How are you delivering business outcomes for customers?
Being "Outcome Driven" is the latest buzzword in CS so we wanted to get a bit more tactical and tangible with that topic for the audience.
We'd love to hear a few examples of....
- outcomes that you drive
- what matters (and doesn't matter) to your customers
- how you identify & realize those outcomes
- ultimately how you quantify the impact
Any examples you can share of this loop?
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- How using a technology affects a process
- How improving a process affects a business result
- How the technology's value is then quantified
Of course, value is subjective and multi-faceted, data are not always easy to obtain, and ROI is not always the determining factor. However, numbers are frequently used justify decisions that have already been made. That means if we cannot clearly articulate these cause-and-effect relationships and demonstrate them to customers, then we will continually struggle to be 'Outcome Driven,' in my opinion.
So many points to cover as part of this - but ultimately as my good friend Paul Henderson (Author of The Outcomes Generation) says, outcomes management is a team sport.
I do think there is a maturity aspect to this, but I would also say that customers do need to be educated, coerced and consulted through this.
I would ask, why did they buy your product or service? It wasn't just for a platform to perform or to have feature. What business problem does it solve or help them solve? As I said above, none of this is easy but customers "don't know what they don't know" and I believe the CSM has to work with the customer to educate them and take them on a journey of change, hence why change management is such a core competency now for CS professionals.
Another angle, how does your customer justify the investment in your product or service?
To be honest, we have struggled in this area. Initially I took this to a level I was used to from the past (consulting/prof. service oriented strategic reviews). That didn't work very well. We have taken a step back and are currently doing some cursory research to really understand what our customers want from us in terms of outcomes...and to be frank - they want the platform to consistently perform and for us to deliver on feature ideas. Perhaps that is the stage our org. is at but it is very simple in terms of outcomes at the moment. Maybe one day we can show more buzzy-worthy metrics but not at this stage.
Reading my response from last night I was somewhat flippant. While I'm frustrated I will also acknowledge this really isn't easy.
It's not easy because firstly we're asking our CSMs to do something different, secondly our own companies may not be set up to do this well (outcomes based approach has to be a company wide approach not just a CS one) and finally, our customers may not be prepared for this.
We have just started to dip our toes in the water. We've identified the most common value drivers for our customer base and our CSMs are responsible for capturing their top 3 value drivers in Salesforce (out of that picklist). As part of that discussion, they then have to work with the customer to align on how they're going to jointly measure the success of those outcomes. This is currently a free text field (don't love, but it's the best we've got so far), so we can at least pull all of the information and report out on it. I did a recent presentation to senior leadership that I think really shed light on some differences in what our customers are deeming most important to their successes, versus what our company typically talks about when thinking about success.
Now that we actually have some of this data, we have to figure out how to best influence change - both on my team and across the business - so that's my next mountain to climb :-)
We want to be "strategic", we want to be given more credit, we want a seat at the "big boys/girls table" so guess what - we have to earn the right.
That "right" comes from us showing the impact we have on our customers, that in turn drive a fundamental improvement in the way your company does business.
I think @Kyle Kendall is bang on point with his comments as is @Marcus Sparks.
So.....as the GGR Leadership Office Hours facilitator for the 28th April it is by coincidence that this is the topic I would like us to discuss, debate, argue & agree is the way forward.
@James Fisher - We can discuss Wednesday!
Jeff,
I see "outcomes" as another way to say "ROI": if you achieve the desired customer outcome, you deliver ROI. Of your four bullet points, the key ongoing challenge is the fourth one, "ultimately how you quantify the impact".
There is still work to be done in ensuring that outcomes are tied to a business need e.g. "our solution will accomplish your goal of standardizing frontline training". Not good enough. Second-level questions must be asked to understand the business impact of standardized frontline training. Then, you have something to measure that delivers tangible ROI.
Quantifying the impact continues to be a big miss. Why? Because a baseline is never established. Whatever ways your solution solves business problems, you need to be very clear on business impact - how does your product help the customer make money, save money, or decrease pain and frustration (ties back to save money)? Once everyone is clear on why the customer bought and how our solution will impact the business, partner with the customer to baseline the current state. Take a snapshot of the business KPIs today so you have something to measure against tomorrow. Your sponsor will do this work because tangible ROI seals the renewal.
In my opinion, the best way to identify the business outcomes a customer cares about is to ask... and keep asking until you have mutual agreement AND a tangible method of measurement. Whenever forming a new Executive Sponsor relationship, I'll meet with them 1-1 to walk them through examples of how similar clients attribute the value of our product to their businesses. The goal of the conversation is to leave with a mutual agreement on specifically how we will measure the success of our partnership. Having the ES on board is critical because it's typically impossible to quantify impact without the client providing specific information about the 'before state'.
Being a self-serve analytics platform, the business outcomes we drive for our customers are oftentimes internal facing, such as increased efficiency or improved agility. Let's say the Executive Sponsor agrees that product team agility is the primary desired outcome. One tangible way we might agree to measure the success of our partnership is by looking at the # of JIRA tickets tagged with 'analytics'. The goal is to decrease the volume of those JIRA tickets, assuming that means product managers have become more self-sufficient due to the adoption of our platform.
Because we have the Executive Sponsor's buy-in on our success metric, instead of saying 'our platform makes your team more efficient', we can quantify it by looking at the decrease in JIRA tickets and assign it a quantifiable % (ex. 80% more efficient). It should also be easy to get this intel from the client since the directive is coming from the ES.