Does transparency actually win?
I grew up drinking Sunny D instead of orange juice. So, yes, I’m not a Gen Z founder. Food in 90s was the final decade of a lawless wasteland where color and shelf-life reigned supreme, and MSG was the flavor panacea.
It was, also, a time when people started thinking about food differently. Fad diets were everywhere. WeightWatchers was quantifying the Applebee’s menu. People were starting to think of food as data points. All of this was occurring while the obesity epidemic was reaching a fever pitch.
The more people thought about the value of food, the more they started to care what was in their food. Nutrition Facts and ingredient lists were mandated in 1990 (although it wasn’t until years later they would surface in restaurants), and that mandate led to scrutiny. Transparency was essential… but it wasn’t enough. Instead of just listing ingredients, we needed to explain them. Then, we needed to take action and start choosing food that was better for us.
Fast forward to today and there are entire Haagen Dazs billboards just listing their five ingredients to differentiate against their “artificial” foes. The health food industry is ascendent. What started with transparency and education grew through action into a societal movement.
In software, we’re in the earliest stage of transparency. The FDA is never going to ban the “contact sales” button (it wouldn’t hurt to write a letter to your congressional representative), but B2B SaaS is catching up to the information age in that whatever information a buyer is looking for is out there somewhere. Your pricing is on Reddit. Your demo is on Youtube. The ingredient lists are now public, and education is taking root.
That leads to a couple interesting takeaways:
1. Transparency is no longer a differentiator if the information is out there anyway.
2. The winners in the transparency movement are the ones with the best ingredients, not the biggest font.
There’s something interesting about transparency. No one goes to aquariums to look at glass. They go there to look through the glass at something beautiful. Transparency in itself is ineffectual, but transparency with action creates a movement.
The best restaurants in the world aren’t afraid of people seeing their kitchen… they charge extra for a view of the kitchen. The machine is as good as the food itself.
This is the process opportunity every B2B SaaS company has right now. If you lead with transparency, and you run a thoughtful, artistic, and efficient process, you can sell the chef’s table experience.
The secret? Less is more. Deliver absolute simplicity at every level. Get rid of the MSG… you don’t need it! SaaS is delicious on its own. Create a simple, quality process that anyone can understand. Throw away the unnecessary steps. Reduce your path to partnership to only the essentials that make your buyer successful.
Yes, it takes work to build your GTM org so thoroughly that you’re proud of the inner-workings of your path to partnership, success organization, and business value, but putting that work in sets the stage for selling at a justified and defensible premium.
The world is watching. Buy a billboard. List your ingredients. Sell your delicious five-ingredient ice cream for $8/pint.
