Your path to negative churn in SaaS is through upselling your current customers. Here we discuss the five elements that go into making an effective SaaS upsell strategy.

1. The Key Parts of a SaaS
Upsell Strategy

2. Introduction
• The path to negative churn is through upselling to your
existing customers.
• The upsell starts way before you sign-up the customer.
• Here we review the 5 essential elements of an upsell
strategy.

3. Part 1. Customer Development
• Customer development helps you understand various pain
points and their business impact.
• Users initially subscribe to solve their big pains. However,
they are happy to pay more (sometimes much more) to
eliminate minor hassles they encounter as they solve big
problems through your product.
• Pains and hassles in a business process are your leverage.
Less pain and hassle to the user → higher subscription
revenue.

4. Part 2. Product Design
• Product design != UI design
• Solutions to various customer pains and hassles yield a
series of value thresholds. Products should incrementally
expose users to these value thresholds and show the
option to upgrade.
• Not all value thresholds are linked to a product usage level.
Upsell features that offer a value threshold without
depending on heavy usage are very effective.

5. Part 3. Data Strategy
• Your users are talking to you when they use your product,
read your blog, get your newsletter. Are you listening to
them?
• A good data strategy helps you pull together information
from all your customer touch points to paint the full picture.
• A good strategy can help you see which of your customers
are likely to upgrade if given a nudge.

6. Part 4. Engagement Plan
• A good engagement plan is multi-faceted. It should engage
users through email, phone, product notifications, event
invites, etc.
• A good engagement plan should highlight what the user
has already accomplished and the milestones ahead.
• Engaged users are your best users. You won’t know who
they are if you didn’t engage them in the first place.

7. Part 5. Sales & Customer Success
• In SaaS everyone is working at the customer success
department.
• Sales and customer success should take a role of monitor
and assist.
• Use data to monitor who is likely to upgrade and then
assist them to cross a value threshold with an upgrade.

8. Hydra analyzes user behavior, product usage and
engagement patterns to help product first companies figure
out who is likely to upgrade with the right nudge.
www.hydra.ai