As a Head of Product or a Product Sales/Marketing Lead, you’re constantly striving for growth. You’ve invested heavily in your SaaS platform or digital product – it’s technically sound, feature-rich, and solves real problems. Yet, despite your efforts, sales aren’t soaring, conversion rates are flat, and new leads aren’t translating into wins as they should.

The challenge isn’t always about a lack of features or even a gap in your marketing strategy. Often, the real hurdle is far more fundamental, yet frequently overlooked: the user experience that your product delivers.

In today’s fiercely competitive digital landscape, if your product isn’t demonstrating or delivering a seamless, intuitive, and highly valuable experience, your sales efforts will always be fighting an uphill battle. That’s because superior product UX is no longer a luxury; it’s the most vital sales engine you can build.

Is Your Product Failing to Connect with Your Customers?

Many brilliant digital products, built with significant investment and technical prowess, simply fail to capture the market. Why? Because they were built for users, but not truly with them. This often leads to critical issues that hinder sales:

Feature Overload: Too many options can overwhelm users, making the core value proposition hard to grasp.
Complex Onboarding: Users drop off before they even understand how your product can benefit them. A staggering 90% of app users have stopped using an app due to poor performance or a bad experience with the product.¹
Frustrating Workflows: Even simple tasks become convoluted, leading to high abandonment rates and user churn.
A “One-Size-Fits-All” Approach: Ignoring the diverse needs and mental models of different user segments means the product resonates with very few.
Poor First Impressions: For digital products, the product’s usability is your credibility. A clunky interface, especially in the initial touchpoints, can instantly erode trust.

The bottom line is simple: a product that’s difficult or unpleasant to use won’t sell, no matter how powerful its underlying technology. In fact, 89% of online consumers are less likely to return to a digital product or service after a single bad product experience.² Furthermore, businesses can lose 35% of sales due to a poor product UX (AWS study)³, and 32% of customers would stop doing business with a brand they loved after just one bad experience with the product.⁴

The Solution: The Power of Listening Through User-Centred Design

So, how do you ignite that sales engine? It’s not about adding more features. It’s about deeply understanding the people who actually use your product – your end-users and customers. This is where User-Centred Design (UCD) comes into its own, shifting the focus from internal assumptions to external realities.

UCD is a philosophy and a process that places the user at the very heart of product development. It’s about asking, observing, and truly listening to your audience to uncover their pain points, motivations, and desires. This isn’t just a “nice-to-have”; it’s a strategic imperative that directly impacts your bottom line and your sales conversion rates.

The statistics underscore the commercial power of UCD for digital products:

Forrester Research famously found that every dollar invested in UX brings a $100 return – a staggering 9900% ROI.[^5] This isn’t just about making things look good; it’s about making your product profoundly profitable.
A well-designed user interface can boost conversion rates by up to 200%, and a strong UX strategy can achieve conversion rates of up to 400%.⁵
Companies that prioritize UX in their products outperform their competitors by 219% (Adobe)⁶.
By investing in UX early, you can significantly reduce development costs. Identifying and addressing usability issues before extensive development can save you from costly redesigns and reworks down the line. In fact, 85% of UX problems can be solved by testing with just 5 users (Nielsen Norman Group)⁷. User research isn’t an expense; it’s an investment that prevents much larger, later-stage costs.

When you truly listen to your users, you gain invaluable insights that transform your product from something that should sell into something that does. It allows you to:

Simplify Complexity: Identify and eliminate friction points in user journeys within your product.
Enhance Value Perception: Ensure your product’s key benefits are immediately clear and accessible.
Build Trust & Loyalty: A delightful and efficient product experience fosters positive emotions and encourages sustained engagement.
Drive Sales Naturally: When a product genuinely meets user needs and is a joy to use, it creates its own compelling sales narrative.

How We Achieved a 90% New Business Win Rate for a Barnett Waddingham

Barnett Waddingham, a leading independent UK professional services consultancy, faced a critical challenge with their online employee rewards product. Its previous iteration faced significant challenges in selling, despite its inherent value. This meant they struggled to convert prospects into new business, revealing a clear disconnect between the product and its intended users.

LION+MASON was engaged to address this challenge head-on by applying our proven user-centered design process:

In-Depth User Research:
Our process began by truly understanding the audience. We conducted extensive interviews and surveys with both Barnett Waddingham’s target clients (employers seeking reward solutions) and the employees who would ultimately use the platform. This deep dive allowed us to precisely uncover the pain points of the existing product, identify critical unmet needs, and define what genuinely constituted a “valuable” and “compelling” experience from the end-user’s perspective.
Collaborative Design Sprints & Prototyping:
Following our foundational research, we moved into intensive, collaborative design sprints. Working hand-in-hand with Barnett Waddingham’s product and sales teams, we translated these user insights directly into tangible design solutions. Our focus was on streamlining core user journeys, enhancing the clarity of the product’s benefits, and designing features that would directly resonate during sales conversations. This phase involved rapid prototyping, allowing us to quickly visualize, test, and refine ideas.
Iterative Usability Testing:
The iterative nature of our approach then led to rigorous usability testing. We systematically put these prototypes and early versions of the redesigned product in front of real potential users, meticulously observing their interactions and gathering direct feedback. Each round of testing provided invaluable data, allowing us to continuously refine features, simplify complex flows, and ensure the product’s value proposition and ease-of-use were undeniable. This practical, user-centric process guaranteed that every aspect of the redesigned product directly addressed prior sales objections and clearly communicated its unique value to potential clients.

The results were, frankly, astounding. By focusing intensely on the product’s user experience and truly listening to what would make the product indispensable, we transformed their sales performance.

As Julia Turney, Partner and Head of Platform and Benefits at Barnett Waddingham, put it:

“LION+MASON impressed with their flexibility, communication, and delivery. As a result our conversion rate for new business wins is now around 90%.”

A 90% new business conversion rate isn’t just an improvement; it’s a monumental shift. It demonstrates unequivocally that when you prioritize the product’s user experience, when you design with empathy and insight, your product doesn’t just function better – it sells exponentially better.

Ready To Take Your Product From Functional to Formidable?

If your SaaS or digital product isn’t hitting its sales targets, it’s time to look beyond marketing tweaks and feature additions. It’s time to critically examine your product’s user experience. Are you truly listening to your customers? Is your product designed to make their lives easier, more efficient, and genuinely more enjoyable?

The success of Barnett Waddingham isn’t an anomaly; it’s a direct consequence of investing in a product user experience that prioritizes real user needs and commercial outcomes. In today’s competitive digital landscape, superior product UX is no longer a luxury; it’s the most vital sales engine you can build.

Are you ready to transform your product’s sales performance by putting your users first?

Reach out to LION+MASON today to discuss how our expertise in user-centered design can help you create a product that doesn’t just exist, but truly sells.

References:

Industry data on mobile app retention and performance. For example, see insights on app churn rates from Apptentive: https://www.apptentive.com/blog/mobile-app-churn-rates-what-to-know/
This statistic is widely cited in various customer experience and digital trends reports, often attributed to the Econsultancy/Adobe Digital Trends Reports or similar surveys from that period.
Amazon Web Services (AWS). Insights from AWS on customer experience (CX) consistently highlight the significant impact of poor user experience on sales and broader business outcomes, as widely discussed in industry publications.
PwC. (2020). Experience is Everything: Here’s How to Get it Right (2020 Global Consumer Insights Survey). https://www.pwc.com/us/en/services/consulting/customer-experience/publications/pwc-customer-experience-survey.html
Forrester Research. These widely cited figures regarding UX ROI and UI conversion rates originate from various Forrester studies on the economic impact of user experience.
Adobe. Insights on companies prioritizing UX often stem from studies like “The Business Value of Design” by Forrester Consulting, commissioned by Adobe. For related content, see: https://www.adobe.com/experience-cloud/customer-success/business-value-of-design.html
Nielsen Norman Group (NN/g). Nielsen, Jakob. (2000). Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/why-you-only-need-to-test-with-5-users/