You know that feeling. You're on a call with a customer, a customer you know loves your product, who tells you things like, "Oh, we just couldn't live without you!" or "It's made a massive difference to how we work."
That's the good stuff, right? The warm fuzzy feeling of knowing you've truly impacted their day-to-day.
...But then comes the internal meeting. "Okay, great, they feel good. But where's the ROI?"
And suddenly, that warm fuzzy feeling is replaced by a cold dread. How do you quantify that "overall influence" or deep impact when your happiest customers aren't necessarily tracking a strict ROI themselves? We often hear from folks in the trenches of Customer Success that these customers often value the broader positive effects your product has on their business – like enabling growth or streamlining workflows – more than a calculated dollar figure.
They value that impact, that difference.
How do we, as CS professionals, prove that impact when the customer themselves isn't tracking a neat little dollar-saved figure?
We've all been there, scrambling for hard numbers when the most compelling evidence is the deep, embedded way our product is woven into a customer's workflow. The truth is, for many successful B2B SaaS products, especially in the PLG world, value isn't just about a clear-cut ROI calculation. It's about enabling new workflows, driving efficiency in less obvious ways, and becoming an indispensable part of their operation.
And the best proxy for that kind of deep value? Product engagement and adoption.
Think about it: if a customer's team is actively logging in, using the core features frequently, and expanding their usage across the organization, they are deriving value. They wouldn't keep doing that if the product wasn't making their lives better in some tangible way, even if they haven't translated that into a formal ROI figure.
So, how do you showcase this kind of value when "ROI" isn't the customer's focus? You shift the conversation slightly. You focus on demonstrating how deeply and broadly they're using your product.
Here’s a low-key, actionable way to start doing this, even manually, for your key accounts: Create a simple "Adoption Snapshot."
For each key account, track just two things:
You might have to pull this data manually from your product analytics tool (Mixpanel, Amplitude, etc.) or even your database if you're a smaller team. It won't be perfect, and it might take a little digging each time, but the act of tracking it is valuable.
Share this simple snapshot periodically with your customer champions. Frame it not as a performance review, but as a celebration of their team's successful adoption. Something like, "Just wanted to share a quick look at how deeply your team is engaging with [Your Product Name]. It's great to see X% of your licensed users were active last month, and they're using our core [Feature A] and [Feature B] features an average of Y times per week. This really shows how well your team has integrated the product into their workflow!"
It's concrete, it's positive, and it directly links their activity to the value they're receiving, without forcing a conversation about hypothetical cost savings.
Now, let's be real. Manually pulling those numbers, especially across multiple accounts and on a regular basis? That's a pain. We've all felt the drain of digging through dashboards just to find the basic metrics needed for a simple update. It takes valuable time away from actually talking to customers and understanding their world.
Imagine if those crucial, account-level B2B metrics that truly show engagement – like Daily, Weekly, and Monthly Active Accounts (DAA/WAA/MAA) and account-level stickiness – were automatically calculated and ready for you every single day.
This is where tools designed specifically for this challenge come in. GrowthCues, for instance, connects to your existing product usage data warehouse and provides Automated Product Analytics specifically focused on B2B account metrics. It effortlessly calculates these crucial figures daily.
Beyond just the numbers, the Account Engagement View within GrowthCues profiles lets you easily visualize this adoption data per account. You can see user activity, feature usage patterns, and key engagement trends all in one place. This gives you concrete, data-backed proof of value – the kind that resonates even when ROI isn't the main driver for your happiest customers. It frees you up from the manual grunt work and gives you the insights you need to confidently demonstrate the undeniable impact your product is having.
