The Forgotten Differentiator

When we think of product or company positioning, we typically lean into features, pricing or capabilities. However, we often disregard a critical value driver for B2B SaaS.

Before I rattle off some thoughts about positioning and differentiation … Happy New Year! I appreciate everyone who enjoys these posts and engages on this site or on LinkedIn. It’s been fun to see our audience grow and meet new friends. Thank you.

As we close out 2024, I’ve been thinking a lot about “positioning”. How do companies brand themselves in a larger market context? What sets one company apart from the others? How might a company position its offerings in the market to maximize revenue potential?

Most B2B companies I’ve been a part of have struggled with this. Some fail to identify a characteristic that stands out. Others have lost their way and attempt to pivot to a new position only to lose their old identity altogether.

When I hear the word “differentiator” (as a way to position a product or company), my mind immediately goes to software features. Admittedly, my background is in SaaS software. So, most of the time, our offering is the product. And the product is competing savagely with other products in the space that often look a lot like each other. Sales bake-offs start to resemble a battle of feature check lists, or companies drive prices down to attempt to be differentiated on price. From my experiences, many companies have a clear differentiator that isn’t a feature or price. And they completely fail to position around it! I’ll discuss what that differentiator is in a moment.

Features are hard to differentiate around. For one, technology is relatively cheap. So, in most cases, your competitors can quickly catch up to your differentiator if they’d like. Or a wave comes along that provides access to new differentiation. Mobile. Social. Cloud. AI. When there’s a gold rush, software vendors will instinctively pick up a shovel and head west. It’s simultaneously an offensive maneuver to innovate before rivals but also a defensive tactic to ensure that no one will do the same to you. Eventually, everyone starts to look like the others.

Positioning is hard. Of the several companies I’ve worked at, only a couple had a clear internal positioning strategy that translated to clear messaging in the market. Perhaps the best I’ve experienced was Virgin Pulse, a company that provides health and wellness experience to employees at large companies. Virgin Pulse set out to create partnerships with myriad wellness apps that were extensions of its own offering (reward system for completing wellness activities). This became the “homebase for health” strategy in which customers could enjoy one-stop shopping for employee wellness. It was a platform play and it worked.

For every company I’ve been part of that had clear differentiation, I’ve seen as many companies that lacked differentiation. I’d often seek our sweet spot. I’d ask, “Why do our customers stick around? What do they like about us?”

The answer, in quite a few cases, was a clear differentiator many companies overlook: customer support. To be clear, I don’t mean a 1-800 line or an AI agent trained on your knowledge docs, I mean a real, human partner. I am referring to dedicated account ownership. For a few of the smaller companies where we lacked feature depth, customers loved the human support they received from us. Yet, software vendors often source the very best in customer success and bake into their operational models and then fail to market this core asset that customers love. Customers find solace - and ultimately success - by picking up the phone and speaking to a live, knowledgeable human they’re familiar with.

Why don’t companies highlight this differentiator? Many companies are fixated on feature differentiation and fail to position world-class service. Sure there are better products than Acme Corp. But at Acme Corp., I can always call Jane or Bob or Harry or whoever I am used to calling and get resolution of my problems. I have a strategic partner on the inside.

From my experiences, support also becomes an afterthought in the pricing and packaging or a throw-in. Or worse, there’s a made up level of support that gets added to the premium version of tiered pricing while the high-value support that all customers get is undersold.

The solution? Treat service like a feature. Speak to its value. Write case studies around how support partners have helped clients in the past. Heck, introduce prospects to their potential support rep pre-sale.

Support may not have the appeal that a new, shiny feature has, and features are still critical to a customer experience. While the rest of the industry is fighting over features, prioritize (and maybe differentiate yourself) based on a very enticing value proposition: human interaction.