Category: SaaS

Designers, these are the kind of companies you don’t want to work in

Who am I writing for?

Product, UI/UX and web designers who work in software/technology companies

There are two kinds of buyers of software; individual buyers and business buyers

Individual Buyers

Individual buying decisions for low-ticket software are frequently driven by emotions more than logic. For example, everyone around me is saying that Slack is an amazing product? Ok sure, I’ll install Slack and try it out.

Then on Facebook, I see an ad for another competing chat product, but for some reason it just looks ‘old’. Like the design is from a few years ago. They promise better features, but no one in my social/work circle is talking about them. I’ll pass.

Individual buyers want to buy products where it feels like there’s been a lot of thought and effort that’s gone into the details. The website looks beautiful, the animations are crisp, the app feels easy and intuitive to use, it has some wow interactions in the interface. It feels as if they’ve understood the day-to-day problems of the user, and added small little things that just make it easier.

SMB tools, personal apps, tools that cost less than $99 to start using, these are all bought by individuals. Examples are Slack, Buffer, Zendesk, Mixpanel, and most “well-designed” mobile apps.

Business buyers

I’m defining a business buyer as someone who has P & L responsibility.

Having P & L responsibility involves monitoring the net income after expenses for a department or entire organization, with direct influence on how company resources are allocated. Those with P & L responsibility often give final approval for new projects and are required to find ways to cut budget expenditure and ensure every program is generating a positive ROI.

Business buyers don’t care about your product. They care about their problems, and whether you can provide a solution to their problems. And the level of problems they’re looking at, those are rarely solved by products alone. Instead, business buyers’ problems are solved through a combination of product, people and deep industry knowledge/expertise.

So, if a vendor can convince her that they’ll solve the business buyer’s problem, the buyer

  • doesn’t care about the website being beautiful (she’s only going to glance through it a few times anyway)
  • doesn’t care that the product has a steep learning curve (because obviously the vendor is going to train her team)
  • doesn’t care that onboarding is difficult (because obviously vendor will have solution specialists who’ll set up and integrate the product with her existing systems)

Examples: Veeva, Domo, Marketo.

So, if you’re a designer

Don’t work in a company that sells to business buyers in enterprise companies, because your skill set isn’t as valuable as in a company that builds software for individual buyers. If you can’t make out who a company sells to, ask them what their Average Contract Value (ACV) or Average Revenue Per Customer (ARPC) is. Anything above $60000 is a place where you don’t want to be.

Understanding the A/B Testing Market

Zarget got acquired by Freshworks back in August 2017, and I was meaning to write about the internals of how the A/B testing market functions. Here are my thoughts and learnings:

1 – A/B testing doesn’t work for those who have low traffic. When VWO/Optimizely started out in 2010, one could survive by serving the SMB market. In 2017, there are far too many competitors and this isn’t possible anymore. For a product to do well, it has to go after customers who have non-trivial traffic and budget to pay for an enterprise testing vendor.

2 – A/B testing products on their own will always have high churn. Testing requires time, technical help, marketing/psychology skills, design skills, meaningful traffic, and yet might not give you the wins that make it worthwhile. In such cases, it becomes difficult to prove the direct RoI of the tool investment. This situation becomes 10x worse for SMBs who don’t have the traffic or the tech/design resources, therefore the high churn in this segment.

3 – Adwords is an unprofitable channel for an SMB focused A/B testing tool. Enterprise competitors and agencies (who charge ~$10,000 per month) have driven up the CPC bids, and SMB customers anyway churn quickly. These two factors mean one cannot rely on Adwords to profitably acquire small, $49 – $99 per month customers.

4 – Another reason for high churn is that Javascript based tools are easy to remove or replace. They’re usually a script that sits just after the < head > tag. Don’t like it, just delete that line. Nothing breaks, and no process is disrupted.

5 – On the other hand, they’re also difficult to place on a website because you can’t use a tag manager to insert the testing tool’s JS. It has to be the first one to load, and therefore is placed before the tag manager’s JS. I’ve heard first hand accounts of marketers who’ve walked up to their IT teams asking to place a JS tag on the website, and been told to fill up a “Business Impact” form, so that this tag can be considered next quarter!

6 – The best market to go after are companies that have a conversion rate optimization (CRO) team in place. A CRO team or senior testing leader means the company is committed to conversion optimization and will run it as a process. Ideally, the testing tool wants to be the one that helps the company run and manage the process. Or, at least be an integral part of the process.

7 – The best customers for an A/B testing tool are those who think of A/B testing as a method of verifying their decisions, and not as a method of finding ‘testing wins’. These customers don’t just go after the ‘wins’, instead they are also happy when a losing test result helps them avoid a bad decision.

8 – Optimizely was probably the smartest A/B testing tool. Their good decisions include:

  • moving upmarket to serve enterprises, though this is a natural progression of most martech vendors
  • having a server side testing product that is difficult to install, but also very difficult to remove
  • giving out a basic free plan which made it the default choice for beginners and SMBs
  • asking agencies to connect them directly to the client (the end buyer of the product), and then owning that relationship, vs. depending on the agency to champion Optimizely to the client
  • adding personalization to their product suite (see next point)

9 – Personalization is a good space to be in, because of two reasons:

  • the average internet buyer today expects a more personal experience when compared to a few years ago. And it is claimed that personalization increases conversion rates. Therefore, most brands today implement some form of personalization on their ecommerce stores.
  • a personalization product takes time to implement, but once in place, it upholds the visitor’s website experience… unplanned removal of the product frequently breaks the website and the customer’s experience, due to which most orgs don’t remove it easily.

Give the “why” behind your feedback, else you’ll warp your team’s behavior

Early in my career, I was sometimes given feedback to the tune of “this isn’t good enough, change it to ….. (my manager’s opinion)”. I’ve worked in tech marketing, where this is extremely common.

I’d ask why, but the reason wasn’t well articulated, or it wasn’t articulated “customer-first”. This in turn led me to change my behavior. Instead of creating marketing that would resonate with our customers, my primary goal was to do work that would get my manager’s approval.

That was incredibly frustrating… the realization that you’re doing something so that the manager approves it, and lets go live. It was difficult to know if I was right or wrong, it would all depend on the manager’s opinion at the time of reckoning.

I suspect the larger problem occurs when this seeps into a company’s culture, and the north-star becomes “what will my manager think?”, versus “how will this make things better for our customers?”.

After I started managing people, I have made the same mistake. But I try to recognize and check myself when I can, and make an honest attempt to explain the “why” behind any feedback I’m giving.

If I can’t give a well-articulated “why” for a subjective opinion or feedback, then I think harder about it, and try to understand why I “feel” that ways. Overall, this has allowed me to explain things better, get buy-in from people around me, and provide some context + direction to those I manage. Most importantly, I’m more often able to steer a decision towards what we as a group think is best for our customers.

So yeah, if you’re managing people, please provide the “why” behind your feedback.

Your SaaS product is a “nice-to-have”, so now what?

Everyone wants to build a “must-have” software product, but must-have software categories are almost always crowded, usually with large, well-entrenched incumbents.

Most founders end up building “nice to have” products, and then hope that their category becomes a “must have” for the market. From personal experience, I can see A/B testing start out as a “nice to have” and now on its way to a “must have” for online marketers… but this doesn’t happen with everyone.

So, you’ve built a nice-to-have, but you’re facing the obvious pain of prospects responding to your pitch like this:

sarcastic-frog

What do you do now?

The next time you speak with a prospect, pitch your product as a “tactical competitive advantage”. Before speaking about the problems it is solving, speak at length about how everyone else is doing x, and to win in today’s market they need to do x + y. And y is the future.

Show them the vision of how much better they’ll be than their competition, or even better than their current self. Show them the old, inefficient way, and the better, new way as supported by your product. Make them imagine themselves as an “elite” group of trailblazers who’re doing far more advanced stuff than their competitors, and reaping the benefits of it.

Small, relevant anecdote: am currently consulting for the folks at AdWyze and heard of a prospect who, very seriously, said this:

“I’ll buy, but don’t sell it to others in my vertical”.

That’s a pretty good statement to hear, because it’s a strong signal that the product will be accepted by customers as a tactical advantage.

(Also, small prediction: the product that these guys at AdWyze are making right now in 2017… it will be the future of performance marketing reporting. If you spend a lot of budget on GDN or FB ads, you should check it out.)

In software, customers listen to product pitches that solve a well-understood pain point, or a promise of an exciting future. Anything in between has a tough time getting organic demand.

Unsolicited Career Advice For Tech Marketers

TL;DR be a business person doing marketing, not a marketer doing marketing

When marketers ask me for advice about what they should do to further their careers, they ask about the skills they should acquire, and the functional areas they should specialize in.

Mostly, they receive advice from others that they should be a T-shaped marketer, i.e. have a broad set of marketing skills where they’re decently good, with a couple areas where they have deep experience and knowledge. I agree and propound this view. Over a period of 30 to 40 years of a professional career, functional/technical expertise is one of your best bets to grow. There’s research to indicate that reportees prefer bosses who could easily do their job, and Andy Grove, the legendary founder and CEO of Intel built a company where he fostered “knowledge power” over “position power”, something that you see all across the flat hierarchies in today’s tech startups.

However, I also think that most marketers end up becoming “just marketers”, and the same happens to folks in other departments who dedicate themselves to only their craft. They end up being just sales people, or just customer success people, frequently capping their growth to the Director or VP of their respective functions.

Instead, I recommend you become a businessperson who is currently handling marketing. By a businessperson I mean you understand your entire business deeply, you understand the different levers that make it what it is, the customer behavior, the delivery of value, the metrics, the industry, what keeps this entity up and ticking, and finally, you understand how your function contributes to it all.

I say this because I see marketers speak in meetings with leadership, and their ideas are not accepted, they’re not given the importance they feel they deserve, or they’re just a part of the side conversation. While the CEO is busy thinking about big-picture stuff like cash flow, burn rate, inside sales process, efficiency, competition, product strategy, the marketer limits himself by capping his thinking at “how do I increase my budget”, or “what if we tried to do more social media”.

Marketers are taught to understand their target audience, but most of them repeatedly fail to understand what is it that’s bothering their CEO. And if you want a seat at the boardroom sometime in the future, you have to start talking their language today.

Advice on how to become a ‘businessperson’

Start by understanding the big picture, and then get an excellent grasp on how that drills down to the day-to-day activities performed by your organization. Basically, understand the levers that run your business. This will necessitate that you understand some key metrics, and once you do, you’ll be able to quickly size up any business in your industry if you get to know their key metrics.

For example, if you know that a SaaS startup has an Annual Contract Value (ACV) of USD 3000, then you should be able to guess that an inside sales team doesn’t make sense for them, churn is an important number to contain, and most of their growth will be coming from new business being added every month, instead of upsells.

Similarly, if a firm has an ACV of USD 200,000, then they’re likely to have a field sales team, extremely strong account management, and a large part of their growth, if not most of it, will be from account expansion (getting existing customers to pay more over time).

Ask yourself why, and what form of marketing is needed today.

If it’s a bootstrapped SaaS, then you should be able to infer that the CEO won’t spend heavily on paid marketing channels, because she doesn’t have that kind of money. Instead, she’ll focus on low-cost inbound marketing, and maybe outbound email/phone prospecting. For her, profitability is more important than outright growth.

If it’s a consumer business that wants to grow fast, then they better have a marketing war chest to spend, or incredible word-of-mouth virality. Aside: differences between B2C and B2B marketing.

If the business is heavily VC funded, then it is basically a financial product, not for you or me, but for the VCs who invested in it. Everyone’s job is to get it to an exit event in a defined(ish) timeline. That event is heavily dependent on growth, so expect a lot of budget for marketing.

If it’s an enterprise play, then marketing’s job is to support Sales with full-funnel sales collateral, product marketing (testimonials, case studies, whitepapers, spec sheets, knowledgebase), and make an impact at events where your target decision makers congregate. Essentially, you want your very specific potential customers to know you, trust you enough to give Sales an opportunity to talk to them, and then be able to evangelize you internally to various stakeholders. Aside: read this interesting post by Mike Volpe on difference between Enterprise and SMB CMOs.

Essentially, when you look at a given situation, you should be able to guess if marketing is needed at all, and if yes, then what kind and form of marketing.

Understand the business you’re in as a system

Systems thinking is a management discipline that concerns an understanding of a system by examining the linkages and interactions between the components that comprise the entirety of that defined system.

Source

All businesses are complex systems, and these systems interact with each and other, and impact each other. As business people, it’s important that we marketers understand how these different systems affect each other, and whether things need correction or not.

1) A SaaS started out with a basic product that mostly catered to SMB customers. Over the years, competitors came in so they kept adding new features to stay ahead of the curve. So many features in fact, that the product isn’t meant for SMB customers anymore who prefer simple, easy-to-use tools. It is now better suited to larger customers with more detailed needs.

However, the brand, website, copy and collateral still retain that SMB positioning. Sales keeps trying to talk to enterprise prospects, but the conversion rate isn’t great, or the ACV isn’t as large as it could be. As a ‘businessperson’ marketer, you should be able to understand and rectify this mismatch.

2) Sales is incentivized to develop a new territory, but no marketing budget or team has been assigned to that new territory. Soon enough, Sales complains that it isn’t going as well as they hoped, and they need geography specific collateral and programs to generate demand.

Similar alignment issues crop up multiple times during lifetime of a business, and marketers must see the big picture, figure out how everything comes together, and push towards that.

Become friends with your head of Finance

When Wingify first hired a person to head up Finance, I thought ok, we probably need this role, but I wasn’t sure what value they’d provide. This was a classic “If you don’t think you need it, you haven’t seen greatness” moment for me. I’ve learnt tons from him since then about financial metrics, what they mean, and the underlying stories they tell. Understanding these metrics is one of the best ways to get a grasp the whole business.

While finance execs are hired a little later in the life of a company, if you have one in yours, I recommend to at least have monthly one-on-one’s with them to discuss the latest tech IPO S-1 and comparing those with others tech businesses. Or, you can get a headstart on this by going through Tom Tunguz’s benchmarking of 7 key SaaS metrics for various companies that have gone public.

If this is good stuff, I’d certainly appreciate you sharing it with your network:

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What marketers get wrong about lead scoring

Recently, a team of SaaS marketers asked me about how we implemented lead scoring at VWO, and what they should be doing to implement the same for their product. They explained the approaches they were considering, and how they wanted to orchestrate the entire thing.

I asked them if the salesteam was involved, and they said not really. Their Head of Sales was passing by, so I asked him to come in to the meeting room and explain the problems his team was facing with leads, and their prioritization. He went on a slight rant, pointing out multiple issues that spanned process, enrichment, and fake leads from domains like mailinator.com. Interestingly, most of the issues that he mentioned weren’t really being considered by marketing.

I’ve been guilty of this myself… working on lead scoring as a pure intellectual exercise because all the SaaS blog posts out there say marketing should do it, vs. working with sales to understand their problems. The outcome was that we started pushing some lead scoring number into the CRM, but saw that sales didn’t give a damn, and simply ignored it.

There are two aspects that we marketers needs to understand here:

  1. What’s the job of lead scoring
  2. How lead scoring can lead to incredible alignment with sales

What’s the job of lead scoring?

Looking at it from a JTBD framework, the ‘job’ of lead scoring is to:

  1. Make sales more efficient… and not just attach a score to each lead
  2. Push marketing to deploy their muscle towards getting the right leads

After implementing lead scoring, sales should be picking up high quality leads quicker, and spending more time on them. Therefore, the way to measure successful lead scoring is:

  • short-term: a marked reduction in lead response time, and increased conversion rate from lead to opportunity
  • long-term: increased ‘opportunity to customer’ conversion rate, lesser churn and overall increased Average Revenue Per Customer

Marketing should spend more muscle towards acquiring, nurturing and preparing high quality leads.

Since marketing usually builds the lead score, they should approach it by looking to change sales’ behavior by understanding how they currently prioritize leads. If they don’t approach the problem from this key insight, it is likely that the lead scoring exercise will fail to deliver any real results in the long-term.

Also, the entire project requires the correct compensation plan, which incents acquiring, working and closing the right leads.

Anecdote: I once observed a colleague complete a sophisticated data analysis exercise and create a new lead scoring model, which they then dumped on the salesteam in a large meeting. They expected sales to enthusiastically adopt it, because it “came from the data”, but that didn’t happen. Sales was wary, almost hostile to the new model, and on questioning, explained that it didn’t gel with their comp plan. The incident taught me to start with understanding sales’ perspective first, proving to them that am trying to help, gaining some confidence and buy-in, and then proceeding.

On sales and marketing alignment

I recently read “Aligned to Achieve” by Tracy Eiler and Andrea Austin, respectively the CMO and VP, Enterprise Business at InsideView. It is an incredible book, and I recommend all B2B CEOs, marketers and salespeople read it. The authors dive deep into a problem that everyone knows about, some acknowledge, and very few try to solve so comprehensively.

In the book, one thread that comes up repeatedly is that data and lead scoring are key to great alignment between sales and marketing. Here are a couple excerpts:

Screen Shot 2017-06-28 at 3.56.47 PM Screen Shot 2017-06-28 at 3.54.16 PM

What are your thoughts on this? Have you faced any painful issues with either sales or marketing where you felt the other simply didn’t want to work with you, or didn’t trust you?

How to decide if SDRs should report into Sales or Marketing

Who am I writing for?
People who’re responsible for orchestrating Sales or Marketing processes in B2B SaaS startups.

The “sales pipeline” often starts at the opportunity stage, after an SDR has spoken to the lead and confirmed that they are in the market right now, they have the budget to buy, and the size & duration of the subscription plan that they want. Example, two identical prospects looking to buy a helpdesk SaaS which costs $25 per seat, per month. One has a tech support team of 10 reps, and the other has a team of 20 reps. In this case, the pipeline will reflect two potential accounts with a total pipeline value of 30 x $25 x 12 months= $9000.

In a SaaS startup where marketing is responsible for delivering MQLs to sales, it will be the Head of Sales who’ll first feel the need to hire SDRs. As the MQLs increase she’ll realize that her reps are talking to far too many unqualified leads and she’ll want her best reps to focus on the qualified leads. To resolve this, she’ll install an SDR layer to qualify MQLs provided by marketing so that only the serious ones are passed on to closers.

In a startup where marketing is measured on pipeline and not just MQLs, the Head of Marketing will figure out that:

  • she needs someone to talk to the leads to qualify them so that they can be added to the pipeline
  • figure out their buying appetite so that she can measure marketing’s pipeline contribution

and therefore she’ll push for an SDR layer to be installed in between sales and marketing.

So, in short, whoever manages pipeline will feel the need to install SDRs. If you’re measuring marketing on pipeline contribution, then the SDRs should report into marketing, and if you’re measuring marketing on leads passed to sales, then the SDRs should report into sales.

Obviously, in the end you’ll end up choosing what works best for your organization, but this is a good decision framework to start with.

Useful? Catch me on Twitter: @SiddharthDeswal

To Reduce Churn Your SaaS Needs To Be Adopted Widely And Deeply

Who am I writing for? SaaS product managers and founders.

We recently had someone move on from Wingify (the company that owns VWO and Pushcrew). After they were gone, admin was doing a review of our software expenses and found a line-item for Popcorn Metrics with no clear owner. The person who had left was the only one using it, and no one knew why, or what it was used for.

Removing Popcorn is as easy as removing a code snippet, so I reached out to them asking to cancel.

This is the problem when your product hasn’t been adopted widely or deeply. You might have sold the product in that a customer is paying for it, but you haven’t truly sold it until they’re using it extensively.

Width

By width, I mean that multiple hierarchies across departments in a company are using the product. Best examples would be:

  • communication platforms (Skype, Gmail)
  • HR & performance management software
  • document editing and management (Google Docs, Office 365)

If a product solves the basic needs of any workforce, it’s likely to be adopted widely. The more widely a product is used, the more value it’s providing and consequently, it’s difficult to remove.

Depth

By depth, I mean the level of dependence on a product. For me, defining features of deep adoption are:

  • the product supports a key process, eg. the company’s sales process runs on a CRM, performance & payroll management is done on an HR software, or technical support delivered through support software
  • the product has important data that companies don’t want to lose
  • the product enables, or connects with multiple other data silos to make 1 + 1 = 3
  • the product is mouldable to support the company’s workflow

Placing the products we use at VWO on a depth/width graph, here’s what I came up with:

Reduce SaaS churn with increased depth and width

Explaining the graph above:

  • Recruiterbox comes in the middle-ish because it’s mostly used by hiring managers and HR. It is used across all departments, but not across enough hierarchies. And the data it contains isn’t as valuable… mostly resumes/profiles of candidates who weren’t a fit.
  • Canva, the easy graphic design software for non-designers, which I put to show a product that has minimal width or depth. It mostly comes up when designers aren’t available. Going by Canva’s initial positioning, they might get slightly deeper adoption if they are able to tap into social media marketing teams.
  • Clearbit, connected to Salesforce and used for lead enrichment. We hardly ever login to the product, but I suspect we’ll keep using it until the contract renewal date rolls by and they raise prices. That’s when we’ll probably look to BuiltWith or something similar. I’ve included Clearbit to show a product that takes care of a small but important part of a business process, and as long as it does its job and the business process remains the same, it’ll keep being used.
  • I’ve put Namely in the middle because even though it is HR and performance management software, at Wingify we haven’t adopted it fully. I notice that everyone uses it, but only for a few days every quarter during appraisal time. It could have deeper adoption if we had big-company kinda HR processes, but since we don’t, maybe Namely is suited to big companies with more sophisticated HR policies and management?
  • Salesforce is probably the best example of a product completely owning a process, owning data, deep integrations and being used extensively by executives. I admire them for this, though I will never recommend them to anyone because of the painful experience it is dealing with the company and the product.
More thoughts

Not all products can have wide and deep adoption, but that doesn’t mean all hope is lost. If a product can capture even one important process for a team, the likelihood of churn reduces significantly. For example, Canva could  if it targeted teams that need quick, good-looking images without relying on a graphic designer. First thing comes to my mind is social media teams in B2C businesses who are running campaigns all the time. Or take Recruiterbox from above, not widely or deeply adopted in the org but does a damn good job of streamlining the recruiting process.

Products tend to have higher a lifetime if they have some of the following properties:

  • Are the “source of truth” in an org for important process/data
  • Are in the core departments of finance, HR, sales, manufacturing/production/product and R&D
  • Are used by practitioners and executives for different purposes
  • Some or all parts of a team’s KPIs are reported by the product
  • Are heavily used by senior management
  • They are close to the value provided & realized by a company, like product, R&D or revenue/profits

Salespeople are trained to hack the selling process by reaching the highest decision maker as soon as possible. No doubt this still works, but in a world where hierarchies are flattening, practitioners who’re going to be actually using the product are becoming important factors in the buying process. Making a quick sale without adequate follow-up support from customer success managers leaves you at a risk of being upended after the contract period.

The Customer Success function can have a massive impact on increasing lifetime value if they understand that their goal in the first few months is to increase width and depth of adoption of the product, and they’re incentivized towards those goals.

Based off my Canva point, I realize that when you’re creating a product, it’s important to think of the process and data that you’re going to own, and for the teams + hierarchies that you’re going to own them.  And this needs product + human effort.

I’m surprised why products don’t integrate more deeply with email. There’s this entire hullabaloo about AI and chatbots right now (early 2017). I’d instead focus energies on much a deeper sync with Gmail and Outlook. After all, that’s where the majority of decision makers spend their time.

Update on 24 May, 2017: Just found out that ProsperWorks is a CRM deeply integrated with G-Suite. Would love to get a sense of their churn and usage stats. And I know I’ll be trying them out the next time I need a CRM.

Here’s When NOT To Write Benefits-Driven Marketing Copy

Who am I writing for?

Marketers, copywriters, SaaS founders, and anyone else writing marketing copy.

Don’t write benefits driven copy if your target buyers are experienced and already in the market for solutions similar to yours.

Also, don’t write benefits-driven copy if the majority of your buyers have already used something similar to your solution in the past, and what you’re offering is an upgrade.

Instead, just tell them what extra you’re offering, and how you’re better.

In the “Why What How” model as propounded by Simon Sinek, experienced prospects are already familiar with the “Why” and they just skip that part of your website, landing page or ppt. Instead, tell the the ‘what’ and the ‘how’.

For example, at VWO we’re about to launch a comprehensive conversion optimization platform. Looking at the data, the majority of our buyers are aware of what conversion optimization entails. To that end, they’re familiar with tools like Hotjar, Mixpanel, Optimizely and Jira/Trello for project management.

After an internal discussion about what kind of copy we should write for the new platform, we did a small poll on the CXL Facebook group and on our Linkedin group. Here are the results (disclaimer: I might have biased some of the opinions on the Linkedin group due to a comment, which I then removed):

Copy poll on the CXL group
Copy poll on the CXL group
Linkedin Poll - Which copywriting direction is better for you
Linkedin Poll – Which copywriting direction is better for you

There are other reasons to chuck the benefits-driven copy. Experienced buyers have usually heard multiple pitches where the sales & marketing communication promised a lot, but the product failed to live up to the hype. And because of this, they’re naturally suspicious and take everything with a pinch of salt.

So do them a favour, create marketing that shows you understand their situation. Give out lots of details on your product, pricing, platform, features pages and sales pdfs.