Why should tech marketers care about what happens after the sale? Because they can meaningfully impact post-sale outcomes, which are key to a company’s overall performance.

For one, marketers can protect against customer churn and downgrades by continuing to sell their product’s value to customers after the sale. In a recent study, just ~10% of Insight Partners portfolio companies reported “product issues” as the “main cause” of customer churn and downgrades (in 2021). In contrast, ~30% cited issues with “unrealized value” and “adoption.”

In the latter cases, could marketing have helped their buyers persuade colleagues to adopt a product? Could they have communicated the product’s full value “customer-wide?” Doing so might have saved some customers.

For instance, a recent employer of mine sold software to business leaders who managed the end of a long, complicated process. But the business leaders needed colleagues who managed earlier stages of the process to adopt the new technology. Those that failed to do so churned.

Markets like firms with strong post-sale outcomes. In protecting against churn and downgrades and shortening time-to-value, marketers can improve their firm’s gross margins and customer retention. Both of these are indicators that investors use to value companies: businesses with strong gross margins (i.e. >80%) typically gain higher multiples.

In my next few posts, I’ll highlight for marketers the key takeaways from Insight Partners’ 2022 Post-Sales GTM Report, a wide-ranging benchmark study of how leading software businesses perform after a deal is closed. Shoutout to Ellie Wu, CCXP for producing the Report.