Read
How to use Voice of the Customer to accelerate SaaS growth
Free ebook. Learn how to capture Voice of the Customer and use VoC insights to improve your branding, website, and everything in between.
Articles
January 30, 2025
7 min read
5 ways VoC data can help you stand out (and stay ahead) in SaaS
You have 5 seconds…
To prove to your customers that you understand them and will solve their problems better than any of your competitors. That’s how fast B2B buyers are judging your website, ads, email campaigns, and landing pages.
The problem? Many companies think they know their audience inside and out, but without talking to their customers, they’re (almost always) working on assumptions. And assumptions are expensive — especially in SaaS. They can drive you to invest in the wrong features and in messaging that misses the mark.
Despite your best intentions, you can’t close the gap between what you think matters and what your customers actually value. You have to invite your customers into the conversation.
If your SaaS brand is struggling to rise above a sea of indistinguishable promises, Voice of the Customer (VoC) data could be the missing ingredient. Here are five practical ways to use VoC data to sharpen your competitive edge and drive steady SaaS growth.
1. Uncover and prioritize hard-hitting pain points
Customers rarely tell you what they want. They tell you their frustrations. Many SaaS companies collect a laundry list of customer pain points and then choose the top three they solve best. In reality, the value comes from reading between the lines and surfacing the emotional triggers for each audience.
Different audiences express different pain points for wanting to purchase your software, often driven by distinct emotional needs.
Let's look at how this plays out when selling project management software to a marketing agency:
- Brandi (Director of Operations) says she needs "better visibility"
- Surface pain point: Lack of project oversight
- Deeper quote: "Three campaigns missed their deadline last quarter because I couldn't spot resource conflicts"
- Emotional trigger: Fear of losing credibility with her team
- Jared (VP of Sales) says he needs "more robust analytics"
- Surface pain point: Only has access to basic reporting capabilities
- Deeper quote: "We just lost a $500K pitch because competitors showed real-time dashboards"
- Emotional trigger: Aspiration to win more deals
Same product feature (reporting dashboard). Completely different emotional triggers behind the marketing agency’s decision to purchase your project management software.
When you understand these emotional triggers, you realize that "better visibility" and "robust analytics" aren't just feature requests – they're expressions of deeper fears and aspirations. Each role has unique pressures they're trying to address, even when looking at the same functionality.
That's why generic pain point lists often fail. Success comes from mapping specific emotional motivators by role and identifying trends.
The key to decoding VoC into tangible customer insights is understanding:
- Who is actually making the purchase decision?
- What keeps those specific buyers up at night?
- Which pain points repeat across multiple buyers?
2. Address pain points with benefits that resonate most with each buyer
Once you understand these role-specific pain points, you can address them with benefits that speak directly to each buyer's needs. But here's where most SaaS marketers get it wrong: they jump straight from pain points to feature lists.
Features alone are a weak moat that (likely) many of your competitors can cross. To truly convince your customers of your value, let the benefits of the features do the heavy lifting.
So, if we go back to our project management software example, flip Brandi and Jared’s pain points and turn them into outcome-focused benefits:
- Brandi (Director of Operations):
- Pain point: "I missed three campaign deadlines because I couldn't spot resource conflicts."
- Benefit: "Hit every campaign deadline with confidence. Our AI flags resource conflicts so that you can stay ahead of delivery timelines.”
- Jared (VP of Sales):
- Pain point: "I lost a $500K deal this year because we couldn’t compete with another agency’s real-time dashboard."
- Benefit: "Win more enterprise deals by demonstrating real-time campaign progress in our easy-to-use reporting dashboards.”
When your benefits align perfectly with your buyer’s outcomes, they're more motivated to take action because they see their exact needs reflected back to them in their own words.
3. Understand why customers choose you over competitors
While identifying your customer’s pain points and mapping them to your product benefits is pure gold, those two things cannot exist in isolation. The pain points you solve, and the benefits you offer are only as convincing as the market your product swims in.
Your project management software’s real-time reporting feature could quickly become redundant if:
- Competitors start copying your functionality
- New tools replace custom reporting dashboards
- A recession necessitates new executive priorities
While your competitors are:
- Trying to one-up each other’s features
- Building solutions and then looking for problems
- Guessing what matters most
- Reacting to market changes way after they happen
You could be using VoC data to:
- Spot emerging needs before they become obvious to competitors
- Validate which pain points and benefits are most important in the market
- Stand out from competitors
- Position yourself where the market is heading, not where it's been
But don't just collect feedback — examine the customer insights you’ve gathered from your ICP to spot patterns. And keep refreshing your research — today's edge might just become tomorrow's table stakes.
4. Use VoC data to gather feedback on your visual branding
Successful B2B SaaS brands ensure their visual identity complements their messaging. When your design choices clash with your messaging, customers sense the disconnect — and their trust in your brand ultimately suffers, whether they’re aware of it or not.
The Stanford Web Credibility Project backs this up. They found that nearly half of all consumers (46.1%) assessed the credibility of websites based on their overall visual design, including layout, typography, font size, and color schemes.
These first impressions matter: customers make instant, gut-level judgments about whether they trust you enough to invest in your solution. And VoC data can help you reveal some (often uncomfortable) truths:
When enterprise customers say your brand feels "too startup-like," they're really saying:
- "I can't trust you with my five hundred thousand dollar budget"
- "Have you done this before?”
- "I'm worried about justifying this choice to my boss"
When mid-market customers say your brand feels "too enterprise," they mean:
- "You look too expensive and complex"
- "I bet your onboarding process is painfully long"
- "I’ll be a small customer, so I probably won't get much of your time and attention"
While your customer's top pain points and favorite features follow clear patterns, brand perception is more subjective. By collecting customer feedback, you can convert visual preferences into helpful data to enable VoC-driven decisions about your branding that resonate with your target audience.
You can apply VoC data to improve your branding, website, pitch decks, or product UI and discover:
- Whether your visual sophistication matches your price point
- If your interface hierarchy aligns with user priorities
- If your product imagery is helpful or confusing
- Which visual elements build or erode trust
- Where design choices create user friction
5. Strengthen customer acquisition and retention with VoC data
Retaining and growing existing customers is far more profitable than constantly chasing new ones. Yet many SaaS companies focus all their efforts on customer acquisition while their existing customers quietly slip away.
Companies that take advantage of VoC data are playing a different game entirely.
According to Gartner, companies using VoC best practices cut retention costs by 25% — all while turning happy customers into a powerful acquisition channel.
That means every case study and testimonial can pull double duty by 1) reminding your existing customers how great you are while 2) showing your prospects exactly what life could be like if they choose your SaaS product.
The key to applying Voice of Customer to your brand is strategic deployment.
Top-performing SaaS companies weave VoC into critical touchpoints across the user journey:
- During onboarding to validate the purchase decision
- At the 90-day mark to measure user engagement and platform adoption
- When launching new features to drive added benefit
How will you use VoC to stand out in SaaS?
B2B SaaS companies that leverage customer insights outperform those who treat it as an afterthought. Why? Continuously gathering feedback and measuring its impact creates momentum in two key areas:
- Marketing learns what messages resonate with each role's needs
- Customer experience improves as you align product development with validated user pain points
This iterative cycle strengthens both acquisition and retention. You'll build products that solve genuine customer problems, not assumed ones. You'll communicate your solution in language that reflects how your customers think about their challenges. And your marketing and sales will focus on the outcomes buyers actually care about.
While competitors can copy features, they can't tap into the deep customer insights that guide your product roadmap and communication strategy. In a saturated market riddled with speculation, Voice of the Customer opens a direct line to the voice that matters most: your customers.
The hard truth about VoC in SaaS? It never stops. The market will keep moving. Your competitors will keep evolving. And your customers' needs and priorities will continue to change.
While implementing customer feedback into your marketing strategy is a good start, it’s important to remember that VoC isn't a one-and-done project — it's a never-ending investment.
Yes, VoC research takes resources, skills, and systems to do it right, but it sure beats throwing features (and money) at the wall to see what sticks.
