Case Study: Redefining the Goal of Customer Success
Aligning Product Strategy, Selling, and Delivery with Customer Value Attainment
Introduction
The advent and maturing of SaaS products and the overall technology ecosystem that supports them has been immensely valuable to customers in terms of projected time-to-value (TTV). In the world of ‘model-based’ intelligence products – whether deterministic, ML/AI, or Generative AI – there is a need use relevant and accurate sets of data from a customer’s subject matter experts (SMEs) to ‘tune’ the models to provide reasonable results that can be effectively used in delivering measurable business value.
Oftentimes, however, the lack of preparedness by a customer prior to the purchase of a subscription (or license, depending on the software company’s business model) deters the customer from achieving a reasonable TTV. The software provider may claim the customer did not provide the right people and/or data to make the configuration and deployment of the software occur in a timely manner, if at all. The customer often feels that their team failed or that the software company did not divulge the level of effort required to make the ‘project’ successful. In either case, both parties lose – and the software company may lose out on their subscription renewal and opportunity for a successful customer.
This case study examines such a situation and highlights how I leveraged my consulting/professional services, selling, technical and background to work externally with customers and collaborate internally with sales, product, marketing, and delivery leaders to break through the barriers faced by companies selling model-based products in achieving customer success.
Situation
A leading SaaS analytical modeling company in the discrete manufacturing product design market struggled with the successful and sustainable adoption of their software application. While the value proposition and promise of the application were significant, customers were often overwhelmed by its implementation process and the best use of the software for their needs.
Summarizing the high-level challenges:
Complex and often lengthy model development and tuning were required to get meaningful model outputs.
Model outputs and accuracy were related to specific use cases, each requiring unique model development, reasonable data input sets, and end-user training specific to the model and its use case.
End-users iteratively use a model to obtain an output that reflected best value for the physical product they were designing or purchasing, but there was no enforceable naming convention or organizational structure for iterative outputs in the software.
Outputs needed to be grouped in a means that would support aggregate product cost across PLM-dictated lifecycle stages or supplier quotes & negotiations.
After license purchase, it was typical that after a lengthy education and modeling process, the customer implementation missed expectations from a schedule, functionality, and business benefits perspective.
Task
Assigned by the software company to improve customer success, I had to assess what ‘success’ meant to the customer, determine how to achieve that with the modeling software, and identify a learning and adoption process for new logos and customers without burdening the sales process. Any significant changes to the sales engagement process or product functionality would require agreement by the leadership team. All of this with the goal of turning around negative trends in resubscription and customer initial TTV & success.
Activities / Solution
Based on a review of customer and account team feedback, I identified that success criteria for customers had historically been "successful model development"—a loosely defined concept focused on model creation rather than practical usage.
To shift this paradigm, I did the following:
Redefined Customer Success Metrics
Collaborated with executive, sales, marketing, and product leadership and customers to propose a new success definition centered on operational use of the software by end-users to continually generate measurable value (e.g., dollars saved across product lifecycle costs and supplier negotiations).
Emphasized the impact of this shift on both pre-sales and post-sales engagement processes.
Enabled Product Enhancements
Partnered with product leadership to influence roadmap priorities, obtaining buy-in to the addition of a ‘tagging’ capability for the product roadmap. Also, convinced leadership to allow for a near term ‘beta’ capability available to the customer service and consulting team to enable them to start assembling solutions with select customers.
Delivered documented product requirements and led a small solution consultant team to validate the implemented features—specifically around tagging and leveraging that for organizing model outputs to support operational reporting.
Designed the Customer Success Journey
Secured executive buy-in to the updated success model.
Led an initiative with customer success and consulting teams to map an end-to-end customer experience for both new and existing accounts—anchored in a “start with the end in mind” approach.
Positioned key journey milestones during the sales cycle to help customers visualize and commit to success early on.
Developed Supporting Tools and Education
Conducted discovery sessions with internal teams to surface necessary enablement materials and processes.
Introduced a “drip education” model to gradually build customer competency in modeling technology.
Developed guidelines and trained customer success team to lead customers in collecting and preparing data and artifacts needed for effective model deployment.
Results
The goal of turning around negative trends in resubscription and customer initial TTV & success was met, with measurable results across multiple customers stating within the next three quarters.
Using the new engagement model and end-target value objective for Customer Success:
Prospects contracted with the company in a more open and partnering manner, appreciating the pre-sales education on the model technology, planning for how they would specifically use it in their business operations, and direction on assembling and categorizing the design inputs for the modeling process. Prospects experienced the pre-sales engagement as part of their journey to success.
Upon sale, customers were empowered to more quickly implement, test, and deploy their models for operational use in measuring cost reduction and savings.
The time to successful implementation of models was reduced by 25–50%, increasing TTV and ROI for customers.
Tagging and organizational structures provided by the product team allowed the consulting team to develop product and supplier-quote dashboards that enabled customers to see aggregate costs and their improvement over time – clearly showing measurable value attained.
This opened the door to a larger market opportunity and increased revenue for the product company.
Enabled the Customer Success function to engage more effectively with customers by providing a clear, quantifiable framework for measuring cost savings for designed products and component supply purchase – and hence ROI for the software.
Accounts that migrated to this new engagement process and product capabilities were more likely to renew their subscription.
Take-aways
Continually Generate Measurable Value - In enterprise software, a product company must have a ‘solution provider’ mentality and provide the necessary services (educational, client success, professional, consulting, etc.) to support ‘operational use of the software product by end-users to continually generate measurable value.’ This can be accomplished with internal resources, partners, or both – depending on the software company’s business model.
Start with the End in Mind: Continual Value Attainment - Structuring a model for a customer success journey must ‘start with the end in mind,’ developing and aligning the educational and professional & consulting services with the endpoint of the journey: continual value attainment.
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