Identifying expansion opportunities across product lines using Hightouch and Salesforce

• You have a customer relationship management platform (CRM). We use Salesforce
• You have a data warehouse or database that can store custom fields from your CRM and product usage data. We use Snowflake.

For each of your accounts, you need to be able to track which products they’ve purchased, are currently exploring, or have shown intent for. Whenever we create a new account in Salesforce, we create a “product” item for each line of business we could offer. Later on, we can programmatically update each product for each account by referencing a unique identifier, which we get by concatenating the accountID (unique to that account) and the productID (which we have just 7 of).

We set up a recurring sync from our data warehouse to Salesforce to update each product's current status. For example, when a new product is purchased, we map the line item from that purchase to the distinct key for the account-product record we created in Step 1 and update the status to “purchased.” We’ll use this sync as a baseline to add new statuses based on customer behaviors in the next step.

We use Hightouch to update the Salesforce object for account-products based on changes to data in our data warehouse, Snowflake.

We’re using a SQL-based reverse ETL query to update these statuses. Here’s a snippet of the query we’re using to populate which products have been purchased:

Select

distinct concat(stg_salesforce__opportunities.account_id, product_2_id) AS purchased_key,
true as purchased

from 
stg_salesforce__opportunity_line_items
left join stg_salesforce__opportunities on stg_salesforce__opportunity_line_items.opportunity_id = stg_salesforce__opportunities.opportunity_id

where
Stg_salesforce__opportunities.service_term_start_date < current_date
and stg_salesforce__opportunities.service_term_end_date > current_date
and stg_salesforce__opportunities.stage_name = 'Closed Won'

This step is as much art as it is science and requires a strong feedback loop with your sales teams: identifying what behaviors your customers take that suggest they would be good candidates to try an additional product.

For example, we offer a solution called Match Booster, which enriches first-party data syncs to advertising platforms with third-party identity data to improve match rates and audience reach. If a customer is using Hightouch to sync first-party audiences larger than 10,000 people to advertising platforms, we’ve flagged that behavior as a signal that the customer might be a good fit for Match Booster.

We’ve gradually refined and built upon our list of expansion signals over time. Our revenue operations and sales leadership teams have a recurring meeting where they review customer behavior and improve the list of signals to programmatically look out for.

Now that you know what signals you want to measure for expansion opportunities, you need to programmatically update your Salesforce products when a customer triggers one of these signals.

We do this again with Hightouch, using another reverse ETL sync to our Salesforce product object. Here’s a sample of the SQL that we use to identify customers who are syncing audiences larger than 10,000 people to advertising platform destinations, who would be a good fit for our Match Booster product:

last30daysSyncRunsSummary as (

select
Dim_organizations.sfdc_account_id,

boolor_agg(fact_sync_runs.destination_type in 
('google-search-ads-360', 'googleCampaignManager', 'tiktok','snapchat', 'pinterest-ads', 'twitter', 'redditAds', 'pinterest-ads', 'linkedin', 'tradedesk', 'facebook', 'facebookConversions', 'facebookOffline', 'yahoo', 'amazonAds')
and fact_sync_runs.query_rows >= 1000000
and dim_syncs.sync_config:type = 'segment') as large_audience_sent_to_ad_destination_last_30_days)

Now, you can programmatically update statuses whenever customers signal intent for your other products. You can also set up alerts based on these same triggers to proactively notify your sellers about these new signals. For example, we send Slack alerts to sales representatives when we populate a new product expansion signal.

Now, your sales team should be notified of any expansion opportunities and should be able to view opportunities across all of their accounts via dashboards in Salesforce. The last thing you need to do is make sure they know how to act upon these signals. We’ve been working with our sales team to build standard “playbooks” of the best way to respond to each expansion material. This is essential to make sure your entire team knows how to react to this new data and take action on it.

By keeping a close pulse on your customer behavior, you can find new ways to add value and deepen your relationships. Your sales teams can get more done and drive more revenue by acting on key intent signals, and scale up the right outreach, at the right time, across their entire book of businesses. With this approach, you can use your product engagement data to deepen your relationships with each of your customers and find new ways you can help them solve their problems.