King of SaaS. You’ve been that for decades. But one day, you notice…slipping. Your sales? And you’re losing your share of the market.
- Why?
- Who?
- What changed?
Pouring through research, your jaw shatters on the floor. People aren’t buying your software because they want an all-in-one finance analysis program.
Congrats! Their hard-earned cash is yours.
But…
It’s only because you’ve created a contact management system better than the one, they pay for on LinkedIn.
Why didn’t you see this before?
Welcome to Forget the Funnel (FTF). The method is a win-win.
Here are SaaS Copywriters’ 7 FTF pros and cons.
What is Forget the Funnel?
Forget the Funnel is a customer-first, interview-based, marketing system. It enhances the buyer’s journey by adding within it customer value-based milestones (micro-conversion moments).
These milestones become a type of marker. Each highlight what the customer gets out of your SaaS program or offer. They often come within a couple of key stages of the buyer’s journey.
FTF research is about understanding customer wants, needs, and pain points. Then, it uses feedback from UX and interviews to set goals. These goals drive FTF-guided marketing campaigns.
They’ll be tied to UX that nets the most payoff for the customer.
Pros…Customer Feedback through Jobs-To-Be-Done Interviews Drives SaaS Marketing and UX
Cash In Your SaaS Copy Desire with Your Golden P.I.N.
As you read through the Forget the Funnel eBook, you begin to see the parallels between FTF and Copyhackers (CH) voice of customer data.
Both programs are phenomenal. But I felt that FTF has the specifics of micro-conversions where CH had the marketing theory of them. FTF has a step-by-step attack, voice of customer, marketing plan that weaves together the transformative power of micro-conversions. Micro-conversions are the little ‘oh, yes,’ celebratory moments when a lead or customer uses your product or service and recognizes a positive difference.
CH uses voice of customer data and micro-conversions for the sole purpose of writing copy. FTF uses them for your whole marketing system.
Forget the Funnel Pro-customer Voice over Survey Multiple Guess
You want to know your customers’ needs and pain points like you already know your own bank account P.I.N. That magic number leads to your treasure. The same is true in FTF marketing.
Yet customer interviews are your debit card and the data from this is your P.I.N. to effective copywriting and more. Interview and recorded sales call transcripts net you excellent source data to write copy. FTF goes deeper.
Enter jobs-to-be-done interviews.
FTF and CH Interview P.I.N.s
FTF builds on previous voice of customer methods with specific formatted interviews and activities.
The Copyhackers-influenced interview formats include the customer obstacle interview, lead interview survey, and their solid foundation of the 1:1 jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) interviews.
But JTBD interviews in FTF are different. They aren’t just looking for copy, they’re on the search for the truth. Where’s the line between your ideal customers and your current customers?
FTF gives you the tools to draw that line with distinction.
Each interview type moves you beyond the numbers and into the minds and hearts of your leads and customers. These go far past the multiple guess predictors of surveys and persona analytics.
In SaaS (data hounds that we are) why guess at your ideal customers?
Chat with them face-to-face and hear their ideal needs. Plus, feel their own ‘I’m on the phone I can’t talk to anyone but a computer-ish’ moments (a.k.a. pain points) firsthand.
The Golden P.I.N. of FTF Voice of Customer Data
Deep dive into this data with JTBD and discover hidden motivations and motivators.
This is raw customer insight. Unlock the body language and interpret tones in your customer experience. These JTBD interviews are better that anything you can gleam from a digital screen.
Swap customer milestones of value with market-standardized KPIs like time-on-page stats. And all the sudden, you ignite your marketing campaigns and UX capabilities.
And as a SaaS copywriter, you’re the leader toward this resource goldmine.
Dividends of Forget the Funnel Ideal Customer Feedback
These aren’t the Michael Jordans of your LinkedIn. This is the preferences of a customer who buys, promotes, and pays on time, every time, for your product or service.
This ideal customer is a primed feedback foundation on which to build your company revenue goals.
Customer-confirmed value = customer-centered marketing systems
The Forget the Funnel Money Tree of Customer Insight
As you listen to customers 1:1, you see where your service or product falls short in meeting their needs. These new opportunities are tied to a somewhat verified demand…. your ideal customer’s conversation.
New product/service development and marketing springs from these personal interactions. Listen to what customers say, lean in, listen close.
You’ll gain a sense of their desire to improve your company’s current offer. And you’ll see new markets to enter on the horizon.
FTF Customer Insights Checking Interest
In FTF research strategies, customers tell you several things. They reveal their motivations for buying or not buying your product or service.
In JTBD interviews, customers share how they use your product. And this in turn, confirms your company’s marketing angles and strategies.
The Bank Holidays of Your Customer Experience
But in the final phase of interviewing within the UX, customers tell you in real time of their frustrations and their celebrations as they explore your SaaS offer/product.
Your ideal consumers do this via metacognitive exercises. These think-alouds, (what a usertest.com would give you) are a different type of feedback into the mind of someone wanting your solution.
Lease 3 FTF vehicles to cognitive checking the 10X of your UX
Thinking, feeling, doing insights of their and your personal UX can fine-tune your company’s offer and delivery. These interview summaries support or get rid of your ideas for innovative marketing angles and UX design.
By hearing the metacognition of customers early on in your product’s development phase, you’ll maximize productive time and resources on campaigns that’ll push your needle toward success.
The Incentive set up by Forget the Funnel activities
When customers feel liked and listened to a type of lottery begins. Their feedback is your chance to show that they’re valued. And they feel it. Plus, as you change your offer and SaaS product features, they build a subtle partnership with you.
Together, you’re making something better. And this increases their buy-in on your company and its offers. Add in customer loyalty… and repeat business skyrockets.
As Dr. Cialdini explained in his books, Influence and Presuasion, customers trust you because you like them, not the other way around. And they believe if you like them, you won’t steer them in the wrong direction.
Forget the Funnel “Ching” “Chings” for Your Marketing
By seeing customer pain points up close, those aren’t cancelations when you know their motivations. They’re cries for help. And such insider info also explains why they ignore your SaaS free trials or trial offers for instance.
See those hidden pleas for help! Get in there with your helping hand.
These interventions by service and training support get customers to experience the value of your product at various stages in their buyer’s life cycle.
Providing training and support before a crisis moment, leads to less inner dialog of ‘forget this’ and more ‘hey, you’ve got to have this.’
Forget the Funnel’s Value Jackpot
There are two huge payoffs behind voice of customer research and feedback implementation. Less cancelations, yes, but also, customer-centered value concentration bumps up your customer lifetime value (CLV).
What is CLV?
CLV is a prediction of how much money a customer will bring to you while they’re doing business with your company.
FTF Skyrockets Value Rankings
Customer-centered marketing ranks you high above your competition. It gives you an insider advantage. When you have confirmation of your customer’s desires, needs, and frustrations, you’re serving more than a persona.
You’re serving a person. And you’re serving them better than your competitors can with their guesses. Your marketing is based on your customers’ value, not your company’s gains from their buyer’s journey.
So, if your key performance indicators (KPIs) match your customer’s micro-conversion moments, then your marketing speaks directly to them. Why would they go anywhere else?
SaaS copywriters… are you pumped to bring this level of Forget the Funnel value to your clients?
Cons of Tapping Customer Interviews to Drive Marketing and UX in SaaS
The sad truth of Forget the Funnel: it takes incentive, intensity, and investment.
Incentivize Participation in FTF
Often, people don’t flock to surveys especially like they do to cash grabs.
It isn’t easy to get a large amount of feedback to justify a marketing decision. To get people to return or complete a survey or interview, you must incentivize them. And finding out what survey-takers like, wasn’t a given.
Each survey taker or interviewer had unique incentive needs.
Ideally, you want to reward interview participation with your own products/services. For instance, bradlong.co promises a copy of his post-workshop interviews with you.
Then, he uses the last part of the interview to pitch a higher ticket course.
In honesty, I wouldn’t advise using JBTD or obstacle interviews to pitch anything. They need to be a safe space to explore customer expectations and your company’s hits and misses on these targets.
Costly Upfront Interviewing/Interviews
No hype needed, but no sale either.
The clients I talked to were jazzed about the lottery-type insight voice of customer data promised. They understood returns were high.
But this type of structured interview from my Copyhackers’ playbook is still catching on.
I haven’t even had the opportunity to share Forget the Funnel procedures in my free hour Zoom calls. My pool of would-be clients is so far from customer voice-related marketing.
It’s like giving them a starter checking account brochure when you’ve got a growth fund pamphlet in your pocket.
Intensity of FTF
FTF is a lifestyle of research. Once you start, you won’t want to stop. And you can always optimize. But before you can bank in the insights, you must find out how to roll with the changes.
Learning curves of JTBD and UX metacognitive interviews
JTBD interview format and procedure takes time to learn. And UX interviews are in the beginning time-vacuums and not cheap. Survey data can be unreliable, if misinterpreted.
And scheduled customer interviews do tend to get cancelled. Plus, JTBD interviews need two interviewers in the room with the customer. This team reads body language and becomes aware of interview participant tone.
This super team must know the balance of when to push deeper into a topic and when to cover it at a surface level.
JTBD and UX flexibility
Mistakes made interviewing customers and users must be forgiven fast. It’s a learning process.
And data transcript analysis translates to inflated costs with invalid conclusions. Results must be interpreted, a hypothesis formulated, and test designed.
It’s best to A/B test survey and interview questions to get them just right.
FTF Investment
Time, talent, and technique are the FTF way.
Interviewing and Research is a mastered art and science
Although you’re listening to your ideal customer in the beginning, as you learn more, you may not be interviewing the right person.
Such results reveal a learning curve and save you expense in the long run. Not so in the short run.
Beware, bias is always lurking. And sometimes, bias shows up in unlikely places i.e., interviewer’s facial expressions.
Unbalanced Insight
1:1 interviews may net a cashdrawer full of negative feedback. So, it’s key to listen to both what is said and how it’s said. This again comes with training. But the gain is feedback used to later better your business.
Limitations of survey and interviews
Interviews are a snapshot of customer data, not a crystal ball. They only represent enough data for a change if they fall in line with what most of your customers want.
- Do they share the same frustrations?
- The same wants and needs?
Don’t push for immediate interview insight implementation. As stakeholders in large companies will drag their feet to apply them to your whole client-base. It isn’t personal. Marketing-based survey and interviewing needs to be on-going. And this future pay-off may not be enough to sway the opinion of key decision makers, now.
Implementing Forget the Funnel-based Changes
Too fast, too soon, won’t last. The professional development master of Impact Teaching, Rich Allen taught me that one.
A customer’s ‘it would be nice to have’ isn’t the same as a ‘must’ in your software package. If you weigh your product down with too many features, you can skyrocket user frustration. That’s also one way to make enemies with product development.
New products = added support costs
More Forget the Funnel Flexibility
It takes experience to prioritize customer feedback. What is their huge burning problem? Not all customers are going to let you see that.
Practice, practice, practice
You need interviewers who are skilled at helping customers feel comfortable. You also love interviewers who can ask ‘the tough’ questions and sense when to push for more valuable insights.
…And interviewers who understand when to back off sensitive areas.
That can translate into hours of training and evaluation. Or hiring professional help. FTF is, in that way, a silver and gold coin commitment to on-going customer-guided research systems. So don’t be leery of reaching out, when you feel overwhelmed.
Remember, reserved time, say two hours, in going over complex solutions with customers may not be long enough to gain meaningful data.
Forget the Funnel and its SaaS Copywriter’s Calls-to-Value
For a SaaS copywriter using customer feedback from interviews to guide your copy and marketing decisions is a golden opportunity.
Metacognition in the UX flat out benefits product development and execution. Plus, think about the insight into pain points for that new product-tied long form sales or landing page.
Substituting your KPI marketing goals with successful UX value markers saves the guessing expense of SaaS marketing personas and review mining.
Be aware of FTF marketing system challenges (above) and have action plans ready to meet them.
Forget the Funnel and Copyhacker marketing and Voice of Customer data collection methods such as obstacle interviews and jobs-to-be-done interviews are still not used by many SaaS businesses.
As a SaaS copywriter, you’ll be sharing this value as you market yourself. Many prospects will hear about voice of customer research and JTBD interviews for the first time. Be patient with your sales pitch. Research to answer any specific customer questions or objections.
Forget the Funnel In Closing…
For a SaaS copywriter, using customer feedback from interviews as in FTF to guide your copy and marketing decisions hits the jackpot of copywriting resources.
If you liked this post, share Forget the Funnel with a friend. One of the best books I’ve read this year. Not an affiliate, but it is available through Amazon.
If you’re a SaaS copywriter, the strategies/procedures taught in this book will help you get a goldmine of copy. Until next time, be your top-shelf you. And join your Top-Shelf family, sign up for updates in the pop-up. Plus, receive your free copy of the Ultimate YouTube Channel Set Up Guide and more.