You need a constant stream of feedback from your customers.
In B2B SaaS there are 3 ways to collect that feedback…
and my favourite is number 3:
1. The Sales Team
2. One-on-One calls with Customers
3. In-Product feedback
If you can do all three, you’ll have a gold mine of data to study and use to improve your product.
1. The Sales team (assuming there is one)
Salespeople will tell you what they’re hearing from customers when they’re on their calls and meetings with them.
Use this feedback to improve your positioning and find product flaws. You’re trying to achieve two things here. First, this will be an insight into your product-market fit. Secondly, you can use this info to help the team improve their pitch and sell more.
Bonus points if you, can sit in on the Sales meetings, or review the call recordings on Gong, Chorus.ai, MeetRecord etc.
2. One-on-One calls with Customers
This is your chance as a Product Manager/Founder/(insert your role) to sit down with some customers and speak to them. Here you want to understand how your product fits within their workflow, whether they would miss it if your product is gone, and what they love/hate about it. These calls are your way to go in-depth and understand behavioural patterns which no analytics tool can show you.
Bonus points if you can record these calls (with consent) to review later and share with the team.
3. In-Product feedback
Including a feedback mechanism inside of your platform will ensure that you have a constant stream of feedback coming in.
You could use something simple like a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey, which is an easy way for people to score your product on a scale of 1-10 and then write whatever they want about why they chose that score or more structured feedback over 3 or 4 questions – it’s easy for people to answer quickly so you’ll get more responses than if you just asked for their opinion directly. Don’t overcomplicate it, one of your existing tools can already do this: Hotjar, Typeform, or the basic Google form.
This will give you a sense of customer satisfaction and let you know where you need to improve things like the onboarding process or the customer service team’s communication style. And from what I’ve seen, many times, this is the best place to get negative feedback which some would not be comfortable sharing face-to-face.
Another option is to rate parts of the experience, particularly at the end of important journeys. That way you can study the isolated individual experiences.
Conclusion
SaaS companies must constantly collect feedback from their customers. When you’re developing a product, the easiest way to do that is through in-product surveys and support tickets. But if you want to use customer feedback to understand your entire market, you need a more targeted approach—and that means talking to your customers directly. If you have a sales team, they make the perfect resource for collecting this sort of information, and make sure that your product team is regularly scheduling one-on-one calls with your customers.
The more your team is actively interacting with customers, the more likely they are to create relationships that allow you to get inside their heads. And I mean, speaking with them on a regular basis, getting to know their specific pain points and challenges.
Hopefully, you’ll be better prepared to implement feedback into your SaaS product. Keep that customer interaction going – even if it’s only via email – and you’ll be well on your way to creating a strong Product which customers will love.
