Packaging up software into a cloud-based solution and offering it to clients as a SaaS (Software as a Service) isn’t inherently new, thrilling, sexy or any of the other adjectives that lend themselves to engaging marketing efforts. Even so, “you’re still selling to people, not just companies,” said Stef Palumbo, the co-founder of Roam, a specialized vertical SaaS platform that offers digital creatives tools to manage their business operations.
As a SaaS founder and a certified psychotherapist with training rooted in the Jungian theory, perhaps there’s no one better than Palumbo to tell marketers that emotional storytelling does, in fact, have a home in selling SaaS.
Palumbo explained that therapy based on the Jungian-theory is about combining talk therapy with explorations of the unconscious mind. “Neuroscience has shown that we are conscious of only about 5% of our cognitive activity,” she said.
This translates to marketing because it “means most of our decisions, actions and emotions depend on the 95% of brain activity that is unconscious,” Palumbo explained. As a result, “getting to know our users psychologically is necessary.”
At the most basic level, “we know facts tell and emotions sell,” Palumbo told Vendelux.
But in the SaaS space, in particular, it’s safe to say “authenticity in relationship building lacks depth.” Palumbo attributed this lapse to executives getting “distracted by short-term gains so they can scale and sell.”
“From a business perspective I understand it, but from a human psychological point of view, it is missing the mark,” Palumbo said. To combat this, just as a therapist often takes cues from a hero’s journey in a fairytale, think of the buyer journey as a story arc. “In both buying journeys and myths, there’s a clear emotional path: a call to adventure (awareness), challenges and trials (consideration) and a transformation (decision),” Palumbo said.
She broke down these three steps further in an interview with Vendelux:
1. Awareness
The first step to telling a more powerful story in a SaaS context is finding “a real, relatable and common human challenge,” according to Palumbo.
At Roam, for instance, that so-called suffering is “a creative struggling without adequate business tools,” specifically as it pertains to increasing their client roster and managing their finances.
As a trained psychotherapist, Palumbo advised SaaS leaders who may be stuck at this very first step to always come back to the individual. “It is impossible to incorporate emotional storytelling into business if one is disconnected from their own emotions, but the reality is—most people are severed from this part of themselves. This is coming from my psychotherapy work, but I think all leaders should be doing their own inner work,” she offered.
2. Consideration
Step two is to “normalize this challenge,” according to Palumbo, who encourages other business execs to think of the marketing moments that have stricken them as a consumer. “The best moments,” she said, “have always been when a product actually understood me—specifically in a way that didn’t feel exploitative.”
She elaborated: “Too many companies take advantage of people’s pain points and just deepen them with a façade-like solution. But when a SaaS product combines real support with genuine care? Oof. I feel respected and valued as a consumer—like someone actually thought about how I’d feel on the other end.”
Bear in mind that many SaaS companies—especially B2B ones—assume buyers only want the hard facts. That’s not necessarily true. “Yes, that is important, but what gets people to feel good about their purchase is the confidence, the feeling of being understood and the respect they receive throughout the process,” Palumbo said.
So how can SaaS brands tap into similar positive sentiments? By offering customers “a believable path to resolution, conveying that ‘things don’t have to be this hard,’” Palumbo explained. It could be as simple as a call to action—or rather, “an invitation to solve.”
Since launching Roam’s beta platform in May 2023, Palumbo’s calls to action have ranged from broad prompts like, “Discover Roam,” to more targeted invitations such as, “Explore a new feature like Fee Finder.”
She also uses these tactics when pitching to venture capital firms, where Palumbo admitted she’s faced the most resistance. “In our pitches, we start with a human-centric approach, and actually bring the investor’s personal experiences into the room—of course, in a digestible and non-invasive way,” Palumbo assured. “Then we move to an emotionally resonant story and spend the rest of the time on metrics and data.”
Similarly, to balance data-driven messaging with emotional resonance in SaaS marketing, “brands need to connect their software features to emotional benefits,” Palumbo advised.
Palumbo’s walking the walk: At Roam, marketing communications associate the Fee Finder with pricing confidence, for example, while the Scripts tool is associated with navigating stressful client communications and the Lookalike Clients feature with initiating ideal client connections that are easier to close. “In this way, we are linking the practical functionality to tangible emotional outcomes,” Palumbo explained.
3. Decision
Palumbo eliminated a lot of, well, decision-making, at this final step and advised SaaS marketers to use visuals in their storytelling efforts. Keep in mind: “Our brains process visual information almost 60,000 times faster than text,” she shared.
In those videos, however, avoid being performative, Palumbo advised, because “users are going to be able to sniff it out” if content doesn’t consist of a real story with real emotions—especially as everything has gotten so tech-centric.
And if things ever get stale, “return to the underlying motive” rather than making finances the sole motivator, Palumbo assured, noting that “storytelling” can lose its true meaning if it’s treated like a buzzword rather than a guiding principle.
Roam’s most successful emotion-driven marketing content came in the form of a video “when our interns talked about how important it is to have respectful bosses, and how much they value flexibility in their work and life.” After all, “work takes up maybe 70% of your time, so if there aren’t any human ethics or values, the only thing keeping you there is the paycheck. And that’s never a good situation,” Palumbo said.
With the right decisions, marketers should see an obvious transformation in their consumers from, in some cases, being totally unaware that a SaaS even exists, to “feeling confident” in its operations and using it to grow their own business, Palumbo concluded.
