Identifying Upsell Opportunities Using SupportLogic
Upsell opportunities are hidden in your support data—are you finding them? This session will challenge your approach to customer interactions, showing you how SupportLogic can uncover upsell potential within your existing support operations. We’ll dive deep into the strategies that turn routine support cases into revenue-generating opportunities, pushing you to rethink how you leverage customer data.
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Okay, folks, we're going to do this next session now.
I'm really excited for this one.
This is all about upsell opportunities and crosssell opportunities.
We have a panel.
We have Jerry Stalik from Delinea joining us along with, yep, yep, absolutely.
Make some noise for Jerry.
Yes, thank you.
And then we have Judith Platz and Max Green from SupportLogic.
I'm really looking forward to this one and the discussion that they're going to
have
around this topic.
So I'm going to hand our microphone over and they can take it away.
Thank you, Ryan.
Great.
How are you doing, everyone?
Holding in there?
Yeah?
Okay, you're doing good.
Just got through snacks, got through Nepal's session, right?
Is there one or two more sessions in this room?
Two more?
Okay, all right.
So let's talk about some of that data and the opportunity for support to
contribute
in meaningful ways to the revenue stream within the company.
You heard a lot this morning about support and the data that they have, but the
fact
that being able to tie yourself to revenue, being able to operate as something
other than
a cost center rate, this is one of the most meaningful ways to do it.
So to share a stat with you, I spent years and years at TSIA.
And when organizations were looking for leads, so the cost of a lead, it was --
so my research
practice, we looked into this, we wrote a research paper just before I left in
2020.
For any kinds of leads on average that the sales team, the marketing team are
generating,
it was $200 and above by the time you took all the cost.
To get a lead from a support organization, does anybody want to take a guess?
And this is based on hard, cold data.
Take a guess how much a lead coming from support cost.
Throw your numbers out.
15, you're warm-ish, lower.
Little bit lower.
Little bit higher.
Perfect.
Yes.
$7 and this research paper still exists and they've updated it.
I looked before we came in here today.
Same numbers, although the $200 number had moved up, but the support numbers
stayed the
same.
So $7 to generate a lead coming from support.
Not right there is meaningful enough.
In reasons why support sitting on this data can take this information, give it
to their
brethren in sales or in renewals or in education or services, right?
Because you uncover all sorts of leads.
It's not just new product sales.
It could be added services or education, things like that.
So I get to be -- I said it wrong when I first sat down.
I am the thorn between two roses and I am going to be asking Max and Jerry some
questions.
That's you.
So Max, I want you to start with how support logic changes the way companies
think about
their support data.
Thanks, Judy.
Thanks, Jerry, for being here.
Take a part in this with us.
I think you've heard it a fair amount already today and yesterday for those of
you who were
here, right?
But 90% of the data that we have in support and with our customers, right, it's
unstructured,
right?
And the difference there is that there's a wealth of information just in the
conversations
that you're having with your customers back and forth.
It goes beyond the categorization of cases that your teams are doing, right?
The values that they're assigning, this case is associated with this product or
is this
defect or associated with this release, right?
Your customers are constantly sharing information in the course of the
conversation that is
positive, is negative.
They're making statements that can indicate that, you know, there's a renewal
coming up,
right?
Or that maybe even that the account is at risk, right?
They're considering other options.
So all of this information, you used to have to sift through the conversations,
read through
it end to end, right?
And with AI, what you're enabled to do now is have that information served up
to you in
a way that it can be meaningful, right?
Meaningful and actionable, right?
The last thing that a manager wants to do is read through 500 support cases
looking for
this type of information, but by using AI, you can have this surface to you in
real time,
right?
Without having to spend all of this time combing your sources looking for it.
And so...
I'm like carrying somebody's face here.
So I think I'm going to turn the question, now I turn the question back to you,
I think,
is what it is.
Yeah.
So let's start with...
Judy, let's start with the mindset.
What mindset shifts are necessary to help support teams see the potential for
upselling
in their day-to-day work and for expansion opportunities in their day-to-day
work?
So there's a lot of mindset shifts, but I would say the first one has to be
lose the victim
mentality.
And I think a lot of support organizations feel like they're the victim in a
lot of
ways.
And truthfully, the reason why is because oftentimes they're making up for
sales expectations that
were set at time of sale.
And when those expectations aren't set correctly, right, what happens?
Support is left trying to do whatever it is that sales sold the customer in the
first
place.
And that's been going on since the beginning of time, quite honestly.
We all know it.
I think that support can lose that we're the victim here and they can rise
above that
pretty quickly because, again, it's amazing to me, and I've said this for many,
many years,
if support could take the time to take the data that they have and turn it
around and
give data-driven insights to other teams, they could become heroes in ways that
are just
beyond the scope of what we could even imagine.
And instead, I think a lot of times what support focuses on is the here, the
now, the fix this
problem.
And it's understandable.
The strategic and the proactive work often go out the door because we're
fighting honest
to goodness fires, right?
And so when you're done fighting that fire and you think about the energy that
it's
going to take to produce this report, to take it to sales, to have the
conversation, everybody
just kind of goes, "I'd rather just go fight another fire, honestly."
So I think for me, those are the things that people would have to change very
quickly.
And I think it's more than possible.
So Jerry, I get to ask you a question now.
Can you share a moment when your team realized there was an upsell opportunity
hidden in
a routine support case?
So I'll actually share two stories.
And I like your victim mentality, but I've also used the term bunker mentality,
right?
We're being attacked from all sides, and so we're just going to hunker down and
just deal
with the stuff we've got, the incoming fire we've got.
So there's two scenarios actually that I've seen.
One is a long time ago I worked in an organization where the support team did
not have access
to sales force or account data.
And so when there were opportunities for upsell or cross-sell or even renewals
at risk, we had
no idea who to reach out to or how to reach out.
And so we were blocked from even doing anything.
But Delenia, fortunately, or unfortunately, we used sales force for our ticket
ing data,
which then means we also have visibility into the account.
So we can at least see who to reach out to, who's the account manager, right?
We all know that account managers change all the time.
And so it's impossible for a support engineer or support manager to necessarily
know who
is the responsible person.
But even without any sort of ecosystem around it, I was told shortly after I
joined the
joint, oh, yeah, this customer was calling in and they wanted to buy more
licenses.
So the support engineer told the manager who wrote an email, who sent it to
somebody
who may or may not have acted on it.
And when you realize that that's the best you can do, you really realize why,
like you're
seen as a cost center.
Because a handful of emails will go out, there's no tracking of it, there's no
systems to it.
You don't get any credit for, even if you identified $100,000 upsell across the
opportunity, in
the end, because there's no tracking, and the support engineer says, but Wade,
I told
you about that, the salesperson takes their commission, yeah, yeah, thanks,
appreciate
that.
I'll buy you beer next time and moves on.
And so I think for me, there has to be a better way.
Thank you.
And folks, just to give a call out, Jerry, as a customer of support logic, has
actually
worked with us over the past couple of months because this was so important to
him, and he
asked us if we could work in our model and start to use our model.
So Max is showing you on the screen, previous screen, where all of the --
Is there the existing signals?
The 40 existing signals that support logic looks for, right?
And this is what we've had out in the marketplace, you know, for the last many
years.
And so Jerry and his team, if we go to the next slide, we -- how are you doing?
We're working on two new sentiments and signals, one for renewal and one for
expansion.
And here what you see are just examples in real data of what comes in, what's
tight,
whether it's in an email or a chat or, you know, a text, however you're
servicing.
And so these things have been built out, and I believe what Karen has told us
is the end
of October, so just weeks away.
This will be incorporated into the new model.
So in addition to all those other signals, now look how easy it is to grab.
These cases can be alerted, right?
Set up an alert, send it to the sales team or, you know, to a group.
And right there, right now, live, they'll have.
So that thing you talked about, the email that got sent and forwarded and
whatever, or unanswered
even.
Now alerts can go out from the system with actions being taken, right?
And so tracking of what sales is doing becomes easier in the system as well,
right?
So really good stuff.
Yeah.
>> Yeah, I want to just jump in on the back of that.
So one of the things that is going on at Deliney and I think a lot of companies
are kind
of in the same boat, right?
Legacy sort of hardware software options, right?
On-prem solutions.
They rolled out a year, year and a half before I joined, they rolled out a
platform so now
customers can consume the same capabilities or similar capabilities in the
cloud.
Our cost per ticket for on-prem is much higher than our cost per ticket for the
platform.
And the number of tickets submitted by an on-prem customer is significantly
higher than
the number of tickets submitted for a platform customer.
So you talked about $7, right?
So this is another thing.
So now we're doing marketing around, hey, come to our platform, try our
platform out.
Customers call in and they say, hey, you know, can, is this feature available
in your platform?
Man, what a great way to sort of start that conversation.
But the part for me that's really important is I do not want my support
engineers to become
salespeople, right?
Their job is to focus on and fix the problem that's in front of them.
So if we can use tooling to grab those sentiments, the same way we grab
escalation sentiments
and use that through automations and alerting to get that information to the
sellers, I
think this is going to be awesome and we'll be able to track support-generated
leads and
then we start getting credit.
Thank you.
Max, what are the most, you work with a lot of our customers, almost every one
of them
at some point in your career with support logic.
What are the most common missed opportunities you're seeing in support
interactions?
Thanks, Judy.
And as mentioned, these are news signals that are coming, right?
So, but up until this point, it's not like we weren't -- our customers weren't
seeing
opportunities to find these types of opportunities within their cases, right?
And so a good example of that would be, right, if you have a customer who's
having -- who
you see having a lot of positive sentiment, right, and you take a look at what
their product
offerings that they currently have with you.
Maybe there are -- and you would know -- are complementary product offerings
for what they
have already been sold.
Like, you're often trying to sell horizontally, right, additional offerings
that complement
what they have.
And so if you find customers that are extremely happy using one of your
solutions, you can
use it as an opportunity to propose another one that you know is typically
complementary
to that solution, right?
So that's actually something that I've seen -- I've seen often missed that you
can actually
do if you're taking advantage of even the existing signals there.
Another example would be our platform detects confusion, as you well know.
Confusion is often a great opportunity, not just for feedback back to say,
product teams
and stuff, but potentially enablement opportunities for customers, right?
And so this is, you know, whether you're providing enablement as part of an
existing service
package that you have with your customers or if it's a potentially an upsell
opportunity
for enablement packages that you want to offer.
There's a wealth of information within these that can be -- that you can
leverage, right,
for these types of -- for potentially generating revenue.
And lastly, another one I would call out is maybe you have a customer that
really should
just be on a higher support plan, right?
And this can be as simple as, you know, this customer has a ton of cases open,
but they're
also -- you see constant follow-up requests from the customers, right?
And under their existing service package, maybe they're not entitled to 24/7
support,
right?
Maybe -- and that's an upsell opportunity for you there as well.
So these are things you can find already with support logic in addition to what
you'll soon
be able to find with the new signals.
>> Thank you.
Very good.
Jerry.
Thank you.
Are there certain industries or types of customers where you see more upsell
potential
coming out of support?
>> So I'm not sure it's necessarily more specific industries.
I think what it is for a lot of -- for a lot of companies that are in the SaaS
or the subscription
space, it is very common for a customer to buy a little and then think about
expansion
in year two and year three, right?
And so I think a lot of the opportunity comes from really focusing in on that
first year,
first couple of years of the relationship and seeing where the expansion
opportunities
or the upsell opportunities are for those customers.
But I don't think that's unique to any specific industry or specific customer
profile.
I mean, I've heard stories of really, really, really large companies starting
with very
small contracts and over a period of time those turn into multi-million dollar
contracts,
right?
And so it's really sort of how do you watch and monitor those customers in the
first year
or two.
And so both the escalation sentiment as well as the commercial sentiment are
great indicators
for that.
>> Absolutely.
I personally like the how to, right, when customers -- if you're classifying
your cases
at the end, right, you should have maybe six or seven buckets that you put them
into.
And if you find a lot of how to, well, that's education team, right?
What are they doing?
Ultimately, you want those how tos out of the product.
But what is education doing to accelerate?
If you steal a lot of install config issues, right?
Who set that up?
Do you have partner issues?
Do you have pro services issues?
And really, you know, doing a smart bucketing, I think one of the things too
many organizations
do is there's too many buckets.
And then you're spreading peanut butter tooth in on that bread and you can't do
anything
with it.
The less buckets that you classify into, the more data you have to make those
smart decisions.
So Jerry, another one for you.
And this may be too early, but we'll go with it.
Okay.
Has there been a, and you should never ask a question, you don't know the
answer to,
but here we go.
Has there been a real world example yet for you of how support logic has
uncovered an
upseller across sell opportunity?
No, there has not.
There has been, I think the potential is there.
I'm very excited by getting a chance to take a look at all of our data and see
what it's
telling us.
I know, because I've looked at tickets, that the signals are there.
They exist, right?
Some of the work that we did in the early days with some of those, I mean, some
of those
messages, those are like from our tickets, right?
And so we know that the opportunity is there.
It's now we need to, we need to farm the opportunity and in full transparency
to one
of the challenges that we've got is because our ecosystem is not set up for
support to
find and identify and generate leads, we don't really have a good mechanism yet
of how to
get those leads to people who will do something about them.
But that's something I'm working on while support logic is, you know, putting
the final,
final pieces together is how do we, how do we have an end in process that we
get the
signal, we can act on the opportunity, we send it off to the renewals team or
the sales
team or whoever it needs to go to and then they can act on it.
Thanks for saying no publicly, Jerry.
You're welcome.
Thanks for asking me.
You're welcome.
We both learned here today, haven't we?
Okay.
Max, how does integrating support data with customer success and product data?
What have you seen, you know, that customers are getting out of that, having a
more holistic
view?
Do you have an example you can share?
You don't have to name the customer, but...
Yeah, I think it really ties back to what I was saying earlier, right, where
you have
all this even, you know, even before what we have here, which is, as we said,
coming
soon, right, you have all the metadata surrounding your cases.
You know what products a customer of yours is using, what features they're
using, right?
And I've had customers specifically look at that, and that's how I gave the
example before,
look at that in conjunction with positive and negative sentiment to determine,
okay,
is this a customer that we should get customer success involved with or sales
involved with
to have a conversation about exploring other product offerings that we have, or
regard to
upselling to a higher service package or something of that nature?
So it is the same example that I gave before, but this is something that we've
actively
worked with customers on before.
So, next one, too.
Judy and Jerry, what are some signals that a customer may be ready for premium
support
or additional services?
Doesn't have to be support logic specific related.
So same answer I gave previously, but put a little twist on it.
So install config issues, highlight those, right?
That's either a partner opportunity, potentially, or a pro services, your
onboarding team.
Because you're learning a lot during install config cases that are coming in,
or is our
product too hard for customers to install themselves if that's the case?
And what should we do?
What wrapping can we put around that, right?
At support logic, we don't have a product today that customers could install
themselves.
We have an onboarding team.
And ultimately, the data that we're collecting from the initial cases that we
have, that
is being fed to Caron, and hopefully you all saw him earlier on stage this
morning.
So because one day, we do want this to be, you know, plug and go, right, with
our software.
We don't want customers to necessarily have to use our onboarding team, and we
'd prefer
to have the onboarding team, therefore, richer value, right?
Because like, hey, Judy, can I have a different model created?
Use them for more strategic services.
And then, like I said, looking at the how-to issues, looking at feature
requests, how
can that information go back to product, and how can we help product prioritize
If you were in the room earlier, you heard my example.
When I brought support logic into Salesforce, I was giving the product team
completely
wrong information, and we were frustrating each other.
And the reason I was is because my support agents were doing the quickest thing
They would click the thing at the top, like whatever the first thing in the
list was,
all cases were being classified to that, when in fact, we had just made their
job so
difficult that they didn't want to scroll down.
It's like when I go and fill out online forums, and I have to scroll for my age
now, like
what were you born, that's what they felt like when they were closing cases.
So you got to get that information in there in a way that's more meaningful
because you
open up a whole new level of conversation with your peers.
I think going back to your question, there's kind of touched on a lot of this
already.
A big one for me is just the volume of cases that they're opening.
And a lot of times what you see is they're getting stuck, maybe they're under-
resourced,
maybe they don't have the right capabilities.
Those are situations, depending on what you define by premium support, is that
sort of
follow the sun, is that named engineer?
But it's generally, customers sort of give you that indication in both sort of
the metrics
that you look at in addition to the sentiment that you can pull out of the
various cases.
But a lot of times it is that, hey, I've noticed you've opened 30 cases in the
last two months.
Maybe we need to lean in a little bit more.
Here's your vendor and see what we can do to kind of help this because the
customer's
not happy about that either.
They don't want to open 30 cases.
So this is, Ryan, how are we doing on time?
I'm sorry.
We're trying to catch people two minutes.
Is that what we have?
Two minutes?
Oh my goodness.
Okay.
So, natural silos, we all know it, right?
There's customer success, pro services, education services, product, sales, et
cetera.
Jerry, what is your thought on if you were going to step out of here today and
say, okay,
I'm going to start using my support data.
How do you not break the silos down, but how do you get sales coming to that
table and
having these, I'll say support in sales for now?
There's other groups, certainly.
How do you get sales to want to be at that table, to take this information from
support,
and what is the number one thing you have to do to make this a successful
relationship?
So I'm going to give a semi-long answer, even though I know we're really tight
on time.
Years ago, we all know that support data has two qualities.
One, we talk to more customers, anybody else in most any company, right?
More than sales, more than customer success, whatever, but it's also unstruct
ured.
And so before, when I prepped for QBRs, I'd go through and I'd look at tickets
and I'd
talk to my managers and I'd talk to the engineers and I'd try to sort of get
this idea of what's
going on.
And I would go into a QBR with the CEO and the CFO and the EIEIO and all the
other people
that are there.
And inevitably, I'd say, well, this is what our customers are telling us.
And somebody would say, oh, but I talked to such and such big customer and they
're not
happy about that.
And the entire House of Cards falls apart because you don't have the data to
really
back it up.
Yes, I've got samples and I've got examples, but they've got an example too.
And when you try to fight with the head of sales, you're going to lose, right?
Now it's about the data and it's about showing them that instead of looking at
a sliver of
the data, I can look at all the data.
I can look at everything.
I can tell you what's happening with all the cases.
I can tell you where the sentiment is.
I can tell you what the customers are saying.
And I can look at that whole view in a matter of minutes rather than spending
hours and
hours and only getting a piece of it.
And if you can pull from that risks and opportunities so that they can target
their time, right?
They're not having to hunt and fish in an open field anymore.
Now they know that the game is there, right?
They're coin operated.
Show them where the coins are.
They're going to go after them.
So that is, I think that's the way to do it is you've got the data, you tell
them the
story and then set them loose.
I think the one thing I want to add and it's as simple as this.
If you really think about it, the sales and support organizations are diabol
ically opposed
to each other.
Sales is incented on the number of conversations they have, right?
Truthfully.
Support, we're supposed to have less conversations, right?
We don't want the ping pong game when we're working on cases.
So if you think about that, sales incentive is more conversations, supports is
less.
And so what we need to do is get better truthfully across both organizations
around aligning
on goals and metrics.
And it's that simple and it sounds a little too simple, but it is that simple.
So I can't reward Jerry for all the conversations he's having and punish Max
because he's having
too many if we're both trying to get to that data to use it for the expansion
and renewals
of our customers and ultimately to the value of our customers.
So I'd add that to what you said.
I think it's important.
Thank you.
[applause]