Ways to increase revenue for your small business for customer support

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okay so with regard to commercial opportunities we've got this problem and solution so the the challenge or the problem that you might be facing is that there's opportunities to sell more to upsell and cross-sell to your prospects and customers who are in touch with your customer service team so really incorporating support and success here when we're talking about CS we'll just use that as the shorthand going forward instead of your sales team and the reason why this occurs by the way is that oftentimes customers just feel more comfortable engaging with people who are not in sales so with uh with sales conversations there there's sometimes this undertone of well I'm talking to you and maybe you're trying to sell me something whereas if they're engaging with your CS people then you don't have that sort of uh sort of undertone but that being said you still have this opportunity to relay that information and get those opportunities across to your sales team and so that's really what we want to do is make sure that we have great lines of communication that your CS team knows when these opportunities are coming up and then getting getting those across to the right people to take advantage of them so next slide please and we can go for it a bit great so let's let's look in a couple of different uh Arenas so first off with prospects so these are people who might not be paying you just yet for your product or your service first of all you want to maybe take a bit of a longer term view so if questions are coming through to your CS team then maybe try to find the underlying reason why somebody might be asking about a help or are trying to get some help so what is the use case what are they trying to accomplish in the very first place so maybe don't just solve the surface level problem but try to dig a little bit deeper and understand what what are the underlying challenges concerns that this customer might be facing with their business and do some Discovery and that kind of leads into the next area which is flagging these prospects over to your sales team and having them actually do more of a formal Discovery conversation with those leads that might be engaging with you so this process in of itself is not that complicated it's pretty simple when it comes to just like let's convey things over to our sales folks but what I found in my own experience is that the the bigger challenge is actually building the muscle memory so just really making it a habit a continuous habit so that all of your CS people are really of the mindset of let me keep an eye out for these potential opportunities from leads that are coming through and make sure that I'm consistently passing them over to the right people on the sales side next slide please and then with regard to existing customers this is another great opportunity to uncover what are these places where we can sell more upsell look for upgrades things like that and so this is really twofold over here so the first part is to start with a CS conversation so a customer service conversation and you can decide whether or not to include sales and as I mentioned earlier having sales in the conversation maybe it's not the right tone for the the conversation to begin things off you want to talk to them solve their problems not come across as okay we're trying to sell you more and and so maybe you want to take that conversation on your own to begin with and then Loop in sales separately or you might want to have a tag team approach if they are very explicitly saying well we are thinking about adding more seats to our subscription or we're thinking about buying more because we're facing XYZ challenges then maybe it does make sense so like let's let's speed things up let's have sales as part of that conversation so we can help you with your current set of challenges in your current solution your current investment and then sales can talk to you about increasing your investment and what are the possibilities there and then on the second point below is making sure that we are just keeping staying organized and we're tagging we're categorizing we're just keeping everything keeping all this information in a central location so that we can refer to it so maybe there might be a list in your CRM or your system of record where you can just have a folder or a place to find here are all the different opportunities that have come up with an existing customer base and then you can have the right people go out there and just explore those opportunities go through that list make sure that you're not you're not leaving behind any of those opportunities that have been uncovered by your CS team that's fine please thank you and then another challenge that you might face or another opportunity rather that this is probably a better way to look at it is just mentions of competitors so maybe competitors are coming up with your prospects or even with your existing customers that is always a bit concerning of hey if customers are being mentioned maybe there's some risk here that we might lose our existing customers and your CS teams are really going to be the main receivers of that feedback and that information and as Leticia mentioned earlier this is just information that's valuable for everybody not just the people on the Cs side or the sales side but certainly if you have a product group or if you have a marketing team like these are all useful bits of information that is really going to make your business more effective and so we want to do is set up a process to be able to like categorize and index and just get all this feedback together and then get it across to the right folks on to the sales side of things the next slide please so we've got some organization tips and I mentioned tagging conversations before as a great practice and within help Scout which is our help desk tool we we do have tags and this is a great way of just identifying or hearing the things that we want to organize and then I'm going to be able to reference them search for them and find the information in the future now when these instances come up then it's great to identify patterns so what are the things that are coming up when it comes to customers and like how big is the customer how much are they paying us what sort of Industry are they coming from what specific aspects of your solution are being called out so are there features that people are saying like this competitor is doing it better or they're doing a great job over there are there things in your own solution that you might want to consider when it comes to your own roadmap of maybe we can add this thing to our own product or our own service so just think about ways of categorizing and bucketing things so that you can figure out like maybe this is a big meaty area for us to explore in the future and the way that you can do so it could be as simple as just a spreadsheet maybe an Excel or a Google sheet and then compile that information feedback there make sure you have a table that's set up and maybe have some of these different columns with the contract value of the industry and so on and then make sure that you're reviewing it with all the teams that can take advantage of this information and make use of it and just analyze it and take some action on it on a regular recurring basis maybe monthly or quarterly once you've compiled enough of this information over that time frame to be able to get like a nice sample to to refer to next slide please right and then another area of opportunity is super fans or your your raving fans your customer Advocates so you might have certain people who are really supportive of your product or your solution but you're not identifying them or you're not taking advantage of the things that they are sharing across to you so what you want to do is first of all build up your super fan base make sure that you have some of them in place and then actually have that relationship and then they can really be so beneficial when it comes to some of the efforts that you're trying to do as a company so next slide please how do we do this okay so we have this this nice graphic that shows us some of the ways that we can think about it so I'm going to start from the top left which is identify what makes a Super Fan so some of the characteristics that you can think about one of them is just if you reach out to them they respond back to you that's a very simple one if they're responsive then that's always a good sign because these people are more engaged more plugged in compared to some of the other customers and maybe there's some ways that you reach out to people something like customer satisfaction survey or other types of surveys and they're responding to you they're providing you with feedback that's a great way to figure out okay these are folks who might be interested in in supporting us and just publicly helping us spread the good word about our business our product and our service now going into uh oh and then some other characteristics of what makes for a superfan they can provide specifics about why is your product or service helpful beneficial features functionality how does it how does it really help them specifically so it's not just I like this in general that's not that helpful but it's just I like this because it's helping me in XYZ areas and that's great and then one last thing to consider here when it comes to identifying your super fence is that they might be familiar with Alternatives competitors or other types of solutions that are out there there's still a loyal to you because of whatever combination magical combination of features and price point that you have with your solution and they're going to stick with you so those are all great things to keep an eye out for and then going into the top right bucket so how do you make those customers and create more of those super fans make sure that you're responsive so going back to what I mentioned a bit earlier about like when you reach out to them they respond back to you the same goes for your side so if they're reaching out to you they're asking for help then make sure you're getting back to them in a timely fashion try to provide a solution if you can if you can't provide a resolution at least acknowledge and let them know they've been heard and something is going to happen at some point even if it's not right away I think that's that's a really important part of cultivating your your fans and your Advocates within your customer base and then this might seem very obvious but certainly increasing the value of their investment with you so whatever they're paying you for your product and service if you're making that more valuable either adding new features new benefits things like of that nature then of course people are just going to be more loyal it's like great I'm paying this amount but this keeps on improving over time I'm going to stick with with this company or with this service going into the the bottom left corner which is asking for reviews case studies and testimonials so make sure that you're you're doing a great job and you're continuing to promote those features functionality and services that you're offering and don't be afraid to ask for their feedback we do this quite a lot here on the help Scout side as well so are there reviews that can provide testimonials case studies you you want to provide something and then ask for something in return that that's a great way of being able to to create engagement with your customers so maybe you've rolled out a new feature or aspect of your solution and then you have some resources that are going to help your customers take advantage of maybe you have some articles or some videos or a blog post something that they can use to get up to speed on this new thing that has increased the value of their investment going back to the the last point that I I was mentioning and then you can ask for something in return those reviews testimonials and case studies and then the last quadrant there which is the reward side of things is off offering a benefit to customers to become Advocates can be really effective maybe you have an affiliate program where they can refer other customers or actually so affiliate and referral programs are a little bit different but kind of similar sort of idea of having them spread the good word word of mouth like Leticia was mentioning earlier on and then other types of rewards that you can consider maybe Swag Like clothing items or other bits of things that that you can share and gifts to to your customers gift cards that's also a pretty popular incentive and you can like I've seen actually this is pretty common in in a lot of places of hey you you leave us positive review on a website like a G2 or trustpilot something like that and then we're going to give you a little gift card as as a thank you for doing so so those are some of the the tips that I have about those areas