The most fundamental thing you should do first is to get multiple contacts at the same place in case our champion leaves. This is the best way to derisk a customer leaving in the future.
Expansion
AEs also do expansion at PostHog. This is because we are constantly on a sales footing with customers - for the most part, we don't do steady state account management with an arbitrary 10% uplift at renewal team. There are two primary ways we look to drive expansion with a customer:
Cross sell new products
- First you need to find out who cares about the new product - is it the existing team or the new team?
- Then you need to find out what are they using now for other tools - surface this during the check in calls that you already have scheduled as part of onboarding.
- At this point
- If it's already a mature product we have shipped, you should aim to show how the product complements what they already are using in PostHog - don't just arbitrarily sell in a product for the sake of it.
- If it's something in beta or coming soon, you should start giving them sneak peeks of what's on our roadmap. You can also schedule a feedback session with the relevant product engineer if they’re a great fit - customers love this. Consider playing the founder card for something really new and big.
Multiple teams using the same product
This is a bit more straightforward, but harder to execute:
- Make sure you are asking for intros to other teams during the regularly scheduled checkin calls - ‘who else would benefit from this?’, 'are there other teams with similar pain points?'
- This is harder to do without in-person visits
Principles for visiting customers
If you offer to do a meeting in person with a customer, they’ll then feel obliged to introduce you to other people to make good use of your time. Trying to get them to adopt more products can be a good trigger, but generally you should be matching the cadence for in-person meetings with the size of contract (ie. more regular for Very Large, less regular for Large).
Generally speaking you should be trying to regularly see customers in your book of business who are $60k+ annually, or could get there. Occasionally you can pull in James/Tim if they are traveling to SF/NY especially.
Retention
These are customers that are in the steady state retention bucket.
This process is much more automated and taken care of by RevOps, who do things like tracking usage and setting up alerts in Vitally to trigger outreach from us when a customer changes their usage behavior (either up or down).
An important part of retention here is also to ensure support issues fixed in a timely manner.
We deliberately don't want to invest a huge amount in hands-on customer success here, because that can often paper over cracks in the product experience or quality of our customer support, so staying hands-off here is a deliberate strategy.