🕵🏻♂️ Expansion & upsell playbooks
How to run a succcessful expansion ABM program: our playbook and case study
Expansion and retention are new revenue, yet here is the reality.
1/ AEs desperately send outbound messages to other business units, stakeholders or regional teams.
2/ AEs don't collaborate with marketing, but marketing is challenged to drive expansion revenue.
3/ Marketing has limited overview of deal history and doesn't have access to Champions and power users.
4/ Relationship with enterprise accounts is managed by account owners that don't cross-share the insights about the strategic initiatives of the key client, the value they get from the product.
5/ There is no culture to leverage client success process to build relationship with key clients and accelerate their time to value.
In these companies, retention = locking an account into an annual contract and sending product press-releases.
Expansion = doing same old school lead generation to the same account but different business units.
And it doesn’t work.
Today I want to share with you:
An expansion ABM playbook we run at Fullfunnel.io
Expansion case study
How to adapt your central expansion framework to new regions or new teams
Let's dive in.
Last call for ABM Virtual Bootcamp - Develop Your 2025 ABM Program In Two Weeks
On 5th -15th November we’ll run a virtual ABM Bootcamp (4 live workshops that will be recorded with a lifetime access) where you’ll take one of ABM roles and work with a group of peers on real ABM program planning.
During the workshops you’ll be involved in peer discussions, real-time planning and research. There will be a private Slack channel where you can ask questions or get feedback from me (Andrei), Vlad and your peers.
In between sessions, you will work on planning your own ABM program for 2025.
Fix marketing and sales silos, achieve alignment and develop a joint process to generate sales opportunities.
Go upmarket and generate sales opportunities with enterprise companies
Creating a predictable ALLBOUND pipeline sourced by sales and marketing by focusing on enterprise accounts that are likely to becomes a sales opportunity
Create vendor awareness among target buyers
Align your marketing and sales playbooks with how your customers buy
When I was ABM lead I've developed a framework that we adjusted later at Fullfunnel.io to drive expansion revenue.
1. Embed expansion/upsell signals in the client success process.
You must embed onboarding and in-depth customer interviews with Champions and power users.
Start with strategic initiatives and how they are impacting other regions, business units and teams.
Understand your Champion's role and KPIs.
Define business triggers that led them to looking for your solution.
2. Accelerate time to value during onboarding.
Incentivize your CS team to accelerate time to value for accounts with high expansion potential.
3. Track customer satisfaction and set up milestone interviews tracking before/after.
Debrief Champion and power users on the positive impact of your product on their KPIs and JTBD.
4. Create an internal case study.
Even if you are under strict NDA, agree with your Champion to create an "internal" case study that you'll be sharing only with the teams and units of this account.
Define which units are likely to benefit from your solution.
5. Run multithreaded engagement.
Embed engagement and relationship building with the buying committee members of your target units on the channels they are active in.
Watch another episode of Full-Funnel Live where we share some examples.
6. Develop a series of account-based events co-hosted with your Champion.
The best way to nurture a bigger group from a target account -> hosting an event where you address a strategic challenge while your Champion presents how they solved it.
7. Create “bridge” activities to generate sales opportunities.
Suggest 1-1 strategy sessions with your SMEs to audit & refine strategic challenges of other units and create a logical bridge between their priorities and your product.
Read our post about the new role of SDRs:
Drive pipeline THIS quarter with full-funnel ABM programs.
If any of these challenges sound familiar:
You are aligned in theory with sales but don’t do anything in practice aside from receiving wish lists from sales and sharing with them your marketing plan. In reality, you work in silos and miss the revenue targets and are being pressured by your executives.
You understand that your marketing and sales playbook is broken (mqls, gated content) but despite many attempts you don’t know how to fix it
Your outbound, paid ads and organic pipeline drastically decreased while CAC increased mostly because most of your market is problem unaware and not buying.
You lack brand awareness among target accounts and sales can’t get even a reply.
You clearly see that you're already behind your revenue targets
We can help.
We'll develop a custom full-funnel ABM strategy aligned with your resources, budget and stack and execute it together to drive results THIS quarter.
Expansion case study
When I (Andrei) was an ABM lead at Biosphere Corp, here is an expansion playbook I used to grow revenue with one retail chain by $1mln in 10 months.
For the full context, we were selling multiple household products to retail chains and were dealing with multiple category buyers. They were led by the head of procurement (our decision-maker) and worked closely with marketing.
Here is what I did.
1.FIGURING OUT THROUGH DECISION-MAKER UNDERPERFORMING CATEGORIES.
For our "bread 'n' butter products" we had fierce competition, and it was extremely hard to grow revenue. But there were categories that were overlooked by our categories.
They didn't invest in marketing budgets and didn't focus on engaging category managers.
I selected two categories with a total revenue share in that account <5%.
2. MEETING WITH MARKETING PEERS.
Before engaging with the category managers, I met with the marketing team of key accounts and discussed:
Upcoming initiatives
KPIs and priorities
Would they be interested in growing the revenue for underperforming categories?
After the meetings, I had enough insights on how to present trade marketing programs to my target category managers.
3. ENGAGING AND BUILDING RELATIONSHIP WITH THE CATEGORY MANAGERS.
I started with booking the meetings where we spoke about why the category was underperforming, their relationship with the competitors, ideas they had to grow the category and revenue targets.
With the collected insights, I readjusted my marketing budget and shifted more money to support a few key initiatives of the marketing team of the key account + introducing the trade marketing plan for the new SKUs I wanted to list in retail.
Marketing initiatives (e.g. giveaways at the opening of a new hypermarket) were not lucrative in terms of ROI, but they helped to get buy-in from marketing and helped us to get into their internal trade marketing programs.
The category managers also released the listing fees, which literally re-balanced the negative ROI from supporting marketing initiatives.
4. APPROVING AND EXECUTING ON AN ANNUAL PROMOTION PLAN.
I agreed with our brand manager that we'll schedule and execute an annual plan with the account. Both the category manager and the marketing team of key accounts were happy to see the commitment and additional revenue they can gain.
It also helped us to prevent any competitors' counteractions as they were simply out of the game for that period of time.
TLDR;
Expansion ≠ 21 outbound touches supported by programmatic display ads. Enterprise expansion doesn't happen through mass emails to the stakeholders of different business units.
To run a successful expansion program you need to build a strong relationship with your Champion and mak him a hero of the organization.
Then, develop meaningful engagement touchpoints with other units that are likely to have a similar to your Champion's challenge and create activities that develop a logical bridge between their priorities and your product.
It happens through understanding incentives of the different buyer personas, multithreaded engagement, connecting the dots for them and showing ROI with the individual proposals and plans.
Listen to Full-Funnel Live - Adapting Global Marketing Programs To The New Markets and Segments
*If you want to attend the next live episode, sign up here to receive an invite. Usually, we host them every Wednesday at 4 pm CET (Central Europe) - 10 am ET (Eastern Time).
In the new episode of Fullfunnel Live we'll share with Vladimir Blagojevic how to adjust your GTM strategy and marketing programs to new markets and segments to drive revenue (not a frustrated regional team).
Tune in to learn:
The most common mistakes when trying to adopt a successful HQ's marketing program to a new region or vertical
5-steps process we use to adjust central frameworks to the new market GTM needs, challenges and team's skillset
How to set up the right expectations and metrics for the new program