Thoughts on Selling Podcast: Alex Raymond on Why Existing Customers Are Your Biggest Growth Engine

Guest: Alex Raymond | Host: Lee Levitt

"The job of account management is to help your company win. How do you do that? You do that in three ways. You keep the customers that sales spent so much time and energy bringing in the door. You grow the ones with the most potential, and you make sure there are no surprises along the way. Keep, grow, and no surprises."

Lee: Welcome back to the Thoughts on Selling podcast. Today it is my absolute pleasure to have another sales expert and podcaster on with me, Alex Raymond. Alex is the host of Account Manager Secrets, and he has published a book called The Growth Department. I personally love listening to Alex's podcast about account management secrets because he takes a deep dive into what's going on in the real world of account management — both account management and customer service specifically — which many of us don't talk enough about.

But before we get into those details, here's the first question. Who is Alex Raymond?

Alex: There's an Alex Raymond — did you ever read the comic when you were a kid, Lee? Flash Gordon?

Lee: I did. And I found Flash as the first item on Amazon and figured I needed to keep going deeper.

Alex: Indeed. Yes. So Alex Raymond was the guy who created the Flash Gordon cartoons, which are really awesome. I was not named after him. I just happened to share the same name and was born many, many years later.

I am someone who has spent the last decade of my life trying to understand how companies can grow more and faster and better through their existing customers. This is broadly termed account management. It can also be called customer success. It is the post-sales function.

I tripped into this area. I was building software about 10 years ago. We decided to pivot into the account management space. Turned out I had a lot to learn because I didn't really know anything about it, and I spent basically a decade becoming very knowledgeable about what's going on here.

And I'll tell you the thing that I think is most interesting and relevant for you and your listeners, Lee, is how neglected existing customers are when it comes to selling — and what that means for revenue and specifically what that means for profit. The best companies out there use the same level of rigor, process, discipline, and strategic thinking about their post-sales motions as they do with their sales motions. That's something I've learned a lot about. I've been really excited to dig into it, and through my podcast Account Management Secrets, it's been great to connect with lots of experts and thinkers in that field.

The Post-Sales Problem: Why Companies Are Missing the Boat

Lee: Alex, I have to be upfront with you. It hurts me to hear that we are missing the boat on this. I'm in complete agreement with you. I've lived in the tech world for decades, and I absolutely see what you're talking about — that once the contract is signed, everyone moves on to focus on the next customer. And that poor customer... now that's when the work begins, right? The evaluation and the contract negotiations and signing the contract — that's just the pre-work. That's putting on your laces before the game starts. For a customer, the work starts when implementation starts, and most tech vendors just go, "Okay, see ya. Bye-bye. Good luck. See you in three years when it's time for renewal."

One of my favorite people on the planet is Jane Scott. Jane was my CSM on the Xerox account years ago at Oracle. She was the glue that held the key account team together — in large part, she was the glue that held much of the Xerox team together. She was on the podcast about 50 or so episodes ago.

And why are we doing this to the CSM world? Why are large three-letter companies — I can't mention any names because I know too much — but why are large companies doing away with the CSM function and hoping that someone else is going to take that role?

Alex: Yeah, it's a great question. Let me answer it this way. A lot of this is structural. It's simply a lack of awareness as opposed to any sort of malice. That's the first thing — this is largely structural.

But Lee, I want to actually extend on what you were saying. First of all, this is not only SaaS companies. All companies out there have this problem. Many companies have recurring or subscription revenue models, or they're trying to get the next contract. Don't assume this is only for SaaS vendors — it's anyone who has a long-term engagement with a customer and is looking for additional contracts and revenue.

The Staggering Numbers Behind Existing Customer Revenue

Alex: The numbers are staggering. The first number to make sure you and your listeners are aware of is: what percentage of revenue comes from existing customers every year? If you look at what that number is versus where the investments are going, you're going to see that it's very, very lopsided.

So let me answer the question. 73%, according to Forrester — 73% of revenue comes from existing customers. That means it's 27 versus 73, new sales versus existing sales. And that's mind-boggling. Now when you go deeper—

Lee: I love this one. You're going to talk about profit.

Alex: I'm actually going to talk about expansion. When you look at net new revenue, there's data from Ebsta who did all this analysis on a 2024 dataset. They found that 52% of net new revenue came from existing customers as well, which means not only are we talking 73-27 — we're actually talking more like 85-15.

Lee: So do you know the profit number?

Alex: The profit number is 100 to zero.

Lee: Yeah. And sometimes I've seen it as being more than 100%.

Alex: Correct.

Lee: Like you have to generate 130% of your profit from existing customers to cover the 30% loss serving new customers.

Alex: Correct. So you look at all this data, and then there's data on cost of customer acquisition, the payback time, how inefficient sales has become — and again, none of these are based on talent or skills or motivation. These are structural issues.

But here's what happens inside a company. We treat the sales team like the varsity team. The varsity team gets the best coaches, the best playbooks. They get fancier uniforms, a nicer bus, nicer changing rooms — all that stuff. And we treat the account management team like the JV team. They get half a coach, ratty hand-me-down uniforms, a crappy bus, smelly locker rooms. And then we say, "How come they're not performing at the same level?"

A lot of people just aren't aware. But when you dig into the profit dynamics, it's like, "Well, hey, hang on a second. The path to long-term durable growth goes straight through the heart of our existing customers. Why don't we make sure the team responsible for that services them properly?"

Lee: That's a great setup. We're in 100% alignment on this. I've seen this, I've lived it. From a pure sales standpoint, if a salesperson can't talk about what happens after the customer signs the contract — and I'm mostly on the pre-signing side of the equation — they don't have the right to be in the seat. Because the customer needs guidance, not just on how to make the decision, as Matt Dixon and Ted McKenna talk about in The JOLT Effect, but also on what's going to happen. It's the de-risking. Once I make that decision, what's going to happen? How do I manage the change management? If a salesperson doesn't have some level of visibility on what happens and the challenges that customers face, they can't properly serve the customer.

The Dangerous Handoff from Sales to Account Management

Alex: Yeah, absolutely. Because the customer is sitting there realizing that what is the end of the salesperson's process is the beginning of their journey. They're like, "Hang on a second, let's not jump over all these very important parts. What actually happens once I sign the contract?"

And that handoff is full of friction. There's so much danger there — danger for sales, for account management, for CS, for the customer. There's danger for everybody in that handoff. Why? Because of the incentives. The salesperson gets the deal. They immediately want to jump onto the next one because that's how they get paid, that's how they get rewarded. They also get rewarded for "filling out the CRM," which basically means putting the minimal information in there.

So the handoff is essentially sending the link to the account to the CSM and saying, "Good luck." And the customer is sitting there having to repeat what they've already said. They're getting bombarded with the same questions all over again, so they're getting annoyed. They're getting annoyed by the CSM showing up to ask them all these questions. You're not off to a great start. The customer just plunked down a bunch of money and made a commitment to you. They're all excited to have you help solve their problem, and you're showing up and not behaving in a very professional manner about it.

Lee: With the JV team who is uninformed — like, "What did you buy again? And what's this for? And what are your metrics?" It's not even a best practice. It should be a standard practice. The CSM should be part of the pre-contract conversation so that they understand metrics, change management requirements, the influence map, and what's driving the acquisition — so that there can be a smooth transition from pre-sale to post-sale.

Alex: A hundred percent. A hundred percent.

Which Industries Get Post-Sales Right?

Lee: Alex, are there industries that do this well?

Alex: There are industries where people spend a lot of time and energy thinking about this, and those are typically project-based services companies. They tend to do it very well, as opposed to the recurring revenue and subscription revenue companies, who often don't.

Companies that do it well include services companies like marketing agencies, consulting firms, and training companies — people who have a significant services component to their work that relies on business continuing with a customer. They tend to be very good at this. If you go to a marketing agency's career page, they're hiring for a lot of "account" something-or-others — account director, account supervisor, account manager, account coordinator. They call them all different things, but you can tell they take this seriously.

Why do they take this seriously? Because they know they have to earn the next job.

Lee: It's not a series of individual touchpoints. It's a continuum.

Alex: Correct. And they keep going, and they know that if they sign some really big new customer — Nike or Citibank or whatever — and they give them a $100,000 project, that's not the full potential of the account. So then it's like, how do we keep growing and penetrating?

The issue I have in the software world specifically has to do with this concept of recurring revenue. It is such a myth — such a dangerous myth — because we've all agreed that recurring revenue is a good idea because it stabilizes our cash flows and our P&L, so it looks like the business isn't that choppy. Everything grows steadily over time.

Lee: It's the enterprise version of "make money while you sleep."

Alex: Totally. So what happens is people assume it's recurring. "I'm just going to put my feet up on my desk and clip coupons like my grandmother used to do." As though money literally just falls off the trees and I'm collecting it in the orchard.

But what's the repercussion? Everyone thinks, "Oh, recurring revenue sounds automatic. Therefore it must be easy to do all the things that go into a renewal and an expansion. Therefore, we can hire younger people or earlier-career, or we don't invest as much money in them — because all this stuff is on autopilot anyway."

Lee: Alex, in the early days of SaaS, that wasn't the perspective. The perspective was: we have to earn the customer's usage every month.

Alex: Well, it depends on the contract terms, right?

Lee: Even on a 24-month contract, we would say we have to earn it every month, otherwise it's going to tail off and go away. And then it's gone.

Alex: Yeah. When we get stuck in this loop, everyone thinks it's easy. Execs think it's easy. They don't fully understand the problem and all the challenges the team is dealing with. So the team is out there going through all sorts of heroics to try to make the customer successful and get the client to where they want to go, and that causes a whole bunch of problems on its own.

Recurring revenue — it's a myth. I don't like it. I wish we would recognize the amount of work that account managers and customer success teams put into making this work.

A Good Marriage — and Good Account Management — Requires Showing Up Every Day

Lee: Alex, I'll take a personal note here. My therapist says that a good marriage isn't based on random acts of kindness every once in a while. It's showing up every day.

Alex: That's right. You're relating this to the heroics angle, right? Structurally, because we treat post-sales like the JV team, they don't get all the stuff. Sales has their playbooks, their methods, their CRMs, their training, and so on. Because post-sales doesn't have that, they find themselves twisting into a pretzel to get whatever the customer needs — to get that renewal in, to get that expansion, to keep people happy, to de-escalate whatever the problem is.

This creates another issue: the teams feel like they are heroes for performing these acts — and they are — and they feel like they deserve a pat on the back. But here's what happens. The leadership team looks at this and they don't see the valor of the heroic acts. They see a bunch of people running around putting out fires, and the respect for that team goes down.

Lee: You just described enablement. That's what enablement's gone through over the past 10 years. "We're the fixers of broken things." Okay — why are there so many broken things? As opposed to saying, "We have a structural issue here. We don't have the right infrastructure, teams, tools, orientation, and alignment. Let's fix that."

Alex: So far, no one has said, "Here is the scaffolding that we need to put around post-sales in order for it to work in a professional manner." Without that, people are feeling very stressed. Account managers, customer success — stressed, burned out, running ragged. Very difficult time for them.

Building a Charter for Post-Sales

Lee: One of the things I've gotten up on my soapbox to promote is the concept of the sales enablement charter and the sales enablement board of advisors internally. The charter says: What are we going to do? What are we not going to do? What metrics are we responsible for? What's our sweet spot? And then the board of advisors gives us advance notice of things going down — good, bad, or otherwise. My guess is those kinds of strategic tools might be useful in the account management world as well.

Alex: So the charter thing — let's talk about that for a second. I'll ask you a question. What is the job of the post-sales team?

Lee: Great question. My perspective is the charter of the account management team is to ensure the success of the customer and the use of the products and services they purchased.

Alex: Good. Can I offer how I think about this? The job of account management is to help the company win.

Lee: The supplier.

Alex: Yes. Help me win. Help me win. I'm on a team. Imagine a team of soccer players — by the way, I got this from Fred Kofman and his book The Meaning Revolution. Imagine a team of soccer players. One of the soccer players is the account management team. What's your job? Your job is not to be the defender or the wing or this or that. Your job is to make sure you score more goals than the other team. Your job is to help the team win.

Lee: Just like Ben Hunt-Davis and Harriet Beveridge: "Will it make the boat go faster?" No one oarsman can win. They have to win as a team.

Alex: So we have to win as a team. The job of account management is to help your company win. How do you do that? You do that in three ways. You keep the customers that sales spent so much time and energy bringing in the door. You grow the ones with the most potential, and you make sure there are no surprises along the way. Keep, grow, and no surprises. So I'm trying to create this scaffolding: keep, grow, no surprises. We help the team win. We deliver profits back to the business. That's essentially what account managers do.

But people don't think about it that way. They think, "I run quarterly business reviews. My job is getting the NPS score up. My job is CSAT. My job is to be a liaison with the product team." Those are mostly useless trailing indicators of impact.

Lee: Those are not things that are helping your team win.

The Purpose of Selling Is Not Selling — It's Helping Customers Achieve Their Objectives

Alex: Yeah.

Lee: I like your framework. My perspective on sales is: the purpose of selling is not selling — it's about buying. Jeff Thull owns that phrase. And in fact, I take it one step further. The purpose of selling is not even buying. The purpose of selling is to help customers achieve their strategic objectives.

When you take it to that level, otherwise nobody buys anything. If I don't need a car, I'm not likely to go to the local Ford dealership and buy one. I might if it's a really cute Mustang with red flames on the side, but otherwise, no. If I need a car, then the salesperson is there to help me get to work on Monday. That's the goal. Or to get to the autocross track on Sunday. But it's not to sit through the finance department for three hours. That's not the purpose. It's not the contractual activity. What's the end result? The end result is I get to go to work on Monday. Or we can report back that our manufacturing quality has gone up by two percentage points, and here's why and here's what to do more of. It's not about getting a new data analytics tool — that's just an interim step to what the customer needs to do.

Is B2B Selling Broken — and Can We Fix It?

Lee: So, Alex. I think selling is broken.

Alex: Okay.

Lee: You think account management's broken. Should we just find an island and go do it differently? Or can we fix this?

Alex: It's going to take some more pain for people to fix this, but the fixing has already started. On the sales side, it's started because the efficiency has just collapsed over the last three to four years.

Lee: Following a drop in effectiveness, efficiency dropped. You can have effectiveness without efficiency. You can have efficiency without effectiveness. If you don't have either, you're stuck.

Alex: So sales is in a tough place. There's just been so much activity. Win rates are down. Deal cycles take longer. Initial contracts are smaller. You have to talk to more people. Marketing is less effective. We know all that stuff.

Lee: Well, Gartner said that 20 years ago. So some things haven't changed.

Alex: It certainly has not gotten any better. On the post-sale side, you have teams running around without clarity about what they're doing, with no clear North Star. Even worse — with no leader inside of the company. If you ask a random CEO you trip over in the hallway, "Who owns post-sales revenue for your company?" — no leader and no champion.

Lee: They're going to be like, "I don't know."

Alex: Yeah. "Him? Her? I'm not sure." That's a terrible place to be. So I think we can fix it. I think the pain is getting acute enough. Here's what happens when people have lots of churn, or very low growth, or negative profits — that's when they start saying, "Why are we ignoring our existing customers? Why aren't we mining the gold that we've got?"

Lee: Okay, so now I'm optimistic. What you just told me is the pendulum's going to swing the other way within the next two to five years. People are going to go, "We had it so good when we had big CSM teams and they were important and customers were happy and we generated a lot of expansion and things were good. Then for the sake of efficiency, we put CSMs on quotas and then we got rid of all of them. Now we're going to go back to building up CSM teams."

CSMs on Quotas: Proceed with Caution

Alex: The CSM-on-quota thing is very delicate. Let me explain how I think about that. A lot of people get into post-sales, specifically customer success, because they don't want to be in sales. They say things like, "I want to be oriented toward my customer. I want to help my customer meet their goals." They tend to be very open, conscientious, creative people. They just don't like the transactional nature of sales.

Lee: And they're the hardest workers. They're the most customer-centric people you will ever meet.

Alex: Correct.

Lee: And they drive more revenue than the salespeople.

Alex: And they drive revenue, but they don't talk about it that much. So when you put them on a quota and start tracking how many conversations they're having and what's in the pipeline and so on, it makes them very nervous. It makes them feel like they're out of place.

Now, you can flip that on its head. You can take this idea that they are customer-oriented — which every sales team wishes they were — and say, "Great, let's build an economic model that still results in revenue, but that starts not with revenue or a quota. It starts with customer value."

So you can say, "Let's define what value means to our customers. Figure out how we're going to deliver it. Track it. Show it back to them. Put it in a dashboard. Get the customer to agree that this was a great investment, that they're excited about the future." And guess what the result of all that is? Revenue.

Tracking Value: The $1 Threshold

Lee: I'm going to push back just a bit, Alex. I've seen that value realization work tried in many organizations, and it's really tough to get right. When you do get it right — oh my gosh — it means you are a true trusted advisor to the customer and they are sharing all of their intimate metrics, good, bad, and ugly. That represents the depth of relationship as much as anything else.

Alex: Actually, the main thing you need to do there is control the process as the CSM. What I mean is: don't be vague about what value means to them. Be precise. Figure out what are the three things they actually care about — or even better, what's the one number? Track it. Report on it. Pop it into your dashboard. Remind them at every single meeting, because they're going to forget. They're busy, they have a lot going on. Use that as a way of focusing your proof.

There's some really interesting data on this. Do you know Greg Daines?

Lee: Greg Daines is someone I consider like the grandmaster of churn data and why customers stay versus leave. He has analyzed a gajillion data points. He has all this experience around why customers stay or leave.

Alex: He shared with me on the Account Management Secrets podcast what that means — how does the customer decide if they're going to stay or go? And the answer is, surprise surprise, you have to show that they're getting closer to their outcome. They're getting some kind of value. Okay, fine — that's a very bland, basic level-one statement.

Lee: There's a level of intimacy required to be able to do that.

Alex: But look, if the customer had a real problem to begin with, then they're going to talk about this stuff. If it was purely a nice-to-have, then they're not. So that's a pretty interesting indicator for you.

Lee: And a good salesperson will know that. A good salesperson will know this isn't data analytics for the sake of having another cool tool — which happens a lot. It's that we actually have a manufacturing problem on second shift, and we don't know how to identify that.

Alex: Right. Let's assume this customer is a good-fit customer who is committed to solving the problem. Now we can track it. We can say, "We're helping you reduce time to whatever — reduce time, save money, increase revenue, whatever the thing is."

The amazing thing is you want to be tracking this stuff and showing them all the time. Two things are going to happen. Number one, your data may not be pointing in the right direction. It might be going down. You're like, "Oh shit, what do I do now?" By the way, the answer there is: still show the customer. Customers who get negative value or have things going down still stay twice as long as customers where you don't report back at all.

The other thing is: what's the minimum threshold to get a customer excited about a renewal with you? You would think, "Oh man, I have to show some big ROI number, a huge amount of value." The answer, according to Greg Daines's data, is basically $1. You have to show about $1 worth of improvement.

Here's why. When you show them $1 of improvement, they can imagine in their heads, "Oh, now I see the path to 10, 1,000, 10,000, a million, or whatever." They can see, "All right, I'm justified in making this decision. I want to continue to work with these people." All this means — going back to the value thing — you have to be very precise. This is where a lot of people are failing, because they're letting themselves and the customer off the hook. They're willing to accept abstract, vague statements as opposed to really saying, "What are we measuring here?"

Discovery Should Be Co-Creation, Not the Spanish Inquisition

Lee: This is a fabulous conversation, Alex, because it's forcing me to think further about how I prescribe discovery. In the traditional sense, discovery either comes just before or just after the demo. And then discovery is used to shape the contract: "Oh, you need 150 seats," or "It's six terabytes," or whatever. That's not good discovery. That's the Spanish Inquisition.

Good discovery is co-creation, where the supplier and the customer sit together and explore possibilities — different ways of doing things with the customer's strategic business objectives in mind. Now, by the way, customers don't always know what's possible.

I was involved in a conversation with a $20 billion semiconductor company that wanted to move some archives from on-prem to the cloud. I said, "Well, that's great. When you do that, you're still going to spend $600,000 or a million dollars every year to store that stuff. So that's a wash. It's easier, but it's still a wash. When you do that, you can also blend in some other data, and now you can start identifying ways of reducing customer support costs — and it might be worth $500 million to your bottom line."

That got their attention. That wasn't on their radar. They were just looking to make life easier for themselves, and we came up with a home run.

Discovery is the first important step in the sales process where the customer's strategic objectives are either mapped out or changed and then mapped out — and that has to flow through the entire selling process. And now that we've had this conversation, through the account management and customer success process, right? It can't just stop at, "Okay, here are your new metrics. Good luck." Now we're going to help monitor and manage and course correct if necessary.

Alex: Yeah, absolutely. A hundred percent. And I want to share that I wrote a book recently called The Growth Department. In it I talk about a couple of things related to what you were just saying, Lee.

The first has to do with how well we really understand the problem the customer is trying to solve. When it comes to expansion — which is a big deal for post-sales, a big deal for account management — the best way to drive expansion is to ladder up and go solve a bigger problem. Go solve somebody else's bigger problem. Go upstream. If we're just the people who build websites, you're down here. If you're the people who drive some kind of engagement outcome, you're up here. If you're responsible for the whole strategy, you're way up here.

So solve bigger problems is point number one, and that links back to discovery because in discovery you want to be hitting the appropriate level, finding the scope of the challenge or the business need that you're solving.

Relentless Curiosity: The Antidote to Bad Discovery

Alex: Point number two is what I call relentless curiosity. How does this relate to discovery? Right now, our customers are inured to our discovery. They know it's coming. They'll participate only insofar as it helps get us off the phone — to be done with us. They know the questions are coming. They know it's a checklist. They know they're being qualified, and they just give us the bare information to be done with us.

Lee: And they're afraid. "The more questions I answer, the more zeros get added to the cost."

Alex: Totally. And they're like, "Why can't I just see the demo? I just want to get on with it." But here's what relentless curiosity means. It means meeting your customer human to human where they are, figuring out what's actually going on in their world, what the world really looks like through their eyes, and then understanding how you may or may not be able to help them. Really understand what's going on for this person. What do they care about? What's important?

The art of relentless curiosity is in not asking leading questions. It's in just asking great questions — without looking for an answer. Customers know when you're fishing. They know when you're fishing for an answer.

Instead, just try to figure out what the world looks like for them. What's on your boss's mind? What's on your board's mind? Questions like this. Now guess what? If you do that properly, you're going to find risks and opportunities. You may find that some customers' opportunity is smaller than you thought, or bigger than you thought. You're going to learn something you can then do something about.

Lee: If you know the truth, you can do something about it. If you keep making stuff up, good luck to you. Those forecasts will be unreliable.

Alex: Correct. That all links to what you were saying before about discovery — because as you get better at solving bigger problems and asking better questions, discovery is going to be a lot more effective too.

Curiosity, Authenticity, and Staying in the Question

Lee: I love that — relentless curiosity. Curiosity is one of the five attributes I consider critical for a salesperson, and either authenticity or curiosity is the top one. The others are passion, resilience, and integrity.

But authenticity and curiosity — if you follow The Four Agreements from Don Miguel Ruiz, it's all covered: always do your best, be impeccable with your word, don't take anything personally, and don't make assumptions.

Alex: There you go. I like it.

Lee: And then his son, Don Jose Ruiz, wrote The Fifth Agreement, which is: be skeptical, but be open. And I've had to trot that one out a couple of times in coaching conversations where an enterprise rep will say, "This is what my customer said." And I'll say, "Let's take a look at that. Let's be a little skeptical. But it might be true."

Alex: So apply relentless curiosity. If they said that, do you accept it at face value, or do you keep asking to figure out what's really going on?

Lee: Yeah. There's a book I recently read called Think Better — a really interesting book. There are two primary takeaways. The first is the difference between productive thinking and reproductive thinking. Reproductive thinking is the kaizen method of 1% improvement each time. Productive thinking is: we don't care how we did it before. Let's look at this from scratch, and we may come up with something totally different.

The second primary thing I took away from the book is: stay in the question. Keep peeling back the layers of the onion. Don't take that next statement for granted. Relentless curiosity. Keep asking.

Alex: Stay in the question. I like that. That's well phrased.

Lee: Yeah. It's the four-year-old saying, "Why?" Get an answer. "Why?" Get an answer. "Why?" Eventually you're going to get to a root cause.

Are We Hopeful for the Future of B2B?

Lee: Where does this leave us, Alex? Are we hopeful for the future of B2B interactions?

Alex: We are hopeful. It doesn't mean there isn't some change ahead and potentially some pain ahead, but I am hopeful. I'm hopeful because companies, boards, investors, and CEOs are waking up to the fact that they're sitting on these pots of gold. And by the way, this is a solvable problem. You just spend a little bit more time, energy, and money on making sure the team is equipped and resourced, and you're going to get much better results.

The number one thing driving that is much more increased understanding of how revenue retention drives company valuations. There are data points showing that every one point of net revenue retention increase drives something like a 13 to 16% valuation increase over five years. What that means is the CEO and CFO types are like, "Hang on — so you're telling me I can massively increase the value of my business without hiring tons of new salespeople? All we have to do is get a little bit better at how we service existing customers? Let's go do that." That's a big change for people.

Lee: So Alex, here you go. Here's how to publicize it: come up with a list of the top five questions to evaluate a company's revenue retention and fax that out to Wall Street.

Alex: Sure.

Lee: They know. The companies that have better retention are going to have better valuations.

Alex: And so the challenge that you have and that I have — and this is why I'm writing my book called Together We Win, which will be out later this summer — is that the technology world, again, this is where I've lived, is driven by religion, not pragmatic thinking. The religion is: "Our stuff is better than everyone else's, and until you get it, screw you." They say that to salespeople. Salespeople say that to customers. And guess what? Customers know better now. They know better.

The high priests — who are the engineers and the company founders — have to learn that our stuff is pretty good, and their stuff is pretty good. It takes a focus on outcomes, as opposed to the features of the widget, to actually cause change. That's the flag I'm carrying in the battle.

Alex: Yeah. I agree.

Where to Find Alex Raymond

Lee: On that note, I want to thank you for a fabulous conversation. Where can people find you?

Alex: Thanks for having me, Lee. Really appreciate it. I'm very easy to find on LinkedIn. All the work is happening in a company called AMplify, and the website is amplifyam.com. That's where we've got the method, the system, the books, a learning community, a whole bunch of stuff. That is the place to begin the post-sale journey.

Lee: Who is the ideal person to reach out to you? Is it the CFO? The CEO? The head of sales?

Alex: We didn't get into this, but if it's a real CRO, then the answer is the real CRO. And you might say, "What do you mean, real CRO?" What I mean is the CRO who owns 100% of revenue — not just the 27% of net new revenue.

Lee: That's awesome. We'll put those links in the show notes. And please — if you want your company to be more successful financially and you want your customers to be more successful, you need to reach out to Alex today. Thanks for a great conversation.

Alex: Awesome. Thank you, Lee. I appreciate it.

Lee: Thanks, Alex.

Another deep dive into the topic of sales excellence and the performance mindset. If you found this conversation interesting, I would appreciate it if you would share the podcast with a coworker or two. To explore this topic in more depth, send me a note via the contact form at podcast.thoughtsonselling.com, or find some time for us to talk at meet.aceleragroup.com. Thanks.