Birth order is a fascinating field of observation. I love to guess whether someone is an eldest, middle, or youngest sibling based on their behavior as an adult. While I’m a firstborn who fits a lot of conventional birth-order wisdom, I’d select “choose your own adventure” youngest-sibling energy to describe today’s B2B customer marketers. Exciting choices and blazed trails abound, as the customer marketing role has expanded well beyond cross-sell and upsell to encompass a vast set of responsibilities including adoption, digital engagement, and customer advocacy. Forrester’s new State Of Customer Engagement Survey, 2024, shows just how expansive this role has become.
Variety is thrilling. But I’d be remiss as the eldest sib if I didn’t give the same warning to customer marketers that I give to my own youngest child: Be ambitious but not careless. Long-term success requires you to take on the right things, not everything.
Ambition And Recognition Are Worthy Goals; Scope Creep Is Not
Our new data overview report on B2B Customer Marketing Responsibilities shows adoption, reference management, and digital programs among the top three customer marketing remits. The potential pitfall of that range of responsibilities: A whopping 86% of customer marketers said that their team has “too many competing priorities.”
If that feels familiar, you might be spreading yourself too thin and creating unnecessary friction with other functions. To avoid this, you must prioritize. Here are some ideas:
- Write it down. A customer marketing charter captures customer marketing’s mission statement, key initiatives, stakeholders, and most important metrics. From experience with our customer marketing clients, I promise it’s not the “homework” it might feel like. A clear charter inspires your team by reminding them what customer marketing is about, helps socialize your contribution to the rest of the company, and protects against inevitable scope creep. We’ll have a customer marketing charter workshop at our B2B Summit in early 2025 to get you started on your own charter.
- Keep your friends close. Successful companies protect against overlap and border skirmishes by ensuring that post-sale engagement functions collaborate rather than override each other. As a customer marketer, you should work with customer success to support adoption and usage programs. You should partner with sales to make sure that reference programs align with buyers’ needs. You should work with portfolio marketing and product teams to build resonant digital experiences such as online communities and customer portals and glean valuable insight from customer interactions.
- Keep customer value front and center. The simplest litmus test? Repeatedly ask yourself whether a program or tactic contributes to maximizing value for the company and the customer. That might be economic or functional value. It might also, or instead, appear as symbolic or experiential value. Be willing to evolve. Maybe something worked in the past, but does it work still? If not, be willing to rebalance, refocus, and deploy your efforts where they will do the most measurable good.
Read more about how customer marketers spend their time and resources, and where they’d like to do more, in the data overview report, B2B Customer Marketing Responsibilities.
Contact us if you’d like to workshop your own customer marketing charter.
