We often talk about Customer Success being a revenue engine at WnTD. When Customer Success is delivered and executed against a well thought out customer success strategy that is driven from the top-down, the impact can be massive revenue growth. If you’ve been following our blog or following us on LinkedIn you’ve likely seen that last sentence before and you’ll see it again. We want to continually convey that Customer Success = Revenue (when done right and when customer success best practices are followed). But let’s talk about ways your organization and CS team can make this a reality.
Revenue Growth through Customer Success is achieved by three means:
- Customer Retention/Churn Prevention
- Expansion Growth through Upsell and Cross-sell
- Obtaining Acts of Advocacy
Today we are going to focus on revenue growth through up-selling and cross-selling. Although, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that in order to turn Customer Success into a revenue engine you need to put a retention vault in place through churn prevention, which we talked about in a previous post.
In our Customer Success Master Class we teach our students strategies and tactics on how to prevent churn and achieve expansion revenue growth. This post will provide a sneak peak at four of the steps Customer Success Managers and organizations can take in order to identify expansion opportunities.
Step One:
Monitor product usage and create product alerts for organic add-on sale opportunities – This is one of the best ways to identify the low hanging fruit for your expansion sales pipeline. An example of this sort of upsell opportunity is to look for customer’s that are at their user limit threshold.
Step Two:
Identify other individuals, teams, departments and other locations that your current users work closely with that could benefit from your solution as well. – What individuals and teams are part of the natural workflow of the current users that aren’t using your product? What teams do they collaborate with most often? For example, are your users in the marketing department and do they work closely with sales? Could sales benefit from using your solution as well? Could you save them money, help grow their revenue and/or help them work more efficiently saving them valuable time? If the answer is yes to any of these questions then you have yourself potential expansion opportunities close at hand.
As another example, does your customer have similar teams in other locations that you could cross-sell? As you’ll learn about your customer’s organization you’ll be able to identify expansion opportunities that can be pulled into the expansion pipeline.
Step Three:
Identify opportunities for selling other product lines (if applicable) – Do you have other product lines that could help your customer base achieve their goals and business outcomes? An example of this would be a CRM company that also has marketing or support solutions as part of their product line. As you learn more about your customer’s business, goals, desired outcomes and challenges you can look to align your solution(s) in solving these problems and achieving these goals. Always be on the lookout for how you can continually add value to your customer base.
Step Four:
Determine the value that your customers could benefit from if they upgrade to a higher package with additional features. – As you work with your customers to achieve successful product adoption and enable them to achieve their goals and outcomes, it’s important to add continual value so they don’t outgrow your product or services (or perceive that they have outgrown them). Look for potential upgrades that can add additional value and will help them meet or even exceed their goals.
As an example, perhaps an upgrade will significantly accelerate your customer’s time to achieving their goals and it’s in their best interest to upgrade. Or perhaps you are in a new contract year and their goals have shifted and this shift requires an upgrade in order to gain access to features that will enable them to achieve their goals. Make sure you align your solution (to whatever extent possible) as a means of meeting their goals. Part of a CSMs job is to show customers what is in their best interest and in some cases upgrades are in fact, in their best interest. This means more expansion revenue for your organization. It’s a win-win.
As you work with your customers to achieve successful product adoption continually look for additional ways to add value. This additional value often aligns with upsell and cross-sell opportunities. As you grow and close your expansion pipeline you want to ensure that you are providing continual value so that your expansion sales are ones that you can also retain and continue to grow over time. Expansion sales should be viewed as circular and continual, not linear, like many sales pipelines.
If you want to learn more about how to execute on these steps join our Customer Success Master Class Level 1 certification workshop. You can sign up for our scheduled webinars and workshops here, as well as sign up to be among the first to be notified when new workshops are announced.
