Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to the Advocacy Channel, a customer marketing podcast brought to you by impact.com for today's episode, our host Will Fraser welcomes Caitlin Hess, Director of customer marketing at G2. With a unique journey from being a G2 power user to leading their customer marketing efforts. Kaitlyn brings valuable insights on building customer centric organizations and leveraging the true voice of the customer in this. In this episode, you'll learn strategies for coordinating fragmented customer communications, practical tips for measuring the impact of customer marketing on revenue, and how to build a culture where customer feedback drives real business decisions. Enjoy.
[00:00:53] Speaker B: Caitlin, it's so wonderful to have you here on the show today. Just thank you so much for joining me.
[00:00:59] Speaker C: Well, thank you for having me. Excited to be here.
[00:01:02] Speaker D: Now, Kaylin, you had a really interesting role and you sit at an interesting place around the idea of the voice of the customer. But before we get into that, I know you've had a windy journey to becoming the Director of customer marketing at G2, and I'd love it if you could share that journey with us today before we jump into the rest of the content.
[00:01:21] Speaker C: Yeah. So I feel like my journey to customer marketing is sort of like a lot of others where it happened almost by accident a little bit.
But I.
My first job in SaaS was at a really small higher ed tech company we had. I think I was employee number 25.
And as I was leaving there, I was the head of marketing, managing everything from demand gen, content development, product marketing, and I was doing a lot of customer things, but I didn't even know that customer marketing was sort of like a dedicated, focused area that I could grow into. And so I, you know, was looking to leave. My company had gotten acquired, a lot of things were changing. And so was talking to VP of marketing and he's just this kind of like a networking conversation. He said, you know, tell me what you like to do. What are your favorite parts of your job today? And everything I listed was customer marketing. And he was like, sounds like you'd be a really great customer marketer.
We don't have a role for that today, but you know, we'd love to keep in touch with you. And I think it was like two weeks later he called me and said, you know, we'd love for you to join to help us build up our customer marketing function. What do you think? And so started there, really got to build customer marketing from the ground up.
And as part of that, one of my main focus areas was G2, and so was working with a G2 account manager. I'd also worked with one when I was at Target X and she posted that they were looking for a director of customer marketing at G2. She reached out and was like, hey, I think you could be a great fit. What do you think? And then ended up making the jump over. So it's been pretty cool to go from being a customer and like super fan of G2 to now getting to do customer marketing there too.
[00:03:15] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, now you're kind of at the Mecca. You're at the place where it's all about customer marketing. And so I'd love to understand, you know, how does being on the other side in some ways, but also still being on the customer, you kind of got that visibility of both sides of the equation.
You know, how does that change your approach to customer marketing and customer feedback?
[00:03:36] Speaker C: Yeah, it's so interesting because when I first started it was like, well, this is super easy. My team also owns customer education. And so as we were thinking about what kind of content do we want to be developing, what are our themes of our webinar, it's like, what do I wish I had access to? You know, six months ago, a year ago when I was a customer, Now I've been a G2, oh gosh, almost three and a half years, which is crazy. And so as I get further away from being a customer power user, it how do I lean into the voice of our customers? How do I talk to the people who were in my shoes when I was sort of informing this strategy to use that to inform what our education or our content looks like going forward?
But it's really cool too because I am still a G2 customer. My team also owns generating reviews about G2 on G2, which is like super meta.
But we're going through the same process. A lot of our customers are. We're doing email outreach campaigns, we're building review asks into our life cycle communication.
We have an ask, like, if you sign into the back end of G2, there's a pop up that says, what do you think of G2? Would you be willing to leave us a review?
So in the same way our customers are having to think about that, it's something that we're focused on too in terms of how it helps me think. It's just like I was that customer voice for a little bit and I, I could feel how powerful that was and having that perspective was. And so now I put a lot of emphasis on like, what are our customers actually dealing with? Not what do I think they're dealing with. Three and a half years removed. And the other cool thing is like, so many of our customers are customer marketers who are trying to do the same thing at their organizations. And so they're always willing to share their feedback or just give me some perspective.
[00:05:24] Speaker D: And you're talking about promoting people for reviews. And honestly, I even just saw this internally with a little review process here. But, you know, how are you filtering or ensuring the authenticity of those reviews today? I'm really curious how you see AI in there as well.
[00:05:39] Speaker C: Yeah, I think we, we view it more as like an assistor, not a writer. Right. And so in the same way. Well, I don't know, one of the ways I use it is like I'm trying to write this promotional email or landing page copy. And so here's my kind of messy brain dump version of that. So it's still me, it's what I think or what I want to be included. And I'm using AI to help me polish it or maybe reorganize my thought in a way that's easier for someone else to consume. And I think we would think about review generation in that same way. So we still want it to be that customer's experience, that customer sentiment. And so G2 actually has a few levels of checking for authenticity.
One is we have a.
It's an AI review reviewer that makes sure that, and I don't know the specific percentage, but that a certain percentage of the review is allowed to be, you know, AI. The other percentage has to be in that customer's voice. But we do also have a team of humans that are review moderation team. And so they're making sure that those reviews that are coming through are authentic. That it's not like, you know, the computer's opinion of what this product or service is. It's actually real human voice and opinion. And, you know, it's okay if it's polished by AI.
[00:07:03] Speaker B: Yeah, it's interesting that I didn't think about that part. Well, like, there's a difference between polished by AI and generated by AI in the review space. That's a, that's a very, very important nuance. And I'm sure it'll be interesting for customer marketers as they continue to go down the road, which is, you know, how many the people who they're asking for feedback from are just users of AI and therefore they're kind of pumping in their six key points and saying, please write me a review that I can now send to them. Interesting. That'll be a very interesting tone change, potentially in our customer marketing out there.
[00:07:35] Speaker C: Yeah. And that's something that we're exploring from a product perspective too, is like, how do we make it easier for your customers to leave a review on G2 with some of those AI assist features? So more to come from us.
[00:07:49] Speaker B: While we were talking before the show, you shared a really cool AI use case that you're using actually internal in your company. And internal chatbot has really kind of streamlining a request that I've heard so many people have problems fulfilling, which is this, you know, give me a customer story about blank. Maybe you can just tell us about that and you know, how it works and maybe some of the results you've been seeing. I think this is just fascinating.
[00:08:12] Speaker C: Yeah. So we feed the chatbot our case study library. So it has access to all of our long form written content. It also is connected to our internal call recording tool. And then we feed it our own G2 reviews. So those reviews about G2 on G2 that my team's generating, and our sales team or marketing team or whoever is looking for customer proof can go in and ask the chatbot, hey, do we have a case study about, you know, this specific use of G2, or do we have anything from someone in this specific industry?
And it will surface the most relevant proof points for our sales team and for a marketing team. And if you're a customer marketer, you've probably gotten that slack, Right? That's sort of how I came to this. I was spending a lot of time like, hey, Caitlin, do we have a case study about this? Or, hey, I'm working with this, you know, prospect, and I really want to send them a case study. What's the most relevant one to them? And I was, you know, racking my brain thinking like, okay, well, that one is pretty good. And it talks about this use case, but it's not the right industry. But we have this one that's the right industry, but not the right use case. And so let me, you know, make a recommendation. The sockbot does all of that for me and for our sales team. And so I was actually just looking recently, and it's something like 90% of our overall revenue team is using the chatbot at least once a month. And I need to verify this with someone from marketing Ops because I ran the query myself and it said that 78% of our prospect conversations have a mention of a customer success. So our team. And it's also kind of interesting because at G2 we care so much about customer voice, and that's the Value that we're selling and instilling in our customers is how powerful customer voice can be. And so our sales team is all about it. They totally understand what we're trying to do, and they're really excited about when they can take a customer success and use that in their sales process too. So I'm not surprised it's that high. But I was excited to see that those results were pretty, pretty great.
[00:10:20] Speaker D: Honestly, I think we've all had this request come in and then two hours of our life disappears as we get back to them with an answer that we're like, yeah, that's probably the best, but maybe I don't even know the single case study. So I think it's fascinating to see that you're using AI to help with this problem. And honestly, this is probably what we should expect from G2, but it's still just so cool to see it's that it's actually happening.
[00:10:41] Speaker B: One of the things that, you know, you also mentioned I think is a problem. Another problem we all face is just this idea of like, fragmented communications to our customers. So, you know, great, we're finding the voice of the customer, finding those points, but we're still kind of sending these disparate messages from all sorts of different places, you know. And I know that when we were talking before, you kind of talked about how to tackle this problem a couple times, but maybe this helps understand, like this problem a little bit more and maybe some ways that you've gone about it.
[00:11:08] Speaker C: Yeah. And want to start by saying, like, this is something that I'm. I'm actively working on here at G2 too. Like, it's. It's something that is not.
Like, I'm not going to give a secret formula and then it's going to be fixed. It's like everybody has to be invested in.
And the easiest way I have found to do that when you're working with sort of cross functional partners and everyone has maybe slightly different goals, is bringing it back to the customer experience. Like, it's really easy to get everyone on the same page. Especially when you work at a place where, like, everyone really cares about the customer experience is anytime you're having that conversation, like, it's not about you hitting your goal instead of me hitting mine, or me hitting my goal instead of you hitting yours. It's what's going to provide the most value to our customers. And so starting the conversation from there sort of takes the you versus me out of it. But when I, when I've tackled this in the Past, like, the first thing I usually do to get buy in is just an audit. Like, I start to document and catalog, like, what are all of the communications we sent to customers last month and what are all of the systems that we're sending those emails from or, you know, in app messages from.
And like, instead of telling people no, or like, I'm doing this so I can stop you from sending all of these disparate messages, it's like, I just want to know, like, let's just, let's just crack it. And so once you have it all, and this happened at my last company, we just put it in a spreadsheet and it was like, oh my gosh, this is a crazy. Like, CS is sending emails, marketing is sending emails, product is sending emails. And we weren't talking to each other about when that was happening. And so from our perspective, it's like, well, why does it matter? Like, you sent that email and I sent this email and it came from a different tool. But like, the customer doesn't know. They just know that they're getting six messages from us in the same week and they're all about totally different things. Which one are they supposed to pay attention to? And so my, my first step is always catalog. Let's just understand where we're at. No judgment, no whatever. This is just it, state of things. Second, it's like, let's all get aligned. What are each of our goals? What are our business goals? Like, what do you care about as an individual person coming to this table? And then what's our customer care about? And what do we, what do we know they need to be successful? What do we know they care about the most? Where are we able to add value and help them achieve their goals? And then you work backwards, right? Like, you start from the customer goals. Ideally your team goals match. You know that it's helping your customers achieve their goals. And then what is the ideal state from a communications perspective? Flow wise.
And maybe it is that you keep all of those messages, but the timing changes and the audience changes and you can get really granular and really specific. And because it's your customers, you know a lot about them, you know, ideally their role, you know what products they have, you know what their goals are. And so like working backwards from what are our customer goals? What's the ideal state? How do we get them there? So it's a, an ongoing, really heavy, really big conversation. And depending on the people in the room, it can get a little heated too. And I think that's where I lean on like, this isn't about us, it's not about me. It's not about you. It's about the customer and what's best for them.
[00:14:33] Speaker B: Yeah, I know that I've struggled more than once to try to get a sense of like, how we're selling, who we're messaging and how we're messaging people at companies that I've been at. And I think that, you know, without that kind of a mapping, you can either get really, well, really cowboy or really conservative messaging where people are like, well, you know, we send a lot of messages and they have no idea what they're sending. So it's just like, let's send less. Or you get the, like just keep firing. And it is not necessarily a win there either.
Yeah, one of the things that's really interesting when it, when it comes to like customer advocacy and customer marketing in general is really just like trying to measure the success. Now I think you've got some pretty interesting numbers already come out of that chat bot that's pretty wild and, and honestly better than most people I've ever talked to have. You know, this idea of how many interactions they're touching. But what are you seeing there for metrics and measurement of, of the work you're doing?
[00:15:25] Speaker C: Yeah, it, it's tough in customer marketing. Right, because so much of our, our work can be a little fluffy. Right. Like it's relationship based and it's, it how your customers are feeling about you and how you're capturing that sentiment. And so sometimes, and I'm super guilty of this, we can fall into like, Well, I produce 12 case studies or I had, you know, 30 acts of advocacy last quarter. And I think that conversation gets us to a point.
And to get to that next level, it's like, but what was the impact on revenue? And that can be a little bit harder. So my tip there is like, and this is, I'm not going to speak for all customer marketers. Something specific to me is I am not great at the data side of things. I am a relation marketer and I really like where I find value is in talking to our customers and getting people excited about our product. And I, I've heard it described as like vibe marketing, but it's something that I'm working on really deeply is like, how can I connect my programs to metrics? And how can I connect them to metrics that aren't just vanity metrics? And so one of the ways I've done this is by becoming really good friends with our marketing ops. Person. And so one of my old bosses, she's a former CMO at G2. When she and I were talking about this, she was like, well, Caitlin, you don't have to know how to pull the report.
You don't have to know how to find the number. You need to know what question you want to ask. And so my question is always, what is the impact customer marketing programs are having on revenue? And so that's kind of what I came to Sarah, our head of marketing, off with. And she was like, well, let's see what we can look at. And so this quarter, for example, one of the things that I'm. I'm sort of struggling with, with the chatbot is it's directing people to. Sometimes it's a call recording. And so there's not a page that they're sending a customer to. They're copying and pasting a snippet. They're sending it in an email, or they are going directly to.
To our website, not to our sales enablement tool, which gives me more tracking and visibility. And so how we're sort of backing into it this quarter is page views of any of our pages that are customer stories, that are tied to opportunities that closed in the last quarter or renewals that closed in the last quarter. And so we're getting. We're having to sort of, like, back into it a little bit differently than I normally would, but I wouldn't have even known that was possible if I didn't have the conversation with marketing ops. And so I think coming back to that, like, what is the question that I want to answer? What's important to the business, and then finding those people who are the data experts who can sort of help you back into what that is. So I don't know if that totally answers your question. This is not my sweet spot, but it's something that I'm. I'm working on and trying to grow into Nolan.
[00:18:25] Speaker B: And I think that that's a really interesting place, especially as we keep tying in this AI story that, you know, it's more about asking the right questions and that's less about knowing how get the data yourself. But. But, I mean, I've always found that especially when building out analytics suites, you know, you'll kind of get this generic like, you know, I need. I need analytics. I want to see all the data. And you're like, yeah, that's not really how it works. Like, I need to know the question you're looking to ask. And if I know the question, I can get to the Answer. There's an infinite number of questions. So, you know, show me all the data isn't really a strategy.
[00:18:54] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. Or like, sometimes I'll default to like, well, that would be impossible to track. So we definitely can't track it.
And that's just like. Because that's not how my brain works. That's where I go to. But I feel like when I go to Sarah, she's like, oh yeah, well, let's see what happens if we pull this, this, this and this. Let me connect all of those and give it to you in a dashboard. It's like, oh, awesome. I'm glad we didn't talk myself out of this. Right. Like, it's possible you might just have to get a little creative.
[00:19:24] Speaker B: What do you see as kind of the commonalities or the patterns among companies that are really excelling at leveraging their customer marketing? You know, I just, I'm kind of curious if you got some insights there you can share.
[00:19:35] Speaker C: Yeah, I think it's, it's like a culture of feedback. Right. Like you'd be hard pressed to find a company that wouldn't say we're customer centric. I think every company would say they're customer centric and believe it and probably act on it in a lot of different ways. But I think the ones that are thriving or seeing the most value from customer voice is they treat it like a voice in the room. So from a customer marketing perspective, I always say it's like with great power comes great responsibility.
Like, I get to talk to a lot of customers every day. I get to learn what they're doing, what, what's important to them. But I'm also hearing like, where they're stuck or where they're stalling. And so for me, it's when I'm invited into those rooms, it's not to represent my voice. It's like, this is what I'm hearing directly from our customers or this is what we're seeing from a data perspective. When I look at adoption metrics, and this is exactly where, where we're seeing that stall. And so how can we fix it? And then how can I connect them, whoever it might be, how can I have them hear it from our customers? And the, the companies that I'm seeing thrive, like they're taking that seriously from the top down. And that's often like people think about reviews for the most part, you think of them as like, oh, that's a great marketing tool.
That's something I use in, on my website, in social campaigns, in A sales deck. But the companies that are like really nailing it, they're like, that is customer feedback. And I'm using review content to feed like, okay, how are our customers talking about our products? So it's feeding product marketing or are there steams coming out when we talk about like where they're struggling and how can I use that to influence product or product roadmap? Like, tell me what's missing. And so a lot of times people will get caught in like, I only want positive reviews and I'm gonna use them for marketing. And that's the only like reviews fit in this bucket. But it's when you expand that and you open it up like, I want reviews from all my customers. Plus it's a better buyer experience too.
When you're asking all of your customers for reviews, you're getting like a true authentic picture of what customers like, what they don't like, maybe what a best fit customer looks like or doesn't look like.
And I think the companies that are thriving, they get that it's a customer feedback voice tool, not just marketing.
[00:21:57] Speaker D: Obviously no one's going to do that, but a lot of companies just want to say that they're customer centric. But to truly live the customer centric life, it really requires you to want to hear the good and the bad. And I think it's just so rare. And it's even more rare to actually use the feedback you're getting, being that ultra customer centric group and bringing it into the company. Do you have any tips for groups that want to make their businesses a little more, you know, how do you. We help some business?
[00:22:25] Speaker C: Gosh, I think it's a few things right. And it's, it's just continuing to be that voice and surfacing your customer voice in all of the places that make sense. So for us we have, we have two different Slack channels that I'll call out. One is the direct integration between G2. So anytime someone leaves a review on G2, it gets piped into a Slack channel that's internal, that our whole company has access to. And so we, well, I look at every single review that comes through and if there is something that we want to respond to, so maybe it's a specific product request or challenge that they're facing or something about the support team or even better is like, my CSM is awesome, you know, shout out Lauren, I'm going to tag them in that channel and I'm going to tag their manager and say like, hey, wanted to make sure you saw this. And so I think step just like making it really visible that other Slack channel is our G2 customers channel. And that's where our sales team or our CS team will flag. Like, here's a really cool thing that one of our customers is doing. And so one that's super helpful for me because I can use that to feed my customer story program.
But it's also really cool for our other CSMs or our other account managers to see, like, here's a real world, you know, live in the field customer example that I can now pull from when I'm talking to another customer.
And I think just getting like, starting the habit of that and being responsive to it and spotlighting the people who are doing that really well. Like, I. I'll sometimes do. I call them internal case studies. So if I have someone on our sales or CS team who's doing something really cool, they're using a customer story in a unique way, or they used it and they're tying it back to a win. I'll spotlight and be like, hey, want to share When Jeremy used a great quote here and closed the deal. And so now I am calling him out as like, this is something that's really cool. He had a big win. Don't you want to be like Jeremy, like, let's build a little bit of fomo. But I. I think that was a long answer. The short answer is just like, make it as visible as possible and then get people to engage, get them to care about it by calling out the specific things that tie back to their role or their goals.
[00:24:43] Speaker B: Wow. Okay. We've. We've covered a lot very quickly here. I think sometimes it was amazing. Like, all of us have some amazing what's going on.
It's just hugely processizing customer marketing, getting it into the hands of the entire company, enabling that through, whether it's kind of the intro cases you're talking about through AI coordinating messaging. A lot of stuff going on. For yourself at G2 and customer marketing in general, there was one takeaway that you could leave our listeners with today. Just one piece of advice that you go, whatever, 10 years back in time, give yourself as. As career advice or, you know, advice in this field. What do you think that advice would be?
[00:25:18] Speaker C: Oh, man.
I think it's. Can I say two things?
[00:25:23] Speaker B: Sure. We. We tend to go for two.
[00:25:26] Speaker C: There's like an external and an internal. Externally, I think taking the time to talk to as many customers as possible and not just the customers who you're doing a case study with. Although those are great customers to talk to and you learn like what works really well, what are they doing that maybe other people aren't? And how can I, how can I take that not and not just use it in a case study? Right? Like how can I use that to inform my outreach or my promotion of something else or an educational piece of content? There are so many things that I wouldn't know if I didn't have those conversations with our customers. And I would say beyond just like those conversations too. It's like where else are you getting customer voice? So is it reviews? Is it an NPS survey? Is it your community?
Um, but just like not losing that connection to the front line. Um, and I'll, I'll call myself out too of like I, I know that I knew a lot coming in because I was a customer, but what was I missing? And you're not going to get that anywhere other than directly from your customers. And then two, I would say like in customer marketing we're only successful when we're truly cross functional. And so I work really closely with obviously everyone on my marketing team. So that's something else. Like I'm starting to see a shift. But a lot of times customer marketing teams are really, really lean. And so I am working with our content team, our design team, our product marketing team, our demand gen team to get my initiatives fully integrated into our, you know, outreach motion and our intake motion. And so like working cross functionally, they're so important. But even more important is like getting the trust and the buy in and the relationships with my account managers, my CSMs and their leaders. And just really like, because I have those relationships, it's so much easier to infuse customer voice into everything we're doing. And then they're feeding my flywheel too.
So I, I've talked about this before. I feel like extraordinarily lucky at you too. I have had the opportunity to say like that customer doesn't feel right for a case study right now. Which I've never thought I would be able to do. But I feel like because our, our account teams understand what I'm trying to do in customer marketing, they see the value of it in helping other customers, in feeding sales. But so much of that is because I've built strong relationships with them first. So building that, building those. So it's I guess, relationships I, I should have started here if I'm going to sum it up in what it's the importance of relationships and customer marketing, both with your customers, but also internally. Long, long answer to a short question.
[00:28:07] Speaker B: No, I love it. I think that's a great place for us to wrap up this episode. I mean, if customer marketing isn't about relationships inside and outside of the company, you kind of what is it all about? And I think that that's just so important for you to remember. You know, this is about people talking to people and I just love that as a way to wrap up this episode here.
For people who do want to stay connected or learn more, where's the best places they can they can find you?
[00:28:35] Speaker C: Definitely LinkedIn. So feel free to add me love to talk about customer marketing, love to share best practices things that I'm seeing and always happy to connect with other customer marketers.
[00:28:45] Speaker B: Wonderful. Caitlin, thank you so much for your time here today. I know I've learned a lot. I'm sure our listeners did too. So just thank you so much for all your time.
[00:28:53] Speaker C: Yeah, thanks for having me. Great to be here.
[00:28:57] Speaker A: Thank you for tuning in to another great episode of the Advocacy Channel, brought to you by impact.com join us next time as we bring on more expert guests like Kaitlyn. If you enjoyed the episode, please review rate and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. To learn more about customer marketing, visit our blog or follow us on LinkedIn. The links are in the show Notes. If you're looking to create powerful customer marketing programs to better activate, engage and retain your customers, head over to impact.com to learn more about our referral platform. That wraps up another great episode of the Advocacy Channel. We'll see you real soon.
