2. Cross-Selling with Wedges at Vymo
- Yamini Bhat Co-founder & CEO, Vymo
To cross-sell, you have to build wedges. They usually depend on your incumbent, what you are trying to replace or create, etc.
In Vymo’s case, sometimes it depends on who is the most tech-savvy individual within that group, who is rushing to prove themselves, etc.
Discovering this wedge requires capturing much knowledge.
Thankfully, our salespeople have also worked in the industry and have been selling in the financial services industry for a credible amount of time. For our largest account, we have this detailed mapping done.
We also speak with partners like Ernst&Young and Microsoft to try to understand different stakeholders and their personas.
Opening doors in key accounts on this site could take up to two years. You keep building these relationships, and then one day, boom, there is a fire — a terrible sales review for two consecutive quarters or something — and then the customers call you to figure out a solution. And then it’s a six to eight-month cycle after that.
But your day zero team cannot know all of this about the account beforehand. This is why the fundamental principle of expansion and cross-selling is to touch everyone—everyone who seems like your user.
All accounts will not have one buyer. Every account typically has X buyers you’re targeting, whether it’s for your inbound persona or outbound emails.
Vymo has more than 70 different potential champions, influencers, and buyers in an account that could become a USD one million contract for us. This is why we reach out to everyone. We have a principle that customers will only recognize us if we touch them in five different ways.
There's an Inside Sales team trying to reach a certain level and sometimes a founder trying to access the CEO directly. Over time, you realize the fastest route to closing. That's the buyer market fit.
Of course, some of this depends on your ticket size, but typically, there are always multiple buyers. You should target all of them, and this will help you discover your wedge over time and expand and cross-sell.
The profile of your Customer Success team changes over time, depending on your ticket size.
If you're more product-led, what you're getting your team to do is to improve user adoption after launch. For this, you can have the same profile on your customer success team as your pre-sales engineer - someone who understands your product to help guide the users.
It doesn’t matter if they have built a relationship with the individual buyer as long as adoption happens. Nobody immediately replaces a product that costs a few hundred dollars. If the product is used daily, it will be sticky.
Typically, this profile looks like a pre-sales engineer who can review product data and identify if users aren’t using key screens, making the most of their integrations, etc.
They will make it easy for users to use features. This can be a playbook. Their role is to get the user to do the things that make a product like yours sticky.
The moment you move a little upmarket—say deals in the 20K to 200K range—it usually means there's a lot of land and expand and cross-sell potential. At this stage, you need your customer success team to be more consultative.
When you are upselling, you usually do so after having delivered some business value already and making the case that more business value can be unlocked by doing more.
You still have to talk about the product at this stage, so you need that pre-sales engineer product focus, but it is in terms of ROI.
This requires your Customer Success team to understand the customer's business. At this stage, you can look for someone from the same background and industry as your customer.
Say, you are a marketing tool. You are looking for ex-marketers to build up this kind of capability. Not every customer success manager needs to be a marketer. Still, you want someone in the team to have that background so they can train everyone on that language and coach people to have that consultative conversation.
In Vymo’s case, our Customer Success leaders are people in the financial services industry.
Our first Customer Success Manager in the US was actually from our client. We try and find people who have worked in transformation departments, launched multiple products like this internally, and potentially built some of these tools themselves.