What is communication?

The answer seems obvious, but at its core, communication is a complex process that involves multiple elements, steps, and factors. Let’s discuss them:

Communication Steps

Communication is an active, two-way process that involves transmitting and receiving messages for specific purposes. Communication is key to achieving our goals, from engaging in feedback loops to persuading someone to act a particular way.

Let’s zoom in a bit and analyze the main steps communication usually involves:

Step 1. Deciding what you want or need

Awareness of defining communication goals is crucial to achieving desired results in the SaaS context.

📝 Quick note: It’s worth noting that communication can also happen randomly. Not all circumstances demand mindfulness when communicating.

Step 2. Crafting the messaging according to your intention

Each goal involves delivering different messages. Also, it involves knowing the message receiver’s particularities and how they may react to the message. This information is crucial to creating the right message to help you achieve your goals.  

Step 3. Encoding the message in a way that your receiver can understand it

This step involves choosing the right language and visual cues and adapting your communication style to your message receiver(s).

Step 4. Transmitting the message

You must decide the appropriate channels for delivering your message depending on your goals and communication type. These channels can vary from emails to in-person interaction.

Step 5. Having the receiver decode the message

The receiver will interpret your message at this stage, hopefully understanding your intended meaning.

Step 6. Receiving feedback from the receiver

In most cases, the receiver will send a message stating whether they understood the meaning you’ve encoded. This feedback can also translate into questions, arguments, statements, additional details, non-verbal cues, and more.

Step 7. Reacting depending on the receiver’s feedback

If the feedback of your receiver requires engagement, you’ll craft new messages accordingly (clarifying your statement, changing your approach) and engage in active conversation. This may not be always the case.

We make these steps automatically without being aware of the process. However, acknowledging the phases of this process helps us understand and become more intentional about what’s involved during communication.

Communication Elements

Multiple elements accompany the communication process in a SaaS environment. Here are some of them:

• Sender: The initiator of communication or the person who sends the message.
• Receiver: The person on the receiving end of the communication.
• Message: The information that is being communicated.  
• Code: The system of symbols used to encode the information.
• Channel: The medium through which the message is transmitted.
• Entropy: The noise or interference that may occur during communication. This can vary from a language barrier to a technical glitch.
• Feedback: The receiver’s reaction, action, or response to the message transmitted by the sender.

Communication Factors

Finally, the communication process is conditioned by multiple factors, such as the:

• Source of information, referring to the credibility of the message sender.
• Overall context of communication revolving around the circumstances and reasons why the communication happens.  
• Background of sender and receiver, focusing on how well messages are formulated and understood.
• The relationship between sender and receiver highlighting the connection between these two as a factor influencing how the message is transmitted and perceived.
• Message complexity, indicating the level of difficulty involved in constructing, encoding, and decoding for understanding of the message.
• And more
  

In other words, communication is a highly elaborated and multifaceted system requiring meticulosity, adaptability, and precision.

That’s especially true in SaaS teams, whose success and growth depend on how well messages are communicated, understood, and acted upon.

The Variable of SaaS Communication Leading To Entropy

Several communication variables will impact the growth of your SaaS. Let’s take them one by one:

Variable 1. Communication agents

SaaS Communication involves multiple internal and external agents, such as:

• Founders
• Executives
• Managers
• Teams (general)
• Employees
• Contractors
• Freelancers
• Investors (if that’s the case)
• Target audiences (general)
• Leads
• Prospects
• Customers
• Community members
• Industry leaders
• And more
  

The bigger the SaaS company, the more people are involved in the communication process, increasing the chance for entropy.

Increased entropy may lead to situations such as:

• Errors
• Misunderstandings
• Conflicts
  

Moreover, when more agents are involved, people may be oblivious to the importance of communicating certain information.

For example, an essential piece of feedback from a customer might not be passed on to the development team because an intermediary believed it to be insignificant. This can lead to missed opportunities for improvement or addressing critical issues.

Variable 2. Communication highways

Whether in-house or remote, SaaS teams usually use multiple communication channels. Here are some internal communication highways:

• Emails
• Direct messages
• Intranet systems
• Company wiki
• Slack or other asynchronous platform for communication
• Basecamp, Notion, or any other project management tools (even a simple KPI update or task assignment is a form of internal SaaS communication)
• Comments or notes via collaborative team tools
• Loom videos or VideoAsk
• Online or in-person meetings
• Shared calendars
• And more
  

For external communication, we can consider the following one-way and two-way highways:

• Emails
• Newsletter communications
• Direct messages
• Discovery calls and demos
• Any content
• Content comments (e.g., on website blog, YouTube, and more)
• Social media comments
• Webinars and live-streams (chat, comments)
• Event interactions
• Community boards
• User feedback tools
• Customer support platforms
• Interactive chats
• Feedback forms
  

📝 Quick note: One-way highway involves unidirectional communication from the brand to its target audiences. In other words, target audiences are passive consumers of brand content. Two-way highway refers to the bi-directional exchange of information and reactions between SaaS brand representatives and external stakeholders. In this case, target audiences become active communication participants.

Communication highways are channels that facilitate the exchange of any type of information. Even accessing someone’s public calendar for scheduling a meeting conveys specific information about the person’s availability.

However, a great number of internal and external communication highways will always involve higher risks for entropy.

Variable 3. Communication dynamics

Communication dynamics refer to how your executive, managerial, and professional teams communicate. When there’s no or little structure in how companies communicate internally and with external stakeholders, errors will happen.

To know whether your SaaS company has strong communication dynamics, answer the following questions:

• Do you have clear, well-socialized communication practices?
• Did you set up specific communication workflows, protocols, and standards?
• Are your team members following your company’s communication rules?
• Do you offer communication training to team members?
  

If the answer is “no” or a weak “yes,” know that your SaaS company has communication problems.

How Does Communication Impact the Growth of Your SaaS Brand

Entropy and errors happen at different levels of communication.

Whether between executives, managers, their teams, or brands and target audiences, there’s no shortage of bad scenarios in which communication negatively impacts SaaS growth.

To give you an idea of what this may involve, I’ve compiled a quick list of unfortunate examples in which communication may lead to a SaaS company’s stagnation and decline.

Examples of Negative Internal Impact

• When executives don’t communicate strategy updates in a timely manner, teams may end up working on tasks that are no longer relevant.
• When managers fail to communicate task urgency, teams may prioritize less impactful tasks.
• There may be project or work delays when professionals fail to update their team members about the challenges they encounter in accomplishing existing tasks.
• The lack of feedback channels may result in poor deliverables and low-quality outcomes.
• Message inconsistency within teams will result in disjoint efforts and decreased productivity.
• A lack of clear communication practices may create a chaotic environment, leading to burnout and a high turnover rate.
• Practices rooted in over-communication will lead to overwhelming and unnecessary tiredness.

Examples of Negative External Impact

• When marketing, sales, and CS teams operate with different terms, prospects and customers will experience unnecessary confusion. This may impact the brand’s public image.
• Differences in tone and communication style across SaaS teams will result in inconsistent brand voice, creating mistrust among potential customers.
• When executives fail to formulate the brand’s value proposition, public-facing teams fail to express it to target audiences, reducing the impact of their outreach efforts. In other words, if the value proposition isn’t clear at the top, those interacting with the target audience won’t communicate it effectively.
• Companies may ruin business relationships with important clients if those responsible for managing these connections fail to communicate the conditions of privacy and non-disclosure discussed with the clients.
• When the Ideal Customer Profile isn’t well communicated, you’ll observe a decreased efficiency of marketing and sales efforts.
• Poor communication standards will lead to bad customer service, which may influence the company’s churn rate.
• A communication problem between the product and CS teams may lead to customers facing issues with new features and changes that support isn’t prepared to help with.
  

Please note that these are just a few scenarios only. Poor communication practices will result in many circumstances and cases that negatively impact overall SaaS growth.

Final note

Building your practices on strong SaaS communication principles is key to reducing human interaction’s negative impact on your company’s growth.

Deliberate action is necessary to improve or set up good communication workflows, protocols, and standards. And obviously, this process doesn’t happen overnight.

However, to secure your SaaS growth against communication entropy, errors, and misunderstandings, you’ll want to work on how your executives, managers, and professionals communicate internally and externally.

And that’s a subject I’ll tackle in the upcoming articles.