Ton Dobbe 🔆

Competition is good. Customers need choice - and competition enables that. The opportunity is however not in trying to be perceived as better (super hard), but to articulate how you're different. Let's illustrate this with an example from the ERP space. I've experienced a flurry of competitive launches of new 'modules' that solved yet another problem (like we already did). The fact your competitor now has similar functionality doesn't matter. What matters is what approach they're betting on to solve the problem. Many enterprise software suites offer similar functionality - but there's no suite that solves the problem in the same way. That's what matters and that's where the opportunity hides. Position around your difference.

Where do I start :-) I wrote a book about it: The Remarkable Effect. Let's start with the first 3 traits that define remarkable Software companies: 1) They acknowledge they cannot please everyone 2) They offer something valuable & desirable 3) They aim to be different, not just better In my book I reveal 3 levers to build a software business that people start talking about - and keep talking about. That's what exceeding expectations is all about - right? These 3 traits are part of The Value Lever. This is the foundation of your business. Getting this foundation established makes everything that follows easier - no matter how tough the market conditions, and no matter how fierce the competition.

Price increases - no matter if done from the perspective of internal cost increase, annual indexation, or simply revaluation of your product suite, always have to answer the 'so what' question. Here's why: No one is waiting to pay more - so explain the increase in a credible way - and, ideally, a way where the customer gets value in return. Pricing is a story. Tell the wrong story (or no story) and it bites you in ways that even the price increase won't cover for. some tips that I've seen working in my career / projects with sales-led SaaS scaleups: 1) Articulate what will they gain as a consequence of the increase? 2) What or who will they gain access to they didn't before? 3) What frustrations will you take away as a result of this?

I've come to learn the hard way that looking at competition, cost or common pricing models doesn't help to create the biggest impact. When I owned Pricing at Unit4, my biggest aha moment came when I started to align our pricing with metrics that my customers were already planning around. Here's why - They understand it like no one else - They can make a rapid decision whether your pricing is 'fair' - They can easier communicate the value internally. What did that mean? That for Professional Service firms we priced our ERP per # of employees (because the bulk of them contribute to revenue (consultants) but for example for Local Government we started pricing per Citizen. Pricing is a story - let it tell a story.

One of the biggest challenges I've seen in the enterprise software space when it comes to GTM choices is 'Ego' - i.e., c-level involvement that aims to push their weight in. More often than not this is based on 'liking' and 'gut feel' - rather than any external validation. That's why any of the work I'm presenting is always backed with customer validation. It simply doesn't matter what we think is best, or like most - it's about what resonates most with a dream customer. If the work doesn't lit their eyes up, or get them to pay close attention - start over.

We all know triggering an emotion can very effective in messaging - yet in 99% out of 100 B2B SaaS websites / posts / emails I read it's absent. As if we think B2B audiences only respond to facts. Even the biggest bean counters and blue collar engineers are humans. They have frustrations. They care about different things. They have anxieties. Aspirations. All of that makes them real - and a better or worse fit for your product. It's therefore always part of step 1, 2 and 3 in my repositioning projects. Not getting this right makes it impossible to - articulate who you're for and who not - build a compelling value proposition - position your product in a way that stands out - even create pricing power. Emotional appeal is foundational