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: • 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 sales process • 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 figure 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 effects compound. They’re more profitable (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 first 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 effort 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 Mobilize Advocates (Customer Success) (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 off 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. • Providing customer feedback on products, marketing materials and their overall experience • Identifying candidates for case studies, testimonials and speaking opportunities • 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 efforts, not separate groups. While customer marketing inherently reaches broader populations and customer success focuses on specific sets of accounts, insights from both efforts 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 offer 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 effectively 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 first 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 benefit. 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 first 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 different 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 officially 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 figure 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.