Features or Solutions: Listen to Your Audience

As a SaaS founder, you may often find yourself enamored with the features and functionalities of your product. Every detail is a point of pride for you. However, your customers—the recipients of your communication—may not share this passion. Your customers have challenges, problems, or pain points they need your software to address. At the same time, these customers represent diverse personas with different roles and responsibilities within their organizations.

Understanding the Audience: The “Customer-Led” Approach

It’s challenging to identify who your exact audience is when they engage with your text, blog post, or website. Are they technical experts, marketing professionals, salespeople, leadership figures, or someone else entirely?

The concept of Customer-Led Communication emphasizes tailoring your messaging to specific job roles among your audience in a language they understand. Different roles require different information:

• For leadership, the focus might be on the overall business impact, cost savings, and organizational efficiency your application delivers.
• For sales teams, it’s about how your solution increases leads or streamlines the sales process.
• For IT teams, they need to understand technical integrations, security features, and scalability.

Even within a seemingly homogeneous audience—like dentists, for example—different roles such as receptionists, technicians, or marketers will interpret and value your message differently.

Redefining the Message: From Features to Solutions
Instead of focusing on features, describe the solutions your product offers:

• What challenges does your application solve for leadership, sales, marketing, IT, or other job functions?
• Create targeted sections or pages on your website explaining the specific benefits for each of these groups.

This approach shifts the narrative from “Here’s what we can do” to “Here’s what we can do for you,” a subtle but critical difference.

Practical Implementation

On your website, especially the homepage, avoid overwhelming visitors with features. Instead, highlight the practical outcomes of your application:

• For leadership: Demonstrate how it reduces total cost of ownership (TCO) and streamlines operations.
• For sales: Show how it enhances customer retention and simplifies workflows.
• For marketing: Explain how it drives engagement and tracks metrics effectively.

Next Steps

This is just the first step in crafting effective SaaS communication. Future blog posts will dive deeper into converting features into solutions by focusing on what each function accomplishes for the recipient.

By adopting a Customer-Led approach, you can ensure your messaging resonates with diverse roles, ultimately fostering stronger connections and driving business success.