Why Did the Customer Buy?
If you don’t know why the customer bought your product, you’re not going to be able to achieve true success for the customer
Several years ago I was sitting in a meeting with an Executive of the company I worked at, surrounded by members of the Customer Success team, reviewing some of the customers that we would be taking him to visit later that week. All was going well until we spoke about one particular customer. Whilst scribbling down notes in his notebook, the Executive didn’t even look up as he asked the next question… “why did the customer buy our product?”. Everyone looked at each other, the Executive looked up as several of us tried a bumbling answer. None of us sounded convinced that we knew why the customer had purchased. That’s because we didn’t know. I felt about an inch tall and immediately knew we’d dropped the ball on a pretty fundamental answer.
Why is it important to know the Why?
Apart from the obvious faux pas, understanding the answer to why a customer bought your product is a crucial element of account management, which will open up opportunities not just for your role in Customer Success, but to several other partners and stakeholders across the business.
At its core, understanding the why enables you to better help the customer proactively, with valuable insights, value opportunities, and overcoming and tackling the challenge or pain they initially sought you out for in the first place. If you don’t understand the why, everything you do for the customer will be reactive to a request, or worse, guess work.
Can you recall a time, either in the business world or your personal life, when someone gave you something of value that you didn’t ask for, but you appreciated because it met a need or desire and they recognised that need or desire without you having to articulate it. Didn’t it feel good? Didn’t you appreciate and value that person so much more because they knew you needed something that, quite possibly, you didn’t know it existed or you even needed it.
How do you articulate the Why?
At a basic level, it can be a simple problem statement or expression of need. Soon after the meeting with the Executive, above, we put in place two approaches to articulating the why. One was a fairly succinct and simple external business facing statement, the second was a much more comprehensive understanding of the why that we could recall internally in a briefing situation.
The following are a couple of examples of external statements I’ve used to articulate the why:
“Currently, [customer] needs to [do this] to solve [describe problem]. We know this is challenging, as [pain description]. We see a future where our customer can [describe better outcome]”
or
“The [customer or department] team bought [your product] so that it could [describe the challenge or pain] and in turn [describe the desired end state] as measured by [success criteria]”
To take the why statement to the next level and give it tangible and repeatable value, for both you and the customer, include an “as measured by… [metrics]” element to the statement.
These why statements should be useful for the customer too. You know you’ve hit the nail on the head when the customer takes ownership of the statement and uses it to help explain, to those who will use or benefit from the system at, why they bought the solution. This can become the anchor point for internal communications for the customer, training, use and ultimately, if it’s strong enough, it becomes the elevator pitch and story that they tell colleagues that aren’t yet using the solution.
For the more comprehensive understanding of the why we created the ‘Gold Standard of Customer Intimacy’ which was made up of the following 8 points
- The Story — what does the customer do and what’s the business story behind what they use your product for.
- Who’s Who — who are the senior stakeholders, sponsors, the champions, the owners/admins of your product, and who do we know outside of the current user group. Who don’t we know that we should or want to know.
- How We Help — based on our customer personas, what challenges and pains do we solve for that role profile.
- Use Case — what department(s) are we in and what processes do they manage using our product? (this is different from what the business does, in point 1, above).
- Licenses — how many and what type of licenses have they purchased, how are licenses distributed across departments, what’s the total ARR, when is the renewal date, what legal terms is the contract on.
- Locations — where is the customer located across the country/world, where are users based, which countries are not using the product but could be
- History — what are the major points we should know about the history of the account, the implementation, ownership
- Priorities — what are the customer’s top 2–3 business or department priorities and what does ‘good’ or ‘done’ look like
Your ability to answer the why question directly correlates to your intimacy and proximity with the customer.
If you don’t know Why, what do you do?
If you don’t know why the customer bought your product, could you find out? If ‘yes’, then find out!
Discovery is an essential skill to master and I’ve found that those who are best at discovery work have a genuine interest in the person or subject matter, and a healthy desire to learn.
It’s not unusual, however, that the customer can’t articulate why they bought your product because they either don’t know why, or they don’t know how to articulate the why. This is a great opportunity for the account team to come together, the Customer Success Manager and Account Executive at a minimum, to educate and prescribe to the customer a value add solution based on your expertise, knowledge of other customers and industry.
If the customer can’t articulate why they bought your product, and they aren’t willing to engage in an exercise to get to that why buy statement, it should sound alarm bells for you and your ability as a company to serve and retain them. The upshot of which is a business decision about whether the customer meets a profile or model where you should engage with them..
Who is the Why useful for?
Knowing the why will create value to several different stakeholder groups, both within your own organisation, but also to the customer. This understanding will become the anchor point for how many types of conversation will be conducted.
Internally
- Customer Success — understanding the why helps to build many of the important artifacts of the CSM role. Every time I have a defined why statement I make sure that goes into the customer QBR deck, right up front, so we can validate its still correct and we’re all on the same page. Once we’re aligned on that, it feeds the Customer Success Plan. In that plan we can then define with the customer what objectives they have over the next 3, 6, 9 months and conversely what we can do to help those.
- Sales — understanding the why always ties back into whichever Sales qualification method is being used. From here it enables the Sales team to build a business case, identify budget, pain, and test the champions. In a wider context the why enables the team to engage a wider group of stakeholders, whilst seeking out expansion opportunities.
- Marketing — the product or customer marketing team should already have a pretty good idea of the target personna profiles, so an understanding of the why really helps to validate, with real world examples, that what you already know is accurate and where and when a shift in sentiment is occurring.
- Product — Product Management is all about solving problems, so if we know what problem we are trying to resolve it helps to build a better product. At a macro level, much like marketing, understanding the challenges businesses face, help Product teams to guide the future of the product. At a micro level, when a Product Manager gets on a call with a customer, its good for them to know the why up front so that when the conversation starts down the inevitable path of “it would be nice to have the X feature/function”, you can zoom back out and approach the ‘what are we trying to solve here?’ discussion.
Externally
- Capturing the why early will then give you a healthy reminder to the Sponsor as to why they bought. Its fine if this changes over time, and is validated and updated in the why statement, but with all the activity and energy that goes into the Sales cycle and immediate post-sale activity, this can get lost very quickly if not captured.
- Very much related to the first point, the why becomes even more crucial if the original purchasing Sponsor leaves and is replaced by a new sponsor or champion, who most likely won’t have the background on the purchase and initial need. There is a high risk of change in sentiment, or even churn, when a new Sponsor comes in, as they don’t have the historical context but, quite often, they also come with their own solution preferences. This spells real danger if you haven’t done the work to get everyone on the same page early on as to why your solution was purchased and met the need.
- Over time, the why becomes a good benchmark to measure against, showing progress the customer has seen since buying your solution. Where measurable success criteria have been defined, a recalibration taken at regular intervals can be translated to money saved/earned, risk mitigated, time reduced, quality increased. All of these become essential to demonstrating the ongoing need and value for your solution so that, at time of the next commercial milestone, be that renewal or growth, the conversation is far smoother.
CALL TO ACTION
👉 Review a list of all of your customers, in order of value, and identify the largest value customer where you haven’t established the reason for ‘why did the customer buy our product?’
👉 Write down everything you know about your customer, using any of the suggested formats above, or any other format you use and identify gaps in your understanding. If necessary, fill in the gaps by speaking to the customer. The output of this effort should be a succinct ‘why did they buy’ statement.
👉 Present back to the customer you’re understanding on why they bought your product, to validate the accuracy, and then use that as the established why statement in future meetings
Thank you to Kate Forgione, who also contributed to this article. I met Kate through the Customer Success Network, which she founded as a community for Customer Success Managers hosting events, mentoring and coming together to share knowledge and experience. Kate is Head of Customer at ServiceRocket where she leads the Professional Services, Managed Services, Customer Success and Training teams. After time in Big 4 consulting, Kate started her customer success career at Yammer, before joining Microsoft through acquisition. At Microsoft she held several roles including Office 365 Customer Success Lead, UK and Adoption Lead in the FastTrack Center — the world’s largest onboarding service.
