Q: We are constantly trying to grow our business, but the sales process to win a new customer is time-consuming. How can we grow our business with our existing customers?
While it is exciting, acquiring new customers is time-consuming and hard to predict, even when you have the best sales people. Many MSPs may think that once a prospect becomes a customer, the opportunity is complete, and they move on to customer retention mode with the customer.
However, with the right business practices, MSPs can, and should, retain and grow their customers at the same time. Here are some tips that can help you grow your business with existing customers.
3 tips for growing existing customer relationships
1. Engage in quarterly business review with your customers. MSPs often share periodic reports with their customers to let them know what work was completed during the specific time periods. While the reports will showcase the completed work, it does not inform the customer what could have happened if the work was not completed, how the work improved the security posture of the customer’s environment, or the operational cost savings that was achieved by remediating a threat or conducting a task.
The purpose of the quarterly business review is to walk the customer through a variety of topics. This includes summaries of tickets generated, the time it took to resolve issue(s), tasks performed in accordance to the service level the customer subscribed to, and ways to further improve the customers environment based on the trends they see from reporting. This is where the potential business growth from the customer originates.
2. Be informed. Ensure your account managers have what they need to help grow the customer. There are business enablement tools in the market that can provide the what is needed.
For instance, email security and site security assessments are great business enablement tools for MSPs. Some remote monitoring and management (RMM) platforms offer a security assessment tool as part of the platform to help simplify the data gathering and the analysis to generate meaningful, actionable reports and conversations. These reports can help your account managers speak knowledgably about the customer’s environment and provide insight on how they can improve.
Not only will the right information enable customers to understand how your team has been helping them improve their environment, but it will also build trust between the account manager and the customer to grow their business.
3. Create and pitch new services. Understanding your customers’ needs is very important. Some may need digital transformation, while others may desperately need improvements to their security posture. Surveying your customers regularly on their short-term and long-term goals can provide you with insights on what tools or services your customers may need in the future.
Additionally, work with your trusted vendors to understand what trends they are seeing in the market, and whether they have any new solutions that can help drive growth within your existing accounts. Vendors also often have great research data and go-to-market material that you can leverage for growth purposes.
Expanding your relationships within your installed base of accounts is a great way to grow your business. You have hopefully already earned their trust through your partnership, which should make your sales efforts require less effort. Enhancing your relationship by providing them with regular conversations, access to tools and information, and tips for how you can provide even greater value to them, are likely to go far.
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