# Customer Goals & Success plans
**Where to find it:** Customer profile → Customer Goals tab **Who can access it:** All team members. Shareable with customers via Shared Space.
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**What it is**
Customer Goals gives your CS team a structured way to define and track what success looks like for each of your customers — not in generic product terms, but in the specific business outcomes your customers are trying to deliver for their own organizations.
Your customers sell outcomes to their customers. A CRM company sells sales growth. An HR software company sells hiring efficiency or cost reduction. An ERP company sells operational speed. An e-sign company sells faster contract cycles. A recruitment platform sells better hires. Customer Goals captures these outcomes, tracks progress over time, and connects them to the work your team is doing — and the AI reads goal progress as part of every customer assessment.
Goals are shareable with customers directly in Shared Space, making the definition of success explicit and visible to both sides of the relationship.
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**Types of goals**
**Business goals** Outcomes tied to what your customer is trying to achieve for their own business or their customers. Revenue growth, cost reduction, time savings, efficiency gains — any measurable outcome your product is supposed to help them reach.
**Adoption goals** The product usage milestones that serve as leading indicators of whether the business goal will be reached. Feature activation rates, user adoption, usage frequency, seat utilization — the signals that show your product is being used in the way that drives outcomes.
Both goal types typically coexist on the same customer. A well-defined success plan has a business goal at the top and adoption goals that serve as the milestones toward it. Adoption without a business goal is activity. A business goal without adoption milestones is aspiration. Together they form a success plan.
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**How progress is tracked**
Goal progress is tracked across multiple dimensions simultaneously:
**Timeline** — goals have a defined timeframe. Progress is tracked against the deadline, giving both your team and the customer a clear sense of whether they're on track.
**Linked projects and tasks** — you attach projects and tasks from Startdeliver directly to a goal. As work gets done — onboarding completed, features activated, training delivered — it counts as progress toward the goal.
**Usage and adoption data** — goals can be linked to actual product usage metrics from your connected analytics tools. If the adoption goal is 80% of users active monthly, Startdeliver reads the live usage data and reflects it in goal progress automatically.
**Milestones** — define specific checkpoints within a goal. Each milestone reached contributes to the overall progress picture.
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**How the AI uses goals**
Goal progress is one of the signals the AI reads when assessing a customer. But it doesn't treat it as a number — it reads it as context about the outcome your customer is trying to deliver for their own business.
The goal belongs to your customer's customer. A CRM company's CS team uses Startdeliver to track whether their customer — a business using the CRM — is on track to grow sales. An HR software company tracks whether their customer is on track to reduce hiring costs. An ERP company tracks whether their customer is saving time on operational processes. An e-sign company tracks whether their customer is closing contracts faster. The goal is what your customer sold their customer — the business outcome your product is supposed to enable.
The AI connects goal progress to everything else it knows about the account. If a customer's users are showing strong feature adoption, key metrics are moving in the right direction, and there's a business goal linked to this customer — the AI reads these signals together and produces an assessment that reflects trajectory toward that outcome, not just current health.
This produces specific, contextual recommended actions grounded in the customer's actual goal. For example: "This customer's users are showing strong adoption of core CRM features and pipeline activity is growing week over week. This aligns with their business goal of 50% sales growth over 12 months. Suggested action: propose activating the lead module in the next call to further accelerate pipeline and keep them on track toward their goal."
Goal progress also surfaces as a risk signal when customers are falling behind. A customer whose business goal is cost reduction through HR automation, but who has low adoption of the relevant features and no completed onboarding projects, is behind on the outcome they promised their own business. The AI reads that gap and flags it as a risk — even if other health signals look neutral.
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**Sharing goals with customers**
Goals are visible in Shared Space. When you share a goal with a customer, they see the goal, the timeline, the current progress, and the milestones — all in their Shared Space portal.
This makes success criteria explicit and mutual. Both sides know what the goal is, both sides can see whether it's on track, and the customer can see how the projects and tasks your team is running connect to the outcome they care about.
Shared goals shift the conversation from "here's how your product adoption is going" to "here's how we're tracking toward the business outcome you need to deliver." That's a fundamentally different and more valuable CS relationship.
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**How to set up a goal**
1. Open the customer profile and go to the Customer Goals tab
2. Click to create a new goal
3. Name it in terms of the customer's business outcome — be specific. "Grow sales pipeline by 50% in 12 months" not "improve sales performance"
4. Set the goal type: Business or Adoption
5. Set the timeline — start date and target date
6. Define milestones if relevant
7. Link projects and tasks from this customer's record that contribute to the goal
8. Link usage metrics if the goal is adoption-related
9. Choose whether to share the goal in Shared Space
10. Save
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**Common scenarios**
**CRM software customer — sales growth goal** Your customer sells a CRM. Their customer's goal is to grow sales by 50% in 12 months. You set a business goal reflecting this outcome and link it to the onboarding project, sales team training, and pipeline feature activation tasks. As usage data shows increasing pipeline activity and more deals being created, the AI reads this as on-track and suggests activating the lead module to further accelerate progress toward the goal.
**HR software customer — cost reduction goal** Your customer sells HR software. Their customer's goal is to reduce cost-per-hire by 30% over the year. You set a business goal and link it to the recruitment workflow activation project and user adoption milestones. If adoption of the relevant features is lagging six months in, the AI flags this as behind on goals and at risk — even if support health looks fine.
**E-sign customer — contract speed goal** Your customer sells e-sign software. Their customer's goal is to reduce average contract turnaround from 5 days to 1 day. You set the business goal and link it to the template setup project and user training tasks. As turnaround time metrics improve, the AI reads this as positive trajectory and surfaces it in the assessment with a recommended action to showcase the ROI in the next Business Review.
**ERP customer — operational efficiency goal** Your customer sells ERP software. Their customer's goal is to reduce manual data entry time by 40% through automation. You set adoption goals around automation feature usage and link them to the implementation project. Low automation adoption despite completed onboarding is flagged by the AI as a gap between where they are and where they need to be.
**Business Review preparation** Goals give your CSM a concrete basis for every Business Review. Instead of presenting a health score, they present: here's what we committed to, here's where we are against the timeline, here's what the data shows about trajectory, and here's what we're doing next to keep you on track. The goal becomes the structure of the entire conversation.
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