How account teams can use Mixpanel to promote customer health

Account teams for B2B and SaaS companies are responsible for the health of dozens of customer accounts, each of which will have dozens, if not hundreds, of users. Keeping track of all of those accounts and making sure they stay healthy isn’t easy. Things can slip through the cracks, and that can have serious repercussions during renewal conversations. 

Monitoring and analyzing account data helps customer success leaders keep accounts healthy right through the customer lifecycle. To do that, you need a platform that aggregates data to give you real-time insights into usage, feature adoption, and overall account health. In 2024, Excel just doesn’t cut it. 

Here’s a look at why account teams need product usage data and the metrics you need to track. We’ll also talk about how we leverage product analytics as account managers at Mixpanel, from implementation to adoption and renewal.

As an account team, we need to know that our customers are getting value from our product. One of the best ways to find that out is to track their product usage. 

For example, the Mixpanel account team tracks data to answer questions like: 

Answering all of these questions gives us information about account health. If we see that a client isn’t using Mixpanel or that user numbers are dropping, it’s a sign that they aren’t getting value from our product—and they probably won’t want to renew it when the time comes. 

Keeping track of all of this data without some sort of analytics tool would be time-consuming and clunky. We would have to look at each account’s settings page, go through Salesforce, or talk to customers individually. With dozens of accounts to monitor, this would take up a lot of time, and there would always be a chance of missing something important. 

A better way to monitor account health is to aggregate their usage into Mixpanel reports so that we can see all of our clients in one place. That allows us to compare accounts against each other and track their usage over time. This makes it easy to see if usage is going up or down so we can prioritize clients who need more support.

We also look at usage data before we talk to any of our customers, whether it’s a renewal conversation or a more casual check-in. We need to know which features they are using and if they are well-adopted. 

If they are, it's important to let our customer know, especially if we are talking to their leadership team. It shows them that their employees are using Mixpanel and that they are getting results from it. Demonstrating usage through data is a powerful way to nudge them to keep our platform. 

If they aren’t well-adopted and aren’t using our most relevant features, we want to offer more support and education about those features to help them get more value. 

Looking at the data also helps us reach the right people. In Mixpanel, we can see who our power users are and reach out to those who are getting the most use from our platform. We want to build relationships with our power users and hopefully turn them into champions who will advocate for our product within their company. 

With a platform like Mixpanel, our power users are often not the ones making the decision at renewal time, so we need to give them ammunition to show the value of Mixpanel internally, and data is a powerful way to do that. 

A power user might share an anecdote about using Mixpanel to troubleshoot an issue that had a huge impact, or uncover an opportunity that generated millions of dollars for their company. 

Those kinds of anecdotes make our champions look great internally, and they’re a great way for us to demonstrate ROI. When we initiate renewal talks, we can weave those anecdotes into our conversations and make a stronger argument.

For the account team, our first focus is product usage: We look at how much our customers are using Mixpanel and how many users they have on that account. At Mixpanel, one of the ways we measure that is by looking at how many reports in Mixpanel they view, but each company will have its own usage indicators.

To dive a little deeper, we compare their usage to their spend to assign a health metric to the account. 

For example, let’s compare an account that spends $100,000 and has 10 users to an account that spends $10,000 and has 5 users. The smaller account is healthier because it has more users per dollars spent—they’re getting more from the platform. 

Another metric to assess account health is MAU (monthly active users). Weekly active users (WAU), daily active users (DAU), and overall active days are also important indicators that your customers are getting value from your product. These metrics will give us insights into whether people are using Mixpanel in their day-to-day workflow or only for monthly check-ins. 

We get a lot of our information about our account usage from Mixpanel Insights reports, which allow us to visualize trends within our data. We can see how our customers are using Mixpanel and how that usage evolves. We can break that down by account, feature, and user to more granular information, and we use Boards to collect several reports into a single view. 

For our enterprise accounts with hundreds or even thousands of users, we often create reports and Boards to track Mixpanel usage across different teams and different projects. We also give our largest accounts access to their own Mixpanel data so they can use Mixpanel to monitor not just their own product, but their Mixpanel usage, as well. This allows them to identify Mixpanel power users and feature adoption in their own self-serve way—we’re basically handing them the same view that we have as Mixpanel account managers. Public Boards can provide a similar function for non-enterprise accounts. 

If we notice something unusual or we want to get a better understanding of a specific account, Session Replay helps us see what our customers are doing and understand their user flows more clearly.  

We’ve also used Mixpanel’s Slack integration to create automatic alerts when anything unusual happens in the accounts we manage.

An average account manager can probably skate by with Excel and some good instincts. But if you want to be a good account professional—and maybe even a great one—you need to take ownership of your data. Making decisions based on gut feelings will make you less targeted and ultimately less effective. 

Most account teams have too many accounts and too much data to keep track of without a solution like Mixpanel. Knowing how to use that solution to build dashboards for different accounts, add filters, and implement new properties so that you can slice your data in different ways without relying on a data engineer will give you more powerful insights, more quickly. 

A good account manager can get ahead of things and understand their accounts more deeply by empowering themselves with data.