Today, growth is not only about investing in customer acquisition. We are now in a new era of subscription-model where many companies recognize Customer Success as a growth engine. Companies are winning largely because they have shifted from a “land and refresh” mindset to life-cycle selling.

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What Does This Change Mean to Customer Success Teams?

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So far, the Customer Success team had been playing defensive with a focus on renewals and managing churn. Companies are now looking at Customer Success teams to leverage intimate customer knowledge and surface opportunities at all points of the customer life-cycle.

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With this expectation of leading from the front, the Customer Success teams will have to execute a growth loop in action. But without a well-defined goal, one is clueless about where they are headed, or if their actions are focused on outcomes that matter.

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There has to be a comprehensive proactive and data-led approach by the team to helping businesses reach several top-level goals, including:

🎯 Renewal sales and revenue

🎯 Customer retention and Churn

🎯 Lifetime customer value

🎯 Annual recurring revenue (ARR)

🎯 New sales and Revenue

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How Can Customer Success Create a Direct Impact on an Organization’s Growth with OKRs?

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It’s no longer an individual’s role in executing tasks as a checklist, but rather a team rallying together on common outcomes with a shift from ‘ME’ to ‘WE’.

We see customer success teams from organizations across scale and size leveraging Objective and Key Results (OKRs), a strategy execution framework to translate strategy into action. It helps you answer two fundamental questions:

1. Where do you want to go?
2. How will you get there?

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As simple as it sounds, OKR helps teams build clarity, focus, and vertical alignment to organizational priorities and drive cross-functional alignment across teams.

The Objective sets the direction for the team followed by a set of 3-5 Key Results (metrics)  to measure the success of whether you have achieved your Objectives or not.

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Set Your Objective‍

‍Pull the strategic lever to set what you want to accomplish.

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Defining ‘Where you want to go’? What do you want to accomplish as a team?’ is the first step. While there are ‘n’ possibilities to drive business impact, carefully picking up the right lever is crucial. 

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We see customer success teams focusing on Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) and new sales 7 revenue.

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You can use the Fitbots formula to help you craft high-quality Objectives : 

Verb + What you are going to do + in order to/so that + business value 

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Example Objective 1: Increase user base in strategic accounts to drive expansion revenue

Example Objective 2: Double down on Referral strategy to accelerate new sales

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Define the Success Metrics‍

Keep your eye on the prize.

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The next step is choosing the right success metrics that will help you reach your destination. Think about the metrics that can be controlled sooner while you measure business impact. Less is more, so choose metrics that will create the maximum impact.

Objective: Increase user base in strategic accounts to drive expansion revenue

The Key Results could be:

KR1: Increase product adoption (DAU/MAU) in strategic accounts from 20% to 60%

KR2: Improve Customer Pulse Score from 3.5 to 4.5 

KR3: Add new paid users (strategic accounts) from 1000 to 2000

KR4: Accelerate expansion revenue from USD 1M to USD 2 M

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Note: While expansion revenue is the final success metric, focusing on lead outcome metrics like no. of users in the account, product adoption, customer pulse scores, etc. will help you achieve the goal.

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Similarly, for the Objective: Double down on Referral Strategy to accelerate new sales

The Key Results could be:

KR1: Increase referral qualified leads from 20 to 50

KR2: Increase user reviews from 40 to 100

KR3: Launch the Referral Program by 20th July

KR4: Increase NPS from 7 to 8.5

KR5: Increase new logos ( from referrals) from 5 to 15

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You can access our range of 1000+ OKR templates on Fitbots OKRs with just a click!  

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Play Your Tactics with OKRs

Experiment - experiment - experiment.

While your focus is on the outcomes (Key Results), build experiments and initiatives as a team to fuel progress. Think about something new and different that could positively impact the outcomes.

Bring in a new way of working and measure what truly matters. Unleash the superpower of OKRs to drive progress-based outcomes to contribute to the organization’s success.

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About The Author

Soujanya is a Certified OKR Coach and leads Customer Success at Fitbots. She has coached over 150+ teams on OKRs enabling organizations to drive growth with OKRs. She loves working with teams to help them execute their strategy and make them successful.

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