Nailing the Customer Discovery

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

I share strategies and guides to help you become a proactive CSM, delivering more value for your customers and revenue for your company every week.

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What is the easiest way to set yourself up for failure as a CSM? Skipping customer discovery. If you don’t understand your customers’ needs, there are only 2 “approaches” you can follow

• trial and error

• one-size-fits-all-eat-or die

It should be self-evident that both are not viable options. Now, more than ever as customer expectations have grown exponentially.

The handoff you get from sales does not include everything you need to know. It’s a surface-level summary of a basic discovery used to detect customer-product-fit.

• Customer goals are vaguely described and unvalidated

• Listing pain points and analyzing problems are not the same thing

• Sales reps are not qualified to evaluate customer skills and knowledge

But these 3 elements (goals, problems, and customer capabilities) are what determines your customers’ needs.

In today’s post, you will learn how to get the in-depth information you need for a successful customer journey.

1. Customer Goals

You want to retain your customers as long as possible. Right? What makes them renew their contracts for another month or year? Getting a high ROI out of your product. But what exactly is “high”? What is the ROI they care about?

1.1 Business Goals

The first part of the equation is business (financial) outcomes. Eventually, your product helps customers to make money, save money, or both. This comes in many forms and needs to be specified. However, there’s usually a limited number of goals your product supports.

A great way to identify and validate business goals is the SMART methodology:

• Specific: Improving employee engagement or building a better product are not specific goals; reducing employee turnover or churn by 20% are

• Measurable: Objective results that (ideally) can be measured by a single metric

• Achievable: Goal accomplishment must be within reach

• Relevant: Goal achievement must contribute to the big picture

• Time-bound: Accomplishment is not fluid but has a specific deadline

If your customers don’t know what they want to accomplish and/or how to measure success, it becomes your mission to help them find out. It’s a great opportunity to build trust and present yourself as a worthy trusted-advisor candidate.

Make qualified suggestions based on

• your customers’ direct peers

• Past comparable use cases

• analyzing your customers’ business

until you have worked out something both sides commit to. There must be absolute clarity and accountability.

1.2 Personal Goals

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