Best practices for driving customer value.
Outcomes based customer success, a strategy that focuses on ensuring customers achieve their desired outcomes, sounds intuitive. But with so many stakeholders in the picture, including your team, your customers, and other internal teams, it’s easier said than done. That’s especially true when it comes to aligning everyone on outcomes and gathering the data to track and measure them, which requires a set of outcomes based customer success best practices.
Keishla Ceaser-Jones, senior director of partner success at EAB and Stephanie Workman-Bolden, vice president of partner success at Discovery Education, are here to help. Using attendee questions from our recent webinar on outcomes based customer success, they’ve mapped out six best practices to follow.
You can find out more about outcomes based customer success, and watch the webinar in full, here.
Six best practices for outcomes-based customer success.
What outcomes based customer success best practices do Keishla and Stephanie recommend?
1: To hold customers accountable for outcomes, practice “proactive reactivity”.
Q: How do you hold customers accountable? Often, they don’t see that it’s partially their responsibility to meet us halfway.
Keishla: Accountability in business relationships is key. I find that where things break down between organizations and their customers is reflected in how well you think through your customer journey in advance. What are the milestones? What do you intend to happen? What will you do if something doesn’t happen according to plan.
This is what I like to call “Proactive Reactivity.” We should know in advance the key moments in a customer journey and think about what we should do if things don’t go according to plan. Some tips to consider:
- Set clear expectations: Make sure roles and responsibilities are clearly defined early in the relationship and have appropriate level shared documentation for ready reference
- Align on shared goals: Agree on joint success criteria to ensure both parties are working toward the same objectives
- Communicate value: Make sure that you let them know how their involvement directly impacts success. Oftentimes, success managers want to SERVE and sees value through being nice and helpful and not asking customers to do anything. That can lead to challenges.
- Escalate when necessary: If needed, escalate issues to higher stakeholders and clarify the risks of non-participation. Better yet, come to an agreement of what you will do when either party gets off track
- Offer support with boundaries: Provide help if they’re struggling, but make it clear they need to take ownership.
- Discuss impact: Be transparent about the consequences of not meeting responsibilities and reinforce that accountability is mutual
Stephanie: I love Keishla’s “proactive reactivity” approach of planning for those moments that weren’t quite part of your original implementation plan. Have you ever used the project management “pre-mortem” approach? You imagine a project has failed and then brainstorm reasons why that might have happened. We often do this when we are onboarding a new customer so we can be prepared for those moments. What if you customer doesn’t engage? What if they don’t refer to the flyer you sent? What if they don’t attend your training session?
This is also part of the process of safeguarding the achievability of your goals. If the goals you are establishing have potential pitfalls, it’s a great best practice to discuss those upfront. If your customer advocate/buyer/decision-maker leaves, it’s ok to revisit your goals to determine if those are still valid and make sense for the partnership.
2: Coordinate internally to understand customer goals without repetition.
Q: My sales team often tells me the customer goals and is hesitant to let CS ask again on kickoff calls. I pose this as “I like to hear it from you” but again, sales is hesitant. Have you encountered this, and if so, how do you overcome it?
Keishla: That’s a common challenge that I am sure occurs in many organizations. It’s obviously important that we make sure the customer experience isn’t full of redundancy and repetition, but there is value in allowing the success manager to validate and often probe deeper to help support the implementation and adoption process to ensure value realization.
On one of my teams, we worked to get shared language on goal statements that we integrated into our new partner information form that was shared by sales to implementation and success managers. We were able to integrate these statements in kick-off meetings as a point of validation, and an opportunity to gain more insight into the partner’s objectives. Often times, sales teams just want to respect and protect the customer’s time, so better internal coordination can ensure both teams goals are met and that the customer is well supported.
Stephanie: It sounds like there is still some work needed to build internal trust among teams. But don’t stress! Most companies are in this position. It requires consistent work from top down and bottom up.
Having deeper goal conversations with customer during a kickoff call is critical for success, even if we are asking customers to restate their goals as we have encourage more constructure dialogue with better discovery questions that can differ from what they got a the pre-sale stage. We were able to correlate some successful implementations to our goal-setting conversations during kickoff meetings and that has helped build trust with sales. I would look for opportunities to do that, so you are armed with the proof!
3: Invest in building a unified understanding of GTM strategy and desired outcomes.
Q: What other teams do you collaborate with to make sure that there is shared language used to describe outcomes? Is it important to make sure the sales and product teams are talking about outcomes the same way you are?
Keishla: I regularly collaborate with product, sales, marketing, implementation, and support to ensure that we have a shared understanding of our GTM strategy and customer journey expectations for both acquisition and renewal sales. Additionally, we engage in shared engagements that support being customer-centric and maximizing our talents and skill sets to drive business outcomes.
It is critically important that we understand the impact of decisions made. Product needs to time enhancements and communicate their rollout in order for sales and renewals team to leverage them in the market. It takes a great amount of coordination and communication to manage those aspects not only effectively but with the intention to drive results.
Stephanie: I concur with Keishla! I regularly meet with product, sales, and marketing leaders to build strategy and track our progress. We also have companywide debriefs to showcase our work towards our KPIs so that we reinforce that shared language. We also created an ongoing meeting cadence with Product to discuss our identified customer goals and how we are verifying those. In fact, product team members have joined some of our customer meetings to hear the voice of the customer.
4: Build a strong feedback loop between your customer success and product teams.
Q: How do you ensure the key information and the impact of the client’s problem are well addressed by the CS person and then well presented to the product team? We struggle a lot with scoring the impact of the feature suggestion coming from the client and effectively delivering it to the product team.
Keishla: Effective cross-functional collaboration between CS and product is essential. Over the past two years, we have implemented some processes and engagement that support good feedback loops to between the two teams.
1: We standardized our collection of product feedback and feature requests. We have a template that any success, implementation, or sales member can use. These entries are submitted through a form in our product Slack channel and feed directly into the tool our product team uses to manage feature tracking. Team members can “upvote” features or provide insights like sales or renewal opportunities with corresponding revenue values that could be impacted by a particular request.
2: We have a cross-functional Product Review board team that has representation from product, success, and implementation. They meet regularly to provide feedback and score request using the RICE framework. “The RICE scoring model is a prioritization framework designed to help product managers determine which products, features, and other initiatives to put on their roadmaps by scoring these items according to four factors. These factors, which form the acronym RICE, are reach, impact, confidence, and effort.”
It’s important to work in partnership with product to determine what features have the opportunity to impact business outcomes. I also work closely with product and marketing to understand the roadmap and release cycle so that I can help my team leverage new features for revenue impact. This effort is something that CS leadership should be managing to and not leaving it to the individual CSM level. Create strong processes that foster good communication and engagement that supports customer and business objectives.
Stephanie: We have a similar structure that Keishla outlined of cross-functional feedback loops. We dissected this into a few ways:
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- Customer advocacy groups: Our Network Community is comprised of folks who are passionate about our product and the education space overall. But they also have opportunities to provide feedback to our product team on future product releases as well as current existing products/features.
- Customer support cases: Our Support and Operations team does a bi-weekly audit of cases to ensure we are capturing trends, anomalies, and areas of immediate need. This has helped our product team to prioritize their fixes and where we should focus attention in the future.
- In-product feedback capture
- Open-door customer meetings: We offer opportunities for our marketing and product team members to join customer meetings to hear voice of the customer. You would be surprised how little these folks get exposed to actual customer/end-user discussion. While focus groups and surveys are essential, there are golden nuggets of information that come from our everyday discourse with customers.
5: If creating customer success objectives is overwhelming, start small.
Q: Do you recommend writing a CSO for your product portfolio as a whole? Or is this exercise more effective if it applies to each product module your organization offers?
Keishla: I think writing customer success objectives (CSOs) is a good exercise for the product as a whole, but I can see who you could have statements for modules or major features, especially if those are upsell opportunities or enhancements. Having clarity on value propositions is always important.
Stephanie: I think it depends upon the functionality of your product and who it’s intended to serve. Many of you present a very vast suite of products that do very different things and if so, it’s helpful to understand the objectives of each at some point. But start out small if you haven’t initiated this process yet. Start with your product portfolio as a whole and then pivot to modules/other products.
6: When customer outcome data is out of your reach, think creatively.
Q: One of our product’s main values is creating efficiencies in business processes that involve other people or technologies. This metric is hard to measure and collect insights about because we don’t/can’t measure how much time a user spent before using our product or what they’re saving by using it. What do you recommend as a success metric in a case like this when so much of it relies on the customer sharing efficiency gains?
Keishla: This is a great question, because sometimes the data that will help your customer determine value realization is beyond the CSMs reach. I have a product with a similar state, and we are beginning to work on some tools and frameworks that posit some assumptions based on the data we have and some conservative assumptions about the data the customer has to create some value correlations.
Depending on the organization and product, these could be framed in terms of time save, money earned, tasks completed, etc. I would spend some time thinking about what types of frameworks that you can provide your customers to make some calculations. In a perfect world, customers might share this data, but I understand how that might have some constraints depending on your industry.
Learn more about outcomes-based customer success best practices from Keishla Ceaser-Jones and Stephanie Workman-Bolden.
