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

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 hea ...Read More

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 wh ...Read More

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 t ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 t ...Read More