Curious to hear what leading SaaS companies are doing to increase customer retention and expansion?
In a recent Customer Value Community small working group, we brought together Value Disruptors—the heads of innovation and scale for business value programs—from top B2B companies to workshop around value realization.
One of the biggest topics of conversation during the event was around telemetry data and how it can be successfully implemented to inform customer conversations and grow net revenue retention (NRR) through cross-sell/upsell efforts.
This blog will walk you through the insights these B2B leaders shared during the workshop.
What is Telemetry Data and How Can It Help?
Telemetry data is historical data that is automatically collected and measured through a remote source. For example, most organizations likely collect telemetry data about their products or services. Most systems are set up to collect data about your customers, such as:
- How many customers log into your software each day
- How often they log in per day
- Who is actively using different services your software provides
- What they are using the software for
- What locations tend to use the software more
The list is endless of what types of telemetry data you may be compiling each and every day within your organization.
From here, your telemetry data can be used to feed into the value conversation. For example, if you are working to justify a software expansion within a specific location of your customer's business, you can pull location data to demonstrate how increased use of your software in a specific region correlates to an increase in revenue for your customer.
But the real question is, how can you easily go about applying this data to cross-sell/upsell efforts in an effective way to increase NRR? Right now, many of our members are facing the challenge of how to scale telemetry data to further earn the right to the value conversation and empower their customers to be champions of their product or service. Below are their insights:
Tactics For Using Telemetry Data to Increase NRR
1. Ensure the Data is Being Stored Properly
Ensure you have a proper warehouse to store your telemetry data to pull into the value conversation. While this may seem obvious, it can be difficult to find a proper means of storing and organizing your information to then be easily pulled and used during the value conversation in business cases. Ensure your information is organized and categorized so you can pull what is relevant.
2. Account for Outliers
As telemetry data is pulled straight from your customers, there is no guarantee that all information will always be accurate. For example, if you are pulling data from your software that your customers are the ones inputting, there is room for human error. How can we adjust for this?
Only pull data at the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles to help ensure outliers are cut out and data is more accurate. You should also disclose to customers when using this data that human error does occur.
3. Help Your Customers Tell the Story Internally
A challenge many are facing is ensuring not only the right telemetry data is in front of their customers, but also ensuring their customers are interpreting that data in the right way to see the value delivered and why they should grow with you. For example, a more IT-oriented stakeholder may understand the data perfectly, but how can we ensure that other stakeholders are also getting the right value story and that the correct story is being communicated internally?
This is where value platforms like Ecosystems software come into play.
How Ecosystems Web Services Can Help
Ecosystems Web Services (EWS) empowers you to feed telemetry data both from your own products and others right into our value platform, helping your sales reps, customer success managers, and product marketing teams both understand it themselves and communicate it to the customer in a way they will understand it.
With EWS, we can take the data you’ve stored in your system and other customer relationship management systems like Salesforce, and put it all in one place for you, helping you organize your stored data into meaningful information relevant to your business case to tell your value story. For example, we can convert telemetric fields of product usage into customer-centric insights on value realized to help strengthen customer partnerships and support value-driven cross-selling campaigns. Learn more about Eco Web Services here.
