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Extend Customer Lifetime Value with Automated Expand Selling

Scott Frew
Scott Frew

Building a strong and sustainable pipeline of new business opportunities has been the cornerstone to business success. While the imperative to achieve this through new markets, customers, and lines of business is well documented, what is not so obvious is the huge opportunity that exists inside a business’ current customer portfolio. In fact, all too often, existing customer success, indeed retainment, is almost ignored as a growth strategy.

Equally, the WAY you execute on a customer retainment and success strategy is as vital as identifying the opportunity.

A profitable customer success strategy reallocates the investments usually geared towards costly new customers, market and line of business opportunities, and points these investments towards an Installed Base Customer Lifecycle Management platform. From this platform, profitable customer expansion and extension strategies can be designed that include up-sell (deeper use of existing assets), cross-sell (reference architectures covering complementary assets to existing investments), trade-in schemes, asset retirement, refresh options and finally, the protection of your customer assets through proactive renewal and maintenance initiatives.

Coupling contemporary financing instruments with an Installed Base Customer Lifecycle Management platform allows for the engineering of recurring OpEx and consumption-based revenue streams, which are clearly replacing large CapEx deals.

The most important part of this strategy is that you are actually creating unsolicited proposals to take to your customer which represent business value that they otherwise would not have seen. In short, you are not a supplier to your customer, you are an enabler of their own business objectives. That’s called true customer value!

The extent of your own profitability rests within the methodologies you deploy to achieve this. The aim is to keep the cost of these expansion based selling initiatives low in order to achieve optimum, profitable growth.

The antiquated practice of translating customer data from spreadsheets, CRMs and ERPs to viable leads requires a considerable amount of additional work that very few sales teams and channel partners have the time or incentive to take on. Rather, the process must be seamless and as automated as possible to minimise costs while amplifying the opportunities uncovered. Ultimately you are able to take action on potential opportunities before your competitors do.

For technology providers in particular, given the complexity and sheer volume of products and services on the market, this is a difficult process. The complexity is amplified when managing this via an indirect channel, with multiple systems housing the data required to prepare and execute product-related campaigns. The result – missed opportunities and lost revenue.

You don’t need to hire more staff to trawl through data for days on end. That has never worked well. You just need the right tools that can help do all of this for you, pro-actively, throughout the entire product and customer lifecycle.

With an Installed Base Lifecycle Management platform such as iasset.com, you will be able to easily drive growth opportunities via tech refresh, upgrade and/or migration campaigns based upon where they are within the product lifecycle: 

  • Create automatic, pre-validated opportunities using pricing tiers and certifications
  • Trigger alerts when products reach end of life or service (EOL/EOx)
  • Automatically program and deploy campaigns or promotions
  • Gain full visibility into all of your customers’ installed products
  • Integrate into any ERP/ITSM/CRM system to ensure data integrity

Want to know more? Feel free to contact me directly at sfrew@iasset.com as I am passionate about making this a reality for as many businesses as I can.

 

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