I’m Co-founder of a SaaS Startup (ABtesting.ai) and yesterday I received the most beautiful email from one of our users (now a proper customer) telling me happily about how our tool made him earn an extra 30k last year just using it for one hour in total. Instantly after reading it, I found myself smiling so much, and, as usual, I entered Slack to digitally celebrate (because #covid-19) with my coworkers.
I went to bed last night, thinking about why that email made me so happy, and I understood, right there, the importance of truly trying to help your user thrive over trying to help yourself thrive by selling him your product. Do I make sense?
I’m aware I’m not the first person to talk about this -not even close-, but now I understand it more than ever, and I’m loving it!
The thing is that most companies (big or small), which try to prosper in this capitalist world, used to focus -and some still do- all their time and resources on one thing: selling to customers. This is absolutely not wrong; it’s the rational thing to do: if you sell, you make money; so, if you sell more, you make more money.
One thing that this project taught me so far after interacting with hundreds of users, is to really understand them not as a customer, but as a person (specially for B2B SaaS). This can sound silly, but if you really think about it, what can a customer or potential customer do? Only two things: buy or not buy. And a person? Well a person is so much more complex than that. A person can be doing well, or not so good; a person can be happy, sad, angry, have passions, fears…
What happens is that you get so caught up in the objectives (sell, sell ,sell) that it’s easy to forget about the fact that that potential customer you are chasing around is an actual person.
A great example of how focusing on the people you can help instead of on the customers you can sell to is a better strategy for growth, is the reason why I’m writing these words.
The guy who sent me the email owns a website related to travelling, and found our tool so helpful that decided to purchase our most expensive plan.
(Do you understand what it means that, thanks to our tool, a traveling-related website made an extra $30k in the first year of one of the biggest global pandemics in the history of the world?? It’s nuts!!!)
Sorry for the detour. Where I’m trying to get here is that, if you really add value to people, the “selling and customer retention” part will come along with it (and so much stronger than if you just center on selling).
As a startup, these types of stories are what motivates us to keep working and give the best of us to deliver as much value as possible to our users; because when they win, we win double: first because we are probably closer to make a sale and, second (but most important), because we love watching them succeed :)
Hope these words gave you some motivation to keep putting in the work!
If you feel like it, you can check us out here: ABtesting.ai; because, who knows? Maybe you are our next success story ;)