🔆 Daily reflection: Growing your installed base

Hi Reader,

Over the past weeks, I wrote 11 parts of a long-form essay about growing the customers you already have. Today I published the final version.

Here are some of the key takeaways:

When something new comes up in their business, your customers often don't think of you, and you never hear about the deal you lost. That's because customers still hold the version of you they bought years ago.
Your installed base isn't one group; often there are at least four, and each needs a different first move. So, one message to your whole base reaches almost nobody.
You know a prospect's business better than a customer you've had for four years. So all you can offer that customer is more of what they already bought.
Every customer is somewhere different today than when they signed. If you don't know where, the next thing you offer is a guess.
Most maturity models list what a customer hasn't bought yet. Instead, map the problems they face at each stage, and they recognise themselves before you've made an offer.
Find out why the right customers stay, instead of why others leave. Otherwise you spend a year fixing what leavers complained about, and your churn doesn't move.
A customer who's happy and a customer who's getting real value from you look the same from your side. You only find out which is which when one of them leaves.
Every time you add more to your offering, you risk losing the reason people chose you. Which means you grow this year and get weaker every year after.
The bigger the value you offer, the more senior the person who decides. The question is: who can have that peer-level conversation?
Most customers don't respond to your emails because you're talking to them like they're a total stranger. Everything you need to do better is already sitting in your systems.
Look at a customer as a business, not as an account. That's where every conversation worth having starts.