How to Make Customer Discovery a Continuous Process

Customer discovery is more important than ever, and it has to be a continuous process.

As a strategic customer success manager, having spent a decade in the customer success industry, I believe it's really important for not just customer success managers, but for any professional to understand answers to a few baseline questions about the client. 

What does your customer do? How do they make money? What do they care about? What are their biggest challenges? What are their goals? And how can your product or service help them achieve their goals?

So for me, it starts and ends with customer discovery. I'm always trying to discover all these things, in particular, why, specifically, have they bought this product or service? What are they trying to achieve with it?

Only then can we come to a common ground of what they're trying to achieve, and where our product or services can help out. Once we've set that foundation and determined the goals we have, we can set the strategy and we measure ourselves on a regular basis. That's where a customer success plan comes into play.

Create a Structure, Like OGSM

There is an industry-wide standard format of OGSM 👇

• Objective (O): What is the company trying to achieve?
• Goals (G): What are the three or four goals they're trying to achieve?
• ‍Strategy (S): Which strategies will you deploy and form to achieve those goals?
• ‍Measure (M): You measure yourselves on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis, based on which operational KPIs?

I like to look at it from a pyramid approach, where the bottom of the pyramid is where we look at usage statistics. Those KPIs are saying, Hey, people logged into your tool, or they used your product or service. 

But I like to step it up from a strategic standpoint, look at the goals discussed, and get to the “so what?” of it. You start to say, What am I getting out of this product or service? Am I saving time? Am I saving money? Am I increasing my sales? 

And that's what the goals ideally should capture, and you choose strategic CS KPIs from there. That's why it’s important to have a thorough discovery from the outset.

Old-School Customer Discovery Methods

Traditionally, what used to happen is, after you've sold the product or when you're about to sell a product, you would ask your clients to share about all of these aspects outlined in OGSM above, and it used to be a static document that we would revisit very close to renewal time. 

Imagine you're the client, and you bought services worth, say, $100,000. We said, Hey, we understand that this is why you bought the product. So we’d create a document summarizing that. You’d let the service go through the course of the 12 months, and come renewal time, say about two or three months before, you revisit your goals and open the books. 

You’ll often realize that perhaps customers have not had enough touch points or the right sort of conversations, and so they may not renew, or they may renew flat, but there's no growth.

New-School Customer Discovery Methods

In today's day and age, with so much data so readily available via AI tools and other technology, we will analyze that data throughout the year and ask, Does this approach work? We're trying to make sure that we come across as researched, that we know what we're trying to do. 

Once you have your OGSM plan, you’ll decide on the cadence of your meetings with the sponsor of the program or the program manager. Let’s say you go over the numbers on a monthly basis. That’s like a progress report saying, Hey, have we done these things that we discussed last month? Yes? Brilliant. What can we do to make sure the things that are pending keep moving in the direction we want them to? 

Aside from that, you’ll want to consider, Do we need to schedule a training? Do we need to do a leadership session? There are qualitative surveys that we send out to clients.

From a strategic standpoint, companies have started investing more and more and saying, How can we start talking about the value narrative? And that's where you partner with the client, and it's not a one-off, or three or four meetings in a year. There's a continuous effort to to be that extended team member of your client, where you understand what their priorities are. You, of course, keep reiterating, saying, Hey, we live in a dynamic world. So whatever we discussed in the success plan of goals, let’s make sure you’re on the right track, and if you’re not, what do you need? Do you need enablement? What's stopping your end users from using the product? 

So, you are actually a part-time consultant. You're a part-time enabler to make sure that the client gets their ROI. And that's a continuous process. So that's the new approach.

Continuous Customer Discovery Is Just Good Business

The benefit of this approach, when you are a true partner with your client and you're measuring yourselves on a regular basis, is that you’re putting checks into place. 

You’re not in for any surprises when renewal comes up. You've worked with the client throughout the year, you know what's going on as far as your KPIs. They've seen value in the product and service throughout your time together. You’ve worked with them to achieve what you set out to do.

And, the conversation from a sales perspective becomes fairly easy. You’re saying,Hey, you've received value. What can we do next? How can we grow together?