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Anne Janzer Writer, Content Marketing Consultant, Author |
In this episode, Anne Janzer, writer, content marketing consultant and author of Subscription Marketing: Strategies for Nurturing Customers in a World of Churn joins us to discuss lessons from working with a hundred technology companies and clients that include serial entrepreneurs, industry thought leaders, and technology pioneers.
Marketers can do scrum.
- Yes, marketers can do scrum. Featured below: Bill Cushard and Daniel Luebke doing it live.
Business of Customer Education Conference on 2/25 in Palo Alto
- ServiceRocket is hosting a conference around "The Business of Customer Education" on 2/25 in Palo Alto, bringing together customer training leaders to share best practices, discuss lessons learned, and help pave a vision for the future of customer education. RSVP today.
Subscription Marketing Is The Future
- Marketing organizations need to remain revenue-relevant in a subscription business model by looking beyond the sale.
- Marketers can help customers be better at their jobs and demonstrate value they're getting from software and their values align with company.
- Customer loyalty increases with customer marketing.
Working Across Organizational Boundaries To Help The Customer Succeed
- Working with ServiceSource led Anne to think about how marketers can help customer succeed.
- The revenue ship was sailing away from the dock and marketers were watching it sail away!
- Customer nurturing is important but marketing teams may not have historically viewed it as urgent.
- Bridging customer success, sales, training and marketing functions is crucial in the subscription economy.
When should companies focus on value marketing?
- Implant value marketing perspectives at the very beginning. It's like retirement savings: 20-year-olds should invest rather than waiting until age 30, 40 and so on.
- Just like investing, recurring revenue is a compounding metric.
- Focus on the ongoing customer relationship from the start to build it into culture as a competitive differentiation over time.
- Start from customer launch plans - there's no difference between marketing messages and training messages - you're expecting a seamlessness of tone, style and message. Marketing needs to reach out across boundaries through the customer journey to ensure promises made in marketing are realized in the customer experience.
The 5 Facets of Value Marketing:
- Helping customers achieve objectives.
- Demonstrating value (or helping customers understand the value they are getting from the solution.
- Adding value through activities beyond the solution.
- Creating additional value in the customer relationship.
- Aligning your business model and story with customer values.
- Original iPhone commercials showed users ordering flowers, not using features.
- How can I add value to customers and make them successful?
Golf analogy
- Don't just look down at "the ball" and whack it. Work on the whole swing and think about where you want it to go - it's the same with customers. Think about the long-term relationship.
Who should own the customer?
- Everyone needs to own the customer. It's like the DMZ.
- Embed marketers on customer success teams and have people cross-report to have feet on the ground working across parts of customer experience.
- Create cross-functional customer task forces.
- If you don't have top-down blessing and organizational structure and support to do this.
- You can always take a marketer to lunch.
Are startups more or less able to do this than large enterprises?
- There's a reverse bell curve; some startups aren't even thinking about it but some are and don't have the organizational boundaries that are divvying up who is responsible for which phase so you have innovative startups doing value nurturing activities.
- At the other extreme, some really large Fortune 100 companies that can create organizational categories for customer marketing
- We're missing the middle of the bell curve doing marketing beyond the sale and focus: that's a big opportunity.
Should marketers take a stake in expansion of customers?
- Marketing is key to doing customer success at scale.
- Marketing is key to campaigns, automation, content, community.
- A few forward-thinking organizations are looking at revenue, retention and customer loyalty as metrics on which marketing is evaluated.
- If marketing wants to be relevant to revenues beyond the sale, marketing should be evaluated on longer-term metrics. Sign up for revenue targets, marketers!
Visit Anne's website and buy her book.
Between episodes, we can continue the conversation on Twitter with the hashtag #HelpingSells. So if you’d like to chat with Sarah and Bill, tweet us and use the Hashtag #HelpingSells.
