Customer Growth

Advisory – An enabler
to Customer Success

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In today’s competitive world, achieving the ever-
elusive customer success is a necessity. With
Customer Growth Advisory in place, businesses can
identify contextual and relevant cross-sell/upsell
opportunities, helping address key customer pain
points and, in turn, enhance customer satisfaction.
This paper emphasizes the need to embrace CGA or
Customer Growth Advisory — A new approach to
realizing Customer Success. Read on to know why
CGA is the new engine for Customer Success.
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Contents
INTRODUCTION����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������4

WHAT IS CGA? �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������4

Identifying the right set of customers������������������������������������������������4

Building customer intelligence��������������������������������������������������������������5

Identifying & Documenting the opportunities�������������������������������6

CONCLUSION — EMBRACING THE CGA APPROACH TO

BUILD A CUSTOMER-CENTRIC BUSINESS������������������������������������6

APPENDIX�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������7

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Introduction
Businesses have realized the importance of
customer retention and growth along with
acquisition and hence have started investing
in the “Customer Success” 1 roles.
Three key outcomes expected out of the
customer success (CS) role are:
a) reducing customer churn
b) enabling getting customer referrals and
c) identifying upsell and cross-sell
opportunities
The CS team works in proximity to the
customer to build customer confidence,
reduce churn, and gain referrals.
However, the third outcome of CS,
i.e., identifying upsell and cross-sell
opportunities, requires a much deeper
investment of time and effort beyond just
identifying the obvious opportunities.
That is where a function like “Customer
Growth Advisory” (CGA) at EdgeVerve
becomes relevant.
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What is CGA?
The key role of Customer Growth Advisory
function is to identify upsell and cross-sell
opportunities for EV products, to facilitate
business growth for the company.
The opportunities are identified via building
a 360-degree view about the customer and
mapping the customer needs with what
EdgeVerve can offer.
These opportunities are then taken forward
by the CS and Sales teams.
CGA Approach to Account Mining:
CGA follows a systematic 3-step process for
opportunity identification:
• Identifying the right set of customers
who are ready for growth
• Building customer intelligence by
mining a customer account and
• Identifying & documenting the
opportunities
Identifying the right set of
customers
We use the ‘RFMI’ framework, defined on
the lines of the RFM Analysis2, a customer
segmentation framework.
Here RFMI stands for:
R – Recency: How recently has the customer
purchased a license or product. A purchase in
the preceding two quarters gets the highest
score.
F – Frequency: How frequently has the
customer purchased from EdgeVerve. A
purchase done in each of the preceding five
quarters receives the highest score.
M – Monetary: What percent of EdgeVerve’s
revenue is coming from the respective
customer. Financial data of the last five
quarters is considered.
I – Interaction: The ‘RAG status’3 of the
customer engagement is considered. In
the case of this parameter, a customer
engagement in Red status would get a score
of 1 while a Green will get a score of 3.
These parameters are scored on a scale of
1-3, with 3 being the highest score indicating
a good state and 1 the lowest.
Each customer is scored one the basis
of the RFMI framework, and the best
customers are the ones with a score of
3333.
Customers with scores 3xx3 or 3xx2 could be
your high potential, high growth customers.
A set of customers from these are selected
by sales after applying additional customer
insights that they might have.
Building customer intelligence
Building customer insight starts with getting
the basic account understanding from the
Product Sales & CS team and then goes on
to use different levers to further build on the
same.
i) Customer profiling checklist: This
checklist helps tick off obvious venues
of opportunities and covers aspects like
• New/open proposals being worked
on for the customer
• Products or services the customer is
using
• Contract renewal’s due
• Applicability of new product versions
• Main business drivers for the
customer
ii) Interviews with key account
stakeholders: This involves
independent conversations with key
personnel related to the account
from different teams like sales, pre-
sales, support team, services team,
account sales, onsite coordinator(s), or
customer-facing folks and key delivery
folks from different projects and service
lines. These conversations are essential
to gaining insights on how the customer
is structured — key stakeholders from
the company as well as customer side,
the work underway for the customer,
issues and pain points, customers’ area
of interest and the opportunities as seen
by folks closely working with customers
for that account. Further, interviews with
domain experts help in obtaining an
understanding of the industry trends
iii) Information from external sources:
This involves doing extensive secondary
research of the customer from varied
sources. The sources could start with
obvious ones to the specialized ones.
Listed below are a few:
• Company website: For understanding
company business, its offerings,
its organization structure, and
leadership team
• Annual reports: Gives the information
of overall health of the customer
organization, its business drivers,
strategy and vision
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 • Financial reports: Gives the financial
position of the company, where is
the most profitable business coming
from, what are the focus investment
areas, and what are the cost levers,
among others.
• Wikipedia, Google search and
Newsfeeds: Gives an idea of what
is keeping the company in the
news, problems they are facing,
new product launches, mergers and
acquisitions, participation in events,
their thoughts and leadership views
• Analyst reports for the domain: Gives
an idea of customer key competition,
how it fares against the same, its
strengths and weaknesses along with
industry trends. Some of the sources
looked at are Forrester, Gartner, HFS,
Everest
• Third-party paid databases or reports:
Provides other curated information
on customers and the industry. Some
of the databases referenced are
InsideView and Discover.
Identifying & Documenting the
opportunities
This step involves concluding the research,
summarizing, and documenting the findings
along with the opportunities into a customer
canvas deck.
The customer canvas consists of the customer
context, business drivers for the customers,
issues faced if any, footprint in the customer
business, SWOT analysis for the account
from EdgeVerve and Infosys standpoint, key
contacts, and the most critical being the
opportunity propositions.
Upsell and cross-sell opportunities are
proposed looking at the following sources:
-- Findings from independent
conversations
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-- Applicability of use cases from customer
industry
-- Applicability of horizontal use cases
-- Use cases implemented for other
accounts in the customer domain
-- Use cases supported by different
product offerings, and use cases from
whitepapers and thought leadership
papers as applicable in the customer
context
The opportunities are then validated with
the relevant sources and shared with
Customer Success and the sales team. The
CS and the sales team then take charge of
the opportunities and pursues them with
the customer while the CGA provides a
supporting role.
Conclusion — Embracing
the CGA approach to
build a customer-centric
business
The CGA team role is one of the most multi-
faceted roles. It requires the team to have
a good knowledge of all the product and
service offerings the company has and its
value proposition. They need to have good
market research acumen, understanding
of financial reports & its analysis, domain
understanding, excellent communications
skills, and stakeholder management.
This systematic, structured, and holistic
approach, followed by the CGA team,
significantly reduces the time and effort
required by CS and the sales team to reduce
the cycle time for sales qualification and
conversion.
CGA driven way of customer success might
be the answer to your company’s growth too.
Accelerate your company’s growth with CGA!
Appendix:
References:
*1 -https://www.customersuccessassociation.com/library/the-definition-of-customer-success/
*2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RFM_(market_research)
*3 - https://pmtips.net/article/what-does-rag-status-mean

Other references:
https://www.gainsight.com/guides/the-essential-guide-to-customer-success/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexmcclafferty/2015/05/18/customer-success/#66632fc1777a

Reference documents:
CGA Artifacts:
i) RFMI matrix
ii) Customer profiling checklist
iii) CGA Standard operating procedure and RACI matrix for interfacing roles
Please reach out to EV.CGA@infosys.com for more information on the artifacts.

Authors

Ashwini Kelkar Bhushan Deshmukh

Sr. Product Manager, EdgeVerve Sr. Director & Head, Product Incubation Cell,
EdgeVerve

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 contact@edgeverve.com www.edgeverve.com

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