Lost in the Value Landscape?
Do you know your product is valuable to your customers?
Have you proved it definitively?
Are you scared to ask?
A number of years ago, I worked with an enterprise client who paid us a significant amount of money. Their account alone accounted for ~20% of our total customer ARR, so they were important to me.
I was doing everything I could, schmoozing the exec buyer, working so closely with the champion to drive engagement and adoption that I was practically living in his kitchen, and influencing my internal teams to deliver features and integrations that would benefit them. As the Head of CS for a start-up, I don’t think there’s anything else I could have been doing to make this customer more operationally successful and give them an amazing experience with us.
It’s not enough, though, is it? Operationally successful? Yet, many companies rely on experience and “operational success” to retain business. And it’s very short-sighted.
Here’s what I define as operational success:
Operational success is the process of giving the customer a seamless experience with your product and business. It covers stakeholder relationships and feature development, all to enable the customer’s usage of the product and their overall sentiment towards it.
Operational success can lead to retention, especially with products which are integral to the client’s operational delivery. It will rarely lead to growth, except in the instance where the customer themselves is growing. They need to buy more of your product to deliver their business.
What operational success doesn’t include is actual success. You know what I mean: if you focus on the experience, you’ll get the outcome. That’s the assumption, anyway.
Let’s get back to the story. I was so determined to give this enormous customer the very best experience with us, yet I was terrified to ask about value data. I knew I would get it if I asked, I knew they’d be measuring it one way or another, but as far as I was concerned, we were in a “don’t ask, don’t tell” situation.
Why?
Of course, I believed in the product, and I believed in the impact it could have, but to me, it wasn’t worth the risk of proving it definitively. The flip side of proving it definitively is obviously to make yourself redundant. My CRO at the time wasn’t bothered by this approach. His opinion was, “Of course, there’s value. Why bother measuring it.” I still think his take was worse than mine.
Some of this was experience. I wasn’t experienced at leading a client of this size through a value calculation. I didn’t want to mess it up, so it was easier not to brooch the topic. I’d lead with experience, and they’d stay because they loved us so much (I’m laughing as I write this FYI).
However, you either get the outcome you want or the lesson you need, and man, did I get the lesson. Without guiding the customer through the value discovery process, they did it on their own. Needless to say, they didn’t really find anything massive. They didn’t churn immediately; they had a 3-year contract, but they didn’t renew it when it came. The experience remained high, but the relationship dwindled as my champion moved off to other, more interesting projects. There’s a second learning: if your champion is in an “innovation” or “technology” team, as soon as you get past implementation, start looking for a BAU champion or risk redundancy.
So, what happened?
Left to their own devices, the client only considered value against one data set in one specific parameter. They weren’t looking at the total picture of how the tool impacted their field operation. If you’re ever relying on one specific metric to define your success, you’re thinking much too small. In an ideal world, you’ll be measuring your impact against a number of metrics. If you can prove moderate impact across a range of ROI metrics, you’ll stand a much better chance of proving your overall value than you will with one.
In this case, not leading the customer through this discovery process across all the available metrics was a bust. All my eggs were in one basket, and I dropped it like it was hot.
This experience led me to discover what I call “The Value Landscape”. You might sell yourself on one specific defined ROI, the solution to a significant problem that you can sell to your prospects, but there a bonuses. An entire ecosystem of related ROIs, which together create one big valuable picture. The picture is so valuable. It keeps the renewals coming year after year.
So, instead of just measuring whether or not our software had had an impact on their first-time appointment completion rate, we should also have been considering;
Reduction in calls to the contact centre on the day of service
Improvement to end customer experience
Improvement in employee experience
Reduction in rescheduled appointments (thus increase in routing efficiency)
Faster service recovery when customers expressed dissatisfaction
As well as
Reduction in failed appointments (primary value driver)
Looking across the value landscape allows you to create a much more compelling story of value and ROI beyond a dramatic improvement to one specific metric.
I think about this experience often. It shaped how I now lead and develop success strategies and teams. Of course, I wished I’d learned these lessons with a much smaller customer, but we get the lessons we need…
And they were;
Always test your champion! Your champion will likely change frequently, especially between the sale, the implementation and business as usual. Don’t cling to contacts you know because you think it gives you the best chance of success. It doesn’t. Always be testing, networking and building.
If you don’t guide your customers through the value definition process, they will do it themselves. This is more of a risk than you not finding value when you look for it.
Ensure your customer appreciates your value landscape. Have a primary value driver for ROI for sure, but make sure they measure and appreciate your compound value across all of the metrics you influence.
Operational Success is important, especially for enterprise clients. But it won’t keep your customers renewing on its own. Be critical, be data-driven and always chase actual tangible value as defined by data.
If you don’t ask, you don’t get. If your champion can’t or won’t share data with you, they’re probably not your champion.
Blog Photo by Jay Mantri on Unsplash
