CUSTOMER SUCCESS AND MARKETING ALIGNMENT: The Key To Unlocking Customer Advocacy

CUSTOMER SUCCESS AND MARKETING ALIGNMENT: The Key To Unlocking Customer Advocacy

The subscription economy is upon us. We re all bought in. And while the extensive adoption of subscription models -- especially software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies -- has lowered the barrier to entry for customers, the barrier to exit has also been reduced. This means as a vendor in the subscription economy, you can no longer rest on the security of a closed deal. You must work smarter to consistently deliver the best possible experience and value to your customers. Rapid and sustainable growth for SaaS companies comes not just from acquiring more customers at a faster pace, but also from making customers successful and keeping them over the long-term to: sales process Grow their use of your products and associated revenue over that extended lifetime Enlist them as advocates to help you recruit new customers and accelerate the Impact the development of your brand through word of mouth, reviews, content, etc. Share their feedback on every aspect of your business, including the product, marketing, customer success and sales process According to Jason Lemkin, true customer lifetime value (CLTV) is probably as much as 2X higher when you incorporate not just upsell and cross-sell revenue, but also: Champion change -- when your customer leaves to work at another company and brings your solution with them Advocacy -- when your customers tell their friends and peers how much they love you 1

But what you really want to do is igure out the perfect ratio of maximum possible investment in Sales, Marketing and Client/Customer Success as one cohesive investment, not two. All-in. Because the second order efects compound. They re more proitable (no additional marketing or customer acquisition costs). They build your brand. And they fuel your growth. JASON LEMKIN SaaStr (CLTV Isn t The Whole Story. Don t Shortchange Second-Order Revenue) Unfortunately, most companies today are not leveraging their relationships with customers to their full, second-order revenue-generating potential. Furthermore, they fail to deliver the exceptional customer experience required to delight customers in the irst place. Why? The customer experience is fragmented across the organization. Thanks to the the rise of digital marketing and the resulting skyrocketing marketing budgets, however, the marketing function is becoming increasingly responsible for the customer experience. According to Gartner s 2015 Marketing Spending Survey, the #1 innovation project for 2015 is customer experience. Another Gartner report found that 89% of companies plan to compete primarily on the basis of the customer experience by 2016. The majority of B2B organizations see the customer experience as important to invest in, but their teams are not prepared or coordinated enough to make this a reality. If customer experience is a focus, it tends to be pre-sale with a coordinated efort between sales and marketing. With the rise of marketing automation, marketing and sales alignment has been a priority for well over a decade now. But what happens to customer after the sale? How well-positioned are marketing or customer success to continue to deliver on the promise sales made during the buying process? They can t do it alone. 2

Customer success is not only at the core of our marketing but the core of our business. If customers are not successful they will not be happy with the product. SHELBY FARIS Marketing Program Manager at Connect First MARKETING AND CS MUST ALIGN TO: Help each other reach their respective goals Work toward a common objective of improving the overall customer experience Create and identify advocates, and then mobilize them The formula for sustainable advocacy GET YOUR ADVOCATES ON YOUR TEAM Develop Advocates (Customer Success) Mobilize Advocates (Marketing) When both the marketing and CS teams work collaboratively, they are forced in a way to understand both perspectives and can better provide the customer with the best experience possible. ALYSSA AZEVEDO Client Marketing Specialist at Virgin Pulse 3

HOW CAN CUSTOMER SUCCESS AND MARKETING HELP EACH OTHER? Both groups need to establish common ground on how they can help each other. Let s break this down by outlining how each department can assist one another: CS CAN HELP MARKETING BY: Cultivating customer delight by kicking the relationship of with an incredible onboarding experience, providing proactive customer service and working with the product team to productize wow moments Identifying potential advocates and referenceable customers. The customer success team works with your customers day in and day out. They know who the top customers are but there may not have been asked by marketing to identify these nor are they incented to do so. overall experience opportunities Providing customer feedback on products, marketing materials and their Identifying candidates for case studies, testimonials and speaking Creating blog posts and other content that helps educates customers and generate leads for marketing. The customer success team should be your subject matter experts. They have content gold in their heads they need to put pen to computer and get those ideas out to the masses. You need buy in from the people that work directly with customers to have a good pulse of how they are doing. KEVIN LAU Senior Customer Retention Marketing Manager at Netbase 4

The ideal universe considers customer marketing and customer success as intertwined eforts, not separate groups. While customer marketing inherently reaches broader populations and customer success focuses on speciic sets of accounts, insights from both eforts can greatly impact and leverage each other. They are most successful when the two worlds work in conjunction with each other to creatively and proactively harness the power of the customer experience. ALLISON WAHL Customer Success Manager at Campaign Monitor MARKETING CAN HELP CS BY: Reinforcing customer delight with wow moments outside of customer service and product, such as welcome packages, event experiences, spotlighting by press and analysts, perks, etc. Organizing customer events. If you want to ofer your customers more than just crappy donuts at a customer event, you need to get marketing involved. They have the budget to help you bam up your customer events. Providing access to powerful tools, such as marketing automation. Marketing can help customer success communicate more efectively to customers using these tools that allow for better segmentation and nurturing capabilities. Recognizing your customers. Customer success teams have limited time and it s mostly focused on assisting customers in need. Marketing can create a more centralized function that recognizes your top customers. Keeping customer success at the core of your marketing is mostly about LISTENING. A good CS person listens a lot. Sure, they act, but irst they just listen. It s easy for marketers to feel one step removed from individual customers, but when we remember to listen we become better marketers and our customers beneit. HEATHER FOEH Director of Customer Advocacy at Lattice Engines 5

HOW TO GET STARTED ON ALIGNING CS & MARKETING Stop taking your customers for granted. Here are the approaches we recommend to achieve an amazing customer experience by aligning your customer marketing and customer success teams: 1. MEET REGULARLY If you want to improve the customer experience, a simple irst step is to open up the lines of communication. This can minimize most issues and generate amazing ideas. Set up a recurring meeting between the relevant members of your customer success team and customer marketing team. This should be used as way to discuss what each group is focusing on for that week, what s working and what isn t. Each department should also discuss how they can assist each other. This will build a stronger relationship between the teams and create a better experience for customers. We have a panel of folks from all departments who meet monthly to plan and execute customer success initiatives throughout all the departments within our company. LIZ RYDER Digital Marketing Guru at Connect First 6

2. CLEARLY DEFINE ROLES Clearly map out and assign certain tasks to diferent groups. Here s an example: CUSTOMER SUCCESS MARKETING Customer monthly newsletter X User groups X X References X Generating customer stories X Creating content based on customer stories X Updating customer contact data X Net Promoter Score surveys X By simply meeting and agreeing on roles, you can drastically reduce the confusion that exists and create a better experience for your customers. We have a weekly marketing-cs meeting. As my colleagues on the marketing team are the pros on all things branding and content marketing, we rely on them for direction. They, in turn, rely on us for access to and information about our customers. CATRIONA ADAM Customer Success Manager at Mobify 7

3. CREATE A STRUCTURED ADVOCATE MARKETING PROGRAM To get to the next level, you shouldn t be tracking who your top customer advocates are in a spreadsheet that rarely gets updated. You need a coordinated, integrated approach to identifying, mobilizing and recognizing your top customers. Your customer success team can play an integral role in identifying which customers to invite into the program and sharing insight about what interests your customers, but marketing should own and run the program. At Lattice, the role of customer advocacy oicially sits in marketing but interacts almost daily with the CS team. Those open lines of communication are essential. HEATHER FOEH Director of Customer Advocacy at Lattice Engines Great customers naturally make great advocates. Customer success has helped us igure out whom to invite to our advocate marketing program. If your organization has the resources, have a customer success person work on your advocate marketing program. JAMES SWEENEY Outbound Marketing Maven at TrackMaven 8

4. ALIGN METRICS At the end of the day, what gets measured gets done. To create a coordinated customer experience, all teams that are involved in supporting these eforts should have some joint metrics that they are measured against. Here are some recommendations: Marketing: Have a bonus metric based on retention and net MRR (assuming you are a subscription-based service). Customer success: Have a bonus metric based on the number of advocates that have been identiied as well as the percentage of customers that are advocating for you. Both marketing and customer success: Have a bonus metric based on customer satisfaction. Many organizations use NPS, but more companies are starting to use customer advocacy. It s a more reliable metric as it s based on tracking if your customers are actually referring you new business. The time is now. You can t put of creating a better, more coordinated customer experience. Start the planning process now by opening up the lines of communication. There is no better place to start than with your customer marketing and customer success teams. Think about it: a customer success manager is a big asset to your marketing programme. More and more of what we do is to make our customers our brand advocates so we can use their success as part of our marketing eforts. Each customer success manager at SmartFocus has some marketing objectives in their MBOs, such as identifying case study opportunities, promoting webinars, etc. CYRILLE SAULNIER Head of Customer Success at SmartFocus 9

KEY ALIGNMENT MOMENTS THROUGHOUT THE CUSTOMER LIFECYCLE BUYER S CLOSED ONBOARDING IMPLEMENTATION ADOPTION JOURNEY WON DEAL AND EXPANSION BUYER S JOURNEY Surround buyers with social proof from your advocates to accelerate the sales process, such as referrals, pro-active references, product reviews on third-party websites, and discussions on social networks and communities across the web. Getting feedback from real customers is the most effective tactic for evaluating software and makes B2B buyers 5X more satisfied with their purchases. Source: Software Advice CLOSED WON DEAL Introduce the whole team. Don t be a stranger. In addition to their customer success manager and executive sponsor, introduce new customers to your advocate/customer marketer so they re not surprised when that person contacts them later on. 10

Start sharing customer stories early. Sales reps often share the customers desired outcomes, which were identiied during the sales process, with customer success once the deal closes. Marketing -- speciically customer marketing -- should be included on these communications so they can get to know new customers and their goals right away. TIP: Having access to this information will also save time when the marketing team eventually writes blog posts, case studies or other content on the success of each customer. Surprise and delight. Customer success may not have the budget to buy gifts for new customers, but the marketing team often does. Send a card and a small token of appreciation to welcome your newest customer to the family. Got budget? Send new customers a welcome kit, complete with swag, educational resources and other cool items. Hootsuite sends branded swag to new Ambassadors TIP: If you simply can t justify the cost or your customers work in an industry where even small gifts are frowned upon, go digital: an ecard or a friendly tweet will do wonders. 11

ONBOARDING Invite new customers to become advocates. Capitalize on the excitement of new customers by educating them about and asking them to join your advocate marketing program as soon as they start the onboarding process. They may not be ready to speak publicly about how they use your product, but you can keep them engaged there until they are. Host part of the onboarding process within your advocate marketing program. Customer success can send their customers all the resources in the world and still have no idea whether they ve actually read any of it or not. Publish key educational resources within your advocate marketing program and ask customers to respond to questions to test their knowledge and track their progress through the onboarding process. Since these challenges will be mixed in with other fun activities, they won t burn out easily. Ask new customers for their irst act of advocacy. Simply request that they tweet or post on LinkedIn that they ve started the onboarding process with your company and they re excited to become successful. Here s an example of a tweet from a new Inluitive customer: While it may seem strange to ask your customers to advocate for you before they ve even implemented your solution, new customers are often the most excited about your product. Introduce new customers to your existing advocate community. Your advocates can be a great source of inspiration to new customers, either 1:1 through a mentoring program or within a larger online community. Ofer to introduce your newest customers to long-time veterans to ensure they stay excited about your ofering, and have the opportunity to pose both strategic and tactical questions to their peers. 12

IMPLEMENTATION First value delivered (and beyond). Once your new customer has experienced their irst taste of real value from your product, this is the time for marketing and customer success to lay the foundation for advocacy. Celebrate the win, both internally and externally with the customer, and start building their success story. Keep each other looped in on EVERY success that happens, no matter how big or small. KEVIN LAU Senior Customer Retention Marketing Manager at Netbase Gather intel on your customers. Early on in your relationship is the perfect time to do a little reconnaissance on your customers. Pepper occasional personal and professional questions among other activities -- both CS- and marketing-related -- to gather important information you can use to beneit you both later on. For example: What s your favorite drink at Starbucks? Which social networks, groups or communities are most valuable to you? Which opportunities are most interesting to you? e.g., speaking at events, social sharing, contributing to content, connecting with peers, beta testing new features, etc. help you get there? What s your favorite restaurant? What s the next step in your career and how does our product/service Which conferences are you planning to attend over the next year? How often should we send you emails now that you re a customer? Would you be interested in speaking with other professionals who are considering using our product/service? Whatever you do, just don t send out a giant survey asking all the questions at once. 13

Create customer marketing events based around customer feedback. Actively solicit and take action on that feedback, allowing customer success insights to drive advocacy eforts and campaigns. ALLISON WAHL Customer Success Manager at Campaign Monitor Increase the value of your asks. You ve nurtured your new advocates with smaller asks, such as tweets, educational content and questions. Now it s time to start introducing them to more valuable requests, including referrals. TIP: You don t have to leave referrals to chance. Customer marketing should work with the sales team to pro-actively identify potential prospects within your customers networks. ADOPTION AND EXPANSION Identify new advocates within accounts. Once a customer is fully up and running, there will likely be new users who weren t present during the initial buying and onboarding process, but who are now using your product or services. Recognize your currently engaged advocates -- and your customer success team -- for bringing them into the fold and inviting them into your advocate marketing program. The deeper and wider you get within each account, the more likely they are to remain customers. Bring executive sponsors to the table. Customer executives can be notoriously diicult to identify, nurture and convert into advocates, but they are critical to the long-term success of any account. Make them feel valued by matching them with a relevant executive from your team and/or one of your customers. Invite them into your advocate marketing program and target them with content and opportunities tailored speciically for executives. 14

RECOMMENDED READING: Engaging Executive Advocates > Recruit beta testers for new products and services. Ask customers if they d like to be among the irst to test out new and exciting product and service oferings. While the product team will likely own a signiicant portion of this process, customer success and marketing play critical roles in recruiting beta testers, getting customers up-and-running, and then gathering feedback and closing the feedback loop throughout the beta process. Get approval to share your customer s success story. And ask them to help you distribute it. Content, such as ebooks, blog posts, webinars and case studies. Social media and communities. Third-party review websites. Industry events. Even sales references. Put eligible customers on an expansion nurture track. When relevant, educate customers about additional product and service oferings that they may be interested in upgrading to now or in the future to ensure that they are not surprised when you come to them with upsell/cross-sell recommendations. It s a two way street. Marketing can deliver compelling insights into who is buying and why they are buying, which should be leveraged by the CS team during onboarding and adoption activities. Feedback from CS to marketing should help drive focus into the right markets and surface key aspects of the application that add value, which could have been previously overlooked. Additionally, marketing and customer success should be partnering to architect and deliver a program focused on driving customer advocacy. ANDREW MARKS Managing Partner at Servitium Partners 15

INVITE, MOBILIZE AND RECOGNIZE YOUR ADVOCATES Inluitive s AdvocateHub is a complete advocate management platform that helps B2B companies capture customer enthusiasm, and use it to turbocharge marketing, sales and customer engagement eforts. With AdvocateHub, you can build advocate communities where customers, fans and evangelists can complete challenges like referrals, reference calls, product reviews and much more. VISIT INFLUITIVE.COM TO LEARN MORE