Delivering Business Outcomes: How to Help Your Customers Realize Value (Part Three)

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A Four-Part Series by Jeb Dasteel and Amir Hartman

In this third piece of our series on value realization and the subscription economy, we discuss achieving value for your customers. This capability is by far the most important—and most difficult—to master.

Part 3: Value Achievement—How to Target, Track, and Measure Realized Customer Value

Capability No. 3: Achievement

To deliver value, you must communicate your goals and measure the process, step-by-step. The heart of value achievement is demonstrating how the customer ultimately achieves financial, operational, and strategic benefits.

Eric Almquist and his coauthors do an excellent job of delineating types of benefits in his “Value Pyramid,” pictured below. Our focus here is on functional and ease of doing business value achievement.

In our research, organizations said that they have seen progress in institutionalizing the measurement of achieved value but that they still have a long way to go. Only 41% of respondents tell us they have a substantial (“a lot” plus “a great deal” of) capability to help customers assess and document value from deployment of their products. Larger organizations do better, with 51% of the respondents with revenues in the range of $250M to $500M have a significant capability to help customers measure value, while 70% of organizations with revenues exceeding $10B say the same.

Measuring value achieved compliments and improves on widely used customer experience metrics such as the Net Promoter Score and the Customer Engagement Index. We believe that a key benefit of effective value achievement is superior accountability across the organization for the outcome targets and the path to attaining those results.

Here are five rules for effective value achievement:

1. Ensure that senior business leaders feel a strong sense of ownership by engaging them in the selection of performance improvements to target, track, and measure. Involving corporate finance for their input and support can often help add credibility to the process.

2. Review and recalibrate value drivers and performance measurements regularly (ideally quarterly) to prevent them from going stale or obsolete.

3. Demand line of business accountability for deployment project funding and delivering results. If the business is unwilling to have the benefits be incrementally counted against their operating plan, that’s a red flag.

4. Be selective about the number of performance indicators and business outcomes to be managed. Focus on just a few for each functional area affected.

5. Use outcome-oriented language in how you communicate so that everyone stays focused on the results that truly matter across the business.

In helping many organizations with value achievement, we have found that there is a common set of questions that are asked of us:

  • What benefits can I expect and how quickly will I see them?
  • What do I need to do to assure these benefits are realized?
  • What benefits have other customers achieved? Over what period of time?
  • How do I drive consumption or uptake of the ongoing updates that I will be receiving?
  • Do I really need all those updates? Does the organization see them as interference of operations or as new capabilities to be acquired?
  • What’s the best way to document benefits realized?

A well-orchestrated value achievement program will anticipate these questions and will look something like this chart below, broken out by target, track, and measure elements:

When looking at performance indicators, remember that benefits can come from many and varied business objectives. Existing literature does an excellent job enumerating the types of business objectives to consider when outlining an approach to benefits measurement. One especially strong example is Business Benefits: Measure and Value All Benefits by Marty Schmidt. Here are the categories suggested by Schmidt:

The bottom line: Value achievement practices can’t be cookie-cutter solutions. Rather, they are composed of a unique set of roles, processes, and tools. Successful practices are highly context-driven and consider the organization’s culture and leadership style.

Don’t wait for everything to be perfect, as it won’t ever be. And most important, institutionalize this capability into how projects are managed going forward. The more effectively you produce and demonstrate business results realized, the more you’ll be perceived as a true business leader or strategic partner.

In the next and last article of this series, we will cover advocacy, the fourth capability. The focus on customer value through alignment to customer strategic objectives, systematically driving customer adoption of your product, and organizing customer engagement for value achievement is the best way to assure that your customers will be enthusiastic brand advocates for you.

About the Authors:

Jeb Dasteel, Founder, Dasteel Consulting
Jeb operates Dasteel Consulting, focusing on advising Chief Customer Officers and helping organizations develop or refine their customer strategy. Jeb served as the global Chief Customer Officer for Oracle from early 2008 to September 2019. In this role, he worked with the Chief Executive Officer, Board of Directors, and Executive Committee members to implement enterprise goals for the Oracle customer strategy. Jeb also served as an executive coach, sponsor, and troubleshooter for large enterprise accounts, strategic deals, and complex customer projects.

Amir Hartman, Executive Director, Value Realization at Oracle
One of the leading global authorities on corporate and technology transformations, Amir is a bestselling author and sought-after advisor to senior business leaders across industries. Today, Amir is Executive Director of Value Realization in Oracle’s Customer Success Organization, where he works with customers to ensure they are achieving measurable value from their Oracle Cloud investments. Prior to Oracle, he founded and lead Mainstay Partners, a leading value realization consultancy. Amir has also served on the faculty at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, and Columbia’s Graduate School of Business where he teaches in their MBA and Executive MBA programs.

Jeb Dasteel
Jeb operates Dasteel Consulting and the Customer Strategy Alliance, focusing on advising Chief Customer Officers and helping organizations develop or refine their customer strategy. Jeb served as the global Chief Customer Officer for Oracle from early 2008 to September 2019. In this role, he worked with the Chief Executive Officer, Board of Directors, and Executive Committee members to implement enterprise goals for the Oracle customer strategy. Jeb also served as an executive coach, sponsor, and troubleshooter for large enterprise accounts, strategic deals, and complex customer projects.

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