Marketers: Think Your Job Ends After the Sale?
July 31, 2013
So, your business is on a roll, and you’re closing tons of new customers. That’s great. But what are you doing to ensure they STAY customers? Marketo Content Marketing Manager Dayna Rothman explains why marketers still have critical work to do after a deal is done.
When most startup and expansion-stage software companies think about the primary role of their sales and marketing teams, one activity immediately comes to mind: customer acquisition.
And why not? After all, for a software company to survive and scale, it must be able to effectively (and cost-efficiently) grow its customer base. Doing so means boosting brand awareness, delivering relevant content, and passing highly-qualified leads through the sales funnel.
Fair enough, says Marketo Content Marketing Manager Dayna Rothman. But she also cautions companies against thinking that their sales and marketing work is done once those customers sign on the dotted line.
Post-Sale Marketing: The New Reality
“The reality, particularly for SaaS businesses that rely on subscription renewal and upsell, is that sales and marketing’s job is not done when it closes a new customer,” says Rothman. “If attention isn’t also paid to nurturing and engaging a customer post-sale, then all of the hard work that sales and marketing put into customer acquisition can be for naught.”
The reason for that is simple: No matter how intuitive you think your product is, your customers’ needs and pain points don’t magically disappear once they sign on to your product. If you’re not there to address their evolving issues, customers may begin to look elsewhere.
“In today’s online world, customers have the upper hand,” Rothman explains. “They have more solutions to choose from, and they have a stronger voice, so it’s critical for marketers to tune into that voice and deliver content that allows customers to optimize their experience. If they don’t, customers will voice their frustration, and probably not in a way that positively impacts your brand.”
The Key to Post-Sale Engagement: Relevancy
“You have to be able to identify the challenges keeping your customers from being successful and deliver content that addresses those issues.”
So, what should marketers be doing to cultivate stronger relationships with customers and ensure post-sale success? In Rothman’s opinion, the process isn’t too dissimilar to the one you used to attract and acquire those customers in the first place.
“At the end of the day, it’s all about needs assessment, communication, and delivery,” Rothman explains. “You have to be able to identify the challenges keeping your customers from being successful and deliver content that addresses those issues.”
Not surprisingly, that means content relevancy and customer segmentation must remain important post-sale.
So, just as you wouldn’t send a prospect in the latter stages of the sales process a piece of content that highlights the basic features and benefits of your product, you shouldn’t send existing customers content that isn’t relevant to their situation.
“It requires a little bit more time and commitment to do that, but content relevancy is very important in helping customers optimize their investment in your product,” Rothman says. “Whether that means producing a case study that illustrates how another customer leveraged your product in a new way, or writing a blog post that walks customers through more advanced features, the key is to make sure that the content you send is hyper-targeted and helpful.”
Using Marketing Automation to Develop Stronger Customer Relationships
While many marketers today use marketing automation software to help facilitate, streamline, and optimize the lead generation and customer acquisition process, they should also use highly impactful tool after the sale, Rothman advises.
Not sure where to start when it comes to marketing automation?
At Marketo, for instance, Rothman says that the company has developed what it calls the “Marketo Customer Engagement Engine,” a nurturing tool designed to help marketers determine the best content to send customers, based on behavioral data.
“The basic idea is that marketers need a way to listen to customers across multiple mediums and figure out which types of content they prefer, and what subjects they care about the most,” Rothman explains. “You don’t have to use a tool like ours to do that, but it helps simplify the process and manage it more intelligently.”
Regardless of which marketing automation platform you use, however, Rothman says the most important thing to remember is that customers – just like prospects – want to feel like more than just a number on a screen.
“If you think about your own habits as a buyer or consumer, most of us tend to continue to do business with companies that pay attention to our needs and display genuine care for what we need to be successful,” Rothman says. “So as marketers, why wouldn’t we try to create the same environment for our customers after a sale is complete?”