On Tuesday, I wrote about the four different situations hiding in your installed base, and how three of them mean talking to someone you’ve never met. Today the next question: what are you going to say to them?
Pick a prospect your team is chasing right now and ask your team what’s going on in that business. You’ll hear about what changed in their market, who the new CFO is and where she came from, what they’re under pressure to fix this year, what they tried before and why it didn’t work.
Now pick a customer you’ve had for four years and ask your team the same question. What comes back is typically angled around what they’ve bought. Which modules they use, how many users they have, when the contract runs out, and what’s still left to sell on the price list.
None of that tells you what’s going on in their business.
Let me share an anecdote with you. Paula, an AE at Wolters Kluwer’s Legal software division, told me about a customer they’d had for years. They were happy with what they had, no reason to move anywhere, other than maybe some extra users, or one of the new modules.
One day she met their General Counsel, who had promised his management he would cut email traffic by 70%. She could have taken that at face value and quoted him something. Instead she went and talked to the contracts team and the corporate team, and kept asking why. Underneath that one goal sat three others. Legal was drowning in work. The business had no visibility, so milestones were being missed. And in a highly regulated industry, contracts were being signed by people who could not legally represent the company.
As she put it: they didn’t even know all of these underlying challenges themselves.
That customer moved from their Essentials line to their Enterprise suite, meaning upping their investment from around 10k a year to 90k+.
If all you know about a customer is what they’ve bought, the only thing you can bring them is what they haven’t bought yet. Paula’s customer wasn’t looking for more licenses. He had a goal he’d promised his management, and no idea what was underneath it. She found out, and showed him.
The growth in your existing customers comes when you show them something about their own business they couldn’t see themselves.
Question for you to reflect upon:
Take your five longest-standing customers. Can your team tell you what each of those businesses is struggling to achieve this year, without mentioning your product once?
The Remarkable Effect is when your customers keep learning about their own business from you.
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