How transparent is your messaging regarding product limitations or potential challenges? Is there a balance between promoting strengths and providing full disclosure?
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CSO9 months ago
Honesty is the best approach. If your customer has a need, and you can fully help them with your solution, you're fine. But, if your product has a limitation that will impact their results, you must tell them. It's the right thing to do.CEO in Software8 months ago
Transparency is key and ideally you want to cover any objections before they come up. I would look at this in a few levels. Marketing transparency in your content and a deeper level in your sales conversations. Director Value Engineering8 months ago
We are fully transparent as we have continuous improvement and developments. Our évolutions answer both our vision and our client feedbacks. On top of that, we also develop on demand for meaningful topics. Chief Revenue Officer in Banking8 months ago
Transparency is paramount, especially when it comes to cybersecurity. I won't mention names, but too many companies in the cybersecurity space make claims beyond their capabilities attempting to paint a picture that they're the silver bullet of cybersecurity. Just speaking in terms of cybersecurity solutions, I find that prospects respect an honest promotion of capabilities. Definitely, promote the solutions capabilities and positive outcomes as it relates to the target audience, but be prepared to honestly present the limitations or potential challenges. For example, two potential challenges we have relate to implementation. As a SaaS solution, we need to partner with the client as they will have to create the API connections to their operational applications. There is also an initial movement of sensitive data from their existing database to the always encrypted platform. In both cases, it's easy to focus on the benefit of the data always being encrypted, but it's equally important to be upfront within the sales messaging to educate the client related to the level of effort needed to implement the SaaS solution.
I could go into limitations, but that is a longer conversation. In short, cybersecurity is about defense in depth. Be honest about where your solution is most effective.
Head of Sales in Software5 months ago
We are borderline aggressive with what our limitations are and what challenges may exist once we understand the customer use case. There is NOTHING worse than winning business only to find out they churned a year later. We qualify hard up front to make sure that we can be useful and that it will be a good fit for both parties for years, not just the initial contract period. Of course there is a balance, especially if you're a startup with minimal functionality, but the more seasoned the product the more you should DQ folks. It's a very important part of sales and it's not just to save the time and energy of the salesperson it's for the prospect as well! We sell more enterprise deals and so we are going to engage our IT team with yours, we are going to demo, do a trial etc. There is no point in wasting your time or ours only to find out it wasn't a good fit. We understand that it takes relational and political capital to buy software these days and let's just say budgets of those two are tight. We won't waste yours or ours! :)