Director of Sales and Strategic Partnerships at ReadyCloud, the Shipping, Returns, Growth Marketing and CRM Suite built for e-commerce.
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As a sales leader, it’s essential to understand the pain points in software as a service (SaaS). Identifying these points and leveraging them strategically can help you unlock success in your SaaS business. To help you get a head start, I’ll share some of the knowledge I’ve learned from my career in selling software as an SDR.
1. Ask the right questions.
The first step in identifying what pain points your solution may resolve as well as present to users is to start by first determining what questions to ask.
Here are a few that come right to mind.
• What issues do my customers typically experience?
• What areas of the product are difficult for customers to use?
• What areas of the product are customers not using as expected?
• What features are customers asking for?
• What features do customers need but do not know how to use?
• What features could be added to the product to make it more usable?
• Are there any competitors that offer features that we don’t?
Using this information, you’ll not only uncover potential pain points but also be able to develop efficient strategies to address them.
2. Analyze the data.
Once you have identified the questions to ask, it’s time to analyze the data. Look for patterns in customer feedback, usage data, support tickets and other sources to gain insights into potential as well as existing customer pain points.
For example, a customer feedback survey may reveal that customers are having difficulty understanding the product’s pricing structure. What’s more, analysis of this key usage data may reveal that customers are not utilizing certain features as you had expected. Cross-examination of your existing and past support tickets may shed even further light on aspects like customers having difficulty navigating the product’s user interface.
Knowing how to leverage this data to your advantage can help you better understand your customers’ pain points and know what measures you need to put into place to resolve them to improve onboarding and long-term retention.
3. Leverage the right strategies.
Once you have identified the questions to ask and analyzed the data, it’s time to develop strategies to leverage your insights. I’ve created a helpful list below that I’ve used in the past: Now it’s yours to reference in your pursuit of pain point resolution.
• Improve documentation. If customers are having difficulty understanding the product’s pricing structure, consider providing more detailed documentation or offering online tutorials to help customers better understand the product.
• Update your user interface.
When users are having difficulty navigating the interface, consider updating the design to make it more intuitive and easy to use.
• Add features.
It's not uncommon for customers to ask for new features that are not currently available. Consider adding them to the product and winning over those customers for the long haul.
4. Develop a plan.
Now that you have the pain points identified, you're going to want to take action to resolve them expediently. Here are the top four measures I recommended putting into place as part of your plan of action. They’ve worked wonderfully for my team and me in the past, and I am confident that they’ll help you out, too.
1. Set clear goals for addressing the customer pain points.
2. Assign tasks to team members to implement the strategies.
3. Monitor the progress of tasks to ensure they are on track.
4. Measure the results of the strategies to ensure they are meeting the goals.
5. Test, test, test...(and test some more for good measure) to best ensure viability and efficacy of your updated solution.
Let's wrap this up.
Using these simple methods I’ve learned from over a decade of being an SDR at a popular e-commerce SaaS company, you can not only improve your product from top to bottom. You'll also see the results pass beyond that in the form of new customers, better retention and improved loyalty in the long run.
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