How are you measuring your pipeline influence with Digital Success?

HeatherTruettner · 2023-08-15T20:39:48+00:00

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I lead a digital success team and a new part of our focus is 'activation campaigns, where we're working to ensure our customers are activating all the features of their purchase, which in turn should create new opportunities for cross sell. We ran one campaign that produced some significant pipeline influence using a crude formula of looking at any upsell opportunity created by a contact in that campaign within a certain timeframe.

My question is: if you are measuring your influence and/or attribution to pipeline, how are you defining it? What does 'CS Influence' or 'CS attribution' for a digital success play look like for your org?

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Comments

Brian O'Keeffe

I have had two ways to measure: CSQL (Customer Success Qualified Leads) and influence on revenue and retention by CS/community advocates.

The first one is straight: how many per day, per month etc... qualified leads are generated? So many come into CS that it's actually pretty easy. The CSM is handing off expansion opportunities, for the most part, that come up naturally during customer engagements. It does require coaching and a rabid focus on identifying and entering them. Usually it goes from the CSM to the Account Owner, who should see it as free money. These only require a closer.

Advocates is far more complex and potentially much more powerful. Every CSM and Community Manager should have a laser focus on advocacy and a tight partnership with the advocacy team. (Ideally) Identifying them should be a CSMs and Community all community team members key objective. Over time, measure how those advocates influence revenue. How many references did they do that led to a closed deal? Or shared best practices/use cases with a struggling customer? (Nothing is more powerful than a current customer talking to another about how they successfully use your software for objective A, something they have not been able to achieve.) Over time, this can become the true superpower of CS and Community!

I have watched it grow and(and much to the chagrin of naysayers and doubting Debbie) take off like wild fire. This can take time to build out and see results. I watched as it not only led the entire organization on influence and results, but became a leading engine for growth. Going from one or two new advocates per month to thirty or forty! Having totally ignored the SMB sector as not having any value, or being worth the time of investing advocacy resources in. Tiny customers can have an over size influence and be successfully influence as huge name brands!

Ed Powers

@HeatherTruettner,

First blush, I would look at how you conducted your experiment. Presumably you would have started with two, sufficiently large matched groups, a control and a test group, one with the campaign treatment and one without. By examining the data, you will likely see the timing when a comparative measurement makes sense. It's probably simpler, more precise, and more compelling to make your case counting events rather than pipeline revenue. You would use a 2x2 contingency table and Pearson's chi-square to determine if there was a difference, and then use Yule's Q or the Odds Ratio to determine the strength of that relationship. Adding the pipeline impact would be a finishing touch, but I would expect much wider variation in those numbers.

Happy to talk through it in more detail, if you'd like. A randomized, controlled experiment like the one above is usually a good approach, but there are other, more advanced techniques available to demonstrate attribution. Ed

Chad Horenfeldt

I highly recommend following @seth Wylie on LinkedIn as he is working through similar challenges.