By Chad Horenfeldt
A number of years ago I had a client that wanted to build out a custom report. They were frustrated as they couldn’t get the data they wanted in the way they wanted it. I’m sure many of you can relate to this. As a good CSM I did my best to devise a solution that could help the customer and extract the data they needed. I didn’t realize it at the time but I was making a bad situation worse.
As I dug into their request it was very evident to me that I couldn’t get them what they wanted. This took me about a week to figure out and when I got back to them and delivered the news they were extremely unhappy. Not only could I not deliver on their request but I delayed progress on the issue for another full week. This was eroding the trust that they had in me as their CSM. What I didn’t realize at the time was I needed to take a step back and move beyond the product. I needed to focus on the customer’s outcomes.
Focus on Outcomes and Not the Product
What do I mean by outcomes? Paul Henderson, author of The Outcome Generation has an excellent analogy for this. When you go to a nicer restaurant, you don’t just go there for the food. You go there for the experience. You may be meeting friends or celebrating a personal milestone. Your outcome is to enjoy yourself.
This applies to your role as a customer success professional. Your job isn’t to help your customers with your products. It’s to help them achieve their outcomes - these are the client’s key priorities. These go well beyond the product and are central to their business.
Focusing on Outcomes Rather Than Just Issues
It’s easy to get wrapped up in your day to day work, which may involve regular client meetings, internal meetings, email, escalations etc… It’s what the authors of The 4 Disciplines Execution call “the whirlwind.” The problem is we’re so busy solving the urgent client issues that we don’t focus on what is most important - what the client is actually trying to achieve. It’s why they bought your product and desire to continue to use it. So how do you create a deeper customer relationship where you focus on their outcomes?
The Birth of the Business Outcome Review
About a year ago as we were growing our customer success team at Kustomer we wanted to better position our CSMs with our clients. We found that when a CSM would take on a new client coming out of implementation or from another CSM it wasn’t as smooth of a transition as we wanted. In addition, the CSM was thrown directly into issues and product challenges. To improve these handoffs and establish the strength of our CSMs we created a new strategic engagement called the Business Outcome Review. We’ve branded it the Kustomer Business Outcome review or KBO for short and it’s drastically changed how we engage with our customers.
The KBO is similar to a QBR in many ways but the objective is to focus on the customer’s business, their outcomes and their priorities. It’s not designed to cover their product usage or the product roadmap. Here is the rough agenda for this meeting:
Discovery (where we ask the client questions)
Outcomes (we specify the client’s outcomes, goals and metrics)
Summary & Next Steps (summarize what was discussed and replay the action items)
The Three Phases of the Business Outcome Review Meeting
Before you even get a meeting scheduled there are some core meeting basics that are needed. You first need to ensure that you include the key client stakeholders in the meeting, preferably the person that decided to purchase your product and others that either influenced that decision or are actively using it. You want to align or realign all the key stakeholders.
It’s also important that you prep the client on the goal of the meeting and what will be included. You can simply let them know that in order to better serve them you need to better understand their business and that is the purpose of this meeting. You can ask them questions ahead of time but that isn’t necessary. We’ve had the best results when we have a discussion with our clients during the meeting. If they have any pressing issues we ask that these be addressed in another meeting so we can have a more strategic discussion.
Discovery. During this part of the meeting our goal is to get the business context needed to uncover the client’s true outcome(s). This is the longest part of the meeting and the most important. It’s critical that you have done your research on the client before the meeting. The goal should be to add to the information you’ve learned previously about the client and to understand what has changed.
If it’s possible, you should avoid asking questions such as “why did you buy our product?” or “what are your goals?”. You should have a sense of what those are from previous conversations or notes in your CRM. I encourage our team to use the following phrasing: “You mentioned previously that you purchased us due to X,Y, and Z reasons. Are these still relevant or have they changed?” This lets the client know that you have prepared for this meeting by reviewing previous discussions.
Here are some of the topics we ask clients about in this phase:
How their team is structured
Who their customers are how they differentiate them (if they do)
Confirm why they bought or renewed
Challenges they are looking to solve for and how that will help their business
Their top priorities and if those have recently changed
Key metrics they use to measure their success
This is the section that will vary based on your business. The high level questions tend to be the same but as you delve down, you will want to craft the questions so you can better understand the customer and their challenges based on how your product interacts with their company. As you go deeper into the discussion, you will discuss your product - that’s ok and inevitable. I just caution you to not go down rabbit holes into features and issues. When this happens I try to refer back to the agenda or ask that we table that item for later in the meeting or for a subsequent discussion.
Outcomes. To prepare for this section of the meeting, our team has conducted an exercise to narrow down the main types of business outcomes that our clients strive for. For example, In our industry the main outcomes involve driving efficiency or improving the customer experience. We display a slide to the client that outlines these and provides definitions. This makes it easier for the client to deduce their outcome when they may not be able to verbalize what it is exactly. I recommend that you go through a similar exercise and define the common types of outcomes for your products.
We then dive into the goals that will help our clients achieve their outcomes. This is where we get into more product related items but it may also involve hiring additional team members or improving processes. We try to prioritize the most important objectives and then align metrics with those goals so we can measure our progress. For example, if the outcome is to improve the customer experience, the goal may be to allow customers to communicate to the business using chat. The metric may be to have the percentage of issues sent through chat to be 10% of the overall number of support items by the end of Q4. This is following the best practices of making goals specific, measurable, and time based. It’s important to get as specific as you can so you can measure your progress and ultimately the value your product produces.
Summary & Next Steps. The summary of what was discussed is the start of what will be a customer success plan. We go back over what was discussed and align on what the priorities should be. We make sure the client is bought in by asking them a simple question such as: “Is this aligned with your thinking?”. We then define the immediate next steps and ensure that there are owners and timeframes for any actions. I recommend that you schedule the next meeting during this meeting so you get it on the calendar. It can be challenging to do this after the call as you and the client get brought back into the “whirlwind” of your daily tasks. It’s also critical that you send a detailed follow up and document the actions, owners, and key dates. This becomes the basis of your customer success plan.
Business outcome reviews can’t be done for every client as they are time intensive. You will need to determine the segments where it makes sense to have these discussions. That said, if you are looking to deepen the relationship with your customer, I highly recommend implementing these types of strategic engagements or at least experimenting with them. It’s been a very impactful tool in our CSM toolbox and something that may help your organization as well.
The Success League is a customer success consulting firm that helps leaders build and develop top performing customer success teams. We offer modular consulting engagements, as well as coaching for leaders who need some weekly advice. Check out TheSuccessLeague.io for details.
Chad Horenfeldt - Chad is a customer success executive with 15+ years of experience building and developing high performing teams. Currently, he is the Head of Customer Success at Kustomer. Prior to Kustomer, Chad held CS leadership positions at Updater, Bluecore, Influitive, and Oracle (Eloqua). In addition to writing for The Success League, he also writes regularly on the topic of customer success on his blog The Enlightened Customer.