AMA: Pipeline360 Vice President of Marketing, Matt Hummel on Customer Marketing Strategy

This is a tough question, as it depends. For example, what is your growth strategy for the year? What percentage of your revenue are you expecting from existing customers and what type of motions are needed to drive that growth? Based on that, you can determine the right budget. With that said, more often than not, in my experience, there isn't dedicated budget for customer growth. To offset that, I recommend you think about your customers as a segment you need to extend your marketing efforts to. For example, are you creating a campaign centered around a specific product? If so, tweak the messaging so it resonates with your existing customers but those who don't have that particular product. Or if you are already creating blog content or thought leadership, put together a nurture or perhaps a newsletter that touches your customers.

I love this question! Think about your customers in the same way you are hopefully thinking about your prospects. Understanding their needs, pain points, growth opportunities, etc. With that said, I recommend starting by separating your customers into a few buckets - 1) what product do they own? 2) what size company are they? 3) are they at risk or churning (you can look at things like adoption, utilization, etc.) From there, you can look at the numbers of customers per segment, and determine where you want to focus. And what type of motions are required to achieve your objectives. For example, retention could be the focus for your at risk customers. Where as customers who are doing well your focus could be on expansion (upsell or x-sell). Company size may or may not matter for your company, but it may help you dig deeper and determine longer term growth strategy based on that variable.

100%. Customers are 100% your most important market. So why wouldn't you leverage an effective approach such as ABM. Just because someone is already a customer doesn't mean they will be one forever, or that they are currently buying all they could from you. Just like ABM into prospects, there are many flavors, e.g., 1:1, 1:few, 1:many. Whether retention or growth, either is critically important. The last thing you'd want to do is lose a significant amount of your revenue (it's so much harder to make that up), and it's also significantly easier (generally speaking) to sell into an existing customer. Existing customers are no different than prospects. You can just capitalize on the fact that they are already a customer. It's a bit like marriage - marriage doesn't mean you've achieved everything - you still have to continue investing in your spouse and growing your relationship!

I'd recommend two things - 1) set up a dedicated slack channel that captures these notes. Whether it's a product enhancement request, a complaint, or a kudos - make this channel dedicated to customer/product feedback. Second, you need to implement a process by which this is discussed. That could be translating these notes into an excel file (btw, I'm sure there's an AI tool for this!), but then they need to be reviewed/discussed. One thing I've seen work well is a 30 minute meeting once a week to review the feedback and make sure it's being properly actioned. Don't overcomplicate it! It's a bit like collecting win-loss data. You "simply" need a way to capture it, and then (and this is what is often most left out) a standard cadence/approach to reviewing this and actioning on it.

You should be looking at leading and lagging indicators to determine future success. Net-Retention Rate (NRR): the best metric to determine if you're growing your existing customers Net-Promoter Score (NPS): if done right, a great way to get a pulse on the satisfaction of your customers Health Score: this can be unique for each organization, but is generally an algorithm that looks at NPS, utilization, complaints, bugs, growth, etc. If setup correctly, it's a great way you can color code the health of your customers (red/yellow/green) # Products: not applicable to all orgs, but if you are a multi-product company, it's important to look at the average number of products per customer (and related +/- growth metrics); it can be a great proxy to the "stickiness" of your customers