discovered were four key insights that changed our entire approach to customer education:
- Educational materials were spread across multiple platforms and teams, resulting in a disjointed customer experience.
- Unlike traditional SaaS environments, where users are motivated by workplace success, nearly 90% of our users were volunteers supporting their children’s sports organizations. Additionally, since many of our users are from volunteer-run organizations, there is often a lot of turnover.
- While in-app content existed, we found that it didn’t always align with where customers were in their onboarding journey, leading new customers to become confused about next steps.
- We found that the longer a customer remained in the onboarding pipeline without taking action, the harder it was to re-engage them and help them find success.
Solution
Based on what we learned, the leadership team decided to expand my team to include new customer onboarding (1-1 training, self-service onboarding), live webinars, and digital adoption allowing us to consolidate educational delivery and content development under one team. While we still needed to address content in multiple locations, this change let us create a more consistent experience and guide users to the right content when they needed it.
To accomplish this, I decided to take a phased approach that would allow us to leverage what we were already doing and add to it.
Double-Down on Self-Service Content
We already had a library of training and educational resources; however, we needed to do a better job guiding customers to the right content at the right time.
Help Center
Starting with our help center, we worked with our support, success, product, and sales teams to audit, remove, update, and add new content to ensure we were addressing the customers’ needs. We focused on delivering content that answered customers’ most frequently asked questions and organized it into checklists, step-by-step guides, videos, and simple FAQs and articles aligned with different phases of the customer journey.
Webinars
Next, we looked at our webinars, an excellent option for one-to-many training and live Q&A. While we were already hosting weekly sessions focused on specific features and best practices, attendance was often low.
Since many of our users were volunteers with limited time and located across multiple time zones, we introduced on-demand access to all webinar recordings, allowing customers to engage with training content at their convenience. We also added live office hours for direct support from an activation team member.
Sports Connect Academy
The final piece of our self-service strategy was the launch of the Sports Connect Academy, a free, on-demand learning platform offering structured courses and learning paths to help customers solve problems independently and to deepen their product knowledge. We built the Academy from the ground up, from concept and LMS setup to course design and launch, creating a scalable program that drives long-term customer success and product adoption.
Meet Customers Where They Are
Again, recognizing that many of our users were volunteers with limited time and subject to high turnover, we couldn’t be passive when it came to education and training. We knew we had to meet customers where they were in their customer journey.
Digital Adoption
We had tools in place to deliver educational content to users in-app; however, the delivery was time-based rather than outcomes-based, often resulting in customers receiving training content before it was relevant to them.
To reach customers where they were in their journey, we leaned into product usage data and implemented a product-led onboarding approach: we defined key milestones for customer success (and activation), automatically tracked them, and delivered content based on users successfully reaching those milestones. If users got stuck, we had automations in place to send nudges and educational resources, reminding them to complete each task.
People Power
Our research showed that the longer customers stayed inactive after purchase, the harder it was to re-engage them. To keep momentum high, we introduced proactive milestone tracking that alerted the activation team when users stalled. When users stalled we could quickly step in with personalized outreach and 1:1 consultations, helping them overcome roadblocks and stay on track toward successful activation.
Results
Our “Push-Pull” customer education strategy provided the right balance between proactive, in-product guidance and on-demand self-service learning to support customers throughout their journey.
By refining onboarding workflows, adopting a milestone-based, outcomes-driven approach, and introducing blended learning modalities, including in-app tutorials and e-learning, we increased activation rates by 23% for all customers and 30% among self-service customers within 18 months.