Cloud Champions II – The Cross-sell and Up-sell Opportunity - view on demand and access resources

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In today’s Cloud Champions II webinar we heard from Brett Fraser how to grow your business by defining a clear strategy to drive up-sell and cross-sell with your customers. If you missed the webinar or want to review the content, all previous sessions can be found on demand on the Cloud Champions calendar.

THE BLOG BELOW IS POSTED ON BEHALF OF BRETT FRASER – PARTNER CHANNEL DEVELOPMENT MANAGER – MICROSOFT AUSTRALIA.

The cloud has enabled many changes. The way we can deliver technology to our customers and the way customers can purchase technology. We therefore need to think about changing the way we market, sell and package up offerings for our customers.

Cloud has evolved the concept of “ownership” of technology, allowing customers to ‘rent’ or ‘subscribe’ to the ‘services’ they wish to use. This move towards a world that is built on subscriptions has led us to rethink many of the success metrics we have used in the past. It used to be about top line revenue and individual deal value. However, with subscriptions being the main new mechanism in which people acquire technology, we start to think about success in different ways. We have more of a focus on things like:

  • Monthly/Annual Recurring Revenue (MRR, ARR)
  • Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV)
  • Average Revenue Per User (ARPU)
  • Customer Attrition (“Churn”)
  • Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

With these new success metrics in mind, it’s more important than ever to think about how we can increase the volume of sales of subscription services to impact things like Monthly Recurring Revenue and Customer Lifetime Value. Selling Office 365 is fantastic and it can fundamentally change the way your customers work, however to impact metrics such as Average Revenue Per User we need to look to how we can complement and build on Office 365 with other services, be they Microsoft products or your own services that you provide. In order to achieve this, we need to be REALLY good at cross selling to our existing customers.

In today’s session I focused on how critical it is to be both PLANNED and DELIBERATE as we consider our cross sell strategy.

A good exercise is to map out all the products and services that you as a business are able to deliver (i.e. Office 365, Azure, Power BI, Devices, Managed Services, etc.). From there, you can plot ‘paths’ from a product to the next logical product. One of the examples I used today was:

Office 365 -> Tablets -> Enterprise Mobility Suite -> Managed Services.

Whichever path you choose, it is important to ensure you build into your sales process when to have the next discussion with your customer about the next planned product you intend to speak to them about and stick to it. If it’s a follow up meeting 2 months after Office 365 has been deployed, then book it in the moment you deploy. If it’s a recurring “lunch and learn” series set these up as a regular motion that happens every 3 months or so.  However you choose to structure this, it’s imperative that you set a cadence and stick to it.

As with most changes this represents many opportunities. Learning new skills and new ways of doing things is going to be key to achieving success in the new world of cloud. Cross Selling is a vital skill to develop your business within an existing and growing customer base. Having a structured approach and clear strategy to drive both cross and up sell is going to be more important than ever.

Brett Fraser - Partner Channel Development Manager, Microsoft Australia

 

Below are some useful resources following today’s webinar: