This document provides tips for identifying sales opportunities throughout the customer lifecycle. It discusses: 1) Understanding customers and their needs, both explicitly and implicitly, helps uncover natural upsell opportunities. 2) Mapping the customer journey, including their problems, desired outcomes, buying process, and points of influence, helps engage customers at each stage. 3) Managing customer success, communities, evangelism, referrals, upsells, renewals, saves, and win-backs provides ongoing opportunities for growth in the relationship.

1. Identifying Sales Opportunities
Throughout the Customer Lifecycle
Matt Heinz
President, Heinz Marketing Inc
matt@heinzmarketing.com
@heinzmarketing

2. Housekeeping
• Copy of this deck
• Offers for you
– 10 minute brainstorm
– Successful Selling
– Secrets to Successful Content Marketing
• Email me what you want
– matt@heinzmarketing.com

3. Last Slide First
1. You are not in sales (but you’re always selling)
2. It’s all about buying signals and customer needs
(explicit & implicit, known & unknown)
3. The more you understand the customer, the
more natural the upsell opportunity
4. Fire lots of bullets
5. Sales & marketing is too important to leave to
salespeople and marketers
6. Two Words: LIFETIME VALUE

4. Four steps to a better plan
1. Do the math (quantify what success
looks like)
2. Create a clear customer profile
3. Map the sales and buying process
4. Plan to fire lots of bullets

5. Five questions to start
• What/who are your targets?
• What do they care about? What outcome
are they seeking?
• Where do you find them?
• What or who influences them?
• How do they want to engage and
(eventually) buy?

6. Prospect Engagement Funnel
Customer Targets (based on persona profiles) Next Step Accelerator
Ideas
Network-exclusive access to content
Network / Open Community Value-added special offers
Channels: Twitter, Facebook, Blog, LinkedIn Discovery events
Goal: Drive Registration White papers, top ten tips, etc.
Drip Marketing Testimonials, Success Stories
Channels: Email Newsletters, CRM System Profile-Specific Messages
Goal: Drive Active Prospects New product/service offers
Active Sales Cycle New Opportunity Alerts
Channels: CRM, 1:1 1:1 with Existing Customer
Goal: Sell In-Market Events
New Referral & Tell-a-Friend Offers
Customer Network / Community Invites
#loopfuse

7. It’s really a bowtie…

8. Your customers

9. What do customers care about?
#loopfuse

10. The buying progression
Problem/ Solution Objective/
Pain Outcome
#loopfuse

11. Stages of customer engagement
1. Onboarding
2. Early customer success
3. Community management
4. Evangelist development & leverage
5. Referrals
6. Upsells
7. Renewals
8. Saves
9. Win-backs

12. Keys to early customer success
• Map the customer ecosystem and train
accordingly
• Train beyond the product
• Identify the 2-3 most important drivers of
success
• Give lots of early love
• Leverage other customers as peer trainers &
evangelists
• Know and look for early warnings signs

13. Community management
• Daily focus group
• Real-time product feedback mechanism
• Fishing for buying signals
• Other tips:
– Manage lightly
– Hire peer facilitators
– Get executives involved

14. Importance of buying signals
• Hint: It’s not about buying
• It’s about solving problems
– Identifying, quantifying and eliminating pain
(current or future)
– Training your team to listen for, and ask for,
these signals
– Offer advice, answers, solutions before
bringing up the upsell

15. Referrals, upsell, cross sell
• Who’s job is this?
– Sales, customer service, both?
• Who’s compensated for what?
• Balancing church and state

16. The (mostly) missed opportunity
• Transactional emails
– Who owns the content?
– What’s the intent/usage behind the message?
– Timing?
– Who’s monitoring replies?
– Does it help or hurt your brand?

17. Saves, renewals & win-backs
• Renewals start on day one of the
relationship
• What’s your proactive and reactive save
process?
• Who owns win-backs? What’s your
strategy (beyond sending them email)?
– Treat them like they’re still a customer…

18. Don’t forget…
matt@heinzmarketing.com

19. Questions?