Exec Summary

Get the Fundamentals in Place

• It’s hard to expand unhealthy customers

Identify Healthy Customers

• It’s hard to identify the healthy ones without data

Segment by Industry/Company Type and Role

• It’s hard to be all things to all people at once
• Segment the list and focus on on type at a time

Research and Form a POV

• Do the research and bring a point of view

Listen to this short-and-sweet podcast episode where I go more in depth on this topic.

So the other day I got a call from a big tech company about my renewal. The AM introduces himself and asks me if I need anything for my renewal. I say “Nope, I think I’m good,” and he thanks me and ends the call.

What a missed opportunity!

He has dozens of products to sell and multiple tiers of upgrades on the one product I have. Why would he waste his opportunity to expand our account? Simple answer; he was checking a box to “call down on renewals” instead of following a process to expand accounts.

When I was an AE at Salesforce I covered hundreds of existing customers and expanded them by millions of dollars. In this article I’ll break down the process that worked for me and that I’ve seen the most successful B2B SaaS companies use to maximize their expansion pipeline.

Get the Fundamentals in Place

Before we get into expansion, let’s make sure we have the fundamentals in place. Looking at our Revenue Efficiency Pyramid, first we need to be sure we’re selling to the right companies and engaging the right stakeholders. We also need to have processes defined on how to hand off new customers, onboard them, and retain them.

With the fundamentals sorted out, we should have some healthy customers we can expand. If your company isn’t here quite yet, it’s time to take a step back and work on filling the gaps in your foundation.

Identify Healthy Customers

It’s hard to expand a customer that’s not even using what they purchased. This is where tracking usage and risk signals can help us identify our healthy and unhealthy customers.

When I was at Salesforce I had access to all this data, right at my fingertips, inside our own version of Salesforce. I could quickly run a report and see that about 50% of my customers were healthy and another 50% weren’t even using what they bought. The latter category is a separate issue we’ll get into in future newsletters, but for the purpose of expansion, I would quickly filter out non-users and focus on the active customers.

Segment List by Industry/Company Type and Role

At Salesforce I had the double-edged sword of selling into every industry and every department. This provided a lot of opportunity but made it impossible to have any informed point of view.

Fortunately for me, a lot of my customers (especially the healthiest ones) were in B2B SaaS and Professional Services. Within those organizations I spent a lot of time with CROs/VPs of Sales, CMOs, CEOs, CFOs, and COOs, in roughly that order.

By segmenting my lists, I could spend an entire day or more going after CFOs in B2B SaaS companies, for example, and have a much stronger point of view than casting a wide net.

When the AM above called me about my renewal it was pretty clear he had no idea what my company did or my role in the organization. This made it hard for him to open a meaningful, relevant conversation.

Research and Form a POV

After choosing a segment to focus on, I would do the research to form a strong point of view based on what they care about.

For my CFO segment this might be; minimizing costs, getting visibility into forecasts, and building a more valuable enterprise that investors and, eventually, an acquirer would find attractive.

Then, I’d see what information I could find in these areas.

First, I look at their headcount growth and their license usage. If both were high I could ask them if they wanted to reduce their license spend next year. I can’t remember anyone saying no to that question! This would then open the door to sell more seats at a larger discount.

In terms of their forecast, I could look at what they were using in Salesforce and form a hypothesis around this, bringing relevant questions to the CFO about his/her feelings on forecasting. This could open the door to other expansion opportunities or, at a minimum, establish myself as a trusted advisor to help them get more from what they have.

I could keep going, but you get the idea. This is unfortunately not what my AM did with our renewal. He hadn’t done his research or brought a POV so he put it on me to self-discover ways we could expand our account.

Listen to this short-and-sweet podcast episode where I go more in depth on this topic.