How to improve your Customer Marketing during these times

In the Covid-19 era, it is easier to cross-sell (or up-sell) to an existing customer than trying to build an entirely new set of relationships with prospects when face-to-face meetings are still not possible, especially when you are selling into enterprises.   In this post, I will share with you the information your sales and marketing teams need  in order to execute a better customer marketing strategy, so you can build a strong pipeline within your customer base.  By the way, this exercise will also help you become more effective at marketing to prospects, who are similar to your existing customers.

What is my current customer profile?  You need to capture, within your CRM system, comprehensive information about your current customers.  This includes:

• Product information: what products they use, what versions (if not a SaaS application)
• Key contacts: List of key contacts at the customer (by personas, such as business buyer, technical buyer, influencer etc.), as well as key contacts for the account internally (account manager, customer success manager, executive sponsor etc.).  If the customer bought from you more than two years ago, your key contacts information within the CRM system may be stale and needs to be updated.  Valid and active contacts in your system are likely to be their accounts payable admin (you send invoices to) and their users (who call the support line), not the business buyers and influencers.  If your product is implemented by your partners, ensure your CRM system captures the name and contact information of the partner, and their current status (i.e. if they are still active in that account.).  Even if they are not active, they may provide valuable context about the account esp. when your old account team has moved on.
• Customer satisfaction: Capture information if the customer is referenceable and if possible, include a link within your CRM system to their recent support issues.  Your sales rep needs to know if they are currently a happy or an unhappy customer before they call them.  Their recent CSAT score and responses, if they responded to the survey, would also be a good thing to capture within your CRM system.
• Overages: If your solution is sold based on number of users or is usage based, it would be good to capture overage information within your CRM.  This information can be automatically updated in your CRM system if your solution has monitoring tools.  Overages provides sales rep an opening to call the customer and upsell, and perhaps, cross-sell other products.
• Key assets:  It is a good practice to add links for press releases, internal announcements, and case studies to the account record of your CRM system, as you publish those assets. Similarly, it is a good practice to ensure your sales rep adds the sales presentation, RFP responses, contracts, discovery notes etc. when the deal is closed and marked as won within the CRM system.  This provides a lot of context about the account when your current account manager approaches the account for an up-sell or cross-sell opportunity, months or years after the initial transaction was closed and the team that worked on that account is long gone.  For old accounts, see if you can get an intern to add these assets to deals won in the last 2 to 3 years.

This 360-degree information about your customers allows your sales rep to look for up-sell and cross-sell opportunities more easily within their territory. If most of the information is added as searchable and reportable fields within your CRM system, the process becomes a lot easier.  Today, account teams waste a lot of time profiling their target accounts within the installed base, and hence, may end up targeting only a small % of the possible accounts.  Similarly, in absence of such specific information, marketing teams run generic campaigns into the customer base rather than a targeted ABM (Account Based Marketing) approach, leading to very low conversion rates.

But more important, this treasure-trove also allows you your sales reps to more quickly understand why customers purchased your solution and use this information to quickly create customized and relevant pitches for similar customers in similar segments (industry, geography and size) – accommodating for changes to your products over time, evolution of your messages and changes in your competitive situation.  

So, an investment in customer profiling not only makes it easier to upsell/cross-sell into the installed base, but it can also help you open more doors within your target prospects.  And that is a huge advantage in these times.