Is the word 'adoption' why we're failing at...adoption?
If your growth depends on the product, what does 24.5% adoption say about your expected growth?
Is the word “adoption” why we’re failing at…adoption? The SaaS industry has built an entire infrastructure around driving product adoption and our CS teams have more data at their disposal than ever before. And yet, according to Userpilot’s 2025 SaaS Benchmarks Report, the average adoption rate of core features across SaaS companies is still just 24.5%. What if part of this failure is because we’re using words that have no value to our customers?
average core feature adoption across SaaS companies
of those same companies rely on a product-led growth strategy
Userpilot 2025 SaaS Benchmarks Report
Customers don’t care about how well they’re “adopting” our platform, but they do care about whether they’re optimizing their performance on our platform to achieve better business outcomes. The same Userpilot study finds that 79% of the companies they analyzed utilize a product-led growth strategy. That would imply our failure at driving adoption is causing SaaS companies to miss significant available growth and expansion revenue. But worse, our customers are leaving money on the table in the form of business outcomes they never achieved because they’re utilizing the wrong features or they’re using the right features incorrectly.
One point I’ve emphasized on my teams is to remove “adoption” from our customer-facing vocabulary. Adoption is something we care about. It’s a vendor metric. Our customer’s KPIs and the focus of their individual performance reviews will never be about adoption of our product, but rather whether they were able to achieve things like lower food cost, improvements in labor efficiency, or better adherence to regulatory requirements.
A CSM saying, “Your adoption score is low” puts your customer in the position of passively listening to a vendor report card. “You’re missing out on a 2-3% reduction in your cost of goods sold” puts the customer in the position of someone who has something to gain. One of those people will be more motivated to act. The other is politely nodding until the Zoom ends.
When you shift the conversation from adoption gaps to performance gaps, it stops feeling like you’re asking customers to do you a favor and starts a more productive dialogue about specific ways customers can improve their outcomes. It also changes who owns the problem. I can’t make the behavior changes for you, but I can illustrate the money you’re leaving on the table and the changes you should make if you want credit for capturing that revenue in your next performance review.