Building a deck for your business reviews
Do you conduct periodic business reviews with your existing customers?
If not, you might be missing out on a vital tool to further your Account Based Expansion (ABE) efforts. Before we dive into how you can build a value driven deck for your business reviews, let’s first understand the purpose of conducting a business review.
A common mistake made by sales individuals is making a business review about a chance to up-sell products.
Yes, the eventual outcome of conducting business reviews is that you will be on top of your customer’s needs but that does not mean it becomes a case of pushing your products.
In a nutshell, the purpose is to offer value in your meetings and make sure your customers can make the most of the solution they are using.
Here are a few slides that have to be on your business review for a successful business review:
Product usage
The founding principle of a SaaS business is to offer constant value to its users. The first step in doing so, is to make sure you can measure relevant usage stats. Once measured, these stats should be shared with your prospects.
We believe in complete transparency when offering usage stats. We are often asked if it is okay to inflate these stats so that it looks like that the solution is indispensable to the organisation. We firmly believe in being honest and asking questions like “Looks like the product usage is quite low? Is there anything that is stopping you from using this solution more?”.
Your prospects will eventually figure out if your solution is not being used and this will result in churn you may not be able to mitigate.
As mentioned earlier, don’t start your conversation by saying ‘looks like you are using this solution and need more licenses.’ The up-sell will come in due course of time.
Goals for the coming quarter/year
Before you can start to understand the elevated pitch for your product. You first need to establish goals with your customers. Goals don’t have to be purely product driven but can be organisational goals and you as a sales individual need to decide how your product fits into their goals.
Don’t cut off your prospects if they are describing goals that don’t look like they are relevant to your solution/product. It is your job to pay full attention to your customer and then figure out what you need to put on your next goals slide.
ROI
A SaaS product is only useful to an organisation if it is bringing a constant stream of value to the user. The purpose of the ROI slide is not to show how awesome your product is, on the contrary it should be able to link goals, product usage into a single coherent slide.
For example, a ROI scenario could be “Last month you used our product to answer 350 tickets and out of these 100 were answered using our auto-answer feature. This means that a third of your workload was taken care of automation and this would translate into better customer support and also optimal staffing.”
It might not always be possible to directly translate ROI onto a deck. In this case, you will have to be doubly diligent and figure out how you can show the value your product is bringing to the organisation.
Industry best practices/trends
If you truly want to offer value to your prospects, make sure you give them value by offering them industry insights.
What do we mean? If your customer is selling auto-parts make sure your do your research and find out how other auto-part sellers are using your product, then share the insights with your prospects. You don’t have to breach NDAs by name dropping but you can always generalize by industry type.
Similarly, you can always share your most used features/value propositions with your prospects. Be careful though, don’t share irrelevant features/value propositions with your customers just because they are trending.
Product updates
A great value add to the monthly/quarterly business review is to talk about the new offerings you have to offer. Beware, don’t make this the center piece of your presentation.
The center piece of your deck at any given day is either the ROI or the industry best practices slide.
If your product deployment cycle is very long, you might want to skip this slide and keep it on an ‘as and when’ basis.
To summarize, the business review is more about you staying in touch with your prospects and not about up-selling. In addition, the business review also ensures that your product remains relevant to the user and is not swept under the carpet.
If you have any more questions, just tweet to us at @insideselling and we will be happy to answer any questions you might have.