The SaaS Customer Outcome Framework

To Successfully Scale, Restructure Your Approach to Customer Outcomes

Previously, we described how collaboration between customer success and product marketing is essential to successfully scale a SaaS business…including scaling an early stage company.

That’s because an early stage company — while in a relentless pursuit for both revenue and product-market fit — often reactively bends and flexes in support of customer use cases. As a result:

These are typical growing pains for an early stage company. They are also inhibitors to that business successfully scaling.

As a result, a savvy founder with a business that’s developing or achieved product-market fit and that’s poised to scale realizes the need to address these issues — and to enable scalability — by building out and leveraging customer success and product marketing capabilities.

This post — the first in a series of posts that coincides with the four issues listed above that prohibit scalability — describes why it’s important to define and agree to a set of customer outcomes and offers a pragmatic approach to defining those outcomes.

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Understand Customers’ Desired Outcomes and Your Ability to Achieve Them

When Outcomes Are Not Well Understood

How well does your company understand the business outcomes it delivers on behalf of its customers? The answer is “not well enough” if any of the following is true:

  • You operate reactively to your customers
  • The act of managing customers is time-intensive
  • Users — especially those not involved in the buyer journey — have a limited view and understanding of how your company can help them
  • Upon onboarding, you learn that the new customer wants your product to help them to achieve an outcome that your solution either doesn’t support or supports incompletely

As a result:

  • Customer management is chaotic and unpredictable — feeling as if you’re always on your back foot handling fire drills
  • A customer’s time to value with your solution is elongated
  • A customer defines their need, requiring the creation of a unique internal process per customer
  • A customer success manager’s (CSM) capacity is restricted to a smaller book of business
  • A CSM feels as if they are working harder and harder while not ever getting “on top” of their business
  • It’s difficult to forecast renewal likelihood and then deliver on that forecast
  • Finding the time — and earning the opportunity — to qualify a customer for expansion rarely happens

When Outcomes Are Well Understood

On the other hand, a company that understands the outcomes it can expertly deliver on for a customer looks like this:

  • A CSM operates proactively with their customers
  • A customer understands the value of the solution at the time of onboarding and throughout the customer journey
  • A CSM’s expertise builds trust with their customers

And, as a result:

  • Customer management is consultative and prescriptive
  • Customers seek out your expertise, and customer partnerships are forged
  • Customer renewals are predictable and reliable
  • A customer is willing to discuss other outcomes your company delivers on, which leads to revenue expansion
  • Each CSM is able to manage an expanding book of business
  • Your company’s teams share a framework that speaks to the value you provide to your customers

The Carema Consulting Outcome Framework

What if you had a customer outcome framework that guides your actions in alignment with customers’ problems or desired outcomes? And what if those outcomes are ones your company is expert at solving?

What if a customer conversation switched from “What are your goals?” to “Which of these outcomes do we want to achieve first?” What if everyone — customers and your company alike — is speaking the same language regarding outcomes?

With the customer outcome framework, you are painting the picture of what a long, fruitful customer journey looks like.

The SaaS Customer Outcome Framework

And, it’s been our experience that 80–90% of a company’s customers are trying to solve the same problems. With this insight, you can now position yourself as the expert on how to guide customers to quickly realizing value while also equipping your customer success organization with the processes, workflows, and technology that allow them to prescriptively lead their customers to value realization.

Is the Customer Outcome Framework Right for You?

If your B2B SaaS business has been struggling to understand what your solution helps customers to achieve, the customer outcome framework process will help you align your internal teams around solving consistent problems in a meaningful, productive, and revenue-focused way. And the Carema Consulting team can help.

Get in touch with us to learn more about the framework and how to start building one.