With Scott Salkin, senior vice president and general manager of Gainsight's Customer Success Platform

In today’s economy, companies are getting scrappy. They’re searching for new ways to do more with less, optimizing their software and leaning into technological advancements for support.

But prioritizing efficiency and productivity shouldn’t come at the expense of your customers. And, as Scott Salkin explains, it doesn’t have to. Companies like Gainsight are developing new and innovative strategies to leverage their tech stack and better serve their customers. It’s about finding the right tools to invest in and exploring how these investments will ultimately serve you and your customers better.

And with the advent of AI and other game-changing technologies, companies shouldn’t forgo the opportunity to experiment with and implement new ideas and assess their effect on customer success.

Still, sometimes organizations overcomplicate the most impactful strategies to foster long-term customer satisfaction and engagement. As Scott puts it, if companies want to reach higher levels of customer success, they need to explore how to connect with their biggest advocates and greatest champions.

And from there? Where will companies find the perfect balance between high-touch human interactions and the digital world? Only time will tell.

Jen and Scott chat:

• Exploring new strategies to serve customers holistically (4:27)
• Maintaining connections with your biggest advocates and champions (10:35)
• Leveraging software to better understand your business and your customers (18:22)
• Finding the balance between high-touch customer success and digitally led customer engagement (19:50)
• Looking ahead: investing in the right tools to drive customer success (29:09)

Resources:

• HubSpot Attribution Reporting Readiness Assessment
• Sales and Marketing Bootcamp for SaaS Marketers
• The Tech Marketer’s Guide to Achieving Inbound Success
• SaaS Marketing Strategies: Getting Quick Wins and Building for Long-Term Victory

With Scott Salkin, senior vice president and general manager of Gainsight's Customer Success Platform

In today’s economy, companies are getting scrappy. They’re searching for new ways to do more with less, optimizing their software and leaning into technological advancements for support.

But prioritizing efficiency and productivity shouldn’t come at the expense of your customers. And, as Scott Salkin explains, it doesn’t have to. Companies like Gainsight are developing new and innovative strategies to leverage their tech stack and better serve their customers. It’s about finding the right tools to invest in and exploring how these investments will ultimately serve you and your customers better.

And with the advent of AI and other game-changing technologies, companies shouldn’t forgo the opportunity to experiment with and implement new ideas and assess their effect on customer success.

Still, sometimes organizations overcomplicate the most impactful strategies to foster long-term customer satisfaction and engagement. As Scott puts it, if companies want to reach higher levels of customer success, they need to explore how to connect with their biggest advocates and greatest champions.

And from there? Where will companies find the perfect balance between high-touch human interactions and the digital world? Only time will tell.

Jen and Scott chat:

• Exploring new strategies to serve customers holistically (4:27)
• Maintaining connections with your biggest advocates and champions (10:35)
• Leveraging software to better understand your business and your customers (18:22)
• Finding the balance between high-touch customer success and digitally led customer engagement (19:50)
• Looking ahead: investing in the right tools to drive customer success (29:09)

Resources:

• HubSpot Attribution Reporting Readiness Assessment
• Sales and Marketing Bootcamp for SaaS Marketers
• The Tech Marketer’s Guide to Achieving Inbound Success
• SaaS Marketing Strategies: Getting Quick Wins and Building for Long-Term Victory

With Jake Randall, Chief Operating Officer at Common Room

As COO of an early-stage company, Jake Randall understands the importance of building community and solving complex problems with listening and empathy.

In fact, that’s exactly how Common Room came about. Common Room is an intelligent, community-led platform that helps businesses deepen their relationships, build better products, and drive impact for their customers.

As Jake points out, companies often try to solve their most complex problems in silos. By pausing to listen to internal teammates and external customers, you become better equipped to overcome your community’s greatest challenges, wherever that community resides. And when you leverage platforms like Common Room, you can gather impactful, qualitative data about the problems people are solving and the strategies they’re using to solve them.

As Jake puts it, “Customer empathy is our No. 1 value. Everyone has a community; [they’re] just not always listening.” Find the people who are talking about the problem you’re trying to solve. Then, find a better way of solving it.

Empathy and awareness extend beyond an organization’s thought leaders and industry experts. Customers want to feel listened to, too. Focus on customers’ greatest needs and their biggest challenges, Jake says. Then, scale that approach as you begin to tackle today’s biggest economic and industry-related challenges.

What’s next? Speaking like a true innovator and problem solver, Jake says, “Remain agile.” Don’t make the mistake of trying to solve the same problem with the same solution over and over again. If it’s not working, find a new way. Test, pivot, execute. The rest will fall into place.

Jake and Jen talk about:

• Building community to nurture authentic connections (3:12)
• How collective problem-solving breeds collaboration (8:19)
• “Everyone has a community; you’re just not listening” (14:32)
• How to mitigate risk and prepare for shifts in your industry (25:32)
• What? So what? Now what? Leading with authenticity and building trust with your team (29:09)

With Jake Randall, Chief Operating Officer at Common Room

As COO of an early-stage company, Jake Randall understands the importance of building community and solving complex problems with listening and empathy.

In fact, that’s exactly how Common Room came about. Common Room is an intelligent, community-led platform that helps businesses deepen their relationships, build better products, and drive impact for their customers.

As Jake points out, companies often try to solve their most complex problems in silos. By pausing to listen to internal teammates and external customers, you become better equipped to overcome your community’s greatest challenges, wherever that community resides. And when you leverage platforms like Common Room, you can gather impactful, qualitative data about the problems people are solving and the strategies they’re using to solve them.

As Jake puts it, “Customer empathy is our No. 1 value. Everyone has a community; [they’re] just not always listening.” Find the people who are talking about the problem you’re trying to solve. Then, find a better way of solving it.

Empathy and awareness extend beyond an organization’s thought leaders and industry experts. Customers want to feel listened to, too. Focus on customers’ greatest needs and their biggest challenges, Jake says. Then, scale that approach as you begin to tackle today’s biggest economic and industry-related challenges.

What’s next? Speaking like a true innovator and problem solver, Jake says, “Remain agile.” Don’t make the mistake of trying to solve the same problem with the same solution over and over again. If it’s not working, find a new way. Test, pivot, execute. The rest will fall into place.

Jake and Jen talk about:

• Building community to nurture authentic connections (3:12)
• How collective problem-solving breeds collaboration (8:19)
• “Everyone has a community; you’re just not listening” (14:32)
• How to mitigate risk and prepare for shifts in your industry (25:32)
• What? So what? Now what? Leading with authenticity and building trust with your team (29:09)

With Lindsay Tjepkema, CEO and co-founder at Casted

On this episode of the Intelligent Inbound Podcast, Jen sits down with Lindsay Tjepkema, CEO and co-founder of Casted, to explore why she started the company and what other organizations can learn about building audience engagement through creative storytelling.

As Lindsay explains, Casted is a software platform made specifically for B2B marketers who want to both maximize and measure the impact of audio and video content. Although it hasn’t always been easy to convince people to invest in the marketing power of podcasting, the team at Casted has found education to be the key to success.

Literally and figuratively, it’s about keeping the conversation going, so both your target audience and key investors can join you on the journey toward your marketing goals. Whether they’re focused on podcasting or another kind of content creation, Lindsay describes how marketers all too often become consumed by the idea of building new content each time for every campaign.

Instead, she encourages marketers and organizations alike to focus on “shopping [their] closets first”—that is, repurposing and repackaging existing content before reinventing it completely. Ultimately, whatever marketing approach you and your team pursue, as Lindsay goes on to say, you have to find a way to humanize the message, the medium, and the methodology to make the biggest impact.

Jen and Lindsay discuss:

• Meet Casted (2:04)
• Measuring engagement in the podcasting space (6:54)
• Making listener data actionable (8:37)
• Keeping conversations going as you scale (15:10)
• Shopping your closet: upcycling your content (20:00)
• The power of demand generation and content marketing (30:27)
• Humanizing your marketing approach (31:47)

Resources:

• Inbound Marketing Quick Wins for Lead Generation
• The Only Inbound Marketing Guide You’ll Ever Need
• HubSpot Implementation Checklist

With Amy Hutchins, Chief Marketing Officer at WesleyLife

Industries evolve as market needs shift and cultural attitudes change. The senior living space, or what WesleyLife has reimagined as the health and wellbeing market, is no exception. In fact, it’s one of the most rapidly-evolving markets as the general population ages and cultural norms evolve about what it means to grow old, both joyfully and gracefully.

As the CMO of WesleyLife, Amy Hutchins explains, crafting the organization’s brand and disseminating a progressive message about the future of senior living is all about meeting people where they’re at. Paid media efforts and SEO initiatives are just a few of the ways WesleyLife relays this message. Sometimes this means using the language your customers use, if only as a tool to dispel common misconceptions about your industry and to steer those same customers in the direction of your tailored marketing and branding.

It’s about working with, not against, the algorithm. In fact, attracting potential customers who only know you as one thing, whether that’s “senior living,” “nursing home,” or whatever the equivalent in your industry might be, opens the door to education, opportunity, and ultimately larger cultural shifts in the way your customers understand your mission. After all, as Hutchins further explains, you don’t need what you don’t know. After that, the sky’s the limit.

Jen and Amy discuss:

• How to meet customers where they’re at (1:55)
• The power of paid media efforts and SEO initiatives (2:35)
• Changing the way customers see your industry (7:42)
• Turning challenge into opportunity (11:46)
• Working with, not against, the algorithm (19:27)
• “You don’t need what you don’t know.” (22:50)
• The best metrics for measuring your success (25:17)

With Daniel Graff-Radford, CEO of Allbound

On this episode of the Intelligent Inbound Podcast, Jen and Daniel talk about how businesses can build better customer relationships by asking the right questions up front.

As a former founding member of Allbound, Jen opens the conversation with a full circle moment. She’s once again leveraging Allbound’s software solutions, but this time, from the vantage point of SmartBug’s CEO. Since those early days, as Allbound’s CEO explains, a lot has changed within the industry, yet the company has managed to stay on top of the trends, all while retaining top-tier talent.

For businesses to remain competitive, especially as rumors of economic uncertainty loom, they’ll also need to invest in real, tangible solutions to their customers’ most pressing challenges. As both Daniel and Jen point out, it’s about posing the right questions, to the right stakeholders, at the right time. And in order to truly measure the success of those initial inquiries and proposed solutions, companies must deliver reliable, relevant, and pointed metrics so that customers and executive boards alike can make data-informed decisions to end the year on a high note and enter 2023 with confidence.

Jen and Daniel discuss:

• Facing economic uncertainty with poise and agility (07:08)
• Nurturing partner relationships (12:24)
• Thriving in a digital world with a remote workforce (16:20)
• Asking your customers the right questions (22:36)
• Measuring your organization’s health (25:42)
• Investing in content that connects with your customers (31:31)
• What should Saas CEOs invest in next? (36:34)

With Christina Rice, COO at Pyx Health

On this episode of the Intelligent Inbound Podcast, Jen and Christina talk about meeting customer needs, even—or perhaps—especially, in the midst of a pandemic.

Pyx Health offers patients a leading solution for loneliness and social isolation through technology and human connection. Today, they're offering both patients and healthcare providers an innovative and scalable solution to address this U.S. health epidemic.

As COO Christina Rice explains, most healthcare companies are actually quite traditional in their approach to marketing. In fact, there was a time when Pyx Health was too, sending out direct mailers and meeting with prospects at conferences to spread the word and nurture leads.

But as so many companies quickly discovered, COVID-19 turned that strategy on its head. With nowhere to gather in person, Pyx Health pivoted its efforts to a digital and inbound marketing strategy. Inbound marketing allowed the team to make data-informed decisions about its customer relations and future business ventures based on real-time results.

And the value hasn’t stopped there. In fact, as Christina describes, the marketing and sales teams at Pyx Health are now leveraging this captured data to make cohesive, collaborative decisions backed by evidence to strategize their next business moves as they continue to scale from the group up.

Listen in as Jen and Christina discuss:

• The impact of COVID-19: how to pivot according to industry trends (4:12)
• Leading with a fast-paced, high-growth mindset (6:14)
• “Clarity with kindness”: extending care to the most vulnerable health populations, especially in times of economic uncertainty (12:32)
• Creating synergy between sales and marketing teams (15:21)
• Using data as a universal language for trust and collaboration (20:33)
• Placing “inbound marketing on surround sound” (31:22)

With Graeme Watkins, CEO of Valutrades

On this episode of the Intelligent Inbound Podcast, Jen and Valutrades’ CEO, Graeme Watkins, discuss the power of inbound in the FinTech space.

As a company that provides online trading in foreign exchange, commodities, and index CFDs, Valutrades is always looking for new ways to enhance the customer experience and build a brand that users trust.

In the early days, as Graeme explains, the company was hyper-focused on the dollar-for-dollar value of both its paid media and inbound marketing strategies. But over time, that outlook evolved, as did market trends. Now, CEOs like Graeme understand the power of a handcrafted inbound marketing strategy to create a seamless digital path for users and build a brand that customers can trust, no matter which stage of the buyer journey they find themselves in.

Listen in as Graeme and Jen discuss:

• The power of inbound strategy in the FinTech space (02:59)
• Enhancing the customer experience (07:38)
• Partnering with marketing agencies for success (14:03)
• Dollar in, dollar out marketing metrics (18:42)
• Building a trustworthy brand (25:02)
• Tracking engagement with HubSpot analytics (30:27)
• Creating a seamless digital path for your users (40:11)

®With Brandon Voss, President of The Black Swan Group

On this episode of the Intelligent Inbound® Podcast, Jen sits down with Brandon Voss, President of The Black Swan Group, as they discuss the art of skillful negotiation and the power of inbound methodology to reach new audiences.

Founded by former FBI lead hostage negotiator, Chris Voss, The Black Swan Group teaches companies, teams, and individuals how to navigate complex communication hurdles with real-life hostage negotiation strategies.

As Brandon explains, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, The Black Swan Group, like many live events companies, had to pivot. And so they began to track customer engagement and nurture trust with their audience in an ever-changing market. Thanks to The Black Swan Group’s inbound-first approach, what could have been a catastrophic shift in the market, became the team’s next great success.

Now, with the help of inbound marketing, the team has expanded its reach while building trust with its audience. In doing so, they’ve created better listeners, and better leaders, one negotiation at a time.

Listen in as Jen and Brandon discuss:

• Pivoting marketing strategy during the COVID outbreak (4:47)
• Measuring long-term customer engagement (11:43)
• Build trust in an ever-changing market (17:15)
• Negotiate as if your life depended on it (19:25)
• Getting your message out in the world with inbound marketing (24:33)
• Effecting cultural change at the corporate level (33:01) 

The power of Tactical Empathy™ (35:20)