To what degree does your Customer Success Platform or other tools help you to prepare and deliver a Customer Value Review for a customer? And to prepare for a meeting with your CEO and CFO to discuss the profitability the CS team brings to the company? Does it report on the utilization and effectiveness of the CSMs? If it doesn’t inform these conversations, what value does it provide to you as a customer success executive?
Troubling Responses
I put those questions in several social media posts, and the responses I got back were troubling. “Our CSP is decent for basic health scoring and logging meeting notes, but the second you ask it to prove realized value or tie CSM activity to actual revenue impact, it just stares back at you blankly. It’s built for tracking tasks, not outcomes. Most of the real prep for a profitability meeting still happens in a spreadsheet I built myself, pulling data from three different places. The tool tells me we did the work, not that the work mattered.” Another said “,,,the platform kept the health score tidy, but the story I actually walked into the room with still lived in my own spreadsheet. If the customer hasn’t named the outcome in their own words first, what exactly are we proving — or are we just dressing up busywork as value?”
From Mission to Results
The succinct mantra of a CS team needs to be: “we make more money better/faster for our customers and our company — and we can prove it!” Can you? We’re moving ever faster into the era of Customer Realized Value Outcomes, and proving those value outcomes is going to be increasingly required.
You embed a Forward Deployed Engineer and an Adoption Operations person into a customer account. How will you prove their work measurably increase the customer’s profitability? What provable effect does the accomplishment of the specified value outcomes have on your company’s profitability? You obviously have to charge for the services being provided, for people capable of doing such work are expensive resources, but how will you track the activities and effects? Does your CSP have a full featured professional services module sufficient to meeting that challenge? Are you going to be able to prove the value increase to your customers and to your company?
I’ve added a Value Realization Platform category to the CS Technology TechMap page of the Customer Success Directory. So far, three companies have applied for a free listing there, and I’ve identified 50+ more that might qualify. I’m confident that there are more out there because the need is becoming known and will only increase as more CS teams look into the value outcome future, and realize that their current toolkit isn’t going to be enough.
The Continuing Conversation
If your Customer Success team is focusing on delivering value outcomes, or if you’re a technology firm producing tools to enable those provable goals, let’s talk. Join us in The Customer Success Forum on LinkedIn for the discussion, or use the Contact Us form here to reach out directly.
