By Shannon Murphy

Shannon Murphy

“It costs less to retain a client than recruit a new one.” No doubt you’ve heard this advice time and again. It follows, then, that it costs less to grow existing accounts than it does to sign new ones.

Whether upselling, cross-selling or scaling your clients’ current solutions, building deeper and wider relationships with customers increases account-level profitability without the overhead of new customer recruitment and onboarding.

Plus, you’re already starting from a place of trust with current clients. They’ve already chosen to work with you and count on you to provide solutions to their problems. You have the inside track in identifying services that could deliver desired business outcomes.

5 Easy Pieces

Grow together. Strengthen your clients’ businesses with strategic recommendations while also growing and strengthening your MSP. It’s a win-win. Here are five easy ways to get started:

1. Communicate consistently. When you’re trying to win a client, you pay them a lot of attention with calls, emails and maybe even dinners. Once they’re sold customers, do you continue those interactions? If not, you should. Managing client communications with the same enthusiasm and consistency as you did during the sales process can lead to discussions about business requirements. Ongoing conversations lead to additional sales and service opportunities.

Email, texts, social media, web meetings and virtual events can be part of your proactive communications plan to share information with clients about tech trends, innovative solutions, added features, special offers and more. Consider automating communications outreach via email and text, so that it happens regularly.

If you’re offering managed services that ensure client systems run smoothly, proactive communication is even more important since they can’t “see” what you’re doing for them. Automate reports and schedule routine check-ins. Hold quarterly business reviews (QBRs) to remind your clients of your value and to uncover new pain points or objectives.

2. Incentivize your sales teams. If you want your sales teams to focus on growing business with your base, you must not only communicate that but also motivate them to do so with incentives. To encourage reps to increase wallet share with existing clients., consider SPIFFs (a sales performance incentive fund) on single sales or bonuses on revenue milestones.

In addition to incentives for performance, consider rewarding communications behaviors. For example, coach your account executives to ask clients about:

In each case, these questions open conversations with clients that can lead to upselling and cross-selling opportunities.

3. Train your techs to spot opportunities. Your ability to upsell and cross-sell new services to existing customers is directly influenced by your post-sale support quality. Train techs to own their role in building those relationships and, over time, grow revenue.

Groom your techs to identify opportunities when they’re on-site or helping clients remotely. For example, they may uncover possibilities for platform integrations, compliance assistance or increased data security.

4. Turn clients into advocates. An overlooked way to increase average revenue per account (ARPA) is asking existing clients to refer new clients and then attributing the referral revenue to their lifetime value. Keep in mind that referrals can be a measure of how valuable a client is to your business.

Turning your best clients into advocates can not only help keep your net-new pipeline full but also strengthen those relationships. By bringing clients into your inner circle and sharing what’s new in your industry and product road map, they’re more likely to engage in conversations about how you can help them with their own business needs.

5. Make add-ons easy. Make it easy for your clients to upgrade services plans or add related services online. Self-service is a growing preference for many clients, especially millennial and Gen Z buyers, who are more likely to research products on their own and try them before they buy without even talking to your sales team. Don’t put obstacles in their way by forcing them to speak to a sales rep if you can enable an easy upgrade online.

The Bottom Line

Increasing revenue with current customers might take a lot less investment than landing new customers, but it won’t happen on a large scale without intention. Put as much time and effort into farming your base as you do when hunting new clients. Otherwise, you’re just leaving money on the table and the doors open to an enterprising competitor.

Shannon Murphy is chief marketer for Zomentum, an intelligent revenue platform built to help partners discover, sell and manage services. With more than 15 years of tech marketing experience, Murphy focuses on end-user perspectives to develop campaigns, tactics and sales approaches that convert opportunities and drive revenue. You may follow her on LinkedIn or @zomentum on Twitter.