August 25, 2024 | Read Online
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Follow along with this story and you’ll see.
Let’s dive right in.
Interacting with executives and board members can be rattling. Especially if you don’t know your metrics.
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In April, 2022 I took my daughter to her first concert. Elton John [1].
Two songs into his first set, the maestro stood up from behind the piano. Like a sequin-studded penguin, he waddled [2] to the back of the stage where he met a technician dressed in black. He spoke a few words into the tech’s ear and quickly returned to his perch behind the keys.
Next, he addressed the crowd, saying: “The house lights aren’t the ones we normally use and we seem to be having some trouble with them. We’re working to correct that as soon as possible and I apologize.“
His statement served as both an apology to fans and an admonishment to his team to get things figured out.
Stat.
You can see why he wanted that lighting to be just right. What a show!
Mesmerized by the living legend cranking out Benny and the Jets, 99.9% of the audience wouldn’t have even realized there was a problem.
But Elton knew it. There was an issue with his show, affecting his fans, and he wouldn’t let it go so easily. He cared so much that he stopped entertaining 25,000 people—his customers—to make sure his team was aware of the issue, ensure that they would soon correct it, and to apologize to the crowd.
Moments later, engineers resolved the issue and the show continued forward without a perceptible glitch.
This story isn’t about a rock and roll concert. Or a finicky perfectionist.
It’s about an unrelenting obsession with quality. It’s about the delicate nuances of a product. It’s about a commitment to excellence.
This scene got me thinking… Are we sweating the small stuff when it comes to how we interact with our customers?
The thing that makes building and growing B2B software companies is that there are so many touch points with customers and their internal stakeholders. The interactions begin when we educate prospects on the company, the problems its solves for customers, and its products. They continue across the buying journey, whether it be self-serve or sales-led. And they continue with onboarding, activation, and day-to-day usage and support of the product itself (not to mention ongoing account management, renewals, expansion, etc).
There are so many touch points and opportunities for customers to get lost or veer off track. Handoffs between teams. Follow-through on actions. Distractions with other projects.
Customers are mired in complexity. In friction. And in the effort it takes to achieve the results they need, expect, and were promised.
Nick Toman, co-author of The Effortless Experience [3], provides a data point that’s worth stopping to consider:
We found that the majority of customers, notably 96%, who had high-effort experiences reported being disloyal, compared to only 9% of customers with low-effort experience.
In B2B SaaS, loyalty is the result of achieving outcomes with the lowest possible effort despite the size, industries, and tech-savvy of the customers you serve.
And the beautiful thing is that you don’t have to boil the ocean. Making small adjustments, consistently over long periods of time, adds up to big gains over months, quarters, and years.
What’s one thing you can implement this week that will reduce effort and improve experience for your customers?
Thanks, Elton, for the inspiration.
🤘
[1] I let my daughter know that her first concert experience has likely ruined her. Every show she sees from now on will pale in comparison to what she witnessed that night.
[2] Elton was 75 years old in 2022 when we saw him. Other than the waddle, you would have never known it. He rocked the keys like he was still 25.
[3] Easily one of my most referenced books in this newsletter. Most companies are trying to do big things when they should really just focus on removing friction that drives customer effort from getting a product demo, to exploring the product, to learning and operating it on a day to day basis.
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