“There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.”

― Sherlock Holmes, The Boscombe Valley Mystery

The Power of Account-Based Product Engagement Insights

Most SaaS businesses are account-based. You don’t build a product for one user – you build a product for an entire organisation.

In SaaS, accounts:

• Sign-up

• Adopt

• Pay

• Expand

• Churn

It is essential to look at your business through the lens of “accounts”. Marketers have embraced account-based marketing over recent years. The same is true for product engagement. Understanding product engagement metrics at an account level is vital for any SaaS business. If you miss the account perspective, you could be creating a blind spot that limits your company’s overall effectiveness.

Tracking and assessing account-based engagement (ABE) can help your business work smarter and more efficiently. With account-level insights, you can:

Better Understand and Track Account Activation

Whether you offer a self-serve product or provide white-glove onboarding, knowing how your accounts activate is key. Assess engagement at the account level because activation is a team effort. It often takes two or three users in an account before the account is fully activated.

Tactically, knowing the activation process makes your customer success team more efficient. They can prioritise accounts that need extra care over those that are progressing well. Strategically, tracking metrics such as:

• Account activation rate (the % of new accounts that become activated)

• Time-to-activation

• Activation by account type

is essential for improving your customer journey.

Accurately Assess the Health of Your Mature Accounts

The real work happens after onboarding – team training, feature adoption, ongoing value creation, and account expansion. The overall health of an account matters more than the activity of a single user. This insight empowers your team to:

• Spot accounts ready for expansion based on high or rising engagement.

• Identify at-risk accounts showing low or decreasing engagement.

• Improve feature adoption across the entire account.

• Ensure important account segments get the necessary attention, for example when prioritising based on tenure or revenue.

Without assessing account-based engagement, you are essentially working in the dark.

Refine Your Acquisition Efforts

Assessing account-based engagement can also sharpen your acquisition strategy. What if your head of marketing had a list of your most engaged, long-tenured accounts? A smart marketer would use that list to:

• Enhance account-based marketing by focusing on account types that thrive with your product.

• Find great candidates for case studies and social proof.

• Drive look-alike campaigns by targeting customers similar to your best accounts.

These insights can transform your acquisition strategy. If you ignore account-based engagement, you miss out on these opportunities.

Optimise Your Sales Process and Start That PQL Initiative

Do you offer a freemium option or free trial? You likely want your sales or customer success team to focus on the right accounts. A good Product Qualified Lead (PQL) process depends on strong product engagement at the account level.

When you assess account-based engagement, your team can focus on the accounts that matter most. It is a simple step that makes a big difference.

The SaaS World Is an Account-Based World

User-level data is useful, but SaaS operates at an account level. You must track account-based engagement to truly understand your business. Many SaaS companies still focus on individual users, missing the bigger picture.

As the SaaS model matures, so does product engagement assessment. It only makes sense to assess engagement the way your business works. When we built Accoil, our goal was to close this gap. Now you have an easy and effective way to work around account-based product engagement.