We invest a lot of time thinking about how we can motivate our teams to deliver value. But how often do we stop to think about how we can inspire our customers to take the actions we need them to?

I’ll be honest: Not enough.

Last week, I reached out to five CS leaders I respect and asked how they incentivise usage directly with the customer. The response? None of them had a clear strategy.

With AI transforming the SaaS landscape, we’re already seeing companies like HubSpot, Canva, and MidJourney adjusting pricing to align with usage and value. 

This is great for the customer.

But it also introduces a significant risk for technology companies.

No Usage = No Revenue.

In this evolving world of usage-based models, incentivising customers to engage more deeply with your product will be critical.

Today’s Customer Incentives: A Look at the Old Ways

Traditionally, customer incentives have relied on two main factors:

• Economies of Scale: The more you buy, the better your price.
• Contract Lockdown: You’ve already paid, so you better use it.

But this approach has a fatal flaw. It assumes that the customer will use what they’ve bought (and if they don’t, it’s their problem).

The sunk cost is the only motivator.

While in-product gamification has gained traction (think badges, certifications etc), this doesn’t always connect the dots between knowledge, usage, value, and ROI.

Take HubSpot’s Academy, for example. Thousands of people complete courses, and those certificates are prominently displayed on their resumes. It's a freaking awesome resource that people love.

• It's great for HubSpot (more champions and power users)
• It's great for the user (career development)
• It's great for the companies (better use of HubSpot and more growth).

When this works, it's magic. 

However, completing a course doesn't automatically drive outcomes for the business. A lot can happen between taking a course and taking action.

Incentives can help narrow the gap.

The Need for a Connected Customer Incentive Strategy

What we need is an evolved strategy for customer incentives.

One that connects knowledge to usage and usage to tangible outcomes.

Imagine a tailored rewards program for every customer, designed to align with their specific goals. Instead of rewarding loyalty, you are rewarding usage, outcomes and value.

Here’s what that could look like:

• Step 1: Your customer defines their success plan based on their goals.
• Step 2: You connect their goals to the features they need to use.
• Step 3: You reward them based on milestones in their journey — both for learning and for achieving outcomes.

The Pyramid of Customer Incentives

Now that you have the basics in place, you can create a bespoke incentive programme for your customer.

• Learning Incentives: Incentivise users to gain knowledge. These should be individual incentives that you set for all users in the system. They could be time-bound (ie. Need to take this course during the first 30 days) or they could be cumulative (ie.  Users doing multiple courses on a track). Think about all the cool stuff you can do to incentivise users to learn more. Every course completed gets you points, you get accelerators for completing new certifications etc.
• Usage Incentives: Learning isn’t enough. Users need to take action. What if you also awarded points to users based on how they are using the product? This shouldn’t just be frequency, it should be usage that drives towards the company's goals. Over time users could build status to gain exclusive access to events, they could use their points in your swag store, or as discounts for conferences etc.
• Outcome Incentives When the company hits its targets — because of the users’ engagement and progress — it unlocks even bigger rewards. So you could create an incentive that helps unlock value for the business as they get to their goals (these could be enhanced discount levels, premium services, exclusive team events, you can get creative here).

Big Returns on Small Actions

If executed well, a connected incentive program could have a huge impact:

• Retention: Every point of increased usage should yield better retention for your business because customers see real results from using your product. 
• Growth: As customers see value, they’re more likely to expand their use of your product, leading to upsell opportunities.

You could model the potential impact of a program like this by looking at how much better your performance across these items would be.

Time to Execute

As pricing evolves and aligns more with usage, we need to rethink how we incentivise customers.

It's time to create connected incentive strategies that focus on:

• Users learning
• Users taking action
• Companies seeing value

An incentive like this could be the key to moving the retention needle.

What would retention, usage, and customer growth look like if every user was incentivised to take the right actions?

Daphne Costa Lopes

Linkedin

Scaling Customer Success 

RetentionOS 

If you're ready for more, there are 3 ways I can help you:

• The CSM Skills and Drills Guide: This simple guide has helped over 300 CSMs develop the skills to ace retention and growth targets. You'll find 8 core CSM skills with tools and frameworks to support them and 24 exercises to help you and your team develop these skills.  

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• Book a 1:1 Consultation: Sometimes content isn't enough. You need to talk through the nuances of the challenges to devise a good strategy. Get 1:1 access to Daphne’s 10+ years of experience building and scaling Customer Success teams starting at €300.