Customer Marketing Meetup
•
0 likes•64 views
Nick Christman, VP of Marketing at Namely, discusses how customer marketing is increasingly important. As buyers do more research online before engaging with sales, companies must focus on building relationships and communities. Namely found success by attending conferences and events to build relationships that led to over $100k in sales. They now focus on scaling these relationships through client communities, online reviews, references, events and webinars. This fuels new sales, upsells and retention by giving clients influence and a sense of community.
Recommended
Recommended
More Related Content
What's hot
What's hot (20)
Similar to Customer Marketing Meetup
Similar to Customer Marketing Meetup (20)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Customer Marketing Meetup
- 1. ©2016 Namely, Inc. Customer Marketing: The Time is Now! Customer Marketing Meetup Oct 13, 2016 Customer Marketing: The Time Is Now October 2016
- 2. Nick Christman VP, Marketing 2 Years @ Namely Engineer turned marketer Revenue > Leads Introduction
- 3. The Rise of the Empowered Consumer B2B buyers are typically 57% of the way to a buying decision before actively engaging with sales • New technology to block unwanted ads • 24/7 connectivity through social media • Easy access to unlimited research and opinions
- 4. 4 The “Yelpification” of the Buying Process The number of reviews on Yelp has grown over 6X in the last 5 years
- 5. In a Crowded Market, Relationships Win In Q1 2015, we sent two reps to a small HR conference We closed over $100K in ARR
- 6. How Can We Scale Relationships?Challenges We Faced • Reference requests growing rapidly • Little presence on online review sites, and no positive voice in the market • Siloed users…doing incredible things
- 7. 7 Build The Community THEY Want
- 8. 8 The Servant Marketer: Today Is About The Client!
- 9. Relationships Breed Advocacy $1.8M 600+ 10X 100+ In ARR from closed deals influenced by references Clients in our client community from over half of our clients Increase in the number of referanceable clients Reviews on 3rd party websites
- 10. 10 Relationships Breed Advocacy: References
- 11. 11 Relationships Breed Advocacy: Events
- 12. 12 Relationships Breed Advocacy: Webinars
- 13. What Comes Next? Home Page New ARR Through affiliate marketing, referrals, and references. Upsells Seed coffee chats, webinars, AMAs, roundtables, and open discussions among our clients. Retention Give clients the opportunity to influence our product roadmap, get instant support, and build a community they never want to leave.
- 14. Questions?
Editor's Notes
- Getting Qualified Opps is My Focus Main message: It is easy for marketing to focus on hitting their numbers and getting names in the door, but this doesn’t mean they all become clients Marketing is about revenue. At Namely, we use cascading goals, where our CEO sets company level goals, each manager sets team level priorities tied to a company goal, and then employees set individual goals tied to the team ones. For marketing, we tie our goals to increasing ARR and client retention. When it comes to marketing tactics, I’m willing to try anything. As long as we can track, report, and optimize. For example, we started with out of home advertising and then TV ads, long before we launched google adwords or focused on SEO I saw the web traffic spike in locations we launched ads, so I knew it was working. Then, we started digital. This was easy. I could track everything. Someone clicked our content, filled out a form, and boom. New lead. For my first year at Namely, that was my focus. Getting those leads in the door and passed over to our inside sales team. I assumed if someone was willing to give us their contact info, they were ready to buy. I was wrong. In January, I took over the SDR team, and I realized just how wrong. We were passing over hundreds of leads each month, but most never opened an email, talked to the sales team, or showed any interest in the product.
- The Rise of the Empowered Consumer Main Message: As new technology comes to play, buyers are becoming more empowered and marketers must adapt Today’s buyers are more and more immune to traditional advertising and sales. They conduct independent research, discuss with friends and colleagues, and take more convincing before they’re sold on any purchase. The buyer’s journey is no longer the same for everyone, or even for distinct demographics. And this isn’t just for B2C buyers. Today’s business buyers are following the trend. Just like you buy on Amazon so you can read dozens of customer reviews, CMOs and CTOs are now doing their own research instead of waiting for sales to call. So, what created this new buyer? New technology: Ad blocking grew by 41% globally in the last 12 months. (Source: PageFair) 24/7 connectivity: On social media, 58% of consumers share their positive experiences with a company, and ask family, colleagues, and friends for their opinions about brands. [SDL] 75% of customers say they use social media as part of the buying process (IBM) Easy Access to unlimited research: B2B buyers are typically 57% of the way to a buying decision before actively engaging with sales (CEB) The ”tried and true” ways of marketing no longer work Outbound is drying up. According to a study by the Keller Research Center at Baylor University, 1% of cold calls convert into an appointment So, we started investing in Inbound marketing and producing content. This brought in XXX leads in the last year, but they aren’t always qualified or on the right timeline A report by TrackMaven shows that 13 million pieces of content from 8,800 brands over 24 months and found that while the output of content per brand increased by 78%, content engagement decreased by 60%. Marketing’s goal is to bring in inbound leads. That was working. However, once I took on the SDRs, I realized that a piece was missing. The Leads were not getting past the SDRs. I had SDRs upset with marketing because they were not meeting their quotas and Account Executives upset with the SDRs for not sending them leads
- The Yelpification of the Buying Process Main Message: Buyers are now crowdsourcing information. Their own networks are not big enough, so they are willing to trust online reviews. The combination of decreasing trust in brands and increase in customer empowerment lead to the yelpification of b2b buying For decades, buyers relied on hefty research firms, analyst reports and advisory services when making large software purchases. Software was complex, implementations could take a year or more, so companies that could afford it, used this model Mid-market companies, X number of companies, instead turned to the opinion of colleagues, peers, and friends along with publicly available resources to inform their decisions The number of reviews on Yelp has grown over 6X in the last 5 years (Yelp) 88% of people trust online reviews written by other consumers as much as they trust recommendations from personal contacts. [BrightLocal] My question was: how can we make this consistent, predictable, and trackable?
- In a Crowded Market, Relationships Win Main Message: Buyers want experiences, conversations, and real connections with sellers, not just canned messages and mass-marketed ads. At Namely, we sell software. And not exciting B2C software, we sell software to run your HR and payroll. There are dozens of us. Yes we have product differentiators that close the deal, but we need buyers to notice us before we can even show them those People are exposed to between 4,000-10,000 advertisements a day, but only recall about 100 (http://www.redcrowmarketing.com/2015/09/10/many-ads-see-one-day/) By sending two reps to a mid-size conference, we closed over $100M ARR. And that was with our dinky little booth. Just imagine how much comes from bringing 20 people to the largest industry conference in the world. We saw a 40% increase in the number of reference requests from May through September compared to January through April 89% of millennials trust recommendations from friends and family more than claims by the brand 68% of buyers trust online opinions from other consumers, which is up 7% from 2007 Sales people are 4.2X more likely to get an appointment if they already have a personal connection with the buyer
- Build the Community They Want: Main Message: Marketing today is all about earning the trust of our clients and prospects. This means working with our clients to find out what they want and expect, and molding strategies around this What we did: Built a community and asked what they want in it Brought clients into the product road mapping process Gave them an open forum to discuss our product and bigger industry concerns Worked with them to produce user-generated content such as ebooks, webinars, blog posts, and case studies You can see from this graph that our clients joined the community for education and to participate in product feedback. Learning, product improvement, and sales is now a joint effort between the company and the clients.
- The Servant Marketer: Today is About the Client! Main Message: By promoting our clients and showing how much we appreciate their time and help, we have partnered on content, press, and sales enablement. The thing about people is that they like to talk about themselves and they like to show off their accomplishments. These intrinsic needs are perfect for marketing! Speaking at events, press interviews, case studies. Great for marketing and loved by clients. Creating blog posts or case studies on clients serves two purposes: It amplifies the client’s success for them. It gives them a piece of collateral to share with their community, their boss, and even future recruiters. It also shows that we recognize their hard work and have noticed their results. This partnership is great for retention. Sales collateral! This is a printed (or digital) example of the ROI a real person sees from using your product. Sales can send this out, you can gate it for lead generation, or provide it to other clients for upsells. This is like a reference you can use over and over again, without annoying your clients. https://medium.com/postmodern-marketing/the-postmodern-marketing-imperative-the-rise-of-the-advocate-and-the-role-of-the-servant-marketer-36d510cd49c7#.rirpm8gq6 What sets this new era in marketing apart from the “modern” is an earth-rumbling shift away from mass-reach metrics and click-this-to-do/get-that strategies This approach isn’t about setting an automated campaign in motion and stepping aside while The Machine does its thing This new chapter in the marketing book is all about people connecting with people. That is, your customers connecting with each other and prospects, and your employees connecting with these groups, too It’s high touch of the genuine relationship variety, not the merge field kind to which we’ve lazily become accustomed. turning down the volume on our own telling of the brand story and turning up the dial on the customer’s story about their experience with our brand Think of the postmodern marketer as a sort of air traffic controller within your organization. They serve as the intermediary between the goals of your business and the goals of your customers. They work tirelessly to connect all departments, all projects, all organizational goals to your customers, translating from corporate speak to everyday conversations about interesting opportunities.
- Relationships Breed Advocacy Main Message: By working with our clients to build a community they enjoy, we found hundreds of hidden advocates who organically became our best marketing asset These results didn’t come from bribing our clients with points and prizes, or from only targeting the clients we knew were happy. These came from building personal relationships with dozens of individuals. For a while, I thought Amy was wasting time and money by sending birthday cards or gift baskets when a client had a baby. How could there be a high ROI from Amy sitting on the phone at 9pm talking to a client headquartered in Japan? There is! For too long, our clients, and many other B2B clients, have been seen as accounts or Admins, not people. Amy broke down these walls and built friendships and personal relationships with our clients. I think she’s even friends on Facebook with some of them. Not only does this give us insight into what our clients want – things they wouldn’t feel comfortable telling their Support Consultant – but it also gives us a safety net. When the end of the quarter comes, and Amy needs to fill 15 reference requests in a week, she can easily go to these people and ask for a favor. We provide them with content, community, events, and even someone to vent to if there is a product concern. In return, they have become our army of advocates, supporting us publically and helping us reach our marketing goals.
- Relationships Breed Advocacy Main Message: By working with our clients to build a community they enjoy, we found hundreds of hidden advocates who organically became our best marketing asset Results from the case study and upsells References: References are and will continue to be a very important part of our sales process. In a crowded space like HR technology, or really any industry these days, buyers care way more about their peers’ opinions than what our sales team has to say. A year ago, we had 10 clients we called on weekly. This worked to get new clients, but also risked annoying our current clients. We knew there were other advocates in our 500+ client roster, we just didn’t know where to find them. That is when we launched our client community, Namely Backstage Pass. We provided what they wanted: educational content, opportunities to influence our product roadmap, and a community of likeminded professionals. Then, we passively asked if they would speak on our behalf. We now have well over 100 clients who volunteered to be a reference. And, if we need a client reference that doesn’t fit the specifics of anyone we already have on the list, we now have a way to encourage them to help us. Prizes and points can work, but so far we’ve hardly seen anyone ask for them or redeem them. They want the community and they want to help us. This is one of my favorite reference stories. Our sales team saw this post on LinkedIn from one of our prospects. He mentioned it to Amy, who asked some of our clients to respond. Within two hours, over 20 clients took to LinkedIn to convince him to buy Namely. We’ve done this now on numerous occasions. I love seeing the look on our sales team’s faces. https://www.linkedin.com/hp/update/6137995577088110595
- Relationships Breed Advocacy Main Message: By working with our clients to build a community they enjoy, we found hundreds of hidden advocates who organically became our best marketing asset It was completely natural, and expected, that Amy would take pictures with each client that visited our booth. They recognized her more than our CEO. - Events: I polled our clients on what activities they wanted in our community, and many asked for events. So, when the biggest HR conference of the year came around, we created a virtual experience in Namely Backstage Pass: Namely is bringing SHRM to you. The experience included discussions on conference best practices, heated discussions about speakers and topics, fun activities for at the event, like taking photos at our booth or tweeting about their experience. Finally, we added in a few relevant advocacy actions – main word there is relevant – such as sharing an online review since many conference attendees will be looking into us post conference and signing up for a 30min slot to speak with prospects at our booth. We received close to 10 online reviews and 5 clients signed up to speak with prospects at our booth. Not only did this give us the opportunity to meet our clients and spend time with them at our booth, it also helped speed along the sales process, since attendees heard from a peer, not just a sales rep
- Relationships Breed Advocacy Main Message: By working with our clients to build a community they enjoy, we found hundreds of hidden advocates who organically became our best marketing asset - Webinars: We can’t do a big event and experience every month, but we can easily product webinars. By building one-on-one relationships with our clients, we get to know what they are most passionate about and where their expertise lies. One of our Q3 goals was to upsell our brokerage offering. Amy met one of our clients at an event earlier in the year, and heard her speak about Namely transforming their benefits plans and saving the company money. Since they already had a relationship, Amy asked her to participate in an upcoming webinar. With just one practice sessions and a few emails back and forth, we produced an hour long webinar where our client and VP of Employee Benefits discussed Namely’s offering and the ROI our client saw. Within 30min of the webinar ending, a client we had been trying to sell for months sent Amy an email asking for pricing. He made the purchase in under 48 hours.
- What Comes Next: Get the Entire Company Involved Main Message: To reap the full benefits of customer marketing, this cannot be contained to only the marketing team. We recently began involving more of our company in our customer marketing initiatives Ways to involve other departments, results we’ve seen from bringing others into the picture (AMA, roundtables, events, tip Tuesday, CS team sharing client information, upsells)