Practical strategies for tech leaders

Making Your Customers More Successful

Create more customer advocates and maximize lifetime value for you and your customers by focusing on their success, not your product and your metrics

Your customers partnered with you by purchasing your product or service in order to solve a business need that they have. But do you know what those needs are for each and every one of your customers? If not, then how do you know whether they are getting the most value from your product? Are you leaving money on the table because they are gaining disproportionately more value than you are charging them? Are they an attrition risk because they’ve forgotten know how much you are helping them achieve their business goals?

“We need a more personalised approach to helping our customers succeed so we can earn the right to convert them into advocates and maximize lifetime value”

Success is not how much they are using your solution, but whether your team and your solution are helping them achieve their business goals. But you need to know what those are, quantify them, track against them, and regularly report back to your client.

Solving Customer Needs

The people in your company have different understandings of your customers’ needs.

• The Founder has an intimate knowledge of key customers and has driven the company to solve the problems for them and others like them.
• Product Development and Marketing team have segmented customers into broad categories so they can target relevant segments with new features and marketing messages.
• Customer Service teams know the immediate pains of customers who are seeking help in solving a problem or learning how to use the product.
• Sales teams have a good understanding of the business drivers that motivated the customer to seek a solution.

Combining these insights for each and more for each customer is critical in ensuring your teams understand your customer’s business needs and then demonstrating why your company is best positioned to solve them.

1) Know Their Goals

Ask them what their business goals are. And ask them again, and again. Customers know their business really well and may only give you a slim understanding of their business needs because it is obvious to them, or they may not fully trust you yet or may be embarrassed about having the problem in the first place. Some common techniques are 5 Whys and Ask Follow-Up Questions.

Customers will often express similar business needs and goals in different ways. It is important to repeat those back in their language to show that you really understood them from their unique perspective. For reporting purposes on the backend, you will map those to common themes so you can determine trends. Those goals are often variations of increasing revenue and reducing costs.

2) Quantify Their Goals

To understand how important their goals are, it is essential to ask them to quantify their goals. Getting them to quantify is critical as there can be no dispute in defining the value that they expect to get. Any goal will be broken into one or more objectives.

The most successful sales reps are great at focusing on customer goals and objectives in order to then demonstrate how your company can address them and in getting the customer to quantify them so they can justify your company’s pricing. That information needs to be shared with the Customer Success teams that are responsible for helping the client adopt.

Some examples of converting objectives in quantifiable ones include:

• “I want to ensure our users adopt your system”, can be quantified into “We want to ensure the best time to adoption, and expect all users to be trained and have logged in within the first 2 weeks”
• “We expect to create a new revenue stream with your product”, can be quantified into “We want to create a new revenue stream, and expect to see $100,000 in the first fiscal quarter”
• “Your system will save us lots of time”, can be quantified into “We will reduce the time to build our widgets, which will allow us to create more widgets without having to spend $100,000 on new equipment”

3) Help Them Meet Their Goals

Your customer wants your help in meeting their goals. Once you know what their goals are you need to leverage your Customer Success team to help the client achieve them through multiple channels, including:

• Email — what is the best email drip campaign to guide customers
• Video — what self serve video content will educate them
• Phone — how frequently do you call to assist them, human to human
• In person — who should go on site and when
• Mail — are there alternative channels that will surprise and delight your customers
• In-app — for software companies, you can judiciously use pop-up messages and walkthroughs to guide the users

Whichever channel, it is critical to reiterate:

• What their goals are, in their words
• Summarise how your company can help them
• Guide them to do the necessary steps in order to meet their goals using your solution

4) Report Back To Them On Their Progress

What is the appropriate frequency to check-in with the client on progress and remind them how your company is helping them meet their goals:

• What are their goals — reinforcing that you understand why they are working with your company
• How are they tracking against them — how successful the partnership between your client and your company are
• What do they need to do in order to better meet them — what are the specific actions the customer needs to take using your company’s services
• What are the latest capabilities/features that your company offers them — reinforce with them how your company is continuously working to help them meet their goals
• Get their commitment to continue paying for your services — after demonstrating how you are a trusted partner dedicated to solving their business needs it is easy to renew or discuss price changes.

5) Level Up and Repeat

Once they are closer to meeting their original goals, it is important to review how their goals have changed. Customers that purchase your product often follow a similar evolutionary path where you can add value to them at each stage.

Personalizing Customer Success

Know the value that you are bringing to each of your customers so you can ensure that your company is delivering on them, creating advocates from your customers, and maximizing lifetime revenue.

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