Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré | B2B SaaS Consulting

B2B, Customer Development, Customer Experience, Customer Success, Growth Hacking, Product Management, SaaS

There is no better “growth hack” for B2B SaaS than talking with your customers.

May 16, 2019 by Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré

B2B SaaS Growth Hacks

Not just when you’re developing or marketing a product, but through every stage of the customer lifecycle.

It sounds simple — but it’s not easy: talking with your customers through every stage of the customer lifecycle.

There’s been a lot said about the value of talking to your customers before you build the product to ensure market fit, but very little said about continuing the conversation past marketing and past the sale.

Why do I know talking with your customer is *the* very best predictor of, and contributor to, SaaS business growth? Because creating a constant flow of customer feedback, input, and conversation makes Customer Experience (CX) better.

Multiple studies show that CX leads to revenue growth.

CX Drives Sales

CX also drives brand advocacy (aka. word of mouth), creating a virtual sales army, which leads to:

Decreased cost-to-acquire.

“Customers with the best past experiences spend 140% more than those with the poorest past experiences.” — Harvard Business Review

Increased customer lifetime value.

“Customers with the best past experiences have a 74% chance of remaining a member for at least another year.” — Harvard Business Review

Plus, qualitative customer research leads to making data-informed decisions that streamline product management, ensure customer success, and make marketing and sales far more efficient.

In short, as Laura Klein, author, VP of product, and co-founder of Users Know says,

“User research saves time. Period. When you actually understand what your user needs before you build things, you have a much lower chance of having to go back and rebuild everything after shipping something that nobody uses.”

But what does “talking with your customer” really mean?

It’s not like you’re inviting them over for tea and cookies every week for a casual catch-up (though that would be awesome, and you should do that and invite me).

When we say “talk to your customers,” or “listen to your customers,” I usually mean getting on the phone with them (or better, meeting up with them in person). But, it can also mean sending surveys that include long-form response fields, or building quicker in-app surveys into your roadmap to uncover moments of friction.

And, of course, if you’re earlier in your business, there’s the Lean approach of interviewing dozens of target customers in person and over the phone — groundwork that helps founders (and product developers and marketers) form better hypotheses around what will deliver the best product-market fit.

There’s also user testing.

These are all valid ways of listening to your customers. But I’d like to advocate for doing all of these things and going several steps further. I’m talking about combining all of the above and adding genuine conversations to the mix.

It’s just not input. It’s just not feedback. It’s getting to know your customers as human beings and building relationships with them that drive positive CX far more powerfully than any of these elements could do alone.

So much has been written about interviewing customers prior to developing products that I’d like to focus on how to keep communication lines open after the launch, after customer acquisition, starting with onboarding.

Track more than actions, during and after onboarding

Customer Success + Product Management

(This is a chart I created for: “Product Managers: Why You Should Include Customer Success Milestones in Your User Flow”)

The first key to ensuring communication stays clear and open is to observe your customers. We communicate far more by our actions than we do verbally, and tracking the actions of your customers, especially (but not limited to) during onboarding can tell you the truths you need to hear.

Tracking customer behavior during onboarding and throughout product use allows you to see:

Time to first value (how long is it taking?)
Where customers run into trouble and need tech support
When customers typically need Customer Success help to reach their desired outcomes
Which customers reach their success milestones (the points in their user journeys where they see real progress towards their ideal outcomes)
And which customers don’t reach their success milestones

Yes, you want to track how well your customers accomplish the required tasks outlined in your User Flow, but usually, tracking stops there. If they press the right buttons at the right times, if they input the requested information, if they log in relatively regularly, it’s easy to assume customers are happily using your product.

But that’s not always the case. There may be ‘success gaps’ you can’t see that are causing churn. FYI: A ‘success gap’ is “the gap between what you think represents the customers’ successful use of your product and what they think equates to success,” according to Lincoln Murphy.

This is where aptly timed in-app surveys come in handy, which I’ll get to in the next section.

Tools that can help:

Appcues for onboarding
Intercom for targeted in-app messaging
Segment for easily managing your tools without dev

Check in with event trigger-based surveys

While you’re tracking user behaviors, successes and failures, you’ll also want to check in with your users in an unobtrusive way to get their feedback at specific points in their user journeys.

For example, if you identify a page or prompt during onboarding that tends to ‘lose’ people, have a trigger-based in-app AI chatbot pop up and offer to clarify, or transfer them to an agent. (This, incidentally, would have saved my relationship with more than one app! If you hit a ‘wall’ during onboarding, the odds of completing the process and becoming a successful customer are terrible — unless you get timely help).

You can set up event trigger-based surveys to deploy when users spend too much time on a page, ‘click away’ before completing the action, or when they’ve been ‘dormant’ (not logging in) for a while.

By giving customers opportunities to tell you they’re confused, are experiencing failure, aren’t getting the results they’d hoped for, or are suffering from a lack of time/motivation/technical skills etc., you will know who is really at risk of churning in time to save them, and really impress them with your customer service skills.

Finding friction with customer effort scores

Another place where checking in with your customer can really pay off is after the onboarding sequence is complete. It’s a perfect time to ask “How difficult was this?” (aka. A Customer Effort Score survey). The easier a process is, the less friction people experience, and the more likely they will be to complete your desired actions and reach their desired outcomes.

Then, after your new user has had a chance to put your product to work, you should send out a Net Promoter Score survey (NPS) to find out how they *really* feel about your product. Do they like it enough to recommend it to a friend or colleague? That’s an excellent indicator of how well they’re succeeding. And be sure to send an NPS follow-up question to understand the why behind the score.

Tools that can help:

Wootric: For these types of in-app surveys, I recommend Wootric. Their dashboard makes it very easy to understand what you’re seeing, and they do great work with extrapolating insights from qualitative data questions too.

Wootric

The Game Changer: Have real conversations in your community

Tracking what customers do and asking them what they think at strategic points is a very good start; the trouble is, that’s where most B2B SaaS companies begin and end. But B2B SaaS businesses are subscription-based. They’re in this for the long-haul. They depend on customers sticking around (customer lifetime value! retention!).

And that means you also have to build relationships with your customers.

This is why I so strongly advocate that B2B SaaS companies build social communities around their products. It’s an opportunity to relate to your customers as people.

The bonuses are many. B2B SaaS product communities give you:

An on-tap resource of customers who are delighted to answer your questions and give you real-time feedback on everything you do
A straight line to your most engaged customers
A real-time capability of helping customers in trouble and creating delightful experiences for them, on a public forum, with everyone else watching (warm fuzzies all around!)
An opportunity to cultivate a culture around your brand and a genuine community
And… it’s possible — ZERO churn!

The most important thing to remember about building a community is that it’s not a one-sided arrangement. This isn’t a place for you to ‘shout into the void’, post blog posts nobody reads, try to ‘sell’ or advertise. It’s a place where you and your customers can come together around your common interests. Human to human.

Tools that can help:

Facebook
Slack
Your social community of choice!

Bring it all together now!

When you are tracking user behavior in your product, identifying predictive patterns of behaviors/successes/failures, locating trouble-spots and offering timely help, checking in with surveys to ask your customers what they think — in their own words and with numerical ratings, AND forging human-to-human relationships in the casual setting of social media groups, you’ll see a few things happen…

Customer Happiness

Your referrals will skyrocket as more customers achieve success
Your retention rates will go through the roof
Your acquisition and product development spend with become more efficient (as you target the right prospects, and use customer feedback to guide your iterations)
And you will grow — fast

Are you ready for that?

💗 Check out Nichole’s Services for B2B SaaS startups 💗

Customer Experience

The surprising impact onboarding has on employee retention

May 16, 2019 by Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré

employee onboarding

When does your relationship with a new employee begin? Much like relationships with customers, they begin long before you’re aware – from the first time the employee encounters your brand. From there, it’s a bit like a sales funnel as awareness increases, the prospective employee weighs their options, does some research, and finally decides to apply. The employee goes through the application and interview process, and – hurray! – they’re a great fit. They have a lot to offer you, you have a lot to offer them, they’re so excited to start their first day.

Fast-forward one year – that great-fit employee who was so excited to begin is gone.

What happened?

The issues that lead to employee turnover may have their source in your onboarding – those first few, very important weeks of a new hire’s job. It’s why new hires are at a higher risk of leaving within their first year.

When you get onboarding right, retention rates rise, turnover falls, and you’ll see the ripple effects of higher engagement and productivity. Onboarding is an investment that pays off again and again over the course of the employee lifecycle.

“The seeds of animosity or advocacy are sown from and individual’s very first interaction with a company. The attraction, recruitment, hiring and onboarding stages – along with daily experiences that continue after onboarding – each affect how a candidate or employee feels about an organization and its promises… Gallup data reveal that companies are faltering even in the earliest stages of the employee experience.” – Gallup, State of the American Workplace 2017

Why Few Companies Get Onboarding Right

Too often, companies confuse onboarding with induction – the paperwork and mandatory tasks required to start a new job. Onboarding is much more than that. It’s your opportunity to set your employee up for success with their work, and engage with your company’s mission – the big WHY behind what you do.

“12% of employees strongly agree their organization does a great job of onboarding new employees” – Gallup, State of the American Workplace 2017

This is one of the missing pieces in most onboarding practices – sharing your ‘why’ and showing your values as a company. How do you help people? What impact do you have on your customers’ lives?

Aligning employees behind a shared sense of purpose has been proven to raise engagement levels — and with them, retention rates.

Sharing your purpose and values with your new hire will lay the foundations for engagement, but that’s not all they need to be successful. To understand that, you have to understand why new hires leave.

Why New Hires Leave

New hires are at the highest risk of leaving within the first year and a half, with the highest turnover happening within the first 45 days. What happens during that short period of time to send them running out the door?

“22% of staff turnover occurs in the first forty-five days of employment.” – The Wynhurst Group

“46% of rookies wash out in their first 18 months” – Leadership IQ, in a study of 20,000 new hired employees over 3 years

In one survey, 26% of departing employees cited mismatched expectations between their interviews and their actual work as the primary reason for leaving – and that’s an onboarding issue.

Onboarding is a time to make sure managers and new hires establish a shared set of expectations – hopefully the same set of expectations that were set up during the recruitment and interview process. At minimum, that means:

A job description that accurately and comprehensively describes the position.
A statement of how the individual position contributes to the broader purpose of the business (ie. how it impacts customers, why it’s important)
A discussion of the new hire’s goals, and what support they can expect from management

But there’s also a crucial, and less tangible, factor during onboarding – does the company culture match the expectations set during recruitment? If the onboarding experience falls flat, it can undermine the new relationship and cast doubt as to whether the new starter made the right decision.

“When employees don’t have the experience they were promised, they will likely make their unhappiness known – in obvious and not-so-obvious ways. They may start looking for new job opportunities, or they may become actively disengaged employees, meaning they develop such a distaste for their organization that they take deliberate steps to undermine its progress.”- Gallup, State of the American Workplace 2017

Get Onboarding Right & Raise Retention Rates Substantially

When you lay the foundations for engagement, success and aligned expectations, employees have what they need to do well in their work and feel part of something bigger. And that is a recipe for retention.

“Employees who have a positive onboarding experience are 69% more likely to remain at the company for up to three years.” – SHRM, Onboarding New Employees: Maximizing Success

But those aren’t the only ingredients required. A positive onboarding experience gives employees a strong start, but you also need to follow through on those first impressions. Employees need to feel supported by management, able to connect their work to the company’s larger purpose, and feel like the company lives its values. It’s a relationship that requires care and feeding, like any other.

“Employees are consumers of the workplace. They are drawn to brands they can connect with. And they stick with – even advocate for – brands that honor their promises.”- Gallup, State of the American Workplace 2017

In other words, a great onboarding experience only works to increase retention when companies follow through and live up to the hopes of their new hires.

How to get started:

Download Enboarder’s white paper The Avoidable Problems That Cause Your Best People to Leave to unmask the primary culprit behind your turnover problem.

Microsoft, Google and Eventbrite reveal how they balance technology and the human element to keep their best people.

B2B, Customer Experience, Emotion, Guest Posts, Human-to-Human (H2H), SaaS, Storytelling

Differentiate by how you make people feel, not on features, by @OmerMolad

March 8, 2019 by Omer Molad

B2B SaaS: Differentiate by how you make people feel, not on features

Guest post by Omer Molad, Vervoe CEO and Co-Founder

Differentiation is at the core of any business strategy, because the ultimate marketing question is: Why buy this solution? Your answer literally defines you. But it’s not so easy in a crowded marketplace to clearly state what makes you different – and state it in an impactful way that inspires your users.

That’s a tall order.

I often get asked how we differentiate ourselves at Vervoe. The problem with that question is that the person asking the question usually assumes we’re trying to differentiate ourselves from other software solutions.

Sure, sometimes we are.

But most of the time we’re competing against the status quo because we’re creating a new way of connecting businesses and job applicants. By definition, we’re competing against the old way of doing things, the way it has always been done.

That sounds much easier than it actually is, because the act of differentiation is comparison. You’re comparing your business with other existing businesses.

We didn’t have that. No other existing business in history has taken our approach to hiring.

What makes us different? Everything.

Which is very difficult to explain to people.

Our challenge was to learn how to win people over without comparing ourselves to something familiar. Instead of saying “our thing is better than some other thing,” we needed a way to say “our thing is perfect for you.”

As we went on that journey, we made a lot of mistakes. But eventually we stumbled onto some things that work for us nearly every time.

What we found, fortunately, also works when we’re competing against other software solutions. It just works, period.

Tell your story

Usually, the most effective way of selling, especially in a B2B market, is to focus on the problem and how you solve it. And we absolutely do that. However, what we learned is that people also care why we decided to solve this particular problem. And it turns out that they care about that quite a lot.

Initially I was surprised by how many people, particularly buyers, asked why we started Vervoe.

And then it hit me.

We’re doing something new and they’re looking for a reason to trust us.

At a very fundamental level, people trust people. Once people heard that we decided to solve their particular problem for the right reason, they bought in.

So I started telling our backstory more and more, in articles, in interviews, on podcasts. How I went from a guy with a great résumé in Tel Aviv – top school and grades, military service, experience at the hottest startup – to the guy with a weird name and no degree that couldn’t even get an interview in Melbourne. How frustrated that made me feel, being disqualified from jobs I knew I could do, just because people weren’t prepared to look beyond my background on paper.

Time and again I saw how much this resonated with people from companies of all sizes. Because so many people have a story like mine. But also because of something else. People like the fact that we started our company for a reason they consider to be worthy.

Supporting us makes them feel good.

So we learned a very important lesson. Authenticity scales across all company sizes. Whether it’s SMB or enterprise, people connect with an authentic story. And, if they connect with us because of how we make them feel, our bond is inherently stronger.

Understand user experience from a new perspective

Our origin story gets people’s attention, but that just solves the first challenge – attracting customers. Once they become users, we have a different challenge: Creating the first-class user experience people have come to expect.

The user experience includes the entire experience inside and outside of the product. We believe that every interaction with the brand must bring clients one step closer to achieving their goals.

And here’s a paradigm shift we realized: An elite user experience isn’t about functionality. It starts with the mindset of the user.

For example, at Vervoe we help companies see how well job candidates can do the job they applied for. To achieve this, we need candidates to complete tasks. What we learned through an enormous amount of research and analysis is that the single biggest factor impacting completion rates is the candidate’s mindset.

If candidates feel like they are presented with an opportunity to showcase their talent and put their best foot forward, they’ll make an effort. This also depends on how much they want the job. Conversely, if candidates feel like they’re being asked to jump through arbitrary additional hoops, they are much less likely to invest in the process, especially if they have other options.

Once again, we focus on how we make users feel above all else.

Great service is always an unfair advantage

We’re a software company and we’re always trying to make our product more intuitive to use. This helps us scale. And, while it doesn’t make much commercial sense, we also relish the opportunity to speak to our customers. When we speak with our customers, not only do we learn, but we also have an opportunity to leave them with a positive feeling.

The thing about customer service is that everyone knows how important it is, yet very few companies do it really well. So any company that can consistently deliver exceptional customer service has an unfair advantage over its competitors.

It doesn’t matter if you’re selling vacuum cleaners, air travel or software. People remember great service. And they remember it because of how it made them feel.

So while we’re always aiming to offer low-touch experience, we’re also secretly hoping we get an opportunity to provide service. Put differently, we relish each opportunity that comes along.

Treat your customers like humans – simple, right? Not quite

In software, we like to talk about users, buyers and ideal customer profiles. The reality is that we’re dealing with humans. And at a very basic level, they’re just like us. They get confused if it’s not clear enough, frustrated if it’s not simple enough and really mad if it’s unfair. But if we help them do what they’re trying to do, and we make an effort, odds are they’ll respond.

People don’t sit at a café and talk about some feature they used. They talk about the service they received, the story they heard and the experience they had.

When you can differentiate by how you make people feel, you’re winning.

💗 Check out Nichole’s services for B2B SaaS startups 💗

Quora Answers, SaaS, Tools

“What are the best SaaS platforms you’ve used? What was great about them?” Answer by @NikkiElizDeMere

February 2, 2019 by Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré

Best SaaS Platforms

My criteria for “best” platforms might be a little unorthodox, but here are the factors I take into account:

Usability – how user-friendly is it for its target audience?
Functionality – how much does it make my life easier/better?
Is the company behind it good? – Do they put customer experience first? Are they good people? Are they transparent?

With those criteria in mind, these are the best SaaS platforms I use on a regular basis, recommend often, and really enjoy.

Ahrefs – all-in-one SEO tool

Ahrefs is one of my favorite SEO tools for finding keywords and brainstorming ideas because it has a few features the others don’t. They show estimated traffic for all pages ranking in the top 10 for any keyword phrase, the ranking history of your pages for any keyword, and even have a “content gap” feature that shows what content your competitors rank for, but you don’t.

Ahref SaaS Platform

Airtable – spreadsheet + database

When you need something more than a multi-tab spreadsheet, Airtable is what more and more SaaS folks are using for project planning, sales tracking, drag-and-drop list-making and building custom applications. You can use it for so many things, like CRM and task management, or sorting and filtering customer feedback.

Airtable SaaS Platform

Appcues – user onboarding checklists

Appcues is an in-app user onboarding checklist that engages and guides new users through the onboarding process and deploys NPS surveys. Two very important functions to include in SaaS products! It’s one tool that does just a couple things, but does them really well. And it’s also a cool company that’s devoted to customer success – their blog is amazing.

Appcues SaaS Platform

Basecamp – project management & team communication

Basecamp is not only a great project management tool, with an incredibly user-friendly platform, it’s a very unique SaaS company. Their signal vs. noise blog actively works to tear down the hustle culture, as does their book It Doesn’t Have to be Crazy at Work, with messages that are completely aligned with what their product does: Helping businesses run efficiently and calmly.

Basecamp SaaS Platform

Buffer – social media management platform

Buffer is an ultra-user-friendly staple of social media management. The platform makes what can become a time-suck far more streamlined. I love that they have a “Happiness Team” with a focus on really listening to customers and improving CX as much as possible. I also love their Transparency Dashboard, where they make salaries, revenue, code, diversity and values public.

Buffer SaaS Platform

Hotjar – heatmaps, session recordings

Hotjar, as a tool, was created to tell you what customers are doing on your site, and try to answer the all-important question of why they’re doing it! Using heatmaps, session recordings, conversion funnels, form analysis and customer feedback polls (like NPS), it’s a thorough user analysis and feedback tool. This is another company that gets props for transparency. Their blog is an exercise in radical honesty.

Hotjar SaaS Platform

Hull – real-time B2B customer data platform

Hull.io is on the cutting edge (overused term, I know, but really!) of capturing and analyzing the entire customer journey, even when that data is stored in multiple places, in multiple tools. For data-driven growth teams, it’s an incredibly powerful platform.

Hull.io SaaS Platform

Intercom – customer messaging platform

Intercom easily integrates with your site and/or product enabling in-app messaging, user segmentation, event tracking and message automation. But I’m a customer success advocate, so it’s Intercom’s customer education content that really impresses me. If you’re an autodidact like I am, you can’t not succeed with Intercom because they give you all the information you need.

Intercom SaaS Platform

InVision – Digital product design, workflow & collaboration

The InVision platform is such a beautiful solution for faster product design workflows. You can design a prototype, make it interactive, show it to customers, gather feedback, and simplify the handoff from design to development. And, they’re a genuinely forward-thinking company. InVision’s newsletter regularly ends up in my Swipe file. Shoutout to Kristin Hillery when she was editor for keeping the quality so consistently high, and featuring diversity and inclusion-based topics.

InVision SaaS Platform

Notion – like having all the work apps in one place

We use Notion for The Shine Crew, and we love this platform for collaboration and organization. It’s so useful, whether you’re an individual user or a team (or a Shine Crew) – it has everything you need to organize your life, without a giant stack of tools.

Notion SaaS Platform

Segment – customer data infrastructure

Segment syncs customer data from your favorite tools, puts everything in one dashboard, and enables you to synthesize that data into traits and audiences for more effective and accurate customer personas.

Segment SaaS Platform

Unbounce – landing page, pop-up and sticky bar builder

Everyone I’ve ever met at Unbounce has been so friendly and genuine – it’s really a lovable company. And, the product fills a real need in the market: the ability for anyone, without specialized knowledge, coding or web design tools, to make a professional-looking landing page that converts.

Unbounce SaaS Platform

Wootric – customer feedback collection & measurement

Wootric is a women-founded, women-lead company that is doing some remarkable work using machine learning and artificial intelligence to improve customer experience with smarter qualitative feedback analytics. In short: They give you several modern ways to collect a lot of user feedback, both qualitative and quantitative, in any customer communication channel, analyze it at scale, and take action in your systems of record.

Wootric SaaS Platform: NPS / Net Promoter Score

Vervoe – AI-powered hiring platform

An amazing team and an amazing concept make Vervoe one of my favorite SaaS platforms. They’re actively trying to do away with the resume and make the job search and hiring process easier and faster for everyone involved. Instead of having applicants upload a resume or CV, they offer real-world scenario skills tests and video interviews, so the top performers shine.

💗 Check out Nichole’s services for B2B SaaS startups 💗

Customer Development, Customer Success, Language-Market Fit, SaaS

5 steps to rock your value prop for B2B SaaS customer success

January 23, 2019 by Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré

5-steps-to-rock-your-value

**Use qualitative data to uncover language-market fit**

When the right words appear in front of the right people, it’s like the copy from your page joins a conversation already happening in the minds of your prospects. It becomes a dialogue of “I wish I had this” and “Do you wish you had this? Let me show you how you can get it.” The conversation continues from there, sometimes with other people, like user reviewers, chiming in just at the right moment. Sometimes with your marketer sending an email that is so perfectly timed your prospects wonder if you’re reading their minds.

In this conversation, your job is to convey a simple message of the value you have to offer. But, crafting that message is anything but simple. It all starts with…

Customer Success

Customer Success is a complete customer-lifecycle process that helps customers achieve success – whatever success means for them in the real world – with your B2B SaaS so that you can decrease churn, increase revenue, and create an exponentially increasing mountain of new sales.

I’m not over-promising. When you nail Customer Success, those are the results.

This process begins with qualitative data research: Real feedback from real users. This research can help you form a unique value proposition to attract your ideal customers from the very beginning so that you (and they) can start achieving Customer Success, and all of the results that come with it.

Qualitative Data Research

At best, analytics can tell you what is happening, but they can never tell you exactly why. They can tell you a channel is underperforming or a page has a high bounce rate but those are symptoms, and you can either guess at the root causes or you can conduct qualitative research to get meaningful answers. When you’re investing time and money into growing a business, guessing becomes expensive. Running A/B tests or trying new things based on your own intuition or your team’s brainstorming without getting outside of the building is an easy way to waste time and money.

In fact, this is how many startups fail – or make fools of themselves. Remember the fiasco when iTunes gave everyone a U2 album?

When you try to guess what to improve upon or how to fix what’s wrong, it’s not just that you might waste time getting to what ultimately works, it’s that you might not ever make the change that really matters. As people, we’re great at coming up with options and ideas based on the combination of things we “see” or understand, but we’re not good at identifying the factors that may be completely off our radar.

As Donald Rumsfeld famously said, we’re not good at dealing with the “unknown unknowns.” Unfortunately, it can often be those unknown unknowns that are holding back Customer Success. And we’d never get to the answers ourselves. Unlike Sherlock Holmes, we usually can’t identify the dog that’s not barking. So research isn’t just about speeding up the process of finding wins—it’s essential to finding them in the first place.

Qualitative research breaks down into a few key buckets: surveying, interviewing and observing, and inbound analysis.

Let’s Get Started

Here’s five steps you can use to gather, analyze and utilize qualitative research to continually improve your language —and ultimately rock your value prop:

5 Steps

Identify your ideal customer
Gather qualitative data from existing and potential customers
Form a unique value proposition to begin establishing language-market fit
Update and test your language
Monitor

1. Identify your ideal customer

Most B2B SaaS companies don’t want to narrow their focus to an ideal customer, but this is critical. After all, how do you know what kind of language to use if you don’t have a clear picture of who you’re talking to?

Think you can write a sales page that appeals to everyone? Think again. Copywriters know that effective copy, the copy that converts into action, must be highly targeted on just one persona (or, at most, two – but they don’t recommend it!).

You can start identifying your ideal customer based on Lincoln Murphy’s Ideal Customer Profile Framework.

2. Gather qualitative data from current and potential customers.

Once you’ve identified your ideal customer, you need to determine how the market perceives their problems and your product through the language that you’re currently using on your website and marketing materials.

After all, language is the foundation of growth.

Here are four methods you can use to accomplish this:

Surveys
Interviews
Observation
Inbound Customer Feedback

Surveys

This is pretty straightforward. Implement regular surveying of both website visitors and customer segments via onsite and email-based surveys. These include product/market fit, customer satisfaction, net promoter scores, demographic/psychographic profiles, product features and more.

Why you should talk with “qualified noes”

Onsite surveying is great, but you can also end up getting feedback from people who aren’t your customers – ie. unqualified leads. This is not the feedback you want. Instead, focus on surveying the “qualified noes” (the people who are qualified but decided against buying anyway.) These are the people that can unlock real insights to improve your customer acquisition efforts.

There are two parts to talking to qualified noes: part one is asking your questions within the context of the right parts of the user experience to talk to qualified visitors; part two is asking the right questions.

The right questions at the right time

You want to ask people who just bought what convinced them to buy, and people who abandoned at the last minute why they changed their mind.

Custom surveys via email are another important part of qualitative feedback. Ideally you have a regular survey that goes out to your user base on an interval—say every quarter—that asks the same set of questions about overall satisfaction, demographic data and more. This helps you understand if your product is improving or not, and how your user base is evolving.

Pre-launch Surveys

In addition to regular surveys, you should survey your customers occasionally about new features or initiatives you’re thinking of launching. These can be stand alone, one-off surveys sent from time to time.

Targeting these to the right people is essential to get meaningful feedback.

For instance you don’t want to send new product feature surveys to users who haven’t logged in recently – if they don’t care about your old features, they aren’t likely to invest interest in the new ones.

You can get a lot more detail about how to survey users in Qualaroo’s Marketer’s Guide to Surveying Users.

Surveys are great for aggregate qualitative data, but they often only collect data around the issues you think are important—after all your team is writing the questions. So they are not always the best at getting to unknown unknowns. Free-form fields can help here, but they’re not as good as interviews and observing users.

Interviews

Interviews, such as those done in usability studies, ethnographic research and customer development provide a much richer profile of users. They also help uncover unknown opportunities and issues. The key to interviews is to ensure you’re not leading the interviewee, and are able to elicit the insights and information you’re looking for. Interviewing is a skill, and whether it’s for usability research or customer development, knowing the right questions to ask and being able to put subjects at ease are critical to making the sessions valuable.

Ash Mayura does a great job of outlining the specifics to customer development issues in Running Lean and includes a specific format and question recommendations to help you get the most out of the interviews. Of course it’s critical that you’re interviewing the right types of people—people who are like the customers you are trying to attract or retain.

Observation

Beyond interviews, observation can be really valuable as well. Especially when it comes to usability it studies and ethnographic research, simply watching people interact with your product or service is highly instructive. You can do this remotely, with tools like UserTesting.com and Inspectlet, or you can do it in-person with some of the user testing studies outlined in Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug.

Ethnographic research has you observing users in their actual environment with your product. Watching someone work all day and then pick up their phone to use your app, or login to your service while trying to manage their leads, etc. is an incredibly illuminating experience that not only provides great context to understand how your users think about and use your product in relation to the rest of their lives, but it also creates a great deal of user empathy which is essential in creating new features, campaigns, etc.

Inbound Customer Feedback

Combining these individual deep dives with other qualitative feedback can help provide context to results and analytics data. All of this is proactive research led by the organization, but you also have a great deal of qualitative inbound data that you can take advantage of.

Complaints, support tickets, phone calls, posts on social media, reviews and chat logs are all founts of qualitative data that can be mined for insights. They can be structured, through tools like UserVoice, or they can be mined from unstructured data like support logs or Twitter mentions.

While most inbound customer feedback is simply used to manage complaints and triage issues, the growth team can use this feedback to find new opportunities for features and campaigns that can lead to growth. One of my favorite examples of this is from Bryan Eisenberg, who likes to show how different the language is in e-commerce product descriptions and the consumer reviews of the same product. By mining these reviews, e-commerce companies can find inspiration for everything from ad and landing page copy to new marketing channels to pursue.

User research is an important and rich area of opportunity for businesses. Most of the opportunity is squandered by a lack of action. As usability expert Jakob Nielsen said, even talking to just five users can lead to big insights and wins. By combining surveys, interviews, observations, and analysis of inbound customer feedback, growth teams can find brand new opportunities that can lead to big wins for their business.

3. Form a unique value proposition to begin establishing language-market fit.

As pointed out by Peep Laja on ConversionXL, your value proposition is the number-one thing you need to get right — and to test. It is a promise of the value to be delivered to the customer. It should be in the language of the customer and should join the conversation that’s already taking place.

To do this, you first have to understand what your customer needs (and what they’d like to gain), what their jobs are, and what their biggest pain points are. Don’t try to guess – use qualitative data gained from interviews and surveys of your ideal customers.

Then, look at what your product does, what benefits/gains it offers, and what pain points it relieves.

Where the two lists intersect is where you have problem/solution fit. And each “fit” becomes an ingredient of your value proposition.

Use this value proposition worksheet or Strategyzer’s value proposition canvas to get started. (I highly recommend the Value Proposition Design book, I run through questions from it with all my clients.)

value-prop-canvas

Of course, when filling out the value proposition canvas, you’ll have to condense your users’ answers in order to make a list to compare and contrast with what your product offers. But don’t throw away the complete responses from your interviewees. This chart will help you find problem/solution fit (aka. product/market fit) and let you know exactly which benefits to highlight for your audience, but it won’t tell you which words to use that fit your audience.

Your audience already has.

Within the responses your interviewees give you are perfect little sound bites, snippets of sentences, or possible full paragraphs, that precisely express – in the raw language of your users – what your customers need, want and fear. Use these sound bites as they are (correcting only grammar and punctuation if necessary) in your copy.

When your copy – even your value proposition – captures the diction, tone, and feel of your target audience, they’ll recognize it as quickly as you recognize your own signature on a check. And it will speak to them.

4. Update and test your language.

Now that you’ve collected your qualitative data and put it to use in a working value proposition, it’s time to update the language on your landing pages.

You’ll need to continue to test your value proposition, so form a hypothesis for an A/B test and start testing to determine which variation has a greater positive impact on Customer Success metrics.

A/B testing may be simple, but it’s powerful. Much like the observation technique of gathering qualitative data, a good A/B test measures the real-world behavior of your customers.

Which metrics to look at depends on your goal. Is it lowering Cost to Acquire a new customer (CAC)? Is it monthly recurring revenue, or annual recurring revenue? Is it retaining customers after a typical “drop-off” point in your onboarding process?

Once you’ve chosen a metric and have a hypothesis – which can be as simple as “I think the new language will increase conversions on this page by 25%” – set up an A/B test to find out if you’re meeting your goal. If not, make one change and try again.

You may find that the issue isn’t your language but its presentation, so if you are confident in your value proposition and your on-page copy, you might try having your web design team change the placement of the text, the font, the color, etc. Don’t make lots of changes all at once, unless the page is brand new or severely underperforming. You need a benchmark to compare the new with the old.

5. Monitor

The problem with A/B testing is that it doesn’t tell you why you’re getting the results you are, which is where qualitative data comes into play yet again. Once you’ve noticed that version B actually performs worse than version A, you can use on-page open-ended survey questions, or interviews, or any of the other qualitative data gathering methods to ask your customers “Hey, what about this page isn’t working for you?”

Then, iterate based on their responses and repeat the A/B testing cycle until you’ve optimized your value prop, or page, or onboarding process for customer success.

Conclusion

Qualitative data is at the heart of Customer Success initiatives – after all, how can you help customers achieve their successes unless you’ve first asked them what they are. With the foundation of insights ‘straight from the horse’s mouth’ you can build an empire.

Identify your ideal customer.
Gather qualitative data through the use of surveys, interviews, observation, and inbound customer feedback to validate your language.
Use the Value Proposition Canvas to form your initial value proposition.
Update and test the language on your site.
Monitor.

💗 Check out Nichole’s services for B2B SaaS startups 💗

B2B, Guest Posts, SaaS

Top Go-to-Market Myths in B2B SaaS by @kaleighf

November 20, 2018 by Kaleigh Moore

Guest post by Kaleigh Moore, freelance writer for eCommerce platforms and SaaS integrations.

When it comes to B2B SaaS, there’s a lot of talk about growth–and these conversations often include buzzwords like “growth hacking.”

For good reason: Everyone wants the go-to-market hack or shortcut that will help their brand launch and scale more quickly (and outpace the competition while they’re at it.) And for many B2B SaaS companies, that growth is already happening. Data shows that in 2016, the median growth rate for B2B SaaS was 48%.

The trouble is: There’s a lot of misinformation out there that can put growth on the wrong trajectory.

If you’ve ever wondered where to draw the line between fact and myth around go-to-market strategies for B2B SaaS, you’re in the right place. In this post, we’ll look at the top five most common myths in this realm, as well as insights from experts that help break down false information.

What is “go-to-market”?

Before we jump into the myths, let’s first get on the same page about what “go-to-market” means.

Go-to-market (or go-to-market strategy) is how an organization delivers its unique value proposition to customers (via inside and outside resources) that ultimately helps the brand achieve a competitive advantage.

Essentially, this is the series of tactics a SaaS company uses to grow. It can include marketing and sales strategy, funding, user acquisition and onboarding tactics–anything that will help the business grow and scale at maximum velocity.

With this in mind, let’s now take a look at some of the myths floating around in this realm.

Myth #1: It’s almost impossible to compete with VC-backed giants who already have an established position on the market.

If you’ve ever heard that bootstrapped SaaS companies can’t compete, you have false info on your hands. Just take a look at a company like Basecamp that’s achieved incredible growth and massive market share without a cent of outside funding.

Tom Zsomborgi, CFO of Kinsta, expanded on this:

“If you have a great idea and a good product, it doesn’t matter who the competition is–you can bootstrap your way to success despite the big players in the industry that have secured millions in funding and that work with a team of hundreds of people. Experts or founders on different platforms might advise you to go after another market or niche because that one is saturated and dominated by X companies with deep pockets–but that’s not a good enough excuse. There is always room for another company and a great product that can achieve great results.”

Myth #2: You don’t have to do much research when it comes to content–just crank it out and go.

Content is indeed an important go-to-market strategy that B2B SaaS companies use pretty much across the board. But quality and strategy are two key components that have to be part of that approach. Without them, companies can tie up a lot of time and money with lackluster results.

SaaS writer Amy Ahrens expanded:

“Typically, I hear things like: ‘I just need a bunch of content to help our SEO.’ While there is some truth to this, what needs to happen first is research. By that, I mean that you should research your company’s competitive set and try to find something that isn’t covered and do that well. Also, the algorithms have changed and now content marketing is all about pillar-based content and how that affects SERP. Do these two things well and I guarantee that your SERP placement will improve and your content will resonate better with your audience.”

Myth #3: Businesses can’t onboard themselves into a tool.

Onboarding is another area where SaaS companies get things wrong thanks to best practices that don’t work across the board. Sometimes, breaking industry norms and testing new strategies that let users guide the way is the best path to success.

SEO expert Brendan Hufford shared his firsthand experience with this:

“SaaS usually is entirely self-serve or entirely something you have to go through a sales team on. But a different option is to let people sign up and get started and then have the sales or success team come in from there. We tried both self-serve and very hands-on onboard assistance for Happy Meter. Both produced poor results for differing reasons. The best option we found was to hop in to assist at a strategic time. I think in B2B SaaS there’s often this myth that it has to be a high-touch service or self-serve and that’s it. It creates a false dichotomy.”

Myth #4: Sales and marketing teams can work independently.

Silos are never a good thing–especially in the world of B2B SaaS. Even big brands with years of success under their belts are finally taking note of this and implementing changes. If your go-to-market strategy pivots on teams that work independently, it’s time to reconsider your approach.

SaaS writer Elise Dopson explains why this is so important:

“Misalignment between these sales and marketing departments leads to low conversion rates since the marketing people are referring irrelevant leads. Huge companies like Mars and Coca-Cola are appointing new people for this, but the same applies with B2B SaaS. The people you’re selling to have long, complex sales processes. Confusion and overlap between teams when convincing them to buy + their sales process = long time to see results.”

Myth #5: You can get by without having much ‘go-to-market’ content.

Circling back to the topic of content, let’s talk about content that is specific to go-to-market purposes. Is it okay to skip over it? In most cases, the answer is a resounding no. You need content that helps inch the buyer closer to the conversion point through the customer journey.

Jordie Black, a B2B expert, explains:

“SaaS buyers, especially those in B2B, much prefer to self-educate in order to come to a buying decision. Too many companies put more focus on gearing up their sales teams as opposed to gearing up their content arsenal to ensure that they have enough content that supports a buyer at EVERY stage of the buyer’s journey.”

Final Thoughts: Don’t Fall for the Myths

Information is power, and hopefully the myths we’ve busted here will help you get back on the path to rapid growth. Just remember: Don’t take someone’s word for it when you hear blanket statements about SaaS growth or hear about one-size-fits-all approaches to always work.

In the go-to-market environment for B2B SaaS, you always need to keep and open mind and put information through the ringer before letting it guide your decision-making process.

💗 Check out Nichole’s services for B2B SaaS startups 💗

Design

Creatives: How much does what you wear to work matter?

October 31, 2018 by Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré

At a recent Design Leadership Forum dinner in New York City, the topic of what you wear to work came up when attendees discussed what it takes to give designers a seat at the table. Educating your organization about the importance of design is a common strategy, but could the clothes you wear play an important role in getting design buy-in?

“Clothes make the man,” as Shakespeare wrote, but that line actually comes from a much earlier Greek proverb: “The man is his clothing.” From togas to tights, fashion makes an impression and not just on other people, but on ourselves.

To dive deeper into this conversation, we spoke with several women designers to get a sense of how they use personal style strategically in their work lives, what challenges they face, and how perceptions of workwear differ for corporate designers on the East and West Coasts.

How to Tackle the #1 Problem Product Teams Face: Customer Feedback

September 28, 2018 by Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré

What’s your biggest problem as a Product Dev professional? Too many demands and not enough time? Limited resources? Oddly enough, none of those topped the list for Hiten Shah’s crowd.

Hiten Shah (of KISSmetrics, Crazy Egg, and Quick Sprout fame) recently wrote in his newsletter that “the problems people have on Product teams fall into two main categories: Customer Feedback and Alignment.” This conclusion came after Hiten asked his readers to share their biggest product problems, and in more than 100 replies, those two themes emerged as the leaders.

Wootric helps customers gather, organize, categorize and analyze customer feedback – at volume – every day. And we’ve got a few insights into how Product teams can solve the issues that come with customer-centricity – while improving alignment at the same time.

Let’s go through the problems real Product professionals sent Hiten Shah point by point.

Achieving product-market fit should be job #1. By @SueDuris

September 6, 2018 by Sue Duris

This is a guest post by Sue Duris, Director of Marketing and CX at M4 Communications.

Every startup wants to succeed. Startups want it bad. They know nine out of 10 startups fail. They want to be that one that succeeds!

They spend all their time first making that great product. And trying to make it better. They add to it. A new bell here. A new whistle there.

And when they think they have the next big thing that’s going to disrupt the market, they go hunting for capital, trying to get any venture capitalist and angel investor they can to fund them.

“Capital first” is the battle cry so built into the startup community that whichever startup event people attend, the conversation seems to always be about raising money.

Yet, when a founder does get an investor meeting, typically investors want evidence to support founder claims. They want to see metrics such as monthly and annual recurring revenue, active users, renewal rates, customer acquisition cost, customer lifetime value, and the like.

They also want to know about the market and the customer, in addition to your product. Is the market big enough? Who is your customer? What value do they get from your product? What kind of traction do you have in the marketplace?

Do you know this info?

While startups make their primary focus about raising capital, they place their secondary focus, if at all, on the customer.

Many times I hear startups tell me “I’ll focus on user and customer research after I get funding”.

Too many startup founders feel that getting funding is the magic pill that will solve all of their problems and put them on some fast-track to success.

But, don’t investors want to know about your customer strategy – i.e. how you make money – before they give you money?

Raising capital is very important. But to focus on it first is the wrong approach.

The first thing a startup should do is achieve product-market fit.

It is everything.

It typically determines whether you succeed or fail. It’s what sustains a startup and enables it to grow.

Make something people want.

It seems basic.

Creating a product that doesn’t fit what the market wants is silly. Yet, many do exactly this.

And if a startup doesn’t achieve product-market fit, chances are it will fail.

According to CB Insights, who has been compiling failed startup post-mortems, the #1 reason startups fail is because they don’t achieve product-market fit. This is cited by 42% of CEO’s of failed startups.

According to CB Insights, the #1 reason startups fail is because they don’t achieve product-market fit. Click To Tweet

Product-market fit is hard work and it takes time. There is no doubt about that. Yet, it’s too much work for some founders. They want the glory but not going through all the blood, sweat, and tears to do the work.

This is where things become paradoxical.

These are the same startups that worry about churn.

“We have to eliminate churn,” they say.

But to ultimately reduce churn means you have to first retain your customers, build loyalty and drive customer lifetime value.

So what is product-market fit and why does it matter?

According to Marc Andreessen, product-market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.

He goes on to say product-market fit is the only thing that matters.

When it’s not there you can tell because customers don’t get your value, no one is talking about you, usage isn’t growing, conversions are slow or not at all, etc.

But when it’s there, revenue, usage, and growth are fast.

People crave your product.

People are talking about you, especially your customers.

When your customers advocate and sell for you, you have achieved it, something I call “customer nirvana”.

It’s not a destination. It’s not a journey. It’s a mindset.

When your customers advocate and sell for you, you have achieved customer nirvana. And it’s not a destination. It’s not a journey. It’s a mindset. Click To Tweet

You have to keep on working towards it. You have to give your customer that experience. The experience is the product. And it all starts with product-market fit. And making everything about the customer.

To get to product-market fit, ask yourself:

What is the unmet/under met need my company or product is attempting to fulfill?
How do I meet that need?
What value do I deliver to my customer that enables them to achieve their business outcomes? What is my customer’s WOW or aha moment?

That moment is what gets you to the value. But it isn’t only the value, it’s how quickly you can get to that value. Time-To-Value is key.

You have to know your why – why do they buy from you?

You have to know the what – what is resonating for them that is compelling them to buy from you?

Then you must know the actions and behaviors they have with you that’s helping them be successful.

Knowing your why, and how customers use your product is what will sustain you.

This is THE WORK.

And, you’ve got to do the work if you want to drive revenue, growth and customer lifetime value.

This work will get you to a minimum viable product, which you can use to gain traction, which you can use to get noticed by investors, which will help you get funded.

Having the insights from product-market fit is what drives and sustains growth.

Can product-market fit be measured?

It’s questionable. But there are certain trends you can look for in the product-market fit path.

Retention is the social proof to product-market fit. Other metrics to be watching for product-market fit include NPS, Customer Effort Score (CES), increased sales (upsells, cross-sells, and greater share of wallet). Win-Loss can also hold insights to how healthy product-market fit is.

I scratch my head when companies don’t focus on retention. They should double-down on it. Yet, for many, it’s an after-thought.

In its 2018 NPS & CX Benchmarks Report, CustomerGauge still finds retention is an issue.

44% of respondents don’t know their customer retention rates, that’s one in three companies don’t know this vital info!

This aligns fairly well to my research that 2/3 of marketing budgets focus on acquisition activities and 1/3 is focused on retention.

This is another head-scratcher.

Companies place more resources on acquisition and feel it is more valuable than retention. Forget about data points from Bain – it costs 6-7 times more to acquire a customer than retain one – or Gartner – 80% of your future profits come from only 20% of your existing customers.

According to Bain, it costs 6-7 times more to acquire a customer than retain one. And according to Gartner, 80% of your future profits come from only 20% of your existing customers. Click To Tweet

There are numerous reasons for the push on acquisition.

This is the culture of the organization and how it measures success. Marketing doesn’t view itself as responsible for retention (to this I find fascinating, considering many marketing departments feel they own customer experience). Retention gets passed around so many times that ultimately no one ends up owning it. Investing and analyst communities place high value on acquisition and so CEO’s follow suit to be in lock step. Leaders have number-envy.

Ultimately, retention must be a mindset that is engrained in the culture.

It also troubles me when I hear people say product-market fit is elusive.

Why? How?

You want to determine product-market fit?

Get out there and research. Find people. Ask people. Take the data they give you and identify insights to help you craft your business model. Do the work.

Raising capital is vital. But it should not be the first plan of attack. Startups must make product-market fit job #1. All roads to startup success begin there.

💗 Check out Nichole’s Services for SaaS startups 💗

Design

Do you need a creative safe space for your design team?

September 6, 2018 by Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré

A space that’s perfect for collaboration and creativity. Source: Inside Design: Yesware.

While it’s not a universal experience (and very much depends on company culture), some designers in corporate environments have restraints put on their creative expression. Those might be physical restraints, like rules against whiteboards and Post-it notes out in the open, or ideological restraints that stop the creative process in its tracks.

Maybe you work in a creative utopia, or maybe you don’t.

But creativity is delicate. It needs room to grow and a nurturing environment to bear fruit.

So we’re dedicating this post to finding ways to establish safe spaces for creativity—and creatives—to thrive in corporate settings.

Physical “safe space” for design

“GlaxoSmithKline, the global pharmaceutical giant, thinks it has found the cure for the drab, inefficient office: fluid spaces where you do what the moment requires, alone or in groups, moving throughout the day. Each employee has a laptop with a built-in “soft phone,” a locker for personal possessions, and maybe one file drawer. That’s it. Even US head Deirdre Connelly doesn’t have an office.” – Inside the New Deskless Office by Frederick E. Allen, Forbes, July 2012

New trends in office design and space usage have cut down on clutter, and often even personal space. Shared workspaces and “hot-desking,” where employees move from desk to desk as needed, might minimize the expense of square footage, but it does come with other costs.

You can’t make, or leave, “messes.”

But designers need room—and possibly rooms—to create. To put their ideas out there and see how, or if, they work together.

There are strong arguments to be made for clean, tidy workspaces that lead to clean, tidy minds. But creative minds are messy, and a few studies shows that creativity spikes in messy environments.

“Forty-eight research subjects came individually to our laboratory, again assigned to messy or tidy rooms. This time, we told subjects to imagine that a Ping-Pong ball factory needed to think of new uses for Ping-Pong balls, and to write down as many ideas as they could. We had independent judges rate the subjects’ answers for degree of creativity, which can be done reliably. Answers rated low in creativity included using Ping-Pong balls for beer pong (a party game that in fact uses Ping-Pong balls, hence the low rating on innovation). Answers rated high in creativity included using Ping-Pong balls as ice cube trays, and attaching them to chair legs to protect floors.

When we analyzed the responses, we found that the subjects in both types of rooms came up with about the same number of ideas, which meant they put about the same effort into the task. Nonetheless, the messy room subjects were more creative, as we expected. Not only were their ideas 28 percent more creative on average, but when we analyzed the ideas that judges scored as “highly creative,” we found a remarkable boost from being in the messy room — these subjects came up with almost five times the number of highly creative responses as did their tidy-room counterparts.”

Designate a physical space that allows you and your team to make a mess. Click To Tweet