Acquiring new leads and growing the top of your funnel is critical to growth. New logo business is the act of planting new seeds that will grow over the years and continually yield fruit to grow your business. When sales leaders are asked what the most important aspect of their business is – they inevitably answer “more leads” or “growing my pipeline.” And while new logo business is critically important – as your saas company grows – your existing accounts become a larger and larger portion of your total revenue. Over time, your existing accounts eventually become the greatest source of total revenue growth as well.
Unfortunately, most saas businesses tend to look at account management and customer success as afterthoughts. And, yes, it is true that you’ll never have the need for account management if you don’t have strong new logo growth, neglecting or postponing your focus on account management can slow down your total revenue growth.
Ignoring account management or treating it as second fiddle in your business will only make your total revenue growth more difficult. Without account management churn will increase and your total lifetime value will shrink. The havoc that this has on your business will show up slowly in your metrics and then suddenly in your quarterly revenue.
The key to developing an index to manage customer and account health is to gain complete visibility into the relationships involved and to gain actionable insights that are based on both engagement and signals. Analyzing multiple data signals from different sources will help you discover the right answers at the right time.
What sources should you be focused on when setting up an index of customer and account health? The first and most obvious is to base it on CRM data. This might include simple fields associated with opportunities that are scheduled for renewal, contract expiration dates and scheduled tasks and reminders. Of course, the best data to understand is to measure the level of email and call activity between your company (your sales reps) and the customer (contacts).
The best way to gather engagement data for accounts is to have a powerful activity capture tool that automatically logs emails and calendar into CRM on behalf of the sales rep. A good activity capture tool will also auto-create contacts in the CRM. This will ensure that all of the data is available in the CRM to help determine engagement levels.
With all of the contact data auto-logged into the CRM account managers will understand who all of the stakeholders are and who all of the account managers are interacting with at your company. Understanding all of the stakeholders also means identifying supporters and detractors that are gauged on their real behavior. Reps can then create account plans based on engagement and target disengaged stakeholders or detractors and get ahead of renewal blockers.