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Your customers don’t believe the value of a subscription depends on the number of seats they use. After years of speaking with people who buy information for their organisations, here’s what I think the exam question for b2b information brands is:
“Will this information improve our customers’ performance in a way their organisation cares to measure?”
When the answer is unclear, you’ll need to push sales and renewals – and pushing is expensive. The sales cycle lengthens. Discounts creep in. Renewal pricing gets dented. Churn follows. Payback of CAC tanks.
When the answer is clear, it’s because teams obsess about their customer’s changing world. They know who bought the solution and why, who needs to use it, and what it needs to do at different levels of the business.
The 3 Cs of information businesses:
Get clear about how you help your customers across different roles in their organisation. Map the problems you solve and update the map frequently. Senior executives don’t consume external intelligence for themselves. They take an external point of view, transform it, and distribute it inward. How can you help them with this important workflow?
Content: What’s happening.
Context: Joining dots to understand what it means.
Creativity: Help to see what’s possible.
This is not a seat based play.
Leaving money on the table
I recently found 1 seat is serving 5-6 functions.
When you count seats, you’re counting access. You’re not counting what that access enables inside the organisation.
More seats on your pricing spreadsheet looks simple to sell but it doesn’t create more revenue in the long run. It is a discount you haven’t noticed yet.
The antidote is to know the impact of your information – how many people/teams/functions did your information reach?
Designing effective solutions
The move isn’t from features to better features. It’s from being seen as a vendor to something more visionary. A mindset shift from building more products to creating more possibilities for customers.
When I speak with senior customers of B2B information brands this is what they value:
Trusted scanning of what’s happening in their market.
Filters from noise.
Perspectives they can add to the knowledge for their teams.
Gaps to exploit or defend.
A sense of what’s around the corner.
Teams who stay situationally aware so they can act, not react.
That’s where the edge is.
Get this right and you’ll feel a pull from your ideal customers.
What’s the difference between push and pull?
Creating pull means you have a solution your customers feel is right for them. It sounds like:
“When I move organisations, I’m taking you with me.”
“This is a useful way of seeing my world and what’s changing in it.”
“I heard about you already, let’s work out how to do something.”
“I need my CEO to hear what you’ve got to say.”
And when your champions can finish the sentence “they help us with…” in language their business understands, you’ll know you’re there.
P.S. What they don’t say is: how many seats can I buy?
At Substribe, I work with B2B information and data businesses to find where that pull already exists and build the conditions to scale it.
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