The old ways of marketing are coming to an end.
Five years ago, marketing teams could get away with creating content, promotions, and campaigns without having any touch points or interactions with their customers.
Did this always work? No, but (most) marketing teams were able to skirt by on the assumptions they had about their customers. Those ways are changing.
What separates the good marketing teams from the great ones today is creating content, promotions, and campaigns that are derived from the voice of their customers.
These marketing teams:
- Know the exact pain points their customers are experiencing.
- Understand their market fit and advantages against competitors.
- Are keen to the motivations that convince their prospects to buy.
Knowing your customers on a deeper level isn’t easy, but by working alongside customer success teams, marketers can gain a competitive edge. In fact, customer success and marketing team collaboration rose 17% from 2021 to 2022 – making this one of the most significant internal partnerships in businesses today.
Let’s look at three ways marketing and customer success teams can partner-up.
1. Enhances our product understanding
Customer success managers (CSMs) are in constant touch with their accounts. Whether it’s onboarding, addressing a concern, or simply checking in to ensure everything is running smoothly, these interactions provide a wealth of information.
Over time, CSMs get to see firsthand how their customers use the product, what features they love, and where they might struggle.
Receiving unfiltered feedback
Customers are more likely to share candid feedback with their CSMs, especially when they’re facing challenges. This feedback is invaluable and provides a clear picture of the product’s real-world performance, instead of the always-sunny view that marketing teams love to portray.
Identifying trends and patterns
By interacting with multiple customers every week, CSMs can spot patterns.
- Are many customers facing the same issue?
- Is there a feature that’s consistently praised?
- Are competitive solutions being referenced more often during calls?
Recognizing these trends is the first step in understanding the broader strengths and weaknesses of a product.
Bridging this gap for marketers
While marketing teams are great at promoting a product, they might not always have firsthand knowledge of how it performs in real-life, stress-filled situations. This is where building a feedback loop comes into play.
By regularly sharing insights with the marketing team, customer success ensures that the strategies marketing teams are promoting are grounded in reality.
Refining marketing messaging
With insights from the customer success team, marketing can craft messages that resonate more with existing and new customers.
For instance, if 15% of last quarter’s customers migrated from a competitor to your solution, this insight can be passed onto the marketing team to highlight in its next competitive campaign.
Honing your product marketing
While we’d love for our products to “be for everyone”, that’s just not a realistic position in such a saturated market today.
Beyond just messaging, the feedback received from CSMs can help in positioning the product better in the market. If the customer success team identifies that a product is particularly beneficial for a specific industry or solves a unique challenge, marketing can target that niche more effectively.
2. Facilitates the creation of authentic customer stories
From sales to marketing, everyone wants more customer stories to highlight on the brand website. Stories, also known as case studies, help prospects put themselves in the shoes of a customer to see how a product solved a business problem – it’s a powerful tool for any brand.
However, reaching out to customers as salesperson or marketer without any prior communication can be a painstaking method for getting insight. This is where you’ll want to leverage your customer success team.
Telling the full story
Every interaction that a CSM has with a customer is a potential story. It starts with understanding their challenges, then guiding them to use the product effectively, and finally witnessing the success moments. This journey, from problem to solution, forms the backbone of a compelling narrative.
Publishing quantifiable results
One of the biggest strengths of tapping your CSMs for sourcing success stories is the ability to provide measurable outcomes. Whether it’s a percentage increase in productivity, hours saved through automation, or a spike in sales, customer success teams can gather this data and make your story more convincing.
Note: When publishing results, you need to be 100% sure they match what your customers said. This is when call or video recording (whichever method you’re using to interview customers) comes in handy. Using a VoIP tool is one of the best ways to ensure you don’t miss all the finer details of your interviews.
Building brand credibility
In B2B, decisions often involve significant investments of time and resources, and require navigating through several gatekeepers. Creating authentic testimonials and case studies serve as evidence that a product delivers on its promises. When prospects see that others have found success, it reduces their perceived risk.
Validating with peer companies
Businesses often look to their peers when making decisions. A case study showcasing a successful implementation in a similar industry or company size can be a powerful influencer. This acts as a form of peer validation, signaling that “if it worked for them, maybe it could work for us”, and may start the first warm touch point with your brand.
Showcasing transparency
Genuine testimonials and case studies also showcase a company’s transparency. By sharing both the challenges faced and the solutions provided, it demonstrates a company’s commitment to genuine problem-solving, rather than just making a sale.
3. Boosts customer retention and advocacy
Retaining customers, especially in an economic downturn when budgets are tighter and vendors are more scrutinized, is essential to company health. Thankfully, your customer success team is on the front lines of communications.
Proactive problem solving
Instead of waiting for issues to escalate, customer success teams often take a proactive approach by identifying problems in their CS tools, reaching out to offer help, and closing the loop through follow-up communications. This is one of a few ways CSMs are attacking dissatisfaction and churn, relieving marketing and sales teams of this stress.
Delivering continuous value
Making the sale and ignoring customers can put your business on the fast-track to churn issues.
The real challenge is ensuring that customers continue to find value over time. In this case, CSMs will often work with customers to explore additional features or ways to use a product, ensuring it remains relevant and valuable as the customer’s needs evolve.
When we talk about feedback loops from earlier, this is also how product and marketing feedback is fed to the appropriate teams.
Turning customers into advocates
Advocates, also referred to as champions, are your strongest customers who are always active in the product, leave positive reviews, and are happy to refer you to their peers. This is a goldmine for marketers.
Building a referral pipeline
With so many marketing channels today and wondering what works and what flops, being able to tap customers who are happy to refer to your business is a luxury. Partner customers can open the floodgates to new campaign ideas for earning new business. However, keep in mind this endeavor is often built on the backs of customer success teams, so be sure to thank your CSMs!
Marketing and customer success – the partnership of the future
By tapping into their customer success teams, marketers can ensure that their content is not just well-crafted but also deeply resonant with the audience’s actual needs and experiences. This collaboration leads to campaigns that are grounded in reality, testimonials that echo genuine success stories, and educational content that addresses real-world challenges.
