Are you leveraging customer retention and expansion as a growth strategy to contain costs and compensate for slower new customer acquisition?
It’s likely your account managers are constantly seeking growth, expansion, upsell, and cross-sell opportunities. Your team’s ability to consistently deliver measurable outcomes and value to customers directly impacts customer retention, lifetime value, and advocacy.
There are many ways account managers can identify cross-sell and upsell opportunities. For example, knowing and understanding customer needs, challenges, and goals helps customer engagement professionals recognize new opportunities.
Other effective methods include conducting routine account reviews, collaborating internally, developing extensive product knowledge, encouraging customers to network, and sharing customer success stories and use cases.
White space analysis is an often-overlooked method of revealing customer expansion, cross-sell, and upsell possibilities within existing accounts.
Let’s look at what white space analysis is, its benefits, the steps involved, and how to streamline the process for your reps.
What is a white space analysis?
A white space analysis is a method used by companies to identify business, market, or sales opportunities. Businesses use this type of approach to find new ways to remain competitive with product or service enhancements or improvements. It’s also a way to discover potential untapped customer segments in the marketplace.
However, our focus is on the type of white space analysis account managers can use to reveal opportunities for growth within existing customer accounts.
Benefits of Analyzing White Space
How can account managers benefit from performing and leveraging a white space analysis for their accounts?
Identify Upsell and Cross-sell Opportunities
Selling to existing customers is more cost-effective and profitable. These customers already trust your brand, are likely to spend more, and require a shorter sales cycle.
Whether you are upselling, selling an additional or upgraded product or service, or cross-selling, offering a complementary add-on to a product they’ve already purchased, you are delivering a desirable customer outcome. This is essential since customer retention hinges on your ability to consistently drive measurable customer results.
Reveal Expansion Opportunities
A white space analysis helps identify additional stakeholders within a customer account that would benefit from one of your products or services. It provides an opportunity to establish a greater footprint within the client account and become more valuable to the customer’s business success. This is another way to drive measurable outcomes and results that cause the customer to bond with your business.
Strengthen Customer Relationships
Upsells, cross-sells, and expansion all strengthen your partnership with the customer and elevate account managers to trusted advisor status in the eyes of the customer. The client then becomes more bonded with your organization and sees your solution as integral to their success.
Boost Customer Retention
We know that the best predictor of customer retention is measurable customer results. Clients who are receiving value in the form of outcomes from using your product or service are the ones likely to stay with your company as long as they continue receiving value from the relationship. As value delivery becomes more consistent, customer bonding occurs because they start to see your solution as indispensable to their success.
How to Complete a White Space Analysis
Account managers can take the following steps to perform a white space analysis to identify new growth opportunities within their books of business.
Step 1: Know Your Customers: Effective account managers need a deep understanding and knowledge of their customers. This means consistently conducting discovery and voice of customer (VOC) interviews, developing a detailed customer org chart to understand the company’s inner workings, and conducting a SWOT analysis. Additional customer information account managers need for a white space analysis includes all the products purchased, the client’s industry, competition, and growth potential.
Step 2: Identify Additional Buying Centers Within Each Account: This is where we look for additional divisions, functions, or regions, for example, that buy independently and might be a good fit for your products or services. This requires an understanding of things like client decision-making processes, organizational structures, and budget allocation.
Step 3: Map Out Your White Space: Create a visual matrix of all your accounts broken into buying centers and the products or services they have bought and when.
Step 4: Study Your Findings: The resulting visual representation of this information reveals gaps, a.k.a. white spaces, where products and services haven’t been sold to specific buying centers within each customer account.
Step 5: Identify and Prioritize White Space Opportunities: Now it’s time to determine which gaps have potential where the product or service is a good fit for the client and buying center. Then, prioritize these opportunities where the gap represents a threat where a competitor could break into the account if you don’t pursue the opportunity immediately.
Streamline Your White Space Analysis
Save your account managers significant time by having a white space analysis always ready.
You can accomplish this by taking two steps:
Establish a recurring account management process like Our KAM Process™. Then, instead of needing to research your customers every time you complete a white space analysis, client knowledge collection is ongoing and ever-deepening. This, alone, enables account managers to recognize cross-sell, upsell, and expansion opportunities, build stronger customer partnerships, become trusted advisors to their accounts, and boost retention.
Implement purpose-built account management software, like Kapta, that includes all the necessary tools to gather and store all relevant account information for a single source of truth.
These tools include VOC software, an interactive Org chart to visualize the big picture of each client organization and understand how it functions, plus a SWOT analysis tool and a white space analysis tool that shows account managers the gaps in their entire book of business as well as within each account.
See how Kapta simplifies white space analysis and boosts customer retention. Schedule time with a team member today.
