How to Prompt Meaningful Engagements with Customer Benchmarking

How to Prompt Meaningful Engagements with Customer Benchmarking #CSwebinar @JimBerardone @GetAmity
How to Prompt Meaningful Engagements
with Customer Benchmarking
Jim Berardone
Chief Customer Officer,
OnlyBoth
@JimBerardone

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About our Featured Speaker: Jim Berardone
• Over 20 years in leading new B2B technology businesses
• Chief Customer Officer @ OnlyBoth last 2 years
• First-hand knowledge of customer benchmarking best practices
• Blogs, speaks and organizes meetups on Customer Success
in/JimBerardone @JimBerardone
www.OnlyBoth.com

Customer benchmarking tackles engagement challenges
1. Proactive e-mails and phone calls to customers often go unanswered
2. Difficult to schedule QBR meetings or they get cancelled
3. Key stakeholders of customers don’t show up for a QBR
4. Not having strategic conversations with customers to drive growth
5. Customers aren’t taking actions to get more value from your
solutions

Definition: Customer Benchmarking
The process to identify opportunities
where a customer could improve, or
where a customer already does well,
by comparing to other customers.

Who does customer benchmarking?
Some early adopters of customer benchmarking
in SaaS Customer Success organizations
Source: presented by Peter Armaly for Technology Services Industry
Association at Customer Success Summit March 2016
“25.6% of survey respondents said they do
customer benchmarking in their CS
organizations,” as reported by TSIA.

Poll
Which statement best describes customer
benchmarking in your Customer Success
organization?
We don’t benchmark our customers
We occasionally benchmark our customers
We regularly benchmark our customers

Here’s what you’ll takeaway
1. Why customers care about benchmarking
2. The basic elements
3. How to do it, with 3 step-by-step examples
4. Getting started
5. More resources

Why would your customers care about
benchmarking?
1. Customers are constantly striving to improve their business
outcomes
2. Customers need to improve in many underlying ways to get better
business outcomes
⏤ and this includes improving the value they get from your solutions and their relationship
3. Customers need to identify opportunities to improve
⚫ by comparing to past performance ⚫ by comparing to goals ⚫ by comparing to others

Making comparisons to others motivates action.

Your customers want to answer
4 core questions when comparing to others
1. How are we doing?
2. Where could we improve?
3. What has changed?
4. What’s best-in-class?

And, you have answers to these questions in your
data!
Only your SaaS company has this data
– a rich source of unique, action-provoking, comparative insights
Customer Benchmarking with this data
offers CSMs a great opportunity to deliver value to customers
You have data that
is a by-product of
your customers’ use
of your SaaS
products, services,
and programs.
2 You have data
about the
relationship
you have with
each customer
3You have many
customers who use
the same solutions
for similar business
reasons
1

You’ll need metrics that are meaningful to customers
• Metrics that are potentially insightful and/or actionable by your customer
Examples of Commonly Used Metrics for Customer Benchmarking
Product Usage and
Adoption
• Frequency of Use (e.g. Monthly Active Users)
• Key Feature Usage (e.g. Ave. Monthly Uses per User)
Customer
Outcomes
• Varies. What is the customer trying to achieve while using your solutions?
Support • Volume: Total No. of Tickets
• Responsiveness: Rate of First Contact Resolutions; Ave. Time to Resolve
Engagements • Outreach Response Rate
• Survey Completion Rate
Tip: Use metrics that reflect the behaviors that lead to the customer’s desired outcomes, and, ideally,
metrics for their desired outcomes.

Poll
Which of the following metrics does your
Customer Success organization measure today?
Select ALL that apply:
 Product usage and adoption
 Support
 Customer health and loyalty (CSAT, NPS,…)
 Engagements
 Customer outcomes

You’ll need to create peer groups
• Peer group = a group of customers that are similar in one or more
ways to the target customer you’re benchmarking.
Commonly Used Peer Groups by CS for Customer Benchmarking
• Customer size • Industry • Customer Tier
• Customer journey stage • Customer Segment • Customer Health Score category
• Region • Product purchased • NPS category
Tip: Combine multiple attributes to form a more specific peer group that’s more meaningful to
your customer.
Best practice: Automatically compute the most similar peers of a customer to benchmark
using data for many attributes of your customers.

Let’s see how it works
I’m a Customer
Success
Manager
for
EveryDay HR
Software Inc.
who has
200 SaaS
customers
I manage a key account:
Buzzster Corp., a customer
for 2 years.
They’ve purchased:
• Core HR suite
• Recruiting suite
• Performance Mgmt.
suite

Example 1: Benchmarking key feature use to drive
outcomes
⚫ What’s the comparative insight?
Buzzster Corp. has the 2nd-lowest rate of use of the employee referral
features (21.3%) of the 56 customers that are large-sized businesses.
That compares to the average of 60.5% across the 56 customers.
⚫ Why does this matter?
Employee referrals leads to lower cost-to-hire and time-to-fill; better fit;
and higher employee performance. Buzzster is likely to perform lower on
these desired outcomes, which reduces the value/ROI from our product.
⚫ Uncover why this is happening
• Reviewed training received by employees and looked for changes
(usage, company situation.)
• Prompted a discussion with Buzzster about their use of best practices
and learned they don’t have an incentive plan for referring candidates.
⚫ Next action to take
Setup a discussion between Buzzster and EveryDay’s professional
services director who can discuss the business impact of incentive
structures, best practices and lessons learned.
Peer Group: 56 Large-sized customers
Customers
Use of Employee
Referral features
(% users)
1 Bluejam Corp 81.9
2 Brightbean Inc 76.3
3 Brainsphere Solutions 75.8
… …
Average 60.5
… …
51 Dabvine Works 24.2
52 Rhynyx Inc 23.9
54 Roodel Software 23.1
54 Innojam Software 22.9
55 Buzzster Corp 21.3
56 Jetpulse Corp 19.1

Example 2: Benchmarking to help set goals
⚫ Review Buzzster’s performance
Buzzster has 21.3% of employees using the Employee Referral features. This is distinctively less than the average (and
the best) for any peer group of customers who uses the same solutions.
Gain: get more value from our Recruiting suite Fear: miss attracting the best talent that fits their culture
Pain: lower their cost-/time-to-hire Peer: won’t be competitive with talent
Prompt a discussion with Buzzster. Share what others have achieved (aggregate-level.) Review their goals and results.
Encourage them to aim higher. Get a realistic goal with a CS Plan of actions to improve with milestones along the way.
What should Buzzster strive to achieve for “use of Employee Referral
features”?⚫ What’s best-in-class on “use of
Employee Referral Features”? Use of Employee Referral features
(% users)
Large-
sized
Customers
Expansion
Stage
customers
Most
similar
customers
Average 60.5 54.9 58.4
Best 81.9 81.9 76.3

⚫ What’s the comparative insight?
Buzzster Corp. has the 6th highest employee turnover rate (18.1%) of 56
large-sized customers. That compares to the average of 11.8% across the
56 customers.
Cost to replace is 20%+ of employee’s annual salary to hire, train & lost
work
Reaching the average of 11.8% for Buzzster would imply a decrease of 303
employee separations, with an estimated saving of $1.82M (assuming an
average annual salary of $30,000)
⚫ Uncover why this is happening
We discovered the lack of opportunities to advance one’s position and skills
at Buzzster is driving these results.
Work with Account Manager to create a business case to upsell EveryDay’s
Career Development and Skills Training suites to solve this problem.
Example 3: Benchmarking outcomes to drive upselling
Peer Group: 56 Large-sized customersLast year. 56 large-sized customers.
Customers
Employee
Turnover
Rate
(%)
1 Vipe Labs 23.1
2 Flipopia Technologies 21.4
3 Shufflebeat Inc 20.2
4 Feedfish Technologies 19.7
5 Dabvine Works 19.2
6 Buzzster Corp 18.1
7 Roodel Software 17.5
8 Eazzy Works 17.4
9 Rhynyx Inc. 16.3
10 Vitz Corp 12.9
… …
Average 11.8
… …
56 Bluejam Corp. 2.1

There are many more unique insights in your data that
require sophisticated ways to uncover them.
Buzzster Corp. trained the 4th-fewest users on
Talent Management (43%) among the 28
customers that are in the expansion stage, are
large-sized businesses and in the Insurance
industry.
That 43% compares to an average of 54.8%
across the 28 customers.
Only Buzzster Corp. has both as few
career plans tracked per month (23%)
and trained as few users on the career
development planning module (43%).
Best Practice: Analyze more underlying metrics and more ways customers are similar to uncover
more unique comparative insights in your data.

Getting started with customer benchmarking
Try it yourself with one customer.
Steps
1. Use your CSM platform to create a table as in the examples I showed
2. Select metrics that are meaningful to your customer
3. Filter the results by peer groups for your customer
4. Identify comparative insights, focusing on the most distinctive differences
5. Consider why this matters
6. Uncover why this is happening
7. Decide your next action to take You’ll get more meaningful engagements:
• deliver more value
• engage in more strategic conversations
• drive actions to improve the value they realize

7 Strategies for Customer Benchmarking in CS organizations
http://bit.ly/2rKCut3
No registration is required.
Explanations, Pros and Cons
1: Using Industry Surveys
2: Using Best-Practices Studies
3: Using Vendor Surveys
4: Using Data Scientists
5: Using Business Software Reports
6: Using your SaaS Product
7: Using Specialized Benchmarking
Software

More resources to prompt meaningful
engagements with customer benchmarking
Blog posts
• Why Your Customer Success Managers Need Comparative Insights for Each Customer
(by Jim Berardone, CCO, OnlyBoth)
https://blog.onlyboth.com/2016/08/16/why-your-customer-success-managers-need-
comparative-insights-for-each-customer/
• 5 Tips to Help Customers with Goal Setting ( by Jim Berardone, CCO, OnlyBoth)
https://blog.onlyboth.com/2017/01/06/5-tips-to-help-customers-with-goal-setting-in-
2017/
• Customer Benchmarking Motivates Action (by Ed Powers, VP CS, SimPRO)
https://blog.onlyboth.com/2017/03/14/customer-benchmarking-motivates-action/
• Use Benchmarking to Demonstrate Value and Slim Down that Churn Rate (by Kia Puhm,
Principal, K!A CX Consulting)
http://www.kiacx.com/single-post/2016/03/27/Use-Benchmarking-to-Demonstrate-
Value-and-Slim-down-that-Churn-Rate
Learn about automated
benchmarking software
Try it here:
http://cs.onlyboth.com
Where does automated
benchmarking make sense?
(by Raul Valdes-Perez, CEO,
OnlyBoth)
https://blog.onlyboth.com/
2017/04/20/where-does-
automated-customer-
benchmarking-make-
sense/

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