How to Create an Account Insight-driven Customer Growth Model

Getting deep insights into your existing customers is the most effective way to drive growth from your customer base. In this post, we outline a 10-step customer growth model that gathers meaningful account insights, segments customers, and activates those insights to expand relationships.

Why a Customer Growth Model Focused on Existing Customers Should be a Priority

Here are four reasons why your Existing Customer Growth Model is an underexploited opportunity:

• 5X more expensive to acquire new customers than retain one (Source)
• Returning customers spend 67% more than new customers (Source)
• An increase in customer retention by 5% can lead to a company’s profits growing by 25% to 95% (Source)
• Committed customers are 6X more likely to repurchase (Source)

Building Your Customer Growth Model Foundation

The most common way to do this is the Net Promoter Score (NPS). The Net Promoter Score (NPS) has shortcomings for gaining deep account insights.

The problem with using NPS is that survey participation can be low; feedback is shallow and hard to act on. And when the sample does not represent all the key stakeholders, the responses are biased and may be misleading. And while it can indicate a risk it rarely provides enough precision about addressing it.

The biggest issue is that satisfied clients are not necessarily committed clients. In his book, the Loyalty Effect, the creator of Net Promoter Score, Frederick Reichheld, says that 60-80% of customers who said they were satisfied defected to another vendor.

So, if your customer satisfaction survey tells you that your clients are satisfied, don’t get comfortable. The odds are that they are open to an offer by a competitor.

In our view, you need a much more robust way of gathering account insights.

10 Steps to Valuable Customer Insights

Here is an abbreviated summary of the steps to gathering deep customer insights. You can learn more about this in our book, Total Customer Growth.

1. Initiate a Formal Assessment Project – Make gathering insights a leadership-endorsed priority.
2. Prioritize Key Accounts – Get feedback from at least 50% of revenue sources and high-value accounts.
3. Determine the Best Assessment Method – Use 1:1 interviews with VPs and above and online for anyone below VP.
4. Get Customer Buy-In – Position it as improving their service.
5. Design an Impactful Survey – 10+ probing questions uncover the complete truth.
6. Aim for 75%+ Participation – Robust outreach and incentives drive strong response.
7. Review Objectively – Discuss findings constructively without blame.
8. Present an Action Plan – Share key takeaways and your plan to address them.
9. Follow Up on Progress – Check back in 6 months on executing the plan.
10. Repeat Annually – Convey your commitment to continuous improvement.

Intent Data in Your Customer Growth Model

Intent data provides invaluable additional customer insights to power your growth model. This real-time data reveals what prospects are interested in before they engage you. But it also uncovers opportunities and risks within existing accounts.

Intent data can identify upsell openings by showing current customers researching new solutions you offer. One company saw a large client investigating a service but not buying it from them. Alerting the account team let them win the business days later.

It also flags at-risk customers. If a current client shows surging interest in your competitors, it signals they may be looking to switch.

So, alongside surveys and interviews, incorporate intent data to fully illuminate customer needs and behaviors. This additional account intelligence allows you to get in front of opportunities and risks in a timely manner. Intent data fills crucial gaps in customer knowledge so you can convert insights into growth.

Strategies to Turn Customer Insights into Growth

You’ve gathered robust insights into your customers through surveys, interviews, and intent data analysis. Now it’s time to activate those insights and convert them into expanded customer relationships and revenue growth. In this post, we’ll explore concrete strategies to create an account insight-driven customer growth model.

Seamless collaboration between your customer success, sales, and marketing teams is key. Each plays a pivotal role in driving growth from your account knowledge.

Customer success owns customer satisfaction and retention. Sales focuses on growing revenue from existing accounts. Marketing supports both through campaigns tailored to customer needs.

By coordinating activities and aligning these teams around account insights, you create a customer growth flywheel. Here are actionable strategies for each team:

Customer Success Strategies

• Fix at-risk customer relationships by addressing feedback, communicating your action plan, and scheduling progress check-ins. Run follow-up assessments at 6 months.
• For committed customers, convert them into advocates who provide referrals and references to aid new customer acquisition.
• Analyze account insights to understand the full spectrum of customer needs and satisfaction levels. Share key findings with sales and marketing.

Sales Strategies

• Meet with growth candidate customers to explore their needs and uncover upsell opportunities. Thank them for participating in assessments.
• Ask customers to introduce you to other departments interested in your solutions. Leverage their network.
• Share your product roadmap to help customers plan future purchases and projects.
• For at-risk accounts, monitor intent data for signals they are investigating competitors. Address issues before it’s too late.

Marketing Strategies

• Segment customers into four buckets – committed, at risk, growth candidates, and maintenance. Customize strategies for each segment.
• Create campaigns, content, and events tailored to customer needs identified in account insights.
• Arm sales with branded capabilities presentations to educate customers on potential new solutions.
• Work with customer success to activate committed customers as referrals, case studies, and speakers.
• Address feedback from assessments by creating thought leadership that speaks to customer pain points.

With their powers combined, these customer-centric strategies turn account insights into growth opportunities. But it only works through tight collaboration between all go-to-market teams.

Meet regularly to share insights, discuss at-risk accounts, brainstorm new customer initiatives, and track progress. Eliminate silos between teams.

With robust account insights and strong cross-team alignment, you can convert customers from retention risks into growth opportunities. Follow these strategies for expanded customer spend and lasting loyalty. The revenue impact will speak for itself.

If you liked this post and want to learn more…

1. Check out more posts like this in the Healthtech MarketingLearning Center. It is chock-full of articles, use cases, how-to’s, and ideas to get you started on your ABM journey.
2. Follow me or connect with me on LinkedIn. I publish videos and articles on ABM and healthtech marketing.
3. Buy Total Customer Growth: Our book on how to win and grow customers for life with ABM and ABX.
4. Work with me directly. Let’s book a growth session and we can explore ways you can improve your marketing using the latest techniques in account-based marketing.