As part of the ritual of examining local commerce and SMB Saas strategies, Localogy goes right to the source: SMBs themselves. How do they feel about marketing and operational software? What features do they want? And how has their hunger changed in a pandemic? This is all a moving target.
Localogy’s Modern Commerce Monitor (MCM) Wave 6.1 answers these and other questions across SMB SaaS, which we preview in this Benchmark Bytes series. After examining SMBs’ software engagement levels last week, we switch gears to look at where they hope to see product improvements.
Specifically, what featues and functionality would increase their usage and engagement (tying it back to last week’s data set)? Top answers include a simpler UX (76 percent), better expectation setting about what the product does (and doesn’t) do (67 percent), and better training/onboarding (52 percent).
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Data Dive
Going deeper, a few other insights jump out from these figures.
– The need for simplicity was a resounding sentiment among SMBs’ looking for functional improvements to their Saas products.
– This isn’t suprising, given the psychographics of a large segement of SMBs, specifically involving their tech savvy.
– They’re plumbers, lawyers and chef’s… not trained CMOs and web developers…
– This is an ongoing challenge in software design, given that engineers build SMB SaaS products.
– It’s also a challenge in that there are a series of tradeoffs in the effort to make software feature rich and differentiated… yet not unfocused.
– This challenge is exacerbated by the fact that SaaS products have to choose a spot on that sliding scale, despite the fact that the end-user personas vary widely. So they can never make everyone happy.
– Moving on to other survey sentiments, poor expectation setting seems to be a common pain point for a meaningful segment of SMBs (67 percent).
– This is also an ongoing challenge in the software world (not specific to SMBs) in terms of the pressures on software sales organizations to sell, sell, sell. Sometimes expectations are mismanaged.
– Better onboading, training and support make up the remainder of the list, given SMBs sometimes-urgent and time-cosntrained need to fix issues in their businesses.
– These support issues should be better addressed by SMB SaaS players. Though they don’t score as high as the above SMB sentiments (e.g., software design), they represent “lower hanging fruit.”
Time to Shine
Stepping back, SMB online marketing – website-based or otherwise – continues to grow rapidly. SMB SaaS startups and online services providers are correspondingly thriving as it continues to grow as a leading subsector of the broader SaaS universe. There’s a long-tail opportunity at play.
Meanwhile, new SMB SaaS users could represent permanent adopters – a concept that’s accelerated in the Covid era as SMBs are forced to boost their digital transformation. This sends them into the arms of SaaS providers to accomplish a range of marketing and operational functions.
We’ll return in the next installment to go deeper into Localogy original survey research. That will include SMB goals and success factors. Let us know what additional insights jump out at you from the above data, and stay tuned for more breakdowns in our Benchmark Bytes series.
