Camp CallRail Workshop, Targeting Repeat Customers. Session 4: Jason Rozenblat, VP of Sales at CallRail and Roland Ligtenberg, Co-Founder of Housecall Pro run through how you can target prospects.
SESSION TRANSCRIPTION
Introduction
Jason: Hey, everyone. My name is Jason Rozenblat. I am the Vice President of Sales here at CallRail. A little fun fact about me, grew up in the music industry and my dad was in the music business. Gloria Estefan was actually at my bar mitzvah. She didn't perform, but she was there as an honored guest.
CallRail offers call tracking, form tracking, and Conversation Intelligence products, so that businesses like you can get complete visibility into all of your digital marketing efforts.
Roland: Hey, everybody. My name is Roland Ligtenberg. I'm one of the co-founders of Housecall Pro. I lead the innovation team. I work on everything in our ecosystem and go-to-market. My fun fact is although I am on Zoom, I'm actually 6'9", but I am the shortest of my brothers. I've got two brothers that are both taller and bigger than me. A lot of people don't believe that, but I've got some funny pictures to prove it.
A little bit about Housecall Pro: We are the operating system for home services. It's an all-in-one software package that helps all kinds of home service pros schedule dispatch, invoice, market, online book, remarket, a big suite of products. It's geared towards small and medium-sized businesses, so typically our customers are owner/operators, all the way to about 100 customers at the top end, but most fall between that 0-20. For a lot of you guys watching today, I help a lot of people that are your size, so we're going to be sharing some insights on that.
Session Agenda:
- Why it’s important to care for your customers
- How to identify opportunities
- Insider tips for upselling and cross-selling
- Which tools reveal customer insights and opportunities
- Ways to use data to inform new sales strategies
- How to prioritize leads for incremental business
- Strategies for handling barriers and objections
Why customer care is so important
Roland: You're trying to build a business that has big value. Value is based upon your current customers. You're able to build value and trust with them to be able to sell again and again to them at much lower cost than having to find them initially when you're out there prospecting. Repeat business and repeat customers are important, because the unit economics behind it are so favorable for you. It allows you to go back to that watering well again.
You really want to focus back on your current customer base. The advice I give to my customers is, "Look to your current customer base, and start with just checking in." We'll get back into the tactics here a little bit further in this program right here.
Cross-selling and upselling
Jason: As someone who's been involved with working with SNBs now for almost 15 years, I agree with Roland. Oftentimes, we just are thinking, "Let's go out and get new customers." It's incredibly difficult, it's expensive, there's a lot of competition. Aside from the fact that it helps increase the value of your business if you do look to sell the business at one point, retaining customers is good economics.
There are a few other things that are often overlooked:
- The ability to generate referrals and also use these customers as references
- Potential case studies and testimonials
- Have willing customers be beta testers and provide feedback
You often don't get good feedback unless you have a customer that is engaged and wants to continue to do business with you.
Let's talk a little bit about the concept of upselling, then the concept of cross-selling. What do you think upselling is? What do you think cross-selling is? Do you use those terms internally at Housecall Pro?
Roland: Upselling is getting someone to pay more for something they're already doing, and cross-selling might be a new opportunity in another part of your product suite that they're not utilizing. Within our company, we have our core plans. We work with businesses to make sure that they're on the right core plan. A core plan is usually based upon how many users are within it. Up-sell is getting them to go up your current product stack. Within our product there are things certain companies may get more value of than others. That’s cross-sell.
For example, we have a financing product. We have a customer base who is using our credit card processing, but financing is a powerful thing to unlock for businesses that are doing $5000, $10,000 tickets, because not a lot of homeowners have that kind of cash just laying around. That's an example of a cross-sell, something that's kind of adjacent but still within our product suite.
What can increase usage of what you normally do as opposed to new things within your suite to attach to? How do you increase the usage? Always try to think of attached usage. Within those two models, you're going to be able to take a look at any one of your existing customers and see, "Hey, are they ripe for an upsell? Are they ripe for a cross-sale?" We'll talk more about tactics later. Those are the basics when we're talking about repeat customers and driving that revenue.
Jason: The idea of upselling can have a negative connotation, where someone feels like they're being sold versus them buying something that's a better fit for their needs. Here at CallRail, a good sales methodology is truly understanding what your customer needs. If you do that, whatever your methodology is, whether you're doing some sort of trying to uncover pain points or a consultative sales approach, will actually work. Any sort of discovery you're doing will allow you to find the right solution for your customer upfront, which may include, in a lot of cases, additional products, services, features, spending more money than they were originally intending to spend. Yes, they’re buying more than they were originally expecting to buy, because through that discovery, both of you uncovered that there was more of a need than initially expected.
We call it back-to-base here at CallRail. We are selling new products back to our existing base of customers. When you have a big base of customers, like CallRail and Housecall Pro, and you take care of those customers, then you are fortunate enough to be able to do something like this.
If you launch a new product, want to get more traction with an existing product, or there's a new feature that comes out, it’s a luxury to go back to your existing base of customers. They're happy, they're willing, and they're going to be receptive to your outreach. It's an easy and highly effective way to increase revenue without going out and having to get new business, which we already talked about is oftentimes more difficult than selling back into your existing customer base. Launching new products is a huge effort. It involves marketing. It involves customer support. It involves products. It involves sales. It involves the design and success teams, so it's a big, concerted effort to make sure we can hit the mark, using an archery term.
We launched our first-ever second product, so our second product, last year. We learned a lot from doing that. It took all those learnings and figured out how to properly launch a product back-to-base. It went incredibly smoothly the third time. Going back-to-base is always nice, especially from a revenue leader.
Roland: You need to be able to make sure net dollar retention goes up over time. It's really nice on a cohorted basis. But how do you make the customers that are existing able to make up for churn? How can you get that above 100%? When you can start going down that path, it's very attractive for not just your business, but also for investors because you're proving, "Hey, we're getting more value out of a customer, therefore, we could potentially even spend more on the front-end side, which we can leverage it to more dollars on the backside."
If you do it right, you're using a lot of customer empathy. Spend a lot of time learning about what their needs are, which is, hopefully, how you're designing your other products within the suite that you're intending to sell to them. Unlock additional value based on the pains you know they're having. When you're taking that cross-sell approach and introducing new stuff, you're coming from the angle, "We've been working together so well. I've been solving this pain for you over on this side, but tell me a little bit about this pain, because I've heard a lot of customers have this kind of problem. Are you feeling the same way, too, Jason?"
They say, "Well, Roland, now that you mention it, I am." All of a sudden, it's such an easy and different conversation because you're coming from a position of strength. That helps expand the total dollars that you can generate from your current base.
Creating customer loyalty
Jason: As easy as you made that sound, it takes a lot of work to get to that point. By taking care of customers, we get to be able to do customer interviews, and surveys, and whatnot. We go back and ask, "Hey, what problems are you having that you need help with?"
That's how new products are built. Products may not have been something we originally had on our road map. They may not have been something we were thinking about.Upselling is being able to offer additional services, features, products on the front end when you're onboarding a new customer. Cross-selling, selling back to base, is the ability to go back to your existing base of customers and sell new products, features, generating more revenue from your existing cohorts. For anyone who isn't familiar with the term cohorts, a cohort is a group of customers. Most of the time it's tracked on a monthly basis. That's how we do it at CallRail. Is that how you do it Housecall Pro as well?
Roland: We cohort on a monthly basis, but also on a persona, vertical, and size basis. A cohort is a grouping of people, sometimes based upon time (the most common way when you're tracking dollars) or product or customer-centric metrics (for when you're tracking vertical).
Because by having those cohorts, you'll be able to identify which ones may need some of these cross-sales more than others. Are there different types of industries you serve? Size, are they 0-3, 3-6, 6-10, 10-20? What bucket do they fall into?
Jason: There are different ways to slice and track the groups. It ideally helps you identify and formulate your ICP or Ideal Customer Profile. We started tracking cohorts recently, and we know what the growth curves should look like. It helps us identify if there are ever opportunities or areas that we need to improve on in specific cohorts because to Roland's point, if you start slicing it deeper, saying, "Oh, our mix of customers skewed a little bit more towards this group or this price point," it allows you to change your strategy to make sure you're getting more of your ideal customer profile. The first question is at a high level: what methods are you and your team using to find incremental business opportunities?
Roland: The people that'll buy from you again are the ones who are happy and satisfied, because you've built up trust with them. Those are going to be your first targets. Those are the people that will likely continue to keep paying you, staying with your product. Those are the people that you want to continue to listen to. It's important to listen to the ones that are not happy, that are giving you zero on an NPS score, and figure out how you can address that. But really, you want to continue to make the evangelists hyper-evangelists.
The first thing that we look at is who the happy customers are. That makes the initial conversation easy. The second thing we look at is which of our customers are using our product because the ones using it the most are getting the most value of it, which means they're getting the biggest return on investment of the dollars they're spending with us. We take a really good look at which pros are using our product and how much.
If you can find your top 10% customers, the people who are giving you 10s and 9s on the NPS score, find your top 10% of users based upon usage. If your product has a way to be able to understand who's doing the most amount of GMV, Gross Merchandise Value, you want to be able to target the customers who are fairly influential and running big volume. You might be making money on the processing side of things. You might be making money on the financing side of things. You might want to get the biggest companies using a product because on the marketing side, the smaller companies are looking up to the big companies. If you can show, "These big companies are using it. Why don't you?" that's a great marketing advantage. Those are the things that we're looking at.
Leveraging NPS
Roland: You want to NPS on a regular basis so that it's always fresh and updating. In the early days, we didn't do that. That's okay, because it's better to do something rather than nothing. We'd just kind of ad hoc what we needed to put together for a board presentation or an investor presentation. What we migrated to is a randomized basis within a sample space so we can get some good data and ask them for their feedback.
We ask, "Would you rate it 0-10? Why do you give us this rating?" We're able to have a constant flow of happy people, which could be seen as leads for growth advisors, which could be called your cross-selling or sales team.
You mentioned referrals earlier. If you rate it a 10, you said you're willing to refer it to friends. Maybe you can spike that interest now, again. Call them up and say, "Hey, Jason, so you rate us a 10. Have you referred us to anybody yet? Who else should I be reaching out to, because I'd love a conversation. Do you mind introducing us in a three-way text? Wow, okay, that's great." Now, all of a sudden, you've got that initial trust. You smashed right through the barrier, because you got introduced by a friend.
In the beginning, it was ad hoc. We polled everybody. You can even start with something like a typed form in an email blast or a Google form. That's better than nothing. If you want to upgrade, there are tools that measure NPS. You can set them to then send it on a recurring basis to a sample set of customers, and you can start playing around with those triggers. That gets a little more advanced. That's more for SAS business, but if you have any kind of an SNB, you can easily ask all your customers, "Hey, how likely would you be to recommend us? 0-10, and why?" The usage-based model is a little different. There's a lot of other ways that you want to measure that, and that's going to be wildly different for software business versus service businesses, but you can still get to that data.
Jason: I remember when I first got into sales management, I was so excited. When I was an individual contributor, I didn't really want to deal with quotas anymore. Little did I know. Instead of having one quota, I had everybody's quota. I also didn't realize that I would have to handle escalations when a customer was upset about something. I found early on that if you can talk to an angry customer and turn them around, those become your best customers. The caveat being that you can actually fix their problem, and they're not raving lunatics that can't be fixed no matter what.
Roland: Yeah, because they're not expecting individualized reach-out, or someone to even come to their attention. It's really easy to start to stand out. Once you solve their problem, ask them for a testimonial or for a review. If you're thinking about, "Oh, you know what? Maybe the happiest ones are the ones that give me the most reviews on Capterra or on Google." Ask the zeros that are now not zeros, and are now 10s, for the reviews, because it's an instant win. There's ways to automate that. We've definitely taken advantage of a lot of those flows.
It has to come with customer empathy first. You have to really, truly want to fix their problem. There might be some customers who you won't be able to fix. At the end of the day, you have to be able to let go of those. For the ones that you do, they turn into your most wild evangelists, online, in the community, on the Facebook groups, everywhere. That's happened time and time again. A lot of those are still my friends, because I had to do that reach-out too. I feel like regardless of where you are within the company, you've always got to be willing to do that dirty work. It can be the most rewarding work and generates the most positive returns for the business.
How to identify opportunities
Jason: I want to talk a little bit about more specific ways of identifying these opportunities. I can share a lot of what CallRail does, but I also want to talk a little bit about something that you mentioned: a team that is dedicated to these types of opportunities.
We have a customer success team. I have a team in my organization working specifically with advertising and marketing agencies in our partner program, so they're agency partner advisors. We have the luxury of going out and hiring an army of sales. How much focus should be put on selling back to customers if you're a smaller business? Have you seen anything with some of the smaller customers that you work with that are doing this at all? Anything anecdotal or specific that you've seen?
Roland: Yeah, that's a great question. There's a couple of different mindsets. You could think of people as being able to have hybrid skills, or you can have people that are specialized. If you're really small, you have a lot more hybrids, because you're wearing many hats. One thing that I've seen that works particularly well is a salesperson in the summer season, but in the shoulder season or the off season, they might be more of a growth advisor, or a cross-sell opportunity. There's a point in time where you're sowing seeds, and then you're harvesting.
When you think about these cycles as a smaller business, what are your peak selling seasons? You know that feeling without even looking at any data. Obviously, you want to look at as much data as you can, but you know those feelings where you have high season and you have low season. A lot of people don't do the low season. They keep trying to do the sales motion. They're like, "Sales are bad, and that's just what it is." You could even potentially turn it off completely and focus just on your own customer base.
For those of you that are smaller, think about cycles in your business. When you think about the cycles in your business, you'll be able to match the appropriate type of sale. Is it going to be an upsell? Is it going to be a normal sale? Is it going to be a cross-sale? What are you doing within those modes?
Know what kind of data you want to gather upfront
Jason: That's great. What I'm thinking about is a small business. I am wearing all these hats, as you mentioned. How can I be in multiple places at once? You talked about NPS. CallRail has two dedicated resources outside of our customer success and partner advisors. We call them account development reps. Their job is to call back into our customer base and sell our new products. We launched a Form Tracking product and a Conversation Intelligence product in the last year. With two people, that's really the entire motion.
We are doing a lot with email marketing automation to try to drum up interest. We do a lot with Pendo, which is in-app messaging. For any of our logged-in, existing customers, we may pop a message and say, "Hey, do you want to start a free trial for our new product?" We can be in 100,000 places at once, and talk to our customers where they are. It's very difficult to sift through all the noise efficiently.
If you want good data to be able to do this and be able to talk to all your customers, you've got to have some sort of a methodology and figure out the information you want to capture upfront. Otherwise, every strategy we're talking about here would most likely be pointless.
If you don't take care of that, you're going to have a hard time getting a cross-sale/back to base strategy going. For us, when someone signs up for a free trial, we're capturing a little bit of information. Once they become a customer, we're capturing a little bit more information. Every time we're having conversations with them, we're enriching that data a little bit more, a little bit more. We do that in a natural way, a noninvasive way. It allows us to understand and market back to our customers better. Whether it's running a report, creating a specific, targeted list to feed into our marketing automation software, or giving specific leads to my two account development reps to proactively call, none of that would be possible if we weren't strategic about the type of data we get upfront.
Roland: Progressive enrichment always beats getting everything all at once, because you're going to kill conversions on the front door. You want people to come in as easy as possible and get the bare amount of information that you need to start the process. If you're not thinking about enriching your data progressively over time, you're probably sub-optimizing your initial interactions, which is going to limit your business growth. What you guys are doing is 100% correct. That's something that we do as well.
When you want to learn more about your customers, there's some data enrichment tools that you can throw into the mix to go ask, like Clearbit. The one thing you don't want to do is send out a survey to your customers and say, "Hey, one of you guys wins a $100 Amazon card. Answer these 40 questions," because you're going to enrich five leads out of a thousand. It's going to be a waste of time.
Don’t abuse your merge fields
Jason: I've noticed something as a customer. We bought a house a couple of years ago, and we did a ton of work on it. Some businesses do a good job of email marketing, and some get trigger-happy. With a lot of the email laws, you don't want to be marked as spam. You don't want people to unsubscribe from your emails. Have targeted emails that are relevant to your customers by doing that constant enrichment, whether you're using a Clearbit or an InsideView, or you're just updating your database.
Never send surveys like that. They will tune you out and never listen to anything you send them again. But by sending something that's targeted, that is relevant to them based on what you learned upfront or throughout your relationship with them, you're more likely to get an open and a response, and ultimately a sale. That cannot be overstated. Do not abuse your email marketing list. It is gold if you take care of it. If you abuse it, it is worthless. Yes, people get a lot of email. Everyone gets a lot of email. Everyone on this call gets a lot of email. You've got to be able to sift through the noise. The way to do that is by targeting.
Roland: Another thing to consider as you're using these tools, it's far better to send a targeted email to like a hundred of your customers that’s hyper-relevant. A lot of people overthink it and use a lot of the fancy merge fields, and then it just comes across as super disingenuous. People know when that happens. It's very obvious. Some people forget to do the formatting correctly inside of whatever tool they're using. It may seem like more work from the outset, but sometimes it's better just to spend a little extra time on that segmentation piece, and then just write an email from scratch for that targeted segment.
Jason: We could have a whole other webinar just going through bad emails we get. The equivalent of using merge fields incorrectly is walking up to someone and saying, "Hi, First Name Last Name. Are you interested in my product?" That's literally what you're doing. An email is an opportunity to get a conversation going. I think I get probably two or three of those a day. The non-personalized approach is very difficult, so if you're going to go non-personalized, it's got to be short and sweet.
Sometimes personalization can backfire on you, too. I play in an adult hockey league. Just for fun, I changed my LinkedIn profile to say that I'm the assistant captain of the Polar Bears Ice Hockey Club. It's a bunch of out of shape dads, that play hockey a couple nights a week. We drink beer afterwards. It's not a professional or semi-professional. I did it for fun. I get four messages a week on LinkedIn or emails saying, "I was really interested in learning more about your experience as an assistant captain for the Polar Bears Ice Hockey Club." So, just be careful or the personalization can backfire.
We have a Conversation Intelligence product that a lot of our customers are using, for call transcription. It transcribes and scores the calls. It does Automation Rules, if you set it to track specific keywords. A lot of sales teams use our product. It's a hot topic right now in the sales enablement/sales technology world. There are products like Gong and Chorus. What are ways you think a business can leverage a product like Conversation Intelligence to be able to unlock opportunities, like cross-sales?
Roland: There's two things just to consider:
- The data points you are learning about your customer.
- Which data points are you learning about your own employees?
Sometimes you may have a great product, but the wrong script or salesperson, or they're not asking enough questions. They're spending their entire time just blabbing, blabbing, blabbing and not even asking the customer any questions. When you can find a product that introduces leverage, where you can essentially listen to every call without having to listen to every call, it's very powerful. I can go through lots of calls quickly and analyze different keywords, different things that are being said, call time, call length, the amount of time that the seller is speaking versus the buyer.
There are simple tweaks that you can do there, especially if you start doing this in a bigger volume, or you have multiple team members. You don't want to be spending time listening to every single call. It's literally impossible, so if you can use tools that can help this transcription process and automatically drive some extra insights, it's going to help you in that process to learn what people might or might not want. You'll be able to correlate the people that buy and that don't buy. It's very easy to run a couple of pivots there. If you've got multiple team members, you can just provide instant feedback to them to level them up, because they might not even know. You don't have the time to be able to listen to every single call.
Jason: Whether you use CallRail or any of the other solutions that exist, and if you manage or are involved with any sort of business that is generating calls or talking to customers or potential customers over the phone, you need to go find a solution so that you can capture this information. If you're not, you are wasting so much opportunity.
If there's one thing you take from this entire conversation, it's that. You have to. It's like a cheat code. It's an unfair advantage that you have over your competition. There's so many advantages. Go out and find a solution today, then kick yourself for not having something.
We look at a lot of different ways to identify upsell opportunities. I'm curious for your thoughts. In a situation where the majority of the conversations are face-to-face, and there aren't phone sales, service-based businesses for example, what suggestion do you have for those businesses to be able to identify upsell opportunities, or cross-sell opportunities, rather?
Roland: The easiest way is looking at people that have spent the most money with you. Take your customer list, sort by customer lifetime value. That's the first way. Without any extra data points, you've got a good list to just start working off of. Within our software, you can tag customers with different things. I've seen a lot of SNBs get very clever just around things that they tag customers with. Some things that I see is they add in custom fields for spouse's name, kids' names, pet names, birthdays, political affiliations, all kinds of just pieces of data, so that when they do have a conversation, you can have a much more personal connection right off the bat.
If you do a great job at just adding in data, you're going to have much better conversations to drive that loyal customer, which you really want. In every conversation with them, ask them a little bit about their personal life, not just about the job. It's not rocket science. You might be doing a job for them or selling them something, and they'll go, "Hey, by the way, how was Father's Day?" Or you can ask them whatever those types of normal, human questions to learn so much.
For every conversation you have with someone where you're selling them something, ask them something personal. Take that, and listen actively. Put that into your CRM. Use that next time you reach out. All of a sudden now, they're like, "Okay, they care. This is more of a relationship." I feel like that's the key to building some of these customer relationships.
Jason: I completely agree. That's been the foundation of me for my sales career. Be authentic, give a damn. Actually care, have real conversations. Don't turn into a robotic person where you have to become a character. Have conversations with people the same way you would if they were a friend of yours or you were meeting them for the first time. Don't overthink it. Just have a conversation.
Capturing data is so important, whether you use a CRM or you have some other way of doing it. Here's a few to look into, but there's many more:
- Salesforce
- HubSpot
- Zoho
There are a ton of CRMs out there, but you need to be using something to be able to capture this information. Editing and creating customizable fields so you can capture this information and reference it is invaluable as a method to create that connection and make customers loyal to you.
Roland: Just an extra tip. If you've got people on your sales team you're already asking to fill in a lot of fields, all you have to do is make your top sales rep believe in it and have them do it religiously. Then, when your under-performer comes to you, that missed their quota or didn't hit where they were looking to hit, you just go, "Well, hey, look over here. Look how Janelle did it. Look at the fields," Then, all of a sudden, that's how you can do that. When you're building a true pipeline, and when you're really going for what the point of this whole webinar is about, which is repeat customers, this is a critical piece.
Building strong customer relationships
Jason: I completely agree with that. Arguing with people to put stuff in Salesforce has been my life for the last 15 years. Want to switch gears to the last section here, so we can end on time. Building strong customer relationships. We talked a lot about this already, but when you think of building a customer relationship, what does that mean to you? When does it start? How does it continue? Does it ever end? Talk a little bit about what that means to you, either in your business or businesses that you work with.
Roland: Yeah, sure. If you talk to someone once a year, you're doing that wrong. You need multiple touch points within the year, so you remain relevant in their mind. Just because they're using your product and paying for it monthly, they might not even be engaging with the product. They might just be on a gym membership syndrome, where it's like, "Hey, it's a great idea in January and February, but then after that, you just get billed the rest of the year." Measure the amount of touchpoints you have. It doesn't have to be a phone call every single time, but it should definitely be at least once a year.
Coronavirus is the perfect opportunity to reach out to a customer. Go, "Hey, Jason. Roland over at Housecall Pro. Hey, I see your business is doing pretty good, but how have you guys been faring because of COVID?" Don't even talk about product. Don't even talk about upselling. Don't talk about anything. Just ask them how. It's such a simple thing to just go through your list of customers.
Whether you've got multiple teams that are handling them post-sale, whatever it is, give those customers a touch and just measure the touches. If you send out an email, the best trick that I've found is just send out emails like you do to your friends, which typically are one sentence long. It's like a subject line and a one sentence. If it's longer than one sentence, you're screwing it up, because those get the highest reply rates. The highest reply rates increase your deliverability. Your increase in deliverability is going to pay dividends in the long run.
Simple things like that are just tricks that you should be doing automatically. If you haven't built a good way to remind yourself how to do this, a lot of the CRMs, Pipedrive and so forth, there's all reminder tools. I've been advising a lot of the small businesses throughout this period of time, when they're like, "Roland, I don't have any business to do. I can't. I'm not an essential business." My thing is just call them and ask them how they are. Then offer them something else. "Hey, you know what? I'm actually going to be in the store nearby," if you're doing person-to-person stuff. "I'll be in a store nearby. Is there anything I can pick up for you?"
An easy hack you can do when you're first meeting with clients is to ask, "Hey, as I'm on the way to the house, I'm going to drop over at Starbucks. You want me to pick you up some coffee?" You know who's going to take you up on that offer? Probably zero people. You know who's going to appreciate that offer? 100% of them, because they might say, "Oh, Roland, I don't drink coffee. I like tea." Great, I'm going to write this in my notes, because they like tea. Or they're like, "Hey, you know what? Not now, but thanks for offering." It's little things like that, that you would normally for friends, that helps drive those relationships forward, which builds the trust. Ultimately, will help you turn them into that repeat customer.
Jason: We completely agree. I'll end this section with just a couple of thoughts, things that I've seen work really well over the years. I am a tough customer to sell to, because I know what people are trying to do to me, use my own tricks on me. There are a lot of platforms out there for gifting. It's become a very popular part of sales and marketing stacks. You can send it directly from your CRM, and it doesn't have to be anything crazy. It doesn't have to be a $100, $200 gift. It could be a Starbucks gift card. It could be an Amazon gift card. The more you learn about your prospects, you can send something a little bit more personalized. A lot of these gifting platforms have a catalog of items that you could choose from.
The whole notion of surprise and delight, you've heard that phrase before, adding value. Anytime you reach out, there's this idea of, "I'm just checking in, just checking in." I like to always add some type of value. It doesn't mean that you're trying to sell them anything. Just checking in is JV. You want to do varsity, say, "Hey, I just read this article. I just saw this blog post. I just checked out this webinar." The more you know about your customers, the more you can give them something relevant. Just that thought is very powerful, and it shows that you care. Actually caring goes a long way to be able to have the opportunities to unlock this additional revenue.
