Finding Intent Signals in the Noise

At this year's Inbound conference, HubSpot deemed that we have now entered a new age - the age of the connected customer.

Companies must build deeper connections with their customers through direct communication and connected systems and data.

It was an excellent way to signal the exit from a time of profound disconnection in which we all were socially (and otherwise) distanced.

But I don't think the naming of their definition of our new epoch fully gets at the core of the unique nature of the relationship between businesses and their customers.

Communication has long been a central tenant of turning customers into happy customers.

Communication is Not Enough

In 2022, 61% of customers stated they would stop doing with an organization that provided poor customer service.

That's up from 40% only a few years ago.

The expectation was that when someone had a question or concern, there would be someone on the other side to answer them. That expectation has not changed, and being customer-centric regarding communication is table stakes for SaaS companies.

Customer centricity came about due to changing expectations from how consumers purchase online on sites like Amazon, which go to extra lengths to create an easy, frictionless checkout process.

The cross-over of those expectations to B2B buyers is not all that new. But HubSpot was correct; there has been a paradigm shift.

The expectations of B2B customers have gone beyond open lines of communication for explicit feedback; there now is an expectation of being one step ahead - to anticipate the needs or frustrations of a user and be proactive in response.

This means that instead of just a chatbot for requesting support, you need to be able to predict the need for support based on a user's behavior and initiate the outreach and offer support.

And, instead of expecting users to reach out when they are ready to upgrade their pricing tier, you need to anticipate their additional needs based on their utilization level compared to what's in their contract.

The bottom line is that now, you must be listening to your customers' implicit communication rather than just the explicit ones.

Signal or Noise?

Over the last few decades, we have become obsessed with collecting as much data as possible.

Data on our customers, on our relationship with our customers, on our competitors... on anything.

The prevailing assumption was that the more data we had, the more knowledge we could gain.

This has led to a massive growth in data-focused tools for go-to-market teams. Tools to capture data, tools to analyze data, tools to identify which data to capture, tools to determine which data to analyze... and so on.

For each tool we use to gather or analyze data, another tool comes up as a needed companion to it.

We've learned that there is such a thing as too much data.

Without the correct data or people to analyze that data, you will have too much noise and insufficient signal.

You will end up going down a rabbit hole and chasing ghosts.

A Full Shelf

I've had so many discussions with VP-level leaders who say, "oh, we use x tool to handle that," only to hear the individual contributors below them tell me that it is useless for them because it's just a wall of data and not actionable.

Just another piece of shelfware.

According to Gartner, 25% or more of the software an organization is paying for at any given time might be going unused.

More tools mean more dashboards to log in to and more resources to analyze the data and ensure data integrity throughout the tech stack.

Evolve or Die

Morbid, I know.

But we're now exiting one of the longest bull markets in American history. For over a decade, companies were able to treat revenue as an afterthought. All they needed was a lot of hype, maybe a growing user base or just a really persuasive founder, and investor capital would flow like water.

We are now starting to reap what has been sewn.

Growth at all costs is now too costly, and a new motto is needed.

Revenue, no matter what.

There's more competition than ever for a pool of B2B customers growing at a snail's pace compared to previous periods. The cost to acquire those customers is increasing while budgets are starting to be slashed.

And the market outlook is cloudy, to say the least.

So how are companies supposed to evolve to survive these conditions?

Growing with what they already have.

The vast majority of SaaS companies (81%) attribute less than 20% of their annual revenue growth to expanding current customers, while only 14% see significant growth in current customer contracts YoY.

This is despite the fact that expansion revenue is easier, faster, and cheaper than acquiring revenue through new customers.

Finding the Signal in the Noise of Customer Behavior

Over the last three months, our team has spent countless hours interviewing revenue leaders across the?SaaS?space to understand better their challenges and how we might be able to support them.

The thing that has come up time and again is the frustration around generating expansion revenue and mitigating?churn.

That challenge has only become more critical over the last few weeks.

With these learnings, we had many internal discussions about focusing our efforts on this underserved use case. We decided to focus all of our efforts on Parative to meet this particular challenge.

Finding the intent signals in the noise of customer data is a challenge, and there is no area where solving it is more critical than that of expansion revenue.

Parative Revenue Expansion System?helps SaaS teams discover untapped revenue growth by combining software and data science to identify expansion opportunities.

With Parative, you can:

?? Monitor Critical Signals: Parative identifies growth opportunities by monitoring customer behavior, product usage, and contract consumption.

?? Score Expansion Readiness: Parative enables expansion efforts by accurately scoring each customer's readiness directly in your current CRM.

?? Automate Actions and Alerts: Parative unburdens employees by proactively alerting them and automating desired workflows in the tools they already use.

?? Analyze Efficacy & Outcomes: While Parative's software operationalizes how your team drives growth, your dedicated Parative data scientist will continuously evaluate and suggest which signals have the most significant impact.

Our humans + software approach gives you access to the power of machines with the intelligence of people.

With Parative, you can instantly take action when the customers you care about do something you care about.