Unintended consequences of selling B2B digital subscription add-ons for customer onboarding

For your marketing

Possible founder application

Use this study as a bounded example of unintended consequences of selling b2b digital subscription add-ons for customer onboarding; assess whether its population, intervention and outcome match your own decision.

Reported result

What the study found

More add-on services significantly decreased onboarding-stage retention, and leaner communication channels aggravated attrition. Perceived complexity was identified as the likely mechanism. Add-on bundling had a positive effect on post-onboarding retention, and the negative onboarding effect was not uniform across add-on types.

Research question

What the authors investigated

What does unintended consequences of selling b2b digital subscription add-ons for customer onboarding show about customer decisions or business outcomes?

Design

Multimethod empirical research: theories-in-use interviews, archival field study of a B2B SaaS provider, and cross-industry survey of B2B managers.

Sample and setting

Nine managers at the provider and seven representatives of customer firms in the exploratory interviews; CRM data covering 74,871 subscription contracts (new clients, January 2015–May 2018, 37 countries); survey of 297 B2B SaaS managers.

Scope and transfer

Limitations to keep in view

The accessible publisher page did not provide a detailed author-stated limitations section; avoid generalizing beyond the reported study context. Full article methods and correction history were not independently reviewed.

Research sources

Publisher page directly retrieved; candidate metadata and reported result checked against that page. Full methods were not independently reviewed.