The Life-Long Customer

“ If you want to build long-term success with a customer, the thing I learned most from IDG was to use research about your customer or your industry to help build your knowledge base, but also to build trust and confidence in your customers. So we would go to extreme lengths to field research across prospects to find out how many are in the market.

How big the opportunities might be, how fast the technology was changing and do that research and then come back to them and say this should inform you in your own sales activities, but more than that should help inform how you pitch your clients. And not only that in today's terms how you build out content. So, on your website, on PDFs you send out to customers, and so forth. Research, a lot of clients are very reluctant and don't have line-item budgets for specific research. If you can bring that to the table it means a lot in building trust and confidence in you because you know the market, the industry, you're close to them.

That's the value that you bring.”

- Mike Rogers, President/CEO, Prism Strategies Group

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“What advice do you have to others that are listening?

So I don't like to put marketing in one bucket, because there are so many different aspects to marketing.

And what I would suggest for someone who's starting new in marketing is to try to find the marketing that best fits them and try different types of marketing, be it branding, brand marketing, advertising, research, digital marketing, social media marketing. So there's a plethora of marketing subsections. And there's not one advice that you could give someone other than to try them all, find what you like, and become an expert in that. And work hard for it. Working hard, trying, experimenting in marketing is very important. In everything you do, test it, experiment, try different options, try different ways.

And that's how you can optimize and get to where you want even in your career.”

-Eliana Daboul, VP Brand & Product Marketing, Instnt

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“Act like an owner. Business first, practitioner second. So if you pretend, don't forget, we get knocked as marketers for two big things.

You don't know the product or business in tech, because it's oftentimes very complex and you spend money like water. You are a cost center marketing. Why are we spending all this money on ads or digital and all this? So the cautious rotations are always hard. Those are the two strikes anyone walks into in a CMO role or a marketing management role.

Because the stereotype is that we do that, which I have to admit we do, too much. So if you act like an owner, which means pretend you were the founder of that company, or even a CEO, and you're spending your own money on this marketing budget, would you really pay that much for that? You start making decisions differently. So if you act like an owner in that way and then put business first, practitioner second, where I'm going to think about the business and what we need to accomplish, what are our goals first?

And then say, as a marketing practitioner, I'm going to bring my technical skills in and achieve it that way, versus just being the liberal artists, which is, I want to put a pretty website up, pretty pictures, just some pretty content. It's really well wordsmithed, but it doesn't hit the right message to the right audience or your ICP.”

- Neil Wu Becker, Chief Marketing Officer, Behavox

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“They need a solution? We will sell them the solution. If they ask for something that we do not have, and we are not planning to have it in the future, we will tell them that we don't have it. We won't tell them, "Hey, why do you need this?" or "Try this",  if we realize that this is not what the customer needs.

Don't lie to customers, try to satisfy all their needs. Be nice, right? Be honest with your customer and he will stay with you. 

And follow-ups. Once a month, you have to be in his email.”

- Denys Griga, Head of Sales, Protectimus

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“In SaaS, when you sell a customer for the first time, that's actually when your sale is just starting. SaaS is a perpetually sales cycle. You're always trying to prove your value. You're delivering quarterly business results. That's a sales process in itself. So every new customer creates a whole other sales cycle because you're trying to get that renewal at the end of the day.

And one of the biggest mistakes I see a lot of these, a lot of companies make in general is not thinking that is a sales process. That once that first sale is made, you're done.

If you are constantly selling, if a user leaves, they're going to actually bring you into their new company, you're making them look good and you're making an impact. In Greenfly's case, that's one of the first calls people make when they switch companies is they'll call us and say, "Hey, I just switched companies. I'd love Greenfly to be part of my new company too." because then they look like they're making an impact immediately.”

- Tom Kuhr, Chief Marketing Officer, Greenfly

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“As you probably know by now, I'm a very big fan of community-led growth. So I think a lot of companies have the opportunity to build a community for themselves, and it doesn't have to be a massive community. You can definitely start small with your biggest fan and really empower them to take ownership of the brand and really help craft the story together with your company. When you accept that loss of control, I think amazing things happen.

My advice is really to embrace that community and see what value you can provide to them and I'm sure you'll get a ton of value in return.”

- Victor Coisne, VP of Marketing, Strapi

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“It's never about my glory. It's about how do I remove barriers for my sales team to be successful? How do I think about them being successful? Because they are the ones that sell the deals. Not me. I may be involved in deals, but I will never take credit for selling a deal because that is an account exec deal and an SDR who found it and a CS person who is going to enable it and run the relationship with them long term.

Those are the people who deserve the credit for wins and ongoing success. And so if you think about how can I spend every day of my working life, making their job easier, you have high morale. You have high retention. You have high-performance even, people want to perform in an organization that invests in their success and ensures that they can make money, right?

That's the easiest measuring stick. And, beyond that, how can you invest in them so that they can get better at their jobs so that they can then be promoted to the next job? Then the next job, and the next job and the next job.”

- Kyle Parrish, VP of Sales, Mixmax

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“Yeah, I think there are a few key things that I really connect with over the last year.

One is that a little bit of coaching or training goes a long way. Even for experienced sales leaders, I know that we all get to a certain level of confidence of, “I don't need to prepare for an hour before my next sales call”, or “I don't even need to prepare five minutes”, or “I don't need a script” or what have you.

But an annual physical with a coach, I think can be really helpful. Share your pitch with an experienced sales coach. Share how you introduce your firm or you introduce your product. And get feedback. I think that's been one of the things that I did over the last year,, off of two, three hours of coaching, I got a lot of really useful feedback.

That's something that you should be doing with your teams too: An annual exam of what's going well, where can you make adjustments. And consider the fact that maybe there's a few different opportunities for your message to resonate a little better. “

- Robert Abramo, Head of Sales, RHR International

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“I think honesty is pretty critical. Transparency.

Those are two key things that I think that you have to stay focused on to create those kinds of genuine relationships with your customers. Because in this day and age of marketing, there's no more powerful tool than word of mouth or influence from consumers. There's so much noise on digital channels.

And there's such a lack of trust with corporate marketing teams in terms of the content and messaging that comes from them. People really turn to who you trust, who your friends are, who your colleagues are. So it's so critical to create those relationships with your brand ambassadors, with your brand advocates, with your power users, whatever you want to call them.

As soon as you burn them and don't let them into the conversation or give them that inside knowledge and access, the sooner they're going to turn away from you. And we've all seen that strong communities can make or break a successful brand”

- Lincoln Hershberger, Chief Marketing Officer, Bevy

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“We had to find out what was going on in our customer's minds. 

On the other hand, we're also customers, right? 

So we had some sense of what was happening because we're all a part of this too. 

But we wanted to hear from the church and from individuals.

So we literally would go out to our customers and have conversations and interact with them.  

We'd bring that back. 

Then we have a weekly marketing meeting where we would just simply say, okay, what's going on in the US right now, how are people? 

Are they afraid?

Is there fear? 

And then how do we take our content and adapt our message to what people are going through right now”

- Geoff Dennis - VP of Sales at The Good Book Company

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