Going Farming

Independent agents have long struggled with the balance of “hunting” – searching for and securing new customer logos – and “farming” – retaining and expanding existing accounts.

Jones said RDS historically landed in the category of a farming business.

“Our cliche thing we always used to say, when we were competing or not, was, ‘The sale started after signature.’ It’s what you do after the deal was done. You’re growing revenue from there,” he said. 

Vernick said Upstack intends to farm the many customer bases it has acquired. He said that although RDS already focused on farming, it didn’t always have the time to analyze areas where it could cross-sell new technologies. 

“There wasn’t as much focus on that as there should have been, and that is an absolute strategy of Upstack,” he said. “And additional resources and scalability gives us the ability to do that.”