Scale a SaaS Business via Customer Success and Product Marketing Collaboration
Any Early Stage Company is in a Relentless Pursuit of Customers, Revenue, and Product-Market Fit
As a result, a founder often — and appropriately — leads the sales effort, and it’s typical as well that a founder leads or, at a minimum, participates heavily in positioning and marketing efforts. The website copy for an early stage company? Likely written by the founder. Additionally, a founder often takes on responsibilities for customer deployment and account management.
And that’s OK. A founder possesses unmatched knowledge and conviction regarding the business. From the perspective of a visionary or early adopter customer, who better is there to be sold to and working alongside to realize value than the founder?
During this time, an early stage company often reactively bends and flexes in support of customer use cases — and revenue — that don’t necessarily sync with product positioning and features. When this happens, a company also finds itself creating bespoke customer deployment plans.
As an early stage company validates product-market fit and begins its transition to growth stage, its founder realizes the critical importance of building scalability into the company. The savvy founder will also realize cracks in the foundation represented by the approaches previously taken in the company’s pursuit of customers, revenue, and product-market fit:
- Customer outcomes are too varied, ill-defined, and poorly understood internally.
- The product is not well aligned with the customer outcomes. While the product supports certain outcomes well, its support of other outcomes falls short, leading to customer dissatisfaction.
- Unique, one-off deployment plans (aka, paths to value) mean deployment resources are reactively and chaotically responding to customer demands, negatively impacting the ability of customers to achieve their outcomes.
- Product and company messaging is inconsistent and unfocused.
These cracks, if left untreated, prohibit the founder and their team from scaling the SaaS business effectively.
Your company’s customer success and product marketing functions are key to addressing the obstacles to scaling a SaaS business. With in-depth knowledge of the market, the product, and the customer, these functions are uniquely suited to develop and execute a prescribed ‘path to value’ that enables customers to achieve both initial and long-term success.
Why Customer Success and Product Marketing Are Key to Overcoming Obstacles to Scaling
Product marketing adopts a macro-level perspective in order to understand problems faced by the market, what solutions a prospect or customer may consider to help them solve that problem, and how a product is uniquely suited to solve the problem.
Customer success leads a customer to achieve their desired outcomes through the use of the product and services. Customer success establishes and nurtures a long-term partnership with each customer by intimately understanding the challenges that stand in the way of a customer achieving their outcomes and navigating a customer past those challenges.
Together, customer success and product marketing provide unique insight into how the product is positioned in the market, the problems it’s intended to solve, and how well the product actually solves those problems. Combining the two perspectives allows a scaling company to effectively analyze a customer’s desired outcome against the product’s ability to achieve those outcomes, and then build a playbook that maps out how current and future customers can be most effective at adopting and using the product.
Four Steps for Overcoming Obstacles to Scaling a SaaS Business
Here are the four steps that customer success and product marketing should execute in order to overcome the obstacles to scalability:
- Map a customer’s desired outcomes addressed by your product as well as how how your company solves for each outcome
- Identify the product capabilities that deliver the most value along with any gaps between outcomes and capabilities
- Define a ‘path to value’ to help a customer achieve both immediate and longer term success
- Align ‘path to value’ and desired customer outcomes with product messaging and sales collateral
Stay Tuned…
Subsequent blog posts will further define each of the four steps, including methodologies for successfully completing each step. Make sure you’re subscribed to our newsletter so you’re the first to know when new insights are available.
If you’re considering how you can scale your SaaS business via customer success and product marketing, our team is ready to assist. Get in touch with us today to learn more about our capabilities.
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