By this point, every Customer Success leader knows about leading with outcomes, and the vast majority think it’s the way things should be done. But when you get a group of CS experts in a room and ask how many of them are actually doing outcome-based Customer Success, only a small handful put their hands up.
We know this because, at Planhat Open, we did exactly that. In a survey we sent out before the event, 80% of respondents said companies should sell outcomes not products. We then led two different workshop sessions about outcomes at the event in which we asked who was leading with outcomes, and it was the minority. By far.
So what’s going on here?
While there is huge appetite for leading with outcomes, the most people do not know the tangible steps they need to take to turn this attractive concept into a working methodology they can actually follow.
That’s why we’re here, writing this.
Having seen thousands of leaders try, fail and eventually succeed at becoming outcome-led, we’ve compiled the examples shared by customers already finding success, added our own experience, and turned it into a guide for how to:
identify and measure outcomes;
hire and compensate a team that’s driven by outcomes; and
get other teams on board
Hurdle one: Identifying and measuring outcomes
If you exist in a world where your main interactions with customers are glorified whack-a-mole, where they bring you problems, and you solve them to try and keep them happy, firstly, you’re not alone, but secondly, it will seem impossible to shift to a proactive version of Customer Success centered around outcomes.
Not only will your CSMs not be equipped for the conversations, your customers probably won’t know what to say when asked what their desired outcomes are. Having fewer moles to whack, probably.
But you know who is excellent at having conversations about what desired objectives people have? Sales. When they are in discovery calls, one of the main things they are doing is identifying what the end goal of using your service or product is.
The important step that is often missing is codifying these objectives into outcomes that CS can measure against. If you use a customer platform, you can log the outcomes during sales, then at the post-sales handover, CS can create a value journey based on those outcomes.
Identify the outcomes, create a timeline of incremental value landmarks, generate a workflow with individual tasks against each of those landmarks, and go.
Doing this means you smooth over one of the worst break points in the customer lifecycle, and start the customer relationship with clear goals, and a greater chance of seeing fast value, ultimately leading to a more successful customer—and much more sticky relationship.
For existing customers where this technique is not applicable, a good strategy is to set a meeting with the customer with the clear intention of defining outcomes, then bringing a menu of typical outcomes, generated by collating the outcomes you have already defined for similar companies.
If they cannot identify their outcomes even when presented with a menu of options, choose for them, based on what you’re seeing work well for comparable customers (e.g. ACV, industry, size, etc.). They will tell you why those outcomes are not right, and that feedback will help you shape what their true outcomes are.
Hurdle two: Hiring and compensating
The type of person you hire as a CSM and the way you incentivize them will dictate the way your CS team functions, and as a result the type of customer you retain, and customer experience you deliver.
Now that Customer Success is becoming a more overtly commercial function—using NRR as their primary metric—there is a risk that hiring more commercial CSMs and incentivizing solely based on this metric means they overindex on growth activities, to the detriment of long-term customer experience.
So you end up with worse customer experience, and a smaller (higher ACV) customer pool as CSMs focus their energies on the larger customers with high growth potential.
While there is nothing wrong with this as a strategy, if it’s something you’re looking to avoid, an outcome-based approach can help you balance service and growth.
By splitting incentives across service and growth metrics, you can ensure a balance of the two. One way of doing this is setting a baseline retention metric that needs to be met before growth incentives activate.
If you want to tie incentives directly to customer outcomes, make a percentage of commission based on meeting the value landmarks you created when setting up their value journey.
This ensures that whether you hire more service- or commercial-oriented CSMs, you get a balance of both.
Hurdle three: Getting other teams on board
The ultimate goal of an objective-based approach is to get the entire organization working together, with the customer in the center of how everything operates. Marketing, Sales, Product, and Customer Success are all in agreement about what customers need, and are all working towards delivering that value.
But in reality, that means many departments have to shift the way they currently work. The way to start getting buy-in here is by providing value.
Once you have your customer objectives logged in whatever customer platform you are using, you suddenly become the custodian of some of the most valuable information in the company.
Products and features are typically built on a hypothesis of customer needs, but you have access to the actual customer needs. If the tool you’re using allows you to aggregate customer pain points and requests, you can bring that to Product, reducing the likelihood of them testing a flawed hypothesis.
Sales are in a constant battle to find prospects that will turn into ideal customers, and the stories and use cases that will close those deals, but you have access to information about what types of customers and which use cases lead to the greatest long-term success and value delivery. This means you can provide them with a tighter ICP definition, and compelling value propositions.
Marketing is always looking for the story that is going to resonate with an audience and convert them into a lead, and you can surface the most common outcomes that ICP customers are looking for: enabling Marketing to create compelling positioning and messaging that drives MQLs.
The time is now
Senior Copywriter
Planhat
Andrew is a seasoned creative with over 10 years of experience creating content for industry-leading SaaS companies. As Senior Copywriter at Planhat, he blends strategic clarity with a strong editorial voice to craft content across every channel. He’s held senior content roles in-house at Celonis and Hotjar, as well as The Drum's B2B agency of the year winner Velocity Partners—and brings a distinctive approach to tone and rhythm shaped by his early career as an actor, including the West End production of War Horse.
