Cross-departmental collaboration is key to growth in B2B SaaS companies. It allows for everyone to put in their best efforts into meeting the strategic goals and objectives for your organisation. It also provides opportunities for employees to come together and promote team building.
Customer marketing is essential to cross-departmental collaboration. It is about putting the customer first and working towards delivering more value to your customers. This leads your B2B SaaS company to create the best products and services to satisfy your customer’s needs and to provide a better experience throughout their entire customer journey. It also brings teams closer and helps them have a deeper understanding of their customers needs and personalities.
The departments in question are Marketing, Product, Sales and Customer Success.
Here are the benefits that customer marketing can bring to the Marketing, Product, Sales and Customer Success departments.
Marketing
The role of the marketing team in B2B SaaS is to develop strategies that increase acquisition, conversion and retention of both current customers and prospects.
The customer marketing benefits to marketing are:
- Creating authentic customer stories for product marketing and social media.
- Leverage user-generated content to augment customer experience.
- Create case studies for the company website to drive traffic and provide written blog content to engage your audience.
- Customer quotes and testimonials to provide social proof.
- Collect customers reviews to help boost customer reputation and credibility.
With customer marketing, the team can increase your brand’s awareness by generating social proof and building an online community that boosts your company’s credibility and trust.
Product
Product teams are in charge of ensuring the product delivers value to the customer and understands their pain points and challenges. They develop new product features and curate new ideas with the collaboration of the customer.
The customer marketing benefits to the product are:
- Customer insights by providing advocates for Customer Advisory Boards.
- Ready customers to participate in Beta programmes to test new features.
- Customer Quotes for Product Marketing when releasing new product features.
- Generate new product ideas and help validate product roadmap.
- Collecting customer feedback on products.
Product teams use customer marketing to implement retargeting campaigns and creating content for landing pages to increase downloads and sales. This leads to an increase in product adoption and boosts credibility.
Sales
Sales teams are in charge of the buying journey from the moment a customer comes to your site until they make a purchase.
During the customer journey, they make sure to follow up with the customers, to ensure that they are satisfied and retain them. They create a pipeline of potential buyers who are serious about buying your software to solve problems and challenges in their organisations.
The customer marketing benefits to sales are:
- Accelerate sales cycles by customers acting as references in sales calls.
- Customer referrals filling the sales pipeline with highly qualified leads with high buying intent.
- Customer reviews proving the social proof needed.
- Increase sales conversions by providing customer assets e.g. case studies, quotes and testimonials.
Sales teams can use cross-departmental collaboration to improve customer satisfaction and to increase repeat purchase frequency. They accelerate sales cycles by offering discounts, targeting qualified leads, use social proof to convert prospects and cross-selling.
Customer success
Customer success team main role is to drive customer retention and increase revenue through cross-selling and up-selling new features. They support your sales team in achieving these goals by guiding customers through the complete purchasing process and providing them with the most suitable solution that will address their business problems.
The customer marketing benefits to customer success are:
- Increase product adoption.
- Sharing customer success stories.
- Educate customers on new products and features.
- Customers troubleshooting and solving issues for other customers.
- Increase customer engagement with customer activities that drive success.
They also use customer marketing to educate and train customers on how to use your software and to provide them with the best possible customer solutions.
The team’s main goal is to elevate customer experience and adoption of your product. This leads to a higher retention rate and drives cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.
Conclusion
As it’s been explored, customer marketing helps your company achieve cross-departmental success by combining the forces of your different teams to accelerate sales cycle, build brand reputation, increase product adoption and drive customer retention and satisfaction. Overall, the use of customer marketing also helps your company build the best offering that is relevant to the customer, increase brand awareness, nurture customer relationships to expand your customer base.
