There are three main areas this trend watch covers, the clues are all in the title of this page but here they are in brief with a little more detail below that. There are two glaring omissions that could be considered in the normal business cycle covering this area focused on customers: sales and product development efforts. They have been excluded just to make this topic more manageable. Also, at least two of the topics I am covering might alternatively fall under the title of Customer Success Operations, the tag under which I am writing posts (see bottom of page).
Marketing
Creating customers
Customer Success
Retaining customers
Scale
Scaling the process
Marketing
A great place to start is with a State of Marketing report. Conveniently, Salesforce has just released one (registration required). Never in greater need for innovation, marketing is reinventing itself and battling for relevance and ownership (of the customer).
Empathetic Marketing
Marketers are shifting how they source and manage customer data
and ramping up use of technologies like AI that help them make the most of personalized, empathetic engagement. 186% increase in AI adoption since 2018.
Account Based Marketing
As businesses shift from crisis triage to recovery and adaptation, marketers have a unique opportunity to turn trusted customer relationships into business value. 92% of B2B marketers have an ABM program (incl. B2B2C.
Customer Success
A newer kid on the block, customer success is fast becoming the custodian of customer retention and lifetime value. I work as a customer success professional and write many posts on the topic but in summary:
Post Acquisition
Typically only engaging after the sale is made, astute CSM’s however, also set the tone upfront.
Post awareness
More education, crafting understanding and experience with products/ services.
Customer Health
Customer satisfaction is not new but it’s a static notion. Health is more dynamic than that.
Time to Value
Emphasis has always been on driving impact, measuring it and doing it sooner than the renewal cycle.
Scale: From Funnel to Flywheel
Hubspot has done more than perhaps any other company I know, to perfect the scale motion.
They have also with keen intuition, mapped customer success with marketing and wrapped it up in this motion – below in brief.
Attract visitors with useful content and eliminate barriers as they try to learn about your company.
Engage by making it easy to buy and enabling buyers to deal with you on their preferred timeline
Delight by helping, supporting, and empowering customers to reach their goals again and again.
Recent posts on related topics
Marketing sales and customer success for 360 degree effectiveness
In line with the trend I’m watching and some recent work I’ve been doing working with colleagues in sales and marketing, I had some brief additional thoughts around this topic. More […]
State of a category – customer success 2021
I’ve been in this space formally for almost 10 years now. I say formally because I’ve been doing the work a lot longer, just under another name. I’ve been passionate about […]
Customer Success Operations – an excellent roundup
From this article over at Process Street which I just discovered. Very useful since I am doing so much work in this space at the moment and I am trending watching […]
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