Six SaaS Journeys to Grow and Scale

If you’re working on a B2C product or selling a B2C solution, parts of this journey still apply. Some phases may be shorter—especially if your go-to-market motion is product-led. While this article focuses on SaaS businesses, the underlying principles are relevant across industries.

Every business has a customer-facing cycle and a back-office cycle. Customer-facing functions include sales, marketing, and customer support. Back-office functions include R&D, product development, onboarding, and operations. The six SaaS journey steps described here are inspired by both sides of this organisational rhythm.

Let’s begin.

1 - Buyer, value ideation journey - 

This phase sits entirely with the customer. Most of the time, buyers go through it without explicitly recognising it. Inside the organisation—especially in enterprises—teams face specific problems they need to solve. For example: “We have a lead-generation challenge.”Here, the buyer refers to the individual executive driving the initiative, while the customer represents the broader team or group within the organisation that will ultimately use or benefit from the solution. 👏

Teams gather insights from multiple sources — their professional networks, social channels, YouTube, online research, surveys, and more. Some team members may also draw from past experience solving similar challenges in previous organizations. All this input is collected and distilled into an initial vision of what the SaaS solution should look like. The outcome is usually a set of requirements, with some non-negotiable must-haves and others that are flexible.

Once this groundwork is done, the team presents their findings to their executives. Leaders also need clarity on the projected investment — including time, people, and budget. Typically, business executives expect a return on investment (ROI) of 4–6x the proposed spend. This internal alignment and justification happen long before a demo is ever scheduled.

When this background work is missing, customers often lack clarity and struggle to make decisions. Lack of decision is directly correlated to value loss. This entire process is what I call the Buyer Value Ideation Journey.

2 - Sales (buying) journey - 

For the SaaS provider, it’s a selling journey, and for the customer, it’s a buying journey. Let’s call this the Sales Journey. Buyers typically begin by searching online, meeting SaaS providers at industry events, or asking colleagues and friends for referrals. These touch points become crucial channels for solution providers to connect with prospects and understand the real problems that need solving.

Once the buying team identifies multiple potential vendors, the demo phase begins—conducted either online or in person. SaaS providers showcase their product capabilities, upcoming innovations planned for the next 9–12 months, and details around security, privacy, support services, and more. When both the buyer and provider are enterprises, this evaluation process can take 3 to 9 months, often referred to as the sales cycle length … 🍁

After the customer selects a preferred provider, the engagement moves into the formalisation phase—statement of work (SOW), pricing discussions, infosec and compliance reviews, and procurement approvals. Once these steps are completed, the contract is signed.

At this point, the deal is officially closed. This entire sequence forms the Sales Journey for a SaaS provider.

3 - Onboarding journey - 

Both the buying team and the solution provider work closely in this phase. Guided by the SOW, they jointly implement and configure the SaaS product to match the customer’s requirements. While teams often focus heavily on technical implementation, it’s equally important to understand how end users will adopt the product—whether workflows will change, how daily processes may shift, and what support users will need to succeed.

SaaS providers typically bring in best practices from their work with other customers and guide the buyer throughout this stage … 🙋

The outcome of this phase is a fully configured solution with all SOW items marked as completed. If certain items cannot be delivered immediately, the SaaS provider may commit to releasing them in the next 3–4 months—but ideally not beyond that. A user onboarding plan is also part of the recommended best practices, especially since many organizations have teams spread across different regions and time zones.

This phase is the Implementation and Onboarding Journey.

4 - Change Management Journey - 

When the users are onboarded, modules, access and permissions are configured; specific workflows need to be followed. In any business process flow some of the steps are done by the system and others by the human. It is necessary that this change is addressed well at a larger scale if more users are there and the impact is high. Hence the journey is called a change management journey. 

Both customer and SaaS provider make appropriate changes to make sure that all the use cases and corner cases are solved with the new solution in place and all users are comfortable using it. It is all good if this phase is very small which means there is not much change management to do; which is a good thing … 🎉. 

5 - Adoption and Value Delivery Journey - 

Once change management is addressed, it is important that the new solution is being used at a determined frequency. This can be daily, weekly or monthly. Sales softwares can be used daily, procurement softwares can be used weekly and Compliance softwares can be used monthly once. However it is all addressed as product adoption on a situational basis. 

As week over week the product adoption happens, the customer starts realizing the value of the product and the challenge with which the customer started is now addressed. SaaS providers usually hold a quarterly business review (QBR) to make sure the adoption continues to happen, the product updates/ releases are communicated to all users and so on … 🛟 

6 - Upsell, Support and Churn - 

A lot of buyers are keen on ongoing support as business is global and users are usually located in multiple continents. Uptime, security, privacy, GDPR, etc. are also included in this category and for some of the customers these are non-negotiables and can make or break the relationship between the two parties. 

As the SaaS provider it is very important to keep innovating and solve more customer pain points. Once this happens the customer buys more product/ solution from the same SaaS partner which is called upsell. For the buyer it is very important to consolidate business to one partner and for the partner it is important to hold the customer longer so the customers do not switch and minimize the risk of losing business … 🍁 

Increasing upsells and reducing churn is one of the important levers in the growth and long term survival of SaaS businesses. Sometimes upsell also covers part of the sales journey and the journey cycle restarts. 

Hope with this knowledge you can optimise your journeys and scale your SaaS. 

Viva - we will talk about the picture in 2030.

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Swagat Irsale is a Growth and Scale Advocate. He works with start ups and scale ups and helps them grow revenue and build enterprise products which users use.

Connect with him for work, partner opportunities. 

https://www.groadv.com/post/grow-revenue-the-journey-zero-to-one-billion-swagat-irsale