Upselling in B2B SaaS is a strategy designed to sell a more feature-rich product edition to an existing customer. Prioritizing customer acquisition should not be your only priority for upselling growth. You have to look ahead towards long-term growth and retention to design strategic upsell paths. But if you wonder how to build an upsell strategy, you’re in the right place. If you want to build an upsell strategy I think it’s just a very simple two-step process. Let’s get started.
Identify the triggers
The first step is to identify the triggers. So if you’re a B2B SaaS company what you’re looking for is one of those triggers that you believe will generate a potential opportunity to push an upsell. It could be a certain usage point in a product, it could be a certain search for integration on your support platform or license utilization. It could also be hitting any other parameter that your product is hitting and you have a pricing plan around that parameter.
That’s part one, so you essentially lock yourself in to identify all the right triggers and start with them.
Putting together a playbook
The second step is to put together a process or a playbook. Where, if a trigger is generated on an account what happens next, what are the next steps for Success Manager or as a success manager that you could follow to take that trigger all the way to explore using that playbook and take that trigger and follow-through that trigger in the playbook and explore the upsell opportunity.
Now, when you have run enough of these experiments, let us say you start with the top three triggers, and maybe you have three playbooks or just one common playbook for all those triggers. Once you’ve done that, in the end, you might have 30 or 50 of those triggers through end to end of the playbook. Then you will know which of those triggers are working and which of those are not. You drop the ones which are not working and replace them with new triggers and put together a permanent process around the ones which are working.
Bonus Tip: Customer Success Playbook for an economic crisis.
Conclusion
What you’re fundamentally looking for is a predictable path that leads to customer success. Predictability where you know if 100 accounts get triggered and generated then at the end of those playbooks you want 10% – 30% of them upgraded or upsold to at the end of a successful upsell strategy.
That is the simplest way of figuring out the upsell plan and the upsell strategy for your business. Start with a bunch of triggers, put together the respective playbooks for each one of them, and there you go. You have your upsell strategy.
To know more about Upsell strategy, Strategies to Increase Upsell and How to do it the right way in 2021
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