“We focused on top of funnel in 2023. Today, we’re focusing more on identifying expansions and nailing renewals.” - Jen Igartua
Right now, new business is harder to secure, sales cycles are longer, and conversion rates are going down. But don’t panic, these obstacles aren’t insurmountable. To overcome these hurdles, we must remember why we’re in the SaaS subscription business in the first place. It’s time to get back to focusing on long term customer happiness, securing renewals, and expanding accounts.
“When the prospect signs the dotted line, that’s just the beginning of your customer relationship.” - Rosalyn Santa Elena
The 2024 North Star metric is net revenue retention (NRR) and RevOps has a huge role to play in enabling teams to do better. In the past, organizations have heavily prioritized top of funnel but moving forward, RevOps needs to help reps grow spend with their existing customer base.
Start by ensuring your metrics are properly aligned to the roles of your sales and customer success teams. Instead of expecting CS to onboard, enable, renew, and grow accounts, it might be time to go back to their original KPIs: NRR, CSAT, and product adoption. By leaning into your usage and adoption data, it will become easier for GTM teams to identify expansion opportunities.
“Longer term commitments are great for business because you need more time to uncover the actual value for the customer.” - Ryan Milligan
2024 revenue targets will be hard to meet if you’re still running your 2023 playbook. That’s why honing in on NRR is so important. It allows CS to focus on increasing adoption and securing renewals. For sellers, they’re energy will be funneled toward ICP demos and target customers that are the right long term fit.
Encourage the right behavior by incentivizing your GTM teams with multi-year and early renewal accelerated commission rates. When it comes to your comp plans, the dollar math should prove that your teams are doing a good job setting up your customers for success.
“I use AI as my hardest working intern. It can do a massive amount of work in a short amount of time.” - Jeff Ignacio
In RevOps, the power of AI will really deliver when you use it to do deeper insights and analytics than a human has time for. AI can be used for deep, cohort, and historical analysis and insights that help management make better decisions.
“At QuotaPath, we’ve used AI to rework our loss and churn reasons. Take all of the emails and notes from your reps across all your opportunities, load it into an AI tool, and it will tell you more about the biggest reasons for lost opportunities,” says Ryan Milligan.
“Outbound is never dead, but good outbound is hard to keep alive.” - Jeff Ignacio
Is outbound dead? Naw, new customers still exist. But sellers need to be far more strategic about how they do cold outreach. Be very targeted in who you reach out to, why you’re reaching out, and the value you can bring.
One thing is for sure, don’t use AI to write your emails. AI can be useful for getting the data you need to reach an ICP account, but please refrain from sending an AI-generated template email to your prospects. Trust us, everyone can tell it’s not personalized or relevant to them.
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