How to jumpstart multi-threading in customer success and improve retention
There's a killer tool for that
With every renewal becoming a resale, customer success teams are having to become salespeople and learn critical sales skills, one of which is getting the whole buying team engaged - also known as multi-threading.
However, a peek at the Salesforce records of most startups shows that most customer accounts have fewer than 2 contacts attached to them, with all the account activity concentrated on a single, day-to-day contact i.e. single threading.
This puts the customer success team at a disadvantage when it comes to getting stakeholders engaged for a renewal and puts them on the sidelines when it comes to competing for expansion opportunities.
How to get multi-threading going
Multi-threading isn’t rocket science - you just need to figure out the relevant stakeholders for each account, get in touch with them and get them to see the recurring impact you are delivering so that when the time comes to renew the contract everyone is bought in and signing the renewal is a formality.
Use your ideal customer profile to identify the buyer personas involved in buying your product — most situations require a champion, power user(s), executive sponsor, finance approver and a legal approver.
Grab a list of your customer accounts and contacts and find the gaps on each account — the missing buyer personas.
Use LinkedIn or a contact database to find matches for the missing buyer personas.
Add the contacts to your CRM.
Send each contact one or more personalized. messages
The problem is this becomes a very time consuming process when you are starting with 1 or 2 low level contacts and need to find 2-3 more per account. It’s yet another job for your overworked CS reps to do on top of onboarding, troubleshooting, gathering product feedback and preparing for QBRs, so the chances are very high that they just won’t get to it until the renewal is looming at which point it’s too late.
The way to jumpstart this is with a data extraction and sales automation tool like PhantomBuster
Sales automation is nothing new. Companies like Salesloft and Outreach have been around for a few years although tbh they are expensive overkill for solving this problem. And data extraction tools have also been around for several years however their usage has historically been limited to engineering teams due to their high complexity.
This has recently changed. Thanks to new, affordable tools like PhantomBuster, data extraction and sales automation capabilities are now available to sales teams in a single easy-to-use, self-serve interface.
I’ve been a long time customer of PhantomBuster and love it. I find it incredibly effective for a range of rev ops tasks including jumpstarting multi-threading efforts for my clients and have teamed up with them to provide a step-by-step guide:
Here’s how to set up a multi-threading process in PhantomBuster
Build a list of your customer accounts. The easiest way to do this is by creating a Google Sheet and installing the the free Salesforce Connector Chrome extension for Google Sheets. Its a huge timesaver as it lets you import your account list from Salesforce directly into a Google Sheet.
Build a list of job titles for each persona you are trying to find. Your Ideal Customer Profile should already list your buyer personas and the common job titles for each persona. Simply drop these into a separate tab in your Google Sheet. For example, your job titles could be “Chief Revenue Officer”, “VP Sales”, “Head of Revenue Operations”, “Chief Financial Officer” and “General Counsel”
Combine your account names and job titles into a single list on its own tab. The easiest way to do this in a Google Sheet is with the CONCATENATE function so that each row contains an entry of the form “<account name> <job title>”, for example “Ethena Chief Revenue Officer”, “Ethena VP Sales”, “Ethena Head of Revenue Operations”, “Ethena Chief Financial Officer”, “Ethena General Counsel”.
Sign up for PhantomBuster and set up a “LinkedIn Search Export” Phantom.
Signing up is free (there’s a 2-week free trial with no credit card needed).
Search for the Phantom called “LinkedIn Search Export” and add it to your dashboard.
A Phantom is basically a single automated action that works on your behalf. The LinkedIn Search Export Phantom is an action that scrapes LinkedIn’s search results and saves the results.
Follow the on-screen instructions to set up the “LinkedIn Search Export” Phantom in PhantomBuster.
In the “Searches to scape”, input the link to the tab on your Google Sheet (the one that contains your list of account names and job titles)
In the “Behavior” section tell it to scrape 1 result per search, so that it just returns the top search result from LinkedIn.
Complete the setup and hit “Launch”. It usually takes a 5-15 minutes to complete the task, depending on the size of your account list.
Download the results file from PhantomBuster and import it into your Google Sheet. The reason for doing this is that you’ll need to clean up the data to remove any incorrect matches from LinkedIn’s search results.
The simplest way to remove incorrect matches is to look for the job title(s) and account name in either the “job” or “currentJob” field in your PhantomBuster results file.
The fastest way to do this is using the REGEXMATCH function in Google Sheets. REGEXMATCH will return a value of TRUE if it finds a match and FALSE if it doesn’t.
Copy the list of TRUE matches onto a new tab. This is your list of stakeholders.
Set up the “LinkedIn Profile Scraper” Phantom in PhantomBuster. Add this Phantom to your dashboard and follow the on-screen instructions to set it up.
In the “Profiles to scrape” section, input the link to the tab in your Google Sheet containing the TRUE matches.
In the “Email discovery” section, select “PhantomBuster” as your email discovery service. This will attempt to find the business email of the profile you are scraping.
In the “Settings” section, select “Repeatedly” as your Launch option and set it to 80 profiles a day if you have a regular LinkedIn account and 150 profiles a day if you have a Sales Navigator account.
If you have a very large customer list, simply divide up the TRUE matches across multiple LinkedIn accounts and clone the Phantom.
Complete the setup and hit “Launch”. Depending on the number of profiles in your
Download the results file from PhantomBuster and import it into your CRM. Pick the fields that map to your CRM, for example account name, first and last name, job title, email, LinkedIn profile.
Set up the “LinkedIn Auto Connect” Phantom in PhantomBuster. This is an automated action that sends a personalized connection request to a list of LinkedIn profiles.
There are two ways to set it up, depending on the size of your team and customer base. If you are a small team, set it up to have the connection request come from your founder/CEO/CRO. If you are a larger team, divide the list across your CS team members and set a LinkedIn Auto Connect Phantom for each of team member.
Add a personalized message to the connection request: A simple template is “Hi #firstname#, reaching out here as #company# currently uses {your company name} for {use case you solve} and I’d love to bring you up to speed on the progress we’ve made together. Would you be up for joining our next check-in call?”
Hit launch and monitor your LinkedIn inbox for connection request accepts and responses (you will get more than you think!)
Follow up with a personalized email. These are best sent manually so that you can incorporate additional personalization, for example
“Hi #firstname#, I wanted to reach out and say hi as #company# currently uses {your company name} for {use case you solve} and I’d love to share the progress we’ve made working with {day-to-day champion} and {power user} on {company goal}. Our next check-in call is on {date}. Would you be up for joining?”
Multi-threading with your existing customers is just one of many rev ops use cases you can accomplish with Phantombuster. It really is the new Swiss Army knife of rev ops and I’ll be covering more these use cases in the next few months, including how to jumpstart your prospecting outreach, how to keep track of customers who change jobs and how to quickly build lists from other sources.
PS a huge thank you PhantomBuster for supporting this post!
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