Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Time to End Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success Silos
58 Plays3 years ago
Marketers love the thrill of the chase. We pursue prospects with reckless abandon. MQLs are B2B digital hunting trophies.
But when marketers catch prospects, the game’s over. They quickly forget about these newly-minted customers….because prospects are sexier.
It shouldn’t be this way.
Prospects shouldn’t be engaged separately by sales, marketing, and customer success. The three groups should be working together to attract, capture, and serve customers.
John McTigue argues that silos create friction, which drives customer unhappiness and churn.
He believes a unified approach is a win for B2B companies and customers.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction & Guest Overview
00:00:05
Speaker
I'm Mark Evans, and welcome to Marketing Spark, the podcast that delivers insight from marketers and entrepreneurs in the trenches in 25 minutes or less. Marketers spend a lot of time, money, and effort attracting and engaging prospects. We love the thrill of a kiln. But once a prospect turns into a customer, we seemingly lose interest. This is despite the fact that it's so much easier to keep an existing customer than win a new one.
00:00:34
Speaker
Today, I'm talking with John McTeague, a customer journey strategist on how to keep customers happy and loyal.
Customer Retention vs. Acquisition
00:00:41
Speaker
Welcome to Marketing Spark. Thank you. Glad to be here. Let's start off with the initial premise that, and I could be wrong here,
00:00:51
Speaker
that marketers love to attract and engage prospects and turn them into or help turn them into customers. But we often forget customers after they're part of the fold. They're fat and happy. We've done our job. Now it's up to other people in customer success and customer service to keep them there.
Breaking Down Silos for Better Collaboration
00:01:11
Speaker
Is that a correct depiction of what's going on out there generally?
00:01:18
Speaker
Yeah, I think so. I think historically sales and marketing and customer success or really customer success as a thing hasn't been there for many years. It was just customer service or customer support. Yeah, I think they've been siloed for a long, long time, maybe forever doing their own job. As you said, marketing and sales are really
00:01:47
Speaker
focused on bringing in new customers, and then it's somebody else's problem after that. I think where we're at is changing that mindset. It's not fully implemented yet, let's say that, but it is changing.
Merging Teams for Seamless Customer Experience
00:02:08
Speaker
One of the things that I read a lot about these days is the silos between sales, marketing, and customer success. They all have their different mandates. They all operate differently. In many cases, they don't communicate that well, don't share resources, don't share feedback, and as a result, they're marching to the beat of their own drummer. A lot of people are starting to suggest that they should be morphed together, that there should be an amalgamation, that there shouldn't be any delineation between
00:02:37
Speaker
sales, marketing and customer success. Do you subscribe to that
Challenges and Solutions in Team Integration
00:02:41
Speaker
view? And if so, how do you make that a reality? How do you merge all these different job functions together so you can move forward and lockstep? Well, I do subscribe to that idea, that strategy. It makes perfect sense if you think about it from the customer's point of view.
00:03:02
Speaker
They don't want to deal with silos. They don't want to have to be handed off from one department to the next. They don't want to deal with multiple people who don't know what they're all about, what their interests are and things like that. So there's a lot of friction that builds up in these handoffs between the initial marketing and sales and then finally customer support.
00:03:28
Speaker
which I think statistically shows that you lose a lot of business this way. Those fences between the silos, so to speak, are high friction and they do cause problems. They do cause customers to get
00:03:46
Speaker
you know, unhappy with your brand and your products and so on. So there are lots of good reasons to merge them. Your question is more about how hard is that to do and what are, you know, maybe what are some of the barriers.
Customer Journey Focus
00:04:03
Speaker
But I think if you can do it, it's certainly a great idea to have the three operations meeting as a team, focusing on what the customer wants, exchanging ideas and staying in communication so that that messaging back and forth is always consistent.
Leadership's Role in Unification
00:04:23
Speaker
People are always aware of what the customer, you know, where they are in their journey and what their interests are and what their challenges are.
00:04:31
Speaker
and they're working together to solve them. So I mean, it makes sense from a sort of a logical point of view, but because it's so organizationally siloed and leaders have their little, you know, it's especially true with leaders that they have their fiefdoms and then, you know, they're defending their territory that you have big problems in breaking down those walls.
Account-Based Teams for High-Value Clients
00:05:00
Speaker
So that's kind of the first step is maybe putting in someone above them, a chief revenue officer who says, okay guys, the walls are coming down and you guys have to figure out how to work together.
00:05:18
Speaker
lots of different ways that we can go from here. But one of the issues I believe is the idea of compensation. So right now, if you're a sales rep, you get base plus commission in many cases. If you're the marketing person, you get rewarded based on MQLs or SQLs. And if your customer success, I guess,
00:05:38
Speaker
There's rewards around retention. Maybe it's about upsells, but if everything's going to be amalgamated, the whole compensation system is going to have to be reimagined because everyone's going to have to be in the same boat, be rewarded in the same kind of ways.
SMB Strategies & Product-Led Growth
00:05:54
Speaker
And so that's going to be really interesting challenge, both from an organizational structure point of view, but also in terms of compensation.
00:06:01
Speaker
A modern-day analogy would be a car dealer where now you have sales reps that aren't on commission anymore. They're paid salaries. Everybody's salary goes up and down based on revenue, based on performance and profitability. Why not do that with sales and marketing and customer success in any organization?
00:06:27
Speaker
I don't know why that wouldn't be true because they're all working together to attract and convert people into customers. They're all working to keep those customers through retention and they're all working together to upsell and cross-sell and expand accounts.
Post-Acquisition Engagement & Customer Expertise
00:06:48
Speaker
The only thing that I can think of that would be better than that possibly is having smaller teams focused on specific accounts. So you have like an account-based team with a marketer, a sales rep, maybe couple sales reps, a customer success person, all focused on half a dozen, maybe 10 or 15 accounts. And they are directly responsible for performance, revenue performance,
00:07:17
Speaker
retention, upsell, cross-sell, working as a team and they're rewarded through a bonus system or however you want to handle that. The advantage is it's much simpler that way and you're either doing well or you're not across the board and you're more focused on individuals with individual customers and customer accounts trying to help them be successful because that's how you're successful.
00:07:48
Speaker
Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense in the B2B enterprise space where you've got big high value customers that take a long time to come on board.
Website Alignment with Customer Needs
00:07:56
Speaker
So what usually happens is the marketing people will attract them. The sales people will develop the relationship, nurture the deal, close the deal, and then customer success will make sure the customer is onboarded and happy. But if you had them working together post-sale,
00:08:14
Speaker
The salesperson has a relationship so they can stay involved. The marketer can use their skills to effectively communicate to the customer and the customer success person can then do whatever it takes to expand the client to serve the client in different ways. And that could be a very effective way to do post acquisition sales and marketing.
00:08:34
Speaker
Absolutely. And it is working. There are plenty of companies doing this. But the challenge I think that you're hinting at is in mid-sized companies and SMBs, what's the equivalent? You often don't have enough people to go around even to staff up these teams. Or maybe you have a small ACV product and you have thousands, even hundreds of thousands of customers
00:09:04
Speaker
What's the deal there? So that's a slightly different way of looking at it. But instead of maybe grouping together and working so closely with accounts, those teams instead work on things like product-led growth. They work on using more of a technology approach to staying closely tied in with the customers on their journeys.
00:09:32
Speaker
throughout the process and helping them succeed. There are different ways of approaching that, and they do depend on the size of the company and the product that you're selling, but there are still ways of doing that without going back to the old ways. In the SMB space, I find that one of the
00:09:53
Speaker
shortcomings of post acquisition activities is the fact that marketing seems to wash their hands of customers and that they're not communicating as effectively as they should so in many cases it's a monthly newsletter or a quarterly newsletter and these newsletters are pretty lame i mean there's probably not a lot of time and effort that goes into them.
00:10:14
Speaker
I think a lot of them are simply going through the motions to
Creative Post-Acquisition Marketing
00:10:18
Speaker
stay in touch with the customer but for smb's marketing that's creative engaging proactive prescriptive and really tied to making the customer more successful and making them smarter so that they can use the product and better. In different ways that's a that's just a starting point that's a fundamental way to really keep your customers engaged and keep marketing as important engage with your customers too.
00:10:46
Speaker
I mean, if you think about it, the customer is constantly changing. You know, they have new challenges, new products of their own, new markets. You know, things are happening at that company.
00:10:59
Speaker
And then you're changing. So your products are changing, your markets are changing. So marketing can be really good at sort of bridging that gap between what happened before and what's happening now, kind of keeping people, and not through sort of a stale newsletter, but more like customer stories, doing what marketing does well, interviewing customers, writing up their stories, doing great videos and podcasts.
00:11:28
Speaker
you know, designing up or capturing results from their customers and creating really effective content out of that. And then one of the things that we often miss is involving our customers in our own marketing and us in theirs.
Co-Marketing with Customers
00:11:46
Speaker
So by sharing brands, doing things together, like we're doing a podcast now, I could be your customer.
00:11:54
Speaker
We could be sharing ideas back and forth across our brands and then distributing them to our audiences, which it's a win-win. Why not do that? Why not have marketing more involved in co-branding and initiatives to get the word out on both sides? Try to help all of our customers out at the same time.
00:12:19
Speaker
Yeah, I think you're right. I think there are many win-win propositions that marketing tastes, fails take advantage of when it comes to their customers because customers have tremendous domain expertise and thought leadership that is untapped. What I've found is if you reach out to customers and if you try to engage them, they are in many cases, extremely enthusiastic because they see the upside in two ways. One, they can demonstrate, I made a smart decision by doing business with you, which is great.
00:12:47
Speaker
I'm seen as somebody who is savvy and knows what they're doing. And second, they can promote their own company by leveraging your marketing. There's absolutely no reason why this shouldn't be done more often. But we leave a lot of these opportunities on the table because we just don't think about it as marketers. We ignore it. It's not a priority, not seen as effective. And there's lots of ways that we just fail our customers when it comes to customer success and marketing.
00:13:18
Speaker
Well, if you consider like a 50, 100 year old company that's not really digitally transformed yet, a lot of times, and there's still many, many of those out there, they don't have that kind of
Improving Customer-Centric Websites
00:13:34
Speaker
marketing. They're not really doing much digital marketing. They're not really involved in social media and podcasting and all that. So we can help them with that.
00:13:46
Speaker
Again, it's a win-win because they have a big audience that's probably not aware of what you do. You can get business quite easily, referral business this way. I guess you'd call it a hybrid of direct and referral business. It can't hurt you to do this, to get the word out. Marketing is uniquely qualified to do this work.
00:14:15
Speaker
Let's shift gears a little bit. On LinkedIn recently, you wrote an interesting post looking at friction and the idea that many companies struggle with their websites because it's just not aligned with what customers want to know, need to know, or align with their expectations.
00:14:36
Speaker
Can you walk through some of the biggest mistakes that companies make when it comes to their websites? Because this is the digital doorway. This is the most important portal to educate, engage, and entertain your customers, yet a lot of companies fail. What are they doing wrong and what should they be doing instead? Well, the root cause of this is looking at it from your perspective, not your customer's perspective.
00:15:04
Speaker
So a lot of companies think of their website as, well, this is my brochure. This is my brand. This is what I'm putting out there. And if everybody likes it, they're going to come and do business with us. The only problem is that's not what your customers want. They couldn't care less about your brand. You know, they probably never heard of you.
00:15:26
Speaker
and maybe they just run across you through a Google search or a friend tells them about you and so you go check out their website. That's the first thing you do.
00:15:37
Speaker
And so they don't know anything about you. They don't have this warm, fuzzy feeling about your company or your employees or your awards. They just want to know what you do first, you know, who you are, what do you do? Why should I be interested? How is this relevant to me? It's almost like a website needs to read my mind and tell me why I should be there. And then make it as easy as possible to find out exactly what I want to know.
00:16:07
Speaker
So really, the key thing is answering my questions. And the rest, it could be on the website somewhere, but it shouldn't be up front. It shouldn't be the first thing that they run into. So a lot of people bounce because they go, what is this? This is not something I'm interested in. And they'll see this gigantic picture of people working and stuff like that. And it's like, well, I'm not interested in that.
00:16:36
Speaker
We got that. We got people working at desks. I'm here to make more revenue or fix things faster or something like that. That's the key, is you've got to think through what your customer's journey is like early on in the process and what are they interested in? What are their questions?
Personalized Onboarding Strategies
00:16:59
Speaker
And the easiest way to do that is to ask. I find it fascinating and troubling at the same time that when you see websites and your first impression is, I don't understand what you do. I don't understand why I should care. And it's marketing 101. It really is trying to position yourself in a very simple, accessible way.
00:17:21
Speaker
what you do and why anyone should care. And I'm doing a lot of positioning work these days to try to simplify a company's corporate narrative. And the first thing that I tell people once you develop your positioning is take that and repurpose it for your website because it'll go a long way. But I guess companies are very product focused or feature focused or price focused. And the reality is they're not customer focused.
00:17:49
Speaker
That's the thing even higher up in the pecking order than positioning, in my opinion. You have to understand the why. Why would someone want your product? What is it about them? What is it about their needs or their wants or whatever that would drive them towards... Well, I guess that is positioning, really. What's a connection between you and them?
00:18:16
Speaker
And you got to get that across right away. Because if you don't, you lose them. Nobody's going to watch even a 60-second video, product demonstration, or a blog post you wrote about this and that. I mean, yeah, maybe later. But right now, we're just meeting at a cocktail party. And I'm not telling you my life history yet. We haven't gotten there yet.
00:18:49
Speaker
Let's assume that your positioning is good, your website works, a conversion happens and a prospect turns into a customer and a lot of what you write about
00:19:00
Speaker
on LinkedIn has to do with onboarding and the magic of onboarding that turns a customer into an engaged customer. What do you see as the biggest mistakes when it comes to onboarding and what are the must-dos? What are the things that a company must do right from the onset to make sure that onboarding is almost like a launch tool into something bigger and better?
00:19:25
Speaker
The biggest problem people have in onboarding is not knowing what their customers actually want. During the sales process, there's not a back and forth about what your goals are. If you sign up with us, what do you hope to accomplish?
00:19:41
Speaker
And so the onboarding process doesn't reflect that at all. It's generic. These are the steps we want you to go through to be our customer, which is not what customers want. They want to solve their problems right out of the gate.
00:20:02
Speaker
To the extent that you can make it personal, like have a work, you know, it could be an online workshop or some live training, you know, and to the extent that you actually have someone assigned as either an account manager or definitely assigned as an account team, that's even better because then they know they're being taken care of. Otherwise, you just get a stream of emails.
00:20:27
Speaker
you know, do this and oh, I noticed you didn't do that. And it's like, okay, leave me alone. I'm trying to get things done here. It's that lack of personalization, that lack of customization, you know, that I think is typically what drives people away, even during a free trial.
Marketing Automation vs. Personalization
00:20:47
Speaker
I think it's one of the negatives when it comes to marketing automation is that we put people into buckets or big giant groups and we assume that they have the same experiences and the same needs and the reality is that people buy solutions for lots of different reasons and I think you're right when it comes to onboarding it really is about we know you have or we think you have.
00:21:07
Speaker
specific problems and here's how to solve them using our product here's what you do and then. Based on people's activity then you can personalize the onboarding experience your emails are a lot more relevant a lot more personal a lot more effective we don't do that we just hit the button and hit play and let it go from there and i think again as marketers we leave a lot on the table leave a lot of opportunities untapped.
00:21:32
Speaker
Yeah. And the worst thing I've seen is people actually drive, forcing you into some sort of tutorial program that you have to go through these steps and sort of get certified as this and that. I mean, and that's the last thing people want. They want to skip right to the thing that they were most interested in and dive in.
00:21:55
Speaker
show some dashboards and move on. And so you just can't assume that. You can't assume anything. You have to ask.
Future of Marketing Teams
00:22:06
Speaker
Couple of final question. One has to do with the future of marketing, and this is obviously a loaded question, but as we move forward and as companies reset or recalibrate their marketing activities, there's going to be some back and forth when it comes to actually how to structure their marketing organizations. Do you do things in-house or do you use freelancers, contractors,
00:22:30
Speaker
agencies and fractional executive, the mix could be completely different from what we saw a year or 18 months ago when a lot of companies had big, fully staffed marketing teams. Do you have any thoughts on how things may unfold and how marketing organizations may be structured going forward? Well, I think it depends on a couple of trends. So one of them you mentioned already, the automation trend.
00:22:59
Speaker
If that continues, so the idea there is that more and more stuff that marketers do gets automated up to and even including creating content, maybe even creating strategy for SEO and things like that. I mean, if that really continues unabated, that will have a fairly significant impact, not only on the size of marketing teams, but who works on a marketing team.
00:23:29
Speaker
You're going to have a bunch of tech people, basically, and a strategist. But it could go another direction. And I think it actually is heading in this direction. It's just a little slower than I would have liked. And that is in the opposite direction, more human to human, more personal, more brand forward, and less about conversion and automation.
00:23:59
Speaker
So those are two competing trends. And I think if that trend starts to win out more, you're going to see more hiring of content marketers and designers and brand marketers and even customer marketers and product marketers. Because there's going to be more of this human to human element where you really need expertise at the daily level.
00:24:24
Speaker
that's really hard to automate. And you're kind of seeing that too. You're seeing that it's harder and harder to find talent out there. So it's not quite clear which direction we're going in. And whether or not that's outsourced, that could go either way too, because there are specialty agencies, more and more agencies are sort of, they focus on one or two things and less sort of agency of record.
00:24:54
Speaker
And then consultants sort of the same way. You see more specialized consultants in things like product led growth or ABM or something. And then the fractional CMO or C, C whatever. Uh, I think that's going to increase because there's more and more change in the marketplace all the time. And you see companies coming and going, you see people coming and going.
00:25:23
Speaker
So you need leadership. Having people available for a short period of time is at least one good solution to that.
Brand Content & Storytelling
00:25:31
Speaker
I agree with you. I see the brand content trend gaining more momentum because as companies look to differentiate, everyone's doing automation. It's table stakes. But if you can carve out a unique and
00:25:47
Speaker
Interesting brand through different kinds of marketing activities i think that's going to be more more important and i think fractional you and i are obviously biased because real fractional marketers but get the strategic fire power.
Book Recommendations & Travel Plans
00:26:00
Speaker
That you need when you need it one final question recommendations on a good book that you've read recently and when we can travel internationally where would you like to go.
00:26:13
Speaker
Well, I have a sort of an anti-commercial against sales and marketing books. I don't read very many of them because a lot of them are just kind of methodologies or retreads.
00:26:27
Speaker
But I have some exceptions. I recently read Product Led Growth by Wes Bush. That's really good. If you're really interested in how SaaS companies can drive revenue growth through just making their products more friendly, it's a very interesting read. Of course, there's Never Lose a Customer Again by Joey Coleman. That's a classic read on retention and growth.
00:26:58
Speaker
through customer service, customer journey. The third one I like is Marketing Rebellion by Mark Schaeffer, which is all about the human-to-human trend that's been coming on. Your last question is an easy one for me because we actually had our vacation canceled in 2020 to Portugal and Spain.
00:27:21
Speaker
We haven't rescheduled, but we're planning to. We really want to get to those two places. And you never know, I'm game to actually move somewhere like that one of these days. So we'll see.
Conclusion & Contact Information
00:27:33
Speaker
Yeah, I think a lot of us are looking for an escape of any kind, whether it's Portugal in Spain or it's going to the cottage up north or simply visiting friends again. Doing something different would be a great change of pace. One final, final question is if people want to learn more about what you do and the services that you provide, where can they find that out?
00:27:56
Speaker
Well, as you know, I'm on LinkedIn every day. So if you really want to get my attention, it's just J-M-C-T-I-G-U-E is the last part of my LinkedIn profile. And then www.customerjourneymaestro.com is where I hang out on the web. Look forward to connecting up with anyone and everyone.
00:28:23
Speaker
Well, thanks, John. This has been a great conversation. Your insight into the customer journey and all things marketing has been refreshing. It's another example of someone that I met on LinkedIn, reached out to, developed a relationship, and had jumped onto my podcast. So it's finally good to do something professional together after all our conversations. Same to you, Mark, and thanks for having me. Enjoyed it. Thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark.
00:28:51
Speaker
If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. For show notes of today's conversation and information about John, visit marketingspark.co. If you'd like to learn more about how I help B2B SaaS companies as a fractional CMO, a strategic advisor, and coach, send an email to mark at markevans.ca. I'll talk to you next time.