Discovery and Demos for Renewals and Expansion

A Never Stop Learning! Article

What’s in this article for you? Guidance for doing discovery and delivering demos for:

Renewals – When Things Are Good
Renewals – When There Was Low or No Usage
Renewals – Positioning and Presenting Product Improvements
Expansion – Same Department, Same Use Cases, More Users
Expansion – Upselling and Cross-Selling within Existing Customers
Expansion – Into Different Departments
Bonuses for Doing Discovery and Great Demo! practitioners

“Land and Expand” is the major sales strategy for many software companies. Intriguingly, while great attention is focused on new customer acquisition and corresponding sales processes, less is typically applied to securing renewals and expanding your footprint.

Some sales organizations are structured as “hunter” and “farmer” teams (sometimes identified as “Account Executives” vs “Account Management” and other titles), while others split the responsibility between “sales” for customer acquisition and “customer success” for customer retention and growth. And while there is a great body of work designed to guide those who pursue new name accounts, fewer resources exist for those charged with securing renewals and account development.

This article addresses this gap with respect to doing discovery and presenting demos for the latter group. What strategies and positionings are appropriate? How do you execute discovery and frame your demos for the broad range of renewal and expansion situations?

Let’s explore each scenario:

Renewals – When Things Are Good
Renewals – When There Was Low or No Usage
Renewals – Positioning and Presenting Product Improvements
Expansion – Same Department, Same Use Cases, More Users
Expansion – Upselling and Cross-Selling within Existing Customers
Expansion – Into Different Departments

For Doing Discovery and Great Demo! practitioners I’ll call out specific Doing Discovery and Great Demo! tactics with the designation [DD&GD].

Renewals – When Things Are Good

Strategy: Reinforce Value and Status Quo

Your customers likely went through a difficult buying journey when they first purchased your software and, potentially, a challenging implementation process as well (see “The Advantages of Being the Incumbent Vendor” article for details). It was a lot of work!

Your strategy for securing a renewal is to celebrate their choice, emphasize the value already enjoyed, and remind your customers of the energy invested in purchasing and implementation. Reinforce that they don’t need to go through that again and that it was a substantial investment to attain production use status.

You may need to do discovery to uncover the value if it has not already been documented. See my article on this for details (you’ll be glad you did!).

If you’ve been working with your customer since their go live date and ensuring that they have been achieving their Value Realization Events (VREs), you should be well-positioned to secure the renewal, without the need for a demo. A discussion may be all that is required.

[DD&GD] Use a Great Demo! Situation Slide to refresh why your customer originally made their purchase. Recall (gently, but firmly!) the depth and breadth of the pain they previously suffered, then recap the capabilities they are currently using that form the solution.

[DD&GD] Next, review the VREs they’ve achieved and reinforce the ongoing value they are enjoying by using your offering. This is key!

[DD&GD] Use Illustrations, particularly “before and after” scenarios, to reinforce their wise choice of your solution and their move from their previous painful state to their current positive position (presented with the sound of angels singing!).

[DD&GD] Stay in “you” mode as you communicate all this information. Your customer is the hero in this story!

A live demo is likely unnecessary, other than to clarify software operation or address user questions. You could structure this as a “Lunch and Learn” session.

POSITIONING: You’re doing great; let’s continue our productive partnership!

Renewals – When There Was Low or No Usage

What if your customer has not been using your software or their use is insufficient? Here’s a simple rubric: no use, no value; no value, no renewal.

Strategy: Assess, Apologize, Address, and Restart.

Your strategy should be:

Determine as early as possible after “go live” why your customer is not using your software. Is it a lack of awareness? Training? An implementation problem? A poor handoff from sales to implementation or to customer success?
Address this right away! Find the root cause and fix it. The longer you wait, the harder it will be to secure the renewal.
Apologize for any failures on your side. (Some vendors go one step further and apologize for errors committed by their customers!)
Restart the rollout process: Identify where the lapse(s) took place and reach agreement on a revised plan to enable your customer to achieve their VREs and longer-term goals.
[DD&GD] You may need to remind the key customer players of the risk of not achieving their Critical Business Issues. Vision Generation Demos (Chapter 11 in Great Demo!) can reinvigorate these folks.
[DD&GD] Similarly, you may need to reengage your key customer users. Again, Vision Generation Demos followed by any necessary training (or retraining) may be the solution.
Stay engaged! You must track on your customer’s progress, proactively providing help and guidance. (Does this represent a new version of Buyer Enablement: “Customer Success Enablement?”)

In Step 3, you’ll need to apologize for any errors in your implementation or follow-through process: Be prepared to “fall on your sword,” as appropriate. A professional, heartfelt apology (sometimes with compensation) can go a long way. Note: If you weren’t tracking your customer’s progress, you are definitely in the wrong!

In Step 4, rebuild your position by reviewing the progress and energy invested so far. Revisit the steps taken, addressing any errors or omissions while reinforcing the positive points.

For example, you might observe, “So, it looks like the data migration went really well and the configuration looks great, but we dropped the ball in training the users. Let’s tackle that and get you going again, and we will absorb the cost of doing the training this time around…”

POSITIONING: We’re sorry we let this happen, let’s build on the foundation implemented so far and restart. We’ll make sure to work closely with you to keep things moving forward so that you can achieve your objectives.

Renewals – Positioning and Presenting Product Improvement

Strategy: Reinforce Value, Leverage, Evolve

Context here is key! While you, dear vendor, may be excited about your recently released new features, your customer may have no clue about their existence and/or not visualize the capabilities as useful.

Note: We are assuming your new capabilities are major improvements that enable new use cases, for example, not small changes to (or expanded options) for existing capabilities.

Accordingly, if you present piles of new capabilities, you put yourself at risk of:

Buying It Back (your customer feels they will be paying for capabilities they will not consume).
Opening the door to competitors (“If we are going to re-evaluate using this product, we might as well look at other options…”).

The best way to avoid these pitfalls is (yes, you guessed it) doing discovery. These can be mini-sessions designed to uncover the need for the new use cases. Explore your customer’s goals, pains, value, impact, and relevant timelines for these scenarios.

If the new use cases are a good fit, then you may have two opportunities to pursue:

Reinforcing the additional value for the existing users
Expanding your footprint with new users (see the expansion scenarios below)

[DD&GD] Use Great Demo! Situation Slides to capture this information in a structured way. Note that these Situation Slides likely represent refined, real-life use case examples, vs what might have been suppositional use cases originally coming from marketing or the product team. Add these customer-derived Situation Slides to your internal library and alert the balance of the field!

Careful, it is quite possible that your customer may not have all the needs or problems your new capabilities support. Only present the use cases that are relevant!

When demonstrating these new capabilities, the first step in your demo is to reinforce the successes to date, the value enjoyed, and to remind your customers of the energy they invested in evaluating, purchasing, and implementing, just as in a straight renewal.

A timeline slide can be a good mechanism to accomplish this, showing:

When your customer began their evaluation process
The date they chose your offering
Implementation kickoff
Key implementation steps
“Go live”
Dates when VREs were achieved
Current date
Current value gained
Renewal date

Next, introduce the candidate use case(s), using Vision Generation Demos. Your verbiage should begin with, “Here’s how other customers, who are similar to you, have been using these new capabilities…” Then follow the balance of the Vision Generation Demo process!

[DD&GD] For Great Demo! practitioners, use Situation Slides to summarize the new use case(s), initially in Vision Generation Demo mode, as noted above. Be sure to have compelling Illustrations ready and communicate what your customer is seeing, how they could use the new capabilities to address their problems, and the value that they might expect to gain.

[DD&GD] Once your customer shows real interest, you can provide proof as necessary, with “Do It” pathways (everyone say it together, using the “fewest number of clicks!”), followed by Peeling Back the Layers in accord with your customer’s depth of interest.

POSITIONING: Remind your customer of their decision to go with your product and reinforce the value they are enjoying from its use. Position the new capabilities as leveraging your customer’s existing investment. It’s what your customer should expect from an evolving product: changes, improvements, and adaptations to embrace broader customer needs.

Expansion – Same Department, Same Use Cases, More Users

Strategy: Leverage and Reinforce Value and Success

Your situation here is very similar to “Renewals – When Things Are Good.” You have a great track record of delivering on your promises and your customer has been enjoying the value gained using your product with the existing user population. In principle, expanding deployment to more users in the same department should be simple, but there is an “if” case to consider.

Do the target expansion users have the same problems and use cases as the original users? If so, then you may only need a discussion, focusing on the opportunity for your customer to increase the value obtained by enrolling new users. If no, then you are in an upsell or cross-sell mode (covered in the next scenario).

In the discussion with your customer, recall the success they’ve enjoyed to date and the value gained. Remind them of the purchasing and implementation foundation already in place. Additionally, “power-users” from the initial rollout may be available to help with the expansion process. Contemplate using two timeline slides: one for the initial process and a second for the proposed plan.

You may also want to revisit and tune the previous rollout process, incorporating any lessons learned. Reuse and update the original VREs and add new VREs as appropriate. Set plans in place to enable your customer to achieve all VREs more rapidly and with more certainty, if possible.

Your champion should be an excellent spokesperson to help drive this expansion effort. It will likely help your champion’s cause as well, in terms of success, promotion, raises, bonuses, etc.

Finally, you may also be able to position the value gained through expansion as an acceleration function. (OK, go with me on this!) Many software packages generate value non-linearly as more users are deployed, for both time-to-value and total value returned, in two modes:

Much or all of the original implementation effort can be leveraged. No need to repeat that investment! Data migration, loading, rules, policies, database fields, form definitions, etc. are likely already in place. The costs associated with this effort have already been paid; new users may roll out much faster than the original implementation and achieve VREs much faster.
With some software, the value increases non-linearly with increasing users. For example, the value of a database increases as the amount of information it contains increases. More users contributing more data to the database accelerates the value of using the database. See my article on The Database Breakeven Point for more details.

An example can be found with tools like Amazon, Yelp, or Google reviews. No reviews on a product or business provide zero value to prospective customers. One or two reviews begin to be helpful, but we often don’t trust them: The “N” is too small. With fifty reviews of a product or business, we have a good sampling of people who rave (positively) about the offering, those who are more moderate, and those who had a bad experience. By comparing ourselves to the reviews and reviewers we gain more value from using the tool.

As another example, human capital management software is of limited value if you only have a handful of employees. However, when an organization has hundreds or thousands of employee users, the value of the system accelerates as users leverage existing job descriptions, learning programs, onboarding and provisioning processes, certification management, performance management, etc. Larger user pools also mean richer opportunities for managers to fill openings internally and for employees to explore growth possibilities without leaving the company. Value grows non-linearly with the number of users.

[DD&GD] Once again, Situation Slides are excellent tools for summarizing the success of your customer’s initial investment and for presenting the case for expansion. Plan to have Situation Slides for the relevant use cases for each key job title, along with corresponding Illustrations. A terrific best practice is to teach your champion to present this information, rather than you, the vendor: It’s much more compelling!

A “no touch” opportunity: Automated demo technology may help you reach potential users to explore and measure interest for specific use cases. You can send automated demos to these potential users, offering them the opportunity to explore brief Vision Generation Demo examples of each use case. Information about the users’ job titles and the use cases they investigated is returned to you, providing you with a pre-qualified list of potential users and their interests. Fabulous!

[DD&GD] For effective automated demos, plan to verbalize or present Situation Slide content and then show compelling Illustrations in Vision Generation mode. It is even stronger if you can position your use cases as success stories in production use by other, similar users within your customer’s organization. These serve as effective internal references.

POSITIONING: Remind your customer of their wise decision to go with your product and reinforce the value they are enjoying. Position the new users as leveraging your customer’s existing investment and adding accelerated value.

Expansion – Upselling and Cross-Selling to Existing Customers

STRATEGY: Leverage and Reinforce Value and Success

Your existing customers should be happy with their current implementation. If they aren’t, go back to “Renewals – When There Was Low or No Usage.” There’s no way they will buy more if they are displeased!

So, let’s assume they are happy customers. This means that they should be getting good value for their initial investment. Make sure to quantify this value and reach an agreement with your customer that the value numbers are accurate. Schedule discussions with your customer to help uncover this information, if not already known.

An upsell of new capabilities or a cross-sell of additional products are sales cycles, similar to your original sale, but with several advantages:

You are an approved vendor, which makes subsequent purchases by your customer much
You’ve delivered on your promises of product capabilities, implementation, and value, so you are trustworthy and believable.
You’ve done substantial discovery for the previous sale, so the incremental discovery for the upsell should be easier (“How have things changed since last year…?”).
You likely have one or more champions, power users, and beneficiaries available to support the evaluation and purchasing process.
You are the entrenched incumbent with the advantages associated with that position.

Have the original goals been met? Pains alleviated? Value gained? Timeline met? If the answers are all “yes,” then your position is excellent! Now execute your incremental discovery and generate a summary of your customer’s new goals, pains, desired capabilities, value objectives, timeline, and other relevant information.

For the demo meeting, start by reminding your customer of their previous buying process, outlining their original situation, goals, pains, capabilities needed, value desires, and timeline, and recalling the VREs and other successes they’ve enjoyed so far. Again, a timeline slide is an excellent approach to refreshing and reinforcing this information.

Leverage this success by introducing the upsell or cross-sell use cases, followed by a demo that maps specifically to the new challenges, showing the new capabilities needed and deliverables desired, and outlining the value expected.

[DD&GD] Situation Slides are excellent for summarizing the success of the initial investment and for presenting the case for the upsell. Plan to use Situation Slides for both the existing product and the new offering for each key job title (and corresponding Illustrations).

POSITIONING: Make sure to position (gently but firmly) the advantages your customer will gain by working with you, the incumbent: Purchasing, Data Privacy, Security and Governance, Legal, IT, etc. have already vetted you. Comment about how you are intimate with your customer’s team, culture, and processes, and how that closeness is mutually advantageous. Reference the existing successes and value gained to date, then present your proposed new use cases and solutions.

Expansion – Into Different Departments

Strategy: Reinforce Success and Value, Leverage Existing Investment and Your Internal References

This is a new sales process in many cases. The larger the customer and the further “apart” the new department or business unit is from the existing implementation, the more this sale should be treated as a “new” business. It is also possible that the existing group competes with the new unit for funds, prestige, turf, etc. So, what is the starting point?

Discovery! You can leverage your existing champion and contacts to sponsor you to other parts of the organization, make introductions, and offer internal references to support these discovery discussions and enable them to take place.

Keep in mind that any use cases uncovered in the new department may be the same or similar to those in the existing deployment. These existing cases can provide persuasive internal references in both Vision Generation meetings and in securing proof. It may only take an internal phone call or email to convince the executive(s) leading the new department of the efficacy of your solution.

Note that while you are not the incumbent for the new group, you are an approved vendor, which offers substantial advantages. You are already “in the system” with Purchasing, IT has already approved your fit with their internal architecture, Data Privacy, Security and Governance have vetted you, etc. This dramatically lowers the cost of purchasing from you vs a vendor that is new to your customer.

This also enables a reduction of the time required for a purchasing process. This could be particularly important for time-sensitive solutions (e.g., an upcoming audit or similar Critical Date).

Similarly, any existing implementation that can be leveraged should also be highlighted as an investment already paid for (in the initial implementation). This helps to jump-start a new rollout. An implementation and rollout timeline slide can help communicate these ideas, showing what is already in place for the new group to leverage.

As you’d expect with many new-name opportunities, you may have two sets of demo meetings. The first could be a Vision Generation Demo meeting, designed to communicate what’s possible and to enable discovery conversations to take place. The second would occur after discovery is complete to secure the technical win: a Technical Proof Demo.

A comment about POCs, particularly if a POC was run for the first piece of business: You may not need to run a second POC! Make sure you understand why a POC was run for the initial order and leverage that information accordingly. The architecture fit, capabilities proof, and risk reduction testing that was previously executed may be sufficient for the new group.

[DD&GD] The Great Demo! process here is just like new business, with discovery and Vision Generation discussions, followed (as needed) by Technical Proof Demos. Be sure to define and agree upon VREs to prepare the plan for successful outcomes.

[DD&GD] If possible, enroll your existing champion to provide you with introductions to the new group and to educate you regarding the business and political climate therein. Your champion may also help identify candidate champions within the new team.

[DD&GD] Similarly, consider asking your champion to present success stories (via Situation Slides and Illustrations) for the relevant use cases. It is much more compelling to hear these stories from a colleague in the same company vs presented by the vendor!

No Touch Opportunity: Expansion to different departments is where automated demos can dramatically reduce the time to uncover members of the buying committee, potential champions, “mavens,” and “connectors,” and to begin to scope out a receptive user community. As with the previous expansion strategy, position the use cases as success stories from other, potentially similar users from within your customer.

[DD&GD] Use Situation Slides and Illustrations in Vision Generation mode for the automated demos, based on job title (and industry or vertical, if relevant).

POSITIONING: “You may not know us, but your colleagues do. Here’s how we helped them solve their business challenges…”

Summary

There are a lot of best practices in this article! I hope you will be able to put them into day-to-day use successfully. Please contact me if you have questions or encounter new situations you’d like to discuss.

Renewals and expansion are huge business drivers, particularly with SaaS offerings. Take advantage of your incumbent advantages. Assess each opportunity, apply the appropriate strategy and positioning, and enjoy the rewards of increased renewals, decreased churn, and expanded footprint!

To learn the methods introduced above, consider enrolling in a Great Demo! Doing Discovery or Demonstration Skills Workshop. For more demo and discovery tips, best practices, tools and techniques, explore our blog and articles on the Resources pages of our website at https://GreatDemo.com and join the Great Demo! & Doing Discovery LinkedIn Group to learn from others and share your experiences.

Discovery and Demos for Renewals and Expansion