Are you doing "Success Marketing"?

I had an interesting conversation with a CXO on Marketing and its imperative on Customer Success; which left me with a compelling concept - "Success Marketing"

Today, marketing gets involved with customer success for the case study, a testimonial, and in few cases a joint PR.

What can we do more? – to help reduce churn, better visibility inside customer organization, more farming/mining.

We can do "Success Marketing"

John is a customer key business stakeholder and one of his key KRA is tied to the success of the product/service that you are providing.

While the CS team leads and helps John in making him successful – what more can you do to make it sweeter?

You can help him brag about it – help create several collaterals - joint whitepaper/ success story/thought leadership for his internal presentation and as well external conferences and get his leadership also involved in events to talk about it.

Drive this extensively and diligently inside customer organization and many other forums and social media.

When done one by one with all customers/stakeholders, this creates a positive feedback loop that affects in many ways:

External - Increased visibility, word of mouth, validation of your product/service

Customer – Increase conviction in product/service, more champions, more farming/mining & penetration, higher visibility to leadership

Internal – Team motivation

And when your ailing customer hears this; they trust that you can overcome & do better.

While this is done at a small scale currently and not institutionalized as a separate function within Marketing. Customer Success leadership can look at this seriously and bring it under its fold.

Has anyone institutionalized this? In what form? Happy to hear your thoughts on this.

PS: "Success Marketing" is the term coined by me - no relation to any such term exists as per my knowledge.

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Comments

Mohit Jain

@Laura Lakhwara - this is interesting where your customer is actually your partner so it falls into realms of partner sales & marketing as well.

@Matt Myszkowski - Incredible and good to know that I am not alone. Will be interesting to see what are the KPIs that you have given to her. Are you able to attribute some cross-sell/up-sell opportunities to her work? Agree with you that this is going to be more important than ever in the coming times. Somehow I am beginning to realize that as we are moving to the SaaS-based model in B2B; it is becoming closer and closer to a B2C. That is, If you want to see the future just look at how B2C businesses are managed.

@Neha singh - this is an interesting perspective - but some of these tasks like collating feedback & intelligence - feeding that back to the product/ Sales team etc are generally handled by the CS ops team. Do you mean social listening when you say feedback & customer intelligence?

Neha singh

In our journey to transform clients into champions and advocates, it's impossible for client success professional to go without donning the hat of a retention marketer. While one big facet of marketing is delivering and communicating the value of our product/ service in a way that it goes viral like @Mohit Jain mentions, other facets include segmenting your accounts and relations, planning communication strategy for each segment throughout the customer journey, establishing a smooth feedback process so that the customer intelligence can flow into other business functions like product management or sales or even accounting, finance & legal. Customer Success has always been pivotal in carrying out these functions.

So far, it has been happening implicitly, but like @Matt Myszkowski says, "...it is a thing and a growing thing too". It will be interesting to see how it transforms organisation structures.

Matt Myszkowski

Here is my original post:

https://www.gaingrowretain.com/communities/community-home/digestviewer/viewthread?MessageKey=fc3f97cd-c3d3-4bed-9dc8-1ec7feb6997e&CommunityKey=1261a423-6343-48a3-a722-6c04f19eacc8&tab=digestviewer&SuccessMsg=Thank%20you%20for%20submitting%20your%20message.

Matt Myszkowski

Very good question - I think I asked a similar one a few weeks back on here as I was assigning an existing CSM to a dedicated CS Marketing role.

She has some specific accountabilities currently:

1. Internal brand awareness - marketing our value proposition demonstrating tangible impact on our customers
2. Creative, modern approach to success stories - videos, infographics, podcasts not just an A4 one-pager
3. Driving an Outcomes-based approach to our messaging aligned to our delivery & execution model
4. Educating CSM team on personal brand and social media presence
5. Internal Newsletter

I think "Customer Success Marketing" is a thing, and a growing thing too - it is expanding on the account based marketing model. It may be part of the CS org or part of the marketing org, with a dotted line into CS but it is has a very clear remit around supporting awareness, education, & expansion of your CS offering both internally & to customers. I see this as a massive growth area in the coming years.

Laura Lakhwara

@Mohit Jain

I'm on this journey now at my company. Our product launched in November of last year, and we're finally at a point where beyond the initial case studies, pr, etc. We have a big push to not only utilize in our collateral all the different commentary from our clients, but also to help them success with their marketing. Our clients are new to robotics, and it's a big opportunity to help them "brag" about being a vendor that supplies robotics for cleaning services.

As of now, it's quite simple - supplying imagery (video and images) and language to update their websites, client QBR decks and sales collateral to include our product.

Interested in what others do - @Kelly Hook ?