What doesn't customer marketing do? | Melissa Beck

[Dillon] (0:00 - 0:17)

So much of what you just described, eight years ago, ten years ago, somebody says, that's just customer success. They can do anything. They are the generalists, even as a company matures.

But it sounds like maybe we're shifting away from that. Maybe, let's do some addition by subtraction.

[Melissa] (0:18 - 0:22)

What? You're asking a commerce person about numbers, okay, let's do it. What?

What? What? What?

What?

[VO] (0:24 - 0:29)

What? What? Are you ready for this?

[Dillon] (0:29 - 0:42)

Are you ready? What's up, lifers, and welcome to The Daily Standup Lives with Lifetime Value, where we're giving you fresh, impressive success ideas every single day. I've got Melissa with me.

Melissa, can you say hi?

[Melissa] (0:42 - 0:43)

Hi, everyone.

[Dillon] (0:45 - 0:59)

I am your host. My name is Dillon Young. That's right, there's only two of us.

It's because we are reporting live from the Customer Success Summit in New York City. And I am excited to be here. Melissa, can you please introduce yourself?

[Melissa] (1:00 - 1:24)

Yeah, so I'm Melissa Beck. I'm the VP of Corporate Marketing at Sumo Logic, very technical data analytics company. I've been there for about 10 years, so in the startup world, I'm kind of a relic for being at a company that long.

And I run corporate marketing, so that's all things, communications, PR, AR, social media, and now customer marketing is something fairly new that's kind of rolling underneath me, so. And that's why you're here. That's why I'm here.

[Dillon] (1:24 - 1:48)

You're here at the customer marketing track of the event. Yes. Okay, cool.

So, we ask one simple question of every single guest, and that is, what is on your mind when it comes to, let's just talk about this event, right? Because you've got a lot of different things that sit under your umbrella. I don't wanna ask specifically about one or the other.

I wanna leave this open for you. So what is on your mind?

[Melissa] (1:50 - 2:22)

I'm here to learn, first and foremost. So, you know, obviously, we do customer marketing. I've been in charge of customer advocacy for a long time in my role.

So customer storytelling, our customer community with customer advisory boards. But customer marketing, I think, has changed a lot. And so I'm really here to learn.

There's new tools, there's new ways of doing things, this whole idea of product-led growth and how does that impact customers, like how you acquire new customers, customer retention, like all these things where it's just not in my traditional wheelhouse, so I'm just here to learn about all of it and how we can bring some of that back to Sumo.

[Dillon] (2:23 - 2:49)

Well, and so what's interesting is when I think of customer marketing, I think of the existing customer and I think of it as just email campaigns. And maybe you used to as well, so maybe that's a part of your journey of learning this. Tell me, give me an example of what you've learned either here or recently, just kind of absorbing whatever about customer marketing versus the way it used to be.

What's a good example of that?

[Melissa] (2:49 - 3:29)

So I believe, at the heart of it, customers are buying experiences now. They're not buying products. Like, yes, you're solving a challenge for them.

Yes, they're coming to you because they need something and they need you to help solve their pain. But at the end of the day, they stay with you because of the experience. And that experience starts from the second they onboard, right?

So you bought us, great. Here's how you get started. Here's how you learn more about the solution.

Here's how you get help. Here's how, you know, it goes on and on, right, throughout the whole, I think, you know, your tenure of being a customer. So experience is something that I'm hyper-focused on and all of this adds up to that, right?

I mean, like, yes, we're talking about retention numbers and how do you keep customers from churning. You keep customers from churning by delivering a great experience.

[Dillon] (3:31 - 4:12)

It's interesting to me because so much of what you just described, I think, eight years ago, 10 years ago, there's a world in which somebody says, that's just customer success. And depending on the company you're at, people say like, yeah, because they can do anything. They are the generalists, even as a company matures.

But it sounds like maybe we're shifting away from that. Maybe let's do some addition by subtraction. What?

You're asking a comms person about numbers. Okay, let's do it. Yeah, so take it with a grain of salt.

What doesn't customer marketing do? What's an easy example of what doesn't fall under the week? Because you listed a ton of stuff, a ton of stuff.

[Melissa] (4:12 - 4:58)

Yeah, what doesn't? That's a good question, because even finance, right? I mean, even finance touches it.

So I can't think of, honestly, a single function. So like in our company, we come from a very customer-centric innovation. That's one of our pillars of the company, customer-centric innovation.

So not only how we deliver that to customers, but how do we work with them to take that feedback and put it back into what we're creating, what we're building, all those types of things. And that feedback comes from all kinds of places. Sometimes it's customer success.

A lot of the times, they're kind of the front line. Sometimes it's sales. Other times, it's stuff that I'm doing with our customer advisory board.

I'm getting that feedback. But now there's surveys, there's email. There's all these places where things are coming in from.

And so I think it's really touching every part of the company now.

[Dillon] (5:01 - 5:02)

I'm gonna try this again.

[Melissa] (5:02 - 5:03)

Did I answer it?

[Dillon] (5:03 - 5:04)

Or did I not?

[Melissa] (5:04 - 5:04)

Did I answer the number?

[Dillon] (5:04 - 5:29)

I think you were evasive. No, I'm kidding. Not evasive, but I think your answer was truthful.

But what could somebody come to you and say, hey, do you do this? And let's talk customer marketing specifically. And you just say, no, I wouldn't do that.

Customer success would do that. Or support would do that. And obviously, let's not talk about tickets, right?

Because that's obviously. But where do you guys draw the line?

[Melissa] (5:31 - 6:47)

This is, okay, okay. This is a great question. Let me give you an example of a product incident.

Okay, yeah. So a product incident happens. Maybe we're a fall, maybe we're not, doesn't matter.

There's an element that we're involved in, and the handoff then goes to customer success, right? Because. Interesting.

Yeah, so like, for example, we have an issue where somebody's logs or data got into somebody else's, for whatever reason on the back end, right? We unravel it, we fix it, it's an easy fix, whatever. Well, how do we tell customers that?

And do we tell customers that? Is it a big enough deal? Is it not?

And if we do tell customers, is that frontline enabled to answer all those questions? Because they're the ones that are on the frontline. And that's customer marketing.

It's a piece of it. A piece of it. Yeah, it's the customer comms piece of it, right?

So what I'm finding, what I'm learning in this whole customer marketing journey is that I work with more people now than I ever did, even in comms. I'm deep in customer success. I'm over here talking to product about this.

I've got the SOC team, you know, the security team telling me we need to do this. And I'm not like the driver of it all, but there's always like a marketing person in that. So it's kind of, it's interesting, but I don't, you know, I'm not on the frontline saying, hey, customer X, Y, Z, go do this, or here's how we can help you fix it.

[Dillon] (6:47 - 7:15)

You know, that's definitely- But you have an expertise in your ability to communicate with customers. Would you say that there's a big piece of it that's the scalability of it all? Because the example you gave, not really, the expertise was really in how to convey a message delicately, strategically.

Yep. But I've always thought of customer marketing as a big killer of it, or a tenant of it is the scalability of it all.

[Melissa] (7:16 - 7:56)

Yeah, I mean, I think that absolutely is, right? You have this small group of champions. You want 5 million of those, right?

You want all your customers to be that way. So how do you scale that, right? And this is where all the experience matters because the experience could come from a great customer success exchange, or they helped them solve a problem, or it could come because it came to a great event and we treated them really great, or our awards program that we're honoring.

So I think we want as many as we can and we need everybody to help us scale that. That's why the experience, I keep saying experience because it really does go back to that. Let's give our customers the best experience all the way around.

They'll wanna work with us, they'll wanna be our advocates. There's some customers that I've worked with that have been in the company as long as I have, which I think speaks to experience and collaboration and kind of growing together.

[Dillon] (7:57 - 8:33)

You mentioned in your introduction advocacy. And I think it's probably hit or miss, or 50-50, where advocacy sits within an organization. I've built customer advisory boards that have lived in customer success.

I've built customer advisory boards that have been managed by committee, of which customer success was a piece, but marketing was a piece as well. It sounds like you've also, I don't know if you've built or owned advocacy programs do you think you do it better than us?

[Melissa] (8:34 - 8:36)

I feel like that's a trick question.

[Dillon] (8:36 - 8:40)

No, yeah, that's not the real question. It's more like, what are the benefits of each?

[Melissa] (8:41 - 9:40)

Yeah, at Sumo, I have built the customer advocacy program from the ground up. And it really started with storytelling, right? Like, hey, we wanna go tell this customer story and we wanna do a press release and we wanna pitch it to the media.

So it started with storytelling. It was like, well, we know all these customers already. We know their stories.

How can we pull them all together? Events lives underneath me. Then you start to like, oh, just run an event for them.

But really, I think customer success is a huge piece of it. And I also think that our product management team, right? Cause they're the ones that need the feedback, right?

Like I like hearing it for storytelling. They're the ones that are like, hey, this doesn't work. Like go fix it or go build them what they want or whatever it is.

So our cabs are very practitioner focused. So we're talking like deep engineers are in the room, deep product, deep customer success. And then it's run by marketing, you know what I mean?

And then we take our piece of it. Like we'll go do videos with them or we'll go do something else with them. So we try to kind of make it a one for all sort of thing.

But yeah.

-: 10:00

Yeah. We did something similar where the committee was CS marketing product and engineering. Cause we found that those were the groups that needed to talk to customers the most.

And actually CS didn't need to, but we needed to have visibility into those conversations. Any parting words for the audience?

[Melissa] (: 10:01

I think this is a really interesting time in, I think marketing, but also customer marketing, especially with COVID and people were more like, our customers aren't where they were before. You can't say, I'm going to come into your office. Let's have a coffee.

They're all over, right? So it's like, however you can get them, however you can get something, I think is really the name of the game. And so meeting them where they're at, it's really important.

And all these things that are here, all these tools, all these technologies, all these ideas are all kind of adding up to that. So I'm super excited. It's a really interesting time in the industry.

[Dillon] (: 10:31

It's an opportunity to reframe a lot of our stayed tendencies in business.

[Melissa] (: 10:39

We all want to be in person, right? I mean, I love being in person here. This is great.

It's not always possible, right?

[Dillon] (: 10:44

And we've had to really adjust. Do you work remotely?

[Melissa] (: 10:46

I work remotely.

[Dillon] (: 10:46

Exactly. So if somebody wanted to come and meet with you, you'd be like, that's weird. But you come to this and you're like, I love it.

That's an example of how it has to meet the customer at the right time with what they need.

[Melissa] (: 11:00

It's a hundred percent true.

[Dillon] (: 11:01

So cool. Well, Melissa, that is our time. Thank you so much.

[Melissa] (: 11:05

Thanks for having me.

[Dillon] (: 11:05

For being a guest. And I hope you enjoy the rest of your time.

[Melissa] (: 11:08

Yeah, thank you.

[VO] (: 11:15

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