How to Build Customer Centricity With Outcome Accountability

Customer Success is a revenue function. Stop treating it like a help desk. For too many SaaS companies, CS has become the department of "did you turn it on and off again?" — then leadership wonders why retention is suffering. The most successful organizations I've worked with take a fundamentally different approach: they build Customer Success with the same rigor as their sales organization. Here's how forward-thinking CS leaders are making this shift: 1️⃣. Reframing onboarding as value acceleration, not feature training When a new customer joins, the focus shouldn't be "here's how to navigate our UI." It should be "here's how we'll help you achieve the business outcome you purchased us for." The best CS teams are scrapping feature-focused training for value-focused activation that connects directly to ROI. 2️⃣. Running discovery as deep as sales does Elite CS organizations don't accept the sales handoff at face value. They conduct their own thorough discovery to uncover the true business objectives behind the purchase. This allows them to create success plans that address actual priorities rather than assumed ones. 3️⃣. Building a renewal pipeline with the same discipline as sales Assuming renewals will happen is the fastest path to churn. Top CS functions forecast renewals using objective data: stakeholder engagement, milestone achievement, and demonstrated business impact. They track timelines, decision paths, and apply the same forecasting rigor sales teams use for new deals. 4️⃣. Measuring outcomes, not activity Login counts and feature usage don't convince CFOs to renew. Business impact does. Progressive CS teams are shifting from product usage metrics to business outcome metrics: time saved, revenue influenced, costs reduced. 5️⃣. Developing commercial acumen in CS teams Renewal conversations are business discussions, not friendship check-ins. The best CS leaders invest in teaching their teams how to handle procurement objections, negotiate effectively, and recognize early warning signs. --- Is your Customer Success function built to maintain licenses or drive business growth? When customers consider whether to renew your solution, they ask one question: "Did this make us more successful than we would have been without it?" Not "Was our CSM responsive?" Not "Did we use all the features?" Not "Were the QBRs well-organized?" Revenue impact. That's the bar.

I've taken a lot of "help" calls from companies between five and $75 million this month. These organizations had established products, solid-ish processes, and confident customer success (CS) teams. Yet, they all faced a surprising challenge: Some of their “green” status customers—those who appeared healthy on paper—were churning. This issue wasn’t immediately obvious. After all, if a customer’s health score is green, it means they’re engaged, onboarding successfully, or showing other positive indicators. But digging deeper, patterns emerged. These companies struggled to proactively *demonstrate ROI* or to clearly communicate the *tangible outcomes* that their solutions were delivering. Or they were not reporting these to their champions, instead just working with the tactical folks on a day to day basis. Why does this matter? Even if a customer appears happy right now, they’ll eventually ask the question, *“Is this partnership still worth it?”* If you don’t answer that question decisively and regularly, you’re leaving the door open for competitors—or for priorities to shift elsewhere. When the CFO says they need to cut vendor budget, will you make that cut? Here are a few strategies I shared with these companies (and that other businesses may want to consider): 1. **Make ROI proof points a recurring conversation** It’s no longer enough to highlight value during the sales process or during QBRs. Value needs to be a consistent theme in your customer interactions. Can you integrate ROI metrics into your dashboards, monthly updates, or executive business reviews? For example, one company started sharing quick, personalized Loom summaries with their customers every quarter—a snapshot of time saved, cost reduction achieved, or improved conversion rates. 2. **Leverage customer health scores wisely** Many health scores factor in product usage metrics, survey responses, or support outcomes. But consider adding measurable value indicators to your health scoring framework. For instance, tracking whether customers are leveraging advanced features that typically generate the biggest business outcomes—and flagging accounts that aren’t. 3. **Create champions, not just users** Your champion is your biggest ally, but champions often rotate roles or move between companies. Develop succession plans to expand advocacy within the organization. That could look like enabling a wider audience within your customer base to access training, insights, or leadership alignment around the software’s benefits. Ultimately, customer churn isn’t always a reaction to problems—it can result from feeling disconnected from the value you’re delivering. Stop thinking of “green” health scores as the finish line. Instead, make them a checkpoint in an ongoing process of proving, protecting, and growing your customers' ROI. How do you ensure value communication in your CS strategy?

🚀 From Time-to-Value → Outcomes → Advocacy Every Chief Customer Officer , Next-Sales/Post-Sales, and Customer Success leader I talk to is wrestling with the same reality: 📉 Customers don’t just buy software and services. 📈 They buy outcomes. And here’s the hard truth: • Faster Time-to-Value (TTV) drives renewals. • Clear outcome realization fuels expansions. • Documented impact earns advocacy: references, referrals, and case studies. That’s the flywheel: TTV → Outcomes → Advocacy. Miss one step, and the whole growth engine slows down. 🛠️ Here are 5 actions I've been taking this year (and you can too): 1️⃣ Make TTV an Executive-level (and if possible, Board-level) metric. Don’t just measure logins, onboarding steps, or deliverables. Report on how quickly customers realize their first value, and present it to your executive team alongside ARR. 2️⃣ Redesign onboarding for outcomes. Shift away from “task completion” checklists. Build your onboarding around the first ‘aha’ moment that proves your product works. And if you don't know what the first moment of truth is, make it a priority to discover it now. 3️⃣ Run Executive Value Reviews. Don’t wait for renewal calls. Meet with decision-makers mid-cycle to demonstrate impact in their language: ROI based on revenue growth, revenue protection, and/or efficiency gains. 4️⃣ Quantify the impact. Adoption metrics are nice. But impact metrics are better: hours saved, costs reduced, revenue generated. Speak in numbers your CFO would applaud. 5️⃣ Operationalize advocacy. Turn happy customers into a systematic engine: reference pools, customer councils, case studies, and peer-to-peer referrals built into your success motion. And this is an area where we (ahem, I) still have the most work to do this year. Just ask our marketing team when they asked me for some strong advocacy statements and quotes.... ⚡ And what about the future? Almost all of us have acknowledged now that Customer Success isn’t just about being “customer-friendly.” It’s about designing a repeatable growth flywheel where every outcome creates the next expansion, and every expansion fuels the next referral. The companies that nail this don’t just retain customers, they earn them, over and over again. #CustomerSuccess #PostSales #NextSales #CustomerExperience #CreateTheFuture #Growth