What improvements could accelerate revenue from your hardware or software products and services? Typical ideas include new features, improved server response times, and better user experience design.
But what about better technical writing?
Far too often, the tangible benefits of technical communication are overlooked, especially as a catalyst for revenue acceleration. Technical documentation and the writers who create it are frequently an afterthought in tech companies. Many product teams have high ratios of developers for each writer, and yet anemic revenues are rarely attributed to a lack of high-quality and timely technical communication. However, those companies that have effective writing teams realize the value that technical communication excellence delivers. From meeting product delivery deadlines to higher conversion rates to pipeline growth, your technical writing (or lack thereof) can make or break your revenue goals.
On-Time Delivery is Your Most Important KPI for Revenue
In the logistics industry, on-time delivery (OTD) is the most important KPI for determining revenue. The timely delivery of parts, supplies, and durable goods enables businesses to improve productivity. Customers who experience frequent shipping delays choose suppliers who have a better record of OTD, which causes a direct impact on revenue. The faster and more consistently a supplier delivers, the more customers that supplier retains, typically at increasing value.
Tech product delivery schedules are just as critical because habits and expectations are the same no matter what a customer is buying. SaaS and mobile companies understand that rapid, regular feature delivery is a winning strategy to keep customers engaged, subscribed, and paying. Feature deliveries for SaaS solutions happen weekly, if not daily, providing a robust and evolving solution.
However, without effective documentation for those new features, customers can struggle to realize the value that those features promise. The resulting customer frustration erodes their perception of value of the entire solution and brand.
A Fully Staffed Tech Writing Team Can Improve Delivery Success
Remember what we said earlier about the ratio of developers to writers? If you have a handful of writers stretched across hundreds of developers, or if you have a team of writers who understand writing, but not technology, you’re injecting risk into your delivery cycle. An ineffective or understaffed writing team lacks the resources or expertise to produce accurate, timely documentation. As a result, you can be forced into a no-win situation where you either ship your product with incomplete or poor documentation or slip the schedule so the documentation team can catch up. Either way, you run the risk of frustrating your users and reducing feature adoption, or worse, alienating your users so that they turn to a competitor. All of this leads to reduced revenues.
To improve delivery, you can start by creating an efficient, effective, and adequately staffed technical writing team that understands your technology and can keep pace with your delivery cycles. When documentation is written, edited, and polished in tandem with, and as an integral part of, the development and deployment process, you get complete and accurate communications that are delivered on time. Each new product or feature that gets delivered comes with reliable documentation, meaning that your customer can count on your company to empower them to make quick use of those features. You end up with happier customers, and their satisfaction leads to broader, deeper adoption and accelerated revenues.
Attract New Customers with Technical Writing
In the software industry, independent research accounts for a large percentage of the buyer’s journey. In 2013, Sirius Decisions posted a hotly contested statistic, asserting that 67% of the B2B buyer’s journey is conducted online. As the industry argued for and against that line of thinking, time proved that even if they overstated the number back then, Sirius Decisions was onto something. Today, Gartner indicates that 45% of the buyer’s journey consists of online and offline reading and that sales reps only influence about 5% of B2B purchase decisions. Another recent Gartner study further indicates, “by 2025, 80% of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will occur in digital channels. This is because 33% of buyers desire a seller-free sales experience—a preference that climbs to 44% for millennials.”
In short: your prospects are online, reading what you (and others) have to say about your product and making purchase decisions based on the information they find. For technical product purchase decisions, the technical marketing content you publish must be effective. If not, prospects will reject your offerings without a conversation, and move on to evaluate the alternatives.
Educate Your Prospects through Technical Marketing Writing
The digital sales landscape is causing established software companies to rethink buyer engagement strategies. Digital marketing collateral extends far beyond websites, including whitepapers, blogs, social media posts, paid and organic digital advertising, webinars, videos, and more. The more complete and accurate your marketing materials and sales tools, the better informed your prospects become. Your technical marketing material must highlight the benefits your software features deliver. The story that material tells should reflect a keen understanding of your customers’ pain points, and clearly articulate how your solutions solve the buyers’ problems. During the short span that prospects engage with your sales team, your technical marketing can be instrumental in driving productive conversations. When potential buyers self-educate themselves about your product, your sales team can validate their assumptions with shared language and context. Those productive conversations lead to more closed sales and bigger deals.
Product Documentation *Is* Marketing in the Software Industry
Today’s tech buyers are savvy, educated, driven through self-directed discovery, and most importantly, very wary of marketing materials. They are easily alienated by fluffy content that’s mostly hype with no substance. By creating complete, accurate, and easily consumable product documentation and technical marketing materials, you attain valuable tools that can help you win net-new business faster by providing those documents to prospects.
Purchase requires comfort. Comfort requires understanding.
Technology buyers self-educate through online and in-app help, giving them the comfort with your products that they need to be successful. If your buyer is still in the evaluation stage, the quality of your marketing and trial documentation is a major contributing factor in a purchase decision.
In today’s market, the quality and experience of your self-service help directly impact your bottom line:
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- 67% of customers prefer self-service help over speaking with company representatives
- 91% of customers would use an online knowledge base, as long as it’s tailored to their needs
And possibly the most critical statistics to keep in mind:
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- 1 in 3 customers will leave a brand they love after just one bad experience, while 92% would completely abandon a company after two or three negative interactions.
Convert Your Trial Customers to Paid Accounts Faster
Software is a try-before-you-buy industry, especially in the SaaS market. Whether you produce consumer mobile applications, corporate productivity software, an API, or other products chances are, you offer at least some sort of free trial for prospects. Even hardware companies are adopting this tactic by offering trials via web access to hardware products installed in the cloud. Documentation is no longer reserved for customers. Now, prospects get access too.
As such, trials are a double-edged sword. They’re great for showcasing your solution, but they also expose poorly written or organized documentation. If you have to dedicate excessive support resources to hand-hold trial users through their evaluations to succeed, you’ll find that approach is difficult to scale. If you let your would-be customers flounder on their own, your conversion rates will be sub-par.
With expertly written user documentation, including how-to guides, tutorials, walk-throughs, reviewer guides, and explainer videos, you can empower your prospects to become proficient with your product quickly. The faster they start experiencing the benefits of your product first hand, the sooner they’ll share their successes with their colleagues and managers, and the more likely they’ll become to purchase or subscribe.
Start Accelerating Revenue with Technical Writing from Expert Support
If you suspect that your technical communication is causing you to lose prospects and customers, Expert Support can help. We can fit your needs and budget, whether you need a single technical writer, a team of technical communication experts, or consulting and training to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your in-house writing team. Our clients range from small startups to multinational, Fortune 500 companies and everything in between. Depending on your situation, we can work on a contract, temp-to-hire, or placement fee basis, and you can count on us to be transparent about the work and mindful of the costs. We’re here to offer our expertise when you need us, how you need us.
Want to learn more tangible benefits of technical writing? Check out our article, “Tangible Benefits of Technical Communication Excellence.”