Be Empathetic to How SaaS Platform Growth Impacts Your Customers

SaaS customers are facing an unprecedented number of choices in platforms and tools. How will you break through to gain their attention? It starts with empathy for this new reality.

Transcript: Hi! I’m Anna Talerico with Married2Growth and today I want to tell you that empathy for your prospects and customers might be the thing that helps you win the deal and keep them forever. 

Something that keeps coming up for SaaS sales teams is how to break through to their buyers, and really differentiate, really sustain their attention in a radically crowded market. I think the answer is found in thinking about this from the buyer—the customer’s—point of view.

The number of SaaS applications is exploding.  As SaaS investors, founders, executives, and employees, we on the inside see opportunity and a better way to provision, use and manage software. But customers see an overwhelming number of choices.

As excited as I am to be in SaaS, I know it’s not exciting for the customers. It’s overwhelming. It’s confusing. It’s really noisy. And it’s stressful when the decisions to be made about which product to implement is a potential career breaker. 

Think about this. Within a category (let alone a subcategory) of SaaS, we’re mostly all saying the same thing. Pick any category of SaaS and go look objectively at the home pages of 10 different products in that category. Can you tell the difference between them? Can you even tell one from the other? Do you understand what they do and why you would buy one versus the other? Put aside that you are a software insider for a moment, and you will see that everyone within a category is saying largely the same thing. 

Even when the core products are different, the messaging around them hits all the same benefits. It’s true. Think about what that is like from the outsider’s perspective. For our buyers, there is decision fatigue before they even get close to a decision. 

So, while it’s an exciting time for us to be in SaaS, it’s also critical that we have empathy for the customers who are evaluating, recommending, and purchasing SaaS products. And that’s really my point—we have to have empathy for our buyer. It’s critical that we strive to not add to their overwhelm, but instead that we actually work really hard to differentiate, to illuminate our value, to map our features to real business problems, to be literal in defining our differences. 

Nothing in the near term will stem the tide of growth of the SaaS landscape.  And we wouldn’t want it to. But we must have empathy with the unprecedented experience our customers are having right now. What we can do as SaaS vendors is focus on massive differentiation in product, messaging, marketing and brand. And also massive differentiation in our sales teams. Because people don’t buy products, they buy solutions to their problems. And the solution with the best sales team is likely to win this battle right now.

How our teams get in front of our buyers, gain attention, create relationships, uncover the business need, solve business problems and build value has never been more important. That’s how we win the hearts of buyers, who are struggling through a massive explosion of choice and seeming parity of those choices. That’s it for now. I hope this perspective helps, I’d love to hear what you think. And, as always, thanks so much for watching!