Why I Published a 100 B2B SaaS Audit Report

One day, during an interview process for a Product Marketing role, I was asked:

Think of the most technical feature of a developer tool you worked on in the past. Imagine you’re at a party, chatting with a friend who is not a developer. How would you to them what that feature does?

After a couple of seconds, I apologized as I saw no other way to answer:

I’m sorry, I will not do that.

The interviewer was a bit surprised, and possibly a little put out. But I explained:

If my friend isn’t a developer, why would I bother them with things they don’t care about, especially when it’s getting into the details? We’re at a party, they just want to have a good time, not hear a monologue from me until someone saves them with some actual entertainment.

The reality is that, far too often, Product Marketing struggles in building the right messaging, especially when it comes to highly technical products.

And as much as I picked this specific anecdote, I’ve faced countless similar situations, where some brilliant technology isn’t sold the right way. My career even started with that.

So I decided it was time for me to crunch some data, build some metrics, and tell that story of the majority of tech B2B SaaS founders, at least in France.

The report is here, the story is below.

The impact

Growth.

It’s all about it. It’s the very reason why you hire a marketing team, and most likely a sales team.

Let’s think “Product Led Growth”. Unless you somehow managed to go viral, which rarely never happens for B2B SaaS, one of your traction channels is possibly ads/SEM. I won’t make it a drawing, you have the picture of the journey in your mind:

1. someone types a couple of keywords in a search engine, vaguely related to your activity (depending on how accurate your ads campaign is), with a vague purchase intent, or possibly none;
2. for a reason you still don’t know, they click on your ad (which has a cost for you);
3. they land on a page where you have about 5 seconds time to convince them they should buy your product.

It’s about the visibility you have on the process. Now the weaker your messaging is, obviously, the weaker the conversion rate in between each of these steps. And your Customer Acquisition Cost sky-rockets (if ever you actually acquire any customer).

OK, too much unknown here.

Let’s go for “Sales Led Growth” and equivalents. Let’s hire sales people instead, it’s their job to convince people to buy. They’re incentivized on revenue after all. Let’s think of the new journey:

1. some BDR reaches out to thousands of people who are working at an industry vaguely related to your business, with a job position that could relate, to tell them how great your product is;
2. surprisingly, that picture of their dog in the outbound email got them to book a call with your sales team;
3. your account exec is so good that he could have sold a mortgage scheme to the Pope, just as well as peanut butter to someone with a groundnut allergy;
4. your product team quits after burning out trying to prioritize between “building a feature that assesses the value of the Vatican” and “making an allergy free peanut-butter”, while keeping up the latest application performance monitoring feature you published.

But you made a couple 100’s of MRR.

The 76% problem

Let me be clear. On a very regular basis, I’m astonished by the creativity and intelligence of French Tech founders.

Yet one thing always struck me, and is now very clear and factual with this report. Tech founders default to telling about features, once they built a product.

Is it because features are concrete and provable? That would match the spirit of a scientist, for sure. Now, across the SaaS sites I audited, the data is clear: only 25% of messaging addresses the problem; 38% is features.

There’s a saying I’ve seen in the “Valley” more than 10 years ago already: nobody cares about your product. Your customers have a problem, for which they need a solution. If they could have the problem fixed without using your tool, that would be much more of a relief for them. And they would possibly pay even more for that.

If you’re throwing technical jargon and features at them, that’s a cognitive load they can very well live without. And they’ll leave, that’s quite possible.

Now even before they land on your site; if we’re back to our ads story, which ad would you rather click based on the messaging below?

Ad #1:

Ubik. Adaptive multi-vector proximity intelligence. For what counts.

Ad #2:

You spent 14 minutes looking for your keys this morning. Ubik finds them. Pick up Ubik at your nearest drugstore.

(Thank you, Philip.)

The lack of focus

If there’s one thing we failed at, with the start-up company I joined at the beginning of my career, it’s focus.

We wanted to conquer the entire world. We had an amazing idea, everyone would buy it, and we would be millionaires. And people would love us.

No one bought it. We did get quite a few people to like us, though, which is somewhat comforting.

This resonnates so much with one of the key things this report validates: 85% of the sites I audited target three or more segments.

Whether there is a belief you can serve a diverse crowd, or fear that you don’t make enough revenue from a single market segment, the result is the same: dilution of your positioning.

In the previous paragraph, I tried to establish the fact that you should talk in your users’ words and your user’s problems. If your homepage is built to be read by more than one ICP (Ideal Customer profile, combination of firmography, persona and use case), it’s made to be read by no one.

ICP-specific landing pages? Good try, but that’s barely scrathing the surface. Your entire content (marketing AND sales collateral) should be targeted and written for a specific ICP. If you’re Hubspot, that’s achievable. If you’re between series B and D, you probably still want to pick your battles. If you’re early stage, this is pure operational friction blockade.

Of course, aiming at a single ICP feels like base-jumping without a parachute. So you’ll want to put a lot of effort in finding the right target, iterating on traction channels, messaging, and conversations with leads. Probably a lot more than on building your product, which is of course the more comforting part, since you have some control over it.

But as soon as you start having the right signals, and ability to reproduce closing a deal with nearly the same messaging… time to hammer down! And, surprisingly, you’ll end up developing great features you never thought of before talking to those customers who all have the same problems.

It’s only a symptom

You’ve understood it if you’ve read me that far. It’s not on the shoulders of your marketing team.

No matter how good they can be at building messaging or running any sort of marketing operations, they cannot just be the end of the food chain. Either you have a dedicated “Go To Market” team, whose work is precisely to keep on refining positioning through hands-on work and meaningful conversation, or that’s part of the responsibility of that marketing team already.

During my studies, I heard a lot about the Marketing Mix, McCarthy’s “4 Ps” (Product, Price, Place, Promotion). It was called the marketing mix for a good reason, I guess. BTW, I quite like the 7 Ps extension with People, Process, and Physical Evidence.

As a final word, I’m talking a lot about the importance of building expertise lately. This is the key to great SaaS vs those that can definitely be taken over by AI. And that expertise is absolutely not in how you built your product. It is on how you understand your customers and help them fix their problems.

Some recommended literature: The Mom test.

Featured image by Maud Bocquillod