New Customer Acquisition vs Upselling Accounts
“One of the biggest mistakes that technology companies make is obsessing too much over new customer acquisition, and not spending enough time thinking about how to expand the relationships with their existing accounts and a recurring revenue business. The majority of the revenue comes in from retention and renewal of existing accounts, and as you grow bigger and bigger expansion, they are from upsells and cross-selling will actually exceed the amount you’re bringing in from new accounts.”
Customer Lead Referrals
“Customers are also a great lead source. Nothing sells a prospect better than them. Listening to one of your existing customers talk about their journey, their purchasing selection process, why they picked you as a vendor, how the implementation went in, the value and the benefits and the ROI that they’re receiving from implementing your solution.”
Customer Advocacy
“The number one trusted source of information and purchasing decisions for technology is peer reviews.
So you want to get your customers out there advocating for you on online review sites like TrustRadius and Captain G2. You want to get them speaking on webinars and in trade shows. You want to get them advocating for you in those private slack channels that you can’t get access to as a vendor.
The more word of mouth buzz that your customers are spreading, the less that you need to spend on advertising and marketing, because they’re effectively sending your leads your way through referrals.”
User Conference
“So how can you keep your customers happy and have them advocating for you? Well, a lot of that burden falls on the customer success in the product team. But there is a role for the marketing team to play. And I would encourage you to think about how do you help your customers solve some of their biggest problems. Now, unfortunately, your internal teams probably don’t have the answers to how to solve those problems, but that’s okay because your other customers do. All you need to do is put them together in a room and let them talk to each other and get out of the way. One of the easiest ways to do that is to have an annual user conference.”
Online Communities
“Why not keep the conversation going throughout the year? Have a weekly webinar series where you invite one of your customers to come in and facilitate a discussion around a big problem that they’re trying to solve. You can also build a Slack channel where they can have a real-time conversation 24 hours a day, post questions, and debate the best ways to solve problems.”
Emotional Bond
“When you help customers solve problems, you build an emotional bond with them. There’s an intangible value that becomes associated with your brand. That makes them far less likely to churn, and far more likely to be advocates for you and to spend more money. So you want to build this idea of community and problem solving in your customer experience, in your value proposition, into your product. And into your brand.”
