Customer Outcomes
March 30, 2023
Customer Outcomes. We know that we need demonstrate these to our customers, but how do we do that well? The bottom line is we need to understand what our customers are expecting from the purchase of our product. These then become the North Star we need to keep at the forefront of our minds as we work to create value for our customers.
Once they are identified, we can work on answering the following questions:
- How do we capture our customer outcomes?
- How do we present these results back to our customers?
So, what does this looks like in practice?
Key Insights
Setting up the Capture
- Start with the sales and marketing team before the customer hand-off occurs
- Identify metric tracking discussed
- Identify key customer goals (no more than 5)
- Understand the desired outcomes (around 3)
- What dependencies exist to meet their goals
- Identify key stakeholders (executive buyer, champions, implementors)
- Build out the support work surrounding
- Develop an overall customer strategy
- Add to CRM to aid tracking and goal achievement
- Watch for trends
- Develop a drip campaign based on goals to guide customer behaviors
- Identify product usage metric benchmark based on the most successful clients
- Use this to create the success plan and drive action in onboarding and into adoption
- In a scaled situation
- Analyze the usage data for your customer to identify strengths and weaknesses
- Utilize surveys that tie back to the goals and outcomes they are looking for
- What is measure-able and common across most of your customers?
- In a high-touch situation
- Have conversations about outcomes and milestones
- Track this information in a success plan
- Review results and benchmarks during business reviews
- Use conversation starters to get to the actual rather than perceived needs
- Make sure the language between teams is consistent
- Include other team needs/interactions in the success plan
- Educate your customers
- Clarify roles and expectations for the customer and for the product company so there is no confusion
Presenting the Outcomes
- Use data and align to the WIFM (What’s In It For Me) of their goals and outcomes to show value
- Share the time to completion
- Segment the information to align with various stakeholder needs
- Include information from other teams to give a complete picture of value
- Remember that what gets measured (and shared) gets improved, so make sure you are helping your customers here
- Using a time to value success metric, create a cadence of communication that drives accountability and goal tracking
- Use to celebrate milestones and identify metrics that are not hitting the mark
- Utilize templates to scale the presentation process
- Include the WIFM, the goal benchmarks and any needs
- Remind the customer about why they bought the product and tie the metrics to movement along the journey
- Find tools that help with tracking success plans to make it easy for everyone to understand where things are