Enterprise customers care about their metrics, revenue, cost savings, efficiency and risk reduction. If those metrics aren’t moving, your renewal is at risk no matter how good your adoption charts look.
Usage and adoption metrics are easy to measure. Logins, time spent in app, features used are usually trackable, but none of those guarantees real long-term value.
I’ve seen accounts with near-perfect adoption still walk away because the business outcomes weren’t there. The champion couldn’t justify the renewal to their CFO because they had activity data, not impact data.
Business outcomes are the measurable results customers care about:
- Faster time-to-market
- Lower costs
- Increased revenue
- Improved efficiency
So what do you do?
Map customer goals early: Identify three measurable outcomes in onboarding.
Align metrics: Track adoption, but tie it to customer goals.
Change your QBR story: Don’t bother with the classic QBR, just consistently feed metrics to customers. Are you letting them know consistently how well they are doing using the product? Set up the systems to do this. If you have to, do it manually, but don’t waste their time. Do not ask for a meeting all the time, just provide the data and offer your contact details if they want to learn more.
I realize this isn’t some sort of great leap forward in insight. But its a trap we as CSMs fall into all too consistently. We think using the product equals value, but it will only carry so much value over the long-term. Usage is the baseline. Remember, the work is about showing results not getting them to show up to a call so you can talk about usage metrics.
In enterprise SaaS, usage shows activity. Business outcomes show value. Customers renew and expand when they see value.
If you want better retention, focus less on features and more on moving the metrics that matter to your customers.
Robert Statsky 