How to turn a beloved discovery framework into a company wide operating model for growth, retention, and advocacy
SPICED (Situation, Pain, Impact, Critical Event, Decision) is often treated as a sales technique. It’s far more powerful as a shared language across your entire customer lifecycle. When you combine SPICED with a customer platform like Planhat, you turn qualitative insight into operational workflow with data, playbooks, health signals, and cross functional accountability.
In this article, we’ll show how to apply SPICED from first touch to renewal and expansion, and how to instrument each step in Planhat so your strategy actually gets executed.
Why SPICED for the whole lifecycle?
Consistency Sales, Success, Product, and Leadership all anchor on the same understanding of why the customer buys and what must change.
Continuity No more insight amnesia after handoffs. SPICED fields follow the customer and drive onboarding, adoption, and value moments.
Causality You can connect Pain, Impact, and Critical Event to outcomes such as time to value, retention, and expansion, and manage risk proactively.
The SPICED elements
Situation Where the customer is today, such as stack, organization, process, and KPIs.
Pain What’s broken or too costly to continue.
Impact Quantified upside of solving the pain, expressed in time, cost, revenue, or risk.
Critical Event The deadline or trigger that makes doing nothing unacceptable.
Decision Who decides, how they decide, and according to which criteria.
The trick is to persist each element in Planhat and use it to drive playbooks, alerts, and Success Plans, not just notes in a CRM.
Mapping SPICED to the customer lifecycle
1. Prospecting & Marketing
Goal: Attract the right buyers with the right message.
SPICED alignment: Situational signals define your ICP such as industry, ARR, team size, or stack. Pains inform messaging and content offers. Critical Events guide campaign timing, for example fiscal year end or compliance dates.
Planhat instrumentation: Enrich leads and accounts with situational fields via integrations. Create list views and segments matching Pains and Critical Events to route to SDRs. Track early intent and map to SPICED hypotheses for discovery.
Output artifact: Account Profile in Planhat with pre filled Situation Hypotheses and a checklist for validating Pains.
2. Sales & Discovery
Goal: Validate Pain, estimate Impact, confirm Critical Event, and understand Decision.
SPICED alignment: Capture pains as structured fields, not only call notes. Translate pains into measurable impact ranges. Document Decision units such as economic buyers, champions, and influencers with their criteria.
Planhat instrumentation: Custom fields for SPICED elements at Account and Opportunity level. Discovery template with Impact metrics and Target State. Workflow triggers an internal alignment task when the Critical Event is within 60 days.
Output artifact: SPICED Summary, a one page canonical record of why we’re doing this and how we’ll prove value.
3. Onboarding & Implementation
Goal: Compress time to value by aligning implementation to SPICED.
SPICED alignment: Convert Impact into Value Milestones such as first value, core value, and proven value. Tie the Critical Event to a backward plan with milestones and owners.
Planhat instrumentation: Success Plan with goals derived from Impact. Project tasks with dependencies and alerts for slippage against the Critical Event. Health score inputs include milestone progress, stakeholder engagement, and executive readouts.
Output artifact: Executive Onboarding Brief, a one slide overview linking Pain, Milestones, and the Critical Event date.
4. Adoption & Value Realization
Goal: Operationalize value, make it visible, and expand champions.
SPICED alignment: Monitor leading indicators tied to Impact such as usage, cycle times, and error rates. Maintain a living view of Pains, resolved versus emergent, and update Situation as the organization evolves.
Planhat instrumentation: Product and usage data mapped to Impact metrics with threshold alerts. QBR template that opens with SPICED recap and ends with Impact to Date and next Critical Events. Playbooks for risk patterns such as executive sponsor churn or usage drop, and for opportunity patterns such as a new team showing similar Pain.
Output artifact: Value Scorecard, a time series of Impact KPIs with commentary.
5. Expansion
Goal: Align additional use cases to new or adjacent Pains.
SPICED alignment: Use resolved primary Pains to uncover secondary or adjacent ones. Recalculate Impact for new teams or workflows.
Planhat instrumentation: Signals for cross sell propensity such as license utilization and feature adoption. Success Plan addendum for each expansion motion with a mini SPICED per team. Automated tasks for champions to introduce peers before the next executive review.
Output artifact: Expansion Hypothesis Sheet with evidence, expected Impact, and next step.
6. Renewal & Advocacy
Goal: Make renewal a non event and turn value into voice.
SPICED alignment: Revisit Situation to confirm today’s baseline versus the start. Summarize Pain and Impact delivered and map next Critical Events for the customer. Align the Decision path and start early to avoid surprises.
Planhat instrumentation: Renewal workflow that auto kicks 120 days out, pre populating Impact to Date. Health score weighting for executive alignment and verified value metrics. Advocacy tracker for references and case studies tied to Impact realized.
Output artifact: Renewal Readiness Pack, showing baseline versus current metrics, risk flags, and the proposed next cycle plan.
The SPICED and Planhat Data Model (practical guide)
Create a simple, durable schema so everyone knows where to store and find truth.
Account level fields Situation: industry, region, stack, key processes, baseline KPIs Pain (primary or secondary): description, owner, severity 1 to 5 Impact targets: KPI, baseline, target, unit, confidence Critical Event: description, date, consequence of miss Decision: EB, Champion, Influencers, criteria, procurement steps
Opportunity level fields Hypotheses for Pain and Impact with validation status Competitive landscape and Decision risks
Plan or Project level fields Value Milestones with name, due date, owner, and acceptance criteria Risk log with type, probability, impact, and mitigation
Telemetry level fields Usage metrics mapped to Impact KPIs such as time to complete or adoption depth
Make these required in your templates and forms. Do not let critical context live only in free text notes.
Example Playbooks
Playbook: Critical Event at risk Trigger: milestone slippage of more than 10 days or executive sponsor inactive for 21 days. Actions: escalate internally, executive to executive outreach, re baseline plan with customer, log revised Critical Event.
Playbook: Adoption stall in target team Trigger: active users below threshold for 14 days. Actions: champion enablement session, peer reference call, re confirm Pain relevance. If misaligned, update Situation and reset Impact.
Playbook: Expansion signal Trigger: utilization above 90 percent and Value Scorecard improving for 3 months. Actions: discovery on adjacent Pains, build mini SPICED, propose pilot with explicit Impact hypothesis.
Dashboards that matter
SPICED Integrity, the percentage of accounts with complete and current SPICED fields.
Time to First Value, measured in days from kick off to first Value Milestone.
Impact Realized, aggregate KPI deltas versus baseline such as cycle time down 27 percent.
Critical Event Risk, accounts with a Critical Event within 30 days and red health.
Expansion Readiness, accounts with high utilization and verified Impact.
If a metric doesn’t tie to a SPICED element, challenge whether it drives action.
Common pitfalls (and fixes)
Everything is free text. Convert to structured fields and enforce through templates.
No ownership. Assign an owner per SPICED element, for example Sales for Decision, CS for Impact tracking, and Executive sponsor for Critical Event alignment.
Value is implicit. Quantify Impact in the customer’s units, not generic usage numbers.
Handoff gaps. Require a SPICED Summary review call before onboarding starts.
The payoff
When SPICED becomes your operational backbone and Planhat your execution layer you achieve faster time to value with fewer surprises. You gain clear attribution from problems solved to business outcomes. Renewals become predictable and you establish a systematic path to expansion.
Interested in mapping SPICED into your customer lifecycle using Planhat?
👉 Book your free 45 minute SPICED advisory session this summer.
If you’d like, we can tailor the SPICED fields, playbooks, and dashboards above to your ICP and use cases and deliver a first version in two weeks.
