How to Drive Growth with Existing Customers with Beanworks SVP of Growth, Meena Sandhu

Your revenues by up to 75%. You think about your month over month revenues that you're bringing in through your existing customer base. You know, we all know that retention is important, but we don't all have a cohesive strategy to really leverage and optimize the revenue dollars that we're pulling in through existing customers. And you know, what do you really need for existing customer growth? You know, you need a strong product, obviously that the existing customers aren't going to stick around without a good product. You need visibility into your product. What are people using? What are they not using? Do you have an ideal customer profile? Do you have sales, marketing, customer success alignment? And do you have the right pricing or monetization that allows scaling? We're not going to really get into too much of the pricing or monetization today. That's a separate topic itself. But an element on this slide that really plays into leveraging existing customers. Is that something sales, marketing, customer success alignment. Out of those of you listening in today, how many of you feel, you know, raise your hand if you feel you have strong alignment between these three departments. How do we feel about alignment between those three departments? Is it good? Not seeing a lot of hands? Okay, got a couple there. That's good. And you know, when we talk about existing customers and the reason why I have this slide here is I feel when I have conversations with people, that alignment piece is missing and it's holding companies back on really actualizing enough revenue. And there's various ways to get that sales, marketing, customer success alignment, and one of the ways is to make sure that your goals make sense. And we're going to get into that a little bit later here. And who follows price intelligently? If anybody does this is a slide from them, they have a lot of data on how important expansion revenue is. So really growing your revenue through your customer base. So I just have this up here so that you can, as a reference point, reach out to them and follow some of their content if you want to see more deep data. So one thing that I find really important to talk about is successful customers. How many of your organizations have defined what a successful customer is? Because a successful customer means more success for you as a business. So often customers are labeled as being active or inactive, but just because they're labeled as active doesn't mean that they're fully successfully using your product and getting as much out of it as they can. So I'm not a big fan of the active user number. I don't feel that it's telling me Enough information about my customers. Because if what we've defined as active is merely showing up and using the product once a month, when really somebody who's truly successful with the product that's really gaining the benefits of the product is in the product on a daily basis. So defining what's really active and what's successful is important for every organization to have. You need to know what is the ideal existing customer scenario? We talk a lot about the ideal customer when it comes to an acquisition perspective, but we don't talk about the ideal existing customer. And why is that? So, you know, it's almost as though we forget about that importance once we have the customer. We're not defining what activities, what user behaviors really make a customer successful, both for themselves and for you. Any questions on that right now? Anybody want to comment on that? Please jump in whenever you feel the need. Okay, moving on. Revenue actualization. So when is revenue actualized for your company? So we're all, I'm assuming, SaaS organizations. For a lot of us, the second a customer joins, they sign up for either a monthly or an annual subscription and that is the bulk of the revenue. For others, it's a deeper product. So the revenue really isn't actualized until the customer is onboarded and they're retained month over month. So understanding, you know, where is revenue actualized for you? Because that's when we're going to be looking at drop offs. You know, are customers completing the process and getting to that stage of revenue actualization or are they falling off and you're losing people? And we want to make sure that there's no, there's no leaky customers. We want everybody making their way through to being a successful customer. And when we talk about existing customers and expansion revenue, we need to understand where the account management sits. This is when things sometimes get messy. So when a customer is onboarded, is it entirely self onboarding? Do they meet with an account manager or a customer success manager? Have they met with a salesperson that's closing them? Where does the account management sit? This element is critical and who you have in those roles. Is it sitting with sales or is it sitting with customer success? And there's no black or white answer. I've seen companies where account management sits with sales, and I've seen companies where account management sits with customer success. Both avenues can be successful. You just need to have the right definitions and set it up appropriately. So with beanworks as an example, you know, we have a fairly detailed, complex SaaS product. So it's not Entirely self onboarding. There's some self onboarding and then they're assigned, after the sale is closed, a customer success manager who does the account management. And in order to get them fully set up, we also have a technical expert come in to set up the software for them. On their side, it's all web based, but they need to understand how everything is working and it takes some technical troubleshooting as well. That's an example of a deeper product, which means the customer is going through many hands and you want to limit how many people they're being shuffled around to. And having fewer people deal with the customer makes the account management a lot easier. So closing the business sits with sales. Once they're an existing customer, they sit with account management with us. And in that account management is where we start talking about upsells and cross sells. So for each customer you need to have clearly defined milestones for when in the customer journey is it best for us to introduce expansion revenue opportunities? So say somebody signed up and they signed up for a monthly subscription instead of annual. Once they're three months in, we find that three month mark gives them enough time to really become a successful user. And it's an ideal time when they're happy they're seeing the benefits of the product. It's a great time to say, hey, sign up for annual so you can save some dollars. Or we see their usage rates go up and we prompt them and say, okay, your usage is trending to be higher than what it was before. If you lock in for annual, this is where we can give you a discount. So the milestones, defining the milestones for your different types of customers and knowing when to cross sell and upsell, this is critical. If you don't upsell or cross sell at the right times and they're shuffling through too many hands, you're not going to be able to really reap the benefits of expansion revenue through your existing customers. So jump in and figure out what the milestones are for people. Okay, you guys are pretty quiet. Any comments, Anybody want to raise their hand to jump in? So far, no. All right, we'll keep going then. So when it comes to defining the milestones, figuring out what team you know your people should be sitting on, the next step is determining incentives and quotas. And these incentives and quotas really vary team to team. I've had, you know, obviously with a sales team, they're very quota driven generally and you want to have clear quotas for your teams to hit. When the cross sells and upsells Sit with customer success people, true customer success people. I have found through my experience they're not as driven by hard quotas. So I often. So for at beanworks, we actually have more of a team target every month in terms of what we want to hit. In upsells and cross sells, the customer success team is very good at supporting each other on the team to help hit that team goal. And then they're commissioned individually. So having that individual commission base for them is also an incentive. And in my experience, when we come up with a team target and we give them good incentives, that customer success team seems to hit the quota without me saying that there's a quota. Whereas as soon as I put a quota on customer success people, they start to feel as though, okay, no wait, I'm not a salesperson, I don't know if I can carry a quota, I don't know if I can hit the quota. They just, they require different motivations. And maybe some upsells and cross sells for you. Sit with your customer success team and other upsells and cross sells sit with sales. So when we're doing upsells and cross sells in terms of contracting or add ons within an existing product, that's great to keep within customer success. When all of a sudden you're introducing a new product that's going to almost require a reselling, then you're probably better off bringing in your salespeople to do that. It's going to be a tougher job for your customer success people to do that type of sales. And the other thing with team structures is count how many people the customer is talking to. If you have more than three touch points for any type of transaction, I feel it's, it's too much. You can move between three people through a long process that's, you know, three to six months long, but you can't really go through, you know, if you're, if your full process is two weeks, you really only need one person. So determine how many, how complex is your sales and your customer success process and how long does it take and then you have a good idea of how many people you can have the customer deal with to still make it less disruptive to the customer. That's what we really want, is less disruption, smooth transitions from one incentive to the next. So as an example for you, you know, at beanworks, once we introduced the additional incentives to customer success members, the commissions that they were earning for upsells and cross sells, we saw our revenue, our month to month revenue from existing customers, nearly Double. They simply needed the structure. A customer success person on their own without any incentive, without any team target. They're not so motivated. They're not structured or set up to really close that additional business. But once those team targets are brought into place and commission structures are brought into place, you'll see those numbers creep up. And then there's the communication that you have with your team every month, week over week, in our team huddles. Where are we tracking for our monthly target? How far are we. Which customers do you have left to onboard? Which customers do you have left to onboard? Can we get some more annual contracts? Can we up the, you know, the number of invoices they're processing a month? We look at all the different levers we can pull, and we really work together as a team on the customer success side to hit those targets. And that's really the structure that you need when you're dealing with customer success people. It's more of a team effort of helping. And the perspective that they take is helping the customer become more successful. When you're dealing with salespeople, you can really talk about hitting quotas, hitting a certain target of dollars or customers, and you don't need to really reframe it as, how do we make the customer more successful? But with true customer success folks, that's really what they're all about. Their job is about helping the customer successfully use your product. And that's the language that needs to be used when you're talking to them. They want to know, how can I make this customer more successful? And in turn, it results in increased revenue for the company overall. That's the approach that we want to take. Does anybody have that structure set up right now? Anybody doing expansion revenue through customer success? No. Yeah, Gabe, you're doing that?

Yeah. We have our account management team actually sitting under success. We feel like they belong there a little bit better, but they're incented with individual targets around revenue expansion. But we feel having them aligned with customer success, even though they have a sort of a revenue target, works good for our organization.

Yeah, that's great. And your product itself, is it one that's a little more complex, requires more account management? Is it a longer sales process to close? What type of cycles are you looking at?

Yeah, so we're like HubSpot for nonprofit. So it's like a 30k ARR deal. And so then revenue expansion can be 10 to 20% over the life of the deal. So it makes sense to have them sit there.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And did you make that change. Was there a period where you didn't have them there and you moved them into that, that role and you saw more success?

Yeah, actually we had them sitting under sales and what we found was it's so different than a sales conversation. And so most of the conversations around renewal and expansion really are around customer success. I think unless you're sitting with customer success coaches and support reps, you don't fully understand that sort of customer pain and need.

Absolutely.

And it's a little bit disconnected from sales and so we made that mistake early on and then shifted them under success for that reason.

Yeah, yeah. And I've noticed the exact same experience and it's been so much more rewarding to do that. And do you also have in product upsells or cross sells or is it really sitting with your account management team right now?

We prompt for the upsell opportunity and product but we still want to get on the phone with them before it closes.

Right.

So you can't sort of self upgrade, but we prompt for that phone call to your account manager.

Yeah, that's great. Excellent. And who else was it? There was somebody else I saw raised their hand but I couldn't see the name. Anybody else want to share? They're set up. Does anybody have their team, their upsells and cross sells with sales right now. And how is that working? So we're making the transition from sales to customer success. Yeah. And because our sales team has always been commissioned off of those upsells, we actually kind of did a transitional period of they get the first year they need to do right so that we're not just taking away that revenue stream or that incentive they had. So they put the first year where they still get an account manager from customer success, but really sales is running those point conversations and doing more of a slow transition to customer success. And then once that year is over, they transition into customer success and customer success kind of takes that ball. Yeah, that's great. And you know, we've actually done something very similar. If the upsell happens within the first six months since the sale is being closed, then sales gets to still run point or be on those conversations with account management. And it's less in this perspective, it's actually less about the customer. It's more about keeping your employees and your teams satisfied and not over disrupting. So it's a great point to bring up for anybody that's doing a transition. On paper the change looks great. But how much are we rocking the boat when we're moving commissions from One person to the next. And how do we do that without demotivating people? Right. Yeah. We started at 18 months, moved to a year. I hope we'll move down to six and probably just stay there. Yeah, yeah, that's great. Excellent. Excellent. Does anybody have any questions so far or anything we want to jump into or address that we haven't talked about yet? I have a few more examples to go through in terms of how we can actually actualize expansion revenue, but would love to keep the questions going. No. All right, we'll keep moving along here. So expansion and retention revenue marketing tactics. So this is, you know, this is more of a marketing piece, but it's important for anybody in sales and customer success to know what, what are the levers we can pull the talk triggers within your app partner programs. Certification. Who runs a larger SaaS product that would really benefit from certification? Certification is something we're doing at beanworks for AP automation specialists within various organizations to be beanworks certified. This is going to do a lot for our user base, user events, user conferences. You know, once we're allowed to do those back in person, I think there's going to be so much pent up need for face to face events. I'm sure a lot of your organizations are just planning how do we get these face to face events going again. And for existing customers, you know, user events can really be a big driver for increasing that revenue. Is anybody planning user events or user conferences remotely so far? Anyone in this group? We don't have any right now. We're waiting until the face to face opportunity to run our user events. But if somebody would like to share what they're doing for their user conferences remote, that would be awesome to hear an example. And then advocacy programs. Does anybody have an advocacy program right now built for their existing customer base? Advocacy programs is something I've worked on a lot in my career. And you really do build a special community. A community of people that are willing to help each other, that are there to educate, that are waving the flag of your brand wherever they go, whether they're at conferences, whether they're on social media, and determining what that advocacy program looks like, it's important and it's a function that sits over all of those three departments. So sales, marketing and customer success, all three are going to be involved in this advocacy program. More so customer success and marketing than the sales side. But all three departments would be a part of an advocacy program and building that community. As we see more and more companies out there, more and more competition More and more of a drain on social media and the clutter that we see on social media. Having these communities that are completely committed to your existing base and helping grow that existing base. Customer advocacy programs are going to, I think, take a major uptick in the next next couple of years. Customer storytelling and case studies. Who's doing nps? Net Promoter score. I'm sure a lot of you are. And when you do your Net Promoter score, what is the follow up? You know, Net Promoter score is a single question, yet there's so much information that we can get out of our customers. So what we did at beanworks and one of the co founders, she's the chief Experience officer, she actually led these interviews was based on how companies scored us. There were different emails that went out for follow up conversations. And you know, are they detractors? Are they promoters, Are they neutral? How do we get them all to be promoters? If you're just doing the Net Promoter score and not doing those follow up interviews with your existing customers, you are leaving revenue on the table. So through those conversations, we figured out which products and features customers really needed that they weren't getting, if they were detractors or what negative customer experience that did they have and how could we turn them around and get them from detractors to promoters. So this, you know, the Net Promoter score, it's, it's a great tool, but it's all about the follow up. The score itself in my mind doesn't mean anything until you've done the rest of that follow up. And that's retaining your customers and getting them to be promoters and successfully using your product. That's a big one. And then through that, in that outreach, we also said, hey, you know, we have a blog, we have lots of content, lots of how to's and we want to leverage our customers, you know, talk to our customers, be featured in our blog, be featured in our newsletter, get the content you need, the know how you need from your customer base as opposed to you as the organization, always building out the customer content. And that's really played a big part in our user engagement as well. Any other comments or questions here? So the top takeaway is really what we want to focus on. We have a few minutes left to chat and just have a conversation is you really need to have a clear definition of what a successful customer is. We need to drop this. Oh, this many users are active and this many users are inactive. We need to have a very clear definition of what is a successful customer and how do we get all of our customers to get to that milestone, that marker of being a successful customer. The second is when you define those milestones for when customers can be upsold or cross sold most effectively. What is the best time to introduce a tier change? What is the best time to introduce an add on product or feature? When is the best time to introduce annual billing and having that all automated built into your salesforce? Whatever it is that you're using, your email communication from your account management team out the milestones really can easily be automated with just follow up from your account management people. So that's a big one. And then the last element really is having the right team member or structure and incentives. There's no right or wrong. It's about figuring out what's going to work for your company and your organization. So steer away from listening to anybody say it has to sit with sales, it has to sit with customer success. It has to be called account management. You need to figure it out for your own product. I'm happy to have those one to one conversations with you and if you book some time in umbrella with me, we can talk it through based on your existing scenario. But I've seen all sorts of.