Past performance is not indicative of future results.
You’ve probably heard this phrase. It’s a slice of legal disclaimer jargon that wiggled it’s way into our culture. Anyone who’s heard a bank commercial knows it. It’s gone from tiny lawyer print to bona fide figure of speech.
It’s good advice, though. And it’s advice people ignore all the time. Whether we’re picking stocks or drafting a fantasy football lineup or finding a neighborhood to live in, we’re constantly evaluating past performance to assess risk, make predictions, and take action based on those predictions.
It also happens when we’re shopping for service products, where reliability and uptime will have a major impact on our ability to do our work and be successful. Like it or not, at some point in the buying process prospects are checking out a vendor’s service reliability.
For teams working in bringing new customers to the business (primarily the function of sales and marketing teams), this creates a real opportunity. Anticipate your customer’s questions and offer information on uptime, downtime, and service reliability. Make it easy for them to find. Answer these questions on your own terms, before they go looking for them someplace else.
Here are a few examples of how to do this:
Features page
Most landing page funnels have a similar flow. There’s a main landing page with the top-level value prop which links out to sub-pages or sections looking deeper at the individual benefits.
These sub-pages or sub-sections are a great place to talk about service reliability and uptime. Potential customers obviously care about things like features and security, but it’s clear they want to know about reliability if you’re offering a service product.
Consider the addition of a section on reliability in these places.
Paid and organic search strategy
Run a Google search for a cloud software provider’s name + “reliability” and you’re likely to find an ad or comparison page created by a competitor. Keep in mind, people searching for reliability info are very likely customers on the cusp of making a buying decision. By diverting the attention of these potential customers with an ad or blog post or comparison tool, this competitor might grab that customer for themselves. Don’t let ’em!
It’s a simple approach, but it speaks to the opportunity and vulnerability of someone who is searching for your product but wanting to know more about service reliability. We see three strategies here, but you should improvise and get more creative with any of them:
- You could take matters into your own hands and run your own ads for these keywords.
- You could fight back and run similar ads and SEO tactics against your competitors keywords.
- Try to capture organic traffic on this keyword by making an SEO landing page or blog post addressing your service reliability. This is a great place to explain your uptime and historic performance. It can even serve double-duty and complement your /features page in your main landing page.
Sales demo
Take a look at the status page for companies like CircleCI, Wistia, Gusto, and Squarespace. These teams do an excellent job putting out a resource where their customers and prospective customers can see how important uptime and reliability is to the company.
Some teams even include this info when doing sales demos. Prospects will often have questions about SLAs or uptime. Most vendors just say something like, “Oh sure, that matters to us, we work really hard to have good reliability” but don’t really have a way to prove it or back it up by pointing to specific data. It’s good to have a dedicated home, like a status page, for showcasing reliability.
Statuspage Uptime Showcase
We recently launched Statuspage Uptime Showcase as a way to show off service reliability and historic uptime inside of your status page. You can see this live on the pages linked in the section above. By showing service reliability with the tool, future customers get the information they’re looking for when they search for your product’s reliability.
It’s an easy way to show your future customers what they want to see when they inevitably evaluate your uptime. Telling your uptime story on your own terms is a huge advantage — especially if your competitors aren’t telling theirs.