Profitable growth... our playbook at LinkedIn

As the economy shows signs of stabilizing, B2B companies are scouring their markets for profitable growth. Every conversation I have with sales and marketing leaders is a search for new customers and playbooks that can deliver returns quickly in the current environment. The answer they're seeking lies in a single question:

Our best customers love us… why don’t they spend more with us?

As I’ve learned, most companies don’t maximize their best customer relationships at each step in the funnel, despite these relationships being their most profitable. B2B teams focus marketing dollars on new business acquisition, because they don’t know how to measure the impact of customer marketing. They build amazing offers to help new customers try out their products, but don’t have similar playbooks for getting smaller customers to go bigger and broader. They assume that one or two relationships at the company are enough, when B2B purchasing decisions typically involve six to 10 stakeholders in the buyer group and building “collective confidence” among them is crucial. Post-sale resources are aimed at saving customers that are struggling instead of helping successful customers go even further.

Investing in your best customers pays dividends

At LinkedIn, our largest source of profitable growth has been fueled by expanding relationships with existing customers. And according to our 2024 B2B Marketing Benchmark, 88% of CMOs globally agree that relationship building is key to success in the year ahead. While acquiring new business is crucial, we learned that focusing primarily on new customers blinds us to our most profitable growth opportunities. By rebuilding our customer growth strategies at each step in the funnel, we've seen substantial gains, propelling LinkedIn's revenue from $1 billion to over $15 billion while significantly expanding operating margins.

It’s easy to see why growth with existing customers can be incredibly profitable. These customers know your team and have a positive track record with your product, so not only are they most likely to embrace a bigger relationship, but they have the proof points to sell it internally, particularly to their partners in finance who want predictable ROI. Further, you have an inside track on your customer’s pain points. Our 2024 Deep Sales Playbook shows that nearly 90% of B2B buyers are more likely to consider a product if the seller demonstrates a strong understanding of their business challenge. Finally, expanding business with current customers provides greater operating leverage…a customer spending 30% more isn't typically 30% more expensive to serve.

How do you operationalize a customer growth playbook? 

Step 1: Build your list and understand your upside

Get a list of your best customers, preferably by analyzing either product usage or NPS data. My team looked at a variety of factors, including customers with a track record of making a significant number of hires on our platform and those running very high ROI ad campaigns. We then identified the degree to which these accounts had room for further growth by analyzing adoption of our different products and usage of our solutions across their entire team. In many cases, our best customers were using our hiring products (for acquiring skills), but had not yet explored our learning solutions (for developing skills).

Step 2:  Make these relationships even better

Once you have your list, consider directing your Customer Success team to put their focus on healthy customers with the most upside. Prioritize time for making successful customers take their performance to the next level. We called this turning our “green” (healthy) customers “bright green,” and we saw huge ROI from doing so. Further, take an honest assessment of your relationships with these customers and their awareness of your brand. Account teams often build strong relationships with a few stakeholders in one functional area, but overlook other members of the buying group - decision makers and brand advocates who influence the overall purchasing decision. They can be the gateway to more opportunities. B2B decision-makers buy from companies they know and trust, and you need to make sure your company is top of mind when it’s time to buy. Our ad sales team used this approach to identify new buying groups and built new connections to unlock additional budgets across different regions and product areas. Our research shows that top-performing sales professionals globally are already taking this step, with nearly half significantly increasing their investment in building relationships with current customers compared to last year.

Step 3: Make it easy to grow with you

When customers already know your brand, your people, and your product, the key is to simplify the path to a larger relationship. We call this a customer growth play. We have a number of different growth plays – for instance, cross-selling new products, expanding relationships geographically and transitioning a small deployment into one that is enterprise-wide. Each play has its own strategy, but it often includes specific offers that make it attractive commercially for our best customers to go bigger, and we track success of these plays in a quarterly review that I host with members of my leadership team.

One of the most effective ways to amplify successful growth plays is through account-based marketing, because expanding relationships often requires introducing your brand and products to new audiences within an organization’s buying group. Using brand building and creativity to make those experiences memorable is essential, as B2B is just as emotion-driven as it is in B2C. Bigger relationships require new stakeholders, and account-based marketing can help you build the collective confidence in an organization required to go from small to big, or to adopt a new part of your product suite. It is a highly efficient way for you to teach your existing customers what the true potential of your relationship can look like.

Step 4: Measure and manage your customer growth pipeline 

B2B companies typically have a well-established process for tracking their new business pipeline, but lack similar rigor for turning small customers into larger ones. One example is in marketing where B2B leaders often fail to track whether existing customers in their sales pipeline are nurtured by their marketing content. Many companies we work with leave more than 80% of their customers unexposed to their thought leadership efforts, despite the fact that these nurturing efforts drive profitable conversion and growth.

Our team has designed funnels for each growth play we implement. We start with how many target customers we have, measure the number that are being actively pursued in our sales pipeline, track conversions, and most importantly ensure the customer is successful post-sale.  We also assess which members of our sales team are most successful with each playbook, as well as which teams have low levels of adoption so we can improve enablement. These pipelines are used on a weekly basis, but really come to life in a leadership meeting that I host each quarter to optimize each playbook for each customer segment, often leading to changes in our offers, incentives, and process. 

It’s time to write a new chapter for your growth playbook.

There is a mountain of profitable growth available to companies that build playbooks to grow their best customers and build collective confidence among buyer groups. And the beauty of it is: the more you help your customers succeed, the more upside you create for your own future.