Category Archives: Technology

Customer Success Evangelism: Insights from Zuora’s Subscribed Conference

In attendance recently at Zuora’s US Subscribed conference in San Francisco as an observer and enabler of–rather than a participant in–the subscription economy, I really focused on the strategy content: CEO growth advice, SaaS pricing and packaging approaches, customer experience/success best practices.  What I found through these sessions was a recurring theme of a focus on value–value realized by the customer and value captured by the vendor.

While that may seem like something that could be a theme at almost any conference because it is the foundation of business, at Subscribed it stood out in two ways:

  • Variety.  It is the nature of the subscription business model generally and the SaaS version in particular that there is no unitary “product.” Offerings are a construction of features, services, and access and accrue value (revenue and profit) to the vendor through myriad of pricing structures and levels.  Aligning your offering/s with customer value and capturing the appropriate value from the customer in revenue is an iterative process.
  • Conviction.  Many executives talk about focusing on the customer; at Subscribed, the people I heard and talked to really seemed to understand the implications of this and had built their operations and business with this mindset.  This was the rare environment in which most people understood the concept of customer success in SaaS and why it was vital to the success of that business model.

The foundation of all of this, of course, is an understanding of what customer value means to the customer.  Going further, the key to balancing the customer value equation (the value derived from the application equals the value you capture in revenue) is understanding what value means to different segments of customers.  So while the SaaS industry needs to walk before it can’t run and so needs events like this and the people in attendance at Subscribed to be the evangelists for the new subscription economy and to spread the word of the importance of customer success, it’s important to mention that the ideal state should be one in which customer intelligence and customer behavior analytics play a central role in driving SaaS company success.

 

 

How To: Customer Segment Intelligence Gathering

In a previous post, we discussed the uses for and value of customer segment intelligence in SaaS companies. This post focuses on the approaches to gathering customer segment intelligence and provides a framework for developing an intelligence-gathering approach that meets intel objectives most efficiently.

In EMI’s experience, companies often under-invest in customer and market intelligence because they either perceive that doing research is too expensive and time-consuming or they have done research in the past that didn’t deliver value. With a focused research approach in which methodology is aligned with objectives, however, neither of these should be the case.

Start with an Objective

As the previous sentence suggests, successful research always starts with a clear, strategic objective. Often that objective will emerge out of anecdotal identification of potential gaps in knowledge, for example:

  • Penetration in a particular industry isn’t as robust as you would have expected based on the fit between the industry’s needs and your software’s benefits
  • Sales closes significant new contracts with several customers from an industry not explicitly targeted through marketing
  • A group of customers are not succeeding in implementing the software as quickly as other customers
  • Several larger customers cancel or reduce their subscriptions

In each of the examples above, observations of behavior leads to questions—What is driving less-than-expected industry performance? How did these customers find out about us and can we target more like them? What are the impediments to implementation? Why are larger customers cancelling? These questions can then be turned into research objectives: understand how to increase penetration in an under-penetrated or emerging segment; identify customer experience improvements that can improve time to implementation and retention.

Sometimes the need for research arises when a business begins to pursue a new, untested venture. Common examples would be the development of a new product/service, the enhancement of an existing product/service, or the pursuit of an entirely new market.

While the genesis of the research may be different, the approach must be the same. Discipline around objective definition is vital to avoid trying to answer every question about the de novo opportunity. For example, if the research needs are in the area of product development or enhancement, potential objectives are:

  • Collect “blue sky” input to build a list of potential new features for customer segments with high growth potential
  • Test the value to existing customers segments of new features that have already been defined

Each of these two objectives drives a different research approach. Whatever your objective, defining it and maintaining it as your lodestar throughout the research development process is the key to efficiently capture the insight you need and avoid gathering information you don’t need.

Identify Your Methodology

“Research” does not always mean a survey. In fact, it is likely that customer data analysis, secondary market research, in-depth interviews, and/or focus groups could be better methods for achieving your research objectives.

The key to determining which method will best meet your needs is articulating the kind of insights you need and the most logical source of those insights. For example:

  • Do you need to identify differences between customer segments or find what all customers have in common?
  • Are you trying to gather initial, guiding information to develop a list of potential new features or are you trying to understand the relative value of features that have already been conceived?
  • Do you want to understand what existing customers value or the size of the potential new market for your product?

The answers to questions like these will guide whether you pursue qualitative focus groups, interview or survey existing customer, analyze customer usage data, gather secondary research into industry trends, or conduct broad market surveys.

Know When to Stop

There is a famous quote from French author Etienne de Saint-Exupery: “Perfection is attained not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” Perfection may neither be obtainable nor even a desirable goal in research, but the need to limit and control the compulsion to add—questions, completed surveys, interviews, data—is both strong and vital to research quality and utility. The goal should always be to do the least amount necessary to ensure well-grounded decisions and outputs. If you can’t articulate how a question will contribute to better decisions or outputs or how collecting more data is likely to change decisions or outputs, it’s time to stop.

Customer intelligence is a vital tool for identifying and scoping new market opportunities, grounding product development decisions in an understanding of customer value, and honing in on causes of under- or over-performance. Amassing this intelligence isn’t easy, but when approached in a disciplined, grounded way, it almost always produces a measurably positive ROI driven by new revenue and/or productivity gains.

Customer Segment Intelligence Delivers Balance to Your Customer Success Initiatives

In customer success management, there will always be a tension between treating each customer as special and unique in order to ensure their success, and serving all customers without exploding the CSM team budget. One way to strike a balance between these two poles is the collection, maintenance, and efficient utilization of customer segment intelligence.

Customer segment intelligence is the knowledge base of elements relevant to the sale and utilization of your product/service by companies within a target segment. These elements would likely include:

  • Key “firmographic” attributes of companies in the segment (e.g., size, geography) that might influence purchase and adoption
  • Market trends
  • Decision-making structures and influence networks
  • Typical needs and objectives related to your product/service
  • Propensity for and approach to technology adoption
  • Common objections to purchase
  • Common obstacles to implementation/utilization

Equipped with this kind of intelligence, SaaS companies can develop segment-specific customer success programs and segment “playbooks” that will produce better results more efficiently.  They achieve this by being adapted to align with the particular characteristics and meet the particular needs of companies in that segment. A “one-size-fits-all” onboarding program is almost always better than no onboarding program is likely to miss the mark for some customers.  A custom implementation plan is highly effective but unscalable.  A customer segment intelligence-based onboarding program strikes a balance between these extremes by delivering a template that applies to a group of customers, but is effective because it is built on the foundation of knowledge of the typical operational constraints on the companies’ ability to get quickly to value and capture quick wins.

As is the case with the aforementioned onboarding, most customer success initiatives benefit from segment intelligence. For example, it is much more effective and efficient to have a series of segment email templates for cross-selling and/or up-selling rather than each CSM writing new emails from scratch for every upsell/cross-sell opportunity and rather than using a single, generic “canned” email that fails to be compelling because it doesn’t speak to the specific segment needs. Similarly, understanding when breadth or depth of utilization should register either as a concern (too low) or an opportunity (very high) requires knowledge of the relevant segment-specific benchmarks rather than benchmarks based on the entire customer base, much of which may behave very differently than the customers in one specific segment.

Moreover, this intelligence delivers further operational efficiency gains by enabling lesser-tenured CSMs to ramp up and effectively help customers faster. Playbooks, templates, and diagnostics provide a foundation of proven tools and process that gives newer CSMs with good relationship-building skills the opportunity to succeed quickly.

In an upcoming blog, we will discuss best practices for gathering and distributing customer segment intelligence.