How Customer Marketing is the Secret to New Customer Acquisition
Ever wondered how to attract new customers more effectively? The answer might lie in customer marketing. This blog uncovers how leveraging your existing customer base can be the key to acquiring new customers. By focusing on customer satisfaction, advocacy, and referrals, you can drive significant growth for your business.
Hey, how you folks doing today?
Thanks so much for coming to another club, PF event.
My name is Mark Hillens, co-founder of the club.
Today we're talking about customer marketing
and how it's the secret to new customer acquisition.
I mean, I did not even realize it's a Rayleigh,
but I matched my polo to the branding of Kumbia.
Kumbia.
(laughing)
- Good, spot on, it's a day.
- That is some style right there.
So yeah, a Rayleigh as a special guest,
she and I worked at Drift for many years together.
We both love oysters.
(laughing)
And she's now the head of product and customer marketing
and brand at DataGrail.
So Rayleigh, I wanna first ask you a question
right out of the gate.
We're gonna get right into it really fast, everyone.
And folks who joined in live,
we wanna make this super engaging and interactive.
So ask us questions, come off mute.
If you're listening to the recording,
hope you find this valuable, leave questions inside the club
and Rayleigh and I will do our best to respond to them.
But I wanna ask you a question out of the gate,
what is the intersection between product marketing
and customer marketing to your mind?
Like why are those two things together?
They've been together at a few of your jobs.
Tell us more.
- Yep.
Well, first off, thank you for having me.
Super excited to be here today with everyone.
And the intersection, I mean, this is gonna sound silly,
but is customers.
So product marketing, if you're really doing it well,
is you're the voice of your customer, right?
You are understanding their needs, their challenges.
You are understanding how they use your product
or would like to use your product
and you can bring that to inform your roadmap,
your understanding, obviously how using their challenges
to tell stories, right?
That resonate with them and other future customers, ideally.
So I think the core intersection really is customers.
Now there's different ways that,
and so I think you'll see it.
Some companies customer marketing, product marketing,
being together, like I have it at Datagrill,
I think as a company scales and gets really big,
you probably are gonna have separate functions
just given how much there is to do there.
But there's so much overlap,
which we're gonna get into today
in terms of how you're educating your customers,
which is really what you're doing
in product marketing and customer marketing, right?
Is you're educating them and you're making them,
essentially the voice in the face of your brand
to help you retain them, to help you get new customers
and ideally expand your existing customers as well.
I love that and to hone in on what we're gonna talk about today,
it's really these two channels.
It's of course customer led already,
but it's really community led.
It's like what you just said,
it's how do you partner with your customers?
Like a lot of people say,
"Yeah, I'm part of it with my customers."
There's different levels of partnership, right?
In fact, that's something I'm creating for the club now,
which is gonna be this maturity model
when it comes to partner led growth.
How do you actually partner
from a community member customer standpoint?
When we talk about today's event and context,
it's like how do you deeply partner with your customers?
We have 11 different plays you could run
and we have some stuff to tee up those plays
and that translates into what we believe,
Aurelion and I believe are these five pillars
that make up a good customer marketing strategy,
but it's more than just customer marketing
'cause the thing I hate about the term Aurelion,
it's like marketing is in this term.
- Yeah.
- It's not just marketing, right?
- Right.
- Right.
- So yeah, I mean, let's maybe unpack each five
of these things and as you listen to today's conversation,
as you ask questions,
like these are gonna be the underpinnings
of how we think about,
you know, using this is a tough word too,
but like, partner with your customers
to help you generate more revenue at the end of the day.
- Yep.
- Yep.
- Yeah, and I think the partnership is a great word
and it takes a form for different types of customers
that you have, right?
So we talk about you're gonna have your users, right?
Who are in the product on a daily basis
and then you're gonna have your champions
or executive buyers, right?
The folks that are not gonna be in your product
are probably if you have a community, right?
Like a Slack channel or however different forum
that you're hosting it,
you're not gonna have those executive buyers in there
for the most part, right?
That's just not where they hang out.
And so we think about our user groups,
I know we're gonna get into a little bit,
but thinking about the different,
think about your customer base
and thinking about how do you partner
in a effective way with each of them?
So in terms of how do they engage
with your product and with your brand
and how do you ideally want them to, right?
So an executive, I don't want an executive
really giving me feedback on the product
'cause they're not gonna be, that can be detailed enough.
But I do want them out engaging with other executives
at some of our target accounts
because they can speak the business value
of the problems we're solving,
how we're helping them generate more revenue
or lower costs or whatever,
reduce risk, whatever you're doing as a business.
And then those users are so important
to really making your product sticky and valuable
and driving that adoption.
And I know we'll get into this a little bit later too, Mark,
but those users are critical to thinking about,
actually creating educational content
about how you can better use your,
different customers can better use your product
'cause you're learning from your customers
about how are they using it?
And often I found,
we obviously have a perspective of any company
where you have a product,
if you know your product well, hopefully,
you know how you ideally built the product
for your customers to use it.
But you always are surprised to learn
different ways customers are using it
that is incredibly valuable to them
and that can be shared with other customers.
And so I think that's where understanding
how you want to partner and then leveraging that
in the way through different communities,
I've seen it be incredibly valuable.
- Yeah, and number two value,
it's related to product marketing.
A great product marketing strategy,
the foundation is value.
Like what is the quantifiable value
that you're delivering to the users and customers?
And how do you do that differently?
How do you do that from like a feature standpoint?
And then like what are the ways
in which you can deliver that value?
Which goes in number three, customization.
It's not personalization,
that term is way overused.
This is about how do you create customized solutions,
both like for your customers and with your customers,
but also how do you customize the relationship,
the partnership with each customer
to actually help them bring what they're doing
to other customers and to the community,
to your point of failure, right?
And then the two at the bottom,
I put them deliberately at the bottom
'cause that's the foundation of how you actually do one,
two and three.
Like if you're not providing the right level of support
in either a one to many model,
a one to few model or a one to one model,
and you could have all three of those,
or just one of those.
And if you're not providing the right education
to your point of failure,
then being able to actually retain the customer,
which is ultimately like the key goal
if you wanna create a longer-term partnership,
is gonna be much, much harder.
So education support,
we'll talk about some plays
that you can deliver for those two things,
are really how you customize,
how you create the value that they expect
during that sales process, you know, upfront,
and how you actually deepen the partnership.
There's a lot of ways to unpack this,
but oh, is this not being,
oh, sorry, is this not being shown?
I'm sorry, yeah, I wanted to make sure.
- I can see it.
- I wanna make sure,
can you even see the, okay, good, we got, okay, sorry.
Just wanna make sure we get, sorry, sorry folks,
if you were able to see that,
but I was just walking through that with the Rayleigh,
like these kind of five pillars
to how to think about customer-led growth,
how to think about customer marketing.
What we wanna do now is actually unpack customer-led growth
first from a crawl walk run standpoint.
So really, do you wanna go through this first?
'Cause like, if you're just starting out
with like customer-led growth, customer marketing,
we're trying to set the foundation
before we get into the tactical place.
- Yep, yep.
Yeah, so I think, saved one, right?
If you don't have a customer marketing program
or it's new to the company or there's a little bit there,
I think, start small, right?
As we said, crawl walk one, run.
So the easiest way to get started here
is finding your most engaged customers right away.
So every, that might be some of your oldest customers, right?
That might have been your first five customers
that have been along with your brand
throughout the whole ride.
It might be some new customers that you've signed recently
that are super happy.
I mean, whoever it is,
and I think the way that you can identify this is
one through usage data.
So like, how are they, who's using the data?
You can, if you use NPS scores at all
from your, if you send out NPS surveys,
who has high NPS surveys, your CS team is a great channel
to understand how happy are right there
with their customers day in and day out.
Who are those that are most happy,
that are giving feedback, that are asking questions?
If you have a community, again, like a SOC channel
or a community hosted place, who's engaging there,
that's where I would start.
And these probably are not gonna be
executive level customers or personas to start.
That's okay, that's okay.
And I think there could be based on whoever,
running the company and your executive team,
if there are a few friendlies at the executive level,
that's where I would start to see, okay,
can I get a couple customers from that level?
But those are some examples of how I would like
start to find who are those most engaged customers.
And then start to understand how are they using your product?
Like get on the phone with them,
talk to them, meet in person if you can, right?
And you can obviously get the feedback from CS,
but it's so much more impactful
to talk to the customers directly
and understand how they're using it,
what roadblocks are running into,
how else they would like to use it.
And we're gonna talk about a maturity model later,
but this is, if you think about building a maturity model,
you wanna understand the stages that your customers go through
in terms of growth of your product.
And so you might be delighted to learn
that some of these customers are further along
in the journey than others.
And then as we were talking about Mark,
like can use that to share with other customers.
So you can turn some of these originally
into some content about whether in some educational content,
like the best practices, or if it is an educational case study,
for example, that could be created out of this,
that's really great.
But it also could just be a way to facilitate conversations
amongst customers, or in the sales process,
if a rep has a customer with a similar type of challenge,
a good opportunity perhaps for a reference
to use this person to speak to that prospect,
to drive some new acquisition.
- Yeah, this is the great example of customer growth
and the intersection of content-led and event-led, right?
Like those examples that are really just gave
that we'll go through in more details
to begin to the 11 plays.
Also product-led, right, with the usage data
cannot under emphasize, or emphasize enough, I should say,
the idea of using usage data from a product-led standpoint,
both for free customers and paying customers, of course,
to actually get this thing spinning.
And then, of course, like you just said,
the community piece as well.
So stage two is where you have that foundation in place,
you've started to form partnerships with your customers
in a way that's more than just from a monetary standpoint
and a value standpoint.
It's like, no, let's actually work together on different things
and make you more of the star
and actually help you not just as a business
buying our product, but as an individual.
'Cause as you think about your customer partnerships,
you're trying to partner with the person.
Yeah, sure, the logo and the business is important,
but the more you can create that relationship
at the one-to-one level and maybe help them get a promotion,
help them look amazing to the board
or to their executive team.
Like that is where real magic starts to happen.
And one way to do that is in the second stage,
when it comes to things that you've done
are really with customer advisory boards,
voice of customer, et cetera.
Yeah, and I think I totally agree with everything you just said.
And I think the one thing I would add is,
that one-to-one is so powerful and seeing like,
can you multi-thread a little bit too,
like depending who you sell to?
Like if your product is being used by, let's say,
sales and marketing or CS and product,
whatever the departments are,
can you build a champion in a relationship,
a close one with a couple folks?
And I say that because I think what's key is that,
people leave bit companies all the time
and you wanna make sure too that you maintain
that really strong relationship
beyond with the company as well.
But it's strongest of you,
you can do it at the one-to-one level.
So finding that one person, maybe it's two, ideally.
But yeah, a cab, customer advisory board.
I love cabs.
We're doing one in a couple weeks at Datagrail,
which will be the first ever,
we did our first ever one at Drift a couple years ago.
And this is so valuable to engage your executive audience.
You're top 10 to 15 VIP customers
that can really inform your go-to-market strategy
that can give you feedback on your roadmap.
They're thinking high level, right?
They're thinking business.
So you can share your business plan for the next year.
You can share the 12-month roadmap.
You can share some messaging that you're thinking about,
going to market,
and they're gonna have really great feedback
and be really engaged.
And this is critical to,
as we talk about retention and expansion,
having the buy-in from these executives
is foundational, I think,
to growing those customers and expanding to new customers.
And then I think a voice of customer,
I actually love this as well,
because this is probably where you can scale.
So there's many ways to do voice of customer.
So you can try to do it at scale with surveys.
If you aren't at that level,
you can just do interviews,
but this is really very data-driven, right?
And you can understand what are your customers saying,
what do they care about?
There are external, like, win-loss programs you can use,
but there's also just your internal data
from literally the voices of your customers,
from feature requests they're giving,
whether you use Pendo or something else,
how they're using the product,
other feedback they're providing.
And that has a ton of value for not just your team
of growing out customer marketing,
but the product team, the CS team, right?
Your executive team, everybody is gonna wanna understand
customers, because the most successful businesses
are those that are truly putting the customer first
and thinking and building that way.
And I think voice of customers,
such a foundational piece to that.
And the third thing I'd add is,
as we talk about here, the marketing campaigns.
I think in stage two,
this is where you start to think about,
okay, how can I, again,
start to scale a little bit more at stage two
and generate some campaigns targeted at our customers,
not just at new business?
And I would say because this is still stage two,
this is probably not gonna be tailored
to each stage of the customer journey,
but maybe you start out with,
okay, we have different cohorts of customers.
I've customers using, you know, in a certain vertical,
or there are certain segment,
like an enterprise or mid-market,
or they are a certain buyer persona, right,
a certain role, or they use a certain product
if you're a multi-product company.
And that's how you can start to segment.
And then as you get more sophisticated,
I was talking about it later,
starting to think about, okay, you have those segments,
but then within that,
you're starting to segment based on where they are
in their journey with your brand,
in their customer journey,
to provide really valuable advice,
or offers, or just educational content really for them
along that journey.
- Well, which is stage three, right,
when you're starting to run, right?
I mean, and we'll talk,
we have a whole other slide on segmentation
and a few different ways,
and give you folks some ideas
on how to think about it and do it.
But I integrated revenue campaigns,
marketing campaigns are, I think,
are critically important at like stage two and three,
where your customers are,
maybe you build a campaign for your customers,
that's one way to think about it.
But then the other way to think about it is,
how do you actually get your customers
at in the campaigns that are going more after new business
and doing that with you, right?
Like where I'm not gonna say the customer is the offer,
but the different ways in which you can build trust
and that relationship with new folks
at the top, middle of the funnel,
can be greatly accelerated by doing the right things
with your customers as part of that integrated revenue campaign.
So there's gonna be a whole other masterclass
about that a little bit later.
We'll hint at that a little bit,
say 20 minutes in this event,
but going into this stage,
when you think about segmentation, Aurelia,
there's a lot of ways you can segment customers.
Like how would you think about like an approach
for someone kind of getting started
versus someone who's got like, you know,
hundreds of customers?
- Yeah, I think if you're getting started,
I would say, yeah, look at the,
you probably are selling to one segment already,
like say commercial or enterprise.
So I would probably start with the audience,
so the persona, that way, you know,
everybody is, there's different roles
and then you can be much more targeted
in your messaging to them
and know what to offer in terms of product innovation
and content because that's more likely
what they're gonna care about
based on what, you know, their workflow and their role.
So that's how it gets started at the earlier,
I'd say earlier stage.
And then I think as you advance,
I think you start to add in, you know, the segment,
I think you can add in the vertical.
I think you start to add in the stage of their journey
depending on how you've mapped that out at your business,
right?
Everybody has some different customer journeys,
awareness, consideration, purchase,
I mean, probably at the most basic level,
but get a lot more sophisticated than that.
I think some really great ways to do it,
depending on how well you track product usage is,
you know, are they using like their,
how they're using certain parts of your product
and offering very specific content to them
based on, you know, what they most recently,
like what they most commonly use
or what they most recently used, things like that.
And I think something that's critical on stage three
that you mentioned Mark is using your customers to sell.
Like there's no one better to sell your product
than the people using it who believe in it.
And so I'm a big believer in leveraging customers
at events, at dinners, mixing them with prospects.
As we talk about new business acquisition, right?
Prospects wanna hear from people like them
using your product.
And of course case studies and references that all helps,
but nothing beats a one-to-one conversation
with someone who's just like you
and you can get the good, you know,
really understand how they're leveraging your product,
the value they've seen from it.
And that brings them, you know, too,
because I think at the end of the day,
all purchases are somewhat emotional, right?
Like even at the highest enterprise level,
after procurement, after all these stages
and months and months, you're still gonna go with it.
And who do you feel is most trustworthy?
Like who do you feel confident in?
Do I trust it's gonna do this?
And I think customers,
leveraging customers in that capacity
is a really great way to,
on the new customer acquisition side,
get your prospects comfortable
that you can support them
and you're gonna be a long-term partner for them.
- Yeah, which is related to this next slide,
as we get closer to going through these 11 plays,
unpack this really quickly.
Before we do that though,
that stage three is where,
if you have a member led growth strategy,
to a good example of this is HubSpot Academy.
I know a few people are familiar with HubSpot Academy.
It's fun fact with that.
30% of the people in HubSpot Academy,
at least when I was at HubSpot still,
this is like end of 2018,
30% of the, there's millions at that point,
people were customers, users, free or paid,
70% were prospects.
And it did exactly what Aurelia just said.
We blended these audiences
and we're gonna talk about audience cross-pollination a second,
but member led growth is a beautiful play to create
when you're at these kind of more sophisticated levels
of customer led growth,
where you're taking the community and your customers
and you're bringing them together in one space
where they just chat.
They just meet, chat, chat, help each other.
That is kind of game over type situation.
And it gets the word of mouth flywheel
spinning extremely fast.
Anyone know where these six different words came from?
There's a source.
I know some of you folks have probably read the book.
This is one of the all time great books
from a product marketing standpoint,
a marketing standpoint, a sales standpoint.
Someone's gotta know them.
Throw it in the chat.
Anyone know?
Not coattler, nope, nope, nope.
Come on, someone's gotta know this.
All right, no one knows it.
I'm probably gonna ring a bell very quickly.
Chaldini, Robert Chaldini.
So, he's wrote a great book, "Influence."
Definitely gotta read that book.
I joke around like you don't read that book,
you're not a marketer or a sales person,
which is not true.
But really, it's gonna open your eyes up.
So, when you think about these six things,
we're not gonna go through each one,
but are rarely like everything we just talked about
hits on one of these six things.
Like from your point of view,
when you think about these six ways to influence people,
which is through human psychology,
which one do you really say,
oh man, this is one you just can't miss?
- Probably.
I think the first one, like obviously they all matter,
but to me, it's like the equation of,
I need to create value for you
before I can ask for anything in return.
So, I think that's the one I would put like at the,
I mean, it's listed number one,
but also if I were to choose only one,
that's the one I would do.
I think the second, which you didn't ask me,
but I would probably do authority
because people want, are looking to you
as experts in your product, in your brand,
and they don't know, we don't know what we don't know, right?
Like we didn't build the product,
we're doing other things.
Like I want you, Mark, to tell me how best to use
your product that you built,
or be able to answer my question.
So that would probably be my second choice.
- Yeah, and the more that you can be the broker,
going back to the comment I made about Member Let Growth,
and the customer and prospect meeting with you
being that broker, which is the liking principle.
Like that is super powerful, right?
I know, John, you were part of the HubSpot ecosystem
for a long time, inbound's coming up next week.
By the way, if you're going to inbound,
let us know in the chat,
Nick and I would love to meet up with you.
Like that is just a way to broker connections
and introductions and relationships
and partnerships that have already been created.
HubSpot is just a facilitator, facilitator, broker,
matchmaker, whatever you wanna say, right?
That's another way to think about customer-led growth
and customer marketing.
It does not have to be this like crazy, sophisticated
program, whatever, just, just, that's it, right?
Go ahead, really.
- And well, and I think one thing about
how reciprocation ties to liking is,
if I create value for you first, right?
And then ask for something like,
how do you influence people?
Like everyone's motivated in different ways,
you need to understand that, but at the heart of it,
you have to do something for somebody, right?
You're understanding what motivates them
and that's how you're able to influence them.
And so I think that, I love that connection
because as you, if you really understand,
then you know how to create value for them
and then you're starting to influence,
you're starting that liking process.
And as you said, that's so foundational and critical.
- Exactly.
So here's just one high level way to think about this stuff.
Like, we're not gonna go through this
for more than two minutes,
but how do you determine your customers
from an account standpoint that are great fits versus,
and we put buying intent here,
this could be any intent, product usage intent,
loyalty intent, loveability intent, right?
Like, how do you, going back to what I really were saying
in terms of voice to customer data collection
in a scalable way, non-scalable way?
Like, how do you figure out the X and Y axes
to then segment?
And ABCD needs just the quality of the account, right?
Some of these accounts you'll wanna partner with more,
some less, there's ICP, non-ICP,
but like if you don't go through a way to segment,
I think you're gonna miss, first off,
you're not gonna focus enough.
And the great, to be great at this,
you gotta start with high impact low effort, if you will,
'cause then you'll just start to get like,
whoa, this is amazing, we should invest more in this,
because this is typically a very under-invested thing
in marketing teams, right, or earlier,
so it's like, how can you show that low impact, low cost,
sorry, low effort, low cost to high impact?
This is kinda one way to think about it.
Anything you would add here though?
- Yeah, and I just think it's,
obviously you need to your company,
but thinking about what are the criteria
that makes your customers successful,
like in your product successful for them, right,
like a fit for them, so I know a drift,
and actually something we use at daygirls,
like looking at as a very specific criteria
is website volume, and that's a proxy
for certain things for us, right,
now that's one specific thing,
but we know that falls into like,
you're a good account fit, right, if you have this.
Now there's some other criteria
that need to be the case as well,
but starting to get really specific for your company
is just gonna help you do exactly what you just said,
Mark, of the low effort, high impact.
- Perfect, let me see, there's any questions about this.
I don't think so, so we could move on.
We're gonna play a game in just a second, two folks.
- Really, before we talk about the plays
and play this quick game,
talk to us about cross-pollination of audiences,
and how you thought about this,
and how you've done in the past some examples.
'Cause this is super important.
- Yeah, I think I brought up a little bit earlier
with bringing customers and prospects together
as an example of cross-pollination at events,
huge avenue to do that, dinners,
if you do like smaller prospect dinners, right,
or regional dinners that you're doing,
having your local customers come by there as well.
You can even do, I mean, Edriff,
we did those demo series where we hosted demos once a month
for prospects and existing customers,
and in fact, we would try to highlight when we could
or have a customer part of it,
speaking to it as well.
So those are probably some examples,
but I also think there's audience cross-pollination
in your existing customers.
There doesn't need to be prospects and customers.
I've done, I've brought them them together
just on like a Zoom call.
Like you get 10, five to 10 customers,
you get them together on a Zoom call,
'cause everyone's in different places, right,
if you can't get them in person.
And you might bring customers
who are in the same vertical together, right,
as an example, if you sell dessert verticals,
then they can talk to each other about,
how they're best using your product for their needs.
And it's funny, like I've run so many of these
where I've like a talk track, not talk track,
but I have talking points ready
to keep facilitate the conversation,
and I never need it because customers
are happy to be talking to each other.
They just get into their own conversation
and are sharing best practices
and building that network and connection.
And I think that's a multiplier effect, right?
Not just like their networking too
and meeting folks in their industry or like peers, right?
Maybe the same size company,
maybe the same persona,
maybe they sell the same audience.
There's many different ways of how I'd bring
some customers together.
And then I think the third is probably bring customers together
who have different point of view.
So at Drift as an example, we sold marketers,
we sold to sellers,
and then most recently we started to selling
to like CS and support teams.
And so we actually made a really big effort
at our customer advisory board and other events
to bring stakeholders that fit those different personas
because the value of Drift is tenfold
when you have all those teams working together
and thinking about their strategy,
their digital strategy together.
And so I think, yes, they're not gonna have the same workflows
and they're certainly gonna be using your product
in different ways,
but there's still a lot of great sharing
and understanding of that sort of multiplier effect,
I think of bringing those folks together.
- Well said.
All right, so I'm gonna pull something up
before we go to the 11 plays.
There's a fun game.
I told folks there was gonna be two winners to today's event.
They're gonna get these custom ceramic
really high-end mugs, Aurelia.
So let me, yeah, I'll get you one too, don't worry.
I'm gonna pull up the screen.
Do you all folks see the spinning wheel?
Spinning wheel?
I love the spinning wheel.
All right, here we go.
Let's spin it.
Let's see who wins the first mug.
If you win, just send me your address.
And Kyle, I know you already have one.
I'll send you some other type of tack or clap-f merch.
Ramley, congratulations.
You got a mug, you got a mug, all right?
So just send me your address in the chat.
And you got that.
Let's do one more time.
Let's see who's gonna win the next one.
I love coffee, Aurelia, you love coffee, right?
Yeah, yes.
I was saying mug, I mean, this is great.
You can use mug, you can use it for anything.
John, congratulations, you win the mug.
It's for tea, it's very nice.
So that was a little fun game.
All right, I'll stop.
There's plenty more opportunities to win mugs
if you want to, come to more of these.
Let me go back to the slides though.
We may have some merch at Inbound, Nick, is that true?
I think that is true.
Nick's the head of merch.
Actually, fun fact, my wife is the head of merch.
She knows it the best.
My wife Sarah, so let me actually just pull this back up.
Hold on, sorry.
One thing I don't love about Zoom
is how you do screen share.
I wish there was a slightly better way.
Here we go.
All right, let's get into the place.
Cusser marketing place.
My kids love these blocks.
So the reason why I use this as,
I guess you could say this is an analogy.
So these blocks are like these plays,
meaning you can put different pieces together
across content led, event led and product led growth offers
that are part of that people first go to market model.
And you could also use all these plays
in those three channels we talk about.
Of course, like to activate the demand
at the top of the funnel, create demand
to capture that demand when you're trying to bring people
into more of a membership experience
and more unique bespoke experience with your company and brand.
We did that with Drift Insider, I was part academy.
There's so many ways you can get started with that
at a very low cost, easy to do.
And then of course with customer led growth.
So we're gonna unpack each one.
I want you to think though about how you can use these
in different ways to create different pieces
or master pieces, right?
Like just like my kids and their blocks.
So first benchmark, we're coming out of the gate
really hot Aurelia.
This is one that I think so many people underutilize.
So like I noticed a passion of yours, passion of mine.
This is definitely a foundation of block building.
Talk to us about this one.
- Yeah.
So you need to understand what value.
So this is a framework too for those who are familiar
for management sort of command of the message.
So you need to understand what value do you deliver
to your customers at the highest level?
Like what is that value driver?
Is it about driving more quality pipeline?
Is it generating more revenues?
Is it lowering costs?
Right.
This is a high like a high level value
that you're gonna deliver to majority of your customers.
And you probably actually, you might have four,
you might have one, you might have two.
And if you have four, as you're talking with prospects
and customers, they're only likely gonna care
about one or two of them.
So your job is to start to understand what is that,
what value can we deliver to them based on their challenges,
their goals, et cetera.
So that brings a second is buyer pain, right?
So you need to understand and order to understand
which value you deliver is your,
you're listening to your customer.
You're listening to their challenges, their current pains,
what some of their goals are,
which gets you into positive business outcomes.
So if they were to achieve success, right?
What would that positive business outcome look like to them?
And these are in their words in the best, ideally, right?
You're doing this like,
based on all your conversations with customers and prospects.
Like what are those PBOs to use the acronym?
Of if they're using your product,
you're delivering the value, resolving their pain,
what would that positive business outcome look like for them?
And again, the key here is business outcome.
So it's high level and this is allowing you to sell
and talk to the executive.
- Let's give an example.
So an example at Drift,
the most critical positive business outcome
that we could get to that was a leading indicator of success
was two things.
Number of conversations, people, the customers
and their prospects and customers
were having with the chat bot, right?
Or just chat overall.
And then how many meetings they were booking.
So like we could take,
really, and I did this,
we could take all of the data from all of our customers
free and paid and anonymize that data and say,
on average, someone after three months of using Drift
sees this many conversations, this many meetings
and that's much pipeline and revenue.
So if you're a SaaS product or if you're a product
that allows you to capture data
about how people are using your product
and the, to really just point,
the PBOs that come from that usage lean into this heart.
- Yeah. - Like,
only you have this data.
Like no one else has this data.
- Yeah.
Yeah.
That was such a good example.
Yeah, we looked through all of that.
And then we saw, okay, how did that tie to pipeline, right?
As an end revenue and those indicators.
And I think when you get to require capability
that's thinking about what do you need,
this isn't differentiation yet.
It's what do they need to accomplish this?
What are those capabilities that your customers,
your prospects need?
And of course, like you should be influencing this ideally, right?
To, but it should be based on also what they actually need
because your product delivers that
and that's how they can accomplish with their goals.
And then there's a little bit of like,
what are those capabilities that are differentiated?
But we're not in that step yet.
But what are those core capabilities?
And then, you know, why tailoring it obviously for them
and thinking about what, to the extent you can get there,
like what would an ROI look like to them?
And this is probably too early to have a lot of like quantitative,
but you might be able to have gotten some data from them
in early discovery conversations
or if they've been a customer for a while
and you have the data on them.
It's cool.
This is a great opportunity to build a business case.
We did that a lot with our data science scene
would help us, right, pull specific data on our customers.
And we could build out if you were to, you know,
you have this challenge, you want to accomplish this.
If you leverage drift in this way,
like here is the return you're going to see
from a pipeline perspective.
We're going to increase your meetings this much.
We're going to increase your first conversations as much.
Then your meetings, that's going to input to X% increase
or times on pipeline and revenue.
Yeah.
Tertie models, Mark and I spent a lot of time
on this one together.
I think you're on mute, Mark.
Oh, I'm mute, sorry.
I clicked on the next slide.
Sorry, I think you got too excited.
Like as you were talking, because this is what you're talking about,
like Drift still uses this.
I mean, this is how we align marketing sales and CS
from a value articulation and creation standpoint.
And this could be as complicated or as simple as you want to make it.
Like, but the key is you have benchmark data
for each of these stages.
So you can say, well, when you get to stage three, on average,
our customers see this type of pipeline,
this type of deal acceleration,
whatever those business outcomes are.
And you can say, after six months,
this is what you should be saying.
Right? Like, I mean, it's like, and again, like, who do they believe?
Well, they believe, hopefully you more now,
because you're saying, here's customer data.
And then if you take a customer reference,
which we'll talk about as one of the other 11 plays and say,
oh, yeah, I'm at stage three.
I definitely got that.
It's about one, two punch.
How could they argue that?
You can't really argue that.
So anyway.
Right. And how do you like, I think what makes this so power
and Mark and I've spent endless hours together building this
and looking through so much customer data
and it's, I think that the value to,
beyond what you just mentioned, or addition to what you just said,
is if I'm a customer in stage one,
I can then say explicitly to you,
here is how you get to stage two.
These are the ways you need to use our products.
Specifically, you need to use these three features
that you're not using, or you need to turn on this capability
and leverage it four times more often than you are.
Like whatever, however your model is of your business.
And here are example customers who have made the jump
from stage one to stage two, you can speak with them.
And here are the results that they've seen since making the jump.
And that is so powerful and it might be hard to do that for stages
like four and five depending on your business.
Like if you, how much customer, it's all about how much customer data you have.
So think about that as you're building your maturity model to Mark's point.
Like we could do five stages because we had a ton of customer data
and we had customers mature, but if you're earlier on
and like only a couple years in business or whatever it is,
like you're probably not going to have five stages yet
and that's totally fine.
Look at your data of what your, how your customers are using it
and then also marry how you built your product for them to be using it.
Because you could have some customers in stage one, for example,
who aren't fully, aren't fully using everything in stage one.
And so your goal is to help them see that, what they need to do
and how doing that's going to help them accomplish their goals.
Yeah, as a quick plug, we offer this as one of our strategic services as part
of TAC.
We're actually looking, probably to sign a customer, a client this week
who's looking to build one as well.
These are extremely important as you move up market by the way.
As you move more than an enterprise, we had customers bring this into the board
room
to show people why they should spend half a million dollars on Drift.
And here's the justification of that, everything that really just said,
business case development, everything.
Which gets kind of to the next one, which is integrated revenue framework.
So we're going to do a whole master class about this in the club in a few,
probably in two months, because that's when the calendar allows.
I'm going to teach this class.
Aurelian and I use this framework heavily at Drift.
I used it at Airmeet.
But basically, think about the maturity model as an offer.
And you have the overall campaign program, which is like, here's the audience
for the campaign.
It's, you know, the audience could be persona.
It could be a vertical.
It could be a combination of account targeting and, you know, persona level
targeting.
But here's the big wider audience for the campaign.
And then here are some targeted programs that have specific audiences
that still want to be on that campaign level message, but they're nuanced,
because maybe it's a specific persona or specific vertical or specific set of
accounts or something
like that.
The key is out of all the stuff we're going to talk about today and in the next
, say, 10 minutes,
this should have really been a 90 minute event.
This is, there's a lot of stuff here.
You can use these things as offers.
So you think of the maturity model, that's an offer.
When you think about a customer advisory board, that's an offer, right?
Like it might be a very narrow audience that you want to put that in front of,
but that's an offer, right?
So think about these things that we're talking about today in this framework
and
will help you bring them to life.
Of course, the customer story in an event, a customer example, some content
that we'll talk
about in a few minutes, those are all offers, but they can also be things that
aren't always
your traditional, like, type of offer that you can put into this, right?
Your customer reference program can be an offer that's used for your Spire
Sales team.
And guess what your sales team is the channel that you would use that offer to
activate it with,
because you're probably not going to put that offer on a Paydad, for example.
Yeah, anyway, is anything else you want to quickly add here?
No, I think that that covers up.
Perfect. Speaking of reference programs, I did a T up on purpose.
I do think this is probably one of the most underutilized things that companies
today.
Yeah.
Like how did you build the one at Drift?
Do you have one at Data, you know, Gray, like what's going on?
Yeah, so funny enough, like, yeah, Drift didn't have like, we sort of ad hoc
found customers and we're like, can you talk to our prospects?
But the key is, is you don't then none of us want to like inundate customers,
right?
Like you don't want to be asking the same customer all the time.
And so you need to track, you need to understand who is, who are you using for
references and
what in what capacity? Like, are they, are they just speaking on, are they
attending an event?
Are they attending a dinner? Are they hopping on a call?
Are like, there's different forms of reference, right? And so,
the key is, we talked about earlier, is you need to identify who are the
customers that you're
going to target first that you want in your reference. And that's going to be
based on your
ICP as well, right? Like you want a diverse reference program as much as
possible.
You want the different personas, you want different industries, different
vertical sizes,
because the end of the day, people want to talk to people that are like them.
And so as your reps are selling, you're going to need, ideally you have
profiles of customers
that fit those. There is always those like niche random requests that like
nobody like has.
But, you know, I think if you can segment as much as possible, or like, I think
one of the keys of
building a reference program is you'll start to identify what gaps you have in
your customer base
for references. So perhaps you have a lot of commercial and mid-market
customers in financial
services, but you're really lacking enterprise customers and, you know,
manufacturing as an example.
Like that's going to then help your customer marketing team. If you have
someone running the
reference program or target specifically working with CS and sales, like what
are, who are customers
I can target to try to bring into this. And the other part, there are different
tools you can do
to like track references. And how do you like contract and sales force or hub
spot or different
places that you know who's being used on different opportunities. You also can
pay customers.
So something that we rolled out a drift we call the marketing commitments
program.
And it ties into references and some of what we're going to talk about next,
but you if in exchange
for leveraging your logo or attending an event or use it, quoting you or
hopping being a reference
on a call, like you we created a list of things. And we said in exchange for
that sales reps,
you can give a discount to the customer. And that's an extra lever for them.
And then depending on
how much the customer was willing to participate, that discount went a higher
or lower, right?
It's on how many like commitments call it they would sign up for in a year, so
to speak.
So that's like a tactical way that we actually built it at Drift and then
tracked it every
quarter, you know, all the time and looked at it quarterly to identify where,
you know,
maybe we had gaps so needed to to add some folks. Fantastic examples. You can
do this at scale.
You can do this when you have five customers, right? Like we're doing it within
club PF right
now. It does not matter. Like just just it. It's just all about like finding a
few people that
are seeing value that believing in what you're saying, right? Especially when
it aligns to your
point of view and like, you know, what you stand for and just asking them like,
hey,
like we're looking to build a reference program. Like, are you interested in
that? And like,
build it with them. The key with this too, I think, really is when you think
about reference
programs, don't just like force something on someone initially as well, like
build it with
your customers, not just for them. Yep. And I think one thing too, I forgot to
add is like,
then you track how this is influencing pipeline and closed one. So you can see
if a reference was
used in a deal. Like, what did that pipeline like ARR look like? What did that
closed deal
win or lose? And then as you get more sophisticated, where in the cycle, like
where in the sales
process was a reference used? Oftentimes, you see reps do it at the end. And I
think that's too late
because at that point, you've made your decision. Bring it early as we talked
about customer self
for you. They are your voice of your brand of your product. Like let them
engage with prospects
earlier on or existing customers from an expansion perspective, right? Like you
can use references
for new business, but also with other customers looking to expand and add
things within your stack.
Yeah, great. 100%. Next one's kind of obvious, but I just don't know why more
people don't do it.
Like this is how HubSpot Academy started, by the way, we built webinars. We
didn't call them webinars.
I would definitely change the positioning, but live training for customers. And
guess what?
Prospects and buyers started to find out about them. And eventually, it became
50/50. Eventually,
it became actually more prospects and buyers coming at these than customers.
And guess what
happened? Those people ended up buying because it's just pure education, right?
This is a
clavio, by the way, clavio. One of the most tremendous people first go to
market examples
as of recent. I did a post on this on LinkedIn. I also shared it in the club in
the dance floor.
Clavio is the entire model, this partner led. And they're using almost all
seven of those things.
They are using all seven, some more than others, to go to market. And they're a
profitable company
at half a billion dollars going public very soon. And what they do, if you go
to their website,
they see this live right in their website right now. It's in the top nav
underneath one of the
dropdowns. And they believe in this so much that they made it front and center.
So again,
you don't have to do this at scale. You could do one a month, one a quarter.
Like, I don't care
what you do, but do something live with your customers when it comes to
teaching them. And then
we'll do a whole set of curriculum on this eventually, but like measuring the
impact of this type of
stuff before they attend and after they attend. There's scientific ways you can
get really good
at understanding the impact on usage, retention, expansion, when you do these
things. To start
though, just start doing them and invite one or two customers to participate
with you in the
webinar. Again, call it something different and you'll see some magic start to
happen,
which is related to events earlier. Not going to go through all of these. Sum
mits are big
great, but like, you know, they're going to take a lot of time and scale. User
groups,
you need critical mass to do a user group. Maybe, maybe not. It depends, right?
Look,
a good active user group can be done in, you know, one city with 10, 15 people,
but it needs
to keep growing. You're not going to just be able to keep recycling 10, 15
people. So again,
those are more at scale. Customer advisory board, you could do that literally
before
your product market fits. You probably should, right? I mean, it's like design
thinking,
design groups, stuff like that, right? Or really, like design partners, I
should say.
Yeah. Yeah. And I think it can evolve too, obviously, as you grow and, you know
we're a data grow small, so we're doing one this year, but, you know, when I've
been at
Enronok Athena, bigger companies, we did two a year and they become much more
high-end and
blah, blah, blah. But again, yeah, as we talked about, crawl walk, run all of
these, like,
can scale as well. Go back to that model. That's what I'm telling you all, like
right now,
like do not try to bite off more than you could chew. I've been in that
situation. I've tried to
bite off more than I can chew and it does not pan out well, which just doesn't
pan out well.
Ecosystem events, I found this term just the other day. I think it was
yesterday in LinkedIn,
from the CEO of Excel events, I'm like, I love that term ecosystem events.
The end of the day, people first go to market is about helping you create a big
or small ecosystem.
So go to events where your customers are participating in and maybe you just
show up.
You don't even have to do anything other than host to dinner. Look at what Nick
and I are doing.
We're not spending money on inbound. We're just hosting some people for some
events,
doing some co-marketing, things like that. Easy, easy stuff.
Training education goes back to what I just talked about. Again, there's so
much stuff here
that we could unpack. We'll probably do more, we'll definitely do more classes
than events about
customer growth. Content, one of my favorite is best practice recipes.
Here's the exact steps that you should do. You combine that with something you
said earlier
about the maturity model. Here's the recipe you followed to do stage one, to do
stage two,
etc, etc. Super powerful. It tripped us very specific examples we created,
really good chat
bots. It was examples of how to build a chat bot for a specific use case. Then
we built out
different best practices of, those are, that might be a specific use case, like
how to build an
ABM chat bot play. But then we had a best practice on how to leverage drift for
ABM,
which went beyond just the chat bot, but that was part of it. There's many
different ways and
levels to take this, but it's so helpful for existing customers and prospects
so they can
actually see how they would leverage your product. Building blocks. All of
these can be built into
building blocks. What you just said is, again, taking a block, putting it to
this block,
and you've got a nice little house that you could present as part of that
integrated revenue
campaign. That's all we're trying to do here, right? I think we've talked a lot
about this.
The only innovative thing I can say here is think of it as commissions even.
Aurelian and I were talking with us before. There's some companies now. I haven
't seen more than two,
but they're paying customers the commission they would pay a sales rep. No
exaggeration.
It's pretty innovative, pretty out there. But look, if that person brings
sources of the deal, like this customer sources you would do, right? You're
going to get a commission
based off that. Not a $500 referral, but $10,000. Like cash. Not like off your
subscription either,
but like cash, right? You have to figure out your economics, right? Of course,
this is about like
CAC, LTV, you know, you have to be a little more sophisticated before we start
doing this, but
I mean, heck, there's some advantages to this. There's some things you got to
watch out for.
I do think if I had to put some money on this, I would bet that this becomes
more common.
Referrals and references are two things where the software really hasn't caught
up in terms of how
to do it and track it at scale. And also the actual methodology around it. I
think the team at Reveal
is doing some interesting things with the idea of narrowbound and intros,
influence, and intelligence
when it comes to deal making. But yeah, commission, that's a big one. I really.
And it's an interesting one that I think is starting up for some places. I
think to
my point, I think I have a stat that 70% of new business deals come from
referrals.
So, you know, this is just such a to the title of today, like customer
marketing for, you know,
new customer acquisition. Like, this is such a golden ticket to do it. So
really thinking about,
again, that ties into having the right reference program. Like, you need to
have the folks who can
be who can refer and they might do it on their own goodwill. And some people
will do it. I know
people feel differently about commissions, but some people are motivated. Again
, it gets to
understanding what are they motivated by? Are they motivated because they just
truly love your
brand? Are they motivated to network and meet some other folks? Are they
motivated because they
like your product and want to be compensated? Like, think about, you can think
about that and have
different offers for folks to drive more referrals.
All right. So we got three more reviews.
I don't know. I'm actually like, this is like a necessary evil now.
Yeah, I think you find the review site, you know, I know find the review site
that matters most for
your customers. Where do they go? Is it G2? Is it trust radius? Is it, you know
, an app exchange
and open source? Like, where are they, where are they engaging? And, you know,
you can do something
we did at Drift. Is we, we spiffed our CSMs to get customers to, you know, we
said, hey, like,
if you have great customers who are happy, like talk to them and ask them to
leave a review. And,
you know, the CSM got a spiff to do that. So you have to find the internal
motivators
in your company to do that. And I think the tricky part with this from a
compensation
perspective for customers is you can only know it's a customer if they leave
their name publicly,
right? So you can't necessarily compensate them for leaving a review. But you,
there's ways to drive
more, more reviews. And the only other thing I would take with a grain of salt
with reviews is
you're going to get the folks who are really unhappy and really happy. Like,
you're not going
to get the middle of the road, people. So just remember that when you're also
leveraging this
for for customers, which is why I think references and referrals are so much
more important to use
with your existing customers and prospects than just relying on reviews, but a
necessary evil,
as you said, Mark. Agree. Agree. And I think, you know, John's point of charity
, you know,
contributions makes a big difference. Great call. I would look, I could spend
hours on this one.
I know we're like at time. I'm sure a lot of us have things to do. I got
something to do. So
we're going to keep this very brief. Apologies. We'll do another masterclasser
event about this,
but certifications are a goldmine to getting your word of mouth and brand
building flywheel spinning,
along with ecosystem. I mean, I have probably more experience than this than
most. And all I can
say is don't take this lightly. Don't just do it to do it. Really think through
it. I'm happy to,
you know, talk to you about it. There's one to many ways, one to few ways, one
to one ways to
do certifications, but they are an amazing builder of trust. If you do it right
. So message me if
you want more information about certifications. Very untapped customer
marketing piece. But if
you look at again, Clavio, they have a lot of certifications. And that's how
they spin that
flywheel, especially when it comes to their partnership strategy with Shopify.
Customer cons,
another one that we probably just don't have enough, definitely have time to,
rarely, but like this goes back to segmentation, right?
Yep. Yes. I mean, I think understanding what channels, right, like again, the
time, like what
channels your customers want to engage with you through. There's so many
different mediums now.
So really understand that. And then obviously segmenting. So who are you
targeting with
communications or customer newsletters? There are emails or phone call. I mean,
you name it.
You could engage with a customer in any way possible today, probably. So just
understand like,
based on your segments, you have to cohort your customers first. I mean, that's
like the number
one sort of base step as we talked about. And then understand who, how do they
want to engage?
And maybe you can be more sophisticated within a segment and cohort based on
communication
preferences. Or you try a few different ones, knowing that like some people are
going to engage
more on in the community. Some people are going to engage more in app, right?
Through
in app notifications and communication. Some are going to be more via email,
whatever it is.
Like maybe you, you do it a few different ways so that you have your highest
chances of engagement.
Good thoughts there. Last slide. Measure what matters. There's so much to
impact in this slide.
This is why we built the club and community folks. We're going to do master
classes and
events about all these things. One of my favorite things that almost no one
talks about today,
if you Google this, I don't even know if stuff comes up. Leading indicator to
retention. L-I-R.
Anyone ever heard of that term? This is one that's probably the most important.
It goes back to benchmark data adoption, value, etc. I'll unpack that at a
later date.
Cohorts or everything goes back to segmentation. So, a SaaS business looks at
monthly cohorts.
If you're not looking at a monthly cohort or your customers, please start doing
that.
And you can look at that based off of new customer acquisition, based off the
channel they came
in if you're getting at scale with these things, based off of the sales reps
that sold them.
There's so we look at cohorts. Cohorts are critical. Influenced pipeline
revenue,
NPSN outcomes, we talked about that and product and customer engagement. So, it
's not just product
engagement, but how much are your customers engaging with things that aren't
your product?
So, the events, the content, the certifications, the references, the referrals,
all the things that
we just went through, can you start to identify how much engagement and account
and the different
people at an account are showing that's getting to that level three, stage
three of customer-led
growth. And you start to really think about more customized approaches to
growing with your customers.
What's the last thing you want to say, Aurelia?
I just made me think of this that in terms of customer engagement, another
thing that we did at
Drift, we do a data grow, I think is leveraging your customers internally for
your employees.
Your employees are a huge part of your success and your customers can bring so
much excitement
to them, motivate them. We use them at companywide, all hands, department
meetings, leveraging
your customers for your employees to hear directly for them is a goldmine to
improve how you're
supporting them, how you're building product, just motivating your employees
for your brand.
So, that was just that one came to mind as we were thinking about other ways to
engage with
customers. Well said, and folks who are part of the club PF, we thank you, we
're grateful for
you. Thank you so much. If you're not part of the club yet, I highly encourage
you to check it out.
You'll learn a ton more about all the stuff we talked about today in the club.
And yeah, thanks everyone for coming today. I hope you liked it. Time out of
your welcome.
Buzzy brains buzzing. I love that.
I really a big thank you to you. Thank you for taking the time.
Of course. Thank you for having me. This was a ton of fun.
Everyone, we'll see you at the next one. Have a great rest of your day and week
. Take care.
Bye.
Bye.
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