Are you missing out on your account management strategy?
When it comes to SaaS, nothing makes a company more money than 'expanding' existing customers. In a nutshell, the good old ‘Land and Expand’ is made for SaaS.
Putting a concrete account based expansion (ABE) plan in place can be a mix of patience and careful planning. Before we discuss what could help you make a better ABE strategy, it is important to acknowledge that the product/service you are offering will play a vital role in shaping your ABE strategy.
Your strategy will also be shaped by how many customers you have and how large your average account is.
Here are 4 things you could be missing out on, that can help you get more out of your existing accounts.
Business reviews
Based on the type of product/service you are offering, you should design business reviews at regular intervals with key stake holders. The purpose of the business review is not tell your existing customers how they should invest more in your product. It is exactly the opposite.
The purpose of a business review is to get all stake holders together and show the value your product is bringing to their organisation.
Once the value your product/service brings is clear, you can then move into cross selling or upgrading existing accounts.
We will discuss building a concrete business review template in future blog posts. However, the first step is working with your existing customers and agreeing on a repeatable review template.
Tapping into referrals
By referrals, we don’t just mean getting more teams on board. We also mean getting cross organisation referrals. Your existing customer base is probably your best chance to get business through word of mouth.
You don’t ask for a referral you earn it.
What does that mean? You need to work with your prospects and offer value throughout your conversations with them. Be it business reviews, to making sure your prospect has the best tools to help him make industry specific decisions, it all adds up to getting that referral.
The same holds good for case studies. Case studies are referrals you can share on the drop of a hat! They might not always be relevant to your current customer’s business case but if you can make sure you share a relevant case study, you stand a good chance of getting more teams on board.
Lack of usage insights
So you worked really hard to get your first 100 customers on board. Now comes the time to implement a ABE strategy. The only problem is, you now have 100 customers and don’t know where to start.
Most organisations will spend a packet on customer acquisition but where they really miss out is on delivering insights on existing customers. Using software like Totango, you can make sure that you are tracking important customer behaviours and can then alert your sales team on possible markers. Product usage insights are pivotal to a sales team’s ABE strategy, without them you are just hoping that your emails are read and may get a favourable response.
Poor (or no) account segmentation
Continuing on from the previous point. Your team could struggle in equal measure if you have no segmentation of accounts in place. As a sales leader you have to make sure that you are getting your best sales team member’s working on your top accounts. We will discuss segmenting accounts in a separate blog post but needless to say, even the best ABE strategy will fall face first if you are trying to get more from a 2 people company!
There are multiple data enhancement tools that can do the heavy lifting when it comes to segmenting accounts. If you have a limited user base, you can look to this manually also. The important thing is investing in continuous account segmentation.
Feel free to send the author of this blog post an email, Rajiv will be happy to discuss any further inputs your require. Send an email to rajiv@insideselling.org.