The Beat: Make 'em Clap to This

Welcome to The Beat by Rockstar CMO, I’m Ian Truscott, CMO and host of Rockstar CMO, and in this newsletter, I’d like to share a mix of what’s caught my eye from our community, our podcast and our street knowledge blog

Hello!

Happy Sunday, I hope you’ve had a splendid week, and thanks for opening this email. If you like what I am doing here, please do me a favor and click on any of the links just to let me know it’s not just the machines that are opening this email 🙂

It’s taken just ten issues of this rebooted newsletter for me to break my own rules of my subject lines. This issue is not named after a song title, but a lyric from a classic 80’s rap song of my youth, “Eric B Is President”, by Eric B and Rakim, that has ear wormed its way into my head since I was thinking of songs for the podcast this week, as we discussed the topic of customer marketing.

If you haven’t listened to the podcast, in the first segment my chum Jeff Clark, a Forrester alumnus and learned B2B marketer, and I discuss a marketing discipline; then, I drop in a snippet of a tune to match the theme.

As I mentioned, this week’s topic was customer marketing; I picked it because it’s a hot topic in my day job as the CMO of a group of B2B SaaS businesses. As an industry, over the last decade or so, we’ve had to pivot from the relative lock-in of on-premise solutions with replacement cycles measured in years to buyer freedom to change measured in months.

Plus, when the economic going gets tough, we look to how to make the most of this asset we already own.

However, customer marketing is often neglected as we marketers tend to naturally pivot to the generation of new business at the service of our sales colleagues, who usually direct the hunt toward uncharted territories rather than looking closer to home.

And, as is often reported and probably proven by data that lies in all of our CRM systems, it’s a fraction of the cost to sell your new dohickey to an existing customer than find someone new.

You’ll have a far higher close rate and a shorter sales cycle as (hopefully) the customer already knows and trusts you. And ultimately, a slight reduction in churn or uptick in cross-selling can dramatically impact the financial performance of a SaaS business.

Jeff shared some great advice on the podcast, taking us through the five post-purchase customer lifecycle stages, quoting the Pedowitz Group’s Customer Journey Map:

• On-board

• Adoption

• Value Realisation

• Loyalty

• Advocacy

Which, one hopes, will then lead the customer back to a buying stage, like consideration.

Reflecting on our conversation for this newsletter, one thing we didn’t touch on in our conversation is that not only is it easier for us to sell to existing customers, its easier for them to buy from someone they already know, both in terms of procurement procedures, but also we’ve overcome the friction of trust.

And, if you can develop an excellent customer sales and marketing machine, you can make different commercial decisions based on the customer’s lifetime value when you have a customer base with a propensity to buy more from you than just stick with what they have.

For example, offering beachhead offerings, like freemium products, free trials or developing reduced feature offerings aimed at quickly solving an immediate problem that allows you to gain trust, prove your value and introduce new products. Yes, they may not have an immediate commercial impact on revenue, but some will convert to higher margin offerings in the medium to longer term.

Obviously, I recommend listening to Jeff on the pod, but I am sure he will share the model in a future blog article. Speaking of which, please take a look at some of the articles from us and our band below.

Oh, and the song? Well, for the podcast, Jeff and I went for “Satisfy My Soul” by Bob Marley and the Wailers for the lyric:

 “..can't you see what you've done for me / I'm happy inside, all, all of the time”

Which is how we want our customers to feel. Or, as my Eric B and Rakim earworm will tell you, “Make ‘em clap to this”.

What do you think? I’m really interested in this topic and would be delighted to hear from you. In any case, thanks for reading, have a great week! Please get in touch if you have any thoughts or comments on this newsletter, our blog or the podcast.  

Cheers,

Ian

Ian Truscott | Chief Bottle Washer | Rockstar CMO

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Street Knowledge

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Get your Monday Morning Marketing Mojo Working

OK, in this NPR Tiny Desk concert, Rakim doesn’t do the tune that gave this newsletter issue its name, but if you like your classic hip hop, this is wonderful…

The promo image used on the web page was partially created using A.I. through NightCafe Studio