How To Nail Upselling in Customer Success

Introduction

One of the biggest challenges in customer success is aligning goals and expectations. Many CSMs have misconceptions about upselling and they don’t know how to deal with them.

Mausmi Ambastha (Co-founder and COO of ZapScale) hosted Rachel Provan, a renowned customer success leadership coach in this episode of the Scale Tale podcast on the topic “Upselling Strategies for Customer Success Professionals”

They discussed and shared insights on how CSMs can approach upselling with compassion and genuinely want to help customers through upsells.

About The Guest

Rachel is a distinguished customer success leadership coach and the CEO of Provan Success, LLC. With 15 years of experience as a customer success leader, Rachel has effectively built and transformed CS departments in various organizations, ranging from dynamic seed-stage startups to prominent Fortune 500 companies.

Rachel’s expertise and her thought leadership have earned her accolades, including being named top 50 women leaders in customer success by Smart Karrot and one of the top 100 CS strategists by Success Coaching.

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Key Takeaways

The key takeaways from this insightful discussion are:

1. The Long-Term Perspective

Customer success must focus on long-term impact rather than short-term gains. It should focus on forecasting sales impact over one to three years, contrasting with the short-term focus of sales teams on quarterly results.

This long-term view helps prevent detrimental practices like pushing upsells due to short-term pressure, which can harm customer relationships in the long run.

2. Comprehensive Metrics

CS reporting structures are still evolving, unlike the well-established sales metrics. CS metrics like NRR (Net Revenue Retention) are just the beginning.

A deeper understanding of various metrics and stages of CS maturity is needed before pushing for upsells and expansions.

This evolved understanding helps CS teams to smoothly handle their division and its metrics, ensuring sustainable growth and customer satisfaction.

Beyond NRR, understanding the stages of CS maturity that are reactive, informed, proactive, and prescriptive provides a holistic view of customer success.

3. Foundational Building

Establishing strong foundations through customer journey mapping, segmentation, and tool setup is essential before scaling CS operations.

Make your customer success operation scalable and repeatable with ZapScale.

This is done by thoroughly understanding customer needs, mapping out processes, and properly implementing tools.

Skipping these steps can lead to issues when scaling and achieving high-performance metrics like NRR.

4. Founder Involvement

Founders should immerse themselves in CS in the early days to understand customer needs and set realistic expectations before hiring dedicated CS leadership.

They should engage with the customer to identify their problems, challenges, and issues related to upselling, retention, and customer value.

This hands-on experience helps set effective processes and improves communication with CS leaders.

Founders must understand the CS operations by spending time in the role or alongside customer success teams.

Make your customer success operations scalable and repeatable with ZapScale

5. Maturity And Automation

Progressing from proactive to prescriptive CS involves automation and personalized customer journeys, enabling strategic engagements and long-term retention.

Reaching prescriptive CS requires automating responses to predictable scenarios, allowing for more focus on strategic and personalized customer engagement.

6. Educational Resources

Coaching programs for new CS leaders are vital in developing skills for effective CS strategies, leadership, and cross-functional collaboration.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Mausmi and Rachel highlighted the importance of adopting a long-term approach to customer success.

They stressed the importance of prioritizing long-term sales forecasting over extended periods and understanding the stages of CS maturity progressing from reactive to prescriptive approaches.