People buy hammers because they want to hang pictures, not because they want to hit nails. And the same is true for your customers. They are paying for your product or service because they want an outcome. By using an outcome-based methodology in Customer Success, you can:

• define success in a way that aligns with business outcomes

• rally Sales, Marketing, Product and Customer Success around the outcomes that really matter to customers

• shift from reactive problem-solving to proactive value-driving actions; and

• increase retention by making progress and achievement more concrete

But many people get stuck knowing that measuring outcomes is important, but not knowing how to actually do it. That’s why we’ve created this practical guide. 

At Planhat Open 2025, a valued Planhat customer, HighArc shared a demonstration of how CS leaders use Planhat to track and measure outcomes. We've distilled down the core steps so you can get started today:

Initial steps

1. Identify: For each customer, identify 4-5 objectives that would be important to track. If your customer does not know – and cannot generate any – provide them with a list of common objectives for similar customers (as defined by: industry, size, strategy) and ask them to choose. If they still cannot choose, tell them what you think the outcomes should be, and let their feedback dictate the final result. 

2. Articulate: When putting objectives into the Objectives tab on your customer’s Company Profile, make sure to use language that the customer (and anyone else you plan to report to) will understand. Give the objective a name, a status, and then you can add custom fields like a health field, depending on your needs. 

3. Track: Now that you have your objectives in place, agree on a timeline for each, with realistic goals for the coming week, month, quarter, and year. Once these are set, create workflows in Planhat that track against the activities needed to achieve these goals. 

4. Assess and update:  On a weekly basis, look at the objectives and timeline with the customer. If the objectives have shifted or a goal no longer looks achievable, agree on the changes and update Planhat accordingly. 

5. Share: The greatest benefit of objective-tracking comes from reporting back to the rest of the organization. Here’s how you can use Planhat to report in multiple different directions:

   1. Create leadership dashboards that show top-level objectives, rate of completion, and value achieved so far for easy QBR reporting.

   2. Aggregate customer objectives and feed them back to Product, Sales, and Marketing so they can align their work around real customer needs.

   3. Look at the factors—including size, industry, product adoption—that make for the most successful customers both in terms of value realization and revenue, and feed back to the department that owns ICP definition. 

Pro Tips

• When a customer reaches out with an issue, go to the objective tracker and assess if resolving this issue aligns to any of the objectives. If it doesn’t, take this information back to the customer, and clarify if the issue is truly a priority. 

• Draw a connection between objectives and risk by creating a Custom Profile Page that you use to track objectives and risk factors in the same place. If you want to follow this method, create individual tabs for customers, then on each of those tabs create a field for objectives, a field for risks, and a Plain Text Field for a short description. 

• For risks, track:

  • Number of times a risk has been flagged at this customer

  • Risk severity 

  • How long the risk is open

  • How many risks were created in the last week? 

  • Information that confirms risk analysis like usage or number of support tickets

• If your customer only has one objective or their objective is tied to an edge use case, classify that as a risk. 

• Set up automations for key events and risk factors. For example, if an objective is achieved, trigger an automation that sends messages to the customer and an internal Slack group to celebrate the win. Likewise for risk factors, if a customer is falling behind on the tasks in the workflow, trigger a message to the CSM to check in and identify the issue. 

• Objectives can change when new stakeholders join or leave an organization, or when there are changes to the business or industry. If you work in an industry or with a technology that takes months or even years to implement, there can be significant stakeholder change between the contract being signed and launch, so it’s important to keep objectives up to date. 

You have the knowledge, you have the tools, and you have the will (otherwise you wouldn't still be reading). Now all you need is to do it. Good luck.