SaaS Backwards Episode 110 - The Dangerous 8 mistakes SaaS companies make in their messaging

So if you're responsible for driving a SaaS business in the right direction, this episode is definitely for you. Today, we're going to talk about the dangerous eight messaging and positioning mistakes we see SaaS companies making and their evidence on their websites, and many of these mistakes flow from there to other outbound motions, sales presentations, and proposals. Hey Jason, welcome to the podcast.

Jason Myers:
Thanks. Great to be here.

Ken Lempit:
Yeah, this is going to be a fun one. It's always great when we get to turn the mic and camera on ourselves and talk about the work we're doing and the things we see out in the market. And I think this is going to be a lot of fun on this episode. But before we dig in, tell me what motivated you to want to make this particular podcast episode.

And I think if you just put yourself in the shoes of the buyer, like your buyers of other things, like what do you want to see on websites, and it becomes pretty apparent that you're deficient in a lot of areas on your website. The second methodology that I really get behind is from the book The Challenger Customer. And it's an important methodology because it talks about what you need to do or content to help drive someone off of their status quo. More deals are lost to doing nothing than really to competitors or anything else. And companies are pretty deficient when it comes to providing messaging and carrying a narrative through the content that motivates somebody to take action.

And so, that kind of gets into some of the mistakes that you'll hear behind that. But what I like to look at the sites from the angle of, are they using a narrative of getting agreement on the problem worth solving and then pointing out deficiencies in what companies try to do to solve that problem today. So companies try to solve it by doing X, Y, Z doesn't work very well, and then are they providing an adequate reframe or differentiation? So that's why we're solving this problem this way because it's proven to be much more effective.

Ken Lempit:
Yeah, I think those two things are pretty much seminal works that, if you're not taking in the content from TrustRadius and if you haven't had the opportunity to read The Challenger Customer by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson, two great resources, the TrustRadius guys offer that up for free as well as they also give some actionable insights, like after they put that initial research out, they usually follow it up with some how-tos, which is really great stuff. So let's dig into the dangerous eight. What's the first one on the hit parade, Jason?

Jason Myers:
And I'll say these are in no particular order, and they are all taken from actual examples. And so, I'm going to name some names here, but we'll see how that goes. So-

Botanalytics says, "Take your conversational AI to the next level. Simple and powerful conversational analytics that allow you to take action and drive continuous improvement." It doesn't really say much what they do or what problem they're solving. Another one. Nectar.ai says, "Zero adoption and activity capture." Pretty vague statement. And I don't get too much more clarity in the next sentence they have, "Build trust in your CRM with contact and buyer engagement data across the customer life cycle." Any comments on those?

Ken Lempit:
Well, I mean, the phrase word salad comes to mind. I mean, the problem as marketers is there's a lot of pressure on us to use the words that others think matter, whether that's sales, leadership, founder, board. We have to really defend our role as representing the potential buyer and their needs in a situation.

And when you see this kind of word salad on the homepage hero of somebody's website that they're bowing to the pressure from outside of marketing or they may not have a really good handle on what the customers are actually trying to do. So we've built a product, but we're not sure why. So those are the two kind of scenarios we see.

Jason Myers:
Absolutely. One other example of that. Oro Inc. says, "The comprehensive solution for marketplaces of any complexity." And the reason I bring that up is that's a really vague statement, and I think the sales adage here applies that if you're selling to everyone, you're selling to no one. So vague statements like this cause some cognitive dissonance with the buyer, and some people are just not going to do the work to figure it out, and they're going to bounce.

Ken Lempit:
Yeah, I think it's important to point out that, let's say, 40 to 60% of your traffic begins and ends on the homepage. People think they have some kind of interest in your company. Somebody told them they should take a look or they found you on search somehow.

And if we don't capture them right away, yes, I have that problem, or I might have that problem early on in their journey with us. Same thing holding true on a landing page. If you pay to drive somebody to a landing page, you better get them to understanding you can help them right away, and these statements don't do that. So let's leave that for now. Let's go on to number two. What else have we got in our dangerous eight mistakes?

Jason Myers:
Number two is the message is somewhat descriptive but just not very impactful. So two good examples of this. Keona Health Healthcare CRM, followed by, "Harmonize your patient access and be the provider patients want and need." So I get that it's a healthcare CRM, but you really got to dig in there to find out that they're a scheduling product, not necessarily like a strict CRM as I would think about in terms of a HubSpot or something else. Second example is Syndic8. They say, "The product content management platform with specialist support for high variant SKUs."

Ken Lempit:
We're back at the salad bar, man. I have no idea what that means.

Jason Myers:
Right. Well, they're also making another mistake that we'll get to. But yes, so they're trying to be descriptive, like product content management platform. It's just not very impactful, right. Again, we're not getting agreement on a problem that we're solving.

Ken Lempit:
Yeah. I mean, I kind of feel like it's important in today's world to stop people. We need to find language that causes people to go, "Huh," and pause and actually think. People's attention spans are so short that if we don't get them right away into a thought process, we're going to lose them. And I think these two examples have no impact. Really soft selling what they do by just being vague. Being vague is wearing that gray flannel suit into a new business meeting. Probably not the best idea.

Jason Myers:
All right, let's move on to number three. They're leading with AI or other technologies. So now a lot of them make this mistake. I just happened to run across YOOBIC, who says, "The AI-powered Frontline employee experience platform." So not only are they leading with AI, they're a little bit vague in their description. But the big problem with leading with AI is that it has to do with a well-known advertising concept called Market Sophistication. And so, in short, that means that if you're first to market, then you can use it as an advantage to your headline.

But I think we would all agree that AI is so ubiquitous today. You are not first to market. And so it is not an advantage. So somebody is going to wash right over that. Now, I'm not saying don't use AI in your narrative, but it must come later in the form of a reframe. So in other words, we get agreement on the problem, we point out deficiencies in the current solutions or processes, and then we introduce, "That's why we use AI, and here's how we're doing it differently and why we've proven it to be superior to anything on the market."

Ken Lempit:
Yeah. And I think it also depends on your audience, right. So if you're going out and trying to raise some money and the category you're serving doesn't have a lot of AI-based solutions, investors want to know that you're using AI. But I think the people who are going to buy your stuff want to know that it solves the problem.

And oh, hey, it's almost like a question in prospect's minds now. Where does AI fit in your solution? As opposed to a year and a half ago, where AI first was really very potent, and this is going to happen again. We see this kind of technology first marketing over and over and over. So the first client-server XYZ of 20 years ago, or the cloud native accounting system, well, everybody's on the cloud soon enough, everybody's going to have AI. So look for the next thing because the AI wave has already washed over us.

Jason Myers:
That's right.

Ken Lempit:
What's the number four of dangerous eight?

Jason Myers:
Too much marketing speak industry jargon or acronyms.

Ken Lempit:
You can't have too much marketing speak. Come on. That's the business we're in. I love marketing speak.

Jason Myers:
Yeah, we all love marketing speak. It's words like streamlined and automated. We think that means something, but it doesn't. It's too vague. What does streamline mean? If you've ever thought about it, right. The best example of what we're talking about is Mintmesh. They have a digital solution for EPCs bid evaluation process and knowledge management.

The only meaningful words in that statement are bid evaluation process. And even that's a little bit vague, but digital solution means nothing. We're assuming that everybody knows what an EPC is, and we're also assuming that they're going to know what the problem is with the current bid evaluation process. As far as knowledge management, that means nothing. So this whole statement is... I give it a D minus.

Ken Lempit:
You had a couple of others here. You want to give those up?

Jason Myers:
Sure. So I said from FundMiner, they have streamlined and automated fundraising fund management. So, first of all, I don't like fundraising fund right next to each other. I get what it's for. But streamlined and automated means absolutely nothing. It's too vague.

Those words, we should just eliminate them. Tell us what you do. Just be straight about it. What's your differentiation? How are you more powerful? And if you think about it from the buyer's aspect, right, are they losing sleep at night because they need to streamline and automate their processes, or is it something else?

Ken Lempit:
It's really interesting. So I probably do 30 or 40 prospect interviews, client interviews a month on behalf of our clients for messaging and go-to-market strategy work. Not one of them has ever said anything like this is a problem in their business. They almost always cite external factors to their job function that fall into how they have to perform better.

So I just think that if you're not aware enough of the pressures that your economic buyers, your functional and economic buyers really face, you're going to fall back on this inward-looking stuff of how we make something a little bit faster, a little bit cheaper, a little bit easier, and you're not going to be addressing the actual problems that they seek to solve and the pressures that are on them. So this is a good symptom of not knowing your prospect pain points well enough, I think.

Jason Myers:
So the next one is one of my favorites.

Ken Lempit:
So this is number five of the dangerous eight if-

Jason Myers:
That's right.

Ken Lempit:
... you're keeping track.

Jason Myers:
Number five is little or no problem agreement. And I think the reason is is that most marketers don't understand that that's important that we get problem agreement. I would think more sellers would understand that that's an issue, but it's important for marketers to understand it. And I point back to the previous podcast that we did with Challenger Customer author Brent Adamson, where we talk about this is really one of the main problems. That we're not getting agreement on a problem worth solving. So there's all kinds of examples around this. I rarely see some of it do it.move onWell, I just pulled out a couple, though, that are starting to hint at it, but they're not pulling it through. So Cart.com says, "Better fulfillment starts with better software." And the reason I pull this out, so I don't hate this one, but better fulfillment is starting to talk about a problem, but it's not specific enough. So what is it about your customers in their fulfillment process that is such a struggle that they would need to start looking for software would be a better answer to that or get better problem agreement?

Tray.io says, "Accelerate integrations your way." And so the question there is when they talk to their clients about why they bought from them, was it because that they needed to do integrations faster? And were they frustrated because they weren't customizable enough? So if the answers were yes, then I guess they could carry on. I'm just thinking that probably isn't the most pressing problem that their clients have.

Ken Lempit:
Yeah, so integrations is really interesting category, especially if you're a SaaS yourself, having more things that are connected to your software accelerates your own go-to-market. So not exactly sure what these folks do, but if they're helping other software companies to build an integration library, they would be suffering revenue loss because they don't have integrations. Or if you are an end-user organization, perhaps it's taking too long to put new capabilities into your own tech stack.

So that's, I think, the benefit or problem, right. The problem statement is I can't get new software integrated into my tech stack if I'm an end user or if I'm another SaaS that they're selling to, but I'm losing revenue ops because I don't have a large enough integration library. And I think that's the thinking we want clients to be doing, right, is to get to the actual economic business problem, not the outcome, right. So this is a good example of outcome messaging. Accelerating integrations, that's an outcome of the software, not necessarily a business outcome.

Jason Myers:
Yeah. I think it's important for marketers to understand that the best thing that we could possibly do in the messaging on our homepage is to identify a problem so that when a potential prospect comes to the site and they can immediately identify with that problem, we have gained enough attention that they're going to dig further if they agree that that is a problem worth solving.

Ken Lempit:
Absolutely. And I think there could be some criticism of this episode coming at us, and I want to head it off at the pass. So we've talked about each of these, I guess, five of the dangerous eight so far in the context of somebody is problem-aware. So if we're real demand generation purists, there is a level above prospects who are problem-aware. Those are people that don't even have problem awareness.

And what we're kind of saying here is that by the time somebody lands on this website, they at least have an inkling of the problem, right. There may not be complete problem agreement, but they have some sense that there's a problem, and they may have an idea that it could be one of a handful of things where they're trying to figure out what the problem is. The blissfully ignorant, well, we can't really serve them through the dangerous eight, I don't think.

But anyway, I just thought I'd put that in there because I know if people have gotten this far into the episode, they're going to be thinking, "What about people that aren't problem-aware?" And I think that there is a role for marketing, obviously in demand generation, to create problem awareness. And that's probably not going to happen on the homepage itself. That's going to be a thought leadership exercise and an outbound motion to get people to understand they might have a problem. Let's move on to number six in the dangerous eight.

Jason Myers:
All right. I like this one too. This is a fun one. They make too many unsubstantiated claims. So FundMiner, "We are the most effective solution in the space." Clarip says they're the most powerful enterprise privacy governance platform. I can go on and on. "We are the most..." Fill in the blank.

See it all the time, and it's going to wash right over your customer's head. They're so used to seeing this kind of language that it means nothing unless it is substantiated and immediately backed up by something. So if Gartner says it's your number one in the category, okay, put it there, but it may not be the thing that you lead with either.

Ken Lempit:
Yeah. And this is dangerous kind of language because it kind of eats away at your credibility. And we see companies not only use this in their messaging that's apparent on the website but a lot of times in places where it's even more subtle but also very dangerous in their press releases, as an example. Journalists are trained to filter out companies that make unsubstantiated claims.

And I think savvy buyers are now becoming a little more skeptical of claims by vendors, and they want to see the proof. In fact, you might say almost all of us are from Missouri. Want to be shown before they're told. So I think you need to be able to prove the claims you make, and those claims have to be relevant to the buyer. If they're not relevant to the buyer, they're just not going to be worth making. In fact, you're probably damaging the beginning of a relationship.

Jason Myers:
Well, and back to the TrustRadius report this year, the title is Prove It or Lose It. So if you're not immediately proving your claims, you are potentially going to lose them in terms of bouncing or not making the shortlist or whatever.

Ken Lempit:
Nothing good comes from this.

Jason Myers:
Nothing good. That's right.

Ken Lempit:
So let's go on to number seven. What do we got?

Jason Myers:
Number seven is it comes across, and I see this all the time. It comes across as a nice to have but not a must-have. So language that Plytix uses, for example, "Your central source of truth for all your product information." Sounds like maybe that's something I want, I don't know. It certainly doesn't say, "I have to have that." Another one. Gamify says, "Experience a better way to manage grants." Okay.

Ken Lempit:
Yeah. So these are examples of what it does, but not why it matters, right.

Jason Myers:
Right.

Ken Lempit:
I mean, leading with the what is just not a good thing. I mean, you can go all the way back to Simon Sinek, right, Start With Why. You have to have why and what is kind of the last bit of business, what or how. Those things kind of come after.

So I love this your central source of truth. I mean, there's got to be a bigger problem behind that, like, "Product catalogs out of control. Always finding your product information out of sync with major distributors," whatever the use case is here, there's lots of opportunity to get people saying, "Yeah, you got me."

Jason Myers:
Right. And they may well have bought this product, or the clients may have bought the product because it was a central source of truth. But if you're leading with that for new prospects and you're not giving them context about the problems that we're solving in the first place, then it doesn't make any sense.

Ken Lempit:
So I want to step back just a moment here from these sort of eight dangerous things we see. And I want to address another area of skepticism we might be getting from people that have listened so far, which is, "Hey, I've already got eight or 10 million in revenue. What the heck? I'm doing just fine without these suggestions."

And the only thing I can say is, "How much better might you be doing if you're marketing and sales motions were more effective?" And I think that's worth testing. So if you've gotten this far and you're scratching your head, maybe giving us a little virtual side eye, I'd love you to think about where are the opportunities to test more effective messaging if you see yourself making any of these dangerous eight

Jason Myers:
Well, let's make that even a little stronger for them, right. Why this is a must-do instead of a nice-to-do is that if you are losing people for any reason that are qualified, you are missing opportunities on your website. And you want to make sure that you maximize the homepage, especially to attract all qualified prospects to ensure that they're going to dig deeper into your content and hopefully hit that, get a demo button, or talk to sales.

Ken Lempit:
So the gauntlet being thrown down here is the dreaded pain of lost opportunity.

Jason Myers:
That's right. It's the prospect theory that was written in the 80s, I think, that says basically people are way more concerned about losing than they are about potential gain.

Ken Lempit:
Fair enough. All right, so let's drop to the last of the dangerous eight and lay it on us.

Jason Myers:
So this one I don't have any examples for because they are visual, but you've seen it, I'm sure, in the sites that you visit. They're wasting too much space in hero with things like screenshots or illustrations or pictures that really aren't adding value to the narrative.

Ken Lempit:
Yeah. To me, this is one of the real bummers in a lot of marketing is somebody invests a whole bunch of money in custom illustrations that seek to communicate something, and they're so small in detail that the short-term website visitor can't pull any information out of it anyway or it's abstract and does nothing. But what can we do? What's an ideal homepage hero going to look like? What would we recommend somebody do? And I think this is probably a quick answer, and you'll know if you're doing something good.

Jason Myers:
Yeah. My favorite thing to do there is put a video there that I can watch on demand without having to talk to a salesperson. So that could be an explainer video. It could be a testimonial video. It could be your executives explaining and talking through the narrative that we talked about, problem agreement deficiencies, and the reframe.

Ken Lempit:
Right. So there's three elements there, right? There's three elements on this section. There's going to be a solid headline that gets people to stop and say, "I might have this problem, or yes, I do." A little subhead to reinforce it, give it a little more description, maybe a link to see a library of videos that may or may not be gated, and then that compelling, decent production value video at the right to get people engaged right away.

Jason Myers:
Another real quick mistake that I see a lot is that sometimes they will have a good narrative in the explainer video and put that in the hero, which is great, but they're not communicating that in the main messaging. So you're assuming that people are going to... everybody's going to watch that video, and I don't think that's a very good assumption.

Ken Lempit:
Fair enough. So we've given up the dangerous eight, and we have an offer we make pretty liberally, right, to have us train our own expertise on your web property for marketing and messaging assessment. Jason, how can people reach out to you if they want to have you spend a solid hour with them on a detailed set of recommendations on improving the effectiveness of their web-based communication

Jason Myers:
The easiest way to do that would be to email me at jm@austinlawrence.com.

Ken Lempit:
Great. And in the show notes and the promotion of this, we'll put a link to our landing page, which makes this offer of the free assessment. But Jason, this is a lot of fun, the dangerous eight mistakes you must be making or might be making on your web property. Thanks so much for sharing that with us.

Jason Myers:
Absolutely.

Ken Lempit:
And if you haven't subscribed to the podcast, please do so wherever podcasts are distributed. SaaS Backwards is a production of Austin Lawrence Group, a demand generation agency that specializes in software as a service. If you want to learn more about us, it's at austinlawrence.com. And Jason, thanks again for a great episode.

Jason Myers:
You're welcome. Enjoyed it.