How to set the right customer expectations
Hi, I’m Markus, and welcome to a 🔒 subscriber-only edition 🔒 of my newsletter. I help you to deliver, grow and monetize customer value to improve your performance, accelerate your career, and build a profitable SaaS business. Customer success does not start with the purchase.
Customer success does not start after the purchase.
It starts with setting the right expectations.
Because that’s how your customers will evaluate success.
A common misconception I see SaaS companies doing is treating customer expectations as part of evaluating the customer-product fit.
So it’s technically the sales reps’ responsibility.
But you start raising customer expectations as soon as people get exposed to your company.
When they read your posts on social media, blog posts, ads, etc. they will start thinking about your company.
Of course, you should set misguided expectations right during the sales process and disqualify the respective leads.
But it wastes a lot of your sales reps’ time.
The time they could have used to bring the right customers on board that may be gone forever in the meantime.
Customers that want something you can’t deliver, should be enabled to disqualify themselves before they ever talk to churn - at scale.
Types of misguided expectations
I distinguish between 4 types of misguided expectations that are causing SaaS companies to lose a substantial amount of money.
Overselling
There are too many SaaS companies focused on acquiring as many customers as possible.
Consequently, marketers and sales reps are under pressure to bring in tons of leads and convert them into paying customers.
So they are tempted to oversell the product’s capabilities to seal the deal.
In a best-case scenario, these customers are leaving when they find out that they will not get what they were looking for.
But what if they feel like being tricked into buying?
They might be furious about it and leave a negative review causing serious damage to your reputation.
But marketers and sales reps don’t necessarily deliberately oversell the product.
They might simply lack information about the product’s true capabilities.
Underpromising
One of the worst kinds of advice I’ve ever heard is to “underpromise and overdeliver”.
Why? Because why would customers buy a product that looks like 2nd class compared to your competitors?
It might even cause more harm than overselling.
Because you don’t know how many customers have passed your offer.
What you need to do instead is to set expectations accurately and deliver on your promise.
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