If you’ve built trust in your data and aligned your teams around a shared customer health vision, you’re ready for the next leap: moving beyond health scores to tracking customer objectives.
While health scores reveal what’s happening — usage trends, support tickets, or sentiment shifts — customer objectives tell you why it matters. They anchor your retention strategy in the customer’s own goals, making renewals, often a year or more away, predictable and achievable.
The four key practices reviewed in this article will help revenue and customer success leaders learn how to:
- Capture customer objectives during the sales process
- Use a standardized methodology to align teams
- Track milestones to monitor value realization
- Feed customer objectives into post-sale workflows for proactive retention
Why objectives matter
Renewal decisions hinge on one question: “Did we get the value we expected?” Customers don’t renew because of your product’s features or your team’s responsiveness alone — they renew when they achieve their desired outcomes. But waiting until renewal time to assess this is a recipe for churn. By capturing and tracking objectives from the sales process, you create a roadmap of short-term milestones that signal whether a customer is on track for value realization or veering toward disengagement.
For example, a customer might buy your SaaS platform to improve team productivity by 20% within six months. That’s their objective. By breaking it into milestones — like onboarding completion, key feature adoption, or early wins — you can track progress and intervene if they stall. Companies using this approach, which can be achieved using a customer success platform like Totango, have increased renewal rates by up to 25% by focusing on objective-driven success.
Step 1: Capture objectives during sales
The journey starts in the sales process. Too often, sales teams focus on closing deals without documenting the customer’s objectives — “why did they buy your product.” What problem are they solving? What does success look like for them? Capturing these objectives isn’t just a nice-to-have — it’s the foundation of post-sale success.
Train sales teams to ask pointed questions during the discovery phase, like:
- What’s the primary goal you’re aiming to achieve with our solution?
- What metrics will you use to measure success?
- What’s your timeline for seeing results?
This worksheet can help teams get started. Document these answers systematically. It’s best practice to use a customer success platform to log objectives as structured data, not free-form notes. For instance, Totango allows you to tag objectives to accounts, making them visible to CSMs, support, and product teams post-sale. This ensures that the handoff from sales to customer success isn’t a game of telephone.
Step 2: Standardize your methodology
Consistency is critical. Without a standard methodology, objectives can become vague or misaligned across teams. Develop a framework to define, prioritize, and track objectives. A proven approach is the SMART framework — objectives should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
For example:
- Vague: “Improve customer experience.”
- SMART: “Reduce average support ticket resolution time by 30% within 90 days by adopting our automation tools.”
Standardization also means aligning customer success and revenue teams on how objectives feed into health scores. If a customer’s objective is tied to feature adoption, ensure your health score reflects progress toward that goal, not just generic usage metrics. Totango’s AI-customer intelligence tool, Unison, allows you to customize health scores by weighting objective-specific metrics, ensuring clarity and focus, while also baking in customer sentiment and engagement to deliver accurate health scores, focused on value delivery.
Step 3: Track milestones for value realization
Objectives are long-term, but renewals depend on short-term wins. Break each objective into milestones that act as leading indicators of success. For instance, if a customer’s goal is to increase user adoption by 50% in a year, milestones might include:
- Week 4: Complete onboarding and train 80% of users.
- Month 3: Achieve 20% adoption of core features.
- Month 6: Measure a 10% improvement in user efficiency.
Use automation to track these milestones. Totango can send alerts when a milestone is at risk, for example if onboarding stalls or feature usage lags. This allows customer success managers (CSMs) to intervene proactively, offering training or resources to get the customer back on track. Regular check-ins, like quarterly business reviews (QBRs), should also focus on milestone progress, strengthening the customer’s confidence in their investment.
Step 4: Feed objectives into post-sale workflows
Objectives don’t live in a vacuum. They must drive action across teams. Integrate them into post-sale workflows to ensure every department contributes to value realization.
- CSMs can monitor milestone progress and coordinate interventions.
- Support teams can prioritize tickets that impact key objectives.
- Product managers should use objective data to inform feature development or usability fixes.
- Marketing can craft campaigns that celebrate milestone wins or nudge disengaged users.
Platforms like Totango streamline this by linking objectives to tasks, workflows, and health dashboards. When a milestone is missed, automated workflows can assign follow-ups or escalate issues, ensuring nothing slips through the cracks. This cross-functional approach turns objectives into a shared mission — not just a CSM’s job.
The payoff
Tracking customer objectives transforms renewals from a guessing game into a science. By capturing objectives early, using a standardized methodology, tracking milestones, and integrating them into workflows, you align your teams around the customer’s definition of success, and ultimately improve your team’s opportunity to accurately forecast revenue and drive growth.
The business goal isn’t to just reduce churn — it’s to drive revenue expansion by uncovering up-sell opportunities when customers hit their goals.
Recurring revenue is a rhythm — not one note. It’s a commitment to continuous improvement and innovation, led by the customers you’ve got. So, they meet their goals, and you meet yours.
Learn how Totango can help your business put revenue on repeat.
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