are you articulating the right value in CS? 🤔

"We deliver immense value to our customers."

It's the standard claim of every SaaS company. But when pressed, many CS leaders struggle to articulate precisely what value they deliver and why it matters.

This distinction isn't just semantics; the type of value you provide fundamentally shapes your sales, implementation, success demonstration, sales cycle length, and renewal rates.

Nucleus Research highlights a clear hierarchy of value that determines how quickly customers recognize and act on your promised benefits. Understanding where your offering sits in this hierarchy is crucial for an effective CS strategy.

Let's explore the four levels of the value pyramid and what they mean for your CS approach...

The Four-Order Value Framework

Value isn't monolithic. It comes in distinct categories, each with different implications for proving your worth to customers:

1. Direct Value (First Order Benefits)

This is the gold standard: tangible outcomes with immediate financial impact, like direct cost reduction, revenue increase, or headcount avoidance. Recognition is fast; customer belief is high. Think of Charleston-based SIB, whose entire model is reducing vendor costs – the savings hit the bottom line, no translation needed.

2. Semi-direct Value (Second Order Benefits)

Here, you provide inputs that lead to direct financial outcomes, such as marketing qualified leads (like HubSpot generates), conversion optimization, or sales enablement tools. Recognition is short to medium-term, with moderate to high customer belief. The connection to financial impact requires one clear step: the customer must convert your input (e.g., leads) into their desired outcome (e.g., closed business). This slight distance needs intentional value-tracking.

3. Indirect Value (Third Order Benefits)

This primarily manifests as productivity increases that eventually translate to business outcomes, like time savings from a project management tool, process efficiency, or collaboration improvements. Recognition can take medium to long-term, with moderate customer belief. That saved time could allow a team to handle more work without adding headcount, but the connection to hard financials isn't immediate or guaranteed, making it a bigger challenge to prove early on.

4. Very Indirect Value (Fourth Order Benefits)

These are intangible improvement with distant financial connection, such as improved visibility, employee satisfaction, or risk reduction. Think board reporting tools or employee engagement platforms. Time to recognition is long-term, and customer belief can be low to moderate initially. The value is real, but it's several steps removed from direct financial impact, requiring multiple assumptions and time to prove out.

The CS Implications of Your Value Order

Where your solution primarily sits has profound implications for your CS strategy. If you deliver mainly first-order benefits, your CS team must focus on tracking and showcasing that direct financial impact. Build QBRs around achieved cost savings or revenue gains, and train CSMs to speak fluent ROI.

For second-order benefits, the key is to help customers connect your inputs to their desired outcomes. Implement joint tracking of both your provided input and the customer's achieved results, creating intermediate success metrics that predict financial impact.

When dealing with third-order benefits, invest heavily in usage analytics to prove adoption and time savings. Work with customers to quantify the financial value of that saved time and focus on quick wins, demonstrating immediate productivity improvements and helping them translate those gains into business impact.

And for fourth-order benefits, CS must set realistic expectations about value demonstration timelines. Focus on customer sentiment and satisfaction as leading indicators, using case studies to showcase long-term transformations and consistently reinforce the connection between intangible improvements and eventual business outcomes.

The Truth About Most SaaS

Most SaaS solutions offer a mix of these value orders. The key is knowing where your primary value proposition lands and how your CS team can bridge the gap if it's not first or second order.

The further your solution is from direct financial benefits, the more CS must work to connect the dots between your product's impact and the financial outcomes customers ultimately seek.

Transforming Your Value Approach

To adapt your CS strategy based on your place in the value hierarchy, honestly assess your true value order — don't delude yourself. If you're not delivering first-order benefits, meticulously map the steps from your solution to financial outcomes. Then, build "value-translation" frameworks and tools that help customers (and your team) connect lower-order benefits to higher-order impacts. Train CSMs to be "value detectives", hunting for these connections, and ensure your customer journey and value recognition timelines are realistic for the type of value you primarily deliver.

Remember: building a great SaaS business without providing obvious first-order benefits is possible. But it means your CS team is responsible forconnecting the dots between what you actually deliver and the financial impacts your customers ultimately seek.

This isn't optional — it's the essence of true customer success in a world where not all value is created equal.

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