As tighter budgets make new customer acquisition more difficult, customer retention and expansion have become the currency for SaaS growth. CROs know this first-hand. The metrics that matter today are ACV (average contract value) expansion, LTV (lifetime value), wider user adoption, and increased average revenue per user. Driving these metrics requires being smart about the customer journey at every step, and an efficient land and expand sales strategy that creates a flywheel of revenue.

There’s a new type of CRO emerging against these market demands — one who is operationally-minded, adept at driving Sales efficiency, and has an expanded view of revenue generation across new business and existing customers.

Here are 7 tactics for the operationally-minded CRO who wants to drive efficient and competitive land and expand motions.

A shift in focus to lifetime value in SaaS requires initiatives that make the customer journey frictionless. This means keeping customers happy in the present, with future growth and relationship deepening in mind. CROs should prioritize initiatives with Customer Success and Ops teams that both enhance the customer experience and improve the value of their offerings. 
 
This can be achieved in a few ways:
 
a. Consistently deliver on customer needs: Whether it be a new product feature or an account management question, make sure teams know the reality of customer needs, and deliver on the need-to-have vs nice-to-have.
b. Provide exceptional service: If retention is your goal, going above and beyond for your customers is non-negotiable. This is where the CRO relationship with Customer Success teams matters. Are teams empowered to build relationships with customers, offer discounts and incentives, and provide insights that help customers thrive in a challenging market?

“Go back in and reassess what you're doing to give customers an experience of validation that what they’ve purchased is going to drive the outcome that they’re anticipating. Being able to speak in the customer's language really shows intent, and I think intellectual curiosity shows that you care about your customer. That goes a long way in a slow economic period. Offer things like solution audits and graph assessments to help assure customers that they're getting the most out of the dollar that they're spending with us.”

- Alyson Welch, CRO - Neo4j; formerly VP Enterprise Sales - Twilio

Where are the bottlenecks in the Sales process and tooling that are slowing your team down or reducing win rates? That is where revenue goals live or die. Tools that introduce a lot of backend complexity for reps, or aren’t flexible enough for “common-sense requests” can be a major hurdle.

CROs should collaborate closely with Ops and field leaders to:

a. Understand and reduce bottlenecks in the end-to-end Sales processes. What do sellers need to sell faster, more efficiently, and in a way that aligns to what the customer is asking for?
b. Identify areas where they require support — whether it’s poor tool adoption or missing functionality

c. Empower field teams with efficient, user-friendly, data-driven, and reliable tools.

In-depth customer insights drive targeted Sales strategies. For example: Knowing that your customer is increasing their headcount in the next quarter might allow your Sales team to upsell licenses. Therefore, CROs and Sales teams should proactively collaborate with Customer Success teams to grow accounts.

Understanding customer behavior, needs, and preferences allows CROs to get teams focused on the highest-value selling opportunities. This customer-centric approach not only strengthens relationships but also increases the likelihood of a successful land and expand sales strategy.

“It's a team effort. But I love having Customer success primarily responsible for the renewal. The way we've structured it is when an account executive sells a deal, they're responsible for the deal and stay with the deal for half of the initial term. So they can capture some upside and some upsell, but then it's handed to the CSM team and they're responsible for the renewal.”

- Shep Maher, CRO - Betterworks; formerly Senior VP, Sales - Talkdesk

To effectively drive land and expands, businesses should leverage tools that provide a holistic view of the Sales process and customer journey, are flexible enough to scale with the business, and offer the best experience for field teams (which in turn, drives tool adoption). 

These multidimensional or end-to-end tools can include features like pricing flexibility, easy quoting and discounting, tracking sales performance, and providing critical insights into the customer journey. Utilizing such tools enables CROs to optimize Sales processes, identify cross-selling opportunities, and make data-driven decisions to max out lifetime value in SaaS.

Simplifying the Sales processes and fostering collaboration across departments not only makes teams work better, but also improves land and expand efficiency. This is because reducing complexity breaks down bottlenecks, streamlines team handoffs, and increases visibility through shared platforms. Failure to do so means wasted time and energy for both teams, and potential negative impacts on the customer. 

For example, leveraging Customer Success teams for upsells and renewals, when supported by technology, creates a seamless customer experience. Look for opportunities to streamline the customer experience by handing off processes that are more easily managed elsewhere.

Start with a shared and agreed data structure and model. What is the data we are collecting? Why does this data matter? How are we collecting it so it can be easily shared across teams? Consolidating data across teams, and aligning it with the customer journey reduces friction and improves the overall customer experience. It allows teams to have immediate access to accurate customer data when they need it, without having to ask for it. 

In other words, sharing data between Sales, Customer Success, and Post-Sales teams ensures a cohesive approach to customer engagement. 

This is an area where CROs and RevOps teams can collaborate. Collaborating with RevOps provides a comprehensive view of the customer journey, helps identify potential gaps or areas of improvement across all GTM teams, and aligns resources accordingly to drive land and expand motions. This, coupled with the potential adoption of multi-dimensional tools shared with RevOps, could amplify the effectiveness of this alignment and truly ensure that data is aligned end-to-end.

“Whether it's just the Account Executive (AE) responsible [for upselling] or the AE, CS, and the renewals team, having one source of data and understanding how your customers are using your product is super important.”

- Peter Lukens - General Partner, NJP Ventures; formerly VP of Sales Ops and Enablement - Snowflake

Preparing for unexpected challenges is essential, especially when teams are close to closing the quarter or fiscal year. CROs should collaborate with GTM teams to anticipate changes in the economic landscape, identify client issues that may arise, and develop proactive solutions in advance of problems like:

• scenario planning to understand the potential impact on the business
• identifying specific client issues that may arise
• creating plans for proactively addressing them

Learn more about how the Nue platform can catalyze a successful land and expand strategy, or review how Nue benefits team members across the GTM motion.