Succeeding by Partnering with Success

Are you getting all you can from your Go-To-Market colleagues? Stop with the give, give, give. See what you can get from your relationships. 

As I talked about on Monday, marketing, sales, and success should align to best contribute to the GTM flywheel. So, should you just stay in your lane? Of course not, as I spoke about on Monday, marketing can get a ton of value by leveraging the sales team’s outputs. 

Now let’s move around the flywheel and look at what success can do to help marketing.

• Contacts: Marketing is running programs to keep customers happy and upgrading. But that’s hard if you don’t know who to reach out to. Success’ interactions with customers via email and calls can be mined to supplement your CRM / MAP with up-to-date contact information to support your programs.

• Messages that Resonate: Similarly, your success team is sharing content and messaging with customers. Is it working? Analyzing email context and seeing what communications correlate with upsell and retention can help you tune your marketing messages.

• Case Studies: This one is pretty obvious, but don’t stop at the best known names. Often your strongest stories are coming from passionate customers who are getting tons of value. Also, don’t just rely on the traditional case study template. Leverage video and short interviews to get faster approvals and more consumable content. 

• Evangelists: Keep a list in your CRM of users or influencers at your customers that are open to speaking publicly. That could be as a speaker at an event that you submit or as a provider of a great bon mot for a press release. This kind of promotion of evangelists is often as good for their own visibility as it is for yours. 

• Competitive Intelligence: Your customers have a soft spot for you, sure. But odds are your competitors are talking to them about your primary or comparative weaknesses. Get that feedback so you know your soft spots and can counter them with better product and value to your customers.

• Marketing Fit Insight: If you don’t have a product advisory board, get one now. Don’t just rely on your most evangelical customers, get some of the most stubborn and questioning. You want to hear the hard truths about how your product, messaging, or positioning could be improved. 

• Usage Data: You can often get some great feedback from your users by investigating how they use your product. If it’s something that can be monitored, then partner with success to get telemetry. If not, invest in workshops to see how the product is used in reality. This kind of data is a great complement to voiced opinions because it’s unfiltered.

Working with the success team is a great way for marketers to better achieve their goals. What else would you add to this list?