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In many companies, “Customer Marketing” is a new concept. Even Marketing teams don’t always get it right, which may be because they tend to be more oriented around acquisition and conversion rather than retention and expansion. That’s why at Typeform we have a Customer Marketing team that lives within Customer Success (it’s called “Lifecycle Marketing”).
Because the Success group is closest to the customer and is entirely focused on helping customers achieve their desired outcomes, having a Customer Marketing team sit within our organization ensures that the campaigns that team creates are centered around engagement and retention.
For others interested in building Customer Marketing within their Success group, here are a few key elements of our structure:
- First, Marketing also has a Lifecycle team. Our Lifecycle team and Marketing’s will connect weekly to create and maintain email/in-app strategies and a calendar that’s aligned with each other’s lifecycle programs. Our lifecycle team is focused on retention; Marketing’s is focused on awareness and acquisition.
- Our Lifecycle Marketing team is separate from the Customer Support, Education (help center), and CSM teams that all live under the Customer function.
- This team relies heavily on our Voice of Customer program, which is our process for collecting and organizing “given,” “requested,” and “observed” feedback from customers. The Lifecycle team leverages these insights to deeply understand our customers’ business objectives, challenges, and gaps in areas where they could be getting more value from our product. One of their key areas of focus in on explaining and exposing customers to new use cases—some customers see Typeform as simply a feedback survey tool when there’s so much more that customers can get out of the product.
The top articles this week:
This week's newsletter features posts on:
- A Guide to Successfully Training Customers Remotely
- Measuring Customer Success Relationships
- Unstructured Job Interviews Don't Work
- The Secrets to Our (Customer) Success
EDUCATION
Your Guide to Successfully Training Customers Remotely
Customer Success consultants Donna Weber and Lauren Thibodeau share a step-by-step plan for designing and implementing an online training program.
PROCESS
Measuring Customer Success Relationships
“There’s not enough clarity about how valuable relationships are, for any SaaS company.” Here’s Ziv Peled, CCO at AppsFlyer, with a presentation on his high-level vision for measuring customer relationships.
HIRING
(Unstructured) Job Interviews Don't Work
This piece names some of the issues with unstructured job interviews and offers ways to make interviews more effective. For example, I’ve heard of interviewers over-emphasizing activities like “whether the interviewee followed-up on LinkedIn,” and this piece calls that out directly, saying this “is not a representative situation in terms of how the person will perform in the actual interview.” Some better approaches: blind auditions, competency-related evaluations, and more.
TEAM BUILDING
The Secrets to Our (Customer) Success
Daphe Saragosti, Global VP of Customer Success at Centrical, breaks down some key changes they’ve made to their team’s processes and culture that helped reduce churn and drive growth.
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