In short, as per Part 1, you
- keep admitting to every mistake you are making and do something about it, then
- continue by looking for cost-effective opportunities for improvement and pursue them and finally
- never, ever, ever forget the timeless basics.
Today, we’ll continue by describing what you do when you identify, and admit to, the next mistake (mistake 8) we chronicled in our two part introduction to our “dead company walking” (Part 1 and Part 2) series (where we helped your potential customers identify problems that signify you are a SaaS supplier they should be walking away from). (You can find part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5 here.)
8) If there is interest, your product is the solution
Every inquiry is a lead, and every lead is one we must sell and close.
Let me be clear here: Nothing could be further from the truth!
If we go back to mistake #7, buzz and sound bites are more important than timeless educational content, a lot of inquiries are going to come from people trying to figure out what the h3ck you do and if your product has key functionality or process support that they might be looking for.
And if you pass that bar, then they need to know that it meets enough of their requirements to be a consideration — if they can get budget to put out an RFP.
Which means that, the more buzzwords and sound-bites you use, and thus the more confusing your messaging is, the less correlation there is between inquiries and actual interest in your product and, as just stated, actual interest doesn’t mean actual budget, or, more importantly, that your product is the solution.
There was a time when most vendors, with integrity (and without the constant push from greedy investors to sell first, solve later) would qualify a lead before trying to sell that lead, but these days, it seems that most vendors have adopted the Big X strategy of “everyone’s a client, close the deal, and figure it out later” — and they do so even if they don’t have a clue how to solve the problem or the software to do it, when nothing could be further from the truth.
the doctor knows we’ve all forgotten about the Miracle on 34th Street, but it had a timeless piece of sales advice you should never forget if you want to maintain integrity: if you don’t have what the customer wants, send the customer elsewhere. It doesn’t mean you’ve lost them. It means that when they have a problem you can solve, they will come back because they know they can trust you, and in the world of SaaS where they need constant support, they want a vendor they can trust.
At the end of the day, the reality is this:
if there is interest, there’s an opportunity to qualify … and that’s it
And, more importantly,
it there’s an opportunity to qualify, there’s an opportunity to learn … and that could be more important than a sale!
If you stop pushing and start pulling, i.e asking, you can learn about:
- the real problems potential customers are having,
- what they are looking for in a solution, and
- how your solution could be improved to not only solve more problems, but be more appealing, as well as
- why they contacted you, and use that insight to figure out
- how to tweak your messaging and content to get more relevant inquiries in the future
Once you get this information you can,
- tweak your roadmap appropriately
- improve your usability (which does not mean add flash to your UI)
- ensure you have the right price point for a timely, but still profitable, sale
All you have to do is fire your marketing morons*, stop talking gibberish and start listening.
Stay tuned for Part 7!
* the doctor is not implying all marketers are morons, there are still a few very smart ones out there, just that the percentage of morons focussed on hits and not success or meaning has greatly increased over the past decade and the odds are, if you’re a dead company walking, your marketer is a moron and not a maven.