How SOAR Helped Gainsight Enable Their CSMs to Improve Retention, Expansion, and ROI
Easton Taylor, SVP of Customer Success at Gainsight, shares his experience working with SOAR Performance Group.
How can SOAR help YOUR organization?
3 Steps to Drive Breakthrough Growth Within Your Account Base
In this blog, based on a webinar with SOAR and People.ai, learn why customer growth is critical in the current market and how your team can prioritize, plan, and execute to drive breakthrough growth within your account base.
Why Customer Growth is Critical
Pre-economic downturn, the focus was on opportunity execution. At SOAR, we have determined four reasons for an increasing focus on customer growth and retention among our clients post-economic downturn:
1. Changes in buyer behavior.
Sales cycles are currently 20-30% longer for net new logos than a few years ago, partially due to increased business case scrutiny among potential buyers. So, renewing with current customers is quicker and easier than chasing new logos.
2. Economic advantages of expansion.
When selling to current customers, there is a 5x lower cost and 30% higher win rate than selling to new customers, according to TSIA.
3. Impact on Net Revenue Retention (NRR) and Lifetime Value (LTV).
Without an effective expand motion, NRR hits a ceiling. According to TSIA, customers that expand before renewal renew at a 78% higher rate than those that don’t.
4. NRR drives valuation.
According to Gainsight, NRR has the highest correlation with valuation of any other metric.
As you can see, expanding within your existing account base is easier and more cost effective in the current environment than chasing net new logos. Now that we’ve covered why you should focus on growing your existing accounts, let’s talk about how to grow your existing accounts.
3 Practical Ways to Optimize Account Growth
A challenging market in recent years has caused many companies to reconsider how they balance new account acquisition with existing customer expansion.
Keep reading for 3 practical shifts your organization can make to optimize growth in both new and existing accounts, based on insights shared from a recent panel discussion hosted by the Sales Leadership Community.
Ask These Five Questions to Improve Your Value Articulation and Differentiation
In my conversations with chief revenue officers (CROs), a recurring theme is emerging. They tell me: “John, we just aren’t effectively articulating our value and differentiation.” While this has long been a challenge for sales leaders, several macro forces have accelerated this issue:
- Corporate priorities shifting – for many years the focus was on growth. Now, the pendulum has swung to profitability and efficiency.
- Champion disruption – reorganization and layoffs have displaced many of the champions who were so effective at articulating our value when we weren’t in the room.
- Competition – as one CRO told me recently, it feels like there are 20 competitors in every deal. If we can’t credibly articulate our differentiation early on, we are done.
Additionally, there is the issue of a generation of sellers who have come of age in a predominantly growing market. When combined with the overall industry pressures, this creates a major challenge for organizations trying to make their number.
Does this all sound familiar?
As we enter a new year, kickoff is a great time to ensure that our revenue generating teams are all aligned on a high impact, buyer centric conversation.
Recording of Gainsight Pulse Conference: Key Skills CSM Teams Need to Succeed in 2023
In 2023, Customer Success Managers are stuck between the often opposing priorities of customers and companies. Customers are scrutinizing budget, spend and value more than ever, while companies are prioritizing renewal and expansion revenue. This leaves CSMs navigating many expectations from various directions.
How can your organization equip your CSMs to succeed in this environment? Watch this presentation by John Thackston, CEO at SOAR Performance Group, and Easton Taylor, VP of Customer Success at Gainsight, from Gainsight’s 2023 Pulse Conference
You can also watch the original webinar and read our blog based on this topic.