Why Your SaaS Isn't Selling: A Guide to Customer Avatars & Value Proposition
By Sebastian Volkis on May 16, 2024
If you're building a SaaS product and struggling to make sales, you're likely in the challenging marketing phase. It can feel isolating when your efforts don't yield results. This article provides an exercise to help you understand why your SaaS might not be selling and how to refine your SaaS marketing messaging by deeply understanding your customer avatar SaaS and their true problems.
Identifying Your Ideal Customer: The Starting Point
First, clearly define: "Who is my customer?" This goes beyond generic descriptions like "business owners who want more traffic." You need a detailed customer avatar SaaS.
Consider:
- Specific Demographics & Firmographics: What kind of businesses or individuals?
- Their Current Situation: What stage are they at in their business or role?
- Their Feelings & Frustrations: What are their pain points? Are they just starting, struggling, or looking to scale?
- Past Experiences: Have they tried solutions before? Have they failed?
Put yourself in the shoes of various people who experience the problems your SaaS aims to solve. You can't help everyone, but your goal is to convince a specific segment that your product is the solution they need. This detailed target audience analysis SaaS is foundational.
The Core Exercise: Problems, Blame, and Solutions
Here's an exercise to clarify your SaaS value proposition. For this example, let's imagine a SaaS that provides advanced analytics tracking for Facebook and TikTok ads to help e-commerce brands increase profit.
1. Problems Your SaaS Solves: * Identifies which ads are profitable. * Enables focused ad spend on winning campaigns. * Helps pinpoint effective ad creatives and marketing angles. * Aims to increase overall business profit. * Facilitates faster scaling of ad campaigns.
2. Problems Your Potential Customers Are Facing (Their Perspective): * Not getting enough traffic from ads. * Ads aren't making sales. * Losing money on ad spend ("going broke"). * Low or no profit from advertising efforts.
3. What Customers Think is Causing Their Problems (The Blame Game): * "My advertising strategy is bad." * "My ad creatives are underperforming." * "My landing page isn't converting." * "My product price is too low/high." * "I don't know which ads are actually driving sales."
4. Solutions They Are Currently Trying or Would Have Tried: * Buying expensive media buying courses. * Hiring an ad agency. * Creating thousands of new ad creatives. * Redesigning their landing page multiple times. * Attempting complex manual UTM tracking or basic analytics.
Connecting Your Solution to Their Real Problem
Your SaaS likely solves one of the actual underlying issues, and can counter one of the blamed causes. Using our example:
- Customer's Perceived Problem: Facebook ads are unprofitable.
- Customer's Blamed Cause (that your app addresses): "I don't know where sales are coming from / I can't track profitable campaigns."
- Your SaaS Solution: Provides clear data tracking to identify profitable ads.
Your SaaS marketing messaging needs to make them believe, unequivocally, that the real reason their business isn't scaling or they're losing money on ads isn't primarily due to bad creatives or a poor landing page (though those can be factors), but because they lack proper tracking to identify profitable campaigns. If you can convince them of this, your SaaS becomes the obvious solution.
How? Provide proof. Address their existing suspicions. They likely already suspect tracking is an issue. Show them that other attempted solutions (like endlessly testing creatives) are futile without accurate data first.
For instance, your messaging could be: "Why test 100 new ad creatives if you can't accurately track which ones lead to profitable sales? You're essentially hoping a few random successes will outweigh the losses. Doesn't it make more sense to establish precise tracking first, so every marketing dollar is accountable?"
This deep understanding of solving customer problems is more effective than just listing features. It forms the core of a compelling SaaS sales strategy and a robust SaaS value proposition. For further insights on reaching your audience, consider our guides on SaaS content marketing and leveraging YouTube for SaaS sales.
Once you have this clarity, creating content and driving traffic becomes much more straightforward because you know exactly who you're talking to and what message will resonate. If you're also considering your pricing, our article on SaaS freemium models might be relevant.
Connect with Sebastian Volkis: Instagram: @sebastian_volkis YouTube: Sebastian Volkis on YouTube Twitter (X): @sebastianvolkis