ABM in the 'Dotlight'

How customer marketing can be an engine for growth

To be honest, we send our customers a monthly email newsletter and that’s about it.

This early anecdote from my research into customer marketing turned out to be emblematic. While most marketers I spoke with did the basics, such as a customer newsletter, advisory board and reference program, very few were actively marketing to customers to grow wallet share.

But, at the same time, Chief Marketing Officers were under increasing pressure to do more.

When I first started my inquiry in the second half of 2022, the technology sector had just experienced a chilling start to the year.

In an Insight Partners survey,

Naturally, company leaders turned a wary eye to their client base, too. “If customers churn, we’ll lose our main engine for growth,” they fretted.

Meanwhile, Boards were pressing executives for efficiency.

‘The Rule of 40’, a benchmark measure of the balance between growth rate and profitability, had emerged as the startup sectors’ primary refrain in 2022.

The ‘Growth at All Costs’ era had come screeching to a halt. And many CMOs were caught having overinvested in new logos, and underinvested in customer retention and up-sell/cross-sell initiatives.

Reframing the opportunity

The truth, however, is that most marketing leaders should have prioritized customer growth all along.

Benchmarks from post-sale analyst The Successful Customer suggest that companies can earn marginal revenue from their existing client base for little as one-tenth of the cost of new business.

Of course, CMOs shouldn’t burden efficient customer revenue with unnecessary costs.

But, couldn’t a targeted tactical investment unlock marginal profitable growth?
How much more can a company grow its customer wallet share by marketing to them, as they do their prospects?

This gets to the first practice applied by leading post-sale marketing programs: They evaluate all the growth opportunities available to their business, including those among customers.

My colleague Kerry Cunningham, co-author of Forester’s Demand Unit Waterfall™, has described the principles of opportunity mix well:

An account doesn’t represent one selling opportunity—it represents multiple.

If organizations want to better forecast revenue and prioritize resources, they need to understand the unique differences in performance between their various types of opportunities.

For instance, if 80% of your revenue comes from net new acquisitions, your overall cost of sales is going to be dramatically higher than if 80% of your revenue comes from customers. You expect to win most retention deals.

In contrast, cross-sale customer opportunities might not perform much differently than prospect opportunities. In organizations with a diverse product portfolio, there might not be any difference at all, such as in the example where a company that already sold an ERP system to a customer’s Operations department and now wants to sell a CRM to the same company’s Sales department.

So, to arrive at the optimal opportunity mix, Marketing leaders should:

1.

Identify every post-sale opportunity type their team might address—renewals, up-sales, and cross-sales. They can further segment opportunities by product, vertical, or other categorical attributes.

2.

Evaluate each, in partnership with customer success:
Which opportunity types are most profitable? From which types can you generate more? From which types could you likely boost the win rate?

Ultimately, marketers should prioritize those post-sale opportunities where they can drive the greatest marginal improvement, without damaging the overall efficiency of acquiring customer revenue.

Customer marketing strategy

Once they’ve set their opportunity mix, top post-sale marketers home in on a customer strategy.

Where their less performant colleagues default to advisory boards, product release emails, and other rote tactics, leading customer marketers hew to the interests of their ‘retention and expansion centers’.

Like pre-sale ‘buying centers’, post-sale ‘centers’ are made up of sometimes similar, but often different personas that a company must address if they’re to earn repeating and expanding business from customers.

How this group adopts new technology is the basis for your choosing an optimal strategy. For example, if your customers prefer to learn from peers, then a community-oriented strategy might be right for your business.

In contrast, if your customer needs to systematically onboard thousands of users onto your software, then you might focus on building a robust training resource center.

Just as buyer personas and journeys underpin pre-sale strategy, so do customer personas and journeys frame post-sale.

While all businesses benefit from defining a strategic approach to customers, those of a certain value might deserve One-to-few (1:few) or One-to-one (1:1) Account-based Experience (ABX) treatment—meaning Sales, Customer Success and Marketing (aka ABX pods) should use what they know about the customer to orchestrate a personalized customer journey.

Which customers deserve ABX—and the degree to which GTM teams should personalize their journey—depends on the marginal revenue a business can derive from their customers.

In short, the higher a potential customer’s value, the more a GTM team might benefit from personalizing their experience. All of this should be captured in a detailed account plan.

Account-based customer plays

Using their opportunity mix, strategy and account plans as a basis, top post-sale marketing leaders develop tactical plays to suit.

“To me, a good post-sale ABX program is ‘very niche,” says Heather Foeh, Senior Director of Community at 6sense. “We have a lot of different opportunities: I don’t want us to see a campaign work for cross-selling one product and have everyone think the same campaign will work for cross-selling others.”

A customer’s experience with a provider is determined not only by the relevancy of their interactions with a provider, but also the quality: Unhelpful, disjunct, and ill-timed exchanges make for a bad experience.

If, on the other hand, the customer gets exactly what they need, when they need it, they’re likely to ‘repay’ the provider in their loyalty and advocacy.

Like a sports team might coordinate its offensive players against the defense, they execute a post-sale play oriented to a customer’s specific needs.

Everyone on the post-sale team knows what to do, and when.

It’s important that everyone—Customer Success, Marketing, Product—does a good job. If there’s one weak link, the customer experience will be poor. It’s very hard for customer success reps to do it all—marketing can supplement them.

Two-time ABMie award winner Amber Bogie, Director of Global Demand Generation at Reachdesk

Through my research, I have found that most performant post-sale marketers write plays that:

Are based on a deep analysis of the customer journey

In some organizations, a customer experience department gathers insights from various sources—interviews, satisfaction surveys and product analytics—to author a rich story of how customers onboard, adopt and renew.

Home in on a specific opportunity type

Up-sale plays differed from cross-sale plays, which differed from renewal plays, with each tailored to a specific objective.

Deliver on key messages, expressed in a creative concept and relevant tactics.

For example, one cybersecurity software provider I spoke to sells on its unrivaled threat intelligence. This is made part of its post-sale efforts, with bespoke, as-it-happens threat intel briefings that cross-sell products.

Orchestrate tactics and handoffs

Between Marketing, CS and Sales, with explicit stage-based steps.

Ideally, these elements are compiled into one, simple framework that all cross-functional teams run on. (One company I spoke with went so far as to title their playbook “The ABX Bible.”).

Closing on customers

In short, I found that top-performing post-sale marketers address customers like they do their buyers. They segment and prioritize addressable opportunities.

Then, they home in on the opportunities they hypothesize will unlock marginal growth, and set a strategy to suit. Based on that strategy, they author cross-functional plays that tightly orchestrate a seamless customer experience.

With CMOs under increasing pressure to improve their efficiency, their existing client base represents an essential source of growth. However, they must go beyond basic post-sale tactics to seize their total addressable wallet share.