Retention, Expansion & Cross-sell

As a Technical Account Manager, you'll spend as much time managing your existing book of business as you will closing product-led leads. Your first priority is retaining them - this is counter balanced to an upwards Land, Expand, Retain motion. 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 prepaid credit contract.

In order of priority, your objectives should be following all points of "REREE":

• Retention - establish multiple strong lines of communication
• Expansion - cross-sell additional products
• Retention - secure a discounted, credit-based commitment (maybe, but not always - hard to do on just a single product!)
• Expansion - expand usage of the same product into new teams
• Expansion - expand usage of the same product in the same team

The reason why we put cross-sell so high up the list is that we have seen that by far the happiest and best-retained PostHog users, including from a revenue retention perspective, are those who have adopted 2+ products. It makes sense - it's relatively straightforward to replace PostHog if you're just using product analytics, but it's much tougher if you're using analytics + experiments + session replay.

Retention

Your objectives are to:

1. Get people to talk to you
2. Get a longer term commitment (maybe!)

1. Get people to talk to you

We have a handy guide to this in the getting people to talk to you playbook.

2. Get a longer term commitment (maybe!)

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 a prepaid credit contract with PostHog makes sense vs. what they've already got.

Do not push for discounted, credit-based plan no matter what - consider what actually makes sense here! Some customers are very highly likely to stick with PostHog even if they are paying monthly, e.g. if they have many users regularly logging in, lots of product activity, multi-product adoption etc. Do not turn up to a new customer and the first thing they hear from you be 'would you like to pre-purchase credits?'

You'll also go through the same contracting process with them. We usually find that convincing a customer happily paying monthly to switch to prepaid credits 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 prepaid credit plan but paying monthly or quarterly and halve the discount you offer.

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 CSMs, 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 are 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. In the future, we will build out this playbook a lot more.

Expansion & cross-sell

Note: AEs and CSMs also do expansion at PostHog therefore this is not a Product-Led Sales TAM only approach. This is because we all 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.

An overview of how to drive expansion with a customer can be found in the cross-selling pages.

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). If necessary you can request a budget for travel and accommodation in Brex.

Generally speaking you should be trying to regularly see customers in your book of business who are $100k+ annually, or could get there. Occasionally you can pull in James/Tim if they are traveling to SF/NY especially, or if the customer is in London.

If you regularly visit customers, you can (and should) take some sweet merch. You can self-serve this using a discount code pinned in our team Slack channel to get 100% off your order.

Make sure to log notes in Vitally when customer visits take place. This can be done by creating a new note with the "On-site" category and describing any key details and takeaways.