How Customer Success Roles Made Me a Better Marketer

When friends or family ask about what I do, I usually shoot for simplicity and just say that I’m a marketer. That’s certainly my area of expertise, but that statement is not entirely true.  At least it’s not right now. Although my marketing knowledge and experience is a huge part of what I do as the Director of Customer Strategy at Curata, I’m officially on our customer success team.

I’ll admit it: I’ve gone to the dark side (or, depending on your perspective, the light). But this is not my first trip. Back in 2013, I took on a sales role at Hootsuite after being a long-time enterprise customer. I had never been in sales before and to be honest, I wasn’t 100% positive I was even going to like it. But thanks to some longstanding relationships, Hootsuite was willing to let me learn into my role as a strategy consultant working with their enterprise account executives.

For the first few months, the constant client-facing made me nervous and stressed out. I was unaccustomed to so much riding on every conversation and every email (at least that’s what it felt like). But with a little experience, I got over it. And you know what? In a surprise even to myself, I loved it.

I’m a competitive person by nature, so the “thrill of victory and the agony of defeat” in sales was exhilarating. I mean, getting your content to the top of SERPs or achieving a great CTR is exciting too (here’s a non-surprise: I’m a nerd about this stuff), but the responsiveness required of live interaction and the very direct line to revenue was pretty damn motivating. I loved putting together strategies that would solve customers’ needs and I loved working with my team on how to present them. It was like three parts high-stakes puzzle solving and one part improv theater.

That lead to another role at Hootsuite on the customer success team working with Hootsuite’s largest and most complex clients. It was high-stakes puzzle solving x1000. The difference between the pre-sales side and the post-sales side was that we not only had to execute on our promises, but do it well enough to retain the customer’s business and fend off any challengers in a very competitive space.

I had to learn our customers’ businesses inside and out. And not just the stuff about their business model and their audience, but I needed to inspire enough trust to learn how things really got done, about their internal politics, and about what my clients wanted for themselves in their careers.

Since my time at Hootsuite I’ve held both marketing and customer success roles, keeping a toehold in each world. My experiences in both sales and customer success continue to help me see that some of the assumptions I made as a marketer were not correct or even useful. These are some of the biggies:

Engagement is Not an Endorsement

As a marketer it’s really easy to get excited when a blog post attracts a ton of traffic from named accounts or that open rate on your customer email is sky-high. Marketers have to rely on this digital body language to understand performance. And by “performance” I mean metrics that try to distill visits or clicks into some kind of presumption of value. In reality, value is only something you can infer from what is incomplete information. Believe me, when a customer tells you to your face that something sucks, that makes all those nice data points seem irrelevant.

Let me clear: that doesn’t mean I think those kind of metrics are useless; we just need to be aware that they lack context. Just because someone opens your email doesn’t mean they found what they were looking for. Just because someone gobbles up your content doesn’t mean they’re ever going to buy.

My point is, don’t be fooled into falling in love with your own work. Metrics are signals, not irrefutable evidence. Don’t lose the ability to ask yourself, “What can be better about this? And “Is this really making a difference?”

Marketing is Effective Only if it Doesn’t Feel Like Marketing

Yes, I’m talking about feelings—something that doesn’t get talked about enough in B2B marketing in my opinion. If your marketing is trying too hard, if it’s too self-serving, if it seems like it has something to hide, it’s not going to inspire a lot of trust. And if you don’t have trust, you don’t have customers, plain and simple.

But this is why marketers can’t have nice things: we find a new tactic or channel and use it to DEATH until even your grandma knows that ‘Click “like” for option A, and “love” for option B” is just a ploy to game an algorithm. But the reason why these things work for a limited amount of time is because they are not immediately recognized as Big Marketing?.

Some other examples flagrantly counter-productive marketing are:

• Using data irresponsibly: such as retargeting people within an inch of their lives. Yes, I did visit your website. No, I do not want to see your white paper on every web page I visit from now until the end of time. With great power should also come great responsibility (and restraint).
• Hyperbole: making outrageous claims with an outsized enthusiasm befitting an “As Seen on TV” pitchman. People will be able to smell the desperation on you. It doesn’t exactly inspire trust.
• Ambiguity: whether it’s trying to be all things to all people or being too wimpy to differentiate yourself from competitors, ambiguity is yawn-inducing at best and actively confusing at worst. If you’re not being very targeted and very, very relevant, you’re probably doing more harm than good in the long run.

What seems to be at the heart of this is a deep insecurity—about our companies or our products or even our ability to communicate effectively about either. We to try annoy people into submission or dazzle them with sarcasm or tell prospects that we can solve problems 1-10 (when we can only solve 1-5 well). But what if we were more earnest, honest, and (gasp!) subtle? Would that allow us to attract and retain customers that are truly great fits for our companies?

Adoption is Not Inevitable

I think adoption is the most difficult go-to-market metric in SaaS to land. Ten years ago I might have said it was getting qualified leads. Five years ago I would have said it was closing business. We’ve all seen that marketing technology supergraphic, right? I don’t think I need to elaborate further.

Adoption can be so difficult because people love the novelty of new tools and toys, but actually altering your behavior is in direct opposition of the human tendency to hate change. You can have the best product, a super helpful team, great launch resources, the buy-in of the brass, and yet there are still so many variables out of your control that can sink a project.

I have launched many new marketing initiatives and programs throughout my career. Being a marketer in the day and age we are in, many of these projects which might have seemed strange or risky at the time, are now just part of the landscape. Earlier in my career I did not have the appreciation for change management and continuous post-sale adoption and education that I have now.

SaaS marketers should not consider the buying cycle over with the sale. You have to continue to re-earn that sale every day. Customer marketing (and all its permutations) should not be an afterthought but a centerpiece. Though a lot of companies give lip service to “flipping the funnel,” in my experience it’s very difficult for a lot of companies to come down from the churn ‘n burn mindset and the entrenched structures that support it.

Instead of Drinking Your Own Champagne, Drink Theirs

The best education you can have as a marketer is to get out from behind your damn screen. The first thing you should do when you start a new marketing role is not to learn about how your funnel functions, but to listen to customer success and sales calls. Or better yet, meet customers and prospects in person. And continue to do it every quarter.

Sometimes in marketing (present company included) we can get so wrapped up in how clever something is that we forget that most of the people we're trying to impress could not care less about our latest sprocket update. Guess what? It's not about us. It's about them.

Great marketing requires extreme empathy. Understand what customers care about and why. Understand their organizational challenges. Understand why and how customers use your product so that you can better addresses their problems in a language that is familiar to them.

Don’t assume  you know what they want. Don’t assume that everyone in your company knows what they want. It’s invaluable to hear it with your own ears. And hey, you’ll probably learn about innovative ways of using your product that isn’t in your case study lineup.

The Go-To-Market Team is Becoming More Holistic

Even though I’m currently on our customer success team, I still work with our sales, marketing, and product teams daily. And this is certainly not unique. Companies that are the best at sales AND retention recognize that the customer experience doesn’t happen in a series of siloes, even if that's how the company is organized. There’s been a lot of discussion about the blending of sales and marketing—"smarketing" if you will (and if there’s ever been a portmanteau that deserves to die, that is one). But customer success is often left out of that discussion. My hope is that more companies begin to mine the perspectives, expertise, and data in the customer success organization and apply those learnings to marketing and sales. After all, it is in customer success where the most honest measurements of a company’s success lie.