Your Customer Is Not Your Enemy

Customer marketing can be a lonely job. That’s bad for customer marketers, their companies, and customers. Evan Jacobs, Head of Customer & Partner Marketing at Chainalysis, shares why customer marketing is both lonely and dangerous, how this isolation impacts our companies and customers, and how to start working more cross-functionally with other teams. 

Customer education and customer marketing logically overlap but are too often disconnected. Customer education makes great material, and then marketing promotes it. But Shannon Howard, Director of Customer & Content Marketing at Intellum, believes the two functions should combine forces. In this episode, Shannon dives into why customer marketing can better enable customers to turn into advocates, how customer education can scale customer success, and how customer marketing and education can work more closely together.

Customers might not always be right, but they also aren’t the enemy when things go wrong. When SaaS relationships break down, Casey Trujillo, Vice President, Sales Excellence at BrainStorm Inc, sees everyone turn on each other. But it doesn’t have to be this way. In this episode, Casey breaks down how to set up SaaS relationships for success and what to do when they break down.

Too often, businesses focus on product personalization. But they don’t focus enough on ensuring their customers are cared for as humans. Best-selling author Dr Joseph Michelli believes this “making it personal” approach is the key to success. In this episode, Dr Michelli shares the meaning of making it personal, why caring for our customers as people is good for business, and examples of companies from Starbucks to The Ritz-Carlton who are doing it right.

In the time of AI, Carrie Melissa Jones believes we need community now more than ever. In this episode, Carrie shares AI's positive and negative impacts on community building, how not to lose our humanity in the age of AI, and some AI tools that can help you scale your customer community efforts the right way.

Let's look back at the year that was. In this episode, we dive into a recap and soundbite from each of 2023's 18 episodes.

Too often, we wait months—or even years—to engage customers as advocates. But in waiting, we lose out on valuable opportunities. In this episode, Udemy's CMO Dr. Genefa Murphy shares how to engage customers earlier, the massive missed opportunities that happen when you don’t, and why advocacy should truly be a two-way street.

Autodesk has long been a product-driven company. And while they were always customer-centric, they knew they needed to double down and shift from being product-driven to customer-driven. In this episode, Vikram Dutt, Vice President of Industry & Portfolio Marketing at Autodesk, shares the reason for this shift, how they’ve codified these approaches in their marketing efforts, and why being more customer-centric has been empowering to his team.

For a long time, customer retention was viewed as CS' singlehanded responsibility. After all, isn’t that their job? But Kevin Lau, Senior Director of Global Customer Engagement at F5, believes retention is a team sport. Marketing, sales, and CS should come together to create better customer experiences. In this episode, Kevin dishes on why he believes marketing can help CS, why onboarding is a key part of retention, and how to determine the proper swim lanes when multiple teams are involved in ensuring customers are successful.

How often do you run your key messaging by your customers? Probably not often enough. Sara Varni, CMO at Attentive, believes too much messaging work happens in an ivory tower. In this episode, Sara dives into why marketers tend to work in those ivory towers, what happens when we don’t talk directly to our customers, and shares her framework for how she works through messaging with customers.