Mini : Is your SaaS human-centric? Are you sure?
Having the opportunity to lead meaningful conversations with customers and potential customers is a gift. They can help you find the correct patterns you need to use to reflect the value of your product, attract new customers by communicating in familiar ways, and further settle your brand identity (to mention a few advantages).
In B2B SaaS, however, with multiple ways to track behavior online, chatting with your actual users is often perceived as a burden and last resource (rather than an opportunity to gain clarity and improve). The decision-making process and the digital product essence allows teams to gain insight from data without conversations.
It makes sense. We assume people want to avoid interviews and wasting time discussing a particular product, especially when we can find the answers via digital tracking. It would be redundant to have a call to discuss how you use the product when you can see it in heatmaps. But that's different from what research is about. It's more than understanding what people do, but also why they do it.
Multiple team members at 42 come from a B2C background, and Betti, our Research Lead, comes from a place where research was robust and permanent. To her, researching is crucial to understand what consumers think today to help brands stand out in a noisy time. It's not something you do after you notice quick experimentation and iteration isn't doing the trick, nor when you run out of options. Instead, you do it before your competitors do so you can understand consumers and win.
Knowing what people do might not be enough. Grasping why they do things a certain way or even care about your digital product/category can be why your product stands out and connects with their problems.
Everyone claims to be customer-centric, but are we? Really? Are we reducing people to datasets? Is data enough?
This is for all of you, our readers, to answer. And while data is crucial to understand patterns at scale, stories, rituals, and context are essential to see what is happening behind those patterns. B2C could leverage data at scale better, and B2B could invest more in human-centric research.
Perhaps it is time to revisit the role of the planner, a common B2C role in agencies and companies. A person who knows the product, the category, the user, and the bridges between them. A person who orchestrates teams under a unified voice of the consumer so all campaigns have impact.
Do you have a person in your B2B SaaS who owns the consumer's voice? Do you know what the consumer's voice sounds like?
What did you think of this mini?
😍 Loved it
👍 Just ok
👎 Not for me
We want to thank our sponsor, RevenueHero, who keeps 42/ free for you.
RevenueHero helps GTM teams increase their pipeline by qualifying and showing the right sales rep’s calendar immediately after a form submit. They’ve helped companies like Sprinto, Cast, FusionAuth, Ethyca, and many more achieve their pipeline goals.
You’re in good company.
Folks from these companies read 42/
Thank you for reading!