How to build a 360° Customer View
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.
It’s impossible to build a profitable, customer-centric growth strategy without understanding your customers on a granular level.
There are so many SaaS companies that sit on piles of data but have very few meaningful insights.
Because they don’t know what they need, why they need it, and how to use it.
So they gather everything that’s possible and hope the data magically reveals its gems.
Worse, they gather inaccurate or plain useless data because their peers do.
Let’s pick an example to make things more clear:
The NPS (Net Promoter Score)
I can count the number of SaaS companies I’ve met who DON’T measure the NPS on a single hand.
If you are (surprisingly) unfamiliar with here’s how it usually works:
The company sends a survey with a single question to their customers: “How likely would you recommend our product to a friend?”
Participants can choose between a number of 1-10 from very unlikely to likely.
Ok, so now your customers give you a 5.
What does that tell you? Absolutely nothing because you don’t know why.
But your playbook says a score lower than 7 is a “detractor” with a churn risk and you need to reach out.
Turns out they are quite satisfied with the progress but don’t give a higher score because they feel it’s too early to give a higher one.
I once received an NPS survey 1 day! after signing up.
At the same time, another customer responds with a 9.
This time your playbook says that the customer is a safe bet and will likely promote your company.
After all, they are “promoters” and not “neutrals” or “detractors”.
A month later the second customer leaves totally catching you by surprise.
During the exit interview, they are telling you that they liked working with you but did not get the results they expected.
If your playbook would have told you to reach out, the customer could have possibly been saved.
Both - customers with low NPS renewing and customers with high ones churning - happen frequently.
Because there is no standardized method to score and even if there were no obligations to give an accurate one.
In your top segment of net promoters, churn should be ZERO except for reasons not under your control (bankruptcy, mergers, new sponsor, etc.) btw.
The same goes for CSAT, CES, health scores, and product usage - they all lack context and can be misleading.
Creating the big picture
In a Customer-Value-Led-Growth business model context is king.
The goal is to gather all the quantitative and qualitative data that help you to create the whole customer story.
Because only if you understand
who your customers are,
why they are here,
what they are doing,
the actions they take, and why
you can make qualified decisions and drive the right actions.
Relying on guessing and assuming is costing you a fortune and you can kiss profitable growth goodbye.
Here’s a breakdown of the 4 data pillars of a compelling customer story:
1. Who is the customer?
If you would have to give a description you would probably mention things like company size, industry, or annual revenue. That’s information to complete customer profiles in your CRM. But it is (likely) irrelevant to your business.
From the business perspective, there are 3 things that matter to describe your customers
Customer profitability and growth potential
Success factors and success potential (skills, knowledge, attitude, etc.)
The relative ease of working with them
2. Why are your customers here?
What are their desired outcomes?
How do they measure success?
What are the problems they need to solve?
What do they need to succeed?
Understanding the “why” puts the “who” into perspective.
A customer might e.g. be difficult to work with because they came with misguided expectations.
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