5 Brilliant Tips To Successfully Align Marketing & Customer Success

Marketing & Customer Success: Two Sides Of The Same Coin

In many B2B enterprise organizations, unintentional silos exist between Pre-Sales and Post-Sales teams. Within this chasm, a sibling rivalry of sorts exists between Marketing and Customer Success, between the marketing of a prospect and the marketing of a customer, and even between Marketing and Retention Marketing. However, these functions are more similar than they are different.

Marketing teams understand the fundamentals of effective and powerful communication, what value actually is to your customers, and how your different customer segments respond to messaging. Customer Success, on the other hand, is in tune with customer needs, goals and challenges. When they combine their knowledge, organizations are more effective at thoughtfully engaging with their users and retaining and expanding their customers at scale.

In this article, we breakdown 5 expert ideas to successfully align your Marketing and Customer Success functions to supercharge your scale engine and boost customer engagement.

1. Break Down Barriers Through A Regular Customer Success & Marketing Meeting Cadence

One of the most crucial steps in connecting Marketing and Customer Success is simply to break down any pre-existing silos. It’s simple, but not necessarily easy. The best way to do this is by instituting regular cadences between your Customer Success, Marketing and Retention Marketing teams. During these meetings, Customer Success can share key insights, such as changing usage and outcomes trends, common customer questions, customer success stories and potential case study and testimonial candidates. Marketing can share messaging for engagement and upsell opportunities based on segmentation, analytics, market trends and content testing. Crucial and continuous knowledge sharing will help all teams optimize their strategy, messaging and engagement with your customers across the customer lifecycle.

2. Share Your Customer Data Cross-Functionally

Marketing teams possess a wealth of valuable segmentation and customer lifetime value (CLV) data that usually doesn’t make it past the Sales barrier. Conversely, Customer Success has access to useful usage and engagement data that doesn’t make it past the bridge back to Sales. While sharing this information during scheduled organization-wide meetings is a great first step, constant communication of the most up-to-date information is crucial for both teams to create relevant campaigns. Your teams need a platform that will not only help them record, access, and analyze data but also share it easily across departments. Identify which platform – CRM, analytics tools, Customer Success platform – will best facilitate the automation and sharing of this data to keep both teams on the same page. This will help equip Marketing and Customer Success with the latest data and insights they need to ensure a consistent customer experience from Pre-Sales to Post-Sales. 

You can also consider integrating your systems to grant key Marketing contacts access to your Customer Success platform. This will give your teams a clear view of important customer feedback to help them identify your most valuable and engaged customers and analyze how your customer segments are responding to your campaigns. Outfitted with the latest data and important insights, your Marketers and Customer Success Managers (CSMs) will be fully equipped to lead impactful customer interactions.

3. Coordinate Your Marketing & Customer Success Calendars

Siloed teams inevitably lead to siloed content calendars. In many organizations, the Marketing team has their own content calendar, usually planned months in advance, and Customer Success has a separate calendar or triggered messaging flow to engage with customers along their customer journey. With no insight into either calendar from the other team, customers receive myriad, and sometimes conflicting, messages that can make them feel like they’re getting spammed.

To prevent this, it’s vital that Marketing and Customer Success not only share their calendars with each other, but also collaborate on a shared calendar that enables consistent messaging and allows for content cross-pollination. For example, if Marketing is promoting a new webinar series through email or on the website, your Customer Success Managers can pick up that promo and include it in their interactions with customers. Some users will delete anything that looks like Marketing promotion but by having your CSMs share and amplify this content, you’ll help that message meet its mark by routing through a person and personalizing the experience. As an added benefit of coordinating your calendars, your teams can leverage each other’s content instead of building everything from scratch.

4. Create Joint Initiatives Between Marketing & Customer Success

Marketing’s broad view of customers combined with insights from Customer Success’ daily customer interactions is a powerful combination that can boost your campaign outcomes. If your Marketing team is gearing up for a new product introduction with a thorough go-to-market campaign, create a joint initiative with your Customer Success team. Together, they can extend this campaign to their high-touch customers through coordinated templates and to low-touch customers through their scale engine. In the process, you will collect important and valuable customer data so that you can see the end-to-end impact of the campaign. Marketing will greatly benefit from this joint initiative by leveraging CS’ user segmentation, messaging and engagement strategies, enriching the response data with customer usage and risk insights.

5. Measure Marketing & Customer Success Collaboration On Customer Outcomes

The metrics tracked and measured by Marketing and Customer Success are vastly different; but, you need to measure CS and Retention Marketing on some joint metrics focused on customer outcomes in order to successfully analyze the success of joint collaborations. This may include product adoption and activation, for example. Since onboarding is one of the most crucial points in the customer lifecycle, Marketing should develop campaigns that optimize this experience. Other joint metrics should cover customer expansion; for instance, Marketing can develop triggers that indicate when a customer is ready for a new product and build corresponding workflows to reveal these opportunities as they arise. Accurate measurement of the value that each customer realizes from your messaging and campaigns will optimize each team’s ability to drive effective engagement with your customers consistently and at scale.

Drive Powerful Engagement Across Your Customer Lifecycle

A customer’s journey with your business usually begins with Marketing and carries on to the Post-Sales motion through Customer Success. All too often, there’s a disconnect between Marketing and Customer Success that prevents consistency between the customer experience that’s promised and the one that’s actually delivered. To prevent this from happening, you need to bring these teams together through regular knowledge sharing meetings, joint initiatives, and shared outcomes (metrics). Armed with a closely connected Marketing and Customer Success function, your organization will be ready to drive a powerful engagement motion across your customer lifecycle. 

Uniting siloed functions across your business requires an organization-wide focus on your most important asset: your customers. Follow these 5 steps to create and scale a Voice of Customer program that drives deeper customer relationships and helps your business become a truly customer-centric organization.