Note: This post originally published on my LinkedIn account.

Introducing the Sato Curve

I was in a conference room in Saba’s Tokyo office in May 2019 with my colleagues, Shintaro Sato and Mike Warren. They explained a challenge that they were having with customer satisfaction. While the Japanese sales team was seeing sales growth with a solution sales model, customer satisfaction fell off significantly during the customer’s onboarding and implementation. As we talked, Sato-san drew a diagram on the whiteboard like this:

He explained that customer satisfaction was highest as the sales cycle was ending and that lengthy services times, possibly mis-scoped aspects of the implementation work, requirements that were lost in the hand-off from Sales to Services, lengthy project time, lengthy support times, etc., only served to reduce satisfaction. (The actual drawing from our discussion is in the photo below.)

The biggest problem that Mike and Sato-san saw is that we were selling a success story, but then the customer immediately experienced an implementation that was focused on twisting the nuts and bolts and pulling the levers of the application and then later was transitioned to a support experience focused on break-fix. We needed to scope accurately with consistency, have strong hand-offs throughout, and , most importantly, maintain the connection to the customer’s story – their business reasons for buying – throughout the customer journey.

This resonated deeply with me. Sato-san was doing the one thing I have always wanted a sales team to do, connect to the buyer’s business objectives. And we were losing the plot after the customer signed! A great sales effort was quickly in vain with some key accounts.

What I have realized is that the Sato Curve not only maps the familiar customer journey map to the customer experience, it is a simple tool to expand responsibility and accountability for customer success to every team in our company.

Mike dubbed the whiteboard scribblings pictured in both the photo and diagram above the “Sato Curve”, after its creator. I have thought about the Sato curve a lot since then and have evolved it over the past year in a few presentations. What I have realized is that the Sato Curve not only maps the familiar customer journey map to the customer experience, it is a simple tool to expand responsibility and accountability for customer success to every team in our company.

Building your own Sato Curve

Creating your own Sato curve can be valuable for understanding how to improve your lead generation, release processes, selling, services, etc. Just as Mike, Sato-san, and I started this in a conference room in Tokyo, I recommend that you do it with a group of colleagues.

Below are the steps for building your own Sato curve.

1. Define your customer journey stages and touchpoints

Most sales or customer success teams already have a customer journey defined in varying levels of details. I’ve created hypothetical customer journey stages in the timeline below:

(You may view your customer’s journey quite differently, which is okay. The process I’m going to describe can be adapted to any journey framework.)

It is easy to granularly break each journey stage into touchpoints that a customer might or must experience. For example, prospects might Find out about your company and your products on G2.com or Capterra or through a Google search or on Linkedin or on your website or at a tradeshow or some combination of all of the above. And their experience of Buying could involve interaction with your BDR team and will inevitably involve scoping calls, quotes, and contracts.

2. Assess the customer’s experience

For each stage and each transaction, ask

What do our prospects or customers want? What is the business outcome they need?
What is the experience they want to have?
Is their experience high or low? Is their experience good or bad?

Then map it.

By asking these types of questions for every stage (and every transaction if you have gotten that granular), you can easily build your own Sato curve, as in the simple qualitative assessment below for a hypothetical company that has good lead generation through digital marketing and trials but poor conversion.

Gainsight and Salesforce define customer success as customer outcomes plus customer experience, and we are reflecting the importance of both in the Sato curve model. It is possible to have a prospective buyer who is a detractor before they have even interacted with a human being at our company. It is possible to have customers that we think have “green” health scores who are also detractors because they aren’t achieving their objectives or find us hard to work with.

Do a sanity check after you and your team have scored and plotted. If, for example, you think your marketing materials are great and easy to find, but you’re not generating many marketing-qualified leads (MQL’s), then maybe your score isn’t correct. If you think your support portal is great but your case deflection rate is low, then, again, maybe you’re assessment is not correct. Do your best to put your customer hat on. By clearly defining the customer outcome and desired experience for each transaction, you should be able to get a solid qualitative assessment of how your customers are doing on their journey with you.

3. Optionally add more objective scoring

Your team can add a more objective scoring measure. If you have a detailed list of touchpoints or each stage in the customer journey, you can also move to this to a spreadsheet to gather and average scores from multiple colleagues and customers.

Here is one possible way to add more objective scoring:

Score 1-10 for how well customers achieve their objectives for the stage
Score 1-10 for how easily customers achieve their objectives for the stage
Average the two together to get the score for the stage
Plot all the scores and connect the dots for your Sato curve

This might take a few hours with your team or even a few weeks if you’re surveying a large number of colleagues and customers, but it is an easy way to begin to think more holistically about your customers’ experience with your company.

4. Optionally create multiple customer journey maps

You can additionally expand your assessment of the customer experience with your company and products

By region or country
By product segment or individual product
By customer segment
By complexity of buying needs
By channel

This will result in multiple Sato curves that can have value for specific product or region teams.

Conclusion

Sato-san and Mike’s conversation with me led to changes in how we approached enterprise buyers in Japan. We decided to leverage senior services consultants in the buying process to make sure that the resulting SOW was accurately scoped and, more importantly, that it reinforced the buying story, that it connected the dots from our solution-building to the customer’s business needs. We also decided to keep the senior consultant engaged as the lead consultant throughout the implementation work after the customer signed.

These simple changes were effective in improving the Sato curve in Saba’s Japan business. I believe conducting this exercise can similarly lead to a better cross-team alignment in how your marketing, sales, services, support, and customer success functions address buyer/customer needs.

In a subsequent post, I will present what to do with this assessment to enlist your Product, Sales, Services, and Customer Success teams in improving the customer experience.