Why Should Marketing Ops Pros Care About Customer Marketing and Customer Contact Data with Irwin Hipsman

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I'm Naomi Liu.

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Hello and welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by marketingops.com, powered by all the MoPros out there. I am your host, Michael Hartman. Flying solo once again. Mike, I'm sure, is recovering from Spring Fling 2025, and Naomi is working, I'm sure. Anyway, joining me today to talk about the importance of customer marketing and customer data is Irwin Hippsman. Irwin is the founder of Repetitos, a consultancy which helps clients turn their customer data into a revenue-generating advantage. Prior to that, Irwin started and led Forrester's customer lifecycle marketing practice. Before Forrester, he held several leadership roles in customer marketing, engagement, and advocacy. He started his career in sales and account management. So, Irwin, thanks for joining me today.

Yeah, looking forward to it. I'm a big fan of OpsCast. And just give a little bit of quick background. I've been listening to it all the time. And then, in the February issue with Coby Stokke, it was you actually who gave this great quote about customer marketing and customer databases and why it's not a priority. You know, there are always campaigns to happen for it. It's in the report itself, that quote. And I just reached out and I said, hey, you're talking about customer contact databases. Would you have me on? I'm just a regular solopreneur, not a fancy guy, not on the in-crowd. And I really appreciate the opportunity to chat with you.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think it's one of those— we'll get into this a little bit, but I think the idea that customer marketing is one of those ones where I think a lot of organizations Yeah, there's a missing opportunity there, right? And I think we'll talk about some of the background reasons why. But yeah, so after you reached out, you know, you and I talked a little bit and you were working on, you kind of alluded to it, a paper that you, I think, is now published, right? On the state of customer contact database. So maybe just very top level, and because then we may drill into some more, what are some of the key takeaways from this customer? contact database paper. And maybe just, I think it would be good also, because I think when I first heard this from you, I'd like for you to distinguish when you say customer contact database what you mean, because I think some people might, like me, have a broader idea of what that means. It includes more than what I think you are focused on.

Yeah, so by customer contact database, I mean the individuals who— not the accounts at the account level, the individual level— who are those contacts? And there'll be 2 different types of contacts. Imagine a company like Salesforce. You know, they might have 10 or 15 business relationships that they have within a particular account, and then they'll have, you know, hundreds if not thousands of users. I'm less concerned with the individual users because customer marketing You know, won't communicate with individual users. Like, I've never received an email from Salesforce about a new product update, even though I've been a user at every company I've been at. Those emails go to their 10, 15, 20 people. They have a relationship with the account, whatever segmentation. And then, if it's important, they'll let us know that there's a change that needs to happen. So, it's really those anywhere, you know, a small company might be 3 to 4 people, a larger company, 7 or 8 people, enterprise company, you know, 15 to 20 people at the account that you need to communicate with and know who they are and keep track of. You know, did they leave the company? Do they move to a different location? Do they have a new title? Who are the people you really need to keep track of from an account manager perspective? And as I've been talking to more and more sort of companies who are interested in thinking about what do I do about my customer contact database challenge, I realized there was no data out there. There's data on everything, MQLs and all sorts of things. There was no data. It's like, okay, what is the state of customer contact databases? And everyone will say, yeah, it's not that good. But what does that really mean? And so, I endeavored to do a research report that got published last week. And the 4 key takeaways are, first of all, the average score of customer contact database. And by that, I don't just mean You know, how accurate is the locations? It's more everything around it. Like, do you have an inventory? Can you send out a crisis communication? What are the open rates? What's the health of the database? The average score was not good. It was 47%. And like I said in the report, if we were in high school, it might be parent-teacher conference time.

Yeah.

Like, this is our kid. And, you know, why is he or she getting 47% on this test? And so, that was key result number 1. Not a shock. And everyone I talked to said, yeah, that's about right. And by looking at the underperformers versus the overperformers, we were able to say that by doing some of the things that we talked about in the report— and I'll talk about the 2 key ones in a second— you can get that score from 47% to 62%. Now, we're talking about passing grade. It's never going to be above 80%. So, you know, you're doing pretty well if you're in the 60s and 70s. We had some people who scored in the low 80s. And the 2 key factors that would impact the score the highest, one's obvious, one's not obvious. So, the non-obvious one is, do you have a group that meets on a formal, not an emergency ad hoc basis? It could be weekly, monthly, quarterly that thinks about and coordinates customer communications as a whole.

Hmm.

So, here's this group of people in marketing ops, customer marketing, customer success, product marketing. Whoever it would be, they get together and say, okay, how are we communicating with customers? So, if you have that, then, you know, if you don't have that, that's a great way to impact that score because they're going to ask all the tough questions. And then, the second one is the mature— which is very obvious— is the maturity of the segmentation. The more mature the segmentation you have, the better your overall Customer Contact Data Health score will be because it means you're thinking about, well, how do we segment our audience? Is it by Title. Well, that's, you know, a lot of people tend to segment by title because that's easy because you get their titles. What about their role vis-à-vis the product? You know, there are companies where CEOs will log in and be a user. There are companies where the CEO never logs in, and they're just, you know, somebody gives them reports. So, what are those different personas within the account that you want to be able to track?

So, just real quick, something that you hit on That just— is this sort of analogous to the concept of buying groups on the, like, pre-customer standpoint? You know, the— so I don't know if you were in the Forrester part that was Serious Decisions, but, you know, that concept of buying groups that they originated, maybe they popularized, I don't know if they originated it, but that idea, right, of having identifying who are the people you need to be involved with to get a win on a deal with a customer. It's like carry that forward. It sounds like having something similar to that on the customer side is useful as well.

Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, the number one reason when I was managing customer success teams, the number one reason why we lost a deal was we were single-threaded. So, earlier I talked about smaller companies needed 3 to 6 people in their customer contact database. And some of them, Might not even be users. They might not be involved in the deal. But who are those extra people? And you probably need a new sort of role for them.

Yeah.

So, who— and that might be called buying center. So, I've got, you know, let's say 15 people in my customer contact database. These 3 are users. These 2 are influencers. And these 5 are just people we want to keep an eye on. Like, are they moving within their company? Did they leave the company?

Yeah.

They don't use the product but You know, think, you know, but they may, you know, they might in 6 months, they might be, they may have a new role that all of a sudden uses it. And now they've got to learn about your product and you would communicate with them very differently because they're not a user. But absolutely, it's that expansion beyond just those 5 people who the CSMs talk to. Who else do you need to know within that, within the account?

Got it. Okay. What other, so I know you said that you might not be like users of whatever product or service you have might not be the primary people you want to focus on communicating with as customers. Do you think that's— I initially went to the idea of like PLG type SaaS companies, right? Where it's probably maybe a little bit different because you, especially in the phase before it, maybe if you have a freemium kind of model where you could have users who are not paying yet, yet they're customers. So you're going to be communicating to them, but it's maybe still considered not— maybe there's a differentiation between a free premium customer versus a paying customer. And maybe that's the distinction. But do you think there's a difference there where you do want to do communications to customers, especially paying customers in a PLG type organization? Or is that still— do you still think it's most important to have— Yeah, a limited set who are your like core people?

Well, it's, you know, any— it depends on the company, obviously. But, you know, anybody who you would need to— you'd want to communicate with. And depending on that segmentation. So, like when I was at Forrester, when I started, the average email, you know, there were like 15,000 people that were— that we really focused on. The average email went out to about 1,200 people. By the time I left, it went out to 800 people. So, you know, who is that? Who's the audience for that particular communication? And how do you, you know, how do you really do that deep segmentation so you're not sending information to people that they don't really care about? And so, in a PLG world, yeah, you know, they might be— that user might be a segment that gets a very different type of communication than somebody else, than like the admins would get, you know, who get a very different, you know, obviously very different type of communication from each other.

Right.

And that's, you know, that gets, you know, that's a much more mature organization than most. And you can't do that without a healthy customer contact database. Because if you don't have the titles right, particularly the titles, then it gets to be a real challenge.

Well, in titles, I mean, you said titles are easy to segment by. I would say that, yeah, on the surface, it seems like it's easy. But as soon as you start to get any level of detail, It can be misleading because just take the example, like, we only want to communicate to vice presidents, right? That sounds great until you start talking about financial services firms.

Of course.

Right, where like virtually everybody's a vice president of something, even though that's not really the— it doesn't correspond to the level of responsibility as a vice president in many other organizations. Or the size of the organization matters, right? A vice president at a small organization might be equivalent to a director or even a senior manager at a really large organization in terms of scope of responsibility and Yeah.

A lot of companies have inflation, title inflation. We're not gonna give you a raise, but we're gonna give you a nice title. It's like, well, but I'm still doing the same thing.

Yeah. That, I, I haven't used that term. That is a term I've used a lot. And I think it's particularly common in marketing and marketing ops too.

Yeah, exactly.

So, that's a whole— Yeah.

And AI, and AI can only do so much. I mean, AI can, you could drop, you know, a list of 10,000 people in a spreadsheet and tell it what to do. But there are a lot of, gonna be a lot of subtleties around the edge that it's just not going to pick up.

Yeah. So, um, I just want to make sure I understand. So when we— when we— you talk about customers, you're talking about people who have actually paid for whatever product service you—

Absolutely.

People from companies or organizations or individual people who have paid for your product or service as opposed to, uh, prospects or leads?

Absolutely.

Yeah. Okay.

Prospects are a whole different world. Accuracy. I mean, I would argue that if I had a customer contact database and let's say I did some basic segmentation, my most important people, my medium important people, my least important people, just you would never segment that by that. Well, let's just keep it simple.

Sure.

I would argue that you probably need 98% accuracy on your most important people. And then the least, the medium important people, maybe 90%. The least important people, maybe 80%, and you don't worry about them. You focus on those first 2 tiers.

But it seems like to me, I don't know what, like, that seems like they would all be higher in terms of the level of quality and trust you have in that data compared to people who are pre-customer stage.

Yeah, exactly. Like, you know, you wanna know, you know, location's really important 'cause you start doing events. You know, I've worked for Swiss companies and they think I'm in Switzerland. They invite me to events in London and I'm living in Boston. They never invite me to an event in Boston. 'Cause they assume I live where the headquarters is. You know, that's where it starts hurting people across the organization. Other people, not just marketing, not just customer marketing.

Yeah, you know, it's funny you bring that up, that idea of location. And I can remember a specific example at a company I worked for where a lead had come in, got routed because there was some data appended from one of the third-party big data sources, right? And it changed because of what the person had put in in terms of the company. It changed the location that the person had put into the request from one country to another country, which meant a whole different region for lead, like where the SDR would be. SDR picks it up. Turns out what happened is, and I think of the countries were Australia and India, and it'll make more sense. So And it got routed to the wrong place and people were like, what happened? You know, and it's not a great thing. Well, what would I, in digging through what happened, the data got appended, changed it from Australia to New Zealand, or sorry, Australia to India. That's because the person actually, based on LinkedIn profile or whatever, was in India. But it also was pretty evident by looking at the profile of the person who worked for the kind of company that was a service provider to other companies, right? Outsourced type. work. My suspicion, I don't know that it ever got validated, was that person was, because he put in another company name in Australia. Like, so my guess is he's working on being, working on as a consultant contractor for third-party company based in Australia, was doing some research on them for them. And it got rerouted to somebody because, uh, yeah, company name got changed, his location got changed, but that's not really what the intent was. Right. And so that's what, like, that's the kind of stuff that can go wrong if you're not careful.

And then if you have translations, then I'm getting everything in Swiss German and I happen to, even if I wasn't Switzerland, I do Swiss French, I'm getting everything in German.

Yeah. So I think, yeah. So it's interesting because I, I, I, it makes sense that like you really want that customer data, but if you like, if, if a big part of that score you talked about on your report that it was 47%, I'm gonna guess that a part of that is because it just wasn't accurate enough to be able to action on. That's right.

Okay. And one of the questions we ask people is, you know, how would you rate the accuracy of your database? You know, accuracy and usability of it.

Right.

'Cause people may not know the accuracy of it, but they do know the usability of it. They have a gut sense of that.

Yeah. So, knowing that our audience is primarily you know, ops type people. You know, what's something you and I talked about is that it would be good for people in these roles to better understand how to support customer marketing. That's even if a company even has a customer marketing focus at all, which I'm finding less and less common. So one of the suggestions you shared with me was that really you might like, if you're marketing ops, like Yes, you should be coordinating with sales, you know, sales ops, if there's a sales ops function in your marketing ops. But your suggestion is like also reach out to customer success or customer support, depending on what you have at your organization, and learn how to collaborate with them as well. And then obviously a customer marketing team, if there is one. So talk about, maybe talk a little more about that and why that would be beneficial for our folks in our audience.

Yeah, I have a thought with a story. When I was at a company called Crimson Hexagon, it's not there anymore, social media analytics. We would go to marketing ops and say, we need to send this customer communication out. And they go, well, we'll do it at the end of the month. And it's like, well, no, we need it sooner than that. And the end of the month would come and say, no, we didn't get to it because we had this other campaign. We had a launch that was more important.

Yeah.

And after 3 or 4 months of that, I went to my boss and said, we can't get any emails out the door to the customers. Can I just buy my own email marketing package? And she says, yeah, just do it. So, we bought our own email marketing package. It took a year for the marketing ops people to realize we had done that 'cause we left them alone. We never— we stopped asking.

Yeah.

And then they got really mad at us. Like, what do you mean you're doing this? We said, you know, we can't get any emails out to it 'cause we always get pushed to the end of the line. And then they said, okay, cancel the contract. We will put you in the line like everyone else. And so, in every company I've worked at, I've never had a marketing ops person come up to me and say, Hey, you communicate with customers all the time. What can we do to help you? What do you need? Well, you know what would be really helpful is a field in the CRM that lets us know what the person's Gmail address is. Because when we first meet them, they put their non-company address in. But once they become a customer, then you replace it with their with their company address. We want to know what their Gmail address is because when that person leaves, we want to be able to reach out to them because they're a potential lead, but we don't have their email anymore. And now we got to like send InMails through LinkedIn and they don't open them up. Wouldn't it be nice? And it's like, oh yeah, we never thought about that. That's actually a good idea.

That's like— it's funny is there are now platforms that try to Mimic that for a lot, you know, you've spent a lot of money to like track people moving. What you just described would be a pretty simple, I'm assuming as long as there's some discipline like anything else, right? Maintaining that personal email address along with their work email address.

Yeah, I mean, I would encourage people to, I would encourage companies when they have those landing pages to ask people for their Gmail address. And then, you know, as they move through that, through the, you know, through the pipeline and they hit a certain stage, Now let's get their company address. But now you've got both. And it's counterintuitive that you need both email addresses. But if you think about customers, not prospects, then having their Gmail address is really helpful 'cause 20% of all people leave their employers every year.

Yeah, crazy. Yeah, that's never— I never even would've thought of that. Like, that's like right there, I think is worth the time here.

Yeah.

So you mentioned the idea of being able to do a crisis communication to customers, right, as a challenge. And I probably said it before, like, one of the hardest things to do, to fulfill in marketing ops is, hey, we need to send a letter, you send an email to our customers, right? And as your research is evidence, right, most companies, that is a really way harder thing than it should be to do. So take crisis communications in particular, like, What, um, yeah, what can— why do you think it's so hard for companies to be able to identify those key people? And then, yeah, what could— what can we do to try to— yeah, what can our listeners do to try to help their organizations be better prepared to do that kind of thing?

Yeah, I mean, think about a B2C company. Think about United Airlines, you know, with Newark and what's going on. They have, you know, they have a playbook that says if, you know, we have a massive outage in one of our airports, this is how we communicate with the media. This is how we communicate with our customers. This is how we communicate to customers who aren't impacted. These are how we communicate with customers who are impacted. They're literally on their way to the airport. So they've got playbooks because they know that the cost of not doing that is just huge. B2B companies, maybe don't think of their product as being that essential.

Right.

Although, I would argue that, you know, if somebody spent $40,000, $50,000, $100,000 on a product, they want to be going in and see, you know, see the dashboard or go in and use it. And if there's a crisis communication or just a major communication, we're announcing a merger, we want to let you know because it's going to be in the newspaper tomorrow, that gets to segmentation. Like, who are those people? Because you don't want to send to every Salesforce user that we just purchased a company and here's the impact to you.

Right.

You want to be able to do some pretty quick and heavy segmentation. Well, these are the people we need to communicate with. And we only need to communicate with companies in North America. And we only need to communicate with companies that have this sort of profile. Okay. That 100,000-person list is now down to 10,000. Now, assuming that there's another part to it, which is the email needs to get written. So, that's on corporate comms. So, I don't worry about that. Somebody needs to hit the send button. I begin to worry about that. And then, you know, we in customer marketing need to be able to do this segmentation because, you know, we know the subtleties. So, you know, can they— you know, if the CEO calls the head of corporate comms 9 PM on Friday— on Tuesday, and we need an email out by Wednesday, you know, are all those pieces in place? Or no, it's a draw. Everybody has to drop everything because nobody has the playbook.

Right.

So, when I was in customer marketing, I would go to the CMO and say, hey, if we need to send emergency communications out, do we have a playbook? It's like, no, why would we ever need that? Well, what if? Why don't we develop something so that if there is an emergency, everyone sort of knows what we do? And once a year, we sort of remind everybody what that is. To me, it's an insurance policy for everyone's jobs because if I was CEO, And we couldn't get that out the door and the open rates were only 5% because we didn't know who to send it to.

Right.

Or send it to people who didn't care. That would be, oh my God, why do I have a marketing team? Why do I have a customer marketing team? Why do I have a marketing ops team if you can't do an emergency communication? So, I think it's that awareness and it's the playbook. And marketing ops plays a key role because in some ways, they're the ones who hit the send button.

Yeah. So I'm going to tie this back to like one of the things you said is, I think what you said is that the companies in your research that were higher rated in terms of their customer database tended to have a cross-functional team that was, had a regular focus on that. So if I'm, if I'm kind of putting some things together, like one step is just saying we need to have that dedicated team that at least part of their job is to be thinking about customer database. It sounds like having a plan for how we're going to execute on different types of key customer communications, whether it's crisis or whether it's an announcement, whether it's a more general one, whatever.

A product release would be a classic.

Yeah, changing our terms of service or whatever. And then It feels like also a part of that might be what are the gaps in our current infrastructure, both people, process, technology, probably heavy on technology, where if we had to do something tomorrow, like this would be like prioritized, like these are the things we should go try to, I'll say fix, fix may not be the right word, but fix so that we are going to be able to do those things. So then have that play. It feels like all those things would be really valuable. And to some degree, that's why not actually that complicated to do.

Yeah. And that's why that group has such a big impact. If you have that group, your customer contact database health score will be higher. The 3 things, you know, let's say you don't have one. It's like, oh my God, Michael and Irwin, that was a great suggestion. Let's, you know, let me pull, let's start pulling that together within, you know, within my company. And the number one task I would ask them to do is create an inventory of all the one-to-many communications that are sent out from the company. What's product sending customer success? What are those automated emails that no one's ever looked at in the past 3 years? What do they look like?

Yes.

I think you'd be shocked what they look like. So, let's get that inventory. Are there things that we combine? What are the open rates? You know, how do we improve the open rates? You know, who actually sent— you know, who hits the send button? Who writes the content? You know, so, there are probably 7 or 8 things you want to know in the inventory. What platform? Because at Forrester, we have 3 different platforms for emails to go out the door. So, which platform is it on? Who owns that platform? The second thing I would do is I would do a quick— take 400 names at random of your customer contact database and divvy it up amongst the group. Each of us has 50 names. Let's go into LinkedIn and see what does it look like? What's their—

Right.

Title, are they still employed by the company, and location. You probably won't be that far off to say, okay, this is the state of our customer contact database. 20% of our people— this is what I've learned working with customers— aren't employed at the company anymore. 30%, we have the wrong title. And 40%, we have the wrong location. Not worried about fixing it yet, but just assessing it. Right.

Kind of almost like a scorecard. Yeah.

And the third would be, if we have a crisis, Can we get an email out the door? Let's look at that and figure that out. Those 3 things alone would keep that group busy for probably 90 days. And it's a great 30-60-90 for that group. And then, you report back to people, well, you know, our database isn't good. Okay, now let's figure out who do we need to bring in, what resources, what allocation to fix it.

Right.

Again, it's a journey that could take 3 or 4 more months to do. But you at least know what you're doing. And we can't do a crisis communication. So, let's get corporate comms involved in this. Let them head it up and say, hey, let's figure out what the playbook's going to be.

Yeah.

Those 3 things alone would be huge.

Yeah. And it feels like maybe I'm a step beyond here. I'm going to kind of go back to part of different points in my career. I was involved with helping customer support teams, kind of not really on the marketing focus, but I'd always felt like there was a great opportunity with customer support teams. Like, they're interacting with customers on a regular basis. Part of their role should be or could be to help improve the health and the quality and the completeness of customer data.

Yeah.

So in the process of solving customer problems, they could do that.

Yeah. I mean, 2 things. One, the problem with that is more and more companies are outsourcing their support to So, customer support teams are one of the teams that's really getting hurt by bots and AI. Second is that, you know, when like you call Blue Cross Blue Shield, they always will confirm, is this the right email? Is this the right phone number for you? Do you still live at wherever you live? Now, because they're updating their database all the time.

Yeah.

Now, that— I saw, who was it? Venmo did this amazing thing. All of a sudden, just out of the blue, they said, hey, we just want to double-check. Is this still your best phone number? Still your email address? Because they had built it into their system to update because people do change email addresses.

Sure.

To update it. So, you know, and it'd be a big ask for a B2B company when somebody logs in for a little box to come up that says, hey, this is where we have you as located. Is this all correct? I think it's a lot to ask. But I think there are points in various interactions that You know, support would be a good one, even if it's AI and bot. At the end of that interaction, say, hey, we have you as this address. You know, here's your contact information. Can you please update it? Now, a lot of people won't, but some people will. And it'll at least help you, you know, get along the way. You're never gonna have a 100% accurate database, but, you know, it should be a lot better than it is today.

Okay. Well, that all makes sense. Okay. I love this idea of, like, Again, like I keep like, what's, I'm just sort of like absorbing all this and going like, actually, this doesn't seem like it'd be that hard. I mean, yes, there's work.

That's the funny thing.

Right. It's not that hard. And so, which brings me to like, um, you know, one of the things I learned early on when I kind of transitioned to marketing is this whole concept of, um, that it's much less expensive to retain a customer than to acquire a new customer.

Right?

Which is a big, like, why, like, it continues to baffle me why more companies are not really, it feels like similar to like the 4 Ps, right? That really only one of the Ps matters anymore, promotion.

Right.

But like, it feels like over the last 15, 20 years, this idea of like this very classic understanding that it costs less to retain customers has kind of been lost a little bit. So like, What do you attribute that to, right? Like, why aren't more companies— and maybe it's more true on smaller early-stage companies than it is on where growth is a priority, than it is at larger enterprise companies, but it still feels like there's this general trend that customer marketing is not really a focus area.

Yeah, there are 2 types of customer marketers out there, and this is an important distinction. When, you know, if you think about the past 30 years, customer experience is a discipline that's been around a long time, more B2C but certainly in the B2B world. Customer success has been around, you know, 15 years, more in the B2B world, less in the B2C world. Customer marketing is the newbie on the block. And when customer marketers first came on board, they were really customer advocate practitioners. Their job was, you know, references, You know, and reviews, referrals, things like that, case studies, stories, videos. And I think that, and this is a self-criticism, we all sort of boxed ourselves into, well, we're the case study people. We're the people that if you need a reference, call us up. But, you know—

Which is still, it all feeds back into our acquisition.

Right, right. And it's all about new logo. Because case studies don't go to existing customers, they go for new logos. Over the past few years, we're starting to see, and I made that pivot, I've been, I've directed 4 startups for customer marketing practices. The first 2 were customer advocacy. The last 2, I started pivoting, and that's why I'm so passionate about customer contact databases, into what's called lifecycle marketing. Now, some companies think of lifecycle as from prospecting to renewal. I'm talking about post-sales lifecycle marketing. So, everything from onboarding to nurturing. And that's where obviously customer contact databases become really critical.

Yeah.

You know, things like that. And probably early on, 100% of the people were advocacy practitioners. 3, 4 years ago, it's like 90/10. Now it's more like 70/30 and beginning to see more and more customer advocacy people realizing that pure customer advocacy is probably, unless you're at a large company, is probably not a long-term strategy. Because that's where a lot of the layoffs have been is in that, you know, we have a customer marketing team of 3. We're going to, you know, they just do stories. I don't mean to be flip, but not that they just do stories. But the way executives think about it.

Yeah, that is a perception and it's unfortunate, but it's true.

Yeah. And so, we only need 1 person to do it. We still have it. But if one of those people was a customer lifecycle marketer, it's like, oh, that person is, they're helping us identify people to cross-sell. They're being able to send— they're the ones sending out crisis communications or paying attention to it. They're the ones that are doing the one-to-many communication. The product team loves them because the product team doesn't have to think about who needs to— they'll write the message, but they're the ones who figure out who needs to get that message. So, as customer advocates transition to lifecycle marketers, and I would argue that it'd probably be better for a customer advocate person to transition to lifecycle because they understand customers as opposed to a marketing ops prospecting person transition over to customer lifecycle. Yes, they'll understand how Marketo and Eloqua and all these systems work. But they're not going to understand what motivates customers. So, their lens is the operational lens. And the customer advocate lens is they're thinking from the the customer experience, customer relationship, you know, lens. And you could teach the other one. It's really hard to learn, you know, the way customers tick within an organization.

Yeah. At the same time, I probably have said this dozens of times on the podcast and certainly outside of it, that marketing and marketing ops people need to spend more time like understanding customers, whether that's through sitting in or listening to sales calls or sitting in or listening to the customer success or customer, you know, whatever their organization has that is focused on retaining customers and helping them. Because I think it's an important one. Like, I'm a big believer that context matters.

Yeah, exactly.

Otherwise, if you don't really understand the context of why you're being asked to do something, you may fulfill the exact thing that you're being asked to do, but it may not actually be what's needed. Or there might be a better way of doing it.

With customers, context is even harder to assess and even more important than with prospects. Because prospects, yes, there is a context. But they're a little bit easier to think about than customers because customers will change also what their relationship with you is and what their needs are vis-à-vis your product as they get promoted or moved to, you know, they're on a special project for 3 months. So, they're not going to use your software. All of a sudden, alarm bells ring. They haven't logged in in 3 months. No, they're perfectly happy. They're just on another project for 3 months.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, I think, I mean, one, one, another kind of maybe thought experiment that people in marketing ops could do is to think about, you know, what they're, what it's like for them in their, with, with their vendors. Right. So how, how, how does my view of that vendor change over time from when I'm in their mind, right? A prospect or a potential buyer become a buyer. We, we purchased something. We now are onboarded, right? And, and, you know, 'cause I think by nature of it, as I think about my own times going through that, right? My, the things I care about changed over that time, right? And I think it's really important, like what I care about as I'm going through the evaluation to purchase stage is going to be very, like, I very much want to make sure like Will this actually work? Are they, do I believe that the solution will be worth the cost over time and the change effort or whatever that goes into it? Once I go over that, like, then I, like, I want them to be, depending on what it is, right? I think it's software in particular. I want them to be a partner with me.

Right.

And I want them to be responsive. I want them to try to understand me and our business in a level of detail deeper than what it was before. And I think that's maybe that's the flip there is like the level of understanding. And this gets back to your point, right? We should have a really high, a high level of clarity about our customers that we don't necessarily need when they're prospects.

And traditionally, that's been laid on to customer success managers, as has the health of the customer contact database. And most companies, if you were to ask, well, who's responsible for it? Oh, CSMs, they do that. Well, first of all, with the advent of digital customer success, companies have less CSMs. They focus on the top 10% of accounts. Everyone else is in a digital customer success mode.

Right.

And the CSM, yeah, they'll update the 2 people they talk to at an account on a regular basis. Oh, you have a new title. Oh, you moved. I'll go in there and update. But those people in the buying groups that have been added, those 7 or 8 other people in the list who they don't don't come to QBRs, they're not going in there and going to LinkedIn and say, has something changed for that person?

Yeah.

So, they're only, you know, if you were to do a database health assessment of your main primary contact, that's probably in pretty good shape because the CSMs probably are updating them.

Yeah.

But when you get to that, you know, anybody outside the CSMs have that one-to-one relationship, nobody's updating it because, you know, everybody thinks CSMs do it. CSMs say, we're not doing it. And so, and then everyone says, well, everyone's responsible for it. Well, whenever you hear everyone, it means nobody.

Yeah, no, I totally— it's one of my pet peeves when I— whenever I've been— it's like, I want— I say this over and over, right? Clarity about decision-making is a game changer, right? If you don't have that and you think it's by committee, then there's no— no one's taking responsibility for the decision. And so, it makes it easier for people to Yeah, abdicate that responsibility. But even worse is decisions don't get made.

And even at the executive level, I'm like, who really, who really, is it the CMO who sort of, is it under their purview? Is it the, you know, if they have a head of customer success, is it on their purview? Is it VP of sales? I mean, who actually, you know, sort of thinks about the health of their database? I was talking to a CFO friend of mine, And I asked him, like, you know, who's responsible for the update of the database? He goes, well, at every handoff, I expect to be updated. So, when the salesperson first meets, you know, gets updated. When the BDR gets updated. When they become a client, you know, the onboarding person updates it. When it gets handed off to CSM, the CSM checks. It's like none of these people are doing that, you know, at each handoff is the problem.

Yeah. So, I mean, we hadn't really hit on this, but so I'm going to throw this at you a little bit because I don't think we talked about it before. It's like, how do you How would you recommend to that CFO how to measure that database health and quality and then use that to then drive— the way I would think about it is like, here's how we're going to measure the quality of our customer database. And then all the people that we expect, whether it's tacit or not, to be a part of making sure that score or whatever metrics are going in the right direction, how are they then measured on their part of that? Does that make sense? Yeah.

Well, I think it was an Openprise report that said that 71% of all companies do not have a data quality understanding, a definition of data quality. So, I think, again, that might be something that group, that cross-communications group would do is let's define what we mean by data quality and what are Minimal acceptables, like we talked earlier. You know, our key people, that's got to be 95%. Our not-so-key, 90%. Our less key, 80%. So, you know, and what do we mean by that? You know, do we just mean the, you know, the location, title, and employer, or do we mean, you know, utilization? Well, we don't integrate, you know, that isn't integrated. Well, okay, that should be on our roadmap for a year from now. We should be able to at least tie into into the database, you know, health. You know, when did they first become a user? What did— you know, when did they first get their username and password? And when was the last time they logged in? From a segmentation perspective, that's really important because if somebody became a user 3 years ago and they've never logged in, why do we keep on sending them emails like this one they're going to open up?

Right.

So, you can start— you know, that's how you get from the average email going out from 1,200 people to 800 people. And lo and behold, you clean up your database, your open rate's gonna go up 5 to 10 percentage points immediately. Yeah. Quicker than any A/B testing, quicker than any time of day. Cleaning up the database will improve someone's open rates and give you a much more honest appraisal of your open rates than anything else you could do. Yeah.

Totally. I mean, yeah, I think the fear is fear that a lot of people aren't familiar with that is like, oh, we're not like, we're gonna miss someone or they're like, we're not hitting, yeah. And I'm like, but you're to your point, right? If that person's never opened something, like why do we hit our head against the wall and go make, well, this one is good, but this is a much better email. Right? No, right, right. It's really not. They don't give a shit.

Let's go back to your question. The, you know, we talked about earlier about doing a little, just a quick assessment, you know, have people go into LinkedIn, 50, you know, take 50 names each, you know, in a week from now, let's go back and report. I mean, there are data processors out there. Most of the data processors want 1-year commitments, and they'll do a little sample. Yeah, we'll do a 200-people sample for you.

Yeah.

But, you know, I would argue take whatever cross-section makes sense. You know, your 20% of your biggest accounts, all of the contacts in those accounts. Some will be that first level, second, and third level. Let's go to a data processor who will do a one-off for me. Some of them will, most of them won't. I'm happy to Coordinate that. And, you know, let's give them 2,000 or 3,000 names. And now we have some real data. So, we have a sense from manually looking at that, okay, it's not good, but what does that not good really mean? Now, let's take a few thousand names, spend, you know, it's not a lot of money. I mean, we're talking pennies per name, not dollars per name, to do a quick assessment. You know, what's the person's first name, last name, company title? You'll get back a report and you'll be able to see, drop into Excel and, you know, and you'll be able to see, okay, you know, where, you know, where, what patterns do we see? What are we doing poorly? What are we doing well? And now you can start defining data quality. And also, what are those minimum expectations that, you know, we should never fall below this?

Yeah, yeah, there's a floor. So it's interesting, as you were describing that process, my initial thought, like finding the patterns would be, seems like a good use case for an AI kind of tool. Absolutely. And we've talked a little bit about AI and some of the implications on some of this, but like, what do you see as some of the impacts of AI on this, like good, bad, or indifferent on this kind of discipline?

Well, I have a great quote. It's in the report, The State of B2B Customer Contact Databases from Ed King, the CEO of Openprise. The title of his article, a blog post, was AI Will Expose Your Data Quality Issues. And he says, AI is likely the one technology that will expose data quality issues the most, which may help raise the awareness and urgency of dealing with your go-to-market data quality issues. Maybe this will finally make the executives care about and invest in data quality.

Yeah.

So, AI on its own isn't going to— I can't go to ChatGPT and say, okay, here's my 10,000 customers. Tell me, where do they live? What's their current title and where do they work? You know, LinkedIn isn't going to let that happen. So, you know, you need to go in there. I mean, once you have it, then you can start using AI to help with the segmentation. That's a huge use case, I think, for it. But that basic foundational, do we have the data right? AI is not going to help you.

Interesting. Okay. What about other—

It'll magnify the issues because you're going to— and, you know, AI will give you all sorts of— even when you scrape LinkedIn, you get all sorts of crazy false positives. Like somebody just got You know, they work for IBM and they just join the board of directors of their local YMCA. And that's at the top of LinkedIn and a new job is board of directors YMCA.

Yeah.

So, you know, so AI's gotta be smart enough to say, okay, and some of the data processors are and some of them aren't. I mean, the data processors use AI and say, no, no, no, that's a false negative, board of directors YMCA. This is where they really are at, even though that's their second You know, second job on that title. So, if you're working with data processors, you know, are they smart enough to use AI to be able to figure some of those things out?

Gotcha. Yeah, it feels like there's a lot of opportunity to help around some of this stuff, but also, it sounds like some of the impacts of AI have actually caused— put pressure on the roles and jobs that would be focused on this too. Does that mean that?

Absolutely.

Yeah. Okay. Awesome. So Irwin, I think we're going to have to wrap it up here. This has been a fun and very educational conversation for me. I always enjoy these, even though what our listeners may not realize, like I usually talk to these folks before we record. And I'm always surprised that like, oh, there's this thing that came up in this conversation that we actually recorded, which I'm grateful for. that didn't come up before. So, I definitely had a few of those. And this idea of having a cross-functional team that's focused on this area.

Yeah, not so obvious, but huge impact because it touches a lot of things.

Yeah, yeah. And it's— if our listeners make it this far to it, right, just that alone, like, taking that idea back to your organization, I think, and articulating why it would be beneficial for the the enterprise in terms of the relative level of quality of our databases, probably correlated to retention and, you know, expansion.

Yeah, a lot of it impacts a lot of people, even legal. I mean, compliance with email privacy regulations. If legal knew what was going on with locations, they would not be happy.

Absolutely. Well, hey, Irwin, thank you so much. So we can certainly put a link to the report if there's one in the show notes when we publish that. But if folks want to, like, learn more, maybe talk with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Yeah, connect with me on LinkedIn. I am the only Irwin Hippsman on the planet, so I'm easy to find. And if you want to— my parents knew about branding way before anyone else. And if you want to get your own customer health score, if you download the report, there are links to do it yourself. So, go in there and you can generate your own score. by answering the same questions that everyone else asks.

Fantastic.

It's anonymous. So, you know, it's not a lead generation tool. You can just go in there and do your own health score.

Love it. Love it. Irwin, thank you again so much. Great conversation. I'm sure our audience is going to be the beneficiaries of that. Thanks to our audience for their ongoing support and ideas. As always, if you want to be a guest, have an idea for a guest or a topic, feel free to reach out to Naomi, Mike, or me, and we'd be happy to Get the ball rolling on that. Till next time, bye everybody.