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Bridging the Gap Between Customer Success and Marketing, CMOs and Customer Success, and Impactful Customer Metrics
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Your customer just forwarded you an email from the marketing team offering a free demo of your solution. The problem? They’re already a customer and are on track to reaching the level of success they desired when they first came onboard with your organization. Awkward…
Recently, Forbes stated in an article titled “How CMOs Can Know If Their Marketing Campaigns Work” there was a great mentioned about addressing not only positive data points such as blog hits to social and CTA clicks – but addressing negative data points like churn. Marketing utilizing a tool designed for Customer Success can help CMOs and Marketing teams better understand what’s working and what’s not by consolidating all your data points into one source of truth.
Customer Success isn’t just a role or a department within an organization – it is in fact a philosophy that should be practiced and embraced by the entire organization. Let’s focus on how Marketing benefits from Customer Success efforts and how we can bring the two together.
Get them Onboard
Sales aren’t always made externally and you may need to do a bit of demonstrating why you need their help in the first place. There are many benefits to focusing on Customer Success from Marketing’s perspective. Here are some of the fruits of their labor that they’ll enjoy as a result of a fresh collaboration with your team.
- More Referrals – Sales and Marketing are always looking for new customers. By having a customer reach their goals because of utilizing your solution – they’re often more likely to recommend your solution to a friend or colleague.
- Better Reviews – By feeding marketing with what you’ve been doing in your Customer Success software; you can help bridge the gap on which customers are much more likely to engage in a review campaign that they may be running.
- Case Studies – help the Marketing team identify which customers might be willing to be a case study for your organization. If you can make them wildly successful with your solution then they could be an ideal candidate.
- Brand Advocates – instead of throwing spaghetti against the wall try and narrow down which customers it might make sense to target and work to convert into brand advocates by providing them with how they’re utilizing your solution, where they are in their customer Journey, and more.
- Advanced Segmentation – they’ve likely got the “who visits the pricing page” thing down. What they would love is being able to target those that might be a prime candidate for joining you at your conference or to participate in a study you’re running. Data from your platform will be able to deliver this time and time again.
Bring the Information Together
Data is fantastic but too many data can be overwhelming to the point where it becomes counter-productive. The idea here is to identify together the relevant data points that they need to better support the customer and your team.
By bi-directionally syncing your team’s interactions and tasks with your CRM – you can help keep not only Marketing but the rest of the organization in-the-know about what’s happening with a specific account.
By working to bring this data together it allows for more fruitful conversations when planning events, campaigns, and more.
Rally the Troops
You should take this opportunity to bring everyone together. You need to be communicating what you’re seeing on the ground level and bringing that information back to Marketing that tends to be focused on the broader scope. Commit to a set schedule so that new changes and information isn’t slipping through the cracks.
The data that you’re now both sharing will also allow you to make better decisions about what the root cause of some of the issues are. It could simply be that peppering in some communication from Marketing during the onboarding phase to reiterate points covered during training could make a huge impact on adoption.
At the end of the day, your business was built to help serve a need that someone has. The priority here is to establish a relationship internally that benefits and supports the needs and goals that your customers have. By busting down the silo and showing the impact that Customer Success can have on your Marketing department; you can better serve your customers, contribute to a healthier bottom line, and make everyone’s lives just that much better.
Customer Success Around the Web
- How CMOs Can Know If Their Marketing Campaigns Work: There is so much data today and lots of ways for you to engage customers. Steve Olenski gives a rundown of some of the metrics that tells you exactly where you went right and where you lost track. Read more on Forbes.com.
- Are Your Customer Metrics Making an Impact?: In a recent study, Econsultancy found that while most marketers list personalizing messaging and measuring impact as “very important to growth,” only 10 to 14 percent felt they had strong capabilities in these areas. Given that personalization and measuring impact are both critical factors in delivering excellent customer experiences, this is enough to give many marketers pause. Read on to hear why every CMO and CX leader should be looking inward at this now.
- The Best Kept Secret of Customers Success: If you are a Customer Success Manager, you already know that ensuring the success of your clients is one of your key objectives. There are many ways one can go about achieving that success. You reach out to your client frequently, discuss current issues, and follow up on their concerns, you even invest the time to train your client. However, there comes a time when all of this is not enough and your customer doesn’t collaborate with you enough in order to achieve their desired outcomes. Read more at Business2Community.
Upcoming Webinar
Customer Health Scoring: The Why and How
Want to learn about Customer Health Scores, what they are, their goals, and how to create them?
Join Mikael Blaisdell from the Customer Success Association and Abby Hammer from ChurnZero for an infomrtive webinar that goes into the nitty gritty of the Why and How of customer health scores.
This is for both new and veteran Customer Success professionals.