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Mimecast looking to harvest existing relationships
Security player uses partner event to highlight the benefits of selling more products and services to existing customers
Mimecast is encouraging its channel to upsell existing customers with that approach already yielding significant results in its last fiscal year.
The security specialist used a Partner Connect event in London to update channel partners on the progress made and the ambition to continue to develop existing relationships.
The firm can boast a 97% customer retention rate and when it does the maths on the revenue growth through existing business and upselling it saw a gross revenue retention of 111% in fiscal 19.
The channel is around 700 strong in the UK for the vendor and does continue to bring fresh customers on board and has delivered more than 800 new opportunities and half a million seats in the year that ended in March.
Tom Corrigan, UK channel director at Mimecast, said that winning new customers was key but once it got them it, "wanted to keep them forever".
"The cost of customer acquisition is high," he added "We have a team in customer development, which is effectively upsell, and the cost to us is much more cost effective."
He advised the channel to look for those "upsell levers" that could signal the time was right to approach existing contacts with more products and services.
"Upsell levers could be customers doing something differently, going from on-prem into the cloud and from hosted Exchange into 365. These opportunities represent levers to sell more products and services," he added.
Francis Gaffney, director of Threat Intelligence at Mimecast, said that it was keen to offer resellers insights into where cyber security threats were coming from and it was prepared to talk to channel teams and their customers about the big issues in the market.
He added that partners could access expertise for free and it was happy to share intelligence to try to improve the cyber hygiene of the customer base.
"Intelligence is useless if it is not shared," he added "We will send it to you as soon as we have got it so we can say, 'look this is out there and this is coming and this is how we fixed it'."
