The Metrics

• 25% Average Contract Expansion (ACE)
• 200% Increase in upsells leads from Customer Success
• 150% CSM team growth

The Highlights

• After shifting its priorities to growth, RippleMatch split its team into CSMs who handle relationships and Account Managers (AMs) who handle upsells, renewals, and all contract-related matters.
• To facilitate this process, RippleMatch used Catalyst as its centralized CS platform, allowing CSMs to easily identify and tag AMs on upsell opportunities.
• As a result of using this process within Catalyst, the CSM team delivered 200% more upsell leads, with an average upsell of 25% of contract value.

The Challenge

RippleMatch wanted to streamline its upsell process and increase upsell revenue

In a rough war for talent, companies are looking for ways to connect with more candidates, and platforms like RippleMatch make that happen. Candidates sign up for a profile and share their information, while companies post jobs with candidate attributes they are looking for. The platform matches opportunities to candidates, giving individuals the power to see jobs they are a perfect fit for, automatically.

On the RippleMatch team, Hunter Paul, the Director of Customer Success, wanted to find more opportunities for upsells. To help with their growth, the team developed the Customer Success Qualified Leads (CSQL) category, which is when a CSM feels a client is ripe for upsell or expansion. The CSM team then brings in an Account Manager (AM) to handle the upsell. If the AM feels the CSQL is valid, it becomes a Customer Success Qualified Opportunity (CSQO).

Hunter built out the CSQL-to-CSQO logic as a way to track upsells through a funnel, similar to how sales might track a funnel of new customers. This process not only gave CSMs proper attribution for the revenue they brought in, it made compensation decisions much simpler. But tracking all this manually was a burden and inefficient. 

The CSM team didn’t use Salesforce, as that was considered a sales tool only, so instead they worked out of Google Docs. This was helpful to start, but the process to alert Account Managers was manual and many opportunities fell through the cracks. Further, manual note taking made it hard to get a holistic picture of the client, meaning many additional opportunities went unnoticed.

“We needed to get better at generating midterm or off-cycle upsells,” said Hunter.

Hunter wanted a platform that would centralize all customer data, enable automated templates and playbooks to remind CSMs to seek upsell opportunities, and make it easy to engage the AM team when upsell opportunities arose.

“We have an ambitious NRR target,” explained Hunter. “And the only way to hit it is to shift our method towards growing existing accounts.”

Ultimately, RippleMatch chose Catalyst over other Customer Success platforms because their top priority was finding a platform that would allow them to scale their CS function without additional headcount, and empower their CSMs to increase their efficiency and be more proactive.

The Solution

RippleMatch built dashboards and workflows to support CSMs looking for upsells

When RippleMatch implemented Catalyst, they built a custom workflow that matched a custom process Hunter built for the unique way their team operates. 

Within the platform, CSMs use a Notes template that reminds them to ask prompting questions that might identify an upsell opportunity. Then the CSM can click fields within their Note template to indicate whether they feel the client is ready for an upsell, marking them as a CSQO. Account Managers can then be tagged into the account so they can reach out to book a call and validate if the CSQL is indeed a CSQO.

After this practice was implemented, the workflows turned out to be so effective that Hunter noticed an immediate boost in pipeline generation for the account management team.

“Building this process within Catalyst generated actual pipeline for our Account Managers to act on,” said Hunter. 

The team also built dashboards for each CSM, which aided in seeing performance at the individual level. This also ties into RippleMatch’s compensation plan, since CSMs are measured on both gross retention and upsells. 

Hunter said the company explicitly removed net retention as a CSM compensation metric because CSMs had little control over it in the end. Instead, Hunter focused on things the CSM had control over, using a points system. For example, CSMs are awarded more points for getting a senior decision-maker on a phone call with an AM compared to a junior individual contributor. In the end, CSMs are incentivized to do everything in their control to get a senior person on the call, which would increase the chances of an upsell deal closing.

Automated processes and 1:1 accountability tied to compensation have worked out very well for RippleMatch, earning them a 25% average contract expansion and 200% increase in CSM-generated leads, giving AMs a lot of pipeline to work with.

“We more than doubled our upsell lead generation from within the CS team”

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What’s Next

Scaling up the team with Catalyst

The new program with Catalyst is working so well that the company is increasing its growth targets. It’s even adding a new team for customer-facing account-based marketing. This new Customer ABM will liaise between CSMs and AMs, helping to ensure that customers always have a link into what RippleMatch is working on for the future. The process will be built within Catalyst so the Customer ABMs can support CSMs and AMs however they need to.

“We led a trial last quarter and it was successful,” said Hunter. “Now we get to increase our targets and continue scaling our CSQO performance.”