There are many different ways to address any case. Unfortunately, you probably have resources (attention, money, energy, motivation) to try one or two of them at the same time.
The point is then to avoid lengthy discussions about which way is the better (not to mention pointless scenario-building that change the rules of the case), and put some effort instead in identifying what successfully addressing the case looks like.
And then just do, measure and adjust.
Your company is not going to win on features and product.
It is almost boring to say this out loud, and yet many still think that the fact their product is better than their competitors’ is going to give them sustainable competitive advantage.
Your product needs to be good, as infallible as it can get, and that is pretty much the basic expectation of any person who is buying anything. Even more so in B2B. And yet, that is not what is going to make your company successful in the long term.
Few numbers.
Slack went public last week, and they disclosed (among other things) that they invest 56% of their revenue in marketing and sales. Salesforce and Tableau spend respectively 46% and 51% of their revenue in marketing and sales. Out of 205 Saas companies surveyed here in 2017, the median marketing and sales spend as % of revenue was 37 (and by the way, the once who spend more than the median had a marked tendency to grow at a much faster pace).
I like the way David Cancel, CEO and co-founder of Drift (and former Chief Product Officer at Hubspot) explains the importance of marketing and brand in the Saas industry.
In this interview, he describes the current as the P&G wave of Saas. When Saas got started (the Edison wave), few companies were trying to figure out what Saas was and essentially come up with the basics. Then, the industry started to affirm (the Ford wave): a number of companies consolidating practices and growing their businesses. Now, in the P&G wave of Saas, a fast-increasing number of Saas companies (Cisco estimated there were 156,796 third-party apps serving businesses in 2016, a 30x increase in a matter of two years!) need to give buyers a reason to choose them against the competition. And the reason is never the product.
There’s no intention here to claim that merely spending money in marketing and sales is sufficient for success. It is not, as it is not having a good product. The companies that I have mentioned here (Slack, Salesforce, Drift) have excellent marketing people, that know well how to craft a strategy way before moving into tactics.
Nonetheless there’s a clear necessity for Saas companies to take marketing and sales more seriously. Marketing, in particular, is not the interns you are hiring for the summer to take care of your social media pages, nor is it the student you underpay to drive traffic and leads to your website. Make sure you have a solid marketing team that understands positioning, customer research, value proposition and all the elements of a marketing strategy.
Today, there’s no more excuses to overview this fundamental part of building a success story.
How much do you have to insist before your customers say “yes”?
My bank sends me a text every day to tell me there’s a message for me in eServices, regarding changes to Terms and Conditions. I should go there, read it and approve it.
I still haven’t done that.
Facebook sends me daily updates of what my friends are sharing on the platform. I should re-install the mobile app and do not miss any of it.
I still haven’t done that.
LinkedIn has a new offer every other day to make me go back to Premium. I should take it, as it is unprecedented, and enjoy all the benefits (?) of their premium offer.
I still haven’t done that.
While navigating the net and Facebook (desktop), I get targeted with ads of cars that are nowhere close to the league of cars I am interested in. I should really check it out, and perhaps consider a lifestyle change.
I still haven’t done that.
Dumb repetition can get annoying pretty quickly. It breaks trust and it lowers the expectation of you actually having something interesting to say. And perhaps, like Bart and Lisa, eventually you get a “yes!”. Does that sound like a victory?
If you have to repeat yourself too much before inspiring action, you have either the wrong message or the wrong audience. Making it louder won’t help your case.
I got recently reminded of how difficult it is to take the perspective of the customer when you are trying to sell your product.
We were going through an exercise aimed at understanding what is the value our product delivers in front of certain pain points our target customer is facing. This was the pain point.
Uncertainty on whether people in the team are working under the most recent procedures or under outdated ones.
Right away, I listed the following under the “value” column.
Knowing that everybody in the team is working under the most recent procedures.
Then a colleague rightfully pointed out that was not a value, rather it was a feature of our product, something we were able to ensure with our solution.
The value, in this case, as we worked it out together, ended up being this.
Avoiding fines and delays due to having part of the team working under outdated procedures.
This is more measurable (fines and delays can be quantified), and it is more relatable for the prospect customer.
It was a great exercise, one that should periodically be organised across departments. On top of it, try to allocate time and resources to regularly interviewing customers and prospects about the pains they were feeling when they first got in touch with you. With these information on our side, it is possible toavoid talking only about what matters to us in the next campaign.
What would be of your marketing if tomorrow you would be left without behavioural information, pixels, tracking, preferences, and so on?
Just a reminder that the tools you use today to deliver your message are just tools. Much more important is what’s behind that: what you stand for, what your customers stand for, what your products stand for. Once you have that clear, the rest will come no matter what.
You've got this 