It’s such a familiar picture. Your SaaS product is sound. Gartner’s reports showcase there’s a market for it. Looking at the number of downloads of your lead magnets, there seems to be genuine interest. Still – every deal your sales team is involved in feels like fighting a battle to convert.
Very few of your prospects are saying ‘no’; they’re just postponing things for valid reasons that seem out of your control. And with the end of the quarter nearing, offering a considerable discount starts to feel like your only weapon – again…
Recognizable, right?
What’s happening here is that you’re SaaS business got stuck at the bottom of the hierarchy. And the only way to get unstuck is to do something fundamentally different. Pipelines often grow huge, not because of effective marketing but because your prospects don’t have a solid reason to decide. So they don’t.
The reason they don’t decide can be plenty:
- It isn’t clear enough what they will gain
- Every product they’re looking at seems similar at face value
- This project is competing with many other projects on their agenda
- They have plenty of options to choose from, incl. doing nothing
And I could go on like this for a while
This often has nothing to do with the prospect itself or the sales exec owning the account: It’s more fundamental.
To get unstuck, two critical ingredients are critical:
- 👉 Desire and
- 👉 Limiting their options
This is where strategic positioning comes in. In a market drained with competitors, it’s still possible to position yourself in such a way that makes your competitors irrelevant. But to do so, you need to showcase empathy for what your customers long for and do away with the belief that you can help everyone.
In my book The Remarkable Effect, I talk about a simple diagram and three basic questions:
- ✅ Is what you offer valuable in the eyes of your ideal customer?
- ✅ Is it critical on their agenda?
- ✅ Are you exceeding expectations in delivering it?
- If you’re answering any of the questions with ‘no’ – start again.
It’s in the combination of the three questions where you know you got something desirable – and an ability to become ‘the one’ – rather than ‘one of many.’ Making an effort to get this right is a critical ingredient in what I refer to as your value foundation. This foundation helps to align everything – Marketing, Product Strategy, Sales, Services – and put a flywheel in motion that’s hard to stop.
So think about when the question “How much do we have to lower our price to win this deal?” comes up.
You now have a choice—a pretty valuable one.