Nicolette Konkol

This question is specific to scaling a business. No one size fits all answer, what you choose to centralize or decentralize has a lot to do with what growth stage you are in and your priorities. In the case of Morningstar, we have central marketing functions (like brand, PR, demand, and customer marketing) and marketing functions like product marketing that live in a decentral business unit. Decentral models allow for agility and focus and the central functions play a role in consistency and amp ...Read More

Make sure reporting is set up to measure what’s important and is agreed upon across sales & marketing You can’t wait till the martech stack is built or the website is perfect or your strategy is complete to start generating demand. You’re going to have to build the race car while you are racing. You need to capture/generate demand while you are standing up new process, getting new martech in place, etc. Set up a regular cadence of communication with your stakeholders- actively setting and ma ...Read More

Depends on how you’ve defined the scope and priorities of the customer marketing organization but some to consider are: Monthly active users or utilization rate Engagement in onboarding/education programs Percentage of customers that use “sticky features” Number of customer advocates referrals Net Promoter Score Retention rate Avg. Customer Contract size Account spend Growth in customer communities Influenced new deal/upsell/renewal Pipeline & Revenue from customer references, case studies, ...Read More

Campaign operations and demand generation are part of the same value chain of campaign creation, so it depends on the size and scale of your teams as well as the specialization you chose to prioritize. Often in startups, you have demand gen and ops in one person, as the org scales, you begin to introduce specialization. On the other end of the spectrum, I’ve seen roles and responsibilities of ops, in particular, go as far as to be divided into 6 different specializations. For our team at Morning ...Read More

There’s plenty of tech out there to enable any number of strategies and subsequent tactics but the place I’d start is with customer data. Do you have the data you need to inform your customer marketing strategy? This can be as simple as the CRM & Marketing automation data or as advanced as a customer data platform that drives a personalization strategy. Reference program tech, investments in review sites like G2, Trust Radius, or Gartner Peer Reviews, Gifting platforms, PLG, and in-product c ...Read More

Most answers to this question focus on the buying journey and tend to sum up the post-sale experience in one bullet point but there's definitely more to it than that. Indeed the customer experience starts with the buying experience where you come to understand the problems your potential client is trying to solve and the outcomes they'd like to achieve and continues through the handoff to customer success or account management. The post-sale stages of the customer lifecycle generally include: a. ...Read More