Like a lot of customer marketers, I came into the role sideways. My background is in nonprofits, but I’ve been working in the SaaS world for seven or eight years now. I've held pretty much every GTM role; I've been an account executive on a sales team; I created and ran a business development and strategic partnerships program; I’ve also been a customer success manager.

So I don't have a traditional marketing background, but I think having been in a lot of different roles, particularly customer-facing and prospect-facing roles, gives me a broader perspective on customer marketing. My experience is especially useful when it comes to working with customer success teams to drive positive outcomes.

Customer success versus customer marketing

The common ground between customer success and customer marketing is pretty vast. Both organizations are hyper-focused on existing customers and everything that working with them entails. We specialize in engaging these users, bringing them on board, and driving ROI so that they see the value of the product and want to expand.

And, of course, no conversation about customer success or customer marketing would be complete without the word retention. It’s a huge bottom-line driver for both organizations.

Despite their similarities, both teams have different strengths and different ways of achieving their goals. The customer marketing function I've built at A Cloud Guru is responsible for a range of one-to-many customer communication channels as well as customer advocacy. Newsletters, webinar invites, customer stories, and case studies all fall under customer marketing.

Like how there's no one route into customer marketing, there's no one way to set up a customer marketing team. I've seen it done many different ways at many different companies, but you generally see a customer communication component and some sort of customer advocacy or engagement component.

On the flip side, customer success tends to look fairly similar across companies. You've got a team of customer success managers all focused on larger customers. At our company, for example, if you purchase a certain number of licenses you get a dedicated customer success manager. They’re hyper-focused on developing deep interpersonal relationships with the accounts in their book of business.

Our customer success managers know their points of contact so well that they can tell you their husband’s name, the ages of all their kids, and where they went on vacation last year. On top of that, they understand the account’s high-level business goals and where the team fits into the broader organization – they have a lot of knowledge about their accounts.

Customer marketers have data and inputs, but they generally don't have as deep a knowledge of the people involved.

In my experience, that’s the lay of the land for both groups. They share a lot of common ground, but their perspectives differ, which can sometimes be a cause of tension.

Friction between customer success and customer marketing

When existing customers are a scarce resource, there's a lot more emotion attached to them, especially when it comes to those deep interpersonal relationships. If a customer success manager has put a lot of time and effort into investing in an account, they’ve got skin in the game. That can naturally lead to providing a white-glove service and not wanting anyone else to get involved and potentially disrupt the relationship that they've built.

On the flip side, customer marketing teams tend to be very data-driven and focused on the big picture. We're all about developing segments and personas, so the relationships are by their nature one-to-many. With very few exceptions, we're looking for the common denominators; we're creating messaging that's going to resonate with a large group of customers. It might not be a 100% perfect fit for each customer – it'll be more like a 90% perfect fit for the majority.

That one-to-many versus one-to-one tension can lead to silos developing between the teams. That can be a huge problem because these siloes keep us from developing the tight partnerships that are crucial to bringing value to customers and achieving the retention and expansion that we’re all aiming for.

How does marketing and customer success work together?

For customer success and customer marketing to have a fruitful partnership, we all need to first align on our goals. Whether they use OKRs or KPIs or they’ve got broader goals for a certain time period, understanding what customer success’ goals look like is key.

Are they focused on air cover? Do they just want to make sure that every account has heard from their customer success manager? What are their retention numbers like? Customer success managers are responsible for engagement, so these are the kinds of metrics they’re likely to be tracking.

If you have a SaaS product, customer success might be looking at metrics like logins and monthly active users, or maybe they're interested in advocacy pieces and creating case studies. All of those could be the broader OKRs for customer success, and customer marketing should really understand what those are, and vice-versa.

Customer marketing also needs to have its own goals defined, looking at the top-level business objectives and scrolling down to see what they can influence.

To my mind, when you understand what goals customer success is working toward and what goals you're working toward, it's much easier to find those key points of alignment. It also helps you see the broader picture, which is that we're all on the same team and working towards the same goal: providing excellent customer outcomes. That's what we all want to achieve at the end of the day.

Building a culture of collaboration and transparency with customer success

Real collaboration is about more than being strategically aligned – you have to get into the weeds and build relationships. I have bi-weekly meetings with customer success leadership so that we’re always on the same page even when our goals and priorities change.

It’s a great idea to get hands-on with customer success managers since they’re the ones working one-on-one with customers. That gets a lot easier if your company has listening software like Gong or Chorus so you can sit in virtually on customer meetings. Getting access to this direct customer feedback is also going to help you identify the common problems that we're all looking to solve.

Having open communication with the people who are on the ground and having calls with customers every day gives incredible insight, and it works both ways. When customer marketing provides transparency around the programs and campaigns we're running, it breaks down any protectiveness and helps us gain customer success’ trust.

Understanding the customer lifecycle

My last takeaway is that we should all work to understand, from both a customer success perspective and a customer marketing perspective, what the customer lifecycle looks like and what communications are mapping to different parts of the lifecycle. Let me give you an example.

At A Cloud Guru, we’ve built a customer lifecycle map. The aim is to understand the different stages of the funnel that the customer goes through, as well as the milestones, the goals, the metrics, and the people associated with each stage of that journey. We want customer success and customer marketing to be able to look at that lifecycle map and see at exactly which stages the other team reaches out to the customers.

Once we've got that foundation, we can start building our nurture programs to target the different lifecycle stages in alignment with customer success’ communication. That way we're reinforcing and reiterating the same message.

I think that's a huge part of our success. Everyone in customer communication knows that you have to say something 100 times and then 100 more times to make sure that your message gets across. What we've found is that when we use the joint capabilities of one-to-many and one-to-one to reinforce our message, the customer results shine.

This article was taken from a fireside chat featuring Taylor Page at the Customer Marketing Summit, held by our sister community Product Marketing Alliance in September 2021. Since the chat, Taylor has since changed roles and is now Director of Customer Marketing and Advocacy at Kong Inc.