Curious - how are you generating patient leads if the domains aren't associated to a dental clinic?
Instantly suggests 10-14 days. It will also leave your domains at risk of being auto-blocked by Google through one of their 'sweeps' due to the way they have built their infrastructure no matter your own behaviour and despite following their best practice, then they won't tell you about it when you have been blocked and when you realise what's happened, they won't refund you. Spot the disgruntled customer 👍
Hey Devin M., I've been part of a team that's identified this exact problem and worked through a system change to solve it. Quick summary here - drop me a note if you want any more specifics of how we did it.
Problem stems from hiring renewals-only CS, or the team having a culture of renewals-only. Culture change can have a huge impact.
Can you better incentivise or coach your CSMs to cross-sell? Are there CSMs on the market with skills more adapted to cross-sell as well as renewals?
We didn't go out and hire a brand new team of BDRs off the bat - I'm guessing you don't want to either as it's an expensive solution for a hypothesis you've not tested
Start by identifying a small-ish number of target upsell accounts across your portfolio - the ones you think are the most low-hanging fruit. 10-20% of total client base to test.
Pick your BDRs that have the best soft skills and relationship building abilities - you don't want your best new business hunters charging in and potentially overstepping the mark and/or damaging existing relationships
Assign the clients to your BDRs and have them jointly write a cross-sell plan with your CSM that will fit seamlessly with the existing account plan your CSM has for that client
Get the CSM to introduce the BDRs to your key stakeholders at each account
Be open with your stakeholders at each account - tell them you think your solution could help elsewhere in the business & that's what the BDR is helping with
BDRs should also have identified other contacts within the business they can target on a cold basis & be reaching out directly
Test it for 1-2 quarters to see what traction you get
Be careful with how you're incentivising these BDRs - you obviously want the cross-sell but you can't have the same commission structures as the BDRs will have for new business as it'll skew things & might make the other BDRs unhappy. Think about offering bonuses for cross-sell to start, and run another incentive for the cold-only BDRs at the same time so everyone has chance to earn.
Once you've tested for a few quarters you'll be able to see what does & doesn't work and tweak
You might also want to prioritise a cross-sell focussed CSM for your next hire in that team and see results from them
Solutions we found was to have a specific cross-sell BDR team working with CSMs and a specific new business BDR team (however this will depend on the size of your teams & your internal priorities) as well as segmenting accounts to those with cross-sell opportunity and those you've identified as having minimum expansion potential & assigning CSMs with different skillsets to each
Hope this makes sense!
Sounds great, thanks for the context! Here's a few thoughts from me. If you're looking to grow sustainably on a tight budget, don't do them all at once. Pick one experiment, give it a long enough timeframe to show results, then decide if you keep it or not. Then move to the next experiment. If you try too much at once you won't be able to qualify exactly what changes are driving what results. I might try the AI SDR experiment first as it's quite low impact (you can spin up a subset of your existing systems to be just AI SDR) , low budget, you should see results within 2-3 months and work out an ROI from there. All the other suggestions you've mentioned have a much longer lead time and are more expensive. If you're looking to grow sustainably on a tight budget, don't hire AEs in prep for future demand - that's an immediate waste of resources. Make sure your existing AEs are absolutely maxed out first before you then go to hire anyone new. Also, if you try to spread existing workload across more AEs then you'll inevitably be reducing earning potential which will risk making AEs unhappy - particularly any who've had their commission drop. Hiring AEs to drive demos and close deals - have you considered a more cost effective way of closing deals? I noticed you don't have any kind of product demo/videos/FAQs on your website. Perhaps this could be a way of taking your prospects further through their buying journey without needing human intervention? Marketing will always need to be human driven with an AI touch, at least in today's world, rather than the other way round. Anything that's too AI driven won't land/won't rank with Google/won't engage an audience in a way that a good human marketer will be able to drive. 300+ signups - is that per month, per quarter, per year? What is net retention and average contract value? Are your SDRs currently working inbound or outbound, or a mix? If you were truly looking for a cost effective solution, you could move to a 360 source & close model for your sales team rather than split SDR/AE on demo booking/closing. The SDR/AE split is very much a legacy of the SaaS/low interest rates boom where growth was achieved by hiring rather than by looking for efficiency. Is your CS team currently completely maxed out with their capacity, prompting the need to split out onboarding? Is your CS team currently losing customers and cross-sell ops through a lack of time, or could there be another solution rather than hiring a new team to take care of onboarding? TLDR - from my perspective a lot of these ideas would need a lot of resources, a big GTM system/playbook change, would be expensive, would take a few months to start seeing impact. If you're on limited resources and a break-even model you need to be looking at maximising your existing resources first, then looking to start new experiments small before scaling up.
Hey Dennis J., asking these questions in particular against your comment "Any advice for growing sustainably on a tight budget?"
Do you already have human SDRs in place that you're adding AI SDRs alongside?
Your plan for hiring AEs to close deals - will they just be closing or will they be expected to self-generate deals too? (Are your SDRs creating so many deals it'd fill an AEs calendar?)
Do you have so many new signups & existing customers that you need to segment your CS & Onboarding teams?
Marketing to drive inbound leads - do you have human marketers to run the AI driven approach, or will you be using an AI-only approach?
Looks like you've got a lot of people's attention with this approach - AI SDRs in particular are a huge topic within GTM circles but nobody's quite sure yet how productive they might be!
Hey Ben. I'm currently using La Growth Machine for Linkedin campaigns - I can set up multi channel (particularly email) through it too. Works well. I've previously used HeyReach and was pleased with how that worked too, although it only had LInkedin capability rather than multi channel. 2 week free trial was really good to get me going. Looked at using Expandi & Dripify before as they're highly rated. Is there any kind of feedback you're looking for in particular you reckon I could pass on?
Hey Niki. If you've not seen it before, you might want to check out FullEnrich. It's a B2B data platform with Email & Phone Enrichment done by waterfall across 20+ providers including most of the big ones (Apollo, Hunter, RocketReach, Datagma). Has inbuilt email verification (Zerobounce + 2 others). Can integrate directly to CRMs & enrich directly from LI profiles. Subscriptions on a credit usage basis. I've used a lot of other tools in the past and find this the best for accuracy & coverage of emails that I've used so far.
