What is the Secret to Successful Customer Marketing? And the 10 Customer Challenge

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Welcome to today's episode.

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Our guest today is Ron.

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He is a Chief Marketing Officer for Teradata.

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Welcome to the show.

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Thank you very much, Eric.

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Thanks for having me why don't we start by you sharing just a minute or two about who you are and what you do?

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Yeah, thank you for the introduction.

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As you said, I'm the chief marketing officer over here at Teradata.

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We sell software to higher education institutions for managing their study abroad programs and international students coming in.

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So it's slightly different to market than many of your listeners might be familiar with.

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It's probably maxed out ABM right.

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There's a finite number of institutions in the market and a subsegment of those are viable targets for us.

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So we know them all.

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We know them pretty well.

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That sounds like a very interesting challenge.

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So let's jump into a story about some of the best marketing you've done, the marketing that you're the most proud of.

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So this might be at the same time controversial and at the same time duh at the same time controversial and at the same time duh.

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And the thing that I'm most proud of is my marketing department talks to customers all the time.

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I say it's potentially controversial because it's occurred to me.

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I've observed in many companies marketing no longer talks to customers.

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In the smaller companies it's once they start up.

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So once they get the product out the door, it's all about iterating on the agile methodology.

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Right, get the product out the door.

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It's all about iterating on the agile methodology.

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Right, get the stuff out the door, we'll find out what works and what doesn't.

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We'll fast fail.

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In medium-sized companies they tend to be driven by the most recent deals they're trying to close right.

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That kind of dictates the voice of the market.

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And in the larger companies, enterprise-like marketing doesn't get to talk to customers because that's the domain of sales.

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They own them.

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So it becomes this weird thing where the people responsible for knowing the most about the market and the voice of the market don't get a chance to listen to it all that much.

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That's interesting.

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I think, unfortunately, a lot of organizations just rely on the sales team and the customer success team talking to customers to get the feedback and then filter it back, but I don't think that's the best way to do it.

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I think actually, in the marketing that I've done over the last 25 years, the best marketing that I've done to generate demand and the best account-based marketing I've done have come from marketing programs that include customers, like having customers speak on webinars, having customers speak at events and having, like you said, voice of the customer focus groups, and you can use things from that in your marketing.

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The customer-led marketing has been the best marketing that I've done for many companies, and so have you seen that in your organization Absolutely, and it's assumed for a minute.

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Take the statistic at face value that only 5% of your target market is in the market for your solution at any time.

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Right, there's 95% of the available market that's just not interested in buying right now, but marketing is responsible for staying on the radar screen of that 95%.

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How do you do that?

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I was just on a session today it was an insightful session, a panel discussion talking about all the different digital touch points and how to try to aggregate that data to get an understanding of what really motivates the customer Web traffic pages, bounce rates, the ad performance and it occurred to me this is the punchline in this whole thing.

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What if you could just ask what would get their attention?

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What if you could just ask why would they buy?

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Why won't they buy?

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And the reality is you can ask it's tricky, there's some technique to it is you can ask it's tricky, there's some technique to it, but you can't actually go out and ask these people you want to sell to and to market to, what it would take what would get their attention, what would get them to move into that kind of disposition, buying disposition.

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They will tell you the trick is you can't do it with any hint.

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No hint of any sales pressure, no ulterior motive.

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It's truly got to be a genuine quest for knowledge, conversation with them.

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Yeah, and sometimes that could be.

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They want a certain level of support or customer success to get set up as a new customer.

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It could be that they want a certain offer.

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It could be that they need a certain price.

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It could be that they need a certain price that fits their business model or certain terms.

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It could be any combination of those things.

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But I think if you don't ask, you don't know.

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Have you done a lot with things along the lines of voice of the customer to get structured feedback?

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Absolutely.

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One of the things that happens in a lot of companies is messaging gets off right, it becomes a little off and sometimes there's people sitting around the boardroom table wordsmithing the messaging and usually that's a recipe for disaster.

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Right by the time everybody around the table is happy.

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It doesn't resonate with anybody and that leads to things like the big bloated sales pipeline a lot of no decisions, a lot of accounts just sitting there for an extended period of time.

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They don't close, closed one or closed loss, they just kind of sit there.

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They're the long maybes.

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If you go out and talk to even some of them, they will tell you why is it not moving?

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And it's because the value proposition didn't make sense.

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It's not always what you think it is, it's not always an efficiency, it's not always ROI, it is a lot, but sometimes it's something else.

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Sometimes it's employee retention that's happened.

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So there's blind spots and the only way to shine a light in the dark and find those blind spots and understand what's going on is to just ask.

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And you can apply that on the sales and marketing end of the spectrum, on the customer journey, in the middle of the account.

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So is the implementation going well?

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Is the support.

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Living up to par Is customer success.

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Living up to the promise and you can even apply it in the former customer category and find out why they churned, so you can retroactively go back and fix those things.

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Yes, At some of the companies that I've been at that are doing account-based marketing strategies to enterprise accounts and varying industries.

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What's been interesting to watch is a lot of times when organizations haven't done this customer-led marketing and they haven't gotten this feedback from customers.

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The visual that I've seen from this that is somewhat horrifying is it's like planes circling the airport in terms of pipeline.

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You have a pipeline, you have a thousand people who are interested that have indicated interest over a certain amount of time the last, let's call it three to six months, like semi-recently but then they're not moving forward to closing and it just looks like there's a thousand planes circling the airport and you're like, what is it going to take to get them to land?

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And the best way to find out is to ask them.

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And often that's where you get the best ideas on messaging, on offers, on additional value that you can offer them.

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It's not always about price, but I think that's like an interesting visual that I've seen.

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But do you have an example of some of the customer feedback customer marketing you've done that has been most impactful for your organization?

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Let?

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me just give an illustrative example and I'll move to the middle of the customer journey.

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So, like an NPS score In other lives, this is an Eterra Dotta story.

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I've been part of the process to go and interview people that have taken a net promoter score.

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So this is one of those things that's designed to give you that customer feedback at scale right.

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So you don't have to talk to everybody.

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You get them to fill in a survey and you glean stuff from that.

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If you take the time to actually talk to a few of those people, hey, why'd you give us a low mark?

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Or why'd you give us a high mark?

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Or even some of the ones in the middle, there's a percentage of those people that don't even remember taking that little survey.

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Can we call it that?

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The little app that pops up?

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How would you rate us?

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They got a job to do.

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You're in the way.

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They're just clicking it to get it off the screen.

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So we've seen it happen where people have scored a net promoter score of a one and actually been quite happy, and we've seen it in the opposite end, where they've scored it as a 10, but been absolutely miserable.

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So it's been a complete false positive, just false signals coming from it.

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So it's not saying replace net promoter, score.

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But this overlay of just talking to the customers pre-customer, current customer, former customer it's just an extra layer of intelligence that brings just a level of insight that you don't get from a survey or from filling in a short form.

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Yeah, I think that, to your point, nps scores can be misleading.

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To your point, nps scores can be misleading.

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I think customer surveys or prospect surveys can be an interesting data point, but they can also give false positives, just like an NPS, because a lot of times if you have to give an incentive for people to complete the survey, sometimes people are just completing the survey to get a $20 Starbucks card or something.

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Completing the survey to get a $20 Starbucks card or something, or if there's no, if there's no incentive, then you get a very few people who will take 10 or 15 minutes to do it, so you don't get a lot of data.

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The other thing that I've seen in terms of format is um, I've done small customer feedback groups over, say, a lunch in person and I thought that those were good.

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I think one of the challenges that I had with those is we were asking for feedback about messaging and pricing is you do get somewhat of a bandwagon effect If someone says some, if, if one customer perspective customer says something, three or four other people want to be like oh yeah, that's right, I agree with that, but they probably wouldn't have thought of it.

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I'm just curious is one-on-one conversations really the best way to get feedback, in your view I believe it is right.

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In the group setting there's what you described, the bandwagon jumping, but there's also then the it's not everybody's personality to be a conscientious disagree or objector in a group setting like that, so the group thing can slide in.

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When you're doing the interviews, you really have to make it a safe space.

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Can I say that For them to give bad news, you really have to pull it out of them.

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Sometimes ask the question a couple of different ways.

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How could we be doing better?

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If you're trying to figure out what's the next topic for your content marketing strategy, you try to appeal to that 95%.

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What are the topics on your mind these days?

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What was the last marketing campaign you clicked on?

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Why?

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How could we get your attention?

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You can ask those questions as long as they don't think you're going to go.

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Hey, can I set you up with a sales rep?

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That's a great point about the group setting meetings, because people would want to try to do that for efficiency perspective.

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Oh, let's try to get the opinion of 10, 20, 30 people, whether it's in person or on a webinar.

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But a lot of people are really afraid to cause controversy Not me, I'm a potster.

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I'll go into an online discussion group and just lob a grenade in there, but not everybody.

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So no, I'm joking.

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I think that perhaps, if the key is one-on-one meetings, perhaps it's just having a goal, using some of the tools that you mentioned to make it organized to talk to three customers or five customers a week, or prospects, or a mix of those two, and if you're just talking to let's call it five prospects or customers every week and asking them a similar sort of questions one-on-one, you can assimilate a good amount of feedback.

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That's sincere right, absolutely, and you can.

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It doesn't have to be you the CMO right.

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Members of your department can be doing this as well and I would encourage that too.

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That way, if everybody has, I don't know, say, five conversations a month, two or three a week, something like that, all of a sudden as a department you get way smarter, way fast.

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And then the other thing this does I haven't touched on yet is it changes the dynamic of marketing around the table.

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You're no longer there going.

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Gee, I wonder what's going on in the market Sales, could you tell me Customer success?

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Could you tell me Support?

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Could you tell me Somebody tell me what's going on out there?

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You've actually got it firsthand and you've got 25 people that your department has spoken to recorded in something like a user bit is an application I love where you can actually record question answer, question answer in the database and then also tag things like competitive, intel or value proposition or issues right, so you can go back to it later and even ask it more questions.

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There's a way to scale it.

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Yeah, I think it does take away a lot of that us versus them, sales versus marketing.

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If one group is, we have the relationship with the customers.

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So our perspective is right.

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It's makes it a little bit more.

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You're in the same boat.

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And we're great.

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I have a great relationship with the head of sales here, our chief sales officer, so it's not that that I'm talking about here, but because of what you pay sales to do, their bias in the market is towards the shorter term stuff.

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How are we fixing this thing to get those deals across the road?

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Or it becomes a little more tactical.

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Marketing needs to look at a little bit farther over the horizon to really get their stuff right.

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Yeah, I think that there's also the fact that in sales and customer success, what I've run into is a lot of times they don't have the time to just get genuine feedback outside of a sales process because they have a quota and they're like I'm just doing everything I can to meet my quota and the people on the service success support side are like hey, I have to talk to my customers about a lot of different things.

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I don't even know if I can get this into the conversation.

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I think this is another good reason for marketing to to jump in that gap and to help, because it's genuinely hard for those other groups to do it?

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Yeah, absolutely.

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And you can drive your content strategy, your demand gen strategy.

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All that stuff can come from those conversations, and I also there's if you haven't done it, do it first.

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I call it the 10 customer challenge.

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Go talk to 10.

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You'll learn something.

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You got blind spots, you don't know they're there.

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You'll learn something.

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But once you get that baseline established, then it's just a constant, steady ping back from the market.

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You can do it a lower volume and still always be in sync with what's going on in the market.

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I love the 10 customer challenge idea.

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I encourage everyone to take that up.

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So just to review don't include anything about sales in it.

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Encourage people to do one-on-one conversations and try to do it on a regular cadence.

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Is there anything else that you found successful?

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So, thank you very much for sharing these insights about customer-driven marketing.

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Love these challenges for marketers out there If they want to be remarkable.

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I think they got to have this as part of the routine.

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So, Ron, thank you for being with us today.

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Encourage everyone to share this episode with your friends.

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We appreciate you being with us, Ron, today.

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Thank you.