Dear SaaStr: What are some best practices for selling a new product/service to your existing SaaS clients?
First, make sure your NPS is high. And drive it even higher.
Here’s the bottom line: if your NPS is say > 40 or so, a significant portion of your customers love you. If your NPS is say > 60 or so, a ton of your customers love you.
Businesses are looking for solutions to their problems.
If a business’ very favorite vendor has another solution to another of their problems — they’ll want to take a look. You’ll actually be doing them a favor:
- They’ll take the call.
- They’ll attend the webinar.
- They’ll read the email.
But if your NPS is low, they won’t.
So my #1 best practice is get your NPS up. Then, basically any approach will work. Call. Email. Blog. Tweet. Have customer success do a soft sell. Have sales do a hard sale. It will all work — to the segment of your customers that truly love you.
And if your NPS is low, segment it. And reach out not to the customers you think are happy — but the ones that have told you they are. The ones that say they’ll recommend you to others.
These days, I see way way too many “CSMs” and account managers calling into unhappy customers trying to get them to buy more. Don’t bother.
Second, be thoughtful about selling products to different stakeholders at your existing customers.
Almost every B2B founder I know and who has spoken at SaaStr has said just now hard it is to sell into a new stakeholder as a customer. That doesn’t mean don’t do it. But understand the difference before you start.
If the CMO already buys from you, e.g., it’s a lot easier to sell her more products than to sell a CRO to whom you don’t have a relationship with a new product. It can be done, but it takes a lot more time, money and energy. It took HubSpot years to penetrate CRM/sales even after building deep relationships with marketers.
Spencer Skates, CEO of Amplitude, has a great deep dive here on that topic. It was his #1 mistake going multi-product:
Third, give it some time. So start earlier.
Your next product may take off overnight. Great! But overall, it will take time to build. Time to socialize with the best. Time to learn a somewhat new GTM motion. And time for the revenue you do get to be material vis-a-vis the prior product(s).
By the time you realize you need a second product, it may almost be too late. Start earlier.
