What CS can learn from marketing | Irwin Hipsman

[Irwin] (0:00 - 0:20)

Every company should have an inventory of all the customer communications, the one-to-many, not the one-to-ones, one-to-many that go out the door. I think companies would be shocked to see the list of 20 to 30 things that are one-to-many. Some of them are generated from the product.

Some of them, you know, product marketing is sending out, customer success is sending out different parts of the organization.

[Dillon] (0:29 - 0:40)

What's up lifers and welcome to The Daily Standup with Lifetime Value, where we're giving you fresh new customer success ideas every single day. I got my man JP with us. JP, do you want to say hi?

[JP] (0:41 - 0:41)

Shalom.

[Dillon] (0:43 - 0:55)

And we've got Rob with us. Rob, can you say hi, please? What's up people?

Oh, you didn't have anything to add to that? No. And we have Irwin with us.

Irwin, can you say hi, please?

[Irwin] (0:56 - 0:59)

Yeah. Back in the saddle again with Mishpucha here. This is good.

[Dillon] (0:59 - 1:04)

I think you're swearing at me. I don't know what we're saying. Yes.

[Irwin] (1:04 - 1:04)

Two-timer.

[Dillon] (1:05 - 1:13)

Irwin, thank you so much for being here. And I am your host. My name is Dillon Young.

Irwin, as though you need an introduction, can you please introduce yourself?

[Irwin] (1:13 - 1:30)

Yeah. Irwin Hipsman. I am the founder of Repetitos, which focuses on helping clients transform their customer contact database into an advantage.

I've been in sales, customer success and customer marketing over the years. So I'm trilingual.

[Dillon] (1:31 - 1:39)

Irwin, I'm not taking anything away from your first appearance, but that introduction felt tighter. I think you've been working on it. Is that fair to say?

[Irwin] (1:39 - 1:40)

Yeah. I'm working on my pitch.

[Dillon] (1:41 - 1:53)

Anyway, Irwin, you do know what we do here. And that is, we ask every single guest one simple question. What is on your mind when it comes to customer success?

So why don't you hit us with it?

[Irwin] (1:54 - 2:11)

Yeah. Last week I was at the Customer Marketing Alliance Conference in New York City. So I took the Amtrak down.

It was nice. They have three conferences sort of at the same time. There's customer marketing folks, customer success, which Rob was involved with.

And Rob, what was the third one? I never could figure that out.

[Rob] (2:11 - 2:14)

CCO. The CCO Summit. Oh, Chief Customer Officer.

[Irwin] (2:14 - 2:15)

Support too.

[Rob] (2:15 - 2:17)

Chief Customer. Oh yeah, support too.

[Irwin] (2:18 - 2:18)

Yeah.

[Rob] (2:18 - 2:18)

Yeah.

[Irwin] (2:18 - 2:19)

That's the whole mishbah.

[Rob] (2:19 - 2:20)

Yeah.

[Irwin] (2:20 - 4:58)

And what's weird about the conference is that, you know, everyone does their own thing. And there's not a lot of overlap except maybe in the lunchroom, but everyone's, you know, although, you know, customer marketing and customer success, there's a lot of overlap there. It would have been good to have some customer success people roam over and present and vice versa.

But on the other hand, the customer marketing conference that I attended was great. And I had three big takeaways and also gave a little presentation, which we'll talk about soon in a second. One was, because it was in New York, there were a lot of B2C folks there and brand type people, which is unusual for customer marketers to sort of talk to.

And it's good to hear what the B2C people are thinking when it comes to segmentation and branding and all those sort of things. There was a lot of talk about lifecycle marketing presentations from the stage, but very few lifecycle marketers who attended. It was still mainly customer advocacy type people, as opposed to the lifecycle marketers.

I'm starting to see some of the customer advocacy people given lifecycle marketing as part of their portfolio as well. So they're dipping their toes in. And so I was a little surprised there weren't more lifecycle marketers.

And there was one company Workiva who gave really the best presentation. It was the three customer advocacy people came and I learned something. So it's like, you go these things and like, wow, I actually learned something.

So the two things I learned from the Workiva presentation were one is they do a thing called group reference calls. So normally when you have a prospect, you try to line up one advocate to talk to the prospect. What they did is they had one, they do once a month and once a quarter, they get a brand name customer.

They mentioned Disney, for example, and they had 200 prospects who in the pipeline attend that reference call. And people could, you know, they opened it up to questions and, you know, people really wanted to hear what, you know, a neighboring company was doing. So I think there's something there with, it's sometimes so hard to line up the reference with the referencee.

And I thought it was really brilliant to do the group calls where you just invite anyone in the pipeline to, they still may want to do a reference call one-to-one, but this sort of, you know, gives them that big picture overview hearing from a customer. And the other thing they did, which was great, was they, they actually had at Workiva, they had a charter. Like this is the charter of our customer marketing program.

And, you know, here are our goals, et cetera, et cetera. And everyone agrees with it. I think that transfers to customer success.

You know, what is our charter? What are we doing? And almost more importantly, what are we not doing?

So I thought those were some great takeaways along with some of the content I delivered, but any questions off of that?

[Dillon] (4:58 - 5:09)

So first of all, I have to mention the color that you added by saying you took the Amtrak down. I love it. I love it.

A little narration for us. Number two.

[Irwin] (5:09 - 5:12)

I was on the low budget, so I took the slow track.

[Dillon] (5:13 - 5:45)

Okay. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, fine. You could bet your money that Rob would have been floating between rooms if he wasn't serving as the master of ceremonies for customer success. So he would have been your little butterfly flitting in and out of the room between panels.

Thirdly, what a power play to do group reference calls. I I'm struggling to see a downside except maybe competitors kind of sneaking in and hearing what folks have to say, but you're shrugging and saying, yeah, whatever.

[Irwin] (5:45 - 5:51)

And I agree. They don't publicly advertise it as a webinar. It's only inviting those people who are in the pipeline.

[Dillon] (5:51 - 6:07)

I mean, but if you got 200 people in your pipeline, I feel like that eventually gets to a competitor if they're looking at multiple opportunity or a multiple service offerings. Anyway, JP, why don't you jump in and share any questions or thoughts you have?

[JP] (6:07 - 7:34)

Yeah. I also enjoy the little Amtrak detail. Love a nice little train ride.

Yeah. You know, I think you've mentioned something that was interesting about how there were these conferences going on all at the same time, but that, you know, no one, there wasn't as much like sort of cross talk or, but then, you know, sort of juxtapose that with this company that decides to have, you know, like this big, you know, Disney have a call where they invite everyone in for this, this sort of reference call.

So it's sort of like, I guess, two, two different instances of sort of like, you know, leveraging people that are there. One is in a very like separate way. Okay.

You each are going to be focused on this in another way where it's like, okay, you have a lot of people, but they're focused on one thing I would say to the, to that conference, you know, I've, I've actually been very interested in marketing and actually in the difference between customer marketing and product marketing. I think we had a show one time and Rob asked a very annoying question, which was, if you weren't, if you weren't a customer success, what would you be doing? And like, I short circuited, I think Dillon edited it out.

But like, I short circuited because I was like, I don't understand, but you know, we'd love to maybe hear quickly because you said you would, you would actually done that. Maybe you can quickly just say, you know, I know we have a lot of people listening, me included. What's sort of like the difference to you between customer and product marketing?

[Irwin] (7:35 - 9:32)

I mean, product mark customer marketing takes a much wider swath. I mean, product is only interested in getting the product, I shouldn't say quite like this, getting the product updates or getting some feedback, you know, back. Whereas customer marketing thinks about everything from, you know, from the advocacy side.

So how do you get people to advocate on your behalf? Second is, you know, if you're doing life cycle marketing, it's, you know, those nurture campaigns, which could include some product information to clients. So it's, it's looking at the broad swath of all the customer marketing.

One of the suggestions I gave in my presentation was that every company should have an inventory of all the customer communications, the one to many, not the one to ones, one to many that go out the door. I think companies would be shocked to see the list of 20 to 30 things that are one to many. Some of them are generated from the product.

Some of them, you know, product marketing is sending out, customer success is sending out different parts of the organization. You know, what is, what's the open rates of segmentation. But to me that is the first thing to do.

But if I were to go back and work for a company again, the first thing I would do is create that inventory. And then you'll see like, Oh my God, we can start combining things and we can do a better job at segmenting so that we get a higher open rate. I mean, I've just finished this survey and the average open rate was 30% for customer communications, which means that 70% of customers are not opening your emails.

Now what can you do to, you know, to increase that? One thing you could do is clean up the database. You're sending to people who, you know, who've never opened up an email in three years from you have never logged into your product and you're still sending them emails hoping, well, this is the one they're going to open.

You know, my friends in demand gen talk about AB testing, nothing wrong with that. Subject lines, nothing wrong with that. They're talking about two to 3% increase in open rates.

If you clean up your database, you're going to get a 10% increase in your open rates.

-: 10:26

Yeah. It's interesting, Rob. I'll throw it to you in one second, but it's interesting to think about the different ways in which success is measured to like customer marketing and what you're talking about is not, maybe not nearly as interested in things like open rates.

I think they should be, but it's typically about how many folks they're reaching out to and how many folks they get to sign up in the first place. I'll tell you the lifetime value newsletter. We actually go through a process.

It's automated. We don't do it where we actually delete subscribers if they haven't opened an email in the past 90 or 120 days, something like that. If you think about it from our perspective, when we're trying to sell to sponsors, they don't want to see a piss poor open rate or engagement rate.

So it actually behooves us to clean that up consistently and clean up, meaning just deleting those folks entirely. Rob, why don't you go ahead?

[Rob] (: 10:27

No, that's a good point. I hadn't thought about that. It's a very good point.

Irwin, I would have loved to have seen you at the conference. I did butterfly around. I did see you out of my eye, but you were talking about, you had a, you know, the groupies hanging with you.

[Dillon] (: 10:39

I saw Irwin and I was only there for one day.

[Rob] (: 10:42

I also took the Amtrak down, spread out my laptop and all my stuff on one of those big tables. I'll be like, this is mine everybody. But no, I think there's so much good, good content.

What you said. I've never thought about a group reference call until now.

[Irwin] (: 10:55

Me neither.

[Rob] (: 10:56

I was like, what a great idea. Good. Yeah.

I was actually thinking of one of the best masterclasses I ever saw a salesperson put on when it came to a reference call. He was tired of this prospect kept asking for reference, for reference, for reference. And he was like, you know, honestly anyone I introduced to you is going to say positive things about us.

Otherwise I'm not going to introduce them to you. So can we just not waste our time? And I'm thinking that like this would have been a good tool for that.

By the way, that worked remarkably. This would have been a really good tool for plenty of teams that I've been a part of to have in our back pocket. I'm just curious.

I know we don't have a ton of time left, but what goes into, like if you had to pick one agenda item to make sure you hit on, you know, in that group reference call, what it might be.

[Irwin] (: 11:36

I think it's just the customer talking about the relationship with the company, not the product, but the people. That's really valuable. What's support like, you know, what's onboarding like, you know, things like that.

You know, do you, do you interact with executives?

[VO] (: 11:52

Cool.

[Irwin] (: 11:52

Product always works, not always, but usually always works. It's really, you know, those vendors who support you. The last thing I want to, I want to make sure I don't forget this.

The number one deliverable when I presented was a number. It was 47%. When I asked the question in the survey that is, I'm writing it right now.

We had a hundred responses around the health of the B2B customer contact databases. The research is coming out in April. The key question was for people to rate the cleanliness, usability and health of, and trust in their customer contact database.

The score was 47%. If I was in high school, teacher would have called my parents up and said, Irwin failed the class so bad that I have to call you. So the high performers had about a 62% you know, score of the cleanliness, health, trust in the database.

I think we can get up to 70, 80%. It's never going to be a hundred percent, but this should be a wake up call to customer success, customer marketing, rev ops, CMOs, that the customer contact databases at most company fails the organization. It makes everyone's work so much harder when that database is not clean.

[Dillon] (: 13:03

Well, Irwin, lucky for you. If they tried to call your parents, they only had a 50% chance of actually reaching them. So, that's our time.

That was really good. Thank you. Thank you.

Exactly. I have to write him a letter or show up at the house. Irwin, that's our time.

Thank you so much for this information. And for the recap, really interesting. Love the idea about the group reference call and the data that I can't wait to see the full report.

[Irwin] (: 13:32

I've got more research coming really interesting projects coming down the pike and I'll be back. I'm going to be SNL top, you know, top guest host. That's my goal.

Love it.

[Dillon] (: 13:41

Bring more words. I don't understand too, if you could, but until that time, Irwin, you've got to say goodbye.

[VO] (: 13:53

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