How to future sell your product (the right way)

Takeaways

1. In SaaS, future selling gets a bad reputation, but learning how to do it successfully is also essential for long term success.

2. Use three elements to build a product story arc: Backstory, Today’s Capabilities, and Product Vision. Each of these elements can include anecdotes, problems + insights throughout your narrative. Your product story arc should pass through each of these phases. Trouble starts when you blend them together.

3. Anchor the use case in today’s capabilities before talking about the future. Manage expectations first. If a prospect absolutely requires the future capabilities to get started, you may need to revisit them later.

4. Give context for how you got to today’s product, and a vision for where you’re headed.

   1. This is part of the subscription with B2B software. Customers subscribe to your direction, after buying for your current capabilities. The future direction is part of the deal.

What is “future selling”?

The future is optimistic, exciting, and a junk drawer of things you haven’t quite gotten to… yet. When it comes to product storytelling, the future is a great setting to tell your story.

Sales teams often use “future selling” to describe getting a customer to buy into something which doesn’t fully exist yet. On face value, this might sound like an awful idea, especially to product managers. But when done correctly, future selling is a way to show the vision and direction of your product, and how customers can grow with you.

The ongoing relationship is part of why customers value the future plans — they aren't just buying the product today, but subscribing to a future direction.

• The old way = Customers BUY the software for existing capabilities. You only deal with one version of the product at a time.

• SaaS = Customers SUBSCRIBE for today’s capabilities + direction of roadmap + momentum to get there.

Why does future selling cause problems?

The trouble starts when you present capabilities your product will have in the future as though they already exist today. Often this is to compensate for "shortcomings" in the product's current capabilities. That's selling a todo list, not a product or vision.

When customers buy into one thing and find out the features they need are not fully baked, that is a fast way to erode trust and send your customer success team into early retirement from stress.

If a customer has mismatched expectations or needs a feature that does not exist yet to start using your product, having them sign up anyway is a mistake 95% of the time. But if you can get them in on today’s product and hyped for the next few steps, you have a foundation for a healthy customer relationship that’s likely to grow in the months and years ahead.

How do you tell the story of your product to avoid this? In the next section, we'll go over how to find your product's story arc, and give your customers the perspective appreciate your product's direction.

Finding your product story arc

You can shape your customer's perspective of your product with a good story arc. The simplest version of your product’s story should connect to three elements:

1. The backstory, as a way to build expertise and credibility. This is where you highlight the activity that happened before meeting your customer. With the added context, your customers can appreciate the product you have today.

2. Today’s capabilities, and what customers can do with the product you already have.

3. The product vision, and how you might grow together. A good reaction here is “That makes sense”, even if folks would not guess the specifics. The product vision should feel familiar to those already using your product. Even if it isn’t literally predictable, it should match your ongoing narrative.

Part 1: Backstory

The backstory shapes perspective and (with the product vision) adds a sense of momentum. Your product is in motion, and today’s capabilities are the latest step towards the future vision. You move fast, and the wide perspective will help your customers get ready for what’s next. Alignment goes a long way for building customer relationships, and it’s easier for them to include your solution in their long term plans this way too.

For example, if we had a (fictional) subscription robot company 🤖:

“When we first started, robots were too clunky and slow to work in an office. Five years ago, introduced [Robot #1], and six versions later we’ve now got robots working in every major city across the globe. We’ve learned a lot along the way, and you’ll see many of those discoveries reflected in the demo I have for you today…”

Part 2: Today's capabilities

Today’s capabilities are the most important because they determine whether a customer can use your product or not. Without a use case you can solve, you have no relationship.

“Our robots today can lift up to 100lbs without a problem.

Future selling which blurs the line between current and future capabilities might sound closer to this:

“Our new model can lift even heavier items up to 500lbs.”

Part 3: Product Vision

Product vision is where the story goes next. It is about the future, but not just the roadmap or a list of features left to build. Striking this balance is hard. Talking about the future would be much easier with a list of dates and specific features. But that’s also a recipe for mismatched expectations and customer heartbreak. It’s no wonder that future selling gets a bad name – the simplest path is to be concrete, with some small liberties taken on release dates… right? In B2B, customers chase certainty – they have stakeholders, and giving a fuzzy timeframe or non-committal answer feels like it makes their job harder.

But neither you or your customer can tell the future. You can share intention, and the strategy behind it. Part of why customers buy is to have someone anticipate future needs for them. This requires market insights, vision for where the industry is headed, and a little bit of customer feedback. No single customer will predict the future for the rest of your business.

For our robot company, a lightweight version of this might sound like:

We know many of our customers also have heavy machinery, and we’re working on bigger models that can handle larger weights too. They aren’t available yet, but I’d expect them sometime next year…”

Wrap Up

Future selling is a useful tool when done correctly. Many of you have been burned before, and avoiding any talk of the future may feel like the best way to avoid problems. But the best stories (and companies) lead you somewhere, and that requires the ability to share your vision for the future in a way that's useful for the customer. It will take practice, and you will probably have someone on the sales team mess it up at some point. But it's worth doing — good luck.