Nearbound partnerships are your secret weapons when it comes to customer retention strategies. By forming close partnerships with like-minded companies, you can increase your customer retention rates. Not only that, you can even actively share leads with one another. In this article, we take a look at how nearbound can be one of your best-kept secret customer retention strategies.
Bring your GTM team into your customer retention strategies
As Aircall’s App Marketplace Manager Ian Cugniere points out, whether it’s starting Slack channels with your key partners, or looking at which integrations your customers are most commonly using, your partners provide valuable insights into where your customers are operating.
By bringing your GTM team into the mix, they can work out which market might be the hottest to enter based on what your customers say. For example, let’s say your customers mostly integrate your software with a certain CRM, and that CRM is particularly popular in a target market.
Then, entering that market through means of a partnership with that CRM would be a good way to go, and a great example of how nearbound can be one of your strongest customer retention strategies.
Download our ebook to read more: Winning over and back customers during a downturn
Help increase your customers’ stickiness by being one step ahead with integrations
Which integrations are your customers most likely to need? Your nearbound network might just hold the answer.
As Isaac Morehouse, CMO at Reveal and PartnerHacker, says, your product needs to be “woven into the stack”. If it’s not, “it’s on the chopping block”. But the more you integrate with products that are core to the business, the more likely your product is to become essential – and avoid the chopping block.
Your customers could be coy about going into their tech stack in detail, but your network might just have some key insights. That’s why this is one of your best customer retention strategies.
Customer retention strategies: It’s difficult to leave an ecosystem
Saying goodbye to a product is easy. Leaving a whole ecosystem behind is much more difficult. As Isaac puts it: if you’re partnering with people who have sway and rapport within your customer’s company, saying goodbye to you is harder.
Without an ecosystem of some kind in place, you really only have one CSM and one AE fighting to keep customers. With those who hold sway involved, it becomes much harder for them to keep saying no.
Additionally, your competitors will always be after your customers – and they can undercut you with pricing, or new feature launches. Even if these tempting offers are thrown their way, an ecosystem can still convince them to say, particularly if they’re well integrated into it. It really is one of the all-time retention strategies.
Read also: How to create a winning sales culture during a recession
Keep an eye on integration usage
The correlation between inactive integrations and churn isn’t absolute. But it’s high enough that it’s worth monitoring. For example; if a customer has seven integrations set up, but is only actively using one or two of them, then it’s time to get your CS team in there. But your ecosystem can also help here.
When you reach out to them, you might find that they’re considering doing away with one of the products they’ve integrated with. So, whether it’s dissatisfaction with your product, or dissatisfaction with an integrated product, you’ve got great intel either way – and great customer retention strategies.
Read also: What is contract management: A complete guide
Two-in-one customer retention strategies
When you let a partner in your ecosystem know that they might be about to lose a customer, you instantly create a stronger partnership. Going forward, you can even tackle churn reduction together.
By giving each other churn insights, you can develop a whole new relationship. After all, once you’ve given them an insight, they’re likely to return the favor!
The key takeaways
These are just a few of the customer retention strategies that can come from your nearbound network. To find out more about these, and for a ton of other insights, take a look at our ebook Winning over and back customers during a downturn.
