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Step 5: Retain and Grow with Sales Intelligence
In most cases, winning an initial deal is not the end of the sales road. If you’re an Account Manager, Customer Success Manager, Account Exec or in a similar role, your job typically includes a directive to “land and expand”—to find opportunities to “up-sell” your customers more of what they originally bought or to “cross-sell” them additional products. If you are in a subscription-style business, you might also be responsible for making sure your customers renew for another term.
In all of these cases, you will use Sales Intelligence to do two things:
- Monitor accounts for changes that might be renewal threats or opportunities to up-sell/cross-sell.
- Expand your contacts in the account to protect against organization changes and to find new decision makers.
Monitor your accounts
By now you're familiar with the concept of Watchlists and Alerts. You will want to make sure all of your customers are on a Watchlist so you aren’t caught off guard by events such as executive changes, acquisition, partnership, expansion, or financial trends.
Don’t forget to follow individual contacts as well as companies. In addition to news mentions, you’ll see social media posts from them that can give insight into what’s going on at the company and what’s on their mind—timely, off-the-cuff information that you won’t get from news articles.
Expand your contacts
Your success in growing an account hinges on your ability to both find contacts in other parts of the organization as well as build relationships with people who are higher in the organization.
The quickest way to find additional contacts in your accounts is to build a People List based on your customer Watchlist. Specify job functions and/or titles that match your likely buyers.
But rather than entering company attributes, go to "Start with a List" and specify a Watchlist from “My Saved Lists”.
You can even filter the list to see only people to whom you have a Connection.
Browse the list results to find the most promising contacts. Click on any table row to see a preview of the contact’s profile. Click the name to open the person's complete profile in a new tab. Note particularly any contacts to whom you are connected via your network. These are often people worth reaching out to right away.
If you’re focusing on finding additional contacts in a single company, you can use the People tab to filter employees by title, functional area, level, contact location, and contact info. The People tab also shows you who you’re connected to in the company.