In talking to dozens of SaaS companies this week and past, it’s clear most of us are seeing a big slowdown in new deals. Not all of us, but most of us.
But one thing is still going on outside of the most impacted industries — discovery.
In fact, in some cases, tech companies that are WFH have more time as customers to do discovery for new vendors.
I personally do. This week, for the first time in years, I’ve tried out over a dozen vendors. And what I’ve seen is:
- Typos
- Can’t handle load
- Broken log-ins
- SSO issues
- Too-aggressive SDR follow-up
- Copy that doesn’t address my use case
Here’s an app that was highly recommended this week. I was excited. And then after, I logged in:
I can show a lot more examples.
My simple idea is this: Do a Discovery Audit. Take a very fresh look at the process your potential prospects are using to learn about you:
- How is your SEO? When you go a Google search on your brand, what do you see? On related key terms?
- Are your landing pages ugly and “off”? A lot of third party marketing tools create really rough and raw landing pages (ahem, Marketo). Sometimes they aren’t even responsive. The fonts don’t match. The copy is off. Do they look right?
- Does your Free Trial flow still work as well as it could? Maybe not if you haven’t touched it in a while.
- Are you using Intercom and other tools as well as you could? If I’m doing discovery these days, I want help now. Not in 24 hours.
- Has all your copy been touched? Look at it again with a fine eye. I bet a lot of your pages and text haven’t been updated in a long time. Also look at all your marketplaces (Shopify, Salesforce, Google, etc.) and onboard yourself with a fresh perspective.
- Have you tested all the paths into your app? A lot of integrations may not work as well as they should. Test them.
- Should you remove gates to usage and trials? Maybe it made sense 30 days ago to put a lot of qualifying gates in front of prospects. Are you sure that’s true today? Maybe not everyone should need to talk to a SDR these days.
Take a fresh look at every path to your product. Improve everything.
And if you are a new vendor, be prepared for more scrutiny. Have the answers. In tough times, people are interested in new apps and ideas. But they also don’t have the mental bandwidth for downtime, security risks, or lack of scalability. Show folks in discovery they can trust you. And why.
In some cases, folks have more time to do new product discovery today.
Make it count.
