Crafting a Winning Narrative Your SaaS Product
If you’re building a SaaS product in a competitive market, at some point you will need to go head to head with competitors in your space.
Competition doesn’t need to be ugly or cutthroat or any other negative descriptor you can think of.
If done well, it should have an overall positive impact on the market as everyone fights to offer more useful products, more appealing pricing, and a better experience to try to win customers over.
A lot goes into launching a successful competitive strategy. But I would argue that no part of your competitive strategy is more important than crafting a winning narrative.
The key to a competitive Go To Market strategy, that’s focused on winning market share and customers away from a competitor, is to establish a narrative for what differentiates your offering and repeating it again and again (and again and again) both internally and externally.
Why does crafting a winning narrative matter?
As much as we all hope that potential customers will be easily wooed from competitors with a great offer or a promise of more powerful features, the reality is that most customers will be reluctant to make a switch until the pain of their current solution becomes so great that they can no longer accept it.
You may get lucky and hit the right customers at the right time when they are fed up with their current tool(s). But it’s more likely that when you launch your competitive campaign, you’ll be spending the majority of your time and budget engaging buyers that have no immediate intention of making a switch.
Without a winning narrative, here’s how competitive strategies in SaaS typically play out:
Marketing decides (or is “encouraged” by the CEO) that it’s time to launch a campaign targeted at winning customers from competitors.
They spend a few weeks preparing the campaign, crafting an offer, and getting internal teams ready. Internally, expectations are through the roof.
The campaign launches. Everyone is excited. Marketing fires off their campaign emails. Sales starts their outreach.
1-2 weeks go by. Sales holds a bunch of meetings with potential buyers. Or, if you’re primarily a PLG business, users who signed up via your self-service experience start to reach the end of their trial.
A handful of good wins happen but expectations that were set at the start of the campaign begin to look a little overly ambitious.
Expectations get scaled back. Even though the campaign wasn’t a complete flop, it didn’t deliver the game changing results everyone hoped for.
Everyone moves onto the next thing.
Crafting a winning narrative changes this outcome because it provides an a unifying message that the entire company can rally behind.
Instead of just a bunch of activity aimed at winning customers from competitors, you’re able to build momentum around a shared story that both employees and potential buyers can buy into.
That momentum will energize your team, build support for more investment in the competitive strategy, and put you in a position to disrupt the market in a big way.
And even if it’s not the thing that massively changes your growth trajectory, it can help establish your brand in the minds of customers and position you against incumbents that you may win against in the future.
There are two important steps to making this approach work:
Crafting the winning narrative
Repeating it again and again (and again and again and again)
Let’s get into it.
How to craft your winning narrative
This narrative isn’t something that you just pull out of thin air.
It should come directly from the insights you’re able to gather from actual customers that have switched from that competitor or who chose you over a competitor in their evaluation.
Keep in mind: If you don’t have enough customers to provide the insights needed to craft this narrative, then it’s likely a sign that you’re not ready to go all-in on a competitive strategy. That doesn’t mean you can’t still try to win customers from a dominant competitor. It just means, there may be other limitations in your product that need to be addressed before investing heavily in winning these customers over.
In my experience, the best insights for shaping your narrative will come from your Sales and Customer Success teams. A good sales rep that’s been winning deals against direct competitors should be able to articulate clear reasons for why the customer chose you over the alternative. A good Customer Success Manager (CSM) should be able to tell you exactly why accounts in their book of business made the switch from a competitor and why they’ve stuck with you after making the switch.
In addition to talking to your team directly, if you have the benefit of using a service like Gong or another call recording platform, you can search for a competitor name as a keyword and access a list of sales or CSM calls when that competitor came up. Those direct quotes will be critical in crafting your winning narrative.
If your company is entirely “Product Led” and doesn’t have sales or other customer-facing teams, then it is the job of the founder and leadership team to talk to customers and get these insights directly.
Your winning narrative needs to be clear, memorable, and easily repeated in multiple customer touch points. Having been both the target and the company executing a winning narrative in the past, I have found that there are a few models you can use to structure your narrative to ensure it resonates with customers.
Steal one of these and incorporate the details that are relevant to your product and the market you serve:
Old Way vs New Way
Your product offers a new way of doing a job that’s different from the way competitors have enabled customers do things in the past. This sets you apart as providing a more modern and innovative way of doing things and positions the competitor as the “legacy” solution.
This isn’t necessarily about specific features or functionality, but is a broader story about how your team is approaching a problem and enabling customers to be successful.
Complex vs Simple (Ease of Use)
Your product is easier to use than competitors and is designed to help users get things done faster.
This narrative is most powerful when selling to the small business (SMB) market, or when the end user isn’t necessarily an expert in the field that your product services. If you’re a new entrant into a competitive market with a dominant leader, you can lean into your size and simplicity (aka lack of advanced features) as an advantage against competitors that have likely become more complex over time.
Unfair Pricing vs Fair Pricing (Save $)
Your pricing is lower than alternatives on the market and you only charge for features/functionality that a customer is going to need.
Competing on price alone can help you disrupt a market but it has its limits. A strong narrative based on pricing, however, can have a lasting impact, especially if you’re able to position alternatives in the market as being unfair or unreasonable.
If you have customers that have switched to you because you are “more affordable,” make sure to ask follow up questions to dig into the real feelings that led them to make a switch. That can inform how you position your pricing against the alternatives in the market.
Long Wait Times vs No Wait Times (Support)
You offer the best support and allow a customer to speak with a real human vs waiting on hold to talk to a bot.
World-class support can be a massive differentiator in a market where competitors have historically underdelivered for customers. This is another place where up-and-comers can have an advantage against incumbents, because over time there is a trend in a dominant companies to make their highest level of service (dedicate CSM, account manager) exclusive to larger and larger accounts.
If you’re offering service that competitors are charging for, that’s a narrative that’s going to win.
Multiple Tools vs Unified Platform (Consolidation)
You help customers do multiple jobs in one platform instead of paying for multiple products to do these jobs.
Consolidation can appeal to all segments in the market, from SMB to Enterprise. The benefits of consolidation could be cost savings, simplifying your tech stack, or just saving time by reducing the number of vendors a customer needs to work with. How you position this story needs to align with the value you’re actually able to deliver for customers migrating off of different point solutions.
Building for Someone Else vs Building for You
Your team is highly focused on a particular customer in a specific industry, while your competitor is building features your ideal customer doesn’t value.
If you’re building for a specific vertical that’s currently being serviced by a competitor with a more generalized focus, you can carve out a big chunk of the market just by highlighting your focus on addressing their needs and the challenges they are facing. You can also use this approach if you have seen success with customers of a certain size, while the competitor is focused on moving “up market.”
The Secret Weapon
You have a feature that competitors don’t offer that has come up repeatedly as the reason you’re winning customers.
Caution on this one: Competing feature vs feature is rarely the path to a successful narrative. But there are cases where you’ve delivered a feature that sticks with customers and resets expectations for potential buyers in the future. If that’s the case, lean in and drive awareness in the market before a competitor can catch up.
Making your winning narrative stick
Once you have the right story in place, it should become the rallying cry for everyone involved. As you’re building a strategy around this narrative, there are a few rules to keep in mind:
1. Narratives take time to stick (internally and externally)
Unlike a one-off “rip and replace” campaign, building momentum behind a winning narrative will take time. Any strategy you build around this winning narrative needs to include a commitment to execute over the course of months or quarter not days or weeks.
That doesn’t mean you need to lock yourself into one strategy without the ability to adapt. But it does mean that you’ll need to do the work to think longer term about how you’re going to get your message in front of potential buyers.
2. Narratives need to be re-enforced
If you’re the one that’s driving the winning narrative, then you’re also accepting a new role of being the “Chief Narrative Officer.” Part of that job means you need to be constantly on the lookout for examples, anecdotes, and insights that support the narrative you are trying to drive both internally and externally.
This could be an industry news story, a quote from a customer, or a big win (or loss) that involves a competitor. Capture these whenever you can and share them with internal teams and integrate them into your messaging.
3. Narratives get boring to you, long before they lose traction with customers.
The end result of a successful winning narrative is more revenue, faster growth, and a growing momentum behind your business.
None of that will be boring.
But over time, you will reach a point where you feel like you’ve done enough to get your narrative out into the world. You’ll be tired of hearing it and want to pivot.
Make sure when that time comes that you really feel like you’ve done the work to integrate the narrative fully into your strategy. In my experience, this moment happens closer to the midpoint than to the end of the narrative’s usefulness in your strategy. Keep going.
Put your winning narrative into action.
Crafting a winning narrative won’t require you to completely re-imagine your broader Go To Market strategy or processes. But it will require a commitment to seeing the narrative through and ensuring you’re integrating it fully into your strategy.
This will include:
Anchor the narrative in your marketing messaging and all touch points with target accounts.
Integrate the narrative into your sales playbook and ensure every step in the sales cycle reinforces it.
Get buy-in from all customer-facing teams and ensure they continue to tell this story as customers get onboarded and activated on your platform.
Become or appoint a “Chief Narrative Officer” to ensure it is enforced and re-enforced internally over time.
From there, you can continue to adapt and evolve your strategy but as long as you’re seeing signs of progress, do everything you can to remain committed to seeing this strategy through.
Now, Go Win.
The most successful competitive strategies I’ve been part of building included a winning narrative that ultimately outlived any individual campaign and became core to how our products were viewed in the market.
Chances are you already have some thoughts on what your winning narrative will be. Do the work to lock in your narrative and start building your competitive strategy today.
Good luck.
Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.
Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.
