A Certain Success

Product-Market Fit, as made popular by the great Sean Ellis, is a concept that revolves around a simple assumption.

The assumption is that if you can create a product that fits perfectly with a specific market, then you’re onto a winner.

So if, for example, your target market needs something to help them achieve A and help them solve B, then your product needs to do those things. If it does, then customers will flock to your product.

From this it’s easy to think of the formula for a successful product as follows:

People that want a certain product + the certain product = a certain success.

The great thing about Product-Market fit is that it makes sense. You can’t help but read about it and think, “Huh, looks sensible to me.”

But while it may help guide companies in the right direction, there is a problem with it…

… you can never actually achieve Product-Market Fit.

You Have to Move Fast

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: The SaaS world moves fast. If you don’t keep up then you won’t be around for long.

Product-Market Fit relies on the idea that the market doesn’t change. It assumes that once prospects have decided what it is they want, that they aren’t going to change their minds.

But as anyone in the SaaS industry knows, this is far from the case.

Prospects change their minds a lot, sometimes even on a daily basis. The market is constantly shifting in terms of the features they want to see and their priorities will adjust accordingly.

What the market wants today is not necessarily what the market wants tomorrow.

That’s why you can’t ever achieve Product-Market Fit; the market keeps on changing.

By the time you’ve created your product in the hopes of achieving Product-Market Fit, everyone has moved on, everyone wants something else.

So what can you do…

… well, you could start by capturing up-to-date priorities.

Don’t Be an Ostrich

The reason a lot of SaaS companies struggle to identify the current market priorities is that they simply aren’t collecting them in the first place.

If you don’t have the relevant data then how can you possibly hope to build what your prospects need?

Bear in mind that what your prospects say they want and what they want most are not the same thing and…

…if you just ask your prospects to submit features that they’d like you to build you’ll be left with a massive product backlog and you won’t know what to do with it.

You won’t understand what pain points the market wants you to solve and could end up aimlessly building features into your product that don’t support growth or your current users — in fact, you could end up wasting precious time & resources building entirely the wrong things.

But rather than burying your head in the sand, why not try to fix your product backlog so that it becomes less of a chore and actually starts helping you make decisions.

The best part? It couldn’t be easier.

Simply set up a feedback channel for your sales teams. This could be an email address, a spreadsheet if you are a small business, or if you’re more growing or already at scale, you need a dedicated solution like Receptive.

The key things to bear in mind is that it should be constantly accessible to your sales team who are on the front line of collecting data from the market and your prospects.

Then simply ensure your sales and product teams know what to expect from each other. A great way to do this is with a Product Feedback Policy — a short document that outlines how often the product teams review feedback and requests that come into your organization.

Here’s where the magic happens.

Now your Sales team will know where to put the information they collect, and product teams can then use that data to inform and de-risk roadmapping decisions.

Of course you need to ask your prospects what problems they would like you to solve, but there’s something else you need to ask…

… what are their priorities? What is a deal-breaker vs a nice-to-have?

If You Don’t Ask, You Don’t Get

Most feedback forms consist of a few questions about the problem the individual has and how they want it solved. The product team then deciphers those requests and builds features according to the problems.

The issue here is that product teams don’t know how much of a priority each problem is.

Sure, you could count up how many people mention a certain problem, or how many votes a feature has, but it doesn’t give the full picture.

Instead, ask them outright what their priorities are. Having your prospects compare the different requests will ensure that only the most important ones are brought to the forefront.

You can do this either periodically in an email to your prospects, or during Sales calls. It takes very little time and it gets your product team the data they need.

Alternatively, software like Receptive was designed to automate this process, enabling sales teams to update prospect’s priorities and keep them in the loop too.

Having an up-to-date picture of your prospects’ priorities means you are always in a position to balance the demands of the market with strategic developments and things that are important to your current customer base.

The General Gist

So the key takeaways are as follows…

• Product-Market Fit can never truly be achieved
• This is because SaaS markets are constantly evolving
• Instead of aiming for Product-Market Fit, successful SaaS companies should aim to adapt to the market as it evolves — change is your goal
• You can do this by providing sales teams with a way to log feedback & requests which the product teams review (email, spreadsheet, Receptive, etc).
• Get a Product Feedback Policy in place (here’s a free template)
• Make sure to ask for your prospects’ most up-to-date priorities.

That’s about it. Forget about Product-Market Fit, and start thinking about your prospect’s priorities and how sales can help de-risk your product decisions.

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