MetaCX Inc. yesterday launched what it calls an “outcomes-based” platform for managing customer relationships in sales scenarios involving digital products, saying it aims to close the loops that are often left open after a business-to-business transaction is completed.

The software-as-a-service application provides shared spaces where software buyers and sellers can define and measure targeted goals to ensure that buyers are getting what they expect from a product and to give sellers a chance to spot warning signs of failure. The platform ties into digital products and a variety of third-party services to measure outcomes and alert sales and customer service professionals to anomalies.

Founded by former executives from ExactTarget Inc., Salesforce.com Inc. and Pendo.io Inc., the company has spent two years in development fueled by a $14 million initial fund-raising round in 2018.

MetaCX says too many B2B software sales scenarios are defined by transactions rather than relationships. Follow-up is rare once a deal is done and products may be misused or under-used without the vendor being aware that there’s a problem.

Sellers often “are able to measure much of what happens after the deal closes but they haven’t tied that back to the sales process,” said Scott McCorkle (pictured), founder and chief executive of MetaCX. “Many processes are internally focused.”

The MetaCX platform aims to open up those processes so sellers and buyers can monitor success metrics after the deal closes. It provides cobranded and shared collaborative spaces where both parties in the deal can mutually set success metrics and use them to structure the sales cycle. Sales represents can use the platform to hand off the post-sales relationship to customer support teams who continue to align their efforts around promised outcomes. MetaCX says it can improve close rates by at least 25%.

The platform captures live performance data that can be used to document whether customers are achieving promised outcomes. For example, McCorkle said, if a customer registers for an educational webcast but fails to appear or if logging activity decreases, the software can generate alerts for follow-up action by sales or customer success representatives.

Conversely, if usage is increasing or customers are exceeding stated goals, sales organizations can be alerted to the opportunity for follow-on deals.

“You can think of it as a Google Doc, but it’s purpose-built for seller and buyer to define outcomes, tie them to signals that improve performance and make the customer part of the processes a business has created to manage the customer which, in my experience, is usually separate,” McCorkle said.

MetaCX uses an event-based architecture, a complex event processing engine and a data integration layer that enables organizations to instrument data from nearly any endpoint. The software comes with built-in integrations with product analytics tools from Pendo and Mixpanel Inc., customer relationship management platforms like Salesforce.com and HubSpot Inc., and data pipelines from sources like Segment.io Inc. and Snowflake Computing Inc., among others. The company plan to add hooks into additional sales- and marketing-related services in the future, McCorkle said.

Pricing is based on the number of customers and connections supported but fees only kick in after customers are brought on board, McCorkle said. “We don’t get paid until you get paid,” he said.

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