Delivering value to your customers is more important than ever before. As budgets are scrutinized and purse strings tightened, demonstrating your solution’s value relative to its price is key to both acquiring new business and retaining existing customers. Organizations that consistently deliver on value experience higher revenue, increased growth, and greater customer loyalty. Therefore, it is essential that your team is prepared to deliver value to your customers. Here we discuss 5 practical ways to prepare your team for success.
Value delivery refers to the process of delivering value to your customers by providing them with solutions that meet or exceed their expectations. It’s how you keep customers satisfied with the return on their investment. When you deliver value to your customers, you create a positive customer experience that builds brand loyalty and increases customer satisfaction. This can also translate into revenue growth by opening up opportunities to upsell within existing accounts and increasing new business through your brand advocates. Your happy customers are more likely to provide testimonials and case studies–and vouch for your business with colleagues in their network. However, delivering value requires much more than simply having a great solution. Your customers need to be able to realize that value–and that’s where your customer success team comes in. They need to deeply understand the customer’s needs so that they can target value delivery according to each customer’s unique situation. Your team also needs to be aligned around value, and they must be armed with the right processes and tools to measure and communicate that value to the customer.
The first step in preparing your team for success is to ensure that everyone understands the importance of delivering value to your customers–and what it means for them. To accomplish this, you need to cultivate a customer-focused culture where customer value is a fundamental pillar of your organization. Customer value can’t be surface-level. It needs to be embedded throughout the entire customer journey – from marketing and sales to customer success to executive leadership. Everyone on your team should understand how their role supports customer value and contributes to the overall customer experience. Encourage collaboration and communication among teams to ensure that everyone is working towards the same goals. To learn more about how to do this, see Customer Value Best Practices Throughout the Entire Customer Journey.
Your team should have a deep understanding of your target customer and your customer value proposition (or CVP). Your customer value proposition essentially answers the question: what outcomes does our solution deliver for customers and why should the customer care? A solid value proposition is clear and easy to understand, relevant to the customer, differentiated from the competition, and quantifiable. If you don’t already have one in place, learn how to create a compelling customer value proposition. This formal articulation of the value you provide to customers is fundamental to your team’s success, as it helps them clearly and consistently align your solution’s value with your target customer’s needs.
Now that you have a strong understanding of the customer and clear alignment around customer value, you need to have the right processes in place to execute. This is important to define early because if you don’t know what process will generate your desired outcomes from your Customer Success team, you’ll have a harder time defining the tools needed to support your team in this process. To learn more see Customer Success: How to Get the Process Right for Your Team to Succeed.
Once you’ve established a process, you’ll need to equip your team with the right tools to effectively deliver value to customers. There are many different technologies that can support value delivery, so you’ll need to find tools with the right capabilities to meet your team’s needs. For example, your team will likely need a robust analytics and reporting platform that they can use to communicate results with customers and quickly adapt to the customer’s needs. If your team is bogged down in tedious administrative tasks and siloed from other teams, you need a tool that can automate those mundane tasks and improve information sharing between teams. A value platform with these capabilities sets your team up for success by giving them more time to focus on customer relationships and enabling them to provide customers with a seamless and personalized experience.
Finally, your team needs to understand how value delivery is measured. What metrics and milestones are important to track for customers? It’s easy to get wrapped up in tracking a myriad of data points, but when you do that, you risk the true value of the solution getting lost in the numbers. Instead, help your team focus on the right KPIs that matter most to your customer. While this will vary by customer, three baseline KPIs you should be tracking for all customers include: Net Dollar Retention (NDR) / Net Revenue Retention (NRR), Time to Solution Go-Live, and Time to Solution Value. To learn more about these metrics and how to improve them, see 5 Ways to Improve Your Value Realization Metrics Right Now.
When you effectively prepare your team to deliver customer value, your organization can truly thrive. You will be empowered to build your network of loyal customers and brand advocates–and ultimately increase revenue and growth.