In SaaS? Here’s Why You Should Pull Back the Curtain for Your Customers

Remember that saying from the movie Field of Dreams? “If you build it, they will come” was made popular after the movie’s release and it became an, at times, overused adage that was steeped in pie-in-the-sky thinking. The sentiment echoed through the business world, too.

Founders, product creators and marketers alike thought that they could simply push something out to market and have it be effortlessly picked up by raving fans, ready to pull out their credit cards and make a purchase. That may have worked when the marketplace was less noisy and less saturated but now, that methodology just doesn’t work.

Today, we need a new way to move through the creation and launch cycle so that we can find those raving fans earlier in the process. That way, when we push what we’ve created out to market, the buyers are already there — ready to commit.

So, how do we do this and what are the resources that we need?

Changing the Conversation

Marketing, and our reaction to it, has a lot to do with the psychology of humans. Simply put, we, as consumers, don’t love being sold to. We can sniff out a sales pitch from a mile away and we’ll avoid that experience at all costs. Instead, we want to feel seen, heard and like we matter to the people and brands we do business with and we want our problems solved.

As a brand, we need to find the ways in which we can build an emotional connection with our audience and we need to solve their problems. A lot of people use storytelling, client case studies, emotion-fuelled ad campaigns, a focus on pain points, driving down objections and community engagement, just to name a few, to achieve this effect.

Regardless of the medium of choice, the key ingredient to changing the marketing conversation from one of metrics, strategies, tactics and sales cycles is to start looking at your consumers as people you can connect with. Real people with real emotions with very real lives. People you want to invest in and who, hopefully, want to invest in you, too.

Once we reframe the reason we’re doing any of our marketing and communication initiatives, we can begin to change our creation process, too.

Changing the Creation Process

Think about the last time you’ve had a really great idea or you were building something new. Did you share that with your audience early on? Or, did you hold onto it and create in a bubble? If your answer was that you created in a bubble, you’re not alone.

Most of us protect our ideas fiercely and we don’t let anyone into our process until the product is perfect. We don’t want to unleash any part of it into the world until we’re sure it’s ready and we struggle with fear, perfectionism and doubt, which often keeps us quiet. Unfortunately, there are many downsides to doing things this way.

The first is that you’re losing the opportunity for valuable feedback from the people who will use your creation and you therefore risk creating the wrong thing. You may also double-down on specific features that your customers don’t find useful in the end.

Chargify posts about new feature releases and, when customers comment, they engage regularly. This allows them to receive real-time feedback about what’s working and what isn’t.

The second is more emotional, but equally as important, and it’s the thing that is likely having the most impact on poor launches and mediocre sales results. What is that thing? Not allowing people the opportunity to fall in love with and become invested in your product.

When you’re creating in a bubble, you’re more likely than not extremely passionate about what you’re building and you’re also likely to be falling in love with it. It’s hard not to when you spend that much time on any one thing. It’s easy to think that everyone else will love it, too. We do this with our children, our pets and our partners already, why wouldn’t this be true with our big idea?

In order to see success with a launch or a release, we need to be letting people come along for the journey as early as possible.

We need to pull back the curtain and let them look inside. We need to allow them to be part of the iteration and feedback process. More importantly, we need to let them see all of the amazing, incredible, wonderful and inspiring parts of the creation so that they can look at it through the same lens we do.

Buffer regularly shares intimate business details, including salaries, business processes and behind-the-scenes information to create transparency with their customers, which helps to build trust.

How to Pull Back the Curtain

There’s a simple, four step process that you can take to begin the process of creating an emotional connection with your audience.

Research Your Audience

Freshbooks has said that part of their success was in getting to know their first one hundred customers very, very well. This is such an important activity as it allows you to hone in on the type of people you’re attracting to your company, what they need and what’s important to them.

Price Intelligently not only understands their demographic well, they also put them on the home page to really drive the point home. An extremely effective way to get customers instantly engaged.

If you don’t know who it is that you’re talking to, you’re going to have a hard time communicating in an intimate and effective way. This is why honing in on who you are talking to and holding that persona in your mind is key. If you publish for many but write for one, the conversation will feel directed and the people who resonate with the type of person you have in mind will feel as though you are talking to them.

Infuse Personality and Heart Into Your Brand

The simplest piece of advice around this is: have fun! Don’t worry about showing people a potential mess or an imperfect product. Let them see the blood, sweat and tears that go into creating something. Show them what you’re working on and have fun with that process.

People don’t do business with bland and boring messaging — they want to do business with companies that make them feel something. Ask yourself often, how can I communicate with my audience in a way that creates connection?

Canva not only shares customer stories on Instagram but they feature really heartwarming stories with impact.

Communicate and Tell Stories that Matter

If your website is a glorified brochure, you’re going to be much less effective in your marketing. Instead, find ways to become customer-focused and put them in the spotlight.

Through case studies or client stories, you could share with your community how people are already using your product. By doing so, they’ll be able to see exactly how they may use your product, too, and they’ll be inspired to use your tool to achieve the same goals and results as the folks you feature.

Shopify puts customers up-front-and-centre on their website by featuring client success stories.

Many startups have also created blogs or publications that they use to talk about what it is they are doing in the company, how they are building their product and what’s coming up that customers should get excited for. This is a fantastic way to establish thought leadership but also show how you are “walking the talk”, so to speak.

Basecamp, as one example of a transparent SaaS company, shares intimate details around their business and product process often through their Medium publication, Signal vs. Noise.

Through social, we can share behind-the-scenes photos to show people what we’re up to, which helps to bring our audience along for the ride. Seth Godin has said, “Marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make but the stories you tell.” Ask yourself often — how can I tell the story of what it is we’re doing?

The four types of behind-the-scenes content that work really well are:

1) Company culture and team-building content

2) Update or progress report style posts

3) Personal or heartfelt posts

4) Posts that are infused with personality or humour

Here’s the crew over at Slack injecting both team-building, company culture and personality into one post.

At the heart of it, we simply need to communicate out to the world what we’re doing, what we’re working on and why we think it’s awesome so that other people can find reasons why they think it’s awesome, too.

Away We Go

If you’re feeling a little more inspired to connect with your customers and communicate with them a little more authentically, transparently and vulnerably, great!

The next step is to encourage all of your team members to get on board with this idea, too. Together, you can become the champions of the product you are building and begin to share that with people on a regular basis.

Through the act of pulling back the curtain, you’ll create opportunities for solid connection with the people who surround your company and as a result, you’ll build better relationships with those who will support, and invest in, you.