#58: Scale Customer Expansion with Inbound Strategies

Inbound Marketing transformed the way companies sell. 

Instead of the inefficient approach of calling every potential prospect without insight as to whether they are experiencing the problem you fix, you leverage virtual channels to:

• Meet customers where they are
• Educate them using content 
• Build trust in your brand and solution
• Guide customers through the qualification process
• And only sell when they are ready to be sold to

You'd be hard-pressed to find a modern company that isn't using inbound marketing today.

And while the 'Google Search' and SEO model is being disrupted by AI, search is still how most people find solutions to their problems today. 

So why is Customer Success still stuck on manual outreach and blast email campaigns? 

In this newsletter, I will share how you can build an inbound machine to drive customer expansion and supercharge your NRR, without manual CSM work. 

Identifying Customers That Are Ready To Grow

You need to earn the right to upsell to your customers.

If the client hasn't extracted value from their original purchase:

1. they are not going to be interested in buying more from you
2. it will not be in your best interest to sell more to them.

Your first goal with this customer is to activate the current use case to avoid an early churn (I recommend using a Success Plan). 

But there's a moment when that focus shifts.

The customer starts seeing value and is open to doing more.

The problem is that too many companies aren't measuring whether their customers are achieving their goals (ie. using customer outcomes) and don't have a good tool to look at whitespace (total addressable opportunity for an account).

So... how can they know when customers are ready to buy more?

They don't.

That's where the CS Team usually fill the void of outcomes data, with sentiment.

But that isn't scalable.

(If you want to avoid falling in this pitfall, here's how you can define KPIs that work at scale)

When you have thousands of customers, most of them don't have the luxury of a named CSM that knows the context of their use case and where they are in the value realisation journey. 

The good news is that the conversation is shifting.

A lof of CS leaders put defining Customer Outcomes at the top of their priorities this year and are investing in CS tools that can help monitor and measure it at scale ('24 CS Trends Report)

Targetting the Right Customer with The Right Message

The beauty of Inbound is that you're meeting customers where they are.

A clear definition of your funnel stages is the bedrock of pre-sales inbound. Using triggers, marketers shift the content from broad and educational to a narrower and stronger positioning of your solution.

In Customer Marketing, the "funnel" becomes the customer journey.

If you don't have a customer journey yet, check out this simple 7-step Customer Journey to get you started. You can bring this to your Marketing counterpart and have a great conversation about how to nurture customers at each stage together.

What are good triggers for the customer journey?

Trigger metrics for each stage should tell you what information the customer needs to move to the following phase of the journey, for example:

• A customer struggling with usage at early adoption should get use-case enablement;
• A customer flying with usage at the same stage, should get content on features they are not using yet and case studies of companies like them doing MORE with the product

Below is an example of trigger metrics for each phase and tailored content that can help move customers along the value realisation journey:

As you evolve your strategy, you can build multiple triggers per stage and even start tailoring per persona (I wrote about it here), creating a content machine that's always following your customer's actions with supporting information. 

There should be an opportunity to grow your healthy customers at every stage once they are set up and using the product, not just during the renewal phase.

Your goal should be to get the customer from activation to growth in as little time as possible (but do it sustainably).

And yes... in some cases, you can even upsell during onboarding.

But that only happens when key functionality is missed during the sales process. And that's often a bummer for the customer as they just got budget approval and signed a deal and are already forking more money to get what they need.

Couple your tailored inbound content with:

• chatbots that can help customers self-serve
• a scale CSM that can unlock further value
• a sales rep to discuss mature growth opportunities
• a partner that can help customers realise the value (learn more here)

And you will see your upsell and cross-sell rate grow, while freeing up time from your CS team to focus on less repetitive tasks that require deeper collaboration with customers.

TL'DR:

Want to scale upsell and cross-sell in your CS team? Partner with your Marketing team to use Inbound Marketing.

• Map your customer journey
• Define metrics to monitor to move customers through the journey stages
• Target customers with tailored content for where they are at
• Couple that with human intervention where needed