Customer Experience x RevOps Framework for B2B SaaS Startups
November 2023
CX x RevOps Journey
Customer experience (CX) journeys provide a view into how a customer engages with your company. They help you build empathy with the customer, capture customer insights and feedback, design a cohesive end-to-end experience, and serve as a tool for strategic planning and innovation. CX journeys also map to a company's internal processes and operations, including revenue, revealing how these internal functions directly impact CX. In this post I present a framework that combines the CX and Revenue journeys for a B2B SaaS startup.
Revenue follows the customer experience
I created the "CX x RevOps Framework", inspired by the Bow Tie Revenue Model. Mapped together, the CX and Revenue journeys help us understand how the motions of a customer relate to the go-to-market and revenue motions of a company. For example, the "Learn", "Select" and "Buy" stages of the CX journey correspond to a customer progressing as a"Sales Qualified Lead", "Opportunity", and "New Customer" in the revenue journey. It is a healthy reminder that the way a startup orchestrates marketing, sales, and customer success define the customer experience.
Example: Close up showing alignment of customer and revenue journeys
A few points on how I designed this framework:
Lead with CX
I lead with the CX journey so we don't lose sight of the customer perspective. It's a reminder to privilege the customer voice and build the business around the needs of the customer. Unlike most CX journeys, I've started it with an "Identify" stage wherein the customer first discovers the problem. It may be hours, days, or years from when the customer realizes they have a problem to the moment they believe they've solved it (downstream in the "Impact" stage).
Customer vs business centered viewpoints
The CX journey represents a customer-centered view whereas the revenue journey represents a business-centered view. The latter describes what a business is doing "backstage", that is, out of view of the customer, to define and codify the customer behavior from a revenue standpoint.
Simple & self-explanatory
To me, the Bow Tie model is visually complicated -- there a lot of overlapping metrics that are difficult to decipher given all the of the acronyms. My goal is to create a framework that is self-explanatory and comprehensive but not visually overwhelming.
Data driven
The journey is a helpful way to visually map out what metrics define success from a customer and revenue perspective and when these metrics are captured. Quantitative data like win rate, MRR, and LTV tell a more dynamic CX story.
Product & engineering
While the journey appears largely owned and implemented by sales, marketing, and customer success, it's worth noting that product and engineering teams play a critical and underlying role -- they should be learning from the customer at every stage and continually iterating on the experience so it meets the customer's needs.
Non-linear in reality
Like any other visual journey I've created, the journey itself is non-linear -- it can repeat itself, skip stages, and behave chaotically.
Download the PDF here. I'd love to hear how you have used similar types of frameworks in your own practice and how this one might be helpful to you.
Tags: Revenue Operations, Customer Experience, Customer Journey, Sales, Product, Customer Success