Here are links to the five posts from last week and things to steal for yourself and/or take back to your team. Click through on each title for more [each article has a voiceover as well].
To the articles:
Do 100 Dials a Day Still Work?
The insight: Hard to justify this volume of dials when most people screen calls and don’t listen to voicemails. Phone works but as a supplement to your sales strategy.
Change this: Call after a signal like: email opened more than once, content download or a webinar signup. Use that call to run a mini discovery. Later in the funnel, pick up the phone instead of chasing prospects via email.
Track First Value by Hand First
The insight: Lol…not my best post title. More data hasn’t made it any clearer which customers have hit first value.
Change this: Once a week update a list of every active account with the value they’re after, the target date for achieving that value, and the date they actually got there. Review it monthly for slipped dates and repeat blockers before you build any health score. If you’re a big company, do this with a cohort of customers.
Graceful Churn
The insight: The company churning today could have contacts that leave and are a VP somewhere else in eighteen months. How you handle the exit can lead to new business in the future.
Change this: Ask why they’re leaving once and accept the answer, hand over their data without being asked, send each contact a personal note you wrote yourself, and keep them in “light orbit” on LinkedIn and your marketing email list.
Don’t Pitch at the QBR
The insight: Expansion signals show up between QBRs through good discovery.
Change this: Pick one expansion play (like a new product release) and build the play with your CSMs. Find customer candidates from usage data and transcripts, test outreach to champions, partner on discovery and map the stages. Then replicate the process with more customers.
The Customer Needs to Talk During a QBR
The insight: Probs one too many QBR posts in a week. A QBR is a conversation and not a presentation. Customer should talk less than 30% of the time.
Change this: Build the agenda around open-ended presumptive questions like “What friction did you experience this quarter?” Track the talk-listen ratio by CSM across every QBR and look for outliers.
