“B2B sales and marketing organizations often focus most of their time, energy, and budget on acquiring new accounts, overlooking significant opportunities to improve retention and growth within their existing base.” Forrester, Five Perspective Shifts Sales And Revenue Operations Leaders Need To Make In 2022
Recurring revenue is the heart of an efficient revenue engine in any business. But growth doesn’t happen by accident. Leaning on a few superstar members of your sales team might help you make numbers for now, but it isn’t a sustainable path towards growth.
To help revenue teams be more customer-centric, Winning by Design released their methodology for recurring revenue on an open standard with the goal of sharing this valuable intellectual property with the B2B community. Their framework, SPICED, is now available at thescienceofrevenue.com.
A cornerstone of the SPICED framework is making sure your marketing, sales, and customer success teams are aligned and speaking the same language. This is key to recurring revenue and growth.
In a recent webinar, we shared an app we built to help you implement SPICED within Salesforce at your organization. Below, we’ll explain the framework and review how you can use this app to enhance your revenue team’s coordination.
What is SPICED?
SPICED is a framework that allows you to easily break down, organize, and share customer information across teams over time. SPICED establishes a shared vocabulary that allows members of different revenue teams to understand the customer’s story and ensure they’re delivering the impact the customer signed on for in the first place.
The SPICED methodology is about maintaining the customer relationship post-sale and breaking down the information silos that can exist between teams to communicate more efficiently. This helps sales understand marketing leads, and customer success understand why a customer originally closed the deal.
When everyone customer-facing at your org speaks the same language and understands exactly what the customer needs to succeed, this reduces dependence on a few key people or the perfect new hire.
Using the strategies Winning by Design has developed through years of research better positions you to onboard new people, develop your team, and create a stable structure for growth.
The shared vocabulary
For everyone on your revenue teams to speak the same language, there must be a shared set of definitions. SPICED is an acronym that creates a cohesive communication standard across your company. It stands for Situation, Pain, Impact, Critical Event, and Decision.
Situation
SPICED starts by identifying your customer, who they are as a business, and what they need. This means everything from the size of the company, their industry, what kind of technology stack they have, their go-to-market strategy, and their growth goals.
These details help determine if this customer is a fit for your business, and also calculate how your org can deliver the impact they’re after.
Pain
Situation doesn't necessarily dictate the need, challenge, or pain the prospect is experiencing.
Pains can come from external or internal challenges. There could be a new regulation or an outside security audit, or perhaps the customer has a particular area of their process that's not working. Maybe the company deployed new technology and needs some additional support.
Pain is about understanding distinctly what experience or challenge a customer is having so that you can determine the next component in SPICED, which is I for impact.
Impact
On the flip side of pain is impacted; what could be if we cured that pain. The results the customer wants to achieve determine the potential impact, which is the reason any customer makes a deal.
Results can be business-oriented, such as increasing revenue by 200% or solving a lingering issue in the customer journey. Or results can be emotional and personal. For instance, if a sales manager selects the right tools, they’ll be made a hero or could earn a promotion.
Critical Event
Impacts are broad and may have implications that can range from the next two weeks to the next ten years. That’s why the C and E in SPICED stand for critical event, which grounds the impact and ties it to a particular urgency.
Critical events can manifest in many ways and change over time. A critical event could be an upcoming board meeting that will determine budget. It could be an external deadline to adhere to a regulation. Or it could be an upcoming review to which an employee wants to bring some tangible results. In the framework of recurring revenue, these impacts change over time, and continuing to deliver on them as they change will lead to renewed and expanded deals.
Decision
The final component in SPICED stands for decision, as in how is it made and who’s part of making it. Plus, who is going to evaluate whether or not you've delivered impact? Knowing the players is key to making the right play and winning the deal.
These factors will change based on circumstance and time. A decision for a new customer acquisition will be different from a renewal, as will a cross or upsell. Tracking how these decisions are made from the start will help you target the right people and find the right path of entry.
The Skuid approach: designing human-centered experiences
There are a lot of apps on the market that aim to enhance or aid the sales process, but they’re often lacking when it comes to user experience.
At Skuid, our mission is to make enterprise apps more human. As proponents of human-centered design, our process is to start with what users desire, build what they need, and watch adoption and productivity follow.
This closely follows the SPICED framework for recurring revenue: providing customers continued support to deliver continuous impact and eliminating frustrating hang-ups like having to explain a situation over and over, or implementing hard-to-use business apps that result in low adoption.
Companies often think aversion to change causes poor adoption. On the contrary, users are happy to change when the shift is easy, intuitive, and helps them do their job more effectively.
By designing experiences that put the user at the center, you can build apps that users adopt with enthusiasm, and that increase productivity and accelerate impact to customers.
Bringing the SPICED methodology to life with Skuid and Salesforce
Designing human experiences that help increase productivity and impact is what Skuid is all about. So, in an effort to help companies accelerate SPICED framework adoption, Skuid developed the SPICED qualification app, which is free and available on the Salesforce AppExchange. The app has two parts, which we’ll explain below.
The SPICED opportunity module
The SPICED opportunity module helps you qualify and assess the maturity of opportunities which in turn creates better visibility and knowledge among teams. Reps enter a score for each component of SPICED along with notes. The module calculates a total maturity score based on a formula Skuid developed with Winning by Design, specifically for the opportunities phase. The score is calculated by looking at which components are the most important and give you the best chance at winning.
Users can also easily see when the SPICED score was last updated and view score history to see what’s changed, how the opportunity has developed, and the pace at which the opportunity has matured. Over time, this information can help revenue operations leaders identify trends and patterns in their opportunity history to better inform their process and forecasting.
The SPICED manager dashboard
The SPICED manager dashboard allows a manager to quickly view all their team’s opportunities and the score associated with those opportunities. This then allows managers to better manage pipeline and more accurately forecast. Managers can see which opportunities are fully developed and which need more discovery.
In the dashboard, managers can see an overview of all opportunities and scores, filtered by range and time. Scores are sorted into low (1–8), mid (9–48), and high (49+), and can be filtered by this quarter, next quarter, last quarter, this year, next year, and last year. Opportunities in the high range mean that the rep feels confident the deal will close this quarter. If an opportunity is the middle range, it means that more discovery is needed to understand if and when the deal can close. Opportunities in the low range mean that more information is needed and that these likely won’t close this quarter. Anyone wanting additional customization can achieve it by purchasing a Skuid license.
Recurring impact equals recurring revenue
When you can show customers that you’re helping them reach their goals, renewals and expansions are bound to follow. By adopting a common language of recurring revenue across your company, you can cultivate that trust with your customers across teams, deliver better impact, and grow through effective strategy instead of luck.
With the SPICED app, you can capture the impact a customer wants and how you can continually deliver it. Having a record of customer engagement from lead to opportunity to customer success creates a common understanding and allows your team to implement continuous delivery—instead of losing sight of a customer’s goals once they move to the post-sales part of the journey.
