SaaS Up-selling Checklist

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Use this checklist as a guide to understand whether you are prepared to succeed at up-selling your SaaS product. More details for each of the checklist items can be found in this article, Seven Requirements for Succesful Up-selling.

The Right Customer

  • Customer is in the market segment that your product was designed for including enterprise vs SMB
  • Customer is financially healthy
  • For transaction/resource pricing – Customer has business growth to need more transactions/resources
  • For additional feature pricing – Customer has requirement for the additional up-sell features
  • For revenue sharing pricing – Customer’s strategy and execution is likely to be successful

The Right Staff Skills

  • Communication Skills
  • Ability to acquire Customer Knowledge
  • Product Knowledge
  • Problem Solving Skills
  • Account Planning skills, specifically the ability to turn the above into value-based opportunities

The Right Staff Motivation & Incentives (at least one of the below options is used)

  • Measure customer success staff on customer satisfaction
  • Measure customer success staff on customer satisfaction balanced with the level of up-selling achieved
  • Use spiffs for customer success staff
  • Use commission for customer success and/or sales staff
  • Use commission and quota credit for customer success and/or sales staff

The Right Product Structure

  • Pricing and customer value is aligned in a very direct way
  • At least one or more paths for a customer to get added value once they have started using the offer

The Right Information

  • Basic customer information — product champion, purchaser, contact information & position information
  • What was purchased – quantity of licenses, actual usage of the products, contractual terms & renewal date
  • Good understanding of your customer’s strategy and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
  • Understand any negative views that your customer has about your product
  • Account plans

The Right Tools

  • CRM system
  • Support ticket system
  • Database of contracts & renewals
  • Account planning software (optional)
  • Customer success system (optional)

The Right Customer Attitude – Happy & Satisfied

  • Good Net Promotor Score (NPS) results
  • Good customer survey results
  • No chronic or long-term unresolved problems

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