You put so much time, effort and money into winning new customers. But keeping them, preventing churn, and looking for expansion opportunities is what helps take your organisation to the next level.
Otherwise you’re just constantly trying to fill a bucket with holes in it.
So many organisations don’t have a smooth onboarding process to ensure the customer sticks around. Even fewer know how to look for expansion opportunities to win more revenue from existing customers.
Today we’re showing you how to do exactly that. We’ll be looking at:
- How to setup customer success to reduce churn
- The checklist you need prior to going ‘live’, and what to include in your commercial deal pack
- How to look for opportunities for revenue expansion
This is the final part of our mini-series with 7x ex-head of sales, Adem Manderovic. We’re combining marketing and sales forces to build a revenue engine with total alignment. The outcome? A more efficient acquisition system that leads to sustainable growth.
Previously we’ve covered:
- Why sales-led growth is killing your business
- The foundations you need to create for your revenue engine
- How to build relationships of trust with prospects
- How to maximize your chances of winning deals
As per usual, you can watch, listen to or read step 4 of our joint framework with sales expert Adem Manderovic below.
P.S. Are you a sales, marketing or revenue leader? We show you exactly how to implement this system in your business in our CRO School (check it out here).
Listen To The Episode
Watch The Episode
Reduce Churn with Proper Onboarding
In the previous episode of this mini-series, we showed you how to win over the target customer. This final step is about how do we ensure we set them up for success to reduce the chances of them leaving us? Proper customer onboarding is incredibly important here.
Great customer onboarding relies on properly executing your ‘live quoting day’, or for other companies – your demo. We show you what to cover in that here. At a high level, you should have discussed:
- Why you should work together
- What working together will look like
- What the communication plan is
- How often you will meet, who the key contacts are
It’s all about being as aligned as possible prior to the onboarding stage.
Otherwise, you may realise at customer success that you can’t actually service what the company is asking for. This may sound ridiculous – but just speak to Customer Success and you’ll understand how often this happens. Mutual alignment is what is going to prevent churn 6 weeks after someone becomes a client.
Checklist Prior To Going ‘Live’
Prior to going live, Customer Success need to ensure a checklist is completed with everything needed to make this as smooth as possible.
Your commercial deal pack should include: approval, log-in details, account manager details, communications plan, and any other final checks that need to be done.
Feedback Loops Required
To ensure there’s mutual alignment between the customer and your team, you need key feedback loops between Sales and Customer Success.
Information gathered on the ‘live quoting days’ or ‘demo’ will give you insight into everything you need to ensure Customer Success makes it a win for the customer. They should have plenty of context about the customer, what the biggest account level problem is that they’re trying to solve, what their expectations are of delivery etc.
This communication is absolutely crucial to ensure there’s alignment between yourself and the customer. Alignment is what will prevent churn.
Expansion Opportunities
Once the deal is done and you’ve had a first win for the new customer, you should look for any opportunities to expand your business within theirs.
Make sure you ask:
- Do they have any additional sites or branches you can help too?
- Do they know any other businesses like them that they could refer you to?
Generally, it’s easier to ‘expand’ once you’ve landed and had success than you think. If you don’t ask, you don’t get!
Liked this series? We show you how to implement all of these steps in you business in our CRO School, built for Marketing Leaders, Sales Leaders and Revenue Leaders. Check it out here.
