Removing Switching Barriers in SaaS — Gone in 60 Seconds

You’ll have thought long and hard about acquisition channels; but think about this for a second.

Do you want to build customers from those who don’t know about your product, or do you want to go after competitor’s customers?

Converting prospects who aren’t yet aware of the need to use your product is tough. You need to get yourself in front of them, then educate them as to why they need your product. Then there’s that leap-of-faith moment where you need to persuade them that in order to get to that “wow moment”, where they finally see value in your product, they’ve got to commit time and resource in setting an account account up with you.

Customers using a competitor service already know the benefits of using a service such as yours. They’ve already made that time, resource, and financial commitment with your competitor.

So is it better to go hunting for prospects who none of your competitors have got hold of yet — to find them, educate them, and try to get them to commit; or would you rather try and convince your competitor’s customers to switch to you instead?

I know which group of customers I’d rather go after. Those that are with a competitor. But to succeed at grabbing your competitor’s customers you need to win on two levels.

Firstly your product needs to have multiple strong unique selling propositions — your USPs.

Secondly, and key, you need to remove all switching barriers.

Even if a customer is unhappy with your competitor if they’ve already spent time and money setting up their account they’re not going to want to go through the pain of setting up a new account with you all over again.

At StatusCake we know we have four strong USPs over competitors such as Pingdom. We know that:

#1 our alerting is more reliable;

#2 our product offers more features;

#3 our customer success team leads the industry; and that

#4 we offer better value for money.

But none of this really nudges the needle. Even the most disenfranchised Pingdom customer, if it’s going to take them 30+ mins to manually migrate their account, will think twice before moving.

What you should be trying to do here is to take leverage the “evaluation effort” that went into creating the customer’s competitor account, and simply migrate that across to your service. Make the cost to them of evaluating your service as close to zero as possible.

At StatusCake we looked at how we could remove all switching barriers, to make it an absolute no-brainer.

The “Pingdom Importer” simply requires Pingdom customers to fill in 3 fields, check the tests they want to import into StatusCake, and click create account.

Bang — they’re done. Completely migrated from Pingdom, with everything up-and-running in their new StatusCake account, in under a minute — Gone in 60 seconds.

We also decided that if a Pingdom customer was mid-way through their billing period we’d credit them for the remainder of that period; ensuring that there was no immediate financial cost of switching either.

So think about your industry. Who are your competitors? Do you have clearly defined USPs that you can convey to your competitor’s customers? Having done this can you remove any barrier that might make them pause, and ultimately stop them migrating?

Of course having grabbed your competitor’s customers in 60 seconds, ensure that once you have them on-board please nurture them, engage with them, and embed them deeply within your product, and quickly. Ensure that you’re delivering on those USPs that you promised them so that they’ll not be tempted to leave you for another!