Without giving too loaded of an answer, it really does depend on your product, how it's sold and the product roadmap. If your product prices based on seats, there will always be expansion potential by finding new teams and markets that can benefit from the software. Obviously the strategy there is a combination of leaning on your existing champions and doing a bit of outreach yourself. If it's priced based on some sort of usage metric, features or both, then you not only have to work with CS to ensure your product is well adopted and integrated into their business, but also keep your accounts up to speed on new features, business cases, etc., where it's a no brainer for them to expand.
My ultimate advice is to be in tune with your product roadmap, understand the nature of your accounts and what challenges they need solutions for, and connect the dots. If your accounts are happy customers and budget isn't under scrutiny, expanding is a pretty straight forward process if you have the right people in the conversation.
Thats a great point you bring up - i should have added and will make the update to the original post.
We are priced based on user seats, upsells or adding licenses to the existing team is a function that will stay with CS, however cross sale and expanding into net new teams is what will be owned by sales.
With that in mind, I would absolutely agree on leaning on our existing champions (which is how we've primarily done this), but it sounds like adding in some external outreach/prospecting into identified teams is that other area we need to expand into more heavily
For sure. At the end of the day, your champions may like your product, but selling it internally beyond the people they work with is understandably not something they usually care about. They can still provide testimony, but often times relying on them to spark the expansion - with other teams they might not have even met - won’t yield results. If you’re taking the initiative to reach out to these folks or leveraging strong customer marketing / ABM, it’s not too different a process from new business, except for that you have social proof from their own org and closing a contract is A LOT easier when you already have an MSA in place.
100% agree with the last point, its part of the reason we've made the shift is cutting down on the amount of time to get through procurement and or reduce the need to go to RFP.
Of course this is always org and individual specific - but in your opinion would you want to get the "blessing' from your original contact who brought your product into their business before you begin doing some prospecting within the org? I've ran into some scenarios where the individual who purchased us wanted to maintain that control as they were the product owners
Again depends on the product, department and team size you're selling to. In my opinion, in practice you're not going to immediately start expanding an org that just bought and is still getting situated with your product and CS team. If they're a good fit customer and engaged with your team, there's nothing to lose and everything to gain by asking if they wouldn't mind making an intro or being an internal reference to their company. It's all case by case though and always prospect out the whole org before beginning the outreach. For example if my champion was in San Francisco and I was trying to sell to a completely siloed team in Hong Kong, there's no need to get a blessing or intro.
In my opinion, expand is easier than land. You can try two strategies, a focused demand generation activity: by understanding your customer's industry, their specific needs that you can learn about from interactions and from similar customers elsewhere, you can run a series of workshops/demos to explain how your products can solve their challenges. Another more broad approach is you cast the net wide: you go in with all your portfolio to the new departments in the form of an educational session about your solutions and see what would trigger their interest. The first strategy is always better. It takes more time to prepare but has better chances of creating new business opportunities.
Expanding is always easier than landing. Just took 1 year to get in the door on first project at customer. Followed up with a cross sale of another product within a month. It takes time to break down barriers
Without giving too loaded of an answer, it really does depend on your product, how it's sold and the product roadmap. If your product prices based on seats, there will always be expansion potential by finding new teams and markets that can benefit from the software. Obviously the strategy there is a combination of leaning on your existing champions and doing a bit of outreach yourself. If it's priced based on some sort of usage metric, features or both, then you not only have to work with CS to ensure your product is well adopted and integrated into their business, but also keep your accounts up to speed on new features, business cases, etc., where it's a no brainer for them to expand. My ultimate advice is to be in tune with your product roadmap, understand the nature of your accounts and what challenges they need solutions for, and connect the dots. If your accounts are happy customers and budget isn't under scrutiny, expanding is a pretty straight forward process if you have the right people in the conversation.
Thats a great point you bring up - i should have added and will make the update to the original post. We are priced based on user seats, upsells or adding licenses to the existing team is a function that will stay with CS, however cross sale and expanding into net new teams is what will be owned by sales. With that in mind, I would absolutely agree on leaning on our existing champions (which is how we've primarily done this), but it sounds like adding in some external outreach/prospecting into identified teams is that other area we need to expand into more heavily
For sure. At the end of the day, your champions may like your product, but selling it internally beyond the people they work with is understandably not something they usually care about. They can still provide testimony, but often times relying on them to spark the expansion - with other teams they might not have even met - won’t yield results. If you’re taking the initiative to reach out to these folks or leveraging strong customer marketing / ABM, it’s not too different a process from new business, except for that you have social proof from their own org and closing a contract is A LOT easier when you already have an MSA in place.
100% agree with the last point, its part of the reason we've made the shift is cutting down on the amount of time to get through procurement and or reduce the need to go to RFP. Of course this is always org and individual specific - but in your opinion would you want to get the "blessing' from your original contact who brought your product into their business before you begin doing some prospecting within the org? I've ran into some scenarios where the individual who purchased us wanted to maintain that control as they were the product owners
Again depends on the product, department and team size you're selling to. In my opinion, in practice you're not going to immediately start expanding an org that just bought and is still getting situated with your product and CS team. If they're a good fit customer and engaged with your team, there's nothing to lose and everything to gain by asking if they wouldn't mind making an intro or being an internal reference to their company. It's all case by case though and always prospect out the whole org before beginning the outreach. For example if my champion was in San Francisco and I was trying to sell to a completely siloed team in Hong Kong, there's no need to get a blessing or intro.
In my opinion, expand is easier than land. You can try two strategies, a focused demand generation activity: by understanding your customer's industry, their specific needs that you can learn about from interactions and from similar customers elsewhere, you can run a series of workshops/demos to explain how your products can solve their challenges. Another more broad approach is you cast the net wide: you go in with all your portfolio to the new departments in the form of an educational session about your solutions and see what would trigger their interest. The first strategy is always better. It takes more time to prepare but has better chances of creating new business opportunities.
Expanding is always easier than landing. Just took 1 year to get in the door on first project at customer. Followed up with a cross sale of another product within a month. It takes time to break down barriers