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:

1. Helping customers achieve objectives.
2. Demonstrating value (or helping customers understand the value they are getting from the solution.
3. Adding value through activities beyond the solution.
4. Creating additional value in the customer relationship.
5. Aligning your business model and story with customer values.

• Red Bull, Influitive, Gainsight and more.

• Companies who help people be better at their jobs to become better project managers (and oh by the way use our product).
• Recommended reading: Winning The Story Wars
• 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!

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