How one Proof Point showed we were saving our customer $1M per day

Being able to take credit for growing our clients' revenue, reducing their costs, or helping them mitigate risks threatening their business is a key growth driver for building Vital Partnerships.

Then why do so few account teams get credit for the ROI they generate for their clients? Forrester research on B2B leadership dashboards found that 70% of the metrics leaders track measure value to their own organization.

Only 30% measure the business value delivered to the customer.

Many will read these stats and say, "We ask our clients for feedback all the time!" Yes, you do, and many conduct customer reviews and send out surveys. These capture client sentiment. But the data is focused on us, not them. The information points to the things we want to know about ourselves, and it's usually written in our language, not the customer's.

It's soft, subjective evidence that offers little reference to actual customer ROI. This type of feedback has a short lifespan because it's static in nature—just a snapshot in time of what a few individuals at the client think about our relationship.

The Proof Point, however, is a strategic approach to capturing a measurement of the business impact your service produced for the client. It's hard, objective evidence of actual value communicated using the customer's metrics, their language, and their point of view. It takes more time to develop, execute, and capture, which is why we need a strategy at the beginning, when the relationship starts.

Why are so many B2B organizations not capturing Proof Points?

You've likely heard the saying, "What gets measured gets done." Most companies do a great job of measuring their own business results and a poor job of measuring their clients' results. Capturing Proof Points is often not part of the system account teams are running at any account. Landing deals is more heavily weighted than expanding or protecting them. But signing a new contract is just 1% of the relationship. The other 99% of the time, we should be proving the client made the right choice in selecting our team over the alternatives.

One of my largest accounts was behind in key performance metrics with several of their customers. If one of their projects was behind by one day, the estimated direct cost was $55K per day, plus another $800K per day in lost revenue. So, close to $1M every day in losses. The issue was not tied to our services, nor did any penalties or incentives flow down to our contract. This was truly a performance issue our client was facing that was costing their customers millions each day.

We met with them, learned the root cause of the issue, and determined how to solve it. It required some new capabilities and investments, but we were able to develop an immediate fix that would get them back to 100% compliance on their contract. Here are the details.

Challenge: The client was behind on delivery of service by an average of 30 days across multiple projects in a key performance area.

Result: $30M in lost revenue and direct costs.

Client Metric: Achieve 95% on-time delivery every 5 days (-30).

Outcomes: We co-developed an immediate solution that brought the client back to delivering 95% every 5 days.

Proof Point: The "A" solution we installed for "B" client helped them retain several key customer projects that averaged $10M each. The "A" solution was expanded to include more projects and would be extended several times until "B" client was in good standing with their customer's compliance standards.

This client would also start seeing incentives from their customer for meeting their metrics, such as bonuses, renewals, and expansion opportunities. This was objective evidence of actual value communicated using the customer's metrics, their language, and their point of view. If your success doesn't point to their success, then it's not a Proof Point.

This client would go on to be a Vital Partnership that has lasted 20+ years. It's amazing to think that the opportunity to truly help our client solve a critical business problem worth millions in revenue and billions in reputation could have landed with another vendor. But it didn't, because we were running the system we used to develop and capture Proof Points like these. While the competition was taking orders and tracking their successes, our playbook had us focusing on the customer's success, and that made ALL the difference.

Proof Points is just 1 of the 21 Growth Drivers we take on in the Vitality Index, the Key Account Growth System. It belongs in the domain of key account growth we call Competitiveness.

For this Growth Driver, we handcrafted close to 50 of the 1,200+ plays in our system at every level of partnership. The Vitality Index will diagnose and score how well you are capturing Proof Points, build the exact growth strategy the team needs now to increase opportunity in this area, and help guide your execution until you become a Vital Partner to your account.

Growing key accounts can be complex, so we distilled this type of work into a system everyone can use, no matter what level of experience you bring to the table. It was built from the same approach we used to create some of the largest partnerships in our industry that have lasted decades and are still running.

Winning, growing, and protecting key accounts has been our life's work for the past 30 years. In the Vitality Index, we don't tell you what to do. We show you, because we lived it. This is the system we wished we had years ago. But now, it's here! If becoming a top-producing account team is important to you, then the Vitality Index can help.

We made a sample for you to try. This is not the actual system, but it will show you a practical plan for growing a live customer in your portfolio. This snapshot will give you a diagnostic, analysis, and an actual growth plan for where you currently sit across two of the seven Domains: Relationships and Competitiveness.