Why Customer Expansion Should Be A Critical Component of Your Growth Strategy

invest in growth

Did you know that 70% of revenue in a subscription-based business comes from existing customer renewals and upsells? Renewals and upsells are effective ways to expand customer revenue for any recurring revenue business model but they are especially important during periods of economic uncertainty when new acquisition growth slows down or stops altogether. 

In order to ensure renewals and maximize upsell opportunities, it’s important to consistently provide value throughout the entire customer journey. Let’s take a look at how you can more effectively expand your customer base through proactively pursuing renewal and upsell opportunities.

Customer Expansion at its Core 

Customer expansion is a way to maximize your assets by encouraging your current customers to expand their license agreement, purchase additional features, renew at a higher rate or extend their usage of your platform further across their enterprise. It isn’t about pushing current customers to spend more; rather, it’s about creating extra value from which your customers will benefit. Customers are willing to pay for this new value, which helps you increase your company’s revenue. The challenge is to provide the kind of service and value that your customers will want and need more of, which in turn, will help your business refine your offerings while enabling you and your customers to grow together. 

Driving Expansion 

An effective customer expansion strategy begins with an understanding of what your customers want to achieve with your product. What goals did they set out to achieve when they purchased your product or service? Knowing what these goals are will help you identify upsell opportunities that offer them additional value.   

Totango’s Maximize Upsells SuccessBLOC can help you easily and proactively identify and close these important customer expansion opportunities and efficiently manage the upsell process. With this module, you can:

  • Improve efficiencies within your upsell process by using personalized campaigns to automatically reach out to key contacts when they’re running low on licenses.
  • Leverage automated workflows, called SuccessPlays, to proactively call your team to action when expansion opportunities are identified.
  • Standardize the upsell process with SuccessPlays and opportunity statuses that guide your team to a closed-won deal. 

As with all of Totango’s modular SuccessBLOCs, Maximize Upsells includes a Customer Experience Canvas featuring several pre-built Tracks with SuccessPlay and campaign templates that you can use out-of-the-box or customize to fit the specific needs of your customers. 

For example, a workflow template automatically triggers when an account has consumed 95% or more of their purchased licenses, notifying the account’s CSM of a potential upsell opportunity. From there, an email is automatically sent to the account contact alerting them that they are running out of licenses and explaining how and why they should purchase more. 

This SuccessBLOC also features a Scorecard where you can quickly see live updates and metrics for specific goals related to identifying upsell opportunities and achieving growth targets. Some of the metrics tracked in this Scorecard include:

  • Accounts with 95%+ license utilization
  • Accounts with 95%+ licenses consumed
  • Good health accounts with only one product
  • Growth rate last 90 days
  • Current year growth rate target
  • Current quarter growth opportunities
  • Next quarter growth opportunities

Invest in Customer Expansion and Growth Using Totango

In order to effectively grow and expand your customer base, it’s important to have a deep understanding of your customers’ goals, track progress and respond to behavior that indicates when a customer is ready to take advantage of  an expansion offer. Totango and our Maximize Upsells SuccessBLOC make it easy to gather this critical customer data into one place, so you can quickly and easily identify expansion opportunities and use pre-built tools and templates based on best practices to guide your CSMs through the expansion process. Start investing in the growth and expansion of your customers by signing up for Totango for free today!  

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