In this article, you’ll learn different ways you can build expertise for your company and how to communicate it well to increase the authority of your brand.

Let’s begin by defining the terms and ensuring we operate with the same meaning.

Expertise is knowing what you’re doing and doing it well.

The expertise of a SaaS brand refers to cultivating an in-depth understanding of customers’ challenges, as well as developing or offering the right solutions to help them successfully overcome those issues.

At its core, authority or brand authority involves continuously and consistently communicating your expertise to expand credibility, trustworthiness, industry recognition, and reputation.

How SaaS Companies Build Expertise

Building expertise involves gradually immersing yourself into the nature of your customers’ issues and identifying solutions that can be replicated at a larger scale.

Engaging with industry stakeholders to understand their challenges may take time and intense proactivity. Also, depending on a SaaS company’s resources, developing scalable solutions that resonate with the market will take some effort.

Summarizing the process, one can build expertise following three steps:

1. Ask questions to identify problems
2. Experiment to test the viability of different solutions
3. Ask for feedback to refine the best solution
   

In this process, SaaS teams can gain a granular understanding of their customers’ issues, allowing them to discern between multiple nuances and details a problem presents.

Who’s in Charge of This Process? 

No one and everyone at the same time. You see, when there’s a collective intention to do so, building expertise comes as a natural and gradual process.

Here’s what I mean:

• Executives may engage in meetings with key stakeholders, identifying subtle issues and prospect company intricacies that need technical solutions.
• Engineering teams may offer new features and then gather user feedback for improvement. Same user feedback works well for identifying and understanding features customers desperately need.
• Marketing professionals may notice specific search queries highlighting how audiences talk about their challenges. As a result, they may formulate their messages better, helping people understand their issues.
• Sales reps may discuss with prospects and recognize a pattern in the issues these people or companies face.
• While assisting customers, CS reps may identify unexpected roadblocks in solving an existing problem. Or they may resort to specific, untried solutions and gain success.
• Community managers may engage in forum conversations with members to reveal deeper intricacies of existing issues.
  

Everyone’s involved in building a SaaS company’s expertise.

While this comes as a natural process, it’s crucial to canalize and socialize company-wide these findings.

For example, there should be a free flow of information between the sales team and your company’s engineers. Also, the engineers should highlight adding new solutions so that the CS reps can analyze and leverage their real-life impact on a customer’s case.

In other words, besides identifying and solving customer issues, building expertise also requires organic communication between SaaS teams.

What’s a Good Level of Expertise? 

SaaS companies never stop building expertise. It’s an ongoing process that evolves with the industry they’re serving.

However, a SaaS brand reaches a good level of expertise when teams can efficiently highlight existing issues, determine how these issues disrupt customers’ goals, and identify scalable solutions that work.

How SaaS Companies Grow Brand Authority

You can’t establish brand authority out of thin air. Expertise is the foundational pillar on which authority is built. Communicating your company’s expertise consistently results in cultivating and nurturing powerful brand authority.

Brand authority can take multiple shapes, from including relevant features to your product to asking the right questions during your sales calls.

In other words, it’s not only your marketing team’s job to build the authority of your SaaS company. Everyone should be involved.

Let’s take a closer look:

SaaS Executives

There are multiple ways in which SaaS executives can communicate their brand’s expertise.

Here are some of them:

• Engage in meaningful conversations with key external stakeholders, such as executives of prospective companies. During these conversations, like sales reps, executives may help their prospects gain a better perspective on their challenges and the opportunities these challenges can provide.
• Run podcast shows or share knowledge through personal blogs or company articles.
• Participate in podcast shows or get interviewed for online publications.
• Share insights through social media posts and comments.
• Accept invitations to be a keynote speaker at in-person or virtual events.  
• Host and attend webinars.
• Conduct workshops or training sessions with industry stakeholders.
• Contribute to industry-specific communities.
• Build or work in public

📝 Quick note: Some SaaS founders or executives convey their expertise by offering insights into the work that happens behind the scenes sharing their entrepreneurial process. This may not be directly related to building an industry authority as it’s focused on building the SaaS. However, this strategy assists in increasing a brand’s transparency, contributing to the overall efforts of building authority. It’s worth noting that, apart from SaaS founders or executives, managers, and SaaS professionals can also build or work in public as long as their contractual responsibilities allow it.

Engineering Teams

Engineering teams seem to have a reduced role when communicating a company’s expertise. However, they can easily do it through the SaaS product itself.

Here’s how:

• Identify the most straightforward and easy-to-apply solutions to existing customer challenges. It’s worth noting that there may be multiple solutions to issues, but customers want an easy way out. Expertise is translated into authority when your engineering team knows the shortest way to overcome a challenge.
• Develop features and workflows that adjust to the natural process of their customers. For example, the engineering team should design features reflecting the standard project management process when creating a project management platform. First, their customers will expect to be able to add projects or tasks, including detailed descriptions, and only then assign them to team members. It wouldn’t be logical to build a product that begins with task assignation first, followed by task description.
• Prioritize feature building according to their urgency and relevance to the customer.
• Use the right terms when creating the platforms’ micro-copy, helping customers navigate the platform more easily.
  

Marketing Professionals

Building brand authority is often presented as a marketing team’s goal. That’s understandable, considering marketing is responsible for the ongoing communication between your brand and target audiences.

There are multiple ways in which marketing professionals can communicate their company’s expertise, transforming it into brand authority.

Here are some of them:

• Create content such as blog articles, white papers, eBooks, webinars, podcasts, newsletters, and more to educate target audiences.
• Educate audiences based on their maturity and awareness levels.
  

📝 Quick note: Let’s discuss a bit the maturity and awareness levels.

You may differentiate your target audiences based on their maturity levels.

For example, suppose you’re offering an event management platform for retail companies. In that case, you may discover that some brands aren’t hosting events yet, missing an excellent opportunity to increase in-store footfall.

While other prospective retail companies are well aware of the importance of events for revenue growth, marketing professionals should adjust your company’s expertise communication based on the different maturity levels of your target audiences.

Moving on.

In his book Breakthrough Advertising, Eugene Schwartz presents the five stages of prospect awareness:

1. Unaware: Prospects don’t know they have a problem.
2. Problem-aware: Prospects identified their problem.
3. Solution-aware: Prospects know there are solutions available to solve their existing problem.
4. Product-aware: Prospects know about your solution or software and how it can solve their problem.
5. Most aware: Prospects are almost ready to become your customers.
   

With this framework in mind, your marketing professionals should adjust their messaging to communicate company expertise across all levels of awareness.

Being able to resonate with target audiences at their maturity and awareness level will only highlight your SaaS company’s expertise and strengthen your brand authority.

• Use relatable terms in marketing materials to resonate with target audiences.
• Run in-person or virtual events, inviting industry experts and authority leaders as keynote speakers. This will help your company build authority by associating with key industry figures.
• Collect and publish customer testimonials.
• Create case studies based on different use cases, industries, and customer profiles. This task is mostly impactful when coordinated with the sales reps.
• Transform your company’s data into research and publish your findings.
• Conduct and publish industry surveys and research with relevant data and actionable insights.
  

📝 Quick note: Marketing professionals can transform a SaaS company’s expertise into brand authority in multiple ways. But I’ll stop here. Otherwise, the list will be too long.

Sales Reps

Sales representatives communicate a company’s expertise, showcasing authority when engaging with their prospects during discovery calls and demos.

Here are some ways in which they can achieve a higher impact with this task:

• Tailor their discovery call or demo to their prospect’s profile, considering their industry and specific challenges.
• Present relevant and actionable benchmark data during prospect calls.
• Be more than a sales rep. Be a consultant.
• Ask the right questions. This goes a long way as, in some cases, prospects may be oblivious to their problems and focus on the wrong questions. The right questions will make them stop and better understand their challenge and the opportunities this challenge may offer.
• Create personalized outbound messages, ensuring they align with their prospects’ profiles and possible challenges.
• Identify and share relevant customer case studies that will resonate with the prospects—tweak case studies to align with a prospect’s specific situation fully.  
  

CS Reps

CS reps can contribute greatly to growing a company’s brand authority.

Here’s how:

• Provide relevant material and assistance to existing customers.
• Identify personalized solutions to their customers’ specific challenges.
• Share other use case experiences (without breaching confidentiality agreements) to inspire their customers.
• Take customers from zero to achieve a relevant goal.
• Offer proactive support without waiting for customers to reach out first. Anticipate product-related challenges customers may have.
• Create an extensive training program that provides a deep understating of how your platform can help overcome challenges and achieve great results.
• Provide ongoing training and customer education masterclasses based on existing needs and demands.

Brand Community Managers

Finally, brand community managers can help expand your company’s brand authority by engaging efficiently with existing members.

Here’s how:

• Answer questions in a timely manner.
• Redirect to relevant resources.
• Build group cohesion and inspire members to connect with each other.
• Provide a safe space for sharing.
• Organize regular AMAs to answer questions.
• Share relevant updates.
• Encourage active participation. This approach may lead to a surge of brand advocates who’ll expand your company’s brand authority through the content they generate.
  

❗Important: To grow brand authority, one should continuously and consistently communicate their SaaS company’s expertise.

What’s a Good Level of Brand Authority? 

How do you know whether your SaaS company has a good brand authority?

Facts will speak for themselves, as you’ll:

• Generate more high-quality leads
• Close a higher number of deals
• Decrease the churn rate
• Start capitalizing on brand advocacy, generating referrals
• Get invited to industry podcasts, shows, and events
• Receive awards and mentions
• Gain easy access to industry stakeholders
  

In other words, you’ll notice how your SaaS company gains a bigger sphere of influence, attracting more attention and strengthening its industry position.

Final note

Building expertise and transforming it into brand authority is a collective effort. However, this can’t happen without strong communication practices.

Expertise grows when shared, analyzed, and challenged among team members. Brand authority expands when expertise is communicated continuously and consistently to external stakeholders.