How to leverage OKRs to deliver more Customer Value

Hi, Markus here. Welcome to a free edition of the Customer-Value-Led-Growth Newsletter.

Every week, I share strategies, guides, and frameworks to help you create exceptional value for your customers and company.

If you are not a paid subscriber, here’s what you might have missed:

• The Principles of Customer Value-Led Growth Part I

• The Principles of Customer Value-Led Growth Part II

• 5 highly effective Tools every CS Team needs to use

• Customer Onboarding that drives Growth

• How to build a dedicated Customer Success Plan

The nature of Customer Success Management is a quantity game at most SaaS companies.

• dozens of metrics

• hundreds of activities

• thousands of data points

It’s easy to get lost in all that noise without ever being able to work on the job.

If you are doing everything you could and should you’d be working 24/7/365.

And everything for mediocre results that don’t see any major improvement. 

But that’s not how CSM is supposed to work.

• It’s about scoring the big points.

• It’s about focus.

• It’s about making every activity count.

This is the true meaning behind “doing more with less”. 

The OKR framework is a highly effective tool to help CSM teams prioritize the right goals, metrics, and activities in a collaborative effort.

1. What are OKRs?

Let’s start with a simple definition of OKRs to ensure we are on the same page. I borrowed this one from Atlassian:

OKRs provide clarity, accountability, and direction about what needs to be achieved and how everyone in the team contributes to it. It’s a great way to create alignment and be more strategic.

2. Defining your Objectives

Let’s start with a short reminder. Delivering customer value means creating tangible results for your customers. Consequently, I’ll not be writing about “improving customer satisfaction” measured by NPS, CSAT, and CES in this episode.

Besides a clear, positive impact on customer value, your objectives need to be

• challenging to inspire teams and not something that’s a safe bet (none cares for tiny improvements).

• easy to remember to avoid people forgetting them in the heat of daily business.

• suited to produce sustainable results and not temporary peaks as an end in itself.

• limited to a number of 1-3 or you risk losing focus and achieving poor results.

• accomplished within a short period (quarterly is the common recommendation)

3. Defining your Key Results

Similarly, not all potential key results are a good choice to measure whether you’ve accomplished your objective. Here are a few requirements they need to meet:

• Key results need to be easy to measure and update. You don’t have the time to spend days evaluating your progress.

• They need to measure the impact you create. Growing the number of activities and inputs does not equal growth in performance.

• They need to be under your team’s control. If there are strong interferences from the outside your results will be diluted.

• They need to be challenging but possible to accomplish within 3 months. A 100% increase in whatever metric is rarely within reach.

4. Planning your Initiatives

In the last step, the strategy part, you need to define how you are going to accomplish your key results and ultimately your objectives. Otherwise, it’s nothing but wishful thinking.

If there are no changes respectively new initiatives required your OKRs are useless because you are going to accomplish them anyway. Remember, you are aiming for leaps in performance.

If you are following me for a while you might have noticed my dislike for random tactics. Working with OKRs is not any different. All initiatives should result from solid analysis based on qualitative and quantitative analysis.

You further need to make sure that

• You restrict the number of initiatives because 3 well-executed ones will beat 12 half-heartedly executed ones by a mile

• Your initiatives are free of contradictions and don’t interfere with each other as you’ll otherwise sabotage yourself.

• You have the resources available to execute each initiative in terms of skills and knowledge

5. Example

QBRs are a weak spot in many CSM organizations. Customers consider them a waste of time and decline your invitations. They contain dozens of slides full of data and information customers don’t care about.

You spend hours completing thesimply agenda but at the end of the day, you are as smart as you were before the start. Put simply, your QBRs are a chore to cross off your check-list.

But if used the right way, they are an excellent tool for customer success controlling. They can do a great job of helping you find out what worked, what did not, and why. Allowing you to apply changes and course corrections in time.

If a customer is miles away from their desired outcomes for 11 months in the odds of saving them is probably like 1%. If there’s a gap between projected and actual results 3 months in it’s a completely different story.

Consequently, turning your QBRs into that kind of strategic asset is a worthwhile objective to pursue. Your success could be measured by

• a higher number of participants because of a captivating agenda

• a reduction in size to keep your customers engaged during the meeting

• a clear action plan due to asking the right questions and listening carefully