“Usage is no longer enough to build a business case for a customer to renew.” - Daphne Costa Lopes
Your customers might be using your product, but that doesn’t mean they’re seeing value. It’s time to focus on customer retention… and for good reason. According to Marketing Metrics, businesses have a 60% to 70% chance of selling into an existing customer, but only a 5% to 20% chance of selling to a new prospect. So what can you do today to master the retention play?
Customers have jobs to do and metrics they track to determine how well those jobs are going. If you want to remain sticky with your customers, focus on aligning with how they get their own jobs done. How can you help them capture their KPIs in your system? By aligning your product to your customers’ success metrics, you create a well-oiled upsell machine.
Daphne Costa Lopes has a favorite tool, success-qualified leads, that helps her customer success team identify the best-aligned customers who are ready for an upsell conversation. By qualifying their own leads, CSMs can own retention and use available product and usage data to identify cross sell and upsell opportunities.
“Reward team members for bringing on customers. Not just customers, but great customers.” - Ryan Milligan
AI is table stakes. Most organizations that use AI in digital commerce are expected to achieve at least a 25% improvement in customer satisfaction, revenue, or cost reduction. Unfortunately, we’re all working off of similar playbooks. So, how can you break away from the pack and use AI to create an excellent customer experience?
Improving retention only works if your customer base matches your ICP. Start by using AI to identify the customers and opportunities that have the highest chance of closing. Next, compensate your team for working ICP deals. Give your BDRs another $25/demo when the lead fits your ICP and offer higher commission rates to account executives for ICP deals.
“We spend all this time and money trying to personalize around a brand. But what really resonates in the long term is that people want to buy from people.” - Cliff Simon
When you use AI to distill all of the signals and noise that come from customer behavior, product usage, and market changes, you end up with powerful insights. At QuotaPath, Ryan Milligan and his team use AI to tackle the classification and categorization of high volumes of text including churn and win reasons.
Next, QuotaPath uses AI tools to identify buying patterns and condense the text into personalized messaging. But it’s not about matching a name, job title, or segment to a message. It’s about personalizing communication to help retain customers by solving specific problems.
Was this webinar RevOpsAF enough for you? If you want more advice on using AI to improve retention–and so much more–come join hundreds of RevOps pros in San Diego, May 28-30. We’ll cover everything, including advanced comp planning, the RevOps path to the C-suite, and managing the customer lifecycle.
A reminder to myself to add the discount code and link for RevOpsAF to this post 🙂
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