#announcements

Important info for Customer Marketers & Community members

Thread

Ciana Abdollahian July 13, 2023 at 10:23 AM

For any of you who own customer marketing or work at a company that has a customer marketing function: do you have one person who owns adoption, retention, expansion (upsell/cross-sell) or is it broken up e.g have a person who is responsible for driving adoption/retention (because product adoption should help lead to retention) and then have someone focus on expansion. I’m thinking of the latter approach but wondering if there are some big cons to that i’m missing!

Mandy Patterson July 13, 2023 at 02:21 PM

We have that on our Customer Marketing team!

Fanny Laufters July 13, 2023 at 02:22 PM

I’ve worked at a previous company where it was broken down like this: adoption/retention, expansion, and advocacy/community, this works well!

Mandy Patterson July 13, 2023 at 02:22 PM

We have a small lifecycle team and have one person that owns advocacy, one that owns onboarding/adoption/retention and one that owns expansion. It works really well for us.

Cynthia Cooper July 13, 2023 at 02:23 PM

Hi Ciana, Hope you're doing great! At Dell we have other depts doing that. The focus for us was strictly around Advocacy and Reference: storytelling was 75% and the rest was private references, speaking engagements, webinars, AR PR etc. upsell/cross sell usually came from Sales strategy or demand gen/campaigns. I hope this helps.

Daniel Glickman July 13, 2023 at 02:23 PM

I had small marketing teams for Saas (up to 30 people) and the customer marketing was responsible to manage all the above.
KPI: pipeline generated for inside sales (upsell and cross-sell) or NRR (depending on the company).

Katlin Hess July 13, 2023 at 02:23 PM

We keep these separate -- customer marketing owns adoption/retention (plus advocacy), and demand gen owns expansion/cross-sell but we ultimately roll up to the same VP and often collaborate on each others campaigns

Florian Engel July 13, 2023 at 02:29 PM

We have the same setup as Katlin describes.

Katlin Hess July 13, 2023 at 02:32 PM

Also, at my last company I owned all of the above -- and I found that once I started generating pipeline no one cared about the adoption/retention initiatives and my boss was constantly pushing me to do more upsell/cross sell and retention and adoption fell by the wayside (it wasn't a great place to work )

So when I got to G2 I was super clear about what customer marketing did and didn't do. And we still generate pipeline, but it's not our driving KPI.

Megan Ferenz July 18, 2023 at 02:06 PM

this could be a really good call topic!