Customer Success Tactics: How we find Desired Outcomes and show ROI

*These short Customer Success posts are meant illustrate things we’ve learned at Proven, so they may not translate perfectly to your company / industry. For context, the majority of our Saas customers are low LTV “pro-sumers” who are generally SMBs*

The Problem

We have a low touch, mostly self-serve Saas product. It’s great because we don’t need a heavy sales component, and don’t have to worry about losing conversions to the enemy of all deals: time.

However, one of the negatives of such a product is that there’s often no conversation with the customer. Couple this with the fact that they are not responsive to email, and this leaves us with a problem on how to know what they are trying to get out our product.

Finding the Desired Outcomes

As I’ve written previously, the solution we used was to build the capturing of Desired Outcomes into the product. By using our past data (way back when we had no self-serve component and talked to all new customers), we identified the 4 most common DOs. Then, we built a widget into the site as a component of onboarding to ask for their DO and to give us the ammo to make sure they are successful.

The other benefit is that we then know how best to present them ROI. Our product can be helpful on a couple fronts (each one related to different desired outcome; Saving Time, More Applicants, Improved Collaboration, etc), so knowing how to present it correctly is very powerful.

The Presentation

Now that we know the DOs of the customer, we know how we want to frame their ROI. The question became “how to we present it?”. Keep in mind, we’re a small team, so we weren’t going to be able to use engineering for this problem, and, since we’re low touch, a scheduled phone call was unlikely.

To keep things simple, we decided to use Venngage to create some simple infographics that we could email a few days after customers had used the product for the first time. We decided that 7 days after their first job posting was the best time to present them with their ROI.

Now this is pretty simplistic, however we’ve had some great feedback from customers who love seeing that their choice to try our service is giving them measurable success.

It’s a manual process, and could be improved a thousand different ways, but we now have a system for capturing a customer’s Desired Outcome, and a way to show them that they are achieving that outcome while getting a measurable ROI.