Features vs. Benefits: How to Maximize the Impact of Your Messaging

(Coming Soon)

Georgiana Laudi & Claire Suellentrop

Forget The Funnel

“Sell benefits, not features”. 

We’ve all seen the UserOnboard image of Mario + the magic flower = Super Mario. Or Popeye + spinach = super extra-strength Popeye. 

It’s the best practice that says you should focus on selling the benefits of your product, rather than the features. 

What if we told you that this is a best practice that’s lazy and risky?

Welp. It is. Different customers value different things at different stages of their decision-making. We can’t assume that our customers only care about the benefits or business outcomes of your product. 

Don’t get us wrong. Making the outcomes your product provides clear is important. But is it the right thing to be leading with across all of your marketing and messaging and onboarding? I think you’re already picking up what we’re putting down. 

So what should you do instead? 

Shock. You gotta start with knowing what will resonate with your customers and then translating that into messaging that will convert. 

That’s what we dig into on this episode of the Forget The Funnel Podcast. And we’re joined by Anthony Pierri from FletchPMM  to help dispel the whole “sell benefits, not features” best practice brilliantly. 

He shares the example of the humble homepage; how a lot of brands write its content for the person who they think will approve the deal - some executive - leaning way too heavily into the ‘benefits’ and ‘outcomes’ they think they’ll care about. 

Increased revenue. Reduced risk. Saved time. 

…which leads to totally undifferentiated “me too” messaging. 

This episode is for SaaS founders & practitioners who are looking to: 

  • Home in on the value themes your customers care about
  • Map those themes to relevant product capabilities (whether feature or benefit-based)
  • And make sure your messaging is targeted and effective and converts more high-LTV customers.

Discussed: 

  • How exclusively focusing on benefits can lead to generic, “me too” messaging that turns prospects off - if they even pay attention in the first place.
  • Why understanding what customers value at different decision-making stages leads to higher LTV customers.
  • And techniques for identifying what resonates most with your customers to develop targeted messaging and marketing.

Key moments:

01:05 - Anthony Pierri explains how SaaS companies are mixing up features, outcomes and benefits on their product homepage and why that’s a flawed best practice.

08:56 - Claire unpacks Anthony’s “benefits vs features” approach and also asks: what defines a benefit vs an outcome? 

13:22 - Claire notes the importance of knowing what your unique features and product attributes are in a saturated market – why and *when* should you highlight your capabilities as your unique selling points.

18:22 - Georgiana tells us how “pre-research Gia” used to identify the functional and emotional benefits   of product features in reverse. From there, she and Claire share their approach for features vs benefits when working with teams. 

23:25 - Georgiana brings up how Jobs-to-Be-Done interviews can give you the direction needed to identify the value themes of your product - and more importantly, identify what the features of your product are that deliver the value your customer is looking for.

29:00 - The pair highlight how their process helps product owners better understand the language customers are using, prioritize what customers actually care about, and get  a roadmap for messaging. 

32:40 - How will you know your approach is working? Georgiana talks us through ways to test and validate your messaging.

Transcript

Georgiana Laudi: Relying on the best practice of just leaning on benefits is super lazy, but also super risky. Because to the point that Anthony made, your particular ideal customer might care a lot more about features, or they might not. They might care about benefits. It depends on who your ideal customer is. 

Intro: Hey everybody, welcome to the Forget the Funnel podcast, we’re Gia and Claire, founders of Forget the Funnel, a product marketing and growth consultancy that helps SaaS businesses learn from their best customers, map and measure their experiences, and unlock their best levers for growth.

If you're looking to help your team make smarter decisions, this show is for you. 

Claire Suellentrop: Hey everyone, welcome or welcome back to the Forget the Funnel podcast. Today we're picking on another best practice, and it's a classic you might have heard before, which is to sell benefits, not features. So for this one, we asked Anthony Pierri, Co-founder and partner at FletchPMM to share what he thinks, and then Gia and I will share our take. So here's Anthony now. 

Anthony Pierri: My name is Anthony Pierri. I'm a co-founder partner at FletchPMM. We're a product marketing consultancy. We primarily help early stage B2B SaaS companies figure out the best way to position their product. And then we help them translate that strategy into a clear, compelling, easy to digest homepage,

one flawed best practice that we see people misapply all the time is that you should always lead with the benefit. And not the feature. The two of these things are constantly pitted against each other that you should not talk about features. Nobody cares about features. They just care about benefits.

Depending on how you define the word benefit. It can lean less bad or more bad. Most

people when they're defining benefit are actually talking about outcomes. And a lot of times in B2B, they're talking about business outcomes. So what ends up happening is that every company that is quote unquote leading with the benefit is actually leading with outcomes that a business leader would care about.

So you things like Save time, reduce risk, increase revenue. And what ends up happening is they destroy all of their differentiation in the process. And most of the time, this is caused by a lot of different reasons, but a lot of the times it's because companies, startups, especially startups, They're thinking about who signs the check, not who starts the sales process.

So what ends up happening is they write the page for the person that they think is going to kill the deal at the end, the CFO, some sort of business leader. So they say what does the CFO care about? What's the benefit they would care about? And so they start writing things like increased revenue, reduced risk, all those high level benefits, when in reality, the executive, the C suite, all those people, they are not going to be reading the homepage in the first place.

They're going to be at the end brought in by some lower level stakeholder who really cares about it. And they're going to have to make a business case to get that executive to care, and that's when outcomes and things like that come into play. The homepage is not the place to make that case.

So I think the reason that so many people will lead with benefits over features. It's because it's people who are not deep in the marketing world, especially in early stage, you have founders who are not marketers by trade. I think there's some stats where it's like a tiny percentage, like single digit percentage of founders are marketers and a single digit percentage are VCs, so the whole ecosystem is missing the market.

You often say. When do we hire our first marketer? That's a very common B2B statement. The fact that nobody really is deep industry marketing expertise from the beginning, I think causes a lot of this stuff. So I've used this analogy before, but if you've ever seen the movie, happy Gilmore. He has the one piece of advice and he says it's all in the hips and it's if that was the only advice that you knew about how to play golf, it's all in the hips.

Like I don't play golf at all. And if I went to the golf course and I think that it's just the hips, I'm going to be swinging my hips all over the place. And it's really going to fall flat. And I'm going to look like a fool. The only piece of advice that a lot of these people have is when I remember I saw LinkedIn posts, I see LinkedIn posts every day.

Don't sell the feature. Nobody cares about features. They care about benefits and where that can go  is if the benefit, if they're like, in my opinion, misusing benefit, like to me, when they talked about the famous Apple example, a thousand songs in your pocket, to me, that's a product capability, right?

You can add a verb carry. And it's explaining, if you think of the caption, if the caption is the picture of the storage amount, right? Like we have, I can't remember how many gigabytes the first iPod was like five gigabytes or whatever. And I said what's the capability I could do with that? You can carry a thousand songs in your pocket.

That to me is the product capability. So if people are saying benefit in that sense, I think it's fine. Leave it with the benefit as much as you want, because you're effectively talking about what the product does. If though you're like the vast majority of people and you assume benefit means outcome and you assume outcome means business outcome.

Ultimately, you're going to really go down a bad track. 

In general, instead of leading with these vague business outcomes, knowing that people, when they read homepages, they're often scanning. So they're jumping from headline to headline. So when they just scan outcomes, there's a company called Walnut on their page. If you gray out the subtext, knowing that most people won't read it and you just read the headlines, it's sell more, sell faster, sell better or something.

And it doesn't tell you anything. So the thing to lead with. Is the, what we would call the product capability. What can I actually do with the thing? And ideally you have a pretty interesting take on whatever the use case is where the capabilities themselves will highlight why you would care about them.

So there was a big product launch recently from Adam Robinson, our B2B. They led with the product capability and it literally just said, identify anonymous website visitors. And send their profile, their LinkedIn profiles to Slack. That was the headline. They didn't have to explain why you would want that.

What's the benefit, right? What's the outcome of doing that? And it was like an insanely fast viral spread. They're already doing over a million ARR. People were all over it because the capability itself, which is attached to that feature, right? To me, if I think about the two, imagine like a, an image is the feature, right?

You can use a picture of what am I looking at on the product? The capability is like, just like the caption. What does this feature do? It's explaining what you would do with it, right? So if you think about it that way. Leading with the capability is almost always the better option and making everything clear, easier to understand, more scannable and getting people to say, Oh, wow, that's really interesting.

And there's going to be people who don't care about your capabilities. And those people are probably not your best fit customers, because if they don't actually care about getting anonymous website visitors, their profiles or links to profiles sent to your slack, it's likely not going to convince them if you say increase revenue with our B2B, right?

They're not going to care because once they finally realize what is this thing and they see those capabilities, if they're not impressed, It won't have mattered what you've said before.

So if you're interested in learning more about our takes, I would say the easiest thing to do would be follow me on LinkedIn or even send me a direct connect request. I connect with basically everyone. I'll probably shoot you a DM. Don't accuse me of being a bot. I don't use bots. I am on this platform all day.

And it is upsetting when people are like, how you couldn't have responded that fast. I'm like, I literally am just on LinkedIn all day. So that's why follow my partner, Rob Kaminski. We both post content about positioning, messaging, homepages and stuff. Usually multiple times per week. And if you wanted to work with us on our homepage, on your homepage, trying to figure out your positioning, or if you feel like you're struggling with any of those things, I don't know who to target. I have multiple different stakeholders, different departments, different use cases. I could focus on, do I need to focus on a use case? Lots of product categories, I don't know what to put myself into. I have to pick one, all these types of things that make it hard to position, especially as an early stage B2B company just hop on our website.

We have everything listed our pricing, our process, our models, all that stuff is all just, you can check it out and even read our homepage. And it's a, if you can't figure out what we do on our homepage, then don't work with us. Cause that's basically what we're saying is we're gonna make it very clear.

So read our page, see if you can figure it out. It should be pretty clear. And yeah, looking forward to connecting with whoever. 

Georgiana Laudi: Okay. That was awesome. So glad to hear from Anthony on that. I think it's awesome. And I think he's right in a lot of ways. And there's some things that I think are worth digging into.

Off the bat, I guess we start at the top this idea of selling benefits versus features. What does that mean, Claire? Tell us what that means.

Claire Suellentrop: I do think it's a good place to start because Anthony even calls out the fact that when people say benefits, we, we might even mean different things.

Bob Mystic just refers to this as like a dictionary problem or a thesaurus problem. We may be using the same word, but have a different definition of what it is. So to me, selling the benefits, and I think we should come back to what Anthony mentioned about, benefits as outcomes or otherwise.

When I think of Selling benefits. I think of selling, oh, there's that super cheesy, we've used it a million times, like the Mario level up visual analogy.

Georgiana Laudi:  I think it was originally UserOnboard came up with that, and it was the Super Mario jumping on the flower and then turning into, or sorry, not Super Mario, but a Mario brother jumping on the flower and turning into Super Mario.

Claire Suellentrop: Yes. Yes. So it's selling what does your product help the person do versus selling the product itself? That's that visual is the best definition for selling benefits that I can think of. So I would love for you to, yeah, let's pull these apart. Again, Anthony mentioned, some people are talking about selling, focusing on outcomes.

I would love your take on like benefit versus value versus, 

Georgiana Laudi: Yeah, the benefits versus outcomes is really interesting because I think Anthony is 100 percent right. I think that focusing on the outcome can lead to undifferentiated messaging, not to say that the desired outcome shouldn't be a part of your messaging strategy, but should it be like the messaging strategy.

I agree it should not be. We tend to recommend that the companies that we work with, the products that we're developing messaging for focus on like the problem that's being solved within the context that somebody is trying to solve it. So understanding what is the situation that led to this person seeking a new solution?

What is that context that they're in? What situation or previous solution are they struggling with? Knowing that context, understanding the problem that they're trying to solve, and speaking directly to that pain that they're trying to solve is way more effective than focusing your entire messaging strategy on the outcome.

So I agree there, like we tend to talk about like struggles the evaluation and motivations and then desired outcomes. And what's, what motivates somebody to make a decision? What differentiators stand out in there and then desired outcomes is ultimately, what is that better life that they're striving towards?

But that's because we rely heavily on the jobs to be done Methodology for thinking about customers. I'll even say, oh, so I'm gonna say messaging or the customer experience, but just thinking about customers on the whole, we think about that situation, right? The struggle that leads and the trigger moment that leads somebody to seek out a solution.

What motivates them to make a decision? What anxieties did they experience? What are those deal breakers, the pushes and pulls, and then ultimately that desire, those desired outcomes. So when I hear focusing on benefits and equating that with outcomes, I don't see outcomes and benefits as being the same thing.

So I think equating those things is part of the problem of why we've over indexed for benefits. And then when it comes to, what was the other one, value? Value is too big. Of course we're selling value, but that value might be that you're helping somebody out of a painful situation or like a sucky situation.

Or it might be that you're providing them with exactly the capabilities that they've been looking for and haven't been able to find yet. Or it might be that you're providing them with the ability to look like a superstar to their stakeholder or there's a lot of ways to deliver value. So I don't like using the word value because it's boring.

Too broad and means way too many things. 

Claire Suellentrop: Something that I wanted to like, plus one on, I guess you identified situations in which it's not as appropriate to focus on benefits or desired outcomes in messaging. And something that came to mind for me while you were speaking was to get really crystal clear about what this can look like in the market.

Like the more saturated a category is, I think the more focus on features or product attributes becomes useful. I think it was when we were trying to, I think it was when we were trying to fire Airtable as a product in our tech stack that I went looking for replacements. And since Airtable, there have been many similar, like database, but no code types of solutions that have sprung up on the market.

And I had Five different tabs open with five different air table competitors. And it was so difficult to really tell are these actually different? Are they the same product with a different skin? Anyway, all that said, like focusing on the features that differentiate you becomes more important.

The more saturated your category is, or the more sophisticated your buyer is. 

Georgiana Laudi: So in that case, Claire, you were seeking out a tool that you. Needed to know all the capabilities of because you literally needed to use the damn thing, right? You needed to make sure that you were going to be able to do a precise, take a precise action and replace a precise set of capabilities that was going to be going away or that you were no longer happy with.

So your buyer is thinking in terms of very specific capabilities. But we cannot just blanket that capabilities is the only messaging in which that would make sense. So for Airtable, as an example, if you were the functional user within a larger organization, you might need messaging that's more focused on capabilities and features early in your solution seeking mode.

But at some point, the messaging that is going to be most effective for getting buy in with your stakeholders might be something completely different. And might be either a different set of capabilities, or maybe at that point it is a, a set of benefits or some sort of just a, all I'm trying to say at the end of the day is that we don't have one messaging strategy, right?

There isn't one right messaging strategy. Especially in B2B given that in B2B environments, typically there is more than one quote unquote buyer involved and each of those buyers may need a slightly different messaging strategy at a slightly different point in time. in the relationship that company has with your solution.

Ultimately, what I'm trying to say is depending on who you're targeting, at what point in the customer journey, your messaging will change. And in, for some people in some situations or milestones in your relationship with that company, the messaging will change. can shift. It might shift from one set of features to a different set of features.

It might or functional type of benefits or feature more feature focused messaging to other, a different set of features, or it might switch from functional benefits to emotional benefits, or it might switch from features to benefits or the other way around, depending on who is that initial person who's.

Task with solving this problem, seeking out a solution, built, putting together a short list of options, evaluating those options, ultimately floating you up the food chain to whoever else needs to be involved. Maybe a technical buyer, maybe an economic buyer, maybe other functional users that the messaging strategy in each of those situations is different.

So we can't say that like this product for this, one, monolithic customer needs this type of messaging because that's Not the reality of B2B. It's way more complicated than that. I'm going back to that because it sounds complex, but it's actually quite simple. If you can understand the customer experience, that sort of journey, so to speak, or going back to the job to be done.

If you can understand the job to be done of that initial person, And then figure out and understand the relationship they have with others inside of their org and how they're involved in the buying process. And then you map that end to end experience and you identify the different milestones in which you need to deliver value, right?

They need to experience value in order to make a decision to help them to the next milestone and the next. Then it is way easier to make decisions about your messaging strategy and whether to lean into features or into benefits. But until you actually understand that initial person and everybody else that's involved and those milestones.

Claire Suellentrop: So when we were preparing for this episode, you mentioned an anecdote of, the pre research GIA days, attempting to DIY this, right? Attempting to figure out for yourself as someone leading marketing what are the benefits we deliver? So talk me or, what's the value that this product drives?

So talk me through that. 

Georgiana Laudi: Yeah, it was, I'm not sure where the, idea for this came from. I, because I don't even though I don't think it's the right way to do it, I don't inherently think that the exercise is a bad exercise to run through because I think it was helpful. But picture in your mind's eye a spreadsheet, like a Google sheet, where the first column is a really long list of features.

Just just like face value features. And in some cases, once you've done, once you've like just done like a bit of a brain dump on all of the features and all of the capabilities, we're going to get into a dictionary mode here when we talk about the difference between capabilities and features, because there is a difference too.

But just put features in your mind's eye for this. A big long list of all of the features that your product offers. Generally. We, I tend to use the term like feature families because those features will group in some way, right? There's features that naturally go together versus features that have nothing to do with each other.

So in general, there's feature families and then a list of features within those. And then the next column over is functional benefits. And the next column over from that is emotional benefits. And the exercise is, can you go from talking about a feature to thinking about and trying to articulate what the functional benefit of that feature is?

And then thinking about and trying to articulate what the emotional benefit to the individual customer or user is. And it's a useful exercise, but what I Like, what I now know is that I was doing the entire exercise backwards. I was trying to inject, first of all, what I believed the functional benefits were, and what I believed the emotional benefits were.

And I went from features to value, instead of going from value and mapping it back. to features. And so I've just teed you up perfectly, Claire, to talk about what our process for this looks like. Again, because this was like pre research GIA yes, I did that, sir. I ran the surveys, even like crawl surveys.

And I did those things, but of course there was a lot of bandwagoning. And so the customer research that we didn't ultimately end up giving me the answers I needed for messaging. But now, with our I don't want to say with our new way of doing research, but we've been doing this for years, but with this method of research, what is, like, how do we go about it the right way now?

And the way that we would recommend that folks listening to this who are stuck in this features versus benefits not sure which one to lean into, what should they be doing? What's the approach that they should take? 

Claire Suellentrop: Obviously, as we have talked about, many times, our process begins with running jobs to be done interviews with a company's, segment of ideal customers.

And we think about the, like the middle of a customer job statement. So the job statement being, when particular problem arises, help me or give me the product attributes that somebody is looking for, the solution attributes, give me a particular way of solving this problem so that I can desired outcome when we are running interviews.

There's a, there's always a part of the interview where we ask, so you got into the product, you're trying it out. You're, going through the demo process, yada, yada, yada. What happened? When was the moment that you knew that this was the right solution for you? And you could call off the search.

The patterns across interviews. in response to that question, begin to form the middle of that job statement. And from there, we pull apart what are, like, what are the major, we call them value themes, made up that word, what are the major value themes that fit in the middle of that statement? But from there, once we know the major themes, of what customers value in a solution.

We can start bucketing features in, only the most appropriate features in, right? Underneath each of those aims. So you've, you essentially end up with, number one, a lot more clarity in what value to even be describing. You don't have to, you don't have to use your own internal guessing biases. And you end up with a much shorter, versus your enormous brain dump Google Sheet, you end up with a much more concise priority features list.

So you end up knowing actually what to talk about in a much more useful differentiating way. 

Georgiana Laudi: I have a couple of tabs open on my computer and I'm trying to remind myself of some job statements from recent workshops and sprints that we've run with the teams that we've worked with. And I'm reminded that it's not always like a complete straight line from that question to those value themes, but they are a, they're the guardrails.

And sometimes we lean into the answer to that question where it was like, what was that moment? Sometimes we lean into what was it that convinced you, right? What was the what stood out to you about our offering? So sometimes patterns that emerge in the answer to that question, right?

And sometimes it's, look, it's a, it's an interview, so are, is every single question asked in exactly the same way in every single conversation? No, but we are looking for these general themes. So I have a couple of job statements. I have two job statements open in front of me only because these two tabs happen to be open on my computer right now.

But one is, and I won't name the company, but when I'm manually verifying SMS and emails through a UI, and it's taking too much time. So that's the, like, when. situation. That's the context. Give me a straightforward, easy to set up way to test communications so I can automate testing, save time, and get consistent, reliable results.

So that's a job, one job statement, just as an example, that you can already, in that job statement, start to see what parts, like, where The themes sort of start to emerge and easy to set up is a big one. Straightforward was a big one. Testing communications was a big one. That's all taken from that middle part and ultimately the value themes that we identified were easy to integrate.

API reliable API for automated tests. So I'm reading like shorthand right now, reliable API, automated tests, complete quickly and easily. And then comprehensive automation across use cases. So across in this case, across SMS and email functionality, this is a highly technical tool.

Claire Suellentrop:  I was going to say, what's the.

Georgiana Laudi: Category? But yeah testing and QA for email and SMS basically in scalable environments. So we're talking about like bulk email and or transactional email and SMS and doing like QA and testing for visual, for deliverability, for all kinds of things. So it's a highly technical tool and a highly technical.

Product. But anyways, that's the sort of job statement or those were the value themes that were developed. So that was the job that we identified. By the way, we identified more than one job to be done in this customer group. That's just the job that the team, the teams, our team and their team decided to prioritize.

So we really were leaning into this like automators. customer job. And for those automators, we identified those three value themes. So the ease of integration of the API, the reliability of the API, which meant a lot of other things. I'm oversimplifying here. I'm going broad strokes. And then the comprehensiveness of the automation capabilities.

Basically, and again, really technical product, quite a technical buyer and the, what we did for the, when we identify those value themes, what we then do is grab literal quotes, like voice of customer from those quotes and put them next to each other so that we can run the exercise. of trying to unpack and reverse engineer, what are the features that deliver that value?

And sometimes when we're reading quotes from those conversations, it will help jog the team's memory in thinking of, like, all the features that deliver that value. So it is the absolute opposite of the exercise that I went through in that spreadsheet. It starts with the patterns that emerge, And then maps to all the way over to okay, what specific features and this exercise.

Every time we run it is like such a mental shift for the team that the, like the room, so to speak, starts like firing up because they all start to realize, oh, this is how we should be thinking about our feature families. To bring that term back in, this is how we should be thinking about, grouping our features together, the product, anybody who's on the product team that's in the room for this conversation starts to think of all these other features they've got on their backlog that fit into these and they're like, Oh, now I know that the easy to integrate API in this case - is the most important thing that this ideal customer is looking for when evaluating this solution. And so any of the items that I have on my backlog or roadmap that tie back to that value theme, made me want to think about expediting. 

Claire Suellentrop: In my head, I'm picturing like your original Google sheet, and then like a comparison Google sheet.

So yours went, I bet I had a brain dump of features. Functional benefits of each, emotional benefits of each. And this is, like you said, the opposite. It's value that we now know customers care about most in seeking a solution, and then voice of customer quotes to back that up and make it feel more real.

And then we can start to cherry pick exactly, which attributes go underneath each value or next to each value. But in addition to being, number one, a mindset shift, And number two, a way to even more easily start to think about the roadmap. Another thing I really love about this exercise, and this goes back to features, capabilities or attributes, but like this goes this helps the team think of other ways that the product or the customer experience delivers value that can slot in there.

For this like QA and testing tool, that straightforwardness of. The API, I see that one of the bullets in that section is like framework specific documentation. That's not necessarily something the team would have ever known that they should highlight that they even have. But to say we have documentation for whatever framework you're using is actually, I would assume, a pretty a pretty compelling statement.

competitive differentiator. 

Georgiana Laudi: Totally. I, you would never normally put like documentation on the, on a feature list even. But it was a major draw and a major reason for their customers, their ideal customers choosing them. But again, it's not something that you would normally put on a feature list at all.

The other thing that I want to highlight here to even bring it home is that the other thing that this exercise does is thinks about. It helps you think about the hierarchy of those value themes. It maps it specifically to voice of customer and it gives you basically the, not to use roadmap, but roadmap for your messaging because you've got that voice of customer.

So how does that customer describe that value? What are the words that they use? Do they talk about the capabilities? Do they talk about the features? Is there a specific aspect of one feature that they, that everybody mentioned or that many people mentioned? If so. Talk about that tiny little micro - 

Claire Suellentrop:  Take those words and put them in your messaging.

Georgiana Laudi: Take those words. That's exactly right. But if on the other hand, they're describing the emotional benefits or if they're talking about the value with broader language or in, broader strokes, then. Use that in your messaging. Have that be the determining factor whether or not you focus on benefits or features.

It is not like a zero sum game. Relying on the best practice of just leaning on benefits is super lazy, but also super risky. Because to the point that Anthony made, your particular ideal customer might care a lot more about features, or they might not. They might care about benefits. It depends on who your ideal customer is.

And you need to go and find out the answer to that. What is the specific language that they use? That is the language you should be reflecting back to them. If it's feature focused, it's fine. Go with features. If it's benefits focused, go with benefits. And then the other thing too that I'll say and go back to that we were talking about earlier is the most approp like the right message for the right person at the right time.

This exercise also helps you do that because if you understand the job to be done, then you can think about this messaging and when it is most appropriate to lean into. This type of messaging and for who, at what stage of that customer journey, depending on whether it's on your website when they're first discovering you and evaluating you or whether or not it's later in the buying process after your functional user has you on a really short list, maybe the shortest list ever, and then wants to bring you to an economic buyer, it's a different set of messaging that you would use for that person and it's a different set of messaging that you would use for that person.

You need to do the work to get the answers to what messaging is going to actually resonate. Okay, let's talk quickly about how you'll know it's working. And what are some ways that teams can basically, I'm not talking about taking a shortcut here, You still have to do the work of learning from your customers, and whether or not you do that with qualitative surveys or a dozen or so jobs to be done interviews, take broader strokes even than that and do, not broader rather, but do more research across more mediums and methods.

When you come up with this messaging strategy that we've just described, there's a couple of different ways that you can test it. So one of the early ways that a really low barrier way to test messaging, if you've got a more risk averse team, is run a closed paid campaign. So run an ad campaign to a dedicated landing page.

And then, And test that landing page, have your control be what is your current messaging strategy on your homepage features page, whatever, is most appropriate, but basically a landing page that represents your existing messaging strategy, and then a landing page that represents this new direction with this new hierarchy, and whether or not it's feature focused or benefit focused, we've already talked about, and just literally see which one you're looking for.

Not yields more signups, but yields more activated, actual like paying customers, which can take a little bit of time, right? Because it's again, it's not about click throughs to a pricing page to a sign up. It's about actually activating the product and becoming a high LTV customer. And that's the part that I think a lot of teams.

leave out of that test is they think that signups is the determining factor and it is not. Another way to test messaging is if you're optimizing the messaging in your customer onboarding leveraging. 

Claire Suellentrop: That's exactly what came to mind for me. Yeah. 

Georgiana Laudi: Yeah. Leveraging email. And leave your current email onboarding on and a split your signups.

and run some of your signups through getting, I do not recommend a multivariate test here, for the record, if you're doing let's not say these two, - 

Claire Suellentrop: Let’s not overcomplicate.

Georgiana Laudi:  - these are two separate activities. Yeah, but like I said, at the end of the day, they don't have to be two different activities. You could send the messaging from one landing page through to one email onboarding series, and then keep your sort of mainstay.

You're existing as your control, but you can split test basically your email onboarding as well with the same messaging strategy and see if it moves the needle at all. And if it moves the needle at all, then what I would say the next step is then start updating your actual product. Like your in app experience should then start to get updated.

Optimized in this way. And maybe you change some of the micro copy. Maybe you change an in app onboarding flow of some method, whatever your favorite one is like tool tips or product tour or checklist, or there's so many ways to do it, but then maybe you go in app, but you validate, you can validate first by running a test by email because email tends to be much easier to update than the product and there's less fear around testing email than there is around updating, a product experience.

Obviously. So that's how we typically recommend. testing this new messaging strategy and making sure that it actually does move the needle, start incrementally, and then your wins will start to get bigger and bigger as you start to influence more things. And with that, I think we're probably good to wrap.

Claire Suellentrop: Let's wrap. See you next time. 

Outro: And that's it for this episode of The Forget the Funnel Podcast. Thanks for tuning in. If you have any questions about the topics we covered, don't hesitate to contact Gia or myself on LinkedIn. And you can also visit our website at forgetthefunnel.com. 

This is still a new podcast for us so ratings, reviews, and subscriptions in your podcast platform of choice, make a huge difference. See you next time.

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Georgiana Laudi & Claire Suellentrop

When it comes to growing multi-million dollar SaaS businesses, we’ve seen what works. Both separately and together, we've built best-in-class brands from the ground up and played key roles in revenue growth. While our background stories may differ — Gia’s a Canadian who’s been marketing since 2000; Claire’s an American whose marketing career began in 2012 — we’re united in wanting to support those growing SaaS companies, and to provide resources they need to step up as strategic leaders. You can learn more about us here.

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