Value Engineering, Value Analyst, Forward Deployed Engineers. Outcome Engineers. Desired Outcomes. Outcome Pricing. Outcome Architect. These and related terms are being tossed about more and more of late in discussions about the future of Customer Success. What will they mean to the profession? To the customer? Here’s another that ought to be of great concern to us: The Value Gap — the difference between what Sales promised the customer, what the customer thought they bought, and the value that the customer actually realized. The gap is structural. Marketing is promoting promises. Sales is selling features. Implementation is configuring the software. Training is showing the users how the app works. Support is responding to complaints. Success is holding the bag and trying for renewals and expansion sales. The result is like a jazz band where all the musicians are playing from different pages of music.
Into this scenario comes even more terms and concepts. “The Value Management Office exists to infuse all interactions and engagements towards the fulfillment of the customers’ strategic business needs with joint ownership of their long term success.” Job descriptions deepen the confusion. “…you will sit at the convergence of sales, product, and customer success, helping enterprise prospects and customers understand the value of COMPANY’s platform and how it can be tailored to their needs. You will own the technical and strategic side of the pre-sales process, translating customer goals into scalable solutions that drive measurable outcomes.” “In this role, you will work at the intersection of strategy, analytics, and customer engagement: partnering with sales, customer success, and senior customer stakeholders to identify high-impact use cases and translate them into measurable business outcomes.”
“The Value Management Office exists to infuse all interactions and engagements towards the fulfillment of the customers’ strategic business needs with joint ownership of their long term success.”
I think that the transition to Value and Outcomes has the potential to be as fundamental a change in the industry as the advent of SaaS was back in 2006. Or it may be just another set of buzzwords to enjoy their brief moment of popularity before The Next Big Thing arrives. Which will it be? What’s your take on the question?
Is your company going along the Value Outcome Operations journey? Just starting out? Midway? Well advanced? What technologies do you see as required? What are the challenges in transforming an organization? I’d like to interview you to learn what the road looks like in practice. That can be completely anonymous or attributed, whichever you prefer.
