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Marketing to Customers AFTER They Become Customers: Linda Komisak
48 Plays4 years ago
Marketers love chasing, engaging, and nurturing prospects.
Marketers love MQLs and revelling in sexy metrics how about well they are performing.
But once a prospect turns into a customer, marketers move on to the next shiny prospect.
A customer becomes the responsibility of customer success or customer service.
Linda Komisak, CEO of Upturn Consultants, believes this is the wrong approach.
Not marketing to customers, she says, means you're:
- not making enough of an effort to keep them happy and loyal
- not educating to get more value from your product
- not creating opportunities to expand their business with you.
In this Marketing Spark podcast, Linda talks about how marketing to customers matters and why "trusted advisors" play a key role in making sure customers are served properly.
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Transcript
Introduction to Marketing Spark Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi, I'm Mark Evans, and you're listening to Marketing Spark, the podcast that delivers insight, tools, and tips from marketers and entrepreneurs in the trenches in 20 minutes or less. Here's the thing about marketers. We love to focus on attracting, engaging, and winning prospects. But once prospects become customers, well, we pretty much ignore them. We assume that they're happy once they're in the fold, end of story.
00:00:26
Speaker
The reality is that marketing and sales need to focus on customers as much as prospects.
Guest Introduction: Linda Commissath
00:00:32
Speaker
On today's show, I'm excited to talk with Linda Commissath about a better and different approach that B2B companies should take to customers. Hey Mark, thanks for having me on. I'm excited to be here. I have a lot of passion around this topic.
00:00:45
Speaker
I'm sure you do and we'll get into that. Like I said off the top, the vast majority of marketing is focused on prospects. They're sexy, they're compelling, engaging with them and winning them is very exciting. But once a prospect turns into a customer,
Why Do Marketers Ignore Clients Post-Acquisition?
00:01:01
Speaker
as i said marketers move on that's it we don't pay attention to them we don't care my question as a starting point is why is that like does it have to do with marketing incentives metrics compensation and what's the danger of not marketing to customers loaded question i understand let's break that apart so what we start with why are customers for the most part ignored after they become customers.
00:01:27
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great question and a great place to start. I think there are a few things to consider. First is understanding the metrics that are driving your marketing activities. And that is probably a whole separate podcast. But I think it's really important to understand what you're measuring in marketing. But even more important than the metrics is really understanding that too few B2B SaaS companies really understand how to turn their existing client base into a revenue driver.
00:01:54
Speaker
in terms of expanding the platform and driving new business. There's so much data out there from Gartner and McKinsey around 2% increase in your retention, decrease your operating costs around 10 to 15% or so.
The Importance of Client Retention
00:02:10
Speaker
But an even more compelling metric
00:02:13
Speaker
is that it's 60 to 70 times easier to sell into an existing client than it is to sell into a new client. You have about a 5 to 15% chance of selling into a net new client. So making sure that your existing clients are happy and optimizing their investments in your platform is the place to start. But let's be honest, everybody needs to hit an ARR number and the easiest thing to do is to go land a big account. Instead of
00:02:40
Speaker
doing all the work of doing the upsell in your existing accounts, if you could just sell that one big deal that would take care of your ARR number for the rest of the year. Have you heard that? I see that happening a lot in B2B SaaS companies.
00:02:57
Speaker
I hear that and it is a very compelling proposition to go out there and leverage your marketing and, and sort of reap the benefits of your marketing to bring new customers into the fold. But at the same time, something that you said off the top is that it's easier to win more business from an existing customer than it is to attract a new customer. So you would think that there would be a part of your marketing activities would be focused on not only making your existing customers happy, but getting them to buy more.
00:03:26
Speaker
Right. That should be the easiest thing
Engaging Clients Beyond the Initial Purchase
00:03:29
Speaker
for you to do. I love to call this elevating the order of client complaint. In a typical B2B business, you have the acquire stage, the deploy stage, the stabilize, and then support stage. What happens is, sales sells to a buyer. The user is not the buyer or the stakeholder who needs to get reports out of that platform is not the buyer. But the conversation with that client becomes around the issues list that develops during the deployment phase.
00:03:57
Speaker
and your executives who bought are going to totally disconnect from a conversation around the issues list. But then now you're in the support phase and you want to have a conversation with that executive who bought your platform and you can't get to them. You can't get past their gatekeeper because they don't want to hear about the issues list. It's really one of the best things that marketers can do in that situation is create value for those executives through each stage of that process.
00:04:27
Speaker
During the sales stage, we're helping them understand what KPIs are important for them and helping them paint a picture of what success looks like on the platform. And the best thing that happens as that client moves through their journey with you is that you're elevating their order of complaint. They have stopped complaining about the issues list. You've solved their problems and the reasons that they purchased your platform.
00:04:50
Speaker
And now you know that once you've solved those problems, they have new things to solve. So when you can bring some proactive industry insight into those relationships, it's a game
Role of Trusted Advisors in Client Relationships
00:05:00
Speaker
changer. It's a value driven optimization conversation about the platform that will bring your executives coming back for more.
00:05:09
Speaker
For many organizations though, that's a paradigm shift in how they approach marketing and sales because after customer comes into the fold, once you get them on board, then it becomes the role in the companies that I've worked for is that you have a customer success team. And I look at them as they put out fires. If a customer has a problem, they have an issue, they can't figure out how to use the product, then customer success will have these, you know, the holder hand.
00:05:34
Speaker
They'll make sure that the users know what they're doing and solve any problems, but there's no selling going on. There's no marketing going on. So that's one thing. And the other thing that you said that resonated with me is
00:05:47
Speaker
assuming the role of the trusted guide. So you're not doing customer service, which is really what customer success does is you're actually nurturing a relationship. You're, you're discovering, you're providing insight, you're continuing to build trust and build that relationship. And then when you ask for the upsell or the asks for a longer contract, you're in a better position. Does that make sense? Is that, is that the way it should work theoretically?
00:06:11
Speaker
Yeah, so I guess my suggestion is to retool your client success and account management teams and really understand the difference between your hunters and farmers. And then, of course, you mentioned earlier that compensation can be a part of this conversation as well as it should be.
00:06:31
Speaker
What you're really doing in this amped up CSM account management model is you're introducing the trusted advisor in the sales cycle during discovery and demo. So you have this trusted advisor who's not only a platform expert, but an industry expert as well, who's listening to what the client's complaints or opportunities are for problems to solve, suggesting that they are thinking about it correctly, or maybe they haven't thought about something.
00:07:00
Speaker
and then going into a demo to specifically address that client's concerns and demonstrate how the product solves that. But then that relationship slips away when that project goes through deployment and stabilization. But that trusted advisor is coming back 45 days after Go Live on the platform to say, great, let's have our first QBR and let's talk about what you bought the platform for
00:07:28
Speaker
And the KPIs that we set during the sales cycle, here's how you're performing against those. Are these still important to you? Or have you thought about these things that we know are coming down the pike? And the way that marketing plays into that is, first of all, creating content that is very insight driven. I see a lot of B2B content that's about this feature or this product, but it doesn't
00:07:54
Speaker
include a lot of things that executives should be thinking about that are coming down the pike. So marketing plays a very tight role with these customer success managers or account managers, whatever you call them. These are really your trusted advisors who are bringing insights and things that the client hasn't yet thought about because they were so busy solving X problem.
00:08:17
Speaker
But that's where marketing can really partner tightly with those groups to help bring that together. The other thing that I think I've seen to be incredibly powerful is when a company offers a monthly lunch and learn type of thing. And this is not for your end users to get on and talk about their issues. This is for executives get on and get some insights into how similarly sized organizations are performing on the system.
00:08:46
Speaker
what problems they're solving. And marketing can help drive that as well through, here's why you jumping in this lunch call on a Thursday or a Friday is important, and here's what you're going to learn from it. And then having somebody on the call who's actually talking about optimizing the value of the investment that they've made with that platform.
00:09:08
Speaker
Let's take a step back into the trusted advisor. So who was that person? Are they a marketer? Are they sales? Are they a hybrid role? And how do you make sure that they're always there throughout the whole buyer's journey? So from awareness to consideration to decision to purchase and then afterward, put some more sort of color around that person, their roles, their skills. First of all, sales is introducing them as a value add to the partnership. So during the sales cycle, this trusted advisor is added
00:09:39
Speaker
as a value add to the client. So this person, this type of person is going to be available through to you, through us throughout your journey, and they'll be helping you optimize. So that's number one is setting it up for success. The second thing is who's sitting in those seats are people who are platform experts. So they know the platform better than the client does. And we'll talk about that in a second and why that's important.
00:10:03
Speaker
But they're also industry leaders. They're following the industry. They're paying attention to what the competition is doing. And they understand what regulations or what changes or they have insights into what's coming down the road. So these are people who are not just issues list managers. They are thought leaders and they are experts on the platform. Here's an interesting thing that happens. I see this frequently in B2B SAS.
00:10:32
Speaker
Once the client gets into that support stage and they're in the system using it every day, understanding how to get the most out of it that they want, they now become experts on your platform. So you can't send a customer service manager in or a support person in or a sales person in to talk about the platform because the client at that point very likely knows more than you do.
00:10:56
Speaker
I've seen that repeatedly. So it's important to put somebody in there who is aware of all of the cool factor that your platform has to really help the customer get the most out of it.
00:11:09
Speaker
So that's a pretty specialized role. I mean, they've got to have product expertise. They've got to know the product inside out so that, so they can demonstrate the value and the usability and how you can use it to move your business forward. But they also have to be thought leaders. They have to have insight. They have to really have that big picture view of the world. That's, if I can find a person like that, man, they'd be super valuable. I mean, they could do a lot to attract customers and keep them. For sure.
00:11:36
Speaker
And it plays out, right? Once you have an existing client base that is optimizing on your platform and
Partnering on Innovation and Peer Reviews
00:11:43
Speaker
they're innovating with you. I hear marketers talk a lot about success papers or marketing white papers. I like to call them innovation papers. And that's how, this is how I leverage those. When you partner with your clients to talk about how they're innovating on your platform, guess what?
00:12:00
Speaker
you by default are innovative because you're providing them the platform that they're innovating on. So when you can have those conversations and partner with your customers to innovate, you get to ride the coattails of that. And that's where marketing is incredibly powerful. The people I like to see put into these roles often come out of the client delivery organization or out of the professional services organization, because they do understand the configuration and the setup of the system.
00:12:29
Speaker
And I think they can pretty easily be taught how to optimize those features and functions to fit into a thought leadership model. So it's a little less technical and a little more strategic around how to leverage the platform, but you can really pull some great resources onto a trusted advisor team that come out of the delivery organization.
00:12:52
Speaker
The other thing that you mentioned is lunch and learn. So just so I understand it correctly, is this a lunch and learn with a particular client or this be a group of clients collectively discussing what their issues are and the company in turn providing insight into how customers can get more value out of the product?
00:13:12
Speaker
Your trusted advisor should be having regular client calls, whether that's a monthly or a biweekly call with them, depending on where they are in their journey. I wouldn't recommend that these lunch and learns are per client. I would say it's a quarterly event or a monthly event. And you know your client base better than anybody else. However, it's an invitation for those buying executives to come and understand how they're doing
00:13:37
Speaker
with these investments that they've made. So they'd be listening to other executives talk about how they're optimizing and leveraging the platform that they've purchased. And it's an opportunity for the executives to share in that venue, if you will. Yeah, it's really talking about benchmarks. So what are the things you should be measuring? What are the things you are measuring? And how are your peers and competitors measuring? That's really important insight for an executive.
00:14:05
Speaker
Hey, that makes a lot of sense. I have a client who has what they call these peer reviews where they pull in customers and prospects, and it's a group learning session. It's about insight, best practices, and what happens is that the clients get lots of ideas about how they can use the platform better, and prospects get excited because they see right in front of them success stories and people who are actually working together to solve issues. That's really interesting to me, and I think that's something that a lot of B2B executives can
00:14:33
Speaker
Can use it as an important takeaway the other thing that i want to talk to you about his compensation marketers in many respects get paid you know they get paid a flat fee there's not in some maybe they get. Performance bonuses sales guys are are sales people are obviously compensated that way but how should marketers be compensated differently for.
Compensation Models for Marketers
00:14:52
Speaker
doing a good job of marketing to existing customers. I don't know what the mechanisms might be, but how do you change the rules so that a marketer is incentivized to pay attention to people once they come into the fold? Well, I think there's two ways to look at that. The first is when the company does better, their bonuses will be better. So when the company has more money, if the company is selling more and expanding more, they'll have more money for bonuses. So that's, that's the first way to look at it.
00:15:20
Speaker
But the other thing that I've started to work on with customers is allocating a certain amount of the contract value, the annual contract value. So for purposes of this conversation, let's say your annual contract value is $100,000 allocating a half a percent or even 1% to marketing activities on that account can be powerful. And here's how. So the customer comes and says, I need
00:15:46
Speaker
a custom report. Let's say that comes into the customer success team. Then they have to go to the product team and see if there's somebody who can build a report, if it's in the pipeline, whatever it is. Then somebody will have to figure out how much it costs to give this custom report back to the client, even if 10 other customers are asking for it. That's the way it works today.
00:16:09
Speaker
I'm suggesting that we give marketing a budget for existing accounts that's based on the annual contract value that's sitting out there so that if they want to invite a customer to an event and they want to pay for the hotel, the travel, they have a budget to do that. So if you want a customer to come and speak on your behalf at an event, and in the COVID world, I understand this is a little more complicated, but you have money to do that.
00:16:38
Speaker
running around the company trying to figure out how you're going to get this client to this event to speak on your behalf. I would say in terms of compensation for marketing, if the company is doing better, they should be doing better. But give them more budget to work on existing accounts, and I recommend allocating a portion of the ACV or the ARR to those existing accounts.
00:17:03
Speaker
One of the other things that I want to talk to you about is your stories. You've got a very interesting journey from being a sales consultant to where you're at now from
Linda's Journey from Nurse to Consultant
00:17:12
Speaker
where you started. So talk to me a little bit about where you started and how did you come to where you're at right now and maybe talk about the business that you're running right now, the consulting business and the services that you're offering and the approach that or the methodology that you're using to help companies sell more and really pay attention to their customers.
00:17:31
Speaker
Oh, this could be another 30 minutes. In less than five minutes. So I'm a registered nurse by background. I worked trauma for years in major metropolitan areas. And as an end user of health care technology, found it incredibly cumbersome to use. The people who were buying the technology for me to use were looking for
00:17:57
Speaker
accountability, but they certainly weren't addressing efficiency. And there was a lot of disconnect between what the buyers bought and what the users were using. And over time, I had an opportunity to go work with some of these large vendors and really work on closing that gap of experience between what the buyer is experiencing and what the user is experiencing, and really creating a better
00:18:21
Speaker
customer journey across all of the personas within a client. The idea of a consultancy has been rattling around in my head for a long time because I think it's easier to make some of these changes from the outside than it is from the inside. I think when you're trying to make these kinds of changes to sales and marketing and delivery teams, it can feel a little bit political.
00:18:45
Speaker
Whereas if you're coming in from the outside, it's a lot easier to say, here are your opportunities and here's what I've seen work. Where do you want to start? And I get a lot more engagement coming at it from that perspective than being on the inside of it. So it's been kind of a convoluted journey, but we're seeing great results with our customers that are implementing this trusted advisor approach earlier in the sales cycle and continuing it through the entire client lifecycle. How long have you been running your consulting business?
00:19:13
Speaker
I had a consulting business from 2004 to 2016. It was kind of a side hustle, if you will. But I went all in in 2020. So my current consultancy has been up for about four months. And how's that going? Because you're very active on LinkedIn, which is great if you're looking to have conversations and engage with people. But overall, what's it been like to operate amid this strange time in which we're operating?
00:19:37
Speaker
It's been great. My first four clients were all word of mouth customers, so people who had seen the results that I was able to deliver were referring me to their friends, which is the best marketing. I didn't have to pay a dime for that marketing. That was just brilliant.
00:19:54
Speaker
But this lesson in that is that B2B companies can have that as well. You can have your happy clients out there telling their peers and colleagues how great it would be for them to work with you as well. So that's the lesson I've learned is when you deliver really well and you are able to demonstrate optimization and value, people will sing your praises all day long. And that's how it's worked for me.
00:20:16
Speaker
That's awesome advice for any marketer or any salesperson.
Conclusion and Resources
00:20:19
Speaker
So Linda, where can people find you and learn more about what you do? So you can check me out at upturnnow.com. And there's a wealth of information on that page. I have a services brochure that you can download in the menu bar at the top. And if you're interested in having a conversation to learn more about how I might be able to help you, you can schedule 30 minutes for free right on my calendar at a time that's convenient for you by just clicking the link in the contact page.
00:20:47
Speaker
We as marketers obviously are fascinated with prospects, but I think the lesson here is that your customers, people who you've already sold to successfully are as good a material as anything else. I mean, I think there's value in paying attention to your customers and really serving them properly and keeping them for a long, long time.
00:21:05
Speaker
Well, thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review and subscribe via iTunes or your favorite podcast app. If you like what you heard, please rate it. For show notes of today's conversation and information about Linda, visit marketingspark.co slash blog. If you have questions, feedback, we'd like to suggest a guest or want to learn more about how I help B2B companies as a fractional CMO consultant and advisor, send an email to mark at marketingspark.co. I'll talk to you next time.