No one needs your solution unless they have a problem

Let me give this to you straight:  Nobody really cares about your SaaS solution. 

They don’t care how it’s built.  They don’t want to see a demo.  And they don’t want to talk to you about it.

At least not yet.

No one has any interest in your solution… until they see that they have a problem and they suspect you may be able to solve it.

I know this sounds harsh and painfully obvious.  But then why do so many websites sound like this?

Our world-class (fill in the blank) SaaS solution offers this brilliant function, that brilliant function, and this other brilliant function. It’s way better than somebody else’s solution.  Click here for a free trial/to request a demo/ to talk with a salesperson.

I’m sure that some fraction of visitors that see this description on a website will actually click through.  But it requires that these folks do a lot of work.  They need to figure out for themselves why any of these features matter to them.  They need to make the connection between their problem and this solution. 

And that’s not all they need to do.  They’ll also need to assess whether it’s an urgent problem.  Is it something that they can live with, or does it really need their immediate attention? (See “Your toughest competitor… inertia.”)

 When all we talk about is features, features, and features, we’re asking the visitor to do a lot of work on their own.  And by the way, we’re asking them to do all this work in maybe a minute or less.  That’s how much time they’re likely to give with us when they first come to our website.

 Why do we force people to work so hard?

 I’ll guess at why this happens.  It’s often because we fall in love with our technology.  We get so wrapped up in the elegant solution we’ve developed, that we forget the problem we built it to solve in the first place.  Or at least we forget that we need to explain the problem to the prospective customer.  We’re too eager to spew out everything we can say about the solution… even before the person knows what we’re trying to solve.  (See “Demo?  Not so fast.”)

 Earning the right to show more

 Instead of talking about features, features, and more features, a website would probably generate a lot more engagement – clicks, downloads, trials, whatever – if we marketing folks made it easier for visitors to see the problem we solve.  We should make it easy to see the connection between their problem and our solution.  We shouldn’t rely on the visitor to do that work. 

 Before we go into all kinds of detail about our solution, we want the visitor nodding their head and thinking: “Yes, I see I have this problem in my organization, the way I’m trying to solve it now isn’t working, and it needs immediate attention.”

 Only then will we have earned the right to show our solution.

 Nobody needs a solution until they know they have a problem.