Using an “If This, Then That” Approach to Grow Customer Value (IVTMV)

This post is updated from work originally posted on the Gartner blog network. You can find the original post here.

One of the most interesting Web services that has emerged in the recent memory is IFTTT.com.   IFTTT stands for “If This, Then That” and is designed to accelerate “personal workflows” (this is my interpretation of it).  You can use their service to create a simple way to do a repeatable task or to do it conditionally.    It works with a number of services, including my Amazon Echo (which is an “intelligent” speaker).   It can be simple things like, “if I buy concert tickets on Stubhub”, then “put a reminder on my Google calendar.”

I love the simplicity of it.

The same concept can be applied to the way tech companies approach efforts to grow accounts through growth or cross-selling (selling additional products or modules).  All to often, we ask or expect sellers to do this, but don’t give them a simple path to identify the customer situations that would be most likely to drive a willingness for expansion.   I’ve been part of several organizations that grew through acquisitions and a key part of the story was “we can cross-sell to our customers.”  But usually, there was no “formula” for cross-selling and efforts were often haphazard.   Ultimately, that growth path was not as fast as expected.

A modification of the IFTTT approach may be the answer.   The new formula could be IFVTMV.  Expanding on this:

IF a customer has gained Value from one product (by using it in a certain way)

Then

offer an additional product (or expansion) to help them get More Value (by enabling something else).

Here are a couple examples:

If Acme is using our content management product to manage a customer support site (value  source)

then

offering our real-time collaboration service would help them go beyond offering tech notes to accelerate resolution without forcing the customer to switch to a telephone call.

or

If Acme is using our CRM system to manage sales activities

then

expanding their licenses to others that are involved in sales (engineers, industry experts) would help them collaborate more effectively and better understand and capture the customer’s situation and accelerate opportunities.

IFVTMV  does not have to be fancy or complex.   The simpler the better.  By creating a set of simple statements that capture the situation of the customer for gaining value today and how that value could be increased by doing more things, you are providing your sales team with simple discussion guides to drive growth from a customer perspective v. “we got this great new product I want to tell you about.” approach.

Do you provide value based connections between your products?  Do you use value connections to orient account expansion opportunities?  If not, give it a try.