2022 SaaS Trend: Asynchronous B2B Commerce

It is a SaaS company’s dream - buyers who don’t need to talk to sales.  

Most people hear that and think it’s not possible. They think things like:

“Our product is too complicated and feature-rich to be understood and purchased without discovery, demos, etc.”

“My sales team helps people to understand the problems that our product solves. We can’t do that without them.”

While these concerns are valid, the view that content can’t provide a majority (or all) of this support means that you may never have seen a solid content strategy at play.  

So let’s look at how quality tutorials can supercharge your 2022 content strategy and make your product stand out among asynchronous SaaS buyers this year.

Where Most SaaS Companies Go Wrong w/ Tutorials

Tutorials get a bad rap, and for good reason. Most companies do not use them properly and do not make them better than speaking to a live person.  

Humans, by nature, will do what is easiest and what introduces the least friction.  

This means that if your clients or potential customers are not using your tutorials, you’re not making it easy and frictionless.

So where does it often go wrong with SaaS tutorials?

1. People don’t know how to use your tutorials properly
2. Your tutorials are not easy to find, navigate, and search through
3. You didn’t tie your tutorials to solutions as well as features

If you’re seeing yourself in the above, I have good news for you - fixing your tutorial problem is easier than you might think! I’ll cover all of the considerations you need to make to build your 2022 strategy below. Plus, I’ll suggest the coolest tool out there to solve all of your tutorial problems.

But first, let’s talk about why getting your tutorials right is crucial to your revenue success.

What Roles Can Tutorials Play in My SaaS Marketing Strategy?

Typically, SaaS companies use tutorials and guides for post-sale questions and perhaps onboarding if they have a manager or director of customer education.  

Rarely do you find a SaaS company using tutorials well during the presale and selling process.  

Here is what those companies are missing out on:

• True self-drive demos.  Wouldn’t it be nice if your customers could actually click through your interface and perform important, key actions without needing to enter their email, commit to a trial, or book a demo?  Make it easy for a customer to fall in love with your product and reap the reward of more right-fit meetings.  
• Super-charged free trials.  Free trials are not automatic for every company.  Even when they are partitioned automatically, you still use precious sales resources to ensure that the fee trial drives enough value to turn into a sale.  If you used the overlay tutorial feature from iorad that let’s your users put your tutorial on top of their own instance, you could make it very easy (read: no meetings or watching a video and trying to replicate what you saw) for a potential customer to get deep into your product and fall in love with its features.
• Smoother onboarding.  Once someone has test driven your product and learned several features, they will onboard from a stronger point A than someone without real platform experience.  Imagine spending your onboarding time aligning tutorials with customer needs rather than playing tech teacher.  Do I hear less frustration and more engagement? 
• On-demand, 24/7 customer support and success.  How expensive is CS?  Not only in hours but in missteps? What if your CS team helped your customers help themselves and could be advocates for their product usage triumphs rather than serve technical troubleshooters?  Your customers being able to easily access information to expand usage means less time for your CS teams and deeper product engagement.

Do you have to train your customers on how to find and use your tutorials?  Yes.  

But would you rather teach a customer to fish or give them a fish? Fact is, you’re missing out on opportunities across your full funnel if you are not using tutorials to do the above for your SaaS product.

Build Your 2022 Tutorial Strategy

It will take time and effort to put this plan together but the ROI will be better than any campaign you have created before…which should say a lot coming from the owner of a marketing agency!  

Here are the things you need to consider before building out your tutorial strategy:

• What features are the hardest to use or understand?  Make those tutorials first.
• Which tutorials should link to one another to easily allow a user to progress through free trial and onboarding activities?
• What is most valuable for your customers to see during your demos?  This should become the basis for your self-drive demo.
• What problems does your SaaS platform solve?  Tie features to solutions for pre-sale.
• How will you teach people how to use your tutorial system?  Your tutorial tool, of course!
• How will you organize and categorize your tutorials based on the funnel stage that they are used at - I recommend personalizing versions for self-drive pre-demo, the active sales process, and post sale.  Take the time to personalize and relate.
• How will you help people progress through your tutorials?
• The language you will use in your chat bot or support tickets to suggest a tutorial as to not sound like you are being unhelpful
• Outline which features are used most by customers who don’t churn - focus on those features for post-sale tutorials.
• Align with marketing on the delivery of these tutorials in your funnel

You’ve Got This - One Step at a Time!

Give people what they want.  Consumers are more savvy than ever.  The pandemic has made all of us professional online, async buyers, so meet people where they are at.

Pick an area to start building your tutorials.  

Sign up for iorad - the best tutorial tool I have seen (trusted by Zoom, DoorDash, and more!)

Get outsourced help if you have the resources to do so in order to complete this most important task quickly.  

But whatever you do, make it easier for your customers to buy and engage via tutorials!