Learn how to design and execute a Customer Success Strategy that will serve as your most powerful sales differentiator. Growing a successful B2B SaaS company has never been more lucrative but yet has never been harder. B2B SaaS is largely being commoditized and most market categories are close to saturation if not already saturated. The good news is that there are still ways to successfully compete and grow. Your Customer Success Strategy is one such way.
What you’ll learn:
- Why your B2B SaaS business needs to move beyond Product capabilities and competitive pricing to win new customers
- What types of value your prospects are actually making buying decisions against in today’s subscription economy
- How to design and leverage a CS strategy that will not only minimize churn and drive expansion but will also serve as a powerful sales differentiator driving the acquisition of more new customers
Webinar hosted by Planhat, with guest presenter Ross G. D. Fulton - founder of Valuize Consulting
6. 1. Don’t be a
Chad, be a Mia
1. Design your CS
Strategy to be a
Sales
Differentiator
● The Commodification of B2B SaaS
● Value Types Desired by B2B Buyers Are Changing
● Designing Prescriptive Outcomes
● Building Adoption Formulas
● Integrating with Key Sales Processes:
○ Qualification
○ Discovery
○ Presentation
○ Pricing
12. How does Mia do it?
★ Latest Gym Equipment & Magic Powder
★ Fitness Profile Assessment
★ Goal:
○ 20lb weight loss in 3 months
○ Milestones:
■ Flexibility - 15% increase
■ Cardio - 25% increase
■ Strength - 20% increase
■ Nutritional knowledge
★ ...IF you follow Mia’s prescribed plan:
○ 3 sessions a week
○ Diet plan
■ Recruit partner to enforce diet
13. Building Blocks
PRESCRIPTIVE VALUE-
BASED OUTCOMES
PRESCRIPTIVE
ADOPTION PLANS
IDEAL CUSTOMER
PROFILE★ Fitness Profile Assessment
★ Goal:
○ 20lb weight loss in 3 months
○ Milestones:
■ Flexibility - 15% increase
■ Cardio - 25% increase
■ Strength - 20% increase
■ Nutritional knowledge
★ ...IF you follow Mia’s prescribed
plan:
○ 3 sessions a week
○ Diet plan
■ Recruit partner to
enforce diet
PRESCRIPTIVE VALUE-
BASED OUTCOMES
PRESCRIPTIVE
ADOPTION PLANS
IDEAL CUSTOMER
PROFILE
14. Adoption Methodologies
Adoption Plans
Prescribed formulas consisting of the activities,
roles, data and systems required to achieve and
sustain Value-based Outcomes
Value-based Outcomes
Prescribed measurable outcomes that serve as key
milestones representing the achievement or
sustainment of value-based adoption
17. Constructing Value-based Outcomes
Value-based
Outcome
Ideal Customer’s GoalProduct Features
Ideal Customer’s Job
Value Enabler
Ideal Customer’s Goal
Product Features
Value Enabler
Ideal Customer’s Job
Value-based
Outcome
20-30 % reduction
in the cost of
Engineering
AutomationQuality Assurance
Testing
Test Script
Management
20-30 % reduction
in the cost of
Engineering
Automation
Quality Assurance
Testing
Test Script
Management
50% Time
Reduction in
QA Testing
19. Designing Prescriptive Adoption Plans
The activities, roles, data and systems required
to achieve and sustain Value-based Outcomes
20. Building Adoption Plans
What activities, roles, data, systems are required to achieve and sustain the
Value-based Outcome?
● Inside Product
○ Configuration/Customization
■ Workflow
■ UI
■ Reports
○ Integrations
○ Data input/migration
○ User setup
○ Access provision
○ Product training
■ Admins
■ Users
● Outside Product
○ Communication of customer dependencies and
assumptions to the customer
○ Management of customer to ensure dependencies are met
○ Definition of RACI applicable to customer adoption team
○ Definition of RACI applicable to vendor adoption team
○ Execution of adoption governance process
■ User reviews
■ Exec reviews
■ Customer-facing adoption status reporting
○ Tracking of non-product based adoption KPIs
■ EBR feedback
■ Support ticket data
Hope you’re all enjoying your summer.
It is beach season and this brings with it the eternal quest for a beach bod like the Hoff here. To achieve this Hoff-like perfection, we may well want to invest in a personal trainer.
Typically, there are 2 types of personal trainer. You have Chads
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and you have Mias.
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When Chad tries to sell his training services to you, he tells you about all the latest gym equipment AND a magic powder he has, and assures you he can deliver you a beach bod.
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When Mia tries to sell her training services to you, she also confirms that she has all the latest gym equipment AND a magic powder.
Mia then sits down with you and works through an assessment that helps her understand where you’re at right now with your fitness.
This enables Mia to confirm she’d be the right trainer for you
And enables her to agree an achievable goal for you that will result in your desired beach bod.
Mia prescribes a number of measurable milestones to get you to that goal
Mia also prescribes the program that will achieve those milestones
and makes it clear that there’s a dependency on your partner to make the program successful.
Mia won’t take you on as a client unless you can confirm to her that you’re willing to follow the program prescribed and meet the dependencies specified.
Who do you hire to get your beach bod? Mia, right?
Today, most B2B SaaS companies are selling like a Chad,
But to achieve sustainable growth in today’s B2B SaaS market, we need to sell like a Mia.
I have no doubt that your company has the capability to deliver incredible recurring value to your customers. You know this too.
You also know this capability is NOT rooted in your product feature/functions alone.
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It’s rooted in your Customer Success strategy….how you apply processes, roles, data and systems to your product and the customer to drive value-based adoption.
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PRESCRIBING this same CS strategy to your PROSPECTS
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is a massive differentiator to drive more sales.
To effectively integrate your CS strategy into your sales strategy, your CS strategy needs to be:
Prescriptive on WHAT measurable, recurring value-based outcomes a customer will achieve with your product that will in turn enable achievement of their strategic goals.
And prescriptive on HOW those outcomes will be achieved. Prescriptive formulas detailing how a customer will establish and maintain value-based adoption of your solution.
These prescriptions can then be integrated throughout the phases of your sales strategy and, ideally, your marketing strategy.
Over the next 30 mins,
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I’ll explain WHY you need to sell using a prescriptive customer success strategy like a Mia not a Chad to achieve sustainable and profitable growth as a B2B SaaS company in 2018.
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And I’ll explain HOW to design your Customer Success Strategy so that it can be prescriptive and serve as the sales differentiator you need in 2018 and beyond while also using it to ensure you’re acquiring customers that can be consistently retained and expanded
So who are the Chad’s in B2B SaaS?
The Chads are the B2B SaaS companies that sell by focusing on
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1) all the product feature-functions they have
And 2) their promise to reduce cost, increase revenue, increase quality and/or increase scalability
Sounds familiar right? That’s because most B2B SaaS companies are Chad’s.
So what’s wrong with being a Chad or at least selling like one?
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In the vast majority of B2B SaaS market categories your functionality, your machine learning algorithms and your commitment to and EVEN proof of achieving these value types/outcomes are all now commodities.
They’re no longer differentiators.
Let’s talk about B2B SaaS products for a minute.
Today, commoditization applies most acutely to the feature/functions of B2B SaaS products.
The cost and technology barriers to integrating the latest and greatest technological innovations in a B2B SaaS product are declining rapidly.
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This is thanks to offerings from the likes of MS, Google and AWS that provide pre-built ML and other AI services.
The expertise and financial investment needed to integrate these capabilities into a B2B SaaS product is falling rapidly and adoption is sky rocketing.
But suppose you believe your product’s feature/functions are not commodities but are differentiators...
... is your prospect able to see that your product feature/functions are differentiated from the hundreds, maybe even 1000s, of other SaaS products like yours
B2B SaaS market saturation in a number of tech categories is real.
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Take mar-tech for example.
In April chiefmartech.com released their annual Mar-tech 5000 - yes, 5000 mar-tech companies…
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except this year there were actually 6,829.
This saturation creates a overwhelming amount of sales white noise for prospects. Can your product feature-functions really stand out in these types of crowds?
Let’s say I’m wrong about your product and that you do have great product feature/function differentiators AND your prospect is able to identify these.
Feature/function selling doesn’t work anyway and most sales leaders know this.
B2B buyers are seeking value right? So how about selling value, selling outcomes in order to differentiate your product?
But here again, in B2B SaaS in 2018, we run into commodification.
In this year’s March-April issue of Harvard Business Review, Bain & Company published an article doing a great job of framing the types of value B2B buyers desire.
As part of the article, Bain produced the B2B Elements of Value pyramid:
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The pyramid organizes 40 distinct kinds of B2B value into five levels.
The most objective kinds of value are found at the base of the pyramid,
And the higher a level is, the more subjective and personal the types of value are.
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At the bottom of the pyramid are what Bain describe as table stakes...i.e. The value you need to be offering (and delivering) to even have a chance of acquiring a customer.
In B2B SaaS, table stakes are really what Bain describes as Functional Value as well as their Table Stakes category.
Show me a B2B SaaS company that doesn’t offer one or more of these Functional Values.
These are commodities.
The Chads focus on selling these value types.
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To avoid this and to achieve differentiation we need to move up the pyramid and include the more subjective value types in our sales strategy.
These more subjective value types do 2 things.
1) They give the prospect confidence that you can actually deliver on the Functional Values/Outcomes important to them
2) they address the personal outcomes the prospect’s stakeholders and users individually desire.
When the Chad’s are presenting collections of feature-functionality in their sales cycles, they are not giving a buyer insight and confidence into how their product is going to achieve these subjective value types.
Neither does the Chad’s PPT slide simply stating your company’s commitment to these subjective values.
Neither does the Chad’s pricing page that states the prospect will get 24/7 support, access to the Chad University AND an assigned CSM.
Nor does the Chad’s Top 3 rating on G2 or Capterra.
Presence on these lists is rapidly becoming table stakes and the more savvy buyers know these lists are, ultimately, pay to play-driven like the good old Gartner and Forrester lists.
SO how do you give a prospect the confidence that your company and product will deliver the likes of reduced anxiety, a stable and committed partnership, access to expertise or risk reduction?
Let’s see how Mia does it? Let’s go back to her sales pitch.
Sure, we have the feature-functions with the gym equipment and magic powder
We have the stated ability to meet the clients headline goal...the table stakes.
But Mia also uses prescription. Within the prescription is education, expectation setting and taking control of the upcoming client journey by Mia.
Mia makes it clear to her prospective client that she won’t take the client on unless they fit the profile that Mia knows she can deliver value to.
She makes it clear what outcomes the client will achieve and WON’T achieve with her program
Mia prescribes the outcomes that, when achieved will combine to achieving the clients end goal,
Mia prescribes in what order those outcomes will be achieved,
how long they will take,
the steps involved in achieving each outcome including what gym equipment (aka feature/functions) should be adopted when in order to get to the next outcome,
and the dependencies Mia has on the client to achieve the milestones.
In summary, the three pillars that I recommend form the design your customer success strategy are driving Mia’s sales strategy and they should drive your B2B SaaS sales strategy too.
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With this approach, Mia is reducing the client’s perception of risk and their anxiety about the investment they’re thinking of making in Mia and the journey with Mia that would follow.
Mia is increasing the confidence of the client in her expertise,
getting the client excited about the next steps and what they will achieve along the journey to achieving their headline goal.
At the same time, Mia is qualifying the client and so ensuring that she’s taking on a client that she can make successful
and therefore retain for many years and possibly expand into other services she offers.
And, finally, Mia is differentiating herself against Chad in this competitive sales scenario.
Chad’s similar feature/functions, pricing, slick brand and relationship building skills simply don’t tap into the client’s subjective value types.
For the final section of this webinar, we’ll drill into how to design these pillars for your customer success strategy.
We’re going to focus on the bottom 2 because your Ideal Customer Profile is a product of the other 2 and pretty intuitive to create. I do have an article on ICPs on my website.
Together, Value-based Outcomes and Adoption Plans form what I call Adoption Methodologies.
You can of course call these pillars and concepts whatever you like. The important thing is what they contain and achieve.
I’ve highlighted what I think are 3 key terms here. Starting on the right with ‘formulas’.
Your Customer Success Strategy should consist of pre-built adoption formulas as much as possible. With the unit economic pressures of a subscription revenue model, B2B SaaS companies can’t afford to be designing and delivering a bespoke approach to each customer.
This can’t scale or be cost and time efficient for both vendor and customer.
It’s also important to ensure that we know how to sustain value realization for our customers throughout their journey. Value realization should not just be a flash in the pan, single point in time event but needs to be recurring and sustained.
And on the left we have the term, prescribed.
Prescription, as you can tell, is one the key takeaways for you today. It’s a motion that truly enables your CS strategy to be effectively integrated into your sales strategy.
Having a prescriptive customer success strategy enables it to be effectively applied as part of your sales qualification and discovery processes and criteria.
Prescribing what you can/can’t deliver in value, to who, and how, enables you to create your Ideal Customer Profile which then sits at the heart of sales (and ideally marketing) qualification criteria.
This, in turn, helps ensure you’re acquiring customers you can successfully deliver recurring value to and so retain and expand...instead of trying to fit square pegs in round holes.
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Being prescriptive in your sales strategy also improves your sales.
Customers WANT to be prescribed to.
This research by the CEB (now part of Gartner) in 2017 reported that customers found it much easier to make a purchase from a prescriptive vendor and had far less post-purchase regret.
The research found that Suppliers that made buying easy are 62% likelier than other suppliers to win a high-quality sale
Let’s move on and get back to understand HOW to design our two pillars.
I construct what I define as Value-based Outcomes using 4 components.
I use the industry and domain knowledge about the target market to create 2 inputs about the Ideal Customer
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First, what headline goals does our Ideal Customer have? Think big hairy goals. The types of outcomes we talked about as being table stakes for vendors to offer. Cost Reduction, Revenue Increase and so on.
These are still important to map to and deliver but aren’t enough when sold to alone.
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And secondly, what jobs do our Ideal Customer’s users do. What are their
Activities
Responsibilities and accountabilities
Reporting lines
Incentivization
Ambitions
Collaboration/sharing goals/needs
Then I add 2 inputs about our Product.
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What Product Features do we have available in our product
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and what Value Enabler does each feature provide.
Is the feature automating a step, speeding up a step, giving access to a piece of data and so on.
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If we consider an example for a B2B SaaS company that enables companies to reduce their total engineering costs,
The headline goal is to achieve the cost reduction,
One of the key customer jobs is QA testing,
The product provides a Test Script Mgt feature which automates part of the overall QA testing process.
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At the intersection of these four inputs lies a Value-based Outcome.
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In this case, a 50% time reduction in QA testing for the customer.
This time reduction is an outcome that we know we can achieve through the customer’s QA tester’s adoption of our Test Script Mgt function.
And this time reduction will contribute to the customer’s headline goal of cost reduction
Why does this process create outcomes that we can confidently PRESCRIBE in a sales cycle?
Because we obviously control our product features and the value enablers they’re designed to create so there shouldn’t be any risk in us getting that part of the outcome design wrong.
Because we should have enough industry and domain expertise on our customers to know exactly what our target market’s headline goals are
And because we can use that same expertise to build high confidence assumptions about what jobs our target customer’s perform and how.
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All this together means we can create VBOs we have high confidence will both appeal to prospects as well as be outcomes we can deliver with our product.
The only wrinkle with our VBOs is that we’ve used assumptions not facts about the jobs the prospect is performing.
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In reality, the actual customer job is likely going to vary across each customer, at least each customer segment. So in each sales cycle and consequent customer journey we face a potential gap between our VBO and the customer job that we need to bridge.
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Without bridging this gap, the user performing this customer job is at risk of not being able to adopt the product feature and therefore achieve the VBO.
This is where need adoption plans.
Adoption plans are formulas that answer this question for each of your VBOs.
In short, adoption plans will explain to a prospect how their users will adopt your product into their jobs to achieve the VBOs you prescribe.
Again, adoption plans should be prescriptive.
Relying on product, domain, industry and customer knowledge, we can predefine the activities roles, data and systems required from BOTH you the vendor and the customer to effectively adopt your product features.
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Here are some examples of what would go into an adoption formula.
Go and assess how aligned your sales and customer success strategies are. Start with asking the question ‘Are we being prescriptive in both strategies?’
