The Importance of Customer Success When Creating Marketing Initiatives

On today’s episode of Aligned, we’re entering part three of our five and fifteen series about revenue operations. Specifically, this episode focuses on customer success. 

• Why does it matter? 61% of SMB businesses report that more than half of their revenue is coming from repeat customers, and research shows 89% of customers switch to a competitor if they have a poor customer experience.
• Even more important is that a customer, no matter how long they’ve been a customer of your business, can and will retreat all the way back to stage two of a customer journey after a bad customer service experience (where they decide if you matter to them). 

• Moral of the story? Everything can be linked to cognitive marketing.

• Cognitive marketing defines six stages in the change from unaware that something exists or unaware of how something might help you that could be a product or service.

• A few questions to ask yourself when starting the cognitive marketing process: What intention do you have? What plans do you have? How have you mapped out that part of the journey?
• Cognitive marketing is fundamental to a good customer success program. But how does it help the bottom line? People will refer others, leading to net new customers. These people who attract others provide huge value, we’re talking 600% to 1,400% more value, than typical lead generation. 
• That's a reference to Net Promoter Score methodology, which is a simple way for a company to understand where it stands. 

What are some of the negative methods people attract new or repeat customers?

• People are taught to leverage their personal networks to try to gain new business. What’s the downside? When a sales member leaves, they take that business because it was built on their relationship.
• That's the issue that we see a lot in customer success is that it's just a one-off loyalty program (think BOGO coupons.) And what you're really missing are metrics, in terms of what you should be reporting on and what should you be held accountable for?

The recommended methods to evolve customer success:

• Pay attention to the onboarding and handoff from marketing to sales
• But shift the point of focus from your product or service and talk about the customer
• Ask regularly - ask a lot of customer feedback and have a structure to listen