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New Research: Unlocking Customer Growth
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This week’s research note includes:
GTM Research: Unlocking Customer Growth
GTM Poll of the Week: How often do you turn to investors for advice on GTM?
GTM Problem of the Week: What’s the role of AI in outbound?
ROI Study of the Week: Regie.ai
GTM Research: Reframing the retention conversation towards customer growth
A weekly deep-dive into new GTM research and insights
The Dreaded Customer Churn Call
You know the feeling of excitement when you get on the phone with a great customer?
It’s a few months before renewal and you want to plant the seeds for an upsell or maybe an early renewal.
The customer loves you. They’ve done a testimonial. They’ve served as a reference.
Their NPS score is high!
Maybe you even know their kids ages and sports.
And now it’s time to renew, and you hear
“We love working with your team, but we just can’t renew.”
“We love the product, but I just can’t quantify the value to my CFO.”
“You have the coolest brand, and we are big fans. But I think we’ve gone as far as we can together.
“I love you guys but couldn’t convince my boss to keep it in our budget this year.”
“I’m moving into a new role and my replacement is too busy to prioritize this.”
“Sorry, the person that brought you in no longer works here.”
It’s brutal, and we bet it’s happened to everyone reading this research note.
The Old Way (Siloed Customer Retention) Is Broken
The traditional way of imagining customer success as a siloed department with sole ownership over making customers successful and closing the deal on renewals is not working.
How do we know?
Buyers expect fast time to value and measure ROI in months. If you can’t deliver that, you won’t renew.
Customer success teams are at risk of burnout. They feel overworked and undervalued.
The old metrics don’t predict the customers’ commitment. Customers can have very high NPS and low CES and still not renew because you haven’t proved value.
The New Way: Holistic, Customer Growth
We’ve released a new report on unlocking customer growth, and here’s our take:
Long-term success hinges on more than just renewal, it hinges on growth from within existing customers
That could be through additional products and services, usage levers, more teams, departments, and BU’s.
In order to reap those recurring revenue rewards, those customers have to be more than just happy.
They have to be able to achieve and quantify the anticipated results.
When we think in terms of ‘customer retention’, it’s easy to put the responsibility squarely on the shoulders of either the Customer Success department or a team of account-focused sales reps.
Reframing our thinking to center around ‘customer growth’ expands the effort from a department goal to a company initiative.
This has been a bit of a mission for our co-founder Bryan Brown in recent months: the customer’s success needs to be EVERYONE’s job. It’s not a department, it’s a mission.
The executive team needs to spend more energy thinking about their customer’s actual success and less time on thinking about the customer success department.
This shift in focus brings a more holistic approach to ensuring both customer achievement and long-term revenue growth.
Is Your Team Ready to Align on Customer Growth?
Key Questions to Ask
Next time your GTM Team gets together for an offsite, ask yourselves these questions.
And it needs to be the whole GTM team, not just the customer success department.
The CS department cannot ensure customers’ success all alone, despite the wonderful name of their department.
Are you focused on building a CS department or a GTM mindset?
Are you relying on CSMs or all GTM teams to meet the needs of customers?
Are you focused on securing the renewal or creating lifetime value for you and your customer?
Are you thinking, ‘how can we sell them more’, or for more ways to serve them?
Are you focused on the outputs of your CS team (issue resolution / QBR’s) or the outcomes of your customers (value creation)?
Do you view helping customers achieve success as a cost center or as a growth driver?
GTM Poll of the Week
For an upcoming research note on the relationship between investors and GTM teams, would love your input on this question (your responses are anonymous even to us, so we would really like your honest answers):
GTM Problem of the Week
Send us your most pressing GTM problem, and you’ll get a short session with an analyst to answer it!
Dear GTM Partners,
I’m getting sales pitches every day from companies that say their AI tool will completely automate everything my outbound team does so that I don’t need humans anymore.
So far, I don’t feel a ton of confidence in the tools I’ve seen and am afraid that over reliance on AI could really hurt our brand.
In a world where personal connection trumps everything else, how can AI possibly handle outbound alone?
Thoughts?
GTM Leader in South Bay
Dear GTM Leader in South Bay,
We agree, the hype on AI replacing GTM jobs is real. And a lot of companies are saying AI can do everything.
Honestly, we think that’s a red flag. Just like it’s a red flag when you go to a chiropractor who says she can fix your backache, your digestion, your cancer, and your relationship with your parents.
We trust she can fix the backache . . . the rest of those things, maybe not so much.
Same with AI. Any company that says AI can do absolutely everything should not be trusted.
A company that tells you exactly where AI can save you time or make you money is worth hearing out.
The question is not how to eliminate all humans, but where you can use AI to help on tasks that are repetitive and relatively low stakes.
Here are some examples:
Where AI can help outbound:
Account list building
Buying committee identification
Message generation
Task automation
List enrichment
Email outreach
Prioritizing accounts that need more attention and follow up
Deciding “next best touch/action”
Outbound tasks humans need to hang on to:
Brand Messaging
Prompt engineering
Phone calls
Social engagement
Any kind of real relationship building
Attending events and making connections
Participating in communities
Hope that helps, but we are always here to pitch in if you need us!
Send in your GTM Problem of the Week.
We train individuals, teams, fractional leaders, and agencies on our Go-to-Market Operating System. Join the waitlist to be notified when our next cohort launches.
ROI Study of the Week
Regie.ai is an AI-based prospecting platform that delivers on the promises of Generative AI on outbound sales.
This platform brings your CRM, sales engagement platform, and intent data under one umbrella, and uses AI to power:
Audience discovery and lead sourcing
Content generation with customized messages
Task execution and dynamic follow-up
In doing so, companies are able to automate prospecting while ensuring consistent messaging, personalizing follow-up, simplifying the rep experience, and directing human work to the most engaged leads - all while reducing onboarding and ramp time.
Read the Regie.ai ROI Study here.
GTM News
GTM news, nuggets, announcements, and what we’re reading:
MadKudu and Gong are Better Together: MadKudu and Gong announced a strategic partnership that will allow reps to run signal-based prospecting playbooks and prioritize accounts within the Gong Engage platform.
Sales, Marketing and Data are Better Together: Demand Gen Report released a new ebook on key trends and challenges practitioners are facing with ABM strategies and how to solve them by unifying sales, marketing, and data.
Voice of Customer Data and GTM are Better Together: From Karla Sanders at Heinz Marketing, a great read on how to integrate VOC data across the whole funnel.
GTM Events
A list of upcoming events of interest to GTM professionals
May 9 - 10, Seattle, WA: GTM Made Simple Roadshow
May 14 - 16, St. Louis, MO: Gainsight Pulse
May 23, Virtual: Elevate Ops (Pavilion)
June 6, Boston: Pavilion CRO Summit
June 7, Boston: GTM Made Simple Roadshow
July 9-11, London: GTM EMEA from Pavilion
September 18-20, Boston: INBOUND 2024
Hundreds of senior GTM leaders have taken our GTM company assessment.
Take it with your team and compare notes to see how you can evolve and where you’re misaligned.
We will be in Seattle this week with our GTM Made Simple Road Show. Looking forward to seeing many of you there!
Love,
The GTM Partners Team
