The overlooked customer benefit for weakly incentivised users in B2B SaaS and services

When employees & stakeholders don't care (much) about their own objectives

Successful B2B products solve valuable problems for their customers. B2B vendors identify problems, build features which solve those problems, and then translate those features into benefits through which they can sell their product to customers.

But what happens when a vendor's prospective end-users lack the usual incentives to care about their own day-to-day work challenges? What if accomplishing more, hitting targets and delivering measurable improvements don’t matter to them? And what happens if those end-users are also involved in the procurement of the vendor's product?

This article is about what I call weakly incentivised employees, and how an important-but-often-overlooked benefit of B2B solutions can be vital in how vendors communicate and position their proposition.

Workplace motivation and incentives

Whether you're developing a new product or iterating an existing one, it's a mistake to assume future success just because you're confident that prospective customers are experiencing an issue which your proposition can solve.

It's why product teams often use customer development to discover why the problem is a problem, and how severely it's perceived by potential customers. What are the consequences of leaving it unsolved? What are the benefits of solving it? What would a solution be worth to customers? Typically, getting to the bottom of those questions requires us to understand how and why users are incentivised to care.

Many companies and organisations implement layers of motivation and incentives to get employees to achieve specific personal targets, team goals or company objectives. For example:

• Promotions
• Salary bumps
• Performance-related bonuses
• Performance-related perks and other non-monetary benefits
• Better job security / avoid redundancy
• Public celebration of achievements
• Private congratulations from leadership and managers

Weakly incentivised employees

Unfortunately[^1], there are many many jobs in which good performance is not rewarded; where exceptional achievements — even over a prolonged period — will have little or no impact on an employee's promotion prospects or their pay packet.

In the same organisations, poor performers need not fear for their jobs, their pay, or their career progression. Short of gross negligence or outright criminality[^2], there is little they can do to jeopardise their employment or even obstruct their own promotions.

Inside those organisations, employees are deprived of extrinsic motivation to excellence and lack a disincentive to mediocrity (or worse). These jobs are common in — but not exclusive to — public sector and quasi-public-sector organisations[^3]. In almost any job, employees will experience problems and challenges which could potentially be solved with better tools and innovative solutions, leading to measurable improvements. For example:

• deliver a better or faster service to customers
• drive more revenue
• improve retention
• reduce costs
• improve new customer acquisition or conversion
• improve other performance metrics

But for weakly incentivised employees, solving those problems, and the benefits which accrue from their resolution, will be substantially or entirely decoupled from their remuneration, status and career progress. Their willingness to seek out, explore or fully cooperate with solutions which enable them to do their jobs better, is mostly a function of their intrinsic motivation.

This presents a challenge for any vendor who develops a solution which could solve problems in an organisation with weakly incentivised employees. It's even more problematic if weakly incentivised employees are also involved in the procurement process.

If some of the employees involved in procurement or the customer's Decision Making Unit (DMU) lack extrinsic incentives, then how much will they care about the measurable improvements that a solution could deliver? They will only care as much as their intrinsic motivations affect their attitude to their work.

Even if some members of the DMU have extrinsic incentives, how much will their non-incentivised employees and team members care about actually implementing and delivering those improvements? An extrinsically motivated manager — foisting new software onto her weakly incentivised team — may not get the results she's hoping for.

This is problematic for vendors because:

1. It makes an ROI-based sales pitch less effective or even meaningless
2. It makes potential measurable benefits less attractive to prospective customers
3. It makes post-sales implementation harder

A real-life example

I recently completed a project for a B2B SaaS company in which many of the employees of potential customers whom I interviewed were:

1. Weakly incentivised and
2. Involved in the procurement of new software for their teams and
3. Relatively senior within their organisations, mostly in middle and upper management positions.

It was fascinating because:

1. They were well aware of their organisations' targets and objectives and how those were relevant and actionable for their own jobs
2. There was minimal incentive for them personally to reach those targets, and minimal disincentive for them to underperform or fail completely.
3. They were revealingly uninterested in professional development and inactive in developing their own skills.

The customer development sessions demonstrated a weird dichotomy as again-and-again, across many organisations, employees (including managers and DMU members) stated:

1. Their organisations were (notionally) desperate to meet particular objectives and
2. They & their team-mates were personally responsible for achieving those aims and figuring out how they should be achieved and yet
3. They weren't that bothered whether the objectives were met.

The missing user benefit: achieving the same (not better) results with less work

Employees were well aware of the blockers to achieving their objectives, and they were clear that my client's SaaS proposition could help them do their jobs measurably better. But they lacked much motivation to hit targets or deliver improved performance.

This might be a problem, for my client, or any B2B vendor selling to these organisations[^4]. But it was the realisation that employees of prospective customers weren't that motivated to hit their targets that revealed the proposition's true benefit.

Rather than doing their jobs better, they were more interested in doing the same job with less work.

That might be a banal outcome, but it’s certainly not an instinctive one. When we think about product development, we’re focused on enabling customers to perform ‘better’ and achieve ‘more’. When we think about communicating the benefits of the proposition, we talk about alleviating pain points and achieving greater success.

Arguably, “achieve the same outcome with less work” is just a variation of a typical “save time” benefit. But, the “save time” benefit is usually combined (implicitly or explicitly) with a second benefit which involves “more” or “better”.

In this scenario though, our users aren’t interested in “more” or “better”: they just want to do less. Doing less might enable them to leave the office earlier, or have a more relaxing workday, or — in the most optimistic case — deliver something else for their employer via the time saved.

The realisation that this could be a powerful motivation for users, many of whom were involved in their organisations’ software procurement, enabled a substantial improvement in how the proposition was communicated. My client could amend their go-to-market planning and product messaging by effectively segmenting stakeholders depending on whether they were likely to be weakly incentivised or not.

For weakly incentivised stakeholders: the primary benefits were redrafted to emphasise the reduction of effort & elimination of wasted time.

For stakeholders in the most senior positions or those who were likely to be better incentivised: other benefits could be prioritised. In particular, my client's proposition enables those stakeholders to attain their more ambitious measurable objectives without increasing budget or headcount.

Of course, this is partly a straightforward example of the value of segmenting your customers, and developing different messages for different stakeholders, even inside a single organisation. But it also reflects the fact that the obvious or instinctive benefits[^5] might not be the ones which are most relevant or compelling for your customers.

There is little that’s aspirational about this approach

Whether you’re in strategy, development, marketing or sales of a B2B product, this is unlikely to be the approach you’d aspire to take with your proposition. Weakly incentivised users and stakeholders may get fewer and weaker benefits from your proposition, and acquiring them may be trickier (or at least quite different!)[^6] compared to more incentivised DMUs. However, none of this should undermine the fact that your proposition can be used to solve problems and drive efficiency or efficacy within customer organisations. The ability to appeal to stakeholders’ desire to do less work may be a sub-optimal approach and is obviously not applicable to all B2B propositions. But it’s useful to have it in your toolbox.

[^1]: This is unfortunate for the affected employees, but also for the companies and organisations.

[^2]: And sometimes not even criminal behaviour is sufficient e.g. Radiologist faked overtime claims to pay off medical school debts (The Times: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/radiologist-faked-overtime-claims-pay-off-medical- school-debts-wk7qmwv7c)

[^3]: Of course, there are many excellent employees in public sector orgs, with no shortage of intrinsic motivation to perform well. The problem, of course, is that many people have a shortage of intrinsic motivation, or perhaps they just dislike their job

[^4]: It is, of course, also pretty bad for the affected organisations.

[^5]: Indeed, the potential benefits which maybe attracted you to working on the proposition in the first place

[^6]: However, this is just one user acquisition challenge among many when it comes to public sector procurement.