What does customer journey stages look like at an organization that is prioritizing renewals, expansion revenue & product adoption?
I don't think the customer journey stages change if you're prioritizing existing customer revenue, but the tactics and channels used to reach your customers would definitely focus on continuous education and solution marketing.
Specifically, from a "Marketing" perspective, I would make sure that I have mix of the following to highlight use cases and the problems your organization can solve for the customer:
Scaled programs (i.e. paid display, paid social)
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High touch ABM marketing programs (lunch and learn, executive roundtables, session breakouts at 1st or 3rd party events)
In addition, I would focus on customer outreach tactics to make sure you are always communicating the benefits of your solution and ensuring that you are educating customers on why additional users or solutions benefit their organization. These could include:
In product or email onboarding and activation to encourage high initial adoption and use
User group and user conferences
Scaled and high touch customer success programs with messages similar to the scaled programs above
An organization that is prioritizing renewals, expansion revenue and product adoption, will require solid onboarding, adoption metrics, engagement metrics and data around these three priorities. Sales teams will be incentivized on expansion revenue as the priority.
The reason you need the metrics I noted above is that data will need to be monitored at every stage of the customer journey. This will help you understand what is working and what isn’t working. Where are customers dropping off within onboarding (activation)? How do you drive time-to-value faster (engagement or the aha
moment) which will result in better product adoption? How does the product become “sticky” so that you gain additional expansion revenue as customers grow?
Ultimately, this will require meeting customers where they are. The customer needs to have clarity on the impact you are driving. In this scenario, the focus is not on acquisition, but on everything that happens after this stage.