How to Drive 'Customer Success' with your SaaS/Platform Solution
In short: If you want customers to be successful using your SaaS (or platform) solution, you need to build the complementary capabilities that drive customer adoption, usage and ultimately, value-in-use. This applies not only to RevOps and RevTech technologies but to any kind of SaaS solutions. Keep reading to learn more about the three key stages used to prove whether your solution is driving success or not; 1) technical proof of concept, 2) economic proof of value, and 3) productivity proof of usage.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
The global SaaS solution market is expected to grow by almost 350% over the next decade, to a projected USD 1.23 Trillion by 2032. The biggest driver of this growth is increasing productivity, with 54% of buyers identifying it as the main reason to adopt?a SaaS solution.
But there is an unspoken problem with SaaS solutions – the majority of their functionality is never actually used.
SAS estimates that only 17% of CDP functionality is ever used, Microsoft only 20% of MS 365 functionality and Garter only 33% of MarTech functionality. If buyers don’t adopt and use their SaaS solutions, the desired productivity improvements will only ever be achieved on paper.
One way to overcome this usage deficit is to implement SaaS solutions through three step-by-step proving stages, each of which builds on the previous stage.
FIRST STAGE: TECHNICAL PROOF OF CONCEPT
Usually carried in a separate test environment, often using synthetic data, the proof demonstrates that the SaaS solution’s technology works, and is capable of being integrated into the buyer’s technical and data architecture.
SECOND STAGE: ECONOMIC PROOF OF VALUE
Carried out in a demonstration environment using synthetic data or ideally, as a ring-fenced pilot in the production environment, this proof demonstrates that the SaaS solution can create economic value by increasing sales, margins and ROA, i.e. increase operating TSR.
Most proofs stop there and the SaaS solution gets rolled out into full-scale production on a wing and a prayer. This is where the problems start, resulting in only a minority of the solution's functionality ever being used.
Like all technologies, SaaS solutions need a series of complementary capabilities - the processes, data, other technologies, roles, collaborative working, work system and governance that are necessary to get all the value from the solution - to be developed in parallel with implementing the solution, if it is to be adopted, used and create the success that the buyer expects.
The smaller the gap between the buyer’s current capabilities and those required to use the SaaS solution to its fullest the more likely the solution’s functionality will be fully used.
THIRD AND FINAL STAGE:?PRODUCTIVITY PROOF OF USAGE
Carried out in the live production environment, this proof demonstrates that users are using as much functionality as they need to do their work, as productively as possible. Unlike the other two proofs, this proof is usually carried out over an extended period of time in parallel with the development activities that will bridge the capability deficit.
The Proof of Concept and Proof of Value provide the foundation for SaaS solution adoption and usage, but it is the Proof of Usage that really drives success for the buyer.
WHAT'S OUR APPROACH TO THIS??
At 180ops we have developed a ‘RevOps Capability Playbook’ that allows us to quickly assess your current and desired RevOps capabilities, and the capability deficit that need to be bridged. This provides the insight to identify capability development activities, to organise them into immediate, medium and longer-term horizons, and to integrate them into a development roadmap. And by linking the three horizons to your cashflow drivers, the roadmap can be optimised so that development progresses in the most economically valuable way.
Read more about how we assess your RevOps capabilities in a previous newsletter: RevOps challenge: Assessing the maturity of your RevOps capabilities
To see how our internationally awarded revenue intelligence platform works, book a demo session with us.
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HOW TO DRIVE 'CUSTOMER SUCCESS' WITH YOUR SAAS/PLATFORM SOLUTION – THREE TAKEAWAYS
If you want to get the most value from your SaaS solution:
This is the first of two articles on ‘How to Drive Customer Success with your SaaS Solution’. In the next one, we describe how the ten steps in the Revenue Builder Playbook help you drive customer success, on buyers’ terms.
This newsletter is written in collaboration with one of our extended team specialists, Dr. Graham Hill. He brings in 30+ years of experience working for blue-chip consultancies such as KPMG, Price Waterhouse and PricewaterhouseCoopers, as an Interim Head at Toyota and Huawei Technologies and as an independent strategy consultant.
Graham has been closely involved in the evolution of customer value management for over 30 years. Starting with CRM in the 1990s, he pioneered Customer Experience Management in the 2000s and Complex Service Systems Design in the 2010s. More recently, he has been involved in projects implementing Decisioning-as-a-Service, Journey Orchestration and Conversational Commerce.
Graham is the founder of Janus spv., a boutique consultancy specialising in customer value management for corporate clients.
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