How Customer Success Can Leverage the Marketing Team

Customer success leaders… are you getting the most out of your relationship with marketing. It’s an untapped opportunity for getting your flywheel to spin faster. 

I’ve worked with some fantastic customer success folks, like Mike Lee, Mohammed Covadia, and Paulette Greene, to name a few. And one cornerstone of our partnerships was the ability to leverage each other like this:

• Firmographic Data: Marketing teams often have access to data sources like Clearbit, Crunchbase, or ZoomInfo. These tools have rich insight into company size, revenue, team sizes, industry categories, and more. By mining this data and populating it into the CS CRM, success has better insight into customers and the power to segment clients more intelligently.

• Behavioral Data: Marketing tools, like demaskers and marketing automation platforms, are constantly monitoring individual and account behaviors. As a success leader, wouldn’t you love to know when your customers are browsing the terms of service (flight risk) or pricing page (upsell opportunity or churn risk)?

• Integration and MOPS: Marketing teams have a lot of experience with connecting tools and data together. While sales operations and marketing operations are very common in most organizations, success operations professionals are less so. See if you can get your marketing operations colleagues to help wire up your tools so that they work seamlessly with the rest of the go to market stack.

• Offers: Customer success teams want to keep their clients happy and renewing. Marketing is often running promotions and giveaways that drive interest for the top of the funnel. But just like your cell phone service, it’s annoying for clients that these offers aren’t for loyal existing customers. So, ask for things from marketing programs on your customers’ behalf. Make sure that loyalty gets rewarded.

• Retention Selling: One of the most powerful ways to keep customers renewing is to help them to speak about the value you generate for them. But that’s not always easy. Maybe because it’s hard to quantify the ROI. Or maybe they just don’t have the tools and language to communicate the value. Get marketing’s help in creating tools and presentations that make it simple to calculate and present the value to customers – vehicles that they can share internally with their colleagues. 

• Upsell Marketing: Marketing and your product teams are constantly generating value through new features or new products. But you often don’t think it’s worth getting excited about and announcing to the world. Well, these little developments help your customers – who are using your product on a daily basis – to be more effective. Plus, it shows that your product is actively being developed, encouraging more commitment. 

• User Community: Your marketing team has access to a range of tools, like email automation, webinar tools, community platforms, and more that can make it easy for you to build and support a community of evangelists. This kind of investment by marketing in your customer community will often more than pay for itself through referrals and customer case studies.

Don’t be afraid to partner closely with your marketing team to get that revenue flywheel moving!