Jason M. Lemkin (YouTube, Apr 19, 2018) argues that SaaS companies under-invest in customer marketing—the marketing activities aimed at existing customers after acquisition. He defines customer marketing, contrasts it with customer success, cites current retention spends (~5–10% of ACV), and proposes significantly higher investment (example: 10% of revenue under management) to boost upsell, referrals, and advocacy; he also notes emerging tools like Influitive.
Chapters
I think one of the next frontiers in SaaS that we all need to get better at is customer marketing. And what is customer marketing? Because you don't see that much about it on these Internets. It's all the marketing you do to your customers after you acquire them. And think about our SaaS customer journey, it's five to 10 years after those few months it takes us to close it. We put so much energy into sales and our sales team and so much energy into demand gen and funnel management and intercomming and hubspotting. And then we close them and then what happens? Marketing goes away. That's wrong. We have a customer success team and we've gotten better at customer success and we've Learned to spend 5 to 10% of our ACVs on retaining customers. But what about marketing to them? How much of your budget do you spend on drip marketing to your existing customers? On webinars for your existing customers? On customer conferences for your existing customers not to get new leads? How much of your marketing department headcount is focused on customer marketing? The answer is usually not enough and I don't know and no quantitative goals. So that should change. And think about this idea. What if you spent 10% of your revenue of your revenue under management on customer marketing? That might have to come from somewhere else. It's a lot of money. But if you did that, think about how many more seats you might close, how much better your upsell might be, how much better your referral and advocate networks might be. There are nascent products like Influitive and others that help you manage your advocate networks. But who's doing this strategically? Who's got budget and core KPIs? Not enough of us. Us. So I think customer marketing is our next frontier after customer success.
