February Office Hours: Reduce Churn and Win Big

Retention, expansion, churn – it seems like these words are on the tip of everyone’s tongue these days. But what steps can you take to retain your customers and uncover opportunities for growth?

G2 provides a wealth of insights through its Buyer Intent data, enabling companies to anticipate customer needs, reduce churn, and capitalize on upsell and cross-sell opportunities. In a detailed exploration of these strategies, experts Anna Charity and Katlin Hess offered valuable insights on these topics (and more!). 

Here's an expanded look into the four plays they discuss to help you harness the power of G2 to nurture and expand your customer relationships.

Your Best Customer Is Your Current Customer (4:08)

Did you know that it can cost 5-7x more to acquire new customers?

To help combat this, it’s essential to recognize the reasons why your customers are churning. 

The top 5 reasons customers churn are:

Below is the flywheel we typically show when we talk about G2 in terms of how to leverage the platform to get new customers.

However, the flywheel can also works for current customers. Here’s how…

Amplify Customer Voice

It’s important for your current customers to hear how other customers are seeing value with your products. But it's also just as important to raise that voice of your customer internally as well to surface some of those themes or places where people might be struggling to help get ahead of churn.

Power Your Pipeline

We’ll dig more into this later on, but G2 can be a powerful tool to uncover people who may be in-market and could potentially fit cross-sell or upsell opportunities. 

Inform Your Strategy

Before we dive into how to inform your strategy portion of the flywheel, we must first define Buyer Intent. 

Buyer Intent is the combination of online activity and engagement, signaling the likelihood to purchase a product or service. 

Ways to use Buyer Intent to inform your strategy include: 

Play 1: Proactive Churn Alerts (12:16)

Customer churn is an inevitable challenge faced by businesses across every industry. However, with the strategic use of G2 Buyer Intent, companies can adopt a proactive approach toward mitigating this risk.

Using G2, you can set up Buyer Intent alerts to notify you of potential churn risks. These alerts can include those for customers up for renewal this year and competitor alerts. 

A practical way to utilize this information is to surface any signals of churn risk to the account manager or customer success manager so they can take a closer look at the account. With these findings, you can reiterate to the customer the value and ROI your product is already bringing them, especially if they’re looking at your competitors. 

Additionally, Customer Success reps can upload their book of business to keep a pulse on activity across G2. 

And through our Slack integration or email notifications, you can get real-time notifications every time an important action, such as a customer researching a competitor, takes place on G2. 

So now that you’ve seen a churn risk, what should you do next? 

Schedule or accelerate their Business Review, add them to your sales outreach, or even put them into an automated “save” cadence via LinkedIn Matched Audiences, Marketo, or other similar platforms. 

Play 2: Predictive Churn Indicators (24:30)

Analyzing intent data from past customers who have churned enables businesses to identify patterns and signals indicative of churn risk. 

One way to do this is to take a look back at customers who churned in the previous year or six months. After examining these accounts, see if you can identify trends in those customers' habits. 

Using this data, you can also run a win-back campaign by uploading churned accounts in G2 and building custom messaging specific to them.

Be sure that you’re not just sending to every customer that ever churned, but that you're getting in front of people who are showing active signals that they're looking at alternatives for their current solution.

By understanding these trends, companies can tailor their customer engagement and support strategies to preemptively address concerns, ultimately fostering a stronger, more resilient customer base.

Play 3: Customer Insights from Reviews (32:45)

G2's repository of customer reviews serves as direct feedback, offering unfiltered insights into customer satisfaction and areas for improvement. 

You can trigger an alert for any review that comes in, but you can also set up a separate Slack group or e-mail notification for reviews that are three stars and under to make sure that those are getting the attention they deserve right away. 

Taking that a step further, you can use that review content to uncover some of the themes that may need to be addressed. A creative way to do so is to put the reviews into ChatGPT and ask AI to help uncover those themes. 

If a customer leaves a one to three-star review, trigger an alert for their CSM, leadership team, or even yourself to see what first course of action would be right and then reply to that review. 

We, at G2, advocate for replying to all reviews, both positive or negative.

Negative reviews, in particular, are invaluable for identifying specific issues affecting customer experience. Addressing these concerns not only improves product and service quality but also demonstrates a commitment to customer satisfaction, enhancing loyalty, and reducing churn.

Additionally, searching your own reviews on your G2 Profile allows you to find specific feedback. For example, you can search integrations and see all the reviews that mention them. 

You can also filter by business segment, so if you’re focusing on enterprise accounts, you can see reviews that are from only enterprise customers.

From there, you can create Reference Pages for those reviews. Reference Pages are landing pages that showcase reviews. You can get as granular as you like and create them for a specific product or filter them based on company size.

After all, as customer marketers, it's our responsibility to ensure customer feedback gets to the right place and can be actioned on.

Play 4: Upsell/Cross-Sell Campaigns (39:25)

In addition to retention strategies, G2 Buyer Intent is instrumental in uncovering opportunities to expand your relationship with existing customers through upsell and cross-sell initiatives:

Making the Most of G2's Capabilities

By harnessing the insights provided by G2, businesses can not only mitigate risks associated with customer churn but also identify and act upon opportunities for growth within their existing customer base. 

This involves setting up tailored alerts, analyzing trends in Buyer Intent data, and ensuring that insights are actionable across teams and departments. Automation and integrations play key roles in this process, enabling businesses to respond in real-time to emerging opportunities and risks.

The strategies shared by Anna and Katlin underscore the importance of a proactive, data-driven approach to engaging and retaining  your customers. 

Interested in leveraging G2's Buyer Intent data to transform your customer retention and growth strategies? Reach out for a personalized consultation and discover how G2's insights can empower your business to achieve sustained success.