Decoding Customer Value

Hi, I’m Markus, and welcome to a 🔒 subscriber-only edition 🔒 of my newsletter. I help you to deliver, grow, and monetize customer value to improve your performance, accelerate your career, and build a profitable SaaS business.

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Everyone is talking about Customer Value.

But 9 out of 10 people in SaaS I’m talking to share the same struggle:

They don’t know how to identify, deliver, grow, and measure customer value.

Saying that this is a problem would be an understatement at a time when every customer is carefully evaluating their ROI.

Let’s build some serious knowledge here:

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What is customer value?

Let’s first remember why customers are buying your product.

They are not interested in its features and functions.

What they want is to

• increase revenue

• reduce costs

• improve productivity

• hire faster

• build their brand

• …

or a mix of 2 or more things.

If you deliver on one of these you’ve created value.

But there’s more than only one kind of value.

While it looks great on (digital) paper, your customers care little about the business value.

What they really care about is the meaning behind the numbers.

Bain & Company conducted some research a few years ago about the kinds of value that matter to B2B customers.

If you thought that B2B was all about logic and rationality I have to disappoint you.

They rank pretty low.

From the hierarchy you can see that the value increases the more personal it becomes.

That means that if you are able to not only produce good-looking numbers but can also help your customers achieve their personal outcomes you will win.

Supporting their personal and career growth is a hot one.

So when you are determining your customers’ goals, ask them how achieving their business goal would affect them personally.

Or, vice versa, how do the problems they have affect them right now?

When you meet your customers for QBRs or EBRs, ask them how things have changed so far to ensure they are aware of the value they have got.

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