LIVE Workshop Wednesday: 140% NRR: 10 Game-Changing Tactics with Insider's CMO

on how these sessions work. We are going to hear from our awesome speaker today from Insider, and then after that, um, she will go through like a presentation. Make sure you got your questions in early. We always have a ton of them, so get them in early to guarantee that they are answered. And then by the end, we are going to do those Q&A questions. So I will be messaging you privately in the chat to ask if you want to ask your questions out loud or if you want them moderated on your behalf. With that, we are going to shift things over and welcome our speaker today, Merve, CMO at Insider. Welcome.

Hello. Hello, everybody. Nice to see everyone again after SaaStr Europa. Great to be here again.

Yeah, so if you were at SaaStr Europa, You may have seen her there, but since Saastr Europa, thank you so much for joining this session. I know this session was super popular and we're excited to do a little part 2 today.

Yes.

So if you were not at Saastr Europa, we want to get to know you a little bit better, Merve, and ask a few quick questions to kick things off, if that works for you.

Of course.

All right. So with that, how would you define what you do in your day-to-day role?

Well, I'm sure like some of us in the room, I am a CMO of a B2B SaaS company across 27 countries. So it's a bit of a crazy job. Every day I am actually taking care of all the marketing strategy and marketing execution across our 27 regions. Worldwide. So it's, you know, running a lot of events, obviously, because we're in B2B SaaS. It's a very high-touch kind of marketing strategy. So doing a lot of events, building community, and our life after, you know, $100 million ARR became all about customers and customer marketing. So that's taking a lot of my, you know, time right now. So yeah, the life of a CMO, it's quite insane. I'm sure some of you guys relate, but that's what I do.

27 countries sounds super easy. No problem at all. What projects are you working on today you're most excited about?

I'm really excited about the new features and functionalities and technology around AI and ChatGPT that's being integrated in, you know, B2B SaaS technologies at the moment, whether you're like an HR software or fintech or, you know, doing individualized cross-channel journeys like us. Whatever B2B SaaS platform you are, every single leader there is thinking about how they're going to integrate AI and, you know, drive profitable growth and productivity and efficiency in their organizations, even, you know, beyond the economic downturn. So I think those are the projects that excite me the most because we're having— we're preparing for really big launches and they're going to be big global launches around those functionalities. So that's really exciting me right now because it's changing marketing as we know it. Like, marketing as we know it is over and there's a brand new way and we're defining that together. And I think that's like the most exciting thing for most of us at the moment.

Yeah, the year of ChatGPT, but excited to hear what those new launches and offerings are.

Yes, stay tuned.

Yes. Okay. And then our last question before I hand it over to you. In the last 12 months, what's been the hardest thing you've worked on?

Oh God, I think recruitment because, you know, at this scale it becomes even harder to find the right people who fit your culture. And I have a very remote team, as I mentioned, from Latin America to Asia to US to Europe. And it's very hard to find those people to, you know, that fits your culture and the right people to drive you to the next level in the organization. So I think I'm recruiting everywhere at the moment, Caitlin, in parties, always be recruiting in the plane. Wherever I go, I'm trying to recruit people. So I think that's the hardest thing right now and it has always been. But yeah, other than that, I think it's, it's, you know, facing the problems, taking the challenges day by day. But recruitment is always the hardest thing, I think.

Yeah. Well, you heard it here first. If you are open to work, wear a hat on the plane or at your next party to get your next job.

Yeah, definitely.

All right, with that, we will hand it over to you to go through your slides.

Okay, perfect. Well, I see that, uh, a lot of people have joined, so that's awesome. Welcome, guys. Thank you so much for taking the time today for this exciting topic. Uh, you know, we're also learning together, sharing insights, uh, in the SaaS community. I love the SaaS community, how intimate it is, and how much I learn here is incredible. So thank you so much for taking the time today. I'm really hoping to whisk through these tactics and then we can have more time to talk and maybe hear about your experiences. And there is also some controversial topics in customer marketing, so we can hear your experiences and tackle your challenges together. So let's get on with it. So if you're in B2B SaaS, you know, this is your North Star metric. NRR, net revenue retention, net dollar retention is something that we all have as a North Star metric, especially after you know, a certain ARR level. So today I'm going to talk about 10 game-changing tactics. Why is it game-changing? Because there is a common practice that you can follow, but then there are those extra miles that you can go which really helps create the difference. And I didn't ChatGPT or Google these slides. These are actually tried and tested, proven, you know, tactics that we tried at Insider. So I think that's why it's more valuable for the joiners today. So with that, retention is the new acquisition. We all know that. And you know, your customer is at the very center of everything you do in B2B SaaS because we're a recurring revenue business. So we need to keep our customers, we need to keep upselling them. But for that, magic needs to happen. And I'm going to dive into how that magic happens. Today from different angles. So before we get started, you know, there was a great survey by this organization called Influitive, and they asked this question to the marketers. In your view, how important is customer marketing? And most of the joiners said it's very important, and 30% said its importance. So some people, when I say customer marketing, I was talking to one of our investors the other day, he said, what is customer marketing? Isn't marketing all customer? In fact, it isn't, because customer marketing is encompassing a lot of different activities in the organization. However, the teams are really small, so people sometimes don't know that they are doing customer marketing. So I will try to define that. But before that, They also asked, how does it affect revenue? Like, how does— how has your organization's customer marketing efforts impacted revenue? So they're worried about bottom line as usual. And most of the survey respondents said moderate revenue gains and 18% said significant revenue gains. So there is definitely a bottom of the line, you know, bottom line impact here. But I wouldn't think NRR or customer marketing from that perspective only because there are so many things in marketing. As you know, attribution is a big black hole, and attribution is really hard to nail down. So I wouldn't just measure it with these kind of metrics. There's so much that you can't measure. For example, building a community is not something you can measure, but you can see the impacts over time. So increasing customer retention by only a small percentage, according to this research, increases the, you know, company's profits by 25 to 95%. So it's definitely has that impact on the bottom line, but we will dive into the more soft metrics as well. So despite this revenue impact and the importance of NRR for B2B SaaS, customer marketing teams remain relatively small and most people don't understand what customer marketing is or why it's important in the organization. So they fail to get the support from the cross-functional teams. And they're in a hard place because they need to work with account managers, customer-facing. They need to work with sales. They need to work with, you know, very different functions in the business to make this work. So let's look at what customer marketing is and how it covers a wide area of activities. So you ask for case studies, you ask for G2 reviews, Gartner Peer Insights reviews, you ask for, you know, them to become speakers at your events. You do NPS surveys, you do customer advisory boards. There is a very wide range of customer activities, marketing activities that's happening in the organization. But how you define these might be different. But this is— these are the things you're seeing on the slide. I'm not going to read all of it. Is, you know, what tends to be considered as customer marketing in different organizations. So I think I'm not going to be able to see you guys raise your hands, but, you know, maybe I will save this question to the Q&A, but maybe start thinking about this. You know, if you think that your customer marketing program will gain greater importance or a bigger budget next year or not, maybe we can start with this question. But in this research, the survey respondents said 76% said it will have a greater importance. So it's a new area in marketing in B2B SaaS that's being developed. So if you start looking for hiring customer marketing specialists or managers, you will have a very hard time finding them. So these individuals either come from account management backgrounds or they come from marketing. Backgrounds. So you might need to create this role, and those people who are interested in this role can take up the role and learn it as they go, because it's very hard to recruit customer marketing VPs or customer marketing managers around the world. In a couple of, you know, companies, these— I've seen that they have very deep customer marketing or customer experience functions. But in most B2B SaaS companies I've interviewed and spoke to don't have this team yet. So before we move into the tactics, you know, tactics are tactics and we all try to share these with each other and learn from each other. But what's really most important is if you can create scalable, repeatable programs that are consistent. So you should ask yourself, okay, I'm signing up for this, we're going to do this. But if I, if I can't make it consistent, then should I really sign for it? We actually use the Amazon backwards methodology sometimes, you know, really thinking about whether we're going to be able to put the energy, effort, and budgets or whatever is needed, resources into making this a consistent program. Because think about it, relationships, your friendships, they don't happen in one one encounter, you know, you really have to, you know, build that relationship. It's the same with your customers. So please think about if you are starting something or if you're going to apply a tactic, can I make this repeatable, scalable, and consistent to make it really work and to reap the benefits from your efforts? So tactic 1, this sounds quite easy to everyone, but it's not as easy as it sounds. So building a segmented communication plan, because every company needs a communication plan and nurture email stream for their customers. You cannot send prospect emails to your customers. It's the biggest, you know, fail that we all do at some point in our career. But we cannot, you know, just move on with the nurture programs we have. So usually marketers segment customers based on their upsell potential. So if they're using X product, they try to sell X product or they create like email nurture programs, webinars and events that constantly expose them to new features, new products. But that really has a very limited impact. It had a very limited impact at Insider for us. The game-changing practice here is really segmenting customers based on their persona. Are there— are they a C-level? Are they a CRM manager? I mean, just giving examples from our personas here, what is the persona What is the upsell potential for which products? What is the tenure and maturity of that customer in your organization so that you can really tailor the communication plan accordingly or the webinars or the events, whatever you do? So here, let me give you an example. C-levels don't care about— they're not end users of your product. They don't care about a little feature update because they're not using your platform. What they need to see is, are you a G2 leader? Are you, you know, adding these new technologies to your platform? Are you leading the game? Are you going to make them look smarter? You know, are you going to bring ROI? That's what they want to do. So they want to trust you and they want to see that content from you, not feature updates. And there's almost every email program includes everyone from the customer database. Yeah, let's blast everyone. But then you start losing, you start getting on subscriptions. So if you're sending emails or building customer programs, communication programs for your customers, if they're end users, they want to know about the features because they invested in this platform and they are responsible for that in the company and they want to increase the ROI from it. So if you can make their job easier, more efficient, more productive, and give them better results, Obviously they're more interested in using those little tactics. So it's very important if your customers are onboarding, you shouldn't be selling them product usage emails. It happened before due to bad data, bad segmentation. People receive, you know, onboarding customers receive, you know, very advanced feature updates, which they shouldn't. They should be enrolled into a very smart onboarding program which takes them onto a journey with your platform. So this looks very simple, like marketing ABC, but most companies and most colleagues I have, including myself in the time, got it wrong. So this is something that really changed the way we build those relationships with our customers. Second tactic is taking your gifts outside of the box because the common practice, you know, every SaaS company we sell, we send gift boxes or gift cards or something, things that include, you know, mugs, chocolate, water bottles, snuggies, something cute. It definitely touches the heart, but gift boxes are mostly, you know, thrown away, or they, you know, people give it to different, their colleagues, and then they got thrown away. It's a good thing, but imagine you are building a friendship. You just made a friend. You don't just start buying gifts to your friend. What's really important is you You try to, you know, discover each other, understand each other, and then you start building a love, trust, those kind of feelings. So it's very important to create experiences that touch your customer's heart. So what we have done instead of giving things, which we still do, by the way, I'm not saying put that away, but it's not enough to change the game. What we did was we created this digital frame. You know those digital frames you put on your table with your kids' photos or your friends' photos? We created a digital frame, and in this digital frame, the first screen was Hande, our CEO, welcoming, you know, the person with a personalized video. So it would be, hello Chris, hello Caitlin, hello Jack, welcome to Insider Growth Makers 'Club, we're very happy to have you on board.' Da da da da da da, CEO's message. And then we would have dynamic QRs built in, we would have team photos built in. So it was like a living digital frame on your table. And the dynamic QR, there are some software that you can use dynamic QR to change that QR code link every week, every month. Whenever you have a launch or news, you can update that link. So whenever they get their phone and scan it, they can actually see something new. So there are ways to interact and keep interacting with them through these gifts and making it feel really personalized and creating an experience for them. So if you really want to take it to the next level, you know, the future of gifting could be like a basketball or tennis game with jerseys on, and that could be the onboarding for your team and the— your customer's team, which is a great experience for them to remember. And if you have that first impression nailed, The rest comes, as we all know. So think about your gifting strategy. What are you gifting them? How important it is? Is it shareable on social? It doesn't move them enough for them to share it on social. And you know how much of a community feel it's creating for them. So we started experimenting with some crazy ideas. I would love to hear your ideas in the conversation part. So please, if anyone has some game-changing practice here, please feel free to share it with the community at the end. So tactic 3 is reinvent your traditional upsell flow. So everyone is trying to do upsell and the common practices— mails, emails, meetings, QBRs, you know, emails— and it's really trying to push a lot of new features, new products, new, new content to people and wish for them to buy these products. And then account managers go into meetings and they try to sell them. But this feeling of being sold constantly to hit our targets is not a great feeling. Like, none of us really like that. So we need to make a mind shift here or change our mindset about upsell. So what we did is we started these product walks by the bay. I mean, it doesn't have to be a bay, by the way. Product walks anywhere cool in the city. We integrated into their lifestyle because most of us, you know, either take a walk in the morning or join breakfast in the morning. We try not to, you know, interfere too much with our daily schedule because we're all busy, right? So what we did was we built these walks and people would join these walks. And while walking and eating our branded, lovely, healthy snacks and wearing our insider jerseys, we would just talk about the new products that's coming. So you could have an account manager there, you could have a product person, product manager, product marketing person there. Doesn't matter who— whoever is available can join these talks and it can be a casual updates while you're spending some healthy time together. So these things make it so much more organic because people are being informed, they're having their morning walk or run, and they're having their lovely community feel with the t-shirts and hoodies and, you know, Saastr stuff. I love it. My whole team loves them. I bring a lot of swag from Saastr Europe, and we enjoy it because it makes you feel like a part of the community. But only giving swag is not why we love this community, right? There is a rewarding experience there and we need to build that rewarding experience for upsell to happen. So tactic 4 is a little bit interesting because we coined this term active upsell. It doesn't exist on Google. So product-led growth is something we're discussing. There's a lot of podcasts, there's a lot of sessions I'm watching on it. Recently. So product-led growth is really essential for B2B SaaS technologies, and especially if you don't have a trial, like if you're enterprise like us, it becomes even more important. So for product-led growth, before I move into active upsell, the common practices— you have a premium model. There is usually a lack of automated personalized feature offerings within the product. What do I mean by that? So if you go in the product, there are rule-based settings. So if this person is using this, pop up this and try to upsell this product. If they're doing this, pop up that. So it's very rule-based in the product because product feature roadmap always takes over those kind of features. So basically you can also use some tools for, you know, how we use some tools for onboarding. You can also purchase some tools to do this. But the, the game-changing practice is really creating dynamic personalized content. So let's imagine I'm using X products in the platform and I received a certain success. Let me give an example from Insider because it could be a little bit different for every one of you depending on the industries you're serving and your technology. So basically for us, let's say we're using WhatsApp Commerce. And I have increased my conversions by, let's say, 600%, it would say, well done, Merve, by using WhatsApp Commerce, you have increased your conversions by 600%. Why not double that with Architects? Let me take you there. So it's basically a personalized way of helping the user navigate through the platform and show interest. That's how you generate marketing sourced upsell opportunities from a product, because we are responsible for marketing sourced upsell opportunities as the marketing team. So from events, from products, from inbound, whatever that might be. But product is— you're— they're already using it. It's a whole potential there to make that, to navigate them and say, oh, I'm interested. As soon as they hit that, account manager comes in and says, hey, I've seen that you're interested in this platform. So that's one thing. What do we mean by upsell, active upsell? Basically, active upsell is this: rather than trying to promote a feature and convince your users to buy it by showing values, case studies, this, that, They're already your customer. They're already using your product. What we do is we say, hey, we have this new feature. Can we get your consent to open this free for like a week? We would like to run a campaign and show you the results. They have no lock-in, nothing to buy, nothing to invest, no integration. We take care of it. We create a little product lab for that brand. And what we do is we use that product for a campaign. They're already running with another you know, product that they have. And what we do is we show them the results and you don't need to convince them anymore. You don't need to go to meetings, write emails constantly to, you know, prove the value of that product because you just made them use it without any efforts and show results. Once you show those results, if they're a decision maker, they can say, this is great, let's use it. If not, they can go to their CMO or whoever the decision maker is in the company and they can say, look at these results they achieved in one week. Why not? Why not give this a try? That's how we should be doing upsell. Because if we try to push this too much, people, you know, shy away from it because they want to, you know, when they invest in a portion of your platform or entire platform, they want to get a value from it before they invest further or they exhaust their budget. So you really need a strong reason for them to buy something else from you. So that's what we call active upsell. We can discuss it further if you have questions. I hope I explained it clearly, but we can definitely answer your questions at the end. I'm trying to whisk through these guys. We're halfway again to give us more time to discuss, but bear with me here. So tactic 5 is in that song, that loving feeling, you know, creating that loving feeling in your community. What do I mean by that? Again, the common practice is, okay, let's create community, let's create like a Slack channel, and then let's share some engaging content there. Let's put our latest feature update, let's do this, let's do that. And then all of a sudden it's just another Slack channel. Guys, we have how many Slack channels, how many Slack groups, WhatsApp groups, LinkedIn groups, you know, or other tools, logins that we have to deal with. So just creating a Slack channel and ticking your OKR of building a community and putting someone there to answer questions is not going to cut it anymore. Everyone has a Slack community, but it's a supporting channel and it needs to be managed in the very right way to create that loving feeling in the community. So also same with webinars and events, right? Oh yeah. Jason M. Lemkin had a great blog on Running repetitive webinars, having a repetitive webinar program. But Jason doesn't mean go and do boring demos and try to drive upsells through these. There needs to be a lot more engagement factors that are very well thought out and practiced to be able to go that extra mile. So the game-changing practice here would be creating a sense of belonging. I mean, everything that we talked about until now rather than giving a snuggie, doing like a basketball game or whatever. All these things are actually creating that community feeling, but it's, it's a matter of consistent and connected programs that are repeatable. Because imagine if you go and hang out with someone once and add them on LinkedIn, uh, what happens next? Nothing. Uh, maybe you think you have a pain and you think of that person 5 months later and you go back to them and ask a question. But if you imagine if you see that person every quarter in an event, in a gathering, then you start building relationships with them. And, you know, coming and learning something is one, one reward for you. But being along those like-minded people, sharing your pains, having those conversations is the other reward. So here you can do some gamified webinar series. What do I mean by that? Let me give you concrete examples because I really want to give practical examples here. So gamified webinar would be this. Rather than going and doing a demo of the new feature, I would get two of my customers. I would bring them for like to crack a case, a pain that's, you know, we survey our customers, we get their cases and pains, we put them on, we put the timer on, and then two customers like crack that case and use our products to solve it. And then the other customers vote saying, I like, you know, Customer A, I like Customer B doing it better. And then we have a discussion around it. That would be an example of a gamified webinar series, for instance. You know, you can come up with your own ideas depending on, you know, how your technology is set up or which industries you serve and what's the culture in your community. You can change these things up. But gamifying webinar series is, has something, is something that really worked for us. People come back. It's not like demos. Again, doing repeatable, scalable, I'm going to say this 20 times today, repeatable, scalable customer events and customer advisory boards. If you, if they're not repeatable, an advisory board doesn't work. Events don't work. You need to have branded, consistent events. We do uplifts in every region. In 27 regions every quarter. And now we have waiting lists in some of our events. And it's really cool because people come there to meet other people, to hang out, to make friends, to listen to great speakers, to have fun games. You know, they come there for an experience. They don't come there just to get information. We don't do that on a repeated basis if, if there is nothing else in it for us. Championing customers with online and offline award certification programs. So if you, depending on your budget and where you are in the ARR game, if you're just starting out, you can have an award ceremony on the social media for free. People love it. People reshare them like crazy. Certification programs. It could be just a simple email program. And then as you go in the marketing game, as you develop your ARR, then you can start running events, award ceremonies. Customer retention events, maybe summits that we do, Reshape Summit every year for all of our customers in all of the countries. And we give awards there. We celebrate successes of our customers, etc. So it's a scale like you don't need to start there. You can always find creative ways of recognizing your customers and then building meaningful and valuable conversations in online communities. So For instance, imagine if I sign into your platform, if it's my birthday, I receive like a personalized video in the platform before even I start my campaign. Boom, you have already changed the feeling of that person towards you. I mean, think about your love brands. Why do you love them so much? It's the same with B2B SaaS. Yeah, we're not B2C. We're not selling, you know, diapers to moms. But, you know, we are at the end of the day, we have to go from boring to brave in B2B SaaS as well. I think we need to use the product more and personalize the experience a little bit more for our customers. So tactic 6 is creating— when you come to that maturity level, it's really important to create a proper loyalty program and add meaning to it. Again, with everything else, the common practice is, you know, there's a lack of established customer loyalty programs to begin with. Like, not many companies have it. And, you know, most provide gift vouchers. That doesn't really create advocates because you cannot incentivize people externally and expect them to be loyal. You can't just buy 10 gifts to your friend and make them loyal, right? So the game-changing practice here is really creating a meaningful system. So here's an example. You can create a point system for loyalty program. What does that mean? Can you become, Chris, can you please speak at our next events? We're doing an event on AI, blah, blah, blah. And then Chris comes and speaks at your event and he gets 60 points for it. Jane, can you please give us a G2 review? Jane gets 30 points. And they can accumulate those points with those loyalty actions, those customer advocacy actions. And then, you know, they can either turn it into a 10% off for the next upsell, or they can turn it into like a consultation session. However you want to incentivize them. They can turn them into gifts, they can turn it into a donation for a cause that they love. And there are some programs, like there's software to run. We are not using a software at Insider. We built our point system with Salesforce, but you can easily, you know, buy a program to manage these things as well. And the same logic is for referral programs because your customers need to love you and love your technology to be able to refer other people to it, right? So a single fixed reward for referrals and giving them monetary incentives just like in the loyalty program does not work. The game-changing practice here is having a tiered incentive program. So If Jane is bringing a referral to me that converts into a very high MRR and that person stays with me for 3 years, I think Jane's incentive should be much higher than Joe who brings me a referral but it doesn't convert or the person churns in 3 months. So it's according again to your technological, you know, technology platform and how you're set up in the business, these tiered incentives creates a lot of value. And going beyond the monetary incentives, think about them as extrinsic intrinsic motivators. You know, you have to go beyond monetary incentives to make anything work. And you can give them, make them feel special by giving them VIP access to early usage of a new, you know, technology that's coming up. You can gamify the referral process. You can run contests. You can say, We're starting our referral program. Here are the contestants. We have this really cool prize. Once we gave them tickets to fly to a different country with a friend of theirs, for instance. It's a big, cool prize, but you give it to one person, you know, that always triggers the competition between people. So bringing the gamification, the fun. I mean, you know, adults, they love games, they love fun, they're kids inside. So speaking to that really works. So trying to move away from monetary incentives from anything you do, it just doesn't work. It's not sustainable. It doesn't leave a good taste in your mouth. Tactic 8: building enduring review programs that last. I'm sure most of you are on G2 and most of you are closer to the leader's quadrant. I hope if you're just starting out, G2 is a very, very important B2B SaaS 100% user review site, which is very much credited by analysts and B2B SaaS technology buyers. Even when I buy a wrinkle cream now, you know, I go and ask a few girlfriends. It's the same thing. B2B buying cycles are super long. They ask, you know, people ask questions, they go to G2, they read your reviews, they go to Gartner Peer Insights, they read reviews, and they're trying to compare you with competitors, and they're trying to choose the right program. So reviews, reviews, reviews are so important. We have been a G2 leader across 6 categories for the past 8 years, and it's very, very hard to become a leader, and it's very hard to stay as a leader. And you really can't just blast a periodic automated review campaign to your entire customer database to make that happen. It doesn't work that way. So it will actually work against you. I have gone through that. What do I mean by that? If I have a customer base, some— I will have some customers who are extremely happy. I will have some customers who are not happy with the platform. We hope that 95% are happy. But if I blast this email every 3 months saying, hello, Jane, can you please give us a review on G2? Here is a $25 gift card for this. Forget about it. I mean, you will be on the G2 grid, but you won't be a leader. So what is the game-changing tactic there? First of all, target your high NPS customers. If you're using something like Gainsight or any other customer platform database, you target your high NPS customers, maybe 7 and up, 8 and up. At least you start with them so that they give you good reviews. High, high stars. And if this mail goes in an automated way, it has less impact. I've tried it, you know, account managers sending a personalized email with the latest nuggets and latest updates on the campaigns and stuff always works better. Make it human. Oh, someone's drawing on the screen. Thank you for being that excited. Important. Thank you.

Yes.

Importance. Second thing is sending personalized thank you emails with a donation gift after they submit a review is good, but we don't do it before because it feels like bribing, you know, here's a gift card, can you leave a review? Guys, this doesn't work, and even if it works a couple of times, it's not sustainable. So you have to make them feel, uh, like a part of your leadership journey. Thank you, Jane, for leaving that review for us. It matters a lot. Thank you for, you know, helping us on this leadership journey. Thank you for your feedbacks. Your feedbacks are helping us build a better, better platform, blah, blah, blah. So there is a lot more tactics we can discuss, but these are the top 2 I would like to share with the community here. Tactic 9. We're almost there. Give, give, give before you ask. Like in every relationship, we should give, give, give before we ask. Ask, ask, ask before giving to customers is what we do. Buy more products from us. Hey, fill in this NPS survey. Oh, there's this also product survey. Can you please be a speaker at our next event? Can you provide case studies? Can you please write a review on G2? Oh, there's also Gartner Peer Insights. Oh, it's so much. So if your customers don't love you and if you haven't given them anything before you ask all that stuff, and that's not just giving them the platform they're paying for, I mean something else, then, you know, you overwhelm your customers. And if this is not a concerted effort, if, you know, account managers, marketing team, sales, blah blah, are going like 5 people, 5 different departments are going to the same customer, this even creates a bigger frustration. So the game-changing practice here is very simple. Give, give, give, give, give, then ask. Create a great rewarding community for them. Make, make sure that they get great content there. Make sure they don't just get gifts from you, they get an experience. They love hanging out with you, with the people they work with. Make sure that they are getting the right content in your nurture programs. Make sure it's speaking to their pains and what they need to hear. All of that is giving to your customers. The last tactic is championing a culture of customer marketing, and it's the most important one. Why? Because customer marketing teams remain very small in organizations, and they're like, you know, trying to swim against the current, and they fail to get any level of support from customer success, product sales teams, because those, those teams don't yet know the importance of customer marketing on achieving very high NRR, and they don't have common OKRs. So they see it as an extra task coming from this customer marketing team. And as leaders, it is your role to ensure that you are creating that culture and they're understanding the importance of customer marketing on NRR. So one little bonus before we go into the conversation. In the end, number one source of new customers should be word of mouth. And word of mouth, it only happens when you have happy customers. And of course, customer marketing alone cannot achieve that. It's a part of the game. But these people are your best sales reps. And beyond 100 million ARR, you need to acquire 30 to 50 percent of your new customers through word of mouth to have sustainable growth. According to this Nielsen research, 77% of customers are more likely to purchase a product or service when they hear about it from someone they trust. And customers acquired through word of mouth have a higher LTV. So these are some important things to keep in mind. So key takeaways: speak to the C-levels and end users and different personas in the way they need to be spoken to. Think outside the box when it comes to gifting. Be creative. I'm sure if you do a brainstorm, you'll get crazy ideas from the team. Reinvent your traditional upsell flow. Don't do emails and, you know, don't push it to your customers. Try active upsell. If you have a product that's suitable to active upsell. Create a community, not just Slack channels or not just, you know, programs or events, but really create that community experience, the repeatable scalable programs that will bring those people together. Add meaning to your loyalty programs and referral programs. Make sure they're fun. Make sure you gamify them. Make sure you have tiered incentives and give more control to them and more rewards to them. That are intrinsic more than extrinsic. Build enduring review programs, G2, Gartner, Peer Insights, and give before you ask and champion a culture of customer marketing. So all those things work. So thank you so much. I tried to do this as fast as I could and it's still a little bit longer than I thought. So thanks for that. So I would love to stop my screen and see your faces. Hello, everyone. And give it back to Caitlin.

Yeah, great presentation. It was so important that it got written on the screen. That was a first. We are going to start off with a question from Ernesto. I know you mentioned hiring, onboarding, et cetera, as super difficult, so we will start there.

Hi, thank you very much for the great presentation. I was wondering if you were to place yourself in a founder's shoes and starting a company from scratch, just yourself and a couple of co-founders, who would be your first marketing hire and at what scale or when would you do that hire? Very good question, by the way. I'm sure everyone has that question. So when you're starting out, you don't need the VP of Marketing. Uh, you shouldn't have a VP of Marketing. Uh, you need a growth marketer who can bootstrap a lot of things because, um, you should nail down, uh, the events programs first, like running maybe meetups, even using your office. We used to use our offices just to pizza and beer and stuff, just start the community getting together. Because in the beginning, if you hire a VP of marketing, what they're going to do, or a marketing manager, they're going to build their team. But that's not what you need. You need executors and you need to build your event program first. That's the first thing you need to build. And then you can scale into bootstrapping. Like social media is a big channel. We get a very big portion of our revenue from social media. By the way, at Insider, I'm responsible for marketing source revenue. Not pipeline, not influenced. So it's very hardcore metric. So that's why I've seen if you use social media very well and social amplification, what do I mean by that? If you have a very strong social program that's amplified by your network, it really translates into revenue. So I would start with a very strong events person, start running meetups and events. And if you have some budgets, you know, having those 10 people, 20 people workshop workshops with the right personas by industry, by persona, and first nail down that organization and then add digital. I think I have mastered DDG on my fifth year on for the first 5 years. But we're enterprise, by the way. It's not a trial-based or any— it's different. Sorry. Are you asking for enterprise or are you asking for non-enterprise B2B SaaS because the strategy is a bit different. If you're a trial-based company, so if you have a trial and you're trying to build an engine to sell it on its own, then you need to, you need to forget about events and you need to definitely nail down the digital engine first. So in any case, if you're just starting out with a couple of co-founders, first one of your co-founders will own marketing and they will start building the marketing engine. And then you need executors. Whether it's a growth marketer or an events marketer, depending on if you're an enterprise or not, that's how you can go on for probably until $10 million ARR. And also depends how many countries you have.

Ernesto, are you still with us? Are you?

Yeah.

I was like, he's not reacting.

Yeah, I think he might have had some tech issues.

So we'll come back to him as well.

Yeah, if he rejoins, we'll come back to him. As an events professional, love the highlight on how important that is for sure. Our next question, what percent of your overall marketing budget goes to customer marketing and how do you think about this?

Very good question. That's something I'm still trying to figure out, but I think I would say— oh my God, hi Jason M. Lemkin, welcome. I think I would say a good like 20% at the moment, but I'm reading Jason's blogs about this since I'm a baby, so learned a lot from him. I read his blogs about this as well. Jason, if you want to comment. But now we are spending quite a bit on customer retention summits that we do across all regions once a year. We do quarterly events, we do monthly upsell events, mostly events by the way. Because you're not going to go and spend digital money on your customers, right? So bringing the community together. I'm not investing in any software yet for customer marketing, but I'm considering that. But yeah, I would say 15 to 20%, of course, differs per region, but that's about there at the moment. It was Jason's advice, guys. Great insight.

Yeah, I'm still trying to figure out what the right answer is. I think that, that is, I mean, I think, I think that some of this stuff, it is amazing that in 2023, customer marketing is still nascent, right? I mean, I've been writing about this for 10 years and some of the best marketers, I ask them this question and they don't have an answer. But in today's environment where you're leaning into the base, right? If it's not 20%, it's, you're not getting it done.

Yeah.

Right. So, but getting this formula right, we really do need to get better and better and figure out what this number is. And, but yeah, I think in good times, if it's not at least 10, it's way too low. And today, if it's not 20, you're not, you're not taking it seriously, right?

Yeah, exactly. There you go. From the master, Carlos Saz. By the way, that's what I read in your blog. Trust me, when I was building my customer marketing budget first time, I took those numbers and then they changed a little bit over time. Because also we have 27 regions, which makes it a little difficult because if you're running events across that many regions for retention, if you're running gifting programs, loyalty programs, referral programs, there's a lot that goes into customer marketing and it's probably gonna increase, by the way, next year, our customer marketing budget. Yeah.

Well, if you're looking for any of these blog posts, you can go to sastr.com, look at the blog and just search customer marketing. I know I will right after this session. OK. But our next question, can you automate— oh, I'm sorry. Actually, Bahavya, I believe you said you would ask this out loud.

Hi, this is a great presentation. And I would also say, yes, I've learned a lot from Jason M. Lemkin about SAS so far. So glad to be here. So I'm curious, how do you— automate segments, especially signals like, you know, this is a person to upsell? Like, if you— like, I— we are a collaboration tool, and, you know, typically 10 people would sign up. But you're, you're talking about, you know, okay, you want to find the right person, and then you want to— is it manual? Is it automated? Any signals to look for?

Yes, very, very, very good question. It's something I'm trying to master, uh, right now. So Basically, we are using this tool called Gainsight, and we also use different tools that can— like tools like Power BI to pull the product usage data from the platform itself, like our own platform. So we kind of write some— with the data warehouse team, we write some integrations to pull the right data. There's always a manual element when you're trying to build a good data house for your business. So what we do is there is product usage data. So we have, as I mentioned, we segment the data by persona. So if it's a C-level versus an end user, and we have lots of personas, but to be more inclusive, I'm not going to mention those because that's probably for Insider. And we look at, you know, which products they're using, and if they're using that product, we create, you know, an upsell upsell potential prediction almost, because it's actually automated through our platform. But also we always sense check that with the account managers, because account managers is always having that conversation with the customers, right? Maybe they just tried to upsell a product and the customer said no for a reason. We wouldn't want to blast those people with, you know, those products. So what we do is we have a really good customer nurture email program and we do this per combination of products. So let, let me give you an example. We have a customer journey builder called Architect and this basically connects multiple channels. So there's always a potential of upselling. If they bought 3 channels, you can buy 4, 5, 6, 7. You know, it's endless. So when you— when we have an Architect Flow, the first 3 emails are onboarding. This is Academy. This is where you can find the videos. Very generic welcoming. Onboarding is really important. I think there should be a separate session on that. And then after those 3 emails, you start giving them the product usage ones, like which product, which ones they should use to make them more sticky, right? If they use those features, they will get the value. So they'll be more sticky. You don't go and try to sell the most confusing feature in month 4. So after 4 or 5 months, we start talking to the account product managers and we say, hello, product manager, what's your main pain with this product? What are your blockers? Have you run surveys? Have you had customer conversations recently? Can you please spill those insights to us? And they say, yeah, we have a low usage on this product and these are the insights, these are the reasons why. And then we build content around that and we change the content constantly. So it's an automated system, but we are constantly renewing the content based on the product evolution because the product is not static. So in one quarter, if you build the program and if you leave it on for 6 months, it's a problem. And we always sense check with account managers, face customer-facing people, and we always sense check with the product managers who are dealing with usage data because at the end of the day, uh, NRR metrics they're, you know, you have to keep them, you have to make them happy, you have to keep them using your product, and you have to upsell other features. I mean, that's what NRR is made up of. So that's how we do it. It's— there's no magic answer. I know it's very difficult, but I'm working with data warehouse team, I'm working with product managers, 40 of them. I'm working with account managers across 27 countries. It's definitely like accommodation. I hope that's sufficient. Yeah, that's helpful.

Thankfully, we don't have that much data yet, so we can manually—

or we're trying.

Yeah, useful. Thank you.

Of course. Our next question comes from Abhi. Abhi, are you still with us? All right. The question was, at what ARR do you do this kind of customer marketing? So the examples you gave, what ARR would you suggest you start?

I, I don't think I have enough exposure to suggest, but I can share my experience. Maybe Jason can suggest, as he's exposed to many companies. But we started around $60 million ARR properly. I mean, as I told you, everything is customer marketing, right? Since day one, we're doing case studies. Since day one, we're doing G2 reviews. Since day one, we're doing events. Since day one, we're trying to upsell. But to have a concerted, like, team of customer marketing team or customer experience team of people who are responsible different regions And to run a concerted, repeatable, scalable program with a budget started with repeated webinars, etc., around $60 million. But I feel like you should start much earlier. Jason, would you have a further insight?

Well, it's funny, I asked the founders of Monday.com. We did a video podcast. It's up on our podcast now, I think, Amelia, right? Is it up on our podcast yet? Coming soon? Tomorrow. It's on there tomorrow. And I asked them and they laughed and they said, we're just starting now at $700 million in revenue. But they admitted it was late and that they were kind of inspired by SaaS to do more. I actually think the answer is before your first renewals. You know, this is the answer. You don't need to do a lot of customer marketing your first year, right? Obviously. And if you're a slow start, if you're UiPath, which is wildly successful but took 10 years to get to a million in revenue, maybe you can wait 10 years to do customer marketing. But the big, the big unforced error is not doing customer marketing months and months ahead of a renewal cycle, months and months. So a simple answer is, listen, you cannot build a whole team until you're at, at least tens of millions of revenue, although maybe much earlier if you think about it, because if 20%, what do you think about if 20% of your revenue is gonna go into customer marketing? As soon as you're ready to have 10 people on your marketing team, you probably should have 2 in customer marketing, right? Think about if I had count. But at least 20% of your time, 20% of your money, 20% of your budget should not be going into demand gen and growth and acquisition. It should be going into retention and your own. This is where you get your budget for your own little event, your own little state, your own little— yeah, you don't have $1 million, but where do you get the $100 grand to have a nice event in a hotel? Well, I'm putting 20% of my marketing budget after $2 million in ARR into retention. And that's what we don't do. So, you don't need a team to do that. So, you know, and I just see, I made this mistake and I see way too many folks take renewals for granted too early, especially founders, especially founders. And there's so much pressure in sales. We all become so sales-driven, right? This is the meta issue for SaaS companies, especially if you're more enterprise. I'm not, you can tell me if it's not true at Insider, but we naturally become sales-driven, right? We celebrate the big logo, the new deal, it becomes our culture. And marketing gets addicted to growth and demand gen. And so we ignore all of this. Even that's what the Monday founders said. They're very honest. Like, we ignored this for way too long because we're a sales-driven culture too, and we got to fix it. We got to fix it. We have to all become more customer-centric cultures, I think. And anyhow, that's my rambling answer. But I think before you have a renewal cycle, you got to budget this before you have a renewal cycle coming up.

Yeah, 100%. I think we're more educated and more literate about customer marketing now. Considered to 10 years ago when I started this, like this marketing team here, because there was no such thing, no such jargon. I mean, yes, there was, and Jason was talking about it, but it wasn't like out there. We— I still find it difficult to find customer marketing specialists and managers and VPs in the B2B SaaS space. So it's quite new and many, many companies don't have these teams. But of course, starting with a webinar series, starting with review campaigns, these are all considered customer marketing. It should start much, much earlier. I agree. If I did this, redid this in a new company, I would definitely have at least one customer marketing person from the get-go if I'm especially in enterprise because your, your blood veins, like it's more important than new acquisition. Like you need to keep your customers and keep growing. So yeah, thanks for the insights, Jason.

Yeah, I think that is a great note to end on because we are at time. Thank you. I know it flies by, right?

So sorry for taking too much time with the presentation, but they're really tested tactics. So please, please use them. I mean, I learned it the painful way, so I'm sure it was, you know, some of them were useful. It was a really great session. Thank you, Caitlin, for organizing this, and I'm definitely gonna join these sessions to hear from you guys. I love this community. So grateful for it. For it. Thank you so much for joining.

Yeah, it has been such a pleasure. Thank you again, Merve. This session was great. If you're looking for more Insider, A, these sessions are live streamed, so you can find them online directly afterward, and then B, Hyundai is coming to Annual 2023, so make sure you are there. All right, see you all soon.