How to Align Your Marketing and Customer Success Teams
Your customer success marketing team’s efforts can be much more fruitful and yield tangible results once you prioritize alignment. The idea is to not direct energy only toward increasing engagement with potential customers and expanding your consumer base.
As much or more internal collaboration and alignment are required to impact your bottom line. When your marketing and customer success teams are on the same page, you gain more than actionable insights or a positive buzz around your brand.
So, instead of operating in silos and neglecting a big part of your customer’s experience and journey, creating alignment among your internal teams can help you champion client relations and establish yourself as a company that truly values CX.
Let’s see how you can create internal organizational alignment.
CSM marketing and meetings can be sporadic and inconsistent when you don’t have a specific vision of what you want to achieve. True alignment between marketing and CS teams can result in:
So, use these 9 strategies to align your customer success marketing teams.
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Quantify your marketing goals
The first step to successful customer success marketing is quantifying your marketing goals — i.e., determining metrics. This helps you track and measure marketing campaigns’ effectiveness and their precise impact on customer behavior and trends.
A quantifiable goal, like increasing ROI by X%, can help your teams develop measurable strategies. Quantifiable shared goals can drive regular and consistent collaboration between teams, resulting in better organizational alignment.
Specific and structured KPIs will help you check individual milestones as they are achieved while your teams also monitor the overall big-picture vision.
- Create a unified customer journey mapDifferent teams deal with and log different parts of your customer’s experience with your brand. But, you need to maintain a high-level view of customers’ experiences from start to end. This is customer journey mapping, and it’s crucial information that’ll help you design better-targeted marketing campaigns and provide clients with customized options.
Create a unified customer journey map including data from all touchpoints: from when a new or existing client first comes across your brand or SaaS product to when they purchase or speak with a customer support executive.
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Understanding your customer’s journey will help you identify their pain points and modify your customer success marketing efforts to improve their overall experience.
Chris Masanto, the CEO and co-founder of PetLab Co., says, “We identified that fragmented customer interactions were a result of misaligned efforts between our customer success and marketing teams. To address this issue, we created a unified customer journey map that detailed every touchpoint from initial contact to post-purchase support. By centering our strategy around the customer, we ensured seamless coordination between teams, enhancing the overall customer experience. This approach improved internal alignment and boosted customer satisfaction and loyalty, driving our business growth.”
- Use integrated software and tools
Set up a unified CRM to provide your marketing, tech, and customer success teams with a centralized platform for accessing customer data and collaborating more effectively.
A lack of consistency can put new and existing customers off, especially in the SaaS space.
For example, your customer might hear or experience one version of a new product, service, or solution from a marketing executive or channel. At the same time, another one presents itself via the CX platform they’re on.
Integrated software and tools will help your customers have a more unified journey while giving internal teams everything they need to automate marketing and streamline email campaigns.
LinkedIn has become crucial in aligning marketing and customer success because it provides a unified platform for engaging with prospects and customers, facilitating seamless communication and collaboration across both teams. Use cloud-based LinkedIn automation to send automatic invitations and manage all the replies in a unified inbox for your team.
A CRM also becomes vital for collaboration and project management throughout sales processes. Using integrated tools also makes onboarding new customers easier, resulting in less churn.
A unified platform can also host your business’s online store. eCommerce platforms have integrated customer support tools, each with its own set of pros and cons. For example, compare Wix vs. Shopify to see which suits your needs better.
- Hold regular interdepartmental meetings
The best strategies and carefully structured plans can fall apart without regular and consistent meetings. This helps different teams come together in a common space and time to discuss and make precise decisions based on shared data and inputs.
Regular interdepartmental meetings will help result in CSM campaigns and on-the-go modifications based on aligned visions and the common path forward.
Plus, according to a recent study, 21% of professionals spend 2 to 5 hours a day checking emails. Staying on top of new emails, messages, and notifications is key. However, regular meetings for alignment can help your employees cut down on the time they waste intermittently checking emails and notifications.
- Implement cross-functional training sessions
Cross-functional training involves immersing members of different teams into each other’s roles and positions. It can help sensitize employees to the demands of other roles and further interdepartmental collaboration.
Training can also help build cross-functional teams, a practice seen increasingly in 83% of successful digital mature companies.
If your marketing and CSM teams are trained in each other’s roles, they will:
- Have transparency in what other roles achieve
- Understand how each team works towards a common goal
- Develop a shared sense of purpose that will boost alignment.
It will help them better understand what customers experience at each stage of their interactions with different teams.
Exchanging these valuable customer insights and addressing emerging issues or trends will also make your CSM marketing more proactive instead of reactive.
- Share customer feedback and data
Marketing teams will have unique insights into ongoing and upcoming trends, as well as data from various campaigns and analytics. This information can prove valuable to CSM teams.
For example, knowing what percent of people exit a service or system at what point or after how long can help CSM teams work on identifying specific issues and improving customer experience.
Similarly, marketing teams need customer feedback and data access to create the right messaging and package improved campaigns.
A shared platform, up-to-date access to shared data, and robust access-and-use SOPs can help customer success marketing align with organizational goals and drive growth.
- Coordinate content creation
Coordinated content creation directly improves your customers’ experience and positions your brand as deeply customer-centric.
Everybody likes and prefers authentic content. Coordinating internally is the only way to ensure your content creation strategies are based on customer values and needs.
For example, CSM teams can provide accurate and authentic customer feedback data, facts and figures, and testimonials that marketing teams can leverage to create meaningful and relevant content. Age-old standards like the Edelman Trust Barometer are just as relevant today: consumers will more easily trust “a person like me” or “an expert” as a source of authentic information. For example, 63% of respondents say they trust what an influencer says about a brand over what the brand says about itself.
Accurate customer journey mapping, a shared content calendar and repository, and regular team meetings can help transform your overall content strategy to boost customer-centricity.
- Align messaging and communication strategies
Cohesive messaging and communication strategies will result in a great customer experience.
Coordinating content will give consumers the consistency and reliability they want. However, other equally important factors are also important. A report by CI&T showed that 59% of respondents welcome personalization from retailers.
This is true of any business service or product you want to promote among consumers. Aligning your messaging and communication strategies will let you personalize them based on customer insights and trends.
- Foster a culture of collaboration and open communication
Open communication is a core aspect of employee retention. It helps keep employees motivated and confident in performing their roles. For example, IBM has an “Open Door” and “Confidentially Speaking” policy so employees can share their concerns. HP has a similar policy to foster trust and growth.
Collaborative and open communication also increases employee engagement. And studies show that highly engaged teams are 18% to 43% more resistant to turnovers and job shifts.
When you foster open communication among internal teams, each creative cog in the machine works towards a common goal, ultimately benefiting your customers. Customer success marketing thus relies on smooth collaboration and open channels.
Aligning marketing and customer success teams is central to improving your internal capabilities and creating a better, more productive customer experience for your brand. This is particularly true for SaaS products and services.
Boost your business by leveraging cross-functional alignment and integrated platforms to:
Aligning customer success marketing to your company goals and particular client base is a continuous process that should occur throughout the customer’s journey, with a focused approach at the beginning. For example, an aligned onboarding strategy is half the battle won.