Back in 2017, when I was still a design consultant, I was handed a project with the codename, “Scott’s CRM.” I was intrigued by the prospect of working with Scott McCorkle once again, having worked with him on another unique and ambitious past project.
We started MetaCX believing there was a better way to manage the customer lifecycle by transforming how suppliers and buyers collaborate and win together. By ‘win,’ we mean that the buyer achieves their desired outcomes, and the supplier receives concomitant value in return, through an ongoing relationship.
When economies boom, customer retention is largely taken for granted. The customer success team will handle it, many revenue leaders think. Surely we’ll oversell from time to time and, yes, we’ll lose some customers along the way, but that’s the calculus of SaaS. It just works.
If you ask the average B2B business if their team uses the product they sell internally, you’ll likely be met with an indirect response or an answer so well rehearsed that you question its validity. The truth is that most B2B businesses, especially in the world of SaaS, don’t use what they sell.
Outcomes are the smallest atomic unit of business value. They are the key deliverables or goal achievements by which businesses define success. In the age of collaboration, outcomes aren’t one-sided. They’re shared between multiple parties all who have their own contributions and needs to be met. Think of these as shared outcomes.
This week we’re introducing MetaCX’s new video series, The Customer Room! MetaCX co-founder and chief customer officer, Dave Duke, will be offering industry expertise in the categories of outcome management, revenue operations, shared success planning, and more. Stay tuned!
I’ve spent my entire career building and commercializing enterprise software which, in aggregate, has generated billions of dollars in revenue–and, I think, has led to some important and lasting innovations. I’m proud of this and will always consider myself a product person first. But over the years, I’ve seen the primacy of product shift to the imperative of customer experience. That’s not to say that getting the product right doesn’t matter–it does.
These are strange and unsettling times, unprecedented by the measure of almost everyone living and working today. But in the midst of all of the very real worries that we’re dealing with, life has a way of continuing apace. In a way, these occasions take on new significance, reminding us that nothing should be taken for granted. We lean into the ordinary, recognizing that these things are really anything but.
