Cook up a feedback loop that works for you
Apr 05, 2023
The old-school feedback loop isn't working for you.
Right? Otherwise, you wouldn't be here.
But you're working hard, pushing growth, building a quality product, getting user feedback and talking to your prospects.
Sorry to break it to you but that method of pushing the product through sales and then scaling marketing spend does. not. work.
Why doesn't the traditional loop work as a strategy to sell SaaS B2B?
Let's start with the most frustrating point for your prospects: The messaging reaching them is off due to being built in a silo.
Now consider your sales team. Those poor people are trying to connect with prospects while equipped with irrelevant or unrealistic use cases.
You're also optimizing for click-through rate, so seeing poor fit leads and your inbound team is frustrated with this.
What does all this lead to?
Nobody is able to communicate a tangible solution for a problem via marketing, branded outreach, events or even in existing client calls.
The moral of this story is that traditional talk tracks, pitches, and closing tactics don’t provide you with happy customers.
How to make the loop inform a product-led growth strategy
I'll share this like a cooking recipe to make it easily digestible: What you need, how long it'll take, how many it's gonna serve.
What you need:
A document that describes in great detail who your ideal customer (ICP) is, how they speak, how they like to buy, how they interact with your product, and the primary problems they face that your product solves.
This is a Voice-of-Customer or VOC exercise, and a crucial ingredient to making a product-led growth strategy. Once you have that, gather your sales, marketing or growth team and start cooking.
Step 1:
Put the messages in your VOC into all your ads, blogs, social posts, website, email and SMS marketing. This is faster to read than do, so give yourself plenty of time to complete this first step.
Step 2:
Build your talk paths. Notice how I did NOT say talk tracks? Talks paths are a series of questions during your discovery phase of the sales cycle, which give you insight into the pain your ICP might be feeling.
I can't emphasize this enough, a talk path is NOT a series of mini-product pitches and feature definitions.
A talk path might include:
- What brought you to our company?
- How are you doing that now?
- What's happening because of that?
- What about that makes you want to change now?
- What are you going to do if you’re not able to?
- If you could do it, what would be the ideal solution?
- What keeps you from doing that now?
- If our solution was able to, would you…?
NB: Don't start absorbing everyone's irrelevant advice. Consider who's language matters and mindfully segment useful feedback. That translated into impactful messaging.
Step 3:
Get on the phone with your ICP’s and current customers. This is one of the most important things senior leadership should be doing: Interacting with the best customers.
Then implement those learnings, train your growth team in the problems they can solve with your product.
Step 4:
As a sales leader, you need to listen to customer and sales calls as often as you can NOT to critique the rep...
Join and listen to product and sales calls to hear the user. Write down:
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- How are they using a similar product
- What do they like and dislike
- How do they solve the problem without your product
- What are the 1-2 primary things your product offers, that they can’t live without 6 months after signing up
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Step 5:
Loop it. This technique only works for your sales team and results if you repeat it regularly, going back to make improvements to the VOC at least twice a year.
Every 6-9 months your messaging, positioning and value props should evolve your VOC. This is far from a one-time fix. That's why it works.
Serves:
Everyone. Your partner team, your marketers, agencies, leaderships, and even training sessions.
The loop works as a channel partnership strategy
You can use the same recipe to start conversations with potential partners. Then, this same "How to sell SaaS B2B" feedback loop works to build a joint offering for mutual ICPs and informs your entire channel partnership strategy.
Apply the loop to talent sourcing
For your team, the above is an easy recipe of how to learn SaaS sales. Teach them, listen to how they're working, learn how they speak, and then loop back.
You can even use the same 5 steps to find new recruits, see how they speak and why your company is the best fit for them, and then use that during candidate interviews. This will help you hire the right people for whom employment with you is the ideal solution.
Why does this feedback loop work for selling SaaS B2B?
As long as you learned how ICPs speak, then filtered that into your external comms, you're going to connect emotionally with more ideal prospects. This is a major step in any product-led growth strategy.
Remember, B2B still has a person at either end. You're not talking to a business, really. You're speaking to people. Your sales collateral, ads, organic content, and even your executives speaking in public all need to be speaking the language your ICPs speak.
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