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Find out why CS Angel invested in Foresight’s $1.6m seed round alongside Idea Fund Partners, CreativeCo and other private investors.
The first thing to know about Customer Success (CS) is that the craft is clearly spelled out in the name. You create and deploy CS programs, to make your customers successful. By defining, delivering and demonstrating your customers desired outcomes, you earn the right to renew, expand their spend and open the door to advocacy opportunities. In short, you cannot generate more revenue from customers without first delivering value.
The challenge is that not every customer defines success in the same way. The magnitude of this problem is tested at scale, particularly with Enterprise customers who have numerous teams with various business objectives and complex requirements. In theory, CSMs are expected to navigate this through keeping joint customer Success Plans up to date however in practice very few are able to achieve this. This is a pain that Nigel Hammond and Sagar Shukla, Co-Founders of Foresight (pictured above left to right) experienced as they led global post-sales teams.They built Foresight to create a highly effective, user friendly bridge between customers and the people serving them that would uncover the customer’s perception of value.
Foresight does this by quantifiably measuring customer outcomes, including how much value executive buyers, champions, and end users are getting from your solution. Leveraging this customer-generated insight, the platform automatically generates Value Realization Plans (think: next gen Mutual Success Plans) that recommend actions post-sales reps should take to upsell and expand accounts, as well as curb churn. They’ve also launched ValueAI™ which produces market insights broken down by customer segment, enabling Post-Sales leaders to collaborate effectively with Sales, Marketing, and Product to implement changes that drive more revenue. The foundation of Foresight's platform rests on a proprietary data model, purpose-built for capturing Customer Perception of Value that seamlessly integrates with CRMs.
So, why did we invest in Foresight when there are Customer Success Platforms out there? 1. Value Assumptions v Perceived Value
Unlike existing CSPs and tools that rely on “inside out” assumptions of value such as product usage, CSM sentiment, and health scores, Foresight measures outcomes and value directly from the customer. This “outside in” approach quantifies value into a score that can be managed and improved, that ties directly to revenue. Reporting provides insights down to the individual use case level, enabling post-sales to focus on actions that will actually move the value needle with customers. Even though product usage may be high and health score “green”, a customer will still churn if they aren’t getting value. With Foresight, you have a stronger chance of unlocking revenue because the customer’s perception of value is their reality. 2. Architecture Built On Value
Most metrics which attempt to track value today, such as NPS or CSAT, are flat. They do not measure the multidimensional nature of a customer engaging with your platform, which includes their desired business outcomes, key workflows your solution supports, and end users “Jobs to Be Done”. Foresight’s data architecture is purpose-built to measure and improve the complexities of Customer Value, tracking how value changes across stakeholders, teams, and even across time. For existing platforms, it would require an entire re-architecting of their systems to account for the complex structure of multidimensional value.
3. How they Capture Data
Foresight’s primary source of Customer Value data is through their Value Assessments. These personalized questionnaires are sent to customers ahead of an account review or QBR and take <5 minutes to complete. Customers actually love completing these assessments and Foresight generates a response rate of >70%, which is remarkably higher than the standard 5-7% completion rate for NPS or CSAT. We believe that the appetite for customers to complete value assessments is rooted in the increasing pressure on buyers to prove the value of their investments.
4. Customer-Owned Value Realization Plans (aka Success Plans)
Natalie Hayes, Director of Account Management at Intapp (a publicly traded enterprise SaaS company) was able to deliver a 150% ROI on Foresight within 3 months of usage. Her team works in tandem with CSMs who are tasked with retaining and expanding their client base. “Our key priorities are to be less reactive, more efficient and more strategic” said Natalie. Her team leverages Foresight by sending out Value Assessments ahead of key touchpoints in their customer journey (i.e. account transitions, renewal periods), allowing them to bring Value Realization Plans ready to collaborate with customers during their meetings. According to Natalie, “We’ve seen incredible results and we’re only just getting started” including product upsell, license expansions and churn risk mitigation. See case study here.
What do our angels say about Foresight? “When building a CS engine, it's important to remember that your customer's perception of value is their reality. By using Foresight's value assessments, CS leaders can unlock this perception at scale, identifying more ways to drive revenue by improving value.”
- Gemma Cipriani-Espineira, Founder at CS Angel
“Foresight helps me as a CSM get engagement with my Decision Makers so I can come prepared to EBRs with what matters to them - I spend a lot of time planning for each EBR going through notes, usage, and feature adoption and I want to make it count. The feedback from my customers was great after filling out the Value Assessment. With the help of Foresight, I managed to identify 2 expansion opps and 1 churn risk I wasn't aware of which ultimately led me to become an angel investor in the company.”
- Guy Rahamim, Enterprise CS at LinearB
“The best measure of an organization's success is the impact that it makes on its customer's business. This is well known in the CS community, yet we often struggle to effectively capture or measure this 'verified outcome' as a result of a product or service. Foresight's Value Assessments are a powerful tool that help to measure this important metric of verified outcomes, and provide “foresight” directly into the business impact for your customers.”- Bhumika Arora, Founder at Ruffday Services
“Ongoing alignment on value is the number one motion that drives renewals; Foresight provides a non-squishy way of doing that, making it easy for customers and companies to talk hard value.”- Diane Gordon, CCO at Yotta
Learn more about Foresight and register for a demo here: https://gainforesight.co/valuepro/
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