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Like two peas in a pod, Customer Success and Marketing work diligently every day to prove they’re a revenue driver, and not just another department to sink money into.
It’s a common concern for both teams. In this business world where, more and more, everything comes down to revenue and solvency, marketers and CSMs both have to serve that coveted ROI to shareholders on a silver platter and present it like their life depended on it.
But what if I told you that by working together, both teams have a better shot at proving their worth?
It’s true. And today I’ll show you how. Let me walk you through it a bit:
Got your notes app open? Let’s start.
Each department in a company works to drive growth in various ways – Financial works to keep all the books in order, Customer Support works to solve customer issues, and Sales… well, Sales is often deemed the champion at landing new contracts.
But what about marketing?
Well, marketing works to perfect the messaging around your product, services, and overall offer. It does market research, analyzes the competition, writes articles and guides, and constantly chisels at the copy, and the website, and the social posts, and those pesky CTAs until everything is a perfect likeness to your audience’s needs and wants. Marketing is the department most in tune with what’s in demand and thus, marketers have insights into what customers want before they even make a purchase.
So, how does customer success fit in?
CSMs work with customers every day. If they don’t have 10 calls, they have to send 5 emails, respond to 2 chat requests, give 2 demos, and then have time for some proactive engagement by checking the metrics in their CS platform. It’s a constant battle to ensure customers attain their desired goals and become retained, loyal, or even upgrade to a higher plan. As such, CSMs have the data to prove customer behavior, sometimes before the customer even takes action.
Beyond these chief responsibilities, both teams are also often highly skilled, showing a mastery of their tasks and tactics. So why not work together?
Marketing <> CS collaboration rose 17% from 2021 to 2022, a signal that shows people are starting to wake up how effective that can be.
So, from my experience, here’s an extensive, documented, and data-backed list of reasons why customer success and marketing need to work together more often:
One of the biggest mistakes in SaaS is selling lies – specifically when marketing and sales use messaging that does not align with what the product actually does (at all). If that happens, CSMs eventually pay the price by having to balance accurate product demos with saving face regarding any false promises from sales or marketing. Naturally, working closer with marketing is the easiest way to prevent the issue.
Furthermore, by working together, marketing and customer success can establish a consistent branding and messaging guide that can be used by anyone, anywhere, when promoting the business offer.
Both CS and Marketing have access to a trove of interesting, insight-packed data points that can reveal the product story in greater detail by looking at the specifics of what customers do within it.
CS and Marketing can draw in Product to sync on the overall product marketing strategy and use customer success indicators to prioritize the most popular features and services you offer.
Content is at the heart of good product marketing, as well as good onboarding. By working side by side, CSMs and marketers can produce resources that work really well in both social media feeds and in customers’ inboxes. It’s a win for everyone!
CSMs know they need more surveys, polls, and ways to gather feedback from customers. Marketers know how to craft those, but often need a reason to. So, teaming up to gather better customer data is the logical next step.
According to TSIA’s most recent State of Customer Success, 95% of CSMs say their primary focus remains adoption. CSMs and Marketers, through all the collaborative efforts outlined here, can enable better onboarding experiences for new users, leading to higher adoption, improved loyalty, and more upsells.
Marketing always has their finger on the pulse of the industry, learning about real-time developments faster than most CSMs. Working together enables the company to act on those developments.
All these benefits lead to an overall alignment between CS, marketing, and even sales. This enhanced level of collaboration leads to better products, happier customers, more word-of-mouth marketing, and higher referrals.
Lastly, by working tightly with CSMs, marketers can learn how the product delivers value to customers, making it easier to communicate that value through their efforts.
Product or feature releases are some of the most important moments on the business lifecycle. As such, marketers need to guarantee success in raising awareness, while CSMs need to focus on feature or product adoption.
So, how can marketing and CS work together for better feature / product releases? Simple:
Note also that this is one of the processes your business should have nailed down to a T. Once you start, you will need to repeat the process for future releases, so ensure it’s scalable and well-documented.
Marketing usually has a lot of ideas.
However, what it typically doesn’t have is direct contact with customers. If they had, they could determine what those customers and potential new ones might want from their marketing collaterals. Think:
An actionable webinar on issues customers are struggling with right now will always get more attendees, engagement, and ultimately drive more business. Fortunately, CSMs know exactly what those issues are and often have pointers on how to solve them.
Full-blown guides are even better – though more time-consuming – as they offer precise guidance on tactics and methodology for customers and provide a great funnel for MQLs to start showing up in Sales’ inbox.
A knowledge-base will always be a welcome addition to your website. CSMs can help Marketing with the most important topics to cover and, if needed, with the actual content to include.
As with webinars, Podcasts can be incredibly informative and can create a loyal audience if they cover topics relevant to customers’ day-to-day operations.
Last but certainly not least, CS can help Marketing with ideas for short-form, shareable content such as cheat sheets. A good cheat sheet can put your brand in a positive light, allow potential customers to save it and use it every day (thus seeing your brand every day), and also drive significant engagement on social channels. It’s another win for the whole team!
An unfortunate number of digital marketers have a tendency to write very thin content due to the unavailability of people who can enrich that content based on their real life experience.
What does that mean?
It means a lot of articles, guides, or other marketing materials end up lacking realness. They cannot feature actual experience-backed specifics from experts because they can’t find any experts willing to help.
Enter the CSM – a highly skilled professional who can talk to you for hours about:
By working together, marketers can enrich all their materials with actual opinions, insights, and full-blown tactics from CSMs. This makes for more convincing materials that achieve a higher conversion rate.
Next on our agenda are customer personas. They are one of the essential skills in a marketer’s toolkit, allowing for better overall alignment between key marketing messages and the audience you’re trying to reach.
By looping in customer success, marketers can get a good picture of the current customer base – what their needs are, why they came to your business in the first place, what their expected outcomes are, what their stated outcomes are, what their business does, and so on.
Through this in-depth research, which can include a collaborative voice of the customer program, Marketers can reach out to better audiences, while CS benefits in the long run as more relevant, better-fit customers walk through the door.
Case studies, though last on our list, can be one of the best, most impactful ways CS and Marketing can work together. That’s because through these action-packed materials, you’re essentially showing your customers how they can be successful with your product(s) or service(s).
Customer success can help by selecting the best-fit, most successful customers and asking whether they’d be willing to take part in a testimonial or case study. A trusted advisor reaching out for a case study will always have more success than a marketer who’s never interacted with that particular account before.
A voice-of-the-customer initiative is a complex, collaborative effort involving significant effort in terms of customer research, surveys, and coming up with internal processes. Besides Marketing and CS, other teams such as Product, Customer Service, and Sales need to be kept informed.
So what can marketing do to help customers pass their feedback to the right people?
Easy. Marketers are masters at building surveys, crafting compelling questions, and social listening. At the end of the day, successful VoC programs depend on:
As you can see, we can firmly place the first two points under the marketing umbrella. Naturally, once the product is updated, marketers can step in once again and create a campaign promoting the new updates.
Building a churn prediction model is yet another collaborative effort marketers can help with. CS typically spearheads any churn-related activities. A churn prediction process helps the business stay on top of customer retention, distribute company resources better, and overall build better products.
To start, CSMs need to analyze current churn levels and see why it happens. Marketers can help with this one by:
What’s sales got to do with anything? Well – Customer Success is in charge of upsells constantly, they have or will receive sales training, and it’s been proven that existing customers bring in more revenue than new ones.
So, next time marketing prepares collateral for Sales to use, make sure those materials can also be used for customer success interactions.
Remember that CS can help marketing with ideas on what type of collaterals would be most useful to produce. But at the end of the day, it’s still marketers’ responsibility to produce them. Customer success will almost always be in need of:
These types of tactics are just the tip of the iceberg on what Marketing can do to assist their CSM colleagues. 
To sum up, seeing as their activities often go hand-in-hand, both customer success and marketing can greatly enhance each other’s day to day activities through a collaborative approach.
The stats I cited above prove that not enough people are taking advantage of this practice, so what are you waiting for? With just a few easy steps, you too could be an early adopter and put yourself in front.
Irina Vatafu is the Lead Customer Success Manager at Custify. As an ANC Certified Trainer and a Customer Success Manager, Irina uses her technical background to better understand SaaS businesses and drive them to success.
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