How do the best teams expand beyond the first team that bought?

A seven-step method for building relationships beyond one contact. It is written for new deals but the mechanics are identical for protecting and expanding a renewal.

Multithreading in Sales: The B2B Selling Framework

From Highspot by Jessica Hitchcock 11 min read

• In the older enterprise sale, a single contact could carry you 80 to 90 percent of the way to close; now there are a dozen people involved.
• Map five stakeholder roles on every deal: economic buyer, technical evaluator, end user, procurement, and executive.
• Multithreading is not one extra call, it is multiple conversations with multiple contacts across weeks or months.

The Gainsight CEO on why CS should own an NDR number rather than just a churn number, including the idea of giving every CSM their own book of MRR to grow from 100 to 115.

8 Things I Learned from Dave Kellogg About Net Dollar Retention

From Gainsight by Nick Mehta 8 min read

• Gross retention is ambiguous (which ARR is the denominator, is a product swap churn), while NDR folds churn and expansion into one number.
• One cloud company cut NDR by acquisition channel (self-service, enterprise, channel) and found some sales motions were losing money.
• Some accounts churn whatever a CSM does, so that time is better spent expanding healthy customers.
• Break upsell into its parts: more of the same product, new products to the same buyer, new products to new buyers.

Nine chapters covering the QBR structure, the common mistakes (generic content, dwelling on the negative) and how to keep quality when you have too many customers for one per account.

The Essential Guide to Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs)

From Gainsight 9 chapters

• McKinsey found B2B customers with strong executive engagement are 2.5 times more likely to renew.
• 87 percent of business buyers want their rep to act as a trusted advisor, not a vendor.
• Keep a QBR under an hour, and lead with outcomes rather than a data dump (72 percent of senior decision-makers say information overload delays decisions).

Accel's argument that expansion revenue is the specific thing that carries a company past $50M ARR, with the Twilio and Shopify revenue-mix numbers to show what it looks like when it works.

How can SaaS startups tackle scaling beyond $50mn in ARR?

From SeedToScale by Accel by Vyushita Sahay 9 min read

• Past 50 million dollars ARR the equation is Revenue = new revenue + expansion revenue minus churn.
• Twilio held a net expansion rate of roughly 135 to 140 percent for four straight years.
• Shopify's transaction-based merchant solutions went from 24 percent of revenue in 2013 to 57 percent in 2018.

A large part of this conversation is about products with built in collaboration spreading from the first team to the next one inside an account, which is precisely this question. Freshworks did it out of Chennai, so the constraints will feel familiar.

Fireside Chat: Product-Led Growth with Girish Mathrubootham, Founder & CEO - Freshworks

On AIBoomi (formerly SaaSBoomi) by Girish Mathrubootham 50 min