Benefits of Outcome-based Customer Success

Enable a business outcome important to the customer and they’ll stay. The value you help customers achieve is clearer.

Increased expansion revenue (upsell and cross-sell) – identify business initiatives to improve the Success Outcome, your product will be bought as part of the business initiative. More effective than trying to directly sell more product.

Earlier influence – use outcomes to influence customers and prospects earlier in their buying cycle – while they’re thinking about business results and before they’re thinking about technology products.

Your competitors are trying to sell their products. You’re trying to help the customer achieve a business outcome they care about. You stand out from the crowd, which increases your win-rate.

More references and advocates – you create heroes and heroines in existing customers by helping key people get credit for a business outcome the top management of the customer regard as a success. Heroes and heroines love telling prospects how great you are to work with.

Alignment of all internal departments around a single purpose – enable a core outcome for customers (Success Outcome). Each department has a common focus and a clear role.

Engage at the executive level by discussing a business outcome important to the executive, not discussing your products (which they don’t care about).

Move from ad-hoc, transactional engagement to a repeating cycle of engagement driven by continuous improvement of the core outcome (Success Outcome)

Joint engagement and partnership – business outcomes require vendor and customer to work together (it’s not just about the software).

Instil a greater sense of purpose in staff, resulting in increased staff retention and increased discretionary effort. Enabling business outcomes provides a more direct link between the employee’s work and great results for customers. Getting your products working is less direct.

Create new promotion paths – roles that focus on the Success Outcome, not just product.

Clearer and more innovative Product Roadmap

• Every product or service must improve your ability to enable the Success Outcome
  • Gives a frame of reference to resolve disputes about what new features/products/services should be developed
• Assists in setting development priorities
  • The better a proposed product helps enable the core outcome, the higher the priority
  • Allows all departments to understand development priorities
• More innovation – outcomes are a new lens through which to brainstorm new products and services, including disruptive products