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- How to strategically grow your Customer Accounts
How to strategically grow your Customer Accounts
Markus Rentsch
January 18, 2024
Hi, Markus here. Welcome to a premium edition of the Customer-Value-Led-Growth Newsletter.
Every week, I share strategies, guides, and frameworks to help you create exceptional value for your customers and company.
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You are putting in a lot of hard work to take your Customers to the promised land.
It’s only right that you are earning your reward by them happily renewing their contracts.
As we know, Customer Retention is the lifeblood of any SaaS company. It’s what the SaaS business model is built upon.
And yet, it’s still the low-hanging fruit because at some point it should not be a challenge anymore.
You should be able to retain customers at a high rate with predictable accuracy. Except for customers leaving for reasons not under your control.
What’s next? Growing your customers as often and far as possible.
In today’s post, I’ll share how you move from demand for expansions and upsells happening occasionally to strategically working towards it.
1. Discovering growth opportunities
If you are not part of the acquisition process, customer discovery is a sales responsibility. The goal is to find out whether the product and the customer are a match.
Beyond the initial sale, it’s your responsibility to identify growth opportunities. Yes, it’s often done by AMs or AEs but that’s completely stupid.
How could someone who meets with customers maybe once a year accurately do that?
Obvious opportunities
Ok, in some cases it’s pretty straightforward and does not require any specific knowledge about the customer.
All it takes is to do some basic research and in this case, sales can do it.
But, and that’s a big but, growing your customers has nothing to do with sales skills. It also does not happen because of wishful thinking.
It happens or does not based on the value your customers have already received from working with you.
If the CEE organization did not receive value, why would they adopt your product in other regions even globally?
Ok, seizing the obvious opportunities can bring tremendous revenue growth to your company. But what if there’s only one organization, everybody on the team is using your product and they are hiring slowly?
The answer: You can only identify growth potential that is real through knowing the customer organization and working with them.
Hidden opportunities include:
The tricky part is that customers are not necessarily aware of these opportunities. It’s only logical because they don’t know your product as well as you do or how other companies use cases.
This is another reason why you should spend time building meaningful customer relationships. You not only get the insights to raise the odds of success but also to discover these hidden opportunities.
