Strategies for Retention and Expansion in Your Business

During the 18 months that I worked at Eloqua as the director of Premier Support from June 2011 to January 2013, concluding at the same time as the company’s acquisition by Oracle, I made it my goal to visit every customer of the fee-based service. There were 45 customers (companies) of the Premier Support subscription service by the end of my tenure (I had led a 40% growth of the service during my time in the role), and so visiting those customers spread mostly across the United States required a considerable amount of planning, communication, and coordination.

What made it easier was the fact that universally, every customer leader I spoke with in each targeted account enthusiastically agreed to have me visit. It wasn’t the first time I’d employed such a strategy in my years of representing a technology company to its customer base, but it was the first time I never received a single decline. What was...