Enterprise Customer Success - A Key to Marketing Insight

Enterprise customer success management (CSM) is a newer phenomenon in corporate America. Emerging as part of the onset of software as a service (SaaS) offerings, where renewals are key to annual recurring revenue (ARR) growth, CSM functions are now considered essential in many industries, even outside of software. CSMs hack product adoption and often uncover upsell opportunities that a frontline sales team cannot. However, in many companies, customer success is seen as a cost center for senior tech support and not an asset for marketing, sales, and product strategy teams. Therefore they may be an enigma to marketing executives, who are missing out on a myriad of insights.

Here are three areas where customer success can partner with your marketing efforts: 

1. Customer Success Managers Have the Deepest Understanding of What Drives Product/Market Fit

While a product team will understand the nuts and bolts of how to architect a scalable technology platform, and the marketing team will better understand copy, presentation standards, and messaging, the quickest way to find out what current users love and don't love about your product or your competition is to stay close to your CSM team. It is their job to make your customer a hero. CSMs are constantly being asked for features. They also know the best practices of customers who actually use your product daily and their frustrations. Your customer success team can even work with you to pull together customer advisory forums to help you get direct feedback on products during the design phase and feedback on your brand and offerings.

2. Customer Success Account Teams Will Understand Pricing, Willingness to Pay and Client Budgets

If you want to know if a client is sharpening the pencil or if spend is opening up across your customer base, a good CSM is well-networked within your client organization and can read the tea leaves for you. While they are often pushed for discount. CSM is usually incented to maintain or increase revenue. They can tell you what they’re hearing regarding competitive pricing and gauge when a client is authentically pressured. In addition, a customer success manager’s primary goal should be to reduce costs or increase revenue for a client through delivering your product. If pricing is off, the business case will fail.

3. Your Customer Success Teams Are Often the Most Credible Assets for Conferences and Generating Press

Customer success teams are usually the most trusted partners of clients at your company. I’ve heard the Quote, "our CSM is the reason we stay with you," multiple times over my career. CSMs often do huge favors, stay up late, take the clients to dinner, and know their kids' names. While your sales team shows repeated demos, the CSMs work with actual client use cases daily. Therefore when it comes time to select someone for a panel discussion, to work a booth on a show floor, or to speak to the press, your senior and tenured CSMs and their leaders often come across more genuine and trustworthy. CSMs also are your best resources to recruit clients to do a case study, joint press release, or other joint speaking engagement. Often clients appreciate free press.

"CSM organizations focus on the outcomes that drive your clients to buy your product in the first place"

A few things are critical to be successful here. First, do not overuse a single client for all of your press. Secondly, don’t over-ask for insight or rely on a few customers to do all of your competitive or business forecasting research for you. Thirdly, do your homework beforehand. It's always better to ask a question where you also are sharing information with a customer that helps them. Finally, deliver at least some of their feedback before you ask for more. 

CSM organizations focus on the outcomes that drive your clients to buy your product in the first place. The minute that value prop is not realized or not well understood, your relationship with that client is in jeopardy. Marketers who stay close to customer success teams will drive a more consistent customer experience through the sales funnel, deliver more resonating brand images, and connect more authentically with prospects.

About the author

Clark Dumas is a seasoned customer success and operations leader who helps growth-stage tech companies build for scale. As the Vice President of Customer Success at Trustly, an open banking payments company for e-commerce applications, his team helps merchant partners increase patron conversion and decrease payment interchange fees. Clark lives in the Atlanta area with his wife and two young children and finds adventures in the great outdoors whenever he can slip away from work.