As an AE, you'll spend as much time managing your existing book of business as you will closing new deals. Your first priority is retaining them - we have to work twice as hard if we're trying to close new deals and make up for lost customers. You'll typically be assigned a bunch of customers who are paying monthly - this means they could turn off PostHog at any time.
Once you're confident that a customer isn't going anywhere, then you want to think about how you can expand their usage. Usually (but not always) this is after they've signed an annual contract.
Retention
Your objectives are to:
- Get people to talk to you
- Get a longer term commitment
1. Get people to talk to you
This is usually the most difficult bit! Sometimes customers will proactively reach out to us because they see their bill rocketing, but we have many customers who have happily self-served to a very high level of spend without feeling any need to talk to us. In particular, engineers have no interest in jumping on a call with you 99% of the time. These are some of the tactics we have found to be helpful:
- Offer to optimize their usage/reduce their billing - if they are pointlessly tracking a bunch of junk, tell them! Otherwise they'll just find out themselves and churn anyway.
- Tell them about new or upcoming features or products that they may not be aware of which you know could be a great fit for them (and let them try them out for free).
- Use multiple channels - email is usually the worst way to reach our ICP. Slack, in-app Surveys or even Telegram are all usually better. But try email first anyway.
- Figure out what the non-technical people in their team need and then go out and talk to them - get someone who isn’t an engineer to talk to us given engineers don’t want to.
- If they submit a support request, jump in and respond yourself to try and build a relationship.
- Ask the wider team for help - we have to get creative here! As a last resort, deploying the founder card can be surprisingly effective.
Don't do clickbaity things or trick people into talking to you - it'll just annoy them. And definitely don't just offer a generic checkin 'to see how things are going'!
2. Get a longer term commitment
Once you've established contact, you basically want to get them into the same flow as if they were a new customer (and give them the same level of attention). You will be doing a combo of discovery and commercial evaluation, as the customer will want to figure out whether an annual contract with PostHog makes sense vs. what they've already got.
You'll also go through the same contracting process with them. We usually find that convincing a customer happily paying monthly to switch to annual is quite difficult, especially if they are a fast-growing startup (who tend to value flexibility over pure cost saving). This means that the discounts may not be as effective. If you're finding this is the case, you can get them on an annual plan but paying monthly or quarterly and halve the discount you offer.
Expansion
AEs also do expansion at PostHog. This is because we are constantly on a sales footing with customers - for the most part, we don't do steady state account management with an arbitrary 10% uplift at renewal team. There are two primary ways we look to drive expansion with a customer:
Cross sell new products
- First you need to find out who cares about the new product - is it the existing team or the new team?
- Then you need to find out what are they using now for other tools - surface this during the check in calls that you already have scheduled as part of onboarding.
- At this point
- If it's already a mature product we have shipped, you should aim to show how the product complements what they already are using in PostHog - don't just arbitrarily sell in a product for the sake of it.
- If it's something in beta or coming soon, you should start giving them sneak peeks of what's on our roadmap. You can also schedule a feedback session with the relevant product engineer if they’re a great fit - customers love this. Again, consider playing the founder card for something really new and big.
Multiple teams using the same product
This is a bit more straightforward, but harder to execute:
- Make sure you are asking for intros to other teams during the regularly scheduled checkin calls - ‘who else would benefit from this?’, 'are there other teams with similar pain points?'
- In-person visits can help accelerate this
Principles for visiting customers
If you offer to do a meeting in person with a customer, they’ll then feel obliged to introduce you to other people to make good use of your time. Trying to get them to adopt more products can be a good trigger, but generally you should be matching the cadence for in-person meetings with the size of contract (ie. more regular for Very Large, less regular for Large).
Generally speaking you should be trying to regularly see customers in your book of business who are $60k+ annually, or could get there. Occasionally you can pull in James/Tim if they are traveling to SF/NY especially.
Steady state retention
These are customers that are happily using PostHog long term, and are neither a churn risk nor likely to have expansion potential. Managing this group is much more automated and taken care of by RevOps, who do things like tracking usage and setting up alerts in Vitally to trigger outreach from us when a customer changes their usage behavior (either up or down).
An important part of retention here is also to ensure support issues fixed in a timely manner. We deliberately don't want to invest a huge amount in hands-on customer success here, because that can often paper over cracks in the product experience or quality of our customer support, so staying hands-off here is an intentional strategy.