SaaS customers are extremely busy. This is something that very important to remember when you are both marketing and building a SaaS product.

You must remember this because it means that the customer likely doesn’t have the time or desire to read dozens of tutorials on how to use your product. He or she just wants to be able to use it and get it up and working almost instantaneously.

Having your product effectively work right out of the box will help users feel like they are experts, and no longer newbies faster. The faster that a person feels like an expert of your product, the more likely they are to turn into a devoted user of it.

This means that you shouldn’t allow it to take hours upon hours to learn your product. If your product takes hours to get to know, it is too hard to use.

To make sure that customers aren’t being forced to commit an immense amount of time to learning your product, you should be collecting tons of feedback from your customer success team or sales team members. These members of your company will be able to help you quickly discover if there is a hole in your user interface and product that needs to be plugged. Once a hole is uncovered and plugged, customers will stop leaking out and churning or not converting from free trials to paid users.

Busy SaaS customers mean that you need to have an extra refined user onboarding and product education process. Hardly anybody is going to want to take hours out of their week to spend time learning a new product, especially if they are just in the free trial phase of a product.If your customer is a Millennial, this entire notion is even more relevant. An article from the Nielson Norman Group explained:

“We frequently see Millennial users getting stumped in usability testing when they encounter difficult user interfaces. Their interactions tend to be fast-paced. Because they spend less time on any given page, Millennials are more likely to make errors, and they read even less than the average user (which is already very little).”

This quote is really solidified with something that Elon Musk once said:

"Any product that needs a manual to work is broken."

This quote is very accurate when it comes to SaaS products because users now have a somewhat unrealistic expectation for user interfaces. Companies like Apple and Google have created such sleek apps that users now expect all products to be as simple as them.

The same study that we mentioned earlier by the Nielson Norman Group expands on this idea:

"When interfaces fail to live up to those unrealistic standards of simplicity, Millennials rarely blame themselves – unlike older users. Millennials are quick to criticize the interface, its organization, or its designers.”

While this quote is focused on Millennials, it can easily be applied to SaaS customers. SaaS customers demand products that don’t take time to learn. If a product is difficult to use and feels impossible to learn, a SaaS customer isn’t likely to stick around and use a product for very long (if at all!).