This post is part of the B2B Retention Handbook series. To explore more challenges and solutions, check out the series here.
Product choices are strategic moves for your company that must be informed by data. While you can’t imagine that your product is a great fit for everyone in the market, it’s important to know the benefits or consequences of different product choices and how to communicate them with your prospects and customers.
While the reasons vary, you’ll need a relationship with customers to get accurate feedback that highlights the extent of the consequences when your product can’t keep up with competitors. Understanding how to add value and communicating expectations to your customer can both help navigate when things get rocky and provide the information needed internally to make necessary changes for retention.
Outline
Reasons
Customers may churn because your competitors are moving faster than you are to add customer-desired features and capabilities.
There could be multiple reasons.
- You have a minimum viable product and are yet not ready to enhance and add new capabilities.
- You don’t have enough expertise and bandwidth on your Product team to support new development.
- You have other, higher priorities for your Product team, maybe next quarter…
- You don’t think that customer-desired features add enough value to your product to justify the effort and expense of adding them without raising prices.
- Your competitors are better funded and are further along in their growth, and they can afford to innovate more frequently.
- You don’t want to change your product roadmap every time a customer requests something new.
Solutions
- This is really a strategic question. How do you define your product vision and how does it fit into your strategic narrative? How important is continuous innovation in terms of how you position your product in the marketplace? What’s the role of customers in helping you maintain a competitive edge? Build and continuously update a retention marketing strategy around these messages - How to Prevent Customer Churn With Retention Marketing | G2
- Involve customers directly in product feedback initiatives, such as customer advisory boards, community channels, and product update request pages. - The 5 Key Components of a Killer Customer Marketing Strategy | HubSpot
- Take customer feedback and identify and prioritize the most desired new features and updates. Talk to the Product team about feasibility, resources, and cost. Update your product roadmap to reflect desired and planned development. - How to Implement Customer Feedback Into Your Product Roadmap | Pendo
- Keep customers informed of your innovation strategy via product request pages, newsletters, social media, and community channels. - The Best Ways to Communicate the Product Updates to Your Customers | Upvoty
