The holy grail of customer success is to easily prove the “value” or results that your customers get with your products. According to a survey of B2B buyers by IDC, “81% of buyers expect vendors to quantify the business value of proposed solutions” (IDC Survey of B2B Buyers, 2010). Yet, the most common way for SaaS businesses to show that value is by using a combination of metrics that only skim the surface (e.g., number of logins in the last month or time per user in the app) along with subjective satisfaction metrics. In fact, the same report states that 65% of buyers indicate that they do not have the knowledge or tools needed to do business values assessments and calculations.
That is why we decided to tackle this need with our latest product release – ROI metrics. Proving the value of your product via ROI metrics is critical for CS teams and this innovative capability makes it easy for you to understand the business results that your customers are achieving with your product so you can better help them to success. Now you can track the ROI of your customers across three key areas:
REVENUE – what are the revenue returns that your customers are getting with your product and is the cost per activity decreasing over time?
PRODUCTIVITY – is your product helping your customers achieve more faster and with fewer resources?
RESULTS – are your customers seeing an improvement in the quality and results of their outputs such as better website landing pages, more effective email campaigns, a more qualified sales pipeline, etc?
With Totango’s ROI metrics our customers are able to define simple formulas that track metrics specific to their business within a matter of minutes. For example, a helpdesk software customer was able to show increased agent productivity, a key business outcome for their customers, among their customer base by tracking the improvement in the number of tickets solved per agent over time. They use these reports to track both individual accounts and the improved productivity of their entire customer base.
Additionally, one of our recruiting software customers created an ROI metric to measure the effectiveness of their solution by tracking the number of candidates interviewed per job posting. They then built out great content from tips on creating better job postings all the way through to more effectively utilizing the product to screen candidates.
We believe that this functionality will have far reaching uses because these metrics can be used to improve customer retention rates, product improvements, marketing and sales validation and more.
Learn more about ROI metrics and sign up for a live webinar here.
Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below – I’d love to hear from you.