When Monster doubled down on its small business segment at the beginning of 2018, it tapped Totango to help reduce customer churn and identify upsell and cross-sell opportunity. With just one full year under their belt using Totango they have increased their small business segments retention rate 11 points YoY. Doing so helped Monster hold onto over $1.5 M in customer revenue and greatly improved sales rep productivity.
In 2017, Monster unveiled a new strategic approach that included a deeper expansion into the small business market, which faced increased competition from scores of new online recruitment competitors. The company as a whole was also fighting to remain relevant to a new generation of job seekers and employers more familiar with the Monster energy drink.
When the SVP of small business noticed softness in her segment’s e-commerce sales she enlisted veteran Monster employee Katie Yagodnik, Senior Manager Customer Success, to tackle churn. Katie first examined the company’s post sales onboarding process. The current process involved sales reps noticing an order in Salesforce and then following up once before tackling their thousands of other accounts. Reps just couldn’t pay attention to individual accounts properly on a daily basis.
This singular interaction didn’t build a relationship with the customer, led to a high churn rate, and didn’t help the rep increase revenue. Yagodnik knew the sales team needed a better process to help her sales reps be more productive and help their large book of small business customers succeed.
Monster’s Insights Team had also been engaged to help her better understand these customers so she could learn why they weren’t purchasing additional job postings or services and create a better post-sales plan. “Our data operations team created an awesome churn model with 300 variables to determine a high, medium or low propensity to churn,” Yagodnik says. “While it was easier to see a customer’s propensity to churn with their data model, with thousands of accounts per rep, it was still really hard for sales reps to prioritize accounts and help them take action right away on the data.”
Sales reps also needed to better understand what steps they could take based on the customers propensity to churn. At the time, Monster used different, siloed, reactive sales tools and reps dug through data points manually, one by one, to try to pinpoint a customer’s performance and product usage, determine the cause, and then figure out how to help the customer.
“We learned that Salesforce is a great system of record but it was difficult to execute a consistent customer journey post sales across the board directly from there,” to help sales reps, says Yagodnik. “To get better insights into Monster’s customer base, we decided to explore using technology to help us fundamentally change the way we do business and leverage automation.”
Totango, Monster learned, could connect their disparate enterprise systems - including support, service, sales and products – and offered automated workflows that would help sales reps manage thousands of customers and be more productive while boosting a better customer experience.
Totango’s customer success platform helps enterprises selling SaaS products see in real-time how customers are using their software and provides tools to streamline and manage all post-sales activities.
With Totango, Monster segmented its commercial SMB customers into three customer segments, better understood how they purchased, and pinpointed where sales reps could shift their priorities and spend more time selling to existing customers.
“We saw clear winners and identified how to make our offers more simplistic while also giving our customers the best outcome,” she says. “Finally, for the first time, we have proactive, almost real-time customer data to determine customer health and take action.”
She then revamped the sales playbook for reps and implemented Totango SuccessPlays tailored to the different customer segment and situations.
Totango insights helped Monster identify a segment that brought in a large amount of revenue that needed a consistent amount of email and rep touch. This is where Monster’s small business team really needed to focus to retain, maintain and cross sell customers. Examining the data further, they saw an opportunity to create a Totango success play targeting customers who invested in an annual stipend of job advertisements.
Previously, sales reps had to remember to check a low-inventory report on Excel daily. Managing thousands of accounts meant many reps didn’t have time to perform that task every day or they forgot for a week or two. “This provided an opportunity for our competitors to come in and for our customers to churn,” Yagodnik says.
She created a Totango success play where reps are automatically alerted when a customer who has bought more than 5 jobs in a 12-month time span and has consumed at least 70 percent of their job inventory. A success play is an automatically triggered task that an organization configures to improve team workflows, allowing CSMs to focus on the meaningful activities at the right time. The alert helps reps prioritize which customers to contact and gives them consistent messaging about what they should say.
“In just two weeks of giving reps a consistent view with daily updates pinpointing specific customers that were running low on their inventory, we increased revenue from low job inventory accounts by $161,000,” Yagodnik says.
Monster’s success with its small business team prompted Yagodnik and Kristin Hallas, Senior Manager Customer Success, to expand Totango’s use to its commercial mid-market accounts sales team, and its 6-person customer success advisor team.
Totango’s campaigns and SuccessPlays eliminated a lot of wasted time reps spent researching customers in different solutions and trying to construct customer health and history. For example, previously sales reps used Salesforce and an internal tool called Web Admin to look up customer information, and then used another internal tool Customer at a Glance, several Excel sheets and any one of the multiple reports the sales operation team sent out to try to get an accurate picture of customer health and usage.
Now they view data and dashboards in Totango, which ties all the disparate software together, provides a much better health score and saves reps several hours every day.
One sales rep previously spent four hours each assembling a quarterly progress report on his top 10 accounts. With Totango, he not only added new critical information but he pulls one report in 10 minutes. He shrunk his quarterly 40-hour task to 40 minutes, freeing up some 20 days annually to focus on customers.
Using Totango, Monster has created more than 2,600 customer segments, run 400+ offer-driven and proactive engagement campaigns to successfully increase retention and revenues, and deployed nearly 58,000 tasks through various SuccessPlays that have helped sales reps increase productivity.
“Totango has allowed us to be much more proactive,” Yagodnik says. “Reps had become a bit numb when it came to thinking about what they wanted to know and who they wanted to know it about to improve their accounts. They got fed up trying to ask the question without being able to get the answer.”
“Now, they can slice and dice the data quickly, get a view of customer health and with automated workflows, see how they can improve their customers success using our tools.”
Monster’s customer success team is comprised of six customer success advisors that work on a project basis to increase Monster’s customer retention throughout the company.
For example, the team onboards many customers to ensure they have a great experience from the beginning of their contracts and so that everyone follows a consistent plan of action for every customer. They do this with a 4-stage lifecycle that automatically surfaces actions to take to make sure consistent work is done. The lifecycle’s 4 stages are Discovery, Customer Engagement/Training, Customer Health Check, and Strategic Business Review.
The team is also responsible for fostering adoption levels of specific products throughout the life of a customer’s contract. This and other automations are deployed through the use of lifecycles and SuccessPlays within Totango to ensure consistency.
A key goal for our Customer success team is to maintain a good relationship so our customers would renew annually. “There was no way to track or see if we were effective, so we deployed Totango SuccessPlays to automate the process and track specific activity and results,” Hallas says.
She created a checklist of items the advisors could look for in an account and provided detailed instructions on how to respond to the customer matching a specific scenario. She then gave sales reps insight into the advisor conversations and tasks, which helped reps understand the different selling roles.
“Creating the onboarding process through the lifecycle journey in Totango allowed us be more efficient and add customer consistency,” says Hallas. “We onboard more accounts at once and per CSA because we track the process without doing it manually and keep track of all the steps.”
“Now each customer goes through the same process for onboarding , which didn’t happen before because each CSA tracked their own process manually,” she adds. “We expect this new process will drive higher contract value and customer satisfaction overall.”
Monster also leveraged Totango’s robust segmentation to help sales reps present the right offers to the right customers at the right times. “We wanted to leverage automation to help our sales team consistently get in front of segmented audiences with relevant messaging, Totango would allow for us to take the heavy lifting off of the sales team in regards to their marketing efforts within their territory,” says Yagodnik. “We also wanted to track engagement and revenue, which we couldn’t do when reps sent out offers without any real strategy in Outlook.”
They targeted a subset of small business customers, those that didn’t need to recruit often, with messages that would help Monster stay top of mind when clients needed to fill positions. Yagodnik and her team deploy monthly 32 different rep-driven offer campaigns in Totango, which equates to reps sending some 2 million emails monthly, which has generated several million in annual revenue with these targeted Totango campaigns.
“Totango saved one sales team over 50 hours in just one week sending emails on their behalf,” Yagodnik says. “The reps trust us doing these emails on their behalf as a customer response doesn’t have to go through 20 different channels just to get back to the rep – it happens immediately, when facilitated within Totango.”
Yagodnik and Hallas are now using Totango to dig deeper into Monster data like never before with help from the Totango team to further reduce churn.
Totango isn’t just software you implement,” Yagodnik says. “Totango works hand in hand with you to refine your business and dig out more data to improve customer outcomes.”
The Totango team took time to learn Monster’s business and understand what metrics were important to Monster and what success looked like; they didn’t try to force Monster into a common business model.
“I can’t even begin tell you how much Totango has changed how we do business,” Yagodnik says. “Having customer health data is key. We now have the technology to drive revenue, increase sales productivity and help set our customers on the path to successful outcomes.”
