Episode Transcript
Will: Scott, thank you so much for joining us again on the Advocacy Channel. Welcome back.
Scott: Thank you for having me back. Round two.
Will: Round two. And the world keeps changing. And I know you guys are up to many different things and you're exploring what's happening out there in marketing land. So maybe let's just jump right in. What are the big trends that you've been seeing since we last spoke?
Scott: Yeah, it's really exciting times. Things are definitely evolving. Some of the trends - obviously we can't ignore TikTok and people are leaning more into videos via TikTok or YouTube shorts. TikTok is a real threat to Google in terms of search. From a product search perspective, and this is more B2C, we're seeing that Amazon is really taking away from Google search. So the guys in Mountain View are probably a little concerned because people are nibbling away at search.
Some other key trends - with videos, shorter is better. We're seeing more companies, whether B2B or B2C, really thinking about that. NFTs, social currency, even the Metaverse are hitting some speed bumps.
Internally, I was surprised about cross-functionality. HubSpot came out with a study saying that's not moving as fast as we thought it would inside companies. People keep highlighting the importance of it but looking at the HubSpot data, there's still territory issues or pressure of getting things done. And unfortunately there's lots of layoffs, so doing more with less.
Will: And I think those are all interesting. As customer marketers, the idea that video and search are shifting must put a lot of people on edge. Search is a big part of our marketing strategies and trying to adopt video, not necessarily in production, but how do we engage our customers through that as a marketing channel. I think it's a really interesting trend to keep an eye on.
The NFTs and speed bumps are maybe widely predicted or completely unforeseen, depending on how you look at it. But I was just talking to a team the other day, and they have six different people in six different departments that do customer research. None of the six talk - not like they're enemies, but they are not cross-functionally coordinated on a single function. We constantly hear people talking about working with your other teams and talking to your customer, but wow does that seem to be a lot harder for most groups to execute.
Scott: Yeah. I experienced in one of my previous companies, I was really pitching shared metrics. The classic scenario is you're the CEO and you have person A come in with their engagement metrics, person B with theirs, person C with theirs, and they're all talking to the same group. So why not have a shared metric? I got shot down by that senior person. They said you're not being held accountable. I said we are being held accountable. Unfortunately, the story you shared about the research group, I've heard that before in different ways.
Will: You know, it's interesting because we talk about digital transformation or the collapsing of all teams into product. Marketing and marketers are actually very much on the forefront of that, as they've had the digital realm for a while. But much like you said, that story was new and old five years ago, but it's still a struggle now. Do you think there's a linchpin or piece you would change to make that work, or is it just time and practice?
Scott: I believe in forcing functions. It's got to start at the top. At Adobe, my manager said you're going to be working with these five people, no additional resources. You guys got to figure out how to get it done and work together. That was somebody at a senior level forcing us in a room. We redefined the problem of the "first mile" for Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop from 30 days to the first 10-12 hours. The forcing function was we were put on a team with one shared metric.
Will: Well, yeah, that's exactly it. It's six different people who are six different types of customer first. I like just saying it's got to start from the top. Using that example of five people - at 5,000 people how do we make that shared metric work? That's probably for us to figure out as this comes down the waterfall and those leaders push it through. But I'd love to see a heated debate between five departments all fighting for the same metric and not feeling like anyone's not being held accountable.
Scott: There's a really good book called Working Backwards by Colin Breyer and Bill Carr. They both worked at Amazon and they deal with your huge organization issue where teams were built around how many people could eat a pizza pie.
Will: Oh, the pizza box.
Scott: Yeah, the pizza box. In terms of those macro goals, if you can start thinking about these small teams and how to make them nimble. At Adobe I was part of one of the first growth teams, and they took that model and pushed it out to other organizations. At the end of the day you'll have a CMO or CCO - and I'm going to redefine that for you - to own those metrics. Recently I've been talking about the new CMO as the Customer Marketing Officer. It's not politically correct to say Chief.
Will: And isn't that a funny idea how that simple idea could reframe that entire role? Sure, we want to swap out chief, but shouldn't they all be customer marketing officers at some level?
Scott: Exactly.
Will: But customer marketing feels like a different world away from that somehow.
Scott: It puts the customer right out front. I mentioned I was working on this book and part of the section is how to truly put the customer first. Part of it is language. And I think this is an example of that.
Will: Now you're talking about customers. This is a great segue to maybe hear about this project you've been working on since we last talked. A little bit of a new space I think you guys are trying to pioneer. Maybe you could give us a rundown on customer led growth and the work you're doing around it.
Scott: Yeah, so historically retention, which is not used as much as I would hope in the B2B space, tends to be dispersed across the organization like those five people doing research. Organizations have somebody doing webinars, somebody doing case studies, and so on.
What we're seeing now is that it's falling under customer marketing, 60-70% of it. We believe the next phase will be that the customer marketer will play an even bigger role in helping companies be truly customer first and customer led. Since I have a fan here from Vancouver and I like hockey, I'll quote Wayne Gretzky about going to where the puck is going to be. We believe the puck is going to be that companies are going to implement this customer led growth play.
What we've created is something called the CLG Customer led growth campus - CLG campus. This is something I've wanted to do since 2018 when I left Marketo. A lot of the Marketo consultants were like, you should create a community that can help all Marketers. When I went to Base, they were aligned with this vision of having an integrated experience to be truly customer led.
The site consists of templates, webinars, and courses, all set up so that if you search on a topic like customer case studies, or a type of content like a template, you get everything you want. You'll get events, jobs, discussion threads, everything. And then the second thing, which I'm really excited about - between you and me, I've always wanted to be a VJ - is creating learning paths. These are mixes, curated content around one topic.
Everything here is about putting the customer front and center throughout that whole lifecycle, that whole journey. In the spirit of customer led growth or user created growth, all the content's coming from practitioners. You'll have to be pretty clever to find Base branding on the site.
Will: That's interesting. We were actually talking internally not too long ago that there's still a major educational piece missing in the market of customer marketing. There are amazing practitioners that really know what they're doing, but there is just so much room to drive that awareness. And I like what you're talking about - drive that awareness in the C-Suite.
Will: We need to train the practitioners, we need to all learn. Maybe if Google starts to lose more search share, maybe people need to come this way more aggressively. But it feels like there's a lot of good talk, but it hasn't quite permeated that boardroom. Maybe this is one of those ways we can help make sure that customer marketing and customer led growth starts to become a top priority in the boardroom.
Scott: Exactly. And when I was talking about the campus, I was focused on the practitioner or the expert. But there is a whole other track we're developing around the C-Suite. Because that's where the decisions are made, the checks are cut.
Will: Right? And that's important. We've got to put people into these roles. While you can do a lot with five people in a room being forced by your team at Adobe, you still need someone in the room to make it work and share some tools and infrastructure along the way. So this is out now. Obviously it's available. We'll put a link in the description to the CLG campus. Any advice or tips for someone who wanted to explore it for the first time?
Scott: First of all, I think your show is there. If not, I have to get the feed and put it in there. Really leveraging the wisdom of the crowd. All you have to do is go to CLG Campus base AI. I am posting about it pretty frequently now on LinkedIn. We've only been live for two weeks, but there's already over 150 articles and lots of podcasts. Just go to clgcampus.ai and we're open to feedback. You and I talked last time about integrated experiences, and that's what we're trying to do there. I also talked about the CARE initiative - my job is to focus on care, which is community, advocacy, resources and education.
Will: And it's great to see from one episode to the next here on the podcast, getting to see this going from conversation to implementation so others can take a look. Maybe switching topics a little bit - we talked last time about the overlap between customer marketing and other types of marketing, like partner marketing. I think that's interesting to revisit as we talk about this idea of a customer marketing officer. How do you see all that meshing together in this world?
Scott: Yeah, I think a lot of companies I work with, the customer and partner space, there's definitely a blending. The challenge is you're never going to get it perfect. But at the end of the day, the person using your service or product is who you really want to keep happy and understand their needs. HubSpot and other companies are bringing together their customer marketing and partner marketing programs. From an operational perspective, why have two groups doing email marketing? Just like your research example.
Some of your partners might be customers and from a messaging perspective, you want it consistent. This morning I was talking to some folks in the content enablement space, and they were saying they have to create the same content for partners. You want your partners to get up to speed on your products the same way your sales team does.
People in the industry are using the term ecosystem a lot now. The partner community is using the term ecosystem. I like that term, it's just not as warm and fuzzy as a customer term for me.
Will: I love that we're still in a world where we're just trying to figure out the terms. Some days, like we're just trying to figure out what we call that. We're recording this here just looking right at the new year. We talked some trends we're seeing right now. But what do you think is going to change? What should people be ready for or adopt with customer marketing in 2023?
Scott: Yeah, that's a great question. I don't think customer marketers do enough with influencers and really trying to break down the ecosystem of people they interact with. Understanding the different flavors of influencers - people on LinkedIn, that's one flavor. There's lots of different Slack groups where people are enthusiastic about your brand or service or the industry. Then there's the whole content creators, whether it's on TikTok or other content platforms.
We talked about search being another one. So thinking about SEO, but also just how you build out your search. Another thing would be experiential marketing - how do you bring together that live activity as well as asynchronous activity and turn that into an experience?
Scott: Companies are beginning to experiment with it. When I've worked with larger companies, we've always wrestled with what happens when the event is over, how do we keep the momentum going. I think there's some good work companies are doing where they do a webinar, which is pretty tactical, but then they keep the momentum going afterwards.
Again, I have my B2B hat on. Mobile is one to think about. One area that hasn't taken off the way I thought it would, but I'm hoping next year would be, is voice. I'm really big on Alexa and Google. More newspapers and magazines online now have a voice component where you can listen to the article, and I think that's going to piggyback off the podcast trend. I usually follow my kids' leads in terms of trends - they do their searches with voice and when I tell them to read an article, they're going into their rooms and listening.
Will: I think those are all fair points. Once again, we come back to this idea that there's so much technology still to be adopted. We are by no means at the end of the adoption cycle of the technology we have today. One thing that does seem to be constant is economic prosperity and economic downturns. You mentioned before some layoffs happening in the market. If you were a customer marketing expert or a CMO, what's your view for how to capitalize on and prepare for potential economic unrest?
Scott: If I was a customer marketing officer, I would definitely think about focusing on my current customers. When I read about the layoffs, the people on the retention side, the existing customer side are hit pretty hard and we're still kind of focused on acquisition. If I was sitting down with a CMO, I would really focus on what we can do with our existing customers who are sticking with us. Switching costs are lower and lower.
I would say focus on retention, focus on the critical few programs - what are the three things you're going to do? You're probably going to have one or two people doing these customer marketing programs, so really be aware of what they need.
Scott: And if you have a community user base, user groups, how can you get them involved in content creation or building functionality? When I was at Intuit, not only did we have user created content, but we also had user created functionality - some of our users created these little widgets for accounting. It's a pretty challenging time. I love that the CMO of Gong is basically highlighting different jobs around the market. I've been really impressed with how people are trying to help each other through this time.
Will: Yeah, for sure. Now if you were in the unfortunate role where you didn't have customer marketing in your company today, it wasn't a core concept - do you think now is the time that you're going to be able to get that adopted? Whether it's because of better, lower customer acquisition costs or better retentions, or do you think it's just going to go to ground and you should hunker down for the next year or so?
Scott: Well, now I'm playing with other people's money. But if it was my money, I would definitely say I have customers and I want to hold on to them. What can I do from a customer marketing perspective to help them meet their needs? One of my mantras is help them master the product, help them improve their craft and accelerate their careers. Sometimes as marketers, we forget about the last two. Can we help them be better at what they do? And yeah, we hope that they use our product along the way.
I would find somebody to do customer marketing, focus on a few programs, but also work with them to say how can we help our customers be more successful? And that's personal success to them. Like if you were a customer of mine and you had your own show here, what can I do to help you with your show? Whether it's providing content, providing marketing...
Will: Yeah, I think that's an important perspective. We sell this as a way of retaining our customers and helping our customers grow. How do we amplify it if you don't have it today? There's a very financial defensible position, whether that's reduced customer acquisition costs or better retention rates or better margin for your support teams. But it feels like there's still this important piece that we have to get people emotionally on board with.
Will: Those numbers sound great. Executives may have been promised some of them before. And they're true - as practitioners, we know they're true numbers. But getting that emotional commitment to 'we have customers, we need to keep them, cash might get tight, we need to find cost effective ways to acquire those customers' - I think there's a play there in the customer marketing officer's department to really push that.
Scott: Yeah, I'm really glad you highlighted that because I think in all these customer marketing communities, we often don't talk about the emotional aspect of what we're doing and how that can be used. How can you use that emotional aspect to bring our customers either closer together or closer to the brand? When I was working at Marketo, Sanjay, who was the head of marketing there, said, "I want to create a nation, a marketing nation." That vision of tying all these marketers together around a core concept helps sell product at the end of the day.
Most of the questions I see are like, "how do I implement XYZ" - tactical. But at the end of the day, we're dealing with people. Everybody has their below the line stuff you don't see. How can you make the lives of your customers better? One company refers to them as heroes. How do you make them heroes?
Will: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's like a great higher calling for customer marketers out there. This has been a wonderful conversation. Is there anything else we didn't cover today that you think the audience needs to be thinking about as they get themselves into the new year?
Scott: I think spending time thinking about how you package up your information for the C-Suite is really important. I just did a podcast with somebody who wrote the book "The Next CMO," and he did some really good work around how practitioners present to the CMO. CMOs have less and less time and more and more pressure. And times are tough and I really think it's great how the industry is trying to help each other find jobs. So just keep doing that.
Will: Perfect. Well, Scott, thank you very much for your time and your wise thoughts here. As always, if listeners wanted to follow you and get some more information from you, what's the best place for them to find you?
Scott: You can always find me on LinkedIn and now you can find me on the CLG campus. And I respond to everything - probably one or two a week I don't respond to, but 99.9% I do. So feel free to reach out.
Will: Perfect. Well, thank you very much again, Scott. Always a pleasure.
Scott: Thank you, Will.
