If you’re a Revenue leader, chances are you care about two pretty straightforward things: 1) acquiring new customers and 2) selling more to existing ones.
But when it comes to the latter, very few Sales execs are completely confident they aren’t leaving money on the table somehow. Whether they missed an upsell opportunity with a customer they didn’t know was at capacity or they discover a rep didn’t push a certain product because they didn’t realize a customer could benefit from it, every organization is missing out on revenue.
The problem is that this lost revenue can be sizeable. Gartner estimates that 80% of a company’s future revenue will come from 20% of its existing customers. And the more mature an organization is, the more it can count on and—indeed should be—milking money from its existing customer base.
Here’s the good news. You likely have everything you need to capture this expansion: you have customers. The first step is driving the positive customer outcomes needed to keep customers coming back for more. But the second is to leverage your rich customer data to help you uncover the not-so-obvious opportunities for upsell, cross-sell, and new line of business expansion your team has been missing. In short, using your customer insights intelligently can unlock millions of dollars in expansion revenue.
With the launch of our Customer Cloud, we are laser-focused on empowering Revenue leaders with everything they need to drive expansion. But every great solution starts with a deep understanding of the challenges. So, we recently sat down with a number of Sales leaders (a combination of CROs, VPs of Revenue, Renewals leaders, and Ops leaders) to better understand the blockers they face when it comes to capturing this revenue. Here are some of the challenges they highlighted, many of which you’re probably familiar with, and all of which result in lost revenue:
Customer Product Knowledge
“My customer was unaware of our full suite of products.”
Examples:
- You have a solution for something but your customer just bought a competing product for it—because they didn’t realize you could do it.
Rep Product Knowledge
“My reps don’t even know what products are available or would be a good fit for cross-sell, so how would my customers know?”
Examples:
- An M&A event introduces new products that your existing reps don’t feel comfortable selling, so they don’t.
- Reps are used to a few core products, but aren’t familiar enough with others to know if they could be a good fit for a specific customer, so they don’t even come to mind.
Rep Customer Knowledge + Pattern Matching
“My reps don’t have a reliable view of customer entitlements, so they have no idea what else they should be selling.”
Examples:
- You lack reliable data on what a customer has already bought from your product suite.
- You don’t have a way to visualize whitespace.
- It’s difficult to pattern match in the moment; i.e. to determine what a customer is likely to buy based on what similar customers have done.
Scaling The Upsell Motion
“My best customers are at capacity and we’re not moving in for an upsell.”
Examples:
- Identifying upsell within strategic customers is highly manual and requires constant monitoring.
- You don’t have the right data.
- You have too many customers to keep track of.
Driving Usage-based Upsell
“Our sales (and commissions) are consumption-based, but I have no way to help drive usage of the product.”
Identifying Potential Advocates
“I know our customers love us, how do I get more of them publicly on the record as advocates?”
Examples:
- You likely have a lot of “hidden” advocates in your customer base (who can bring in new leads and/or convert leads faster), but no way of programmatically surfacing them.
Breaking Into New Lines Of Business
“How can I leverage my existing buyers to expand into new BUs if I don’t even know if they are promoters?”
Examples:
- Customer departments often feel siloed because you haven’t mapped them out.
- You don’t know how contacts influence one another.
- There’s no sense for who your champions are or how engaged they are likely to be in helping you expand.
Now imagine a world where we can leverage customer data creatively to solve these problems. For example, let’s say a set of similar customers (same vertical, size, geography) all bought the same five out of 10 of your products. They likely have specific use case for those five products. Wouldn’t it be logical to search for other customers in your base who fit the mold of these customers, but perhaps have only bought three out of the five products and try to cross-sell them the other two? Now imagine that you can prioritize which of these customers to go after by easily determining whether they are currently healthy and engaged with your products (and therefore likely to buy more). And now imagine that you can automatically fire off emails to all of them. Voila! You have a list of high-potential customers to go after for cross-sell and you already took action without lifting a finger.
Being able to surface these opportunities regularly to your Reps would be incredibly valuable, but historically it’s been difficult to do this programmatically. Here’s how some of these challenges look in a world where the power of customer insights & action is leveraged creatively:
Customer Product Knowledge
“My customer was unaware of our full suite of products.”
Solutions:
- Based on a set of key characteristics about a customer (size, lifecycle stage, vertical, geography, etc), curate a set of use cases and products that are most likely to resonate.
- Automatically trigger customer marketing campaigns with these products to targeted set of customers.
- As major changes happen with a customer (M&A, new funding rounds, etc) automatically trigger follow ups regarding additional areas of your product portfolio.
Rep Product And Customer Knowledge
“My reps don’t even know what products are available or would be a good fit for cross-sell, so how would my customers know?”
Solutions:
- Serve up Sales reps with recommendations on products that a customer is most likely to purchase.
- Examine customer cohort data holistically to determine if a certain set of customers buys Product A, they are most likely to buy Product B next. Or if they have Product C, it typically pairs most often with Product E.
- Provide the customer context / health insights needed to prioritize customers that are most likely to buy (any product).
- Of the customers that have “whitespace,” surface the ones that are healthy (strong usage, positive NPS, frequent engagement) to target selling efforts.
Scaling the upsell motion
“My best customers are at capacity and we’re not moving in for an upsell.”
Solutions:
- Track usage programmatically down to the user level and automatically trigger alerts to reps when a customer is approaching license deployment or usage limits.
- Automatically trigger emails about upsell for long-tail customers where your reps can’t invest the time.
Driving usage-based upsell
“Our sales (and commissions) are consumption-based, but I have no way to help drive usage of the product.”
Identifying potential advocates
“I know our customers love us, how do I get more of them publicly on the record as advocates?”
Solutions:
- Expose usage data holistically to Sales reps so they can track consumption quickly and easily.
- Provide the tools to work cross-functionally with Success teams to drive product adoption strategically.
Breaking into new lines of business
“How can I leverage my existing buyers to expand into new BUs if I don’t even know if they are promoters?”
Solutions:
- Detailed org structures that bring in rich customer data on each contact including sentiment, engagement, influence, and details of interactions that enable your team to identify champions and leverage them.
- Ability to include partners, consultants, and even your own employees (e.g. your execs) as these individuals have influence and connections too.
How does this new customer-centric world look? Do you think it will help you identify and close more expansion in your business? If so, we’d love to hear from you and get your ideas on other expansion-related challenges you’re facing and what you think would solve them.
See how Gainsight RO can help unlock millions in expansion dollars.
