🔆 The new  game you make your customers play

Posted on Friday, January 20th, 2023 by Ton Dobbe

For those of you who have read my book The Remarkable Effect, one of the most powerful traits that define those software businesses we keep talking about is trait #8: They sell the idea, not the product.

Great examples of that are 

  • Hubspot – famous for the idea of “Inbound marketing.”
  • Drift – famous for the idea of “conversational marketing.”
  • Gainsight – famous for the idea of “customer success.

All three vendors saw an undeniable change in the market, realized how this change negatively impacted a substantial portion of the market and concluded that the only way to conquer this change successfully companies needed to play a new game.

The ‘new game’ idea became their company’s narrative, enabling them to carve out their category in a highly dense, competitive market.

How did they go about this?

The technique is called Narrative Design. One company I recently helped craft their narrative is TOPdesk, a SaaS vendor that’s pioneered the very competitive Service Management space.

  1. The undeniable change they saw: The world is changing, service expectations are rising, and the global workforce is declining  
  2. The impact this has: Service teams struggle to meet evolving customer expectations
  3. What’s required to adopt? Instead of trying to be in control of the process all the time, service professionals have to embrace constant transformation: Service Flux

 If you analyze ten suites in the Service Management space, they’ll likely all look alike, with a 95% similar feature set. 

But that’s not what it’s about. 

Not every solution is created equal. Every vendor can take a different approach, i.e., a different idea, to help customers transform and enable them to play a new game – to win.

For Hubspot, that’s Inbound Marketing. For Drift, that’s conversational marketing. For Gainsight, that’s Customer Success. For TOPdesk, that’s Service Flux

Question for you to reflect upon

What’s the new game you make your customers play?

 

Be Remarkable

Like this message?

Every day I send out a short 2 min reflection on shaping a B2B SaaS business no one can ignore. Join the 1,000+ subscribers that have become fans. 

Not sure? Browse the archive