From symptom to impact
Customers rarely open with their real problem. They open with a symptom. In discovery I work through three levels, from what the customer says, to why it's happening, to what it costs the business. This page applies that to Haulio, the customer in the Kova success plan, and maps their workflow before and after Kova.
L1, L2, L3
| Level | What we found at Haulio | Who says it | Where it feeds MEDDPICC |
|---|---|---|---|
| L1 · Symptom The individual pain | “We keep losing renewals we didn't see coming.” | CSMs, and Rachel in the first call | Identify pain |
| L2 · Root cause The operational problem, at team level | Account health signals sit in four tools. Each CSM pulls them by hand once a week and judges risk their own way, so warning signs are days old and inconsistent by the time anyone acts. | Rachel and RevOps | Decision criteria |
| L3 · Business impact Why it matters commercially | £180k of renewals lost last quarter. Gross revenue retention at 88% against a 93% target. A renewal forecast the CRO can't rely on. | Daniel, the CRO | Metrics and economic buyer |
Each level usually has a different owner. A deal sold only at L1 stalls when it reaches someone who cares about L3.
Getting from L1 to L2
Five Whys, as it went in the Haulio discovery call:
- Why did you lose those renewals? The customers had been unhappy for months, and we didn't act.
- Why didn't you act? We didn't know until the renewal conversation.
- Why didn't you know? The signs were there: usage falling, tickets piling up, a champion leaving. But they were spread across Segment, Zendesk and HubSpot.
- Why weren't they brought together? Each CSM does it by hand once a week across 55 accounts, and in busy weeks it gets skipped.
- Why by hand? Nothing joins the data up, and there's no shared definition of a healthy account.
That last answer is the L2 root cause. It's what Kova has to fix, and it's where the before-and-after below starts.
Before Kova
Red outlines are manual steps. Numbers mark the bottlenecks.
- Four tools, by hand. About 2 hours per CSM every Monday, across 55 accounts. 12 CSM-hours a week for the team.
- Risk judged by feel. Six CSMs, six definitions of “at risk”. Rachel can't compare accounts across the team.
- A weekly batch. By Tuesday's review, a signal can be 7 days old. Anything that happens on a Wednesday waits almost a week.
- Late outreach. Three hand-offs before anyone contacts the customer: tools to spreadsheet, spreadsheet to meeting, meeting to CSM. The lost renewals were spotted in their final weeks.
After Kova
Green numbers show where each bottleneck is removed. Dashed lines happen automatically.
- No manual pulls. HubSpot, Zendesk, Segment and Stripe send events to Kova as things happen.
- One definition of risk. Every account is scored by the same rules, calibrated against Haulio's own lost renewals, with the reasons shown.
- No waiting for Tuesday. The alert reaches the CSM when the account slips. The Monday review covers exceptions, not data gathering.
- One hand-off. Alert to CSM, same day, with a suggested next step.
What changes, level by level
| Level | Measure | Before | After (90-day target) |
|---|---|---|---|
| L1 | Renewals lost without a warning first | 3 last quarter | 0 |
| L2 | Monday review time per CSM | About 3 hours | Under 45 minutes |
| L2 | Age of a signal when someone sees it | Up to 7 days | Minutes |
| L2 | Hand-offs before the customer hears from us | 3 | 1 |
| L2 | At-risk alerts acted on within 2 working days | Not measured | 80% |
| L3 | Gross revenue retention | 88% | Trending to 93% within the year |
Haulio and its numbers are fictional. The same measures are the ones the success plan reports against at 90 days.
How I use this
- Start where the customer starts. Write down their L1 in their own words. It's the line they'll recognise when you play it back.
- Ask why until you reach something a process or a tool causes. That's L2, and it's what the product has to fix. Map the current workflow with the people who do it, and mark where time is lost, where hand-offs happen and where things get missed.
- Confirm L3 with the person who owns the number. The impact has to be in their words and their figures, or the business case won't survive procurement.
- Play all three back before the demo. Then show only what moves each level. The enablement kit has the questions I use at each level.