55: Mike Weir - Churn & Sales compensation to fight churn
Apr 27, 2024
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Former CRO of G2, Mike Weir, discusses using a churn model with highly correlated variables to reduce churn and drive expansion revenue. The importance of product and marketing in customer education, aligning sales, customer success, product, and marketing in a PLG organization, and rewarding behaviors that lead to long-term revenue are highlighted. Founders should stay involved in sales to refine market understanding and product-market fit.
Identifying at-risk customers with a churn model helps prioritize actions for the customer success team.
Compensation plans should reward behaviors that align with long-term revenue goals, not just immediate sales.
Product teams play a critical role in supporting sales efforts and providing valuable data for customer engagement.
Deep dives
Importance of Profile Completeness for Brand Visibility
Ensuring a complete profile on the platform is crucial for brand visibility to attract potential customers. Uploading demo videos, white papers, and adjusting call-to-action strategies enhances engagement and drives brand consideration. This deeper level of engagement leads to building stronger brands, increasing consideration, and generating sales opportunities.
Chitu: World's Largest Software Marketplace
Chitu serves as a two-sided marketplace enabling global buyers to discover, research, compare, and decide on software and related services. Beyond being a review website, Chitu provides consulting and advising services to over 100,000 software companies to effectively engage with the 100 million plus buyers on the platform. Chitu's significance lies in influencing buyer decisions, establishing credibility, and managing word-of-mouth in an unmanipulated system.
Product-Assisted Growth Strategy to Combat Churn
Implementing a product-assisted growth strategy can effectively combat churn by engaging customers with relevant and timely insights. By analyzing 47 variables to predict churn, emphasizing profile completeness, and evaluating user behaviors, companies can proactively address at-risk customers. This approach involves prioritizing actionable alerts, utilizing triggers for customer success, and integrating product insights to drive expansion revenue and enhance customer experiences.
Importance of Hiring a Sales Leader with Strategic Capabilities
Hiring a sales leader who can handle the basic sales functions like setting up sales processes and CRM, as well as contribute strategically by defining the ideal customer profile (ICP) and focusing on outbound sales efforts is crucial. This leader should help in identifying key prospects from a large pool and converting existing customers into long-term relationships. By structuring a two-layered sales strategy based on ICP data, companies can efficiently target prospects and drive expansion with current customers.
Significance of Defining Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) for Effective Sales
Defining a clear Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is essential for streamlining sales efforts and ensuring long-term success. Companies often hesitate to narrow down their ICP, fearing missed opportunities. However, having a well-defined ICP simplifies subsequent steps like formulating compensation plans and strategies. By aligning sales incentives with behaviors that lead to long-term revenue, such as focusing on target industries and customer types, companies can enhance sales effectiveness and avoid chasing unprofitable deals.
The conversation with Mike Weir, former CRO of G2, focused on reducing churn and driving expansion revenue.
At G2, they used a churn model with 14 highly correlated variables to identify at-risk customers and prioritize actions for the customer success team. We also discussed the importance of product and marketing in customer education and engagement and how to align sales, customer success, product, and marketing in a product-led growth (PLG) organization.
The discussion also touches on the role of compensation plans in driving the right behaviors and the importance of measuring and rewarding actions that correlate to long-term revenue and whether founders should do sales and for how long.
Takeaways A churn model with highly correlated variables can help identify at-risk customers and prioritize actions for the customer success team.
Compensation plans should reward behaviors that correlate to long-term revenue, even if they don't directly generate revenue.
Product teams play a vital role in supporting sales efforts and providing valuable data.
Founders should stay involved in sales for as long as possible to refine their understanding of the market and product-market fit.
Sound Bites
"You got a customer that's kind of like half in the boat, half in the water."
"Expansion is the best way to fight against churn."
"If they're already trusting G2, then why not use that G2 third party validated content in that direct conversation when you get them engaging with your marketing materials or in a direct meeting with you."
Chapters 00:00 Profile Completeness and Engagement 11:08 Using a Churn Model 30:41 Aligning Sales, Customer Success, Product, and Marketing 39:36 Measuring Handraisers and Sales Calls 48:15 The Role of Founders in Sales 57:24 Incentivizing Actions that Drive Long-Term Revenue
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