Aligning Strategic Change With Customer Needs

Want to immediately limit a Customer Success team's impact with customers? Keep designing processes, strategies, and engagement rhythms based on what YOU need and on YOUR timelines, rather than what customers need. Keep using inside out thinking that starts from your existing capabilities when deciding how to approach customers. In an era where customers are working with more SaaS vendors than ever before, they don't care about your internal timetables and how often you think certain milestones should happen (i.e. EBRs, etc). Between the rise in AI, pricing models based on consumption, and switching costs often being in the customers' favor, their concern isn't primarily how often their vendor thinks they should meet. If you want to maintain customer influence, try this instead: Anchor on the CUSTOMERS' lifecycle and business need, using this outside in thinking when designing a strategy. Rather than starting with what you need, start with understanding what your customer needs and what they're experiencing in their business. Are they in a phase where they're hyper focused on reducing costs and increasing efficiency? Are they building new AI strategies to get a competitive edge? Are they in a planning cycle, determining their next priorities? Start with questions like these, and then articulate how your product helps them accomplish whatever their priorities are. And set your engagement model to drive their priorities forward. You'll get way more buy in this way from customers, and paradoxically you'll also be more effective at achieving those milestones you think are important. Especially if you leverage your org's unique POV to advise on how customers can improve their business. Consider one example: EBRs. Option 1: you can dictate EBRs based on when you think they should happen in relation to renewal. Option 2: you trigger EBRs to occur after the completion of large project milestones, anchoring them on celebrating your champions' successes with their executive. Option 2 is significantly more likely to get your customers engaged. So let's commit to ending inside out thinking this year. Let's commit to anchoring on our customers' lifecycle and using outside in thinking. How do you guard against the drift we all feel to being inward looking? #SaaS #CustomerSuccess #GrowthMindset #Leadership

Tough Talk Tuesday? If your company says Customer Success is strategic but still treats it like a support function, stop pretending. If your CS team is occupied mainly with “check-in” meetings and renewal prep instead of driving outcomes, stop pretending. If your leaders talk about trust and value but can’t show how CS moves the business forward, stop pretending. Customer Success is not a concierge desk. It is not a feel-good function. It is a growth engine. And it needs to be treated like one. That means: • CSMs who understand the customer’s business better than Sales or Product • Success plans tied to business outcomes, not playbooks • Metrics that reflect value delivered, not just effort made • A culture where CS earns its seat at the revenue table by showing up with data, direction, and urgency We are not here to smooth things over. We are here to move things forward. Five steps to start shifting from support to strategic: 🔢 1. Replace activity metrics with outcome metrics Track customer impact, not just engagement frequency and volume. Stop counting touchpoints and start measuring progress. 🔢 2. Know the customer’s business priorities by heart Treat every EBR and senior executive session like a board meeting. Tie your updates to what your customer’s CEO and CFO care about. 🔢 3. Stop asking “How can I help?” and start saying “Here is what we should do next.” Lead. Recommend. Own the play. 🔢 4. Align CS goals with company goals Revenue, retention, margin, influence - whatever matters to the business should matter to your CS team. 🔢 5. Tell the story of value loudly and often One story, once a week. Share a real example of customer success inside your company until others start doing it for you. The future of Customer Success belongs to those who stop waiting to be seen as strategic and start behaving like it. What is one move your CS team could make this week that shifts how you are seen? #CreatingTheFuture #CustomerSuccess #Leadership #Growth #ClientValue #DISQO

We surveyed 1,244 product teams over the last 6 months and uncovered a reality that blew our minds: While all product teams are trying to create products that better satisfy customer needs, over 80% of product teams do not agree on what a customer "need" even is! Teams define "needs" as exciters and delight-ers, pains and gains, specifications and requirements, features, value drivers, wants and benefits, wishes, aspirations... ...and the list goes on, as if any of these inputs will correctly inform the innovation process. Here's the problem: THEY DON'T! Just like any process, only precise inputs lead to a great result. So what is the right input? We know that people buy products and services to get a "job" done. So, let's start by defining customer "needs" as the metrics customers use to measure success when getting a job done. If we know how customers measure success, we can create solutions that help them get their jobs done better--and win in the marketplace. These metrics, which we call the customer's desired outcomes, are tied to the customer's job-to-be-done and are unique in many ways. They are: - measurable and controllable, - actionable, - unambiguous, - solution independent and, - stable over time. When listening to music, for example, a music enthusiast may want to: “minimize the time it takes to get the songs in the desired order for listening.” This is one of many outcomes associated with the job of listening to music. Using these customer inputs as customer need statements, you're able to: 1. Understand how your customer measures success. 2. Measure how well your solutions get the job done. 3. Give your team clear instructions on how to improve your solutions. Watch your team transform when they're aligned with the metrics your customers use to measure success. #CustomerNeeds #InnovationProcess