The roles of customer success and marketing are different, and yet interdependent. The former interacts with customers to help them derive maximum value from the products they buy.
The latter communicates with them for a multiplicity of reasons – acquisition, retention, cross-selling, upselling, referrals and more.
“The ultimate goal of any organization is to keep customers delighted so that they continue to use and evangelize the products.”
The customer success team members do a great job in this regard since they stay connected with customers and understand their mindsets better. But they need ammunition to function effectively. Here’s where marketing steps in. Marketing can chip in by assisting the customer success teams in more ways than one. That’s because they ‘connected first’, sales closed the deal and customer success took over.
This is the age of omnichannel communication and distributed business operations. So, it’s a prudent decision to have both marketing and customer success function in lockstep at business brainstorming sessions. Let’s examine four common reasons why marketing should be involved in customer success initiatives:
They Know Thy Customers
Team marketing has done its bit from the outset – even before the customer became a customer! They identified the personas, developed content that is likely to appeal to them and aligned the same to the appropriate stage in the buying funnel. In short, they created prospects out of leads and customers out of prospects. So, they know what communication strikes a chord with the different segments of customers.
They also know that they are accountable for the communication assets they create and the campaigns they launch. Sales will expect a steady stream of leads from marketing, while the business owners will require them to justify the spends from an ROI perspective. But the fact is that their level of involvement in customer success influences their readiness to face the aforesaid predicament.
They Craft All the Communication
Marketing helps develop the communication assets required at every stage of the customer’s journey with the product/brand. Be it for devising a lead generation strategy or tackling a post-sales conundrum, marketing can create/source the necessary arsenal. This saves time and effort since they have defined the brand guidelines and templates for any form of communication the business units require.
Experience has proven that the best communication is a result of a synthesis of creativity and business acumen. The latter can be drawn even from customer feedback. And that’s why today’s customer success team members are being invited to review marketing campaign ideas, while marketing is adding value by providing insights for customer conversations.
They Can Generate Talking Points
No doubt, customer success knows the customer’s needs and wants really well. But marketing can take their inputs and translate them into powerful communication strategies that help retain customers longer. Also, they can offer support to customer success teams to keep the conversation going. Oftentimes, they inspire talking points by creating new offers and freebies that delight customers.
Customer success team members will also need videos, tutorials and guides to ensure that their customers never feel let down or lost after using the product. Marketing certainly has a role to play in the creation of all these assets.
They Create Avenues for Revenue
Customer success knows the pulse of the customers, but marketing knows how to translate needs and pain points into revenue-generating opportunities. Be it for cross-selling, upselling or referrals, marketing can help create impactful communication. It’s true that customer success hears the customer’s voice first. It’s also true that customer success is no more about scouting for opportunities to sell more to the same customers.
In today’s subscription-based business environment, customers know what’s available on the market; they just need to know what’s the best choice for their imminent needs. They also have a number of reasons and options to switch brands. Hence, a synergy between customer success and marketing is imperative for making the most of both covert and overt opportunities.
A proactive function, customer success demands the perfect fusion of three elements – technology, strategy and people – to deliver the expected results. According to market research,1 the customer success platforms market is expected to shoot up from USD 854 million in 2019 to USD 2,664 million by 2024 – that’s a CAGR of 25.5% for the period. This underscores the promise of customer success as a function. But they can’t go it alone to achieve the expected outcome. Marketing will be their default partner (not an interloper) in progress as well as success the moment their collaboration works in the customers’ favor, it starts working wonders for the business too.
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