What do customer journey stages look like at an organization that is prioritizing renewals, expansion revenue & product adoption?

Most answers to this question focus on the buying journey and tend to sum up the post-sale experience in one bullet point but there's definitely more to it than that. Indeed the customer experience starts with the buying experience where you come to understand the problems your potential client is trying to solve and the outcomes they'd like to achieve and continues through the handoff to customer success or account management. The post-sale stages of the customer lifecycle generally include:

a. Activation, Onboarding, Adoption

b. Renewal & Expansion

c. Advocacy

An organization that is prioritizing renewals, expansion revenue and product adoption, will require solid onboarding, adoption metrics, engagement metrics and data around these three priorities. Sales teams will be incentivized on expansion revenue as the priority.

The reason you need the metrics I noted above is that data will need to be monitored at every stage of the customer journey. This will help you understand what is working and what isn’t working. Where are customers dropping off within onboarding (activation)? How do you drive time-to-value faster (engagement or the `aha` moment) which will result in better product adoption? How does the product become “sticky” so that you gain additional expansion revenue as customers grow?

Ultimately, this will require meeting customers where they are. The customer needs to have clarity on the impact you are driving. In this scenario, the focus is not on acquisition, but on everything that happens after this stage.