This article was written by Ken Leaver who comes from a product & commercial background. He has founded multiple companies and held senior product positions at SEA tech companies like Lazada and Pomelo Fashion.
Ken runs his own agency that helps early stage companies execute faster and cheaper. Check out his linkedin at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenleaver/
Guest Author: Ken Leaver
Just finishing up this really good interview with Matt Dixon on closing SAAS deals.
And it hits on some things that i’ve noticed and concluded for myself over the years. First let’s look at the trad’l SAAS sales approach which consists of these 2 premises:
1 – Sales people are generally taught to overcome the ‘status quo’ bias. Meaning they try to convince potential clients that continuing what they are doing now won’t cut it.
2- They often do this by ratcheting up FOMO and saying things like… “All of your competitors are doing this” etc.
But what often happens is that this backfires 87% of the time.
Why? Well as a product person that has overseen easily 20+ major SAAS implementations into various org’s the past decade I can tell you based on my actual experience:
1 – You generally don’t want to be the one perceived to be pushing the change.
– Because if you are… you are leaving yourself vulnerable to various folks saying things like “Oh.. i liked that I can do xyz on the old system and I can’t do it now”
– And you need to address all these things yourself… which can be quite painful.
2- This leads to what Chris calls FOMU (The Fear of Messing Up)
– Meaning you get blamed for a software implementation that is perceived as having added little to no value.
– Reality is typically that it does add significant value in ways that they don’t recognize, but reduces value in a few ways that get a lot of attention.
3- It is therefore far safer to stick with the status quo till it becomes so painful that lots of stakeholders are now crying out that they want to change
– And as a product person you generally want to wait till the pain has gotten to the point that a few senior stakeholders are willing to be ‘sponsors’ of the change.
– It is even best to document this support. Because these stakeholders will sometimes change their tune later on if the implementation does not go well.
4 – Having these sponsors is a far safer way to proceed for the product person delivering the change
– Because you no longer have to be the only one defending the change. Rather your sponsors do most of the defense for you.
So now you see why a wise product veteran will rarely push a big SAAS implementation himself. He’s often seen how it can work against him.
So he sits and he waits… till the pain hikes up.
The problem with that for the org is that you end up sticking with shitty, antiquated solutions for way too long.
