Best Practice Guide: What SMBs Value When Buying Software

As a B2B software provider, we are constantly trying to better understand our customers and meet their needs and wants. This is true of marketing initiatives, but more importantly new customer success - encompassing onboarding, training, and ongoing support.

The ongoing battle of how, when, and where to provide training - do we just sign them up and let them fend for themselves, waiting for them to contact support when and if they need help? Do we offer personalized one-on-one training, or self-service options like guided tutorials? Do we establish a customer success team, with dedicated account managers to guide them through using our system?

There is no one size fits all answer, each business is unique and depends on the complexity of the software, the aptitude of the users, and much more. But in a recent survey by GetData (the research arm of software reviews site GetApp), small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) made it clear that what they really want is best practice feedback.

Over 90% of SMBs asked reported that prefer to receive best practice feedback when buying new business software

93.7% to be exact - and almost half of those rated it as "very important" when purchasing new software, the other half saying it would be nice to have. That means that only 6% of the over 500 respondents did not feel that best practices were important. 

What's interesting is that the question was posed in terms of best practice guidance compared to traditional functionality training, so customers are actually looking for more best practices vs functionality - so our kudos to these intelligent software buyers, who see the value in learning from others and utilizing their software providers as valuable business partners!

The takeaway here? Your customers see more value in best practice-focused training than in boring, feature-focused training. Rather than just telling them what your software does, show them how it can improve their business processes, increase efficiency, or any other benefits your software provides - it could very well be the differentiating factor between you and your competition!

Speaking of best practices, be sure to check out our white paper on CRM best practices for SMBs: