What do best-in-class customer Marketing teams look like in terms of roles and responsibilities?

The way that Customer Marketing teams and functions should be staffed and organized will vary greatly from company to company, especially when looking at more traditional B2B or sales-led organizations vs Product-led organizations.

In my experience, though, the best way to orient the team is around three core responsibilities:

• Activation & Engagement: Measurement of activation metrics and time to activation, often in the form of lifecycle marketing. Driving customer education and programmatic communication that support enterprise onboarding, end-user training materials, and aircover to gain as much traction within paying accounts as possible. 
• Upsells & Expansion: Driven through targeted programs that aim to increase revenue from existing enterprise accounts through targeting new teams, referrals, and surfacing new MQLs to account managers. Can be done through Customer Advisory Boards, 1:1 Account Events, Customer Webinars, and account-based acquisition campaigns.
• Advocacy: Measurement of output-based programs that develop champions and put your customers on a stage like case studies, referencable logos, and customer stories across channels (webinars, events, content).

When first starting out or when you have a lean team, I've found starting with an account-based customer marketing approach is the best way to drive meaningful impact and quick wins for your CSMs and on your company's bottom-line. Identify the top renewals or any accounts at risk of churning and create targeted account plans to save and expand each. This will provide the frameworks and structures to scale as the team grows.

I find the definition and scope of customer marketing vary widely from company to company. Still, the main work areas can be described as Onboarding/Adoption, Renewal & Expansion, and Customer Advocacy. Responsibilities can be boiled down to answering: how quickly can you validate that the customer’s decision to purchase was the right one? And then continue building on that foundation to create a raving fan base of customer advocates.

Approaching this from a general perspective, without factoring in your go-to-market motion or your goals, the best-in-class customer marketing teams typically address these areas:

1. How can you help the customer realize value as quickly as possible?
2. What opportunities for expansion can you identify and grow?
3. How can you best reflect the voice of the customer?

Ultimately, it's about meeting the customer where they are and helping them fall in love with your brand.