Repeat customers spend 67% more than new buyers. (Inc.)

Increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25-95%. (Harvard Business School)

Acquiring new customers is 5x more expensive than retaining existing customers. (Invesp)

Yet, do you find that your company is focusing more on net new customer acquisition than on customer growth? Especially in times when sales cycles are longer and close rates are low, growing existing customer accounts can help you hit your revenue goals faster and more cost-effectively.

We analyzed a cohort of approximately 300 Crossbeam customers to identify how much potential revenue their partners could help them close within their existing customer accounts. There is a total of $132 Billion in potential revenue* among the entire cohort for renewal, expansion, and upsell opportunities. If we split the $132 Billion evenly, that would be $440 Million in potential revenue per company.  

44% of companies favor new customer acquisition over retention, and only 18% favor retention. Focusing your efforts on growing existing customer accounts could help you spend less, drive more repeatable revenue, and prevent your customers from churning and choosing your competitor.

Below, we’ll share how you can work with partners to renew, expand, or upsell your existing accounts. What to expect:

• A Quick Overview of the Account Mapping Matrix
• Play #1: Renew
• Play #2: Expand
• Play #3: Upsell  

To note: We analyzed a cohort of 300 Crossbeam customers and identified $966 Billion in potential revenue across the entire cohort, inclusive of all overlap types. In the upcoming months, we’ll share more insights about potential revenue to help you adapt your strategy and generate wins.

If you’re a Crossbeam customer on the Supernode or Connector plan, you can configure Potential Revenue inside Crossbeam to identify how much potential revenue you have with each of your partners by overlap type. If you’re not on either plan, learn more about Potential Revenue here or upgrade.

*The $132 Billion is inclusive of only the Customer <> Customer overlap type and the Customer <> Open Opportunities overlap type.  

A quick overview of the Account Mapping Matrix

Using a Partner Ecosystem Platform (PEP) like Crossbeam, you can uncover opportunities where your partners can help influence a deal. Today, we’ll share how to close open opportunities on your existing customer accounts. For example: You could be selling into a new department via an account expansion or selling a paid integration or product feature via an upsell.  

Each area of the account mapping matrix below represents a different type of co-selling motion. In the top-left box, you’ll see that you have 278 customers in common with your hypothetical partner. These mutual customers represent those who may be interested in adopting your integration or leveraging your joint solution with your partner. They’re already using your partner’s services or product as part of their tech stack. Your tech and channel partners can help encourage integration and feature adoption among your mutual customers and influence renewals, upsells, and expansions.

Compared to other areas of the account mapping matrix that focus on new customer acquisition, the Customer <> Customer overlap and the Customer <> Open Opportunity overlap require less budget and internal resources to operationalize. You’ll likely need to invest less in marketing channels, like paid advertising, field events, and more, which are popular for engaging net new accounts. Instead, you’ll focus more on one-to-one conversations with your customers and developing collateral to communicate your product’s value to new stakeholders.

You and your partner already have an existing relationship with your customer account. In collaboration with your partner, you can identify:

• Which stakeholders you and your partner have relationships with within the account. By leveraging your respective relationships, you can help one another sell and expand into new end-users, departments, or global offices. (Influencing expansions and cross-selling)
• Where your customers are in the customer journey with your partner and the maturity of their product usage. This can help you understand if they’re ready to adopt new integrations and product features and the types of problems they’re trying to solve. (Influencing renewals and upsells)
• Which customers would be the best fit for adopting your integration, according to their business goals, budget, and buying timeline. If they have a good relationship with your customer, they can put in a good word for you. If their customer is about to churn, this is a signal it’s time to either team up to retain your mutual customer or pivot your strategy. (influencing renewals and upsells)

When analyzing our cohort of 300 Crossbeam customers, we found that there’s $86 Billion in potential revenue for the Customer <> Customer overlap alone.

For the customer <> customer overlap: There’s $86 Billion in total potential revenue among the entire cohort. If each company has an equal split of the potential revenue, that would be $286 Million per company that their partners can help them close.

For the customer <> open opportunities overlap: There’s $46 Billion in total potential revenue among the entire cohort. Split evenly, that would be $153 Million in potential revenue per company.

Next, we’ll cover three plays for generating revenue with your existing customers and the help of partners.

Play #1: Renew

If your team is in current discussions with an existing customer about renewing their contract, your partners can help. Your channel partners (including agencies, system integrators, and more) can help your existing customers leverage underutilized areas of your product.

For example: if your customer is considering switching to your competitor’s product because of a particular functionality, your channel partners can help them understand how they can achieve the same outcome using your product and features they may not have used yet. This extra influence from a third party can help you land the renewal and box out the competition.  

Additionally, your channel and tech partners can encourage your existing customer to adopt an integration that will help them hit their goals. The integration can help make your product “stickier” and can sometimes lead to an upsell. Integration users are 58% less likely to churn, on average, and a higher number of integrations or a high-quality integration can help you land the renewal and grow the account.    

A few resources that can help with renewal opportunities:

• How to Calculate Your Tech Ecosystem’s Impact on Churn — Freshworks’s customers are 30% less likely to churn when they’ve adopted one integration (compared to 0) and 60-80% less likely to churn when they’ve adopted five integrations or more.
• 4 Easy Account Mapping Wins (video) — Skip ahead to the 11-minute mark for the “Retention & Vetting” portion of the webinar and to the 13:34-minute mark to learn about co-marketing your integration to your mutual customers.
• How to Learn Your Customer’s Tech Stack and Increase Integration Adoption by 17% — RollWorks’s customers who use partner integrations renew at a rate approximately 30% higher than customers who don’t.

Play #2: Upsell

Let’s say you’ve identified 10 customers who use your partner’s product but have not adopted your integration. Perhaps you also chat with your customer success team and learn that all 10 customers would benefit from adopting the integration and that they have good relationships with your company and your partner’s company.

If you have a paid integration or if customers pay according to integration usage, this presents an upsell opportunity. Or, if you know that integrations impact product usage, feature adoption, and other metrics that may tie directly to upsells depending on your business model, then you can analyze adoption among select customers to communicate the value you’re driving.

Additionally, your partners can speak directly to your customers to put in a good word for you, share success stories about using your paid integration or product features with similar customers, and show how they can use your joint solution as part of their existing tech stack.

A few resources that can help with upselling opportunities:

• 15+ questions to help your sales reps master their co-selling motions — Help guide your sales team to ask their partner counterparts the right kind of questions to uncover upsell opportunities.
• How RingCentral built an internal culture of partnerships — Learn how their solutions engineers identify integration development opportunities with new customers and then adapt the integrations to other similar customers.  
• No opportunities lost: The Crossbeam guide to co-selling with tech partners — Skip ahead to page 14, where we cover the “Integration Adoption” play for the Customer <> Customer overlap.

Play #3: Expand

Whether you’re ready to sell more seats in your product or sell your product to entirely new teams, your partners can be your best advocates. Let’s say you’re looking to sell into the marketing team in a particular account, and you already have existing users in the sales team. Your partner can:

Recruit internal advocates. Reach out to their existing customers in the marketing team to identify internal advocates who can communicate your product’s value to their internal stakeholders.

Share success stories. Reach out to their existing contacts in the sales or marketing team to help make the case for them to adopt your product. They can share relevant case studies and success stories about similar customers they’ve worked with who have adopted your joint solution.

Educate your team about your new buyer. Help you understand the marketing teams business goals and priorities. You can also collaborate on one-pagers, case studies, and other collateral that helps communicate the value of your product to marketing teams.

Encourage integration adoption. They can encourage the marketing team to use your integration, get more value out of your tech partner’s product, and even replace your competitor’s product in their tech stack.  

A few resources that can help with cross-selling into and expanding existing accounts:

• Partnerships 101: What is Cross-Selling? — Hear more examples of cross-selling in the B2B SaaS World.
• How to Win Over Your Strategic Partner’s Customer Success team Right Away — Learn how Spectrm got buy-in from each of their strategic partner’s global teams by helping them expand their existing customer accounts.
• 4 Easy Account Mapping Wins — Skip ahead to the 11-minute mark for the “Retention & Vetting” section and 15:30 to hear about cross-selling and expanding existing customer accounts.