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.
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
©2018 The Cirrostratus Group
