Hidden Gems | Episode 2: Do past champions buy again on their own?

[00:00:00] Krysten: we are back with the Hidden Gems, which is the limited series from UserGems where we dig into the numbers behind why your past customers and users and prospects, which are your gems, have huge potential to positively impact your revenue. And so today we have Trinity Nguyen our VP of marketing at UserGems and we're unpacking a question that I know is one of her favorites and that we come across frequently.

[00:00:26] Krysten: Which is if my gems, my champions, my past buyers, they already love us, they love our product. can't get enough of it. Won't they come back to us on their own? So, Trinity, go

[00:00:40] Trinity: Where do I start? Okay. I'm not trying to not make this a rant session. No, it's not a rant. Uh, this is great. Like so at UserGems we've been very fortunate to work with some of the best brands in SaaS.

[00:00:52] Trinity: It's crazy. They have amazing. Strong NPS scores. Lots of happy customers, lots of fans. Um, so because of it, like one of the questions that we usually hear, uh, when we talk to them about UserGems is like, well, our customers already love us. Um, they're gonna come back on their own anyway because we already see that in their own pipeline.

[00:01:13] Trinity: So why should we buy a tool spending some budget, um, to build out this channel? Or like, buying this tool is essentially they, they thinking that it's just moving money from. One place to another or like moving pipeline source from one bucket to another instead of creating new. So for us, I mean it is, it's an interesting question.

[00:01:32] Trinity: So we, like instinctively, we knew that tracking champions when they changed their jobs, would bring in new pipeline because we've seen that with over like 200 companies. But, No one, like outside of user Jam's, been talking about it. So there's no stats, like, how big is this pipeline? Like do the people really come back?

[00:01:51] Trinity: How about the ones that don't? So we finally managed to convince our data scientist team to spend some time digging through all of the data and give us some stats and analysis.

[00:02:03] Trinity:  So we were, so we look at data from 200 plus companies, um, and thousands and thousands of ops. And from there we did two things. The first one is we analyze data from companies that are clear category leaders with very strong N PS scores.

[00:02:18] Trinity: And two, we then looked for their key contacts who started new jobs more than three months ago, but were not captured in their Salesforce yet. So this mean that these champions were already started new jobs more than three months ago without coming back on their own and buying again. So what we found is even for these best of breed companies, 91% of their gems, so their previous champions did not come back on their own even after three months of starting the new jobs.

[00:02:53] Krysten: 91%. That is a crazy stat and obviously tons, tons of implication for sales process. Um, when we talked with Christian, our c e O, we talked about analyzing over 5,000 deals, and from there discovered that deals with gems, past champions involved have 114% higher win rates. They have 54% bigger deal size.

[00:03:18] Krysten: They have a 12% shorter sales cycle, so, Totally straightforward that uncovering 85% more gems, more past users and champions. Huge impact to pipeline and revenue. But I do have a follow up. So maybe the gems didn't come back within their first three months, but maybe that's because they just weren't ready to buy it.

[00:03:38] Krysten: So are they still a significant source of pipeline? What did we find?

[00:03:44] Trinity: Yes. Great question because the first part we, we saw the 91%, that's a volume, but how likely are these? Leads gonna buy again. So we were curious too. So we looked into the, the gems that didn't come back on their own, the 91%, and then we surfaced them to these customers and kind of observed how they performed in terms of conversion and to deals.

[00:04:07] Trinity: And we have a very strict attribution requirements so that these gems or the missing gems must be the primary contact in the new opportunity that's created after we surface the leads to the companies. So these forgotten gems within the one quarter that we observed them one quarter only. So these forgotten gems alone generated 5% of the overall close one revenue that quarter.

[00:04:31] Trinity: So like, you know, like some sales cycles a little bit longer, so it could, but we just wanna cap a time cap in one quarter. That's 5% of your revenue that's just lost. You wouldn't have gotten otherwise.

[00:04:42] Krysten: so what you're saying is when we started working with these companies that already had high NPS scores, people already loved them, but when we started working with them and surfaced those hidden gems, those folks that UserGems found alone generated 5% of overall closed one revenue in.

[00:04:59] Krysten: That quarter, that's what you're saying, right?

[00:05:01] Trinity: Yeah. Yeah. And these are the ones that started three months ago already. Okay. They've been in the job for a while. So these are not just the overall UserGems leaps, this is just the forgotten gems. The one that you didn't capture,

[00:05:12] Krysten: that you didn't pick up, okay?

[00:05:13] Krysten: Mm-hmm. So, yeah. So even if they don't always come back on their own, you give 'em a little nudge, even after three months, they're still having a material impact on your revenue. And I think we have a story about this, right? Yeah, I think

[00:05:26] Trinity: it is my personal story. So I was like, this is a few years ago. I was a very strong Chorus advocate, so I use Chorus as as a call recording tool, and I use it a lot and I advocate for it because I think there's a huge value in like training, but also from marketing standpoint.

[00:05:41] Trinity: So I told everyone that you need to buy chorus. Then I joined UserGems and. I guess because we were so small that's, I never heard from Chorus and them, but then I started noticing this new company, new back in the day on LinkedIn called Gong, and they're everywhere and they share a lot of tips and it's just fun and interesting to follow them.

[00:06:00] Trinity: So when we had the budget to buy a tool, like it wasn't even a consideration. We bought Gong. We've been a huge Gong fan since then. So it's kind of like put yourself in the buyer position like that. Like as a buyer, you have nothing to lose. When you explore new tools, right, like there are some tools that you love and you're gonna carry, but then like if there's a shiny new tools around the corner, I'm gonna check it out.

[00:06:24] Trinity: So as a vendor, why would you leave your best advocates, best fans up for grab, for competitors to grab? Like why you're not proactively reaching out, congratulating them, and keeping that relationship. So why wait for them to come back on their

[00:06:37] Krysten: own? Yeah, that's a really good point. You don't have anything to lose.

[00:06:42] Krysten: if we work from the assumption that they're all going to come back, then we may not put that much effort or priority into tracking or really trying to track them. Cuz we just assumed that they're gonna come back cuz they loved working with us before.

[00:06:55] Krysten: And so, yeah, not only for, Sales and marketing knowing that we need to like, keep effort on that group and ops that we need to keep clean data on that group, right?

[00:07:12] Krysten: And I think now with the current environment in tech, every new purchase is getting so much more scrutiny. So even if you were already sold on a previous vendor, you're going to have to show due diligence, right? And so, like, you wanna, uh, you know, as a vendor who was a favorite before, you wanna get in there early and really, um, really cement that relationship.

[00:07:32] Krysten: and I mean because we've all seen that like where you just described what just happened where the champions come back on their own. But we've also seen the opposite happen where all of a sudden a previous customer, we may call them up after a year of being there and they've already working with the competitor and you're like, wait, what just happened?

[00:07:47] Trinity: Yeah, we really need to like in, in. Pipeline generation, just revenue in general. I think we really need to tap into the, the fomo, the fear of not missing out, but the fear of missing opportunities. If we don't know when a champion leaves, we don't know how much pipeline we are missing or we're sitting on the, you know, could have happened right now.

[00:08:07] Trinity: Uh, you don't know what you don't know, so it's kind of scary because right now it's really important not to leave revenue up to chance and double down on what works and the relationships that you

[00:08:18] Krysten: already have. I think we just created a new, um, acronym for fomo. Instead of Fear of Missing Out. It's Fear of Missed Opportunities.

[00:08:27] Krysten: I think we should steal that. That needs to become, this is a marketer. She's creating a new tagline just on the fly. I love it. All right. Well, this has been awesome. 91% delt don't come back on their own. That sta just blew my mind. I, I thought it would be more like in the forties or fifties, so, Mind blown.

[00:08:45] Krysten: Speaking of stats, we're gonna talk next time around about more stats that you should know to help hit your number this year. And this is a big one. It's around multi-threading, so definitely tune in for that.

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