Why aren’t existing customers buying more from you?

Your customers already trust you. They use your product, know your team and have seen the value you deliver. So when you launch another product that could help them, it seems reasonable to expect some of them to buy it.

But they don’t.

Sales may conclude that customers aren’t ready, the new product needs more features or the account team needs a better cross-sell pitch. Any of those could be true. There’s another possibility worth exploring: customers understand the product they bought from you, but don’t realise what else you can help them do.

Customers remember what you’re known for

I saw this at a European customer service software company. It was known for its excellent phone capabilities, and that was what many customers came to buy.

The company also offered digital capabilities, including email and chatbots. Early on, those products weren’t as strong as its phone offering. Over time, they improved, but customers’ perception of the company didn’t automatically change with them.

When customers thought about phone support, they thought of us. When they needed digital tools, they often looked elsewhere.

From inside the company, the portfolio had expanded. From the customer’s point of view, we were still largely a phone provider.

That gap is easy to underestimate. Customers don’t follow every improvement you make to products they aren’t using. Unless you give them a reason to reconsider what your company can do, they’ll continue to associate you with the problem you first solved for them.

Give customers a reason to reconsider

We needed to show how the digital capabilities could help customers run a better service operation alongside the phone product they already valued.

So we changed the portfolio story and created packages around specific use cases. One of the clearest was the relationship between chatbots and phone support.

A chatbot could handle simple, repetitive questions. That would give customer service representatives more time for conversations that needed their judgement and attention. The phone product remained valuable, but customers could now see why a digital capability might be useful alongside it.

This gave Sales a more relevant conversation to have. Instead of asking whether an existing customer wanted to buy a chatbot, they could explore which questions took up their team’s time and where a human conversation made the biggest difference.

We began selling more chatbots and email tools to existing customers. I don’t have a figure I can attribute to the change, but the experience showed me how much the story around a portfolio can influence whether customers consider buying beyond the product they already know.

The same problem is happening again with AI

Today, many customer service software companies want to be considered when their customers explore AI.

But imagine you’ve spent years being known as a reliable phone provider. Your customers may be happy with you. They may even trust you more than other suppliers. Yet when someone in their business asks, “Who should we speak to about AI for customer service?”, your name might not come up.

They may start looking at companies already associated with AI, without knowing what you now offer.

That doesn’t necessarily mean your AI capabilities are weaker. It means the customer still has an older picture of your company in their mind.

Adding “AI-powered” to the website won’t change that picture on its own. Existing customers need to understand what you can now help them achieve and why your newer capabilities are relevant to the service operation they already run with you.

AI is the current example, but this can happen whenever a SaaS company grows beyond the product that made it successful. The portfolio changes faster than the customer’s understanding of it.

More products don’t create an obvious next step

An existing customer may know exactly why they bought your original product and still be unable to answer:

• Which of your other products would help us?

• What problem would it solve that we haven’t already solved?

• How would it work with what we use today?

• Why should we buy it from you rather than another provider?

If the answers are clear only to your Product and Sales teams, customers are unlikely to connect the dots themselves.

Start by speaking to customers who get the most value from what they already own.

• What new problems are they trying to solve?

• What are they buying elsewhere?

• Which of your newer capabilities do they know about, and what do they believe your company is best at?

Then look at how your portfolio is presented.

• Does it help customers see a credible path from the problem you originally solved to the next one?

• Can your account teams explain that path through the customer’s needs, rather than a list of additional features?

Existing customers may be your best opportunity for growth. But trust in one product doesn’t mean they’ll automatically consider you for the next purchase. First, they have to realise that the company they know has grown into one that can help them with more.

At Ocean Wave Growth, I help B2B SaaS companies make the value of their wider portfolio clear to existing customers. Together, we identify relevant cross-sell opportunities and align Product, Marketing and Sales around a story that helps customers understand what to buy next and why. Let’s talk about where your next growth opportunity could be.