How does a CSM drive expansion?
How does a CSM drive expansion?
A conversation with a client around the expansion of their current investment in your product or service is underpinned by a mutual understanding of adoption.
Adoption is a simple maths equation. The client has purchased 30 Units of your product and they are using 25 units. The client has 5 units to use before they purchase any more units of your product.
As a CSM, understanding the client's plans around the usage of those 5 units is critical in order to grow or expand the client's investment in your product.
Typically a client knows what they will be doing with your solution over the next 3 months. Business cases have been approved money has been distributed to the team's cost centre and the sprint has been scheduled.
As the client looks beyond those three months you may find that there isn’t too much clarity about the pipeline of work.
As a CSM, you can help the client increase their awareness of how your solution has been used by other clients. Walking the client’s team through some use cases or demonstrating new features can start the process of building demand.
With this new knowledge, the client can decide if these options could be used by their business, to create more value; the discussion on future adoption begins.
There are more strategic ways of driving demand but the way described here is the most simple. Note that it does assume that your Customer Success team does focus on capturing client use cases to support these adoption discussions.
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