Liam R. fair question. I’ve seen some of the best products out there do this as a customer is working through the product, i.e. based on what a customer does as part of a POC or a free trial, there are certain milestone gates that they either pass or don’t pass through. Based on that, it’s possible to determine a customer’s intent. For example, the company I was at most recently had a pretty broad set of problems it could solve. We could tell from how a customer was integrating, i.e. using a “Quick import” option versus a more in-depth programatic integration if their use case was transitive or more permanent. It was a weak signal for various reasons that would require a whole separate conversation, however, it was predictive in 80% of the cases.
Beyond that, yes, often times requiring sales to capture the customer’s known intentions and not allowing CRM advancement until those intentions are captured and accepted, particularly for larger customers, was the right answer.
There is also a really important distinction to be made for “Platform” versus ” Product” companies. A platform that positions itself as something that can solve a variety of problems will require ongoing documentation and periodic re-evaluation, whereas a product point-solution can largely forego that, provided that the product is used as intended by the vast majority of customers.
