Onboarding:
Accelerate Adoption with Multiple Options

How many different ways can your customers onboard? For companies juggling a backlog of signed customers, providing multiple options for onboarding can help. Consider self-guided onboarding journeys where customers can leverage pre-recorded videos, in-product tutorials, or one-to-many webinars. Once you create multiple onboarding options, give your customer the agency to choose which path to take. You may be surprised by how many are willing and able to self-guide if they are equipped with the right toolkit. When a portion of your customers successfully onboard with minimal support, it allows you to spend more time supporting those that require more assistance – and ultimately increases your team’s ability to more quickly turn new customers into referenceable advocates.

Product- and Sales-led Growth:
Create Customer Loyalists and Advocates

Product-led growth (PLG) is a trendy theme in tech – one that is often misconstrued as the opposite of sales-led growth. In our experience, however, these two motions are not mutually exclusive; you can lead with sales and maintain PLG characteristics. Are your customers able to see new or unused features within the product? Is your product designed to allow customers to share key insights easily with their colleagues and/or peers at different companies? These types of features can accelerate adoption within your existing user base, create virality amongst your power users and shorten the cycle to your next sale.

Customer Health Scores:
Measure Your Post-Sales Effectiveness

Do you have a methodology to quantify your customer’s health? If yes, do you know if your customers agree with that assessment? An optimized customer health score is a living, breathing, iterative metric that should incorporate both quantifiable metrics and qualitative feedback. Once you know the health of your customers, you are better positioned to create customer champions and a community in which they can thrive. A strong customer advocacy program can be a very effective way of activating your customer champions. It can also allow customers to connect with one another and create user communities, which in turn create strong referral channels for future sales.

Price Discipline:
Renew Your Customers with Value

These days, subscription contracts often have explicit language around periodic price increases. For those companies that have these mechanisms in place, it is important to evaluate the extent to which your team is enforcing them. For those companies that don’t do this today, we encourage you to reconsider. Price increases can (and should) be grounded in a value-based story and integrated into your standard account management and renewals processes. Equip your account management, customer success and/or dedicated renewals teams with details on product investments, service enhancements and other ways in which your team is working to increase the value delivered to customers. In our experience, many customers expect and anticipate regular price increases; you’re likely leaving money on the table if you don’t consider this growth lever.