Leveraging Customer Success for Better Product Adoption & Retention

In the competitive world of B2B SaaS, acquiring new customers is only half the battle. The real challenge—and opportunity—lies in ensuring those customers successfully adopt your product, use it consistently, and stay engaged over time. That’s where the partnership between Product Marketing and Customer Success (CS) becomes not just valuable but vital.

When these two teams align, they help remove adoption barriers, craft relevant resources, and highlight moments of customer value. This synergy doesn’t just reduce churn; it fosters long-term loyalty, creates upsell opportunities, and strengthens overall brand trust.

Why Product Marketing and CS Should Be Strategic Allies

Historically, customer success teams have been the stewards of onboarding, support, and renewals. But in today’s product-led growth environments, those responsibilities are deeply intertwined with the messages customers hear before and after the sale. Product marketing is uniquely positioned to help shape that experience—from first touch to daily use.

As Gainsight notes, the role of customer success has evolved from a reactive support function into a proactive, insight-driven growth engine. Teams that harness real-time usage data and behavioral signals are better equipped to drive product adoption and prevent churn—making customer success a core driver of business resilience and revenue growth.

The Stakes: Why Retention Is the New Acquisition

Retention has become the new growth metric. Especially in tighter market conditions, companies can’t afford to overlook the value of keeping and growing their existing customer base. That’s why investors increasingly focus on Net Revenue Retention (NRR)—which measures how well a company expands revenue from current accounts.

According to Gainsight, best-in-class SaaS companies are delivering over 120% NRR. That’s not just due to great products—it’s the result of well-orchestrated, cross-functional efforts to ensure customers get value consistently. Product marketing can contribute here by developing messaging and content that speaks directly to those usage gaps and renewal hesitations that CS teams encounter.

Where the Functions Intersect—and Why It Matters

Product marketing’s mission is to articulate the value of the product to the right audience in the right way. CS teams are on the ground, hearing firsthand where that value is being realized—or where it’s falling short. Together, these functions have an unparalleled view of how customers experience the product and where friction exists.

From Totango insights, one powerful idea stands out: CS should inform product roadmaps, marketing messaging, and GTM motions. That collaboration starts by listening to customer pain points and using those insights to craft clearer communication, better resources, and more intentional moments of engagement.

1. Crafting Onboarding That Resonates

Onboarding is one of the most important—and vulnerable—phases in the customer lifecycle. A smooth, clear onboarding experience can dramatically accelerate time-to-value. But when it’s generic or overwhelming, it becomes a risk point for early churn.

Product marketers can partner with CS to design role-specific onboarding materials. These might include:

• Persona-based quick start guides
  
• In-app welcome flows tailored to user goals
  
• Feature-specific video walkthroughs
  
• Behavioral trigger-based emails aligned to usage milestones
  

When onboarding feels personalized, customers are far more likely to achieve that all-important “aha moment.” PMMs bring segmentation and narrative framing skills to the table, while CS ensures the content reflects real-world usability issues.

2. Creating Lifecycle Content That Keeps Customers Engaged

Onboarding may end, but the need to reinforce product value does not. Lifecycle marketing—especially for existing customers—often falls between departments. PMMs can fill that gap by building customer lifecycle campaigns in partnership with CS. These can include:

• Monthly feature spotlights or power user tips
  
• “Did you know?” campaigns tied to usage patterns
  
• Update newsletters with contextual relevance
  
• Case study highlights or internal champion enablement
  

Done well, these communications drive deeper engagement with the platform, helping customers get more out of what they already have—and setting the stage for future upgrades.

3. Identifying and Supporting Expansion Opportunities

CS teams often identify upsell opportunities long before sales does. A power user asking for access across departments? A new initiative that aligns with your premium features? These are all signals that product marketing can support by developing upsell messaging, internal ROI decks, and even persona-driven expansion campaigns.

Imagine a customer success manager flags an account that’s only using 30% of a feature-rich platform. Product marketing can develop:

• One-pagers on higher-tier benefits
  
• Comparison charts or cost-justification guides
  
• Targeted webinar invites for advanced users
  

When these assets are mapped to real customer journeys, CS becomes not just a retention driver—but a revenue multiplier.

4. Turning Power Users into Advocates

Beyond adoption and expansion, product marketing and CS can collaborate to identify and elevate customer champions. These advocates help establish credibility, drive peer influence, and often become essential to ABM strategies.

Joint efforts can include:

• Coordinated outreach for success stories and case studies
  
• Building customer reference programs
  
• Co-developing customer-led content, like blog posts or webinars
  
• Social amplification of wins and testimonials
  

Not every customer wants to be a public advocate, but PMMs can help shape internal stories that still serve as proof points for product value.

5. Formalizing the Feedback Loop

One of the most underrated benefits of PMM-CS alignment is the feedback loop it creates. Customer success teams hear objections and confusion daily—but often those insights don’t reach product marketing in a structured way.

PMMs can create systems to capture this feedback, such as:

• Quarterly CS input sessions during roadmap planning
  
• Shared documents logging feature-related objections or praise
  
• Post-renewal interview summaries that feed into positioning updates
  
• Surveys sent jointly to customers asking about ease of use, value clarity, and more
  

This qualitative data is a goldmine for refining messaging, improving onboarding, and guiding roadmap communication.

Key Metrics to Track Together

To gauge the impact of this partnership, track metrics across adoption, retention, and expansion, such as:

• Time to first value (TTFV)
  
• Feature adoption rates over time
  
• Renewal win/loss ratios by segment
  
• Churn reasons tagged by messaging or support gaps
  
• CSAT/NPS scores before and after lifecycle interventions
  
• Upsell conversion rates by campaign
  

When tracked collaboratively, these metrics show how content and engagement strategies are moving the needle.

How to Make the Partnership Work

Even in high-performing SaaS companies, the CS–PMM relationship is often ad hoc. But you don’t need a major reorg to make it effective. Start with these steps:

• Designate a PMM-CS liaison for each product line or customer segment.
  
• Align quarterly planning cycles to co-create content and feedback initiatives.
  
• Share dashboards or scorecards with key adoption and health metrics.
  
• Join forces on QBR decks or renewal prep to ensure value stories are clear and compelling.
  

Think of product marketing and CS as co-authors of the customer journey. When they write it together, the story becomes clearer, more valuable—and far more likely to lead to renewal.

Final Thoughts: The Lifecycle Is the Strategy

Retention and growth no longer happen in silos. In SaaS, the product experience is the brand experience, and how customers interact with your product post-sale often defines their loyalty and LTV.

Product marketers can’t afford to stop at launch. By partnering with customer success teams, they extend their impact across the full customer lifecycle—helping customers realize value, advocate for your product, and choose to stay.

Want to turn your customer success insights into strategic marketing impact? Aventi Group helps B2B tech companies reduce churn, improve adoption, and grow customer accounts through integrated go-to-market strategies. Let’s talk.