Jason M. LemkinCEO, SaaStr · Co-Founder of SaaStr AI, SaaStr Fund, Adobe Sign

Unlocking the Power of Customer Marketing for Explosive Business Growth

9 Dec 2023 · 1 min

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0:52

Jason M. Lemkin gives practical, prescriptive advice on customer marketing: start small customer events (e.g., 10 customers, two hours plus a steak dinner) that can meaningfully expand sales, and adopt a simple staffing heuristic—hire a full-time customer marketer once you reach ~100 customers. He emphasizes that many companies neglect customer marketing, and recommends aligning customer-marketing goals with customer success metrics such as net revenue retention rather than traditional funnel metrics.

Chapters

But it turns out if your customer event is 10 customers and you just have two hours of content and a steak dinner, that may be magical. Those 10 customers maybe get you 10 more customers. They may buy more from you, they may buy more of your product, et cetera, et cetera. So I said after 100 customers dedicate someone 100% full time. That's a simple rule, but bear in mind probably almost everyone in the room gets an F on customer marketing. And if you think about going long, this is an easy course correction to make. How much of my time do I spend on customer marketing? Not enough. 20? 30? A full time person at 100 customers. That's what you want. And your marketer's core goal is probably going to be something on the funnel. It could be leads, it could be an opportunity commit, it could be MQLs. Whatever it is, we all have different metrics on the funnel. We'll run out of time to talk about them. Today, your marketer and customer marketing, her number should be probably like CS numbers, net revenue retention.