You paid for it. Nobody showed you the feature.
She'd been paying for months. The capability that would have fixed her biggest problem was there the whole time, two menus away.
Most software disappointment isn't missing features. It's shipped features nobody was shown. Judge a vendor on whether somebody sits with your team and builds the first thing with them, because that single hour decides whether you use ten per cent of what you bought or most of it.
On a call earlier this year, a marketer walked us through the tool she'd been using for months. Partway through she opened a section she hadn't explored, looked at it, and said something close to: this would have solved the problem I've been doing by hand all year.
Then she added the part that stayed with us. She wasn't sure the person who gave her the demo knew it existed either.
Her leads had been arriving in an email inbox and getting copy-pasted into a spreadsheet by her sales team, for months, while the tool sat there able to capture them directly.
There are also no people to train us. I'm not learning from them, so it is also a problem.
A marketer, describing her current vendor
Features you don't know about are features you didn't buy
Vendors count shipped capability. Customers experience discovered capability. The gap between those two numbers is where most churn actually lives, and almost nobody manages it.
It's easy to see why the gap opens. A demo runs for forty minutes and covers what the seller finds impressive rather than what the buyer will do on Tuesday. Onboarding hands over a login and a documentation link. Then the customer, busy and now committed, uses the three things they remembered and builds workarounds for the rest.
Six months later they say the tool doesn't do what they need, and they're both wrong and completely reasonable.
Who pays for the gap
The customer pays first, in workarounds. Hours of manual effort against a problem the software already solved, plus the quiet frustration of feeling that the money isn't returning much.
The vendor pays next, and pays more. A customer using ten per cent of the product churns, and tells people the product was thin when the truth is nobody showed them. That's the worst kind of lost account, because the product was never the problem and nothing in the roadmap will fix it.
What to demand from any vendor, including us
Ask them to build the first real thing with you
Not a walkthrough of the interface. Your actual first campaign or journey, using your list and your templates, on a call, while you watch.
If they'll only demo and hand over a login, expect to use a fraction of what you're paying for.
Ask who trains the second and third person
Teams change. The person onboarded in March leaves in September and takes the knowledge with them.
A vendor with an answer to this has thought about your renewal. One without an answer is selling you a login.
Judge the demo rep on the questions they ask
Somebody who asks how your leads arrive today, and what your team does at 9am, will point you at the right features. Somebody reciting a feature tour won't.
The quality of the questions predicts the quality of the onboarding.
- Use most of what you pay for instead of the three things you remembered.
- Get the manual workaround deleted in week one rather than month six.
- Keep the knowledge when the person who learned it leaves.
- Stop blaming a product that could already do the thing.
This cuts at us too. We build your first automations with you and train your team on Business and above, and on the cheaper plan you get templates and guides and you do the building. That's a real limit and you should weigh it.
Nobody can make a team use software they don't want. If the tool genuinely doesn't fit how you work, more training just delays the conclusion.
Ask us the questions in this article
Book twenty minutes and put us through the same test. Ask what we'd build with you, who trains the next hire, and what we won't do. We'd rather answer that than run a feature tour.
Book a 20-minute demo