Customers

🔛 When it comes to customer expansion, there are typically three buckets that revenue can fall into add-on, upgrades, and cross-sales. If you’re a usage-based company, congratulations! Your customer expansion strategy is already baked into your business model. Where companies can get really creative is in add-on and cross-sales. Email and webinars are extremely powerful for both as they are probably the best out of app method to show customers how they can get more out of the product. So develop content and use cases to support it.

🤑 When it comes to customer success metrics (and really customer success in general) there are few more knowledgeable than Lincoln Murphy. He recently covered TTFV (Time to First Value), which is the time between the close of a sale and when that customer is onboarded. It’s a bit of an oddball in that it’s not a metric that businesses have complete control over – every customer has actions they must take to get up and running which you don’t manage. But by setting a goal (say 30 days) and working to get with your TTFV down to that number, you will will be able to measure exactly how much more quickly you can get users to their “aha” moment.

🔐 An often overlooked customer segment with strong growth potential is the adjacent customer. These are folks who are aware of your product (and may have even tried using it) but never successfully converted. That “just missed” conversion could be because your positioning doesn’t resonate with them or they see too many barriers to adoption – in either case, it’s extremely difficult to backtrack and figure out why exactly they chose to pass. To start to solve for these users you can look at who is successful on your platform today, and why. Comparing side by side may highlight where the disconnect is with adjacent users. The linked article from Brian Balfour offers more ways to dig deeper, it’s worth the read.

👂 We’ve seen several companies move away from the lead funnel acquisitions framework to a more customer-centric flywheel. Embracing this mindset shift means that your customer goals (not company) should be at the core of your growth engine. Here’s where customer-led growth (CLG) comes into play; as the name suggests, the strategy entails taking a deep dive into customer experiences and actions to see where your growth levers are. In other words, your customers tell you their needs, and you interpret their feedback into the product. While slightly different from the product-led growth theory, if they are combined the two strategies can be very powerful.  One word of caution - be selective about the feedback you incorporate; segmentation is vital here.