It goes without saying that all startups – and, for that matter, all businesses - exist to serve a value to customers. In doing so, the startup makes money. In turn, customers provide a value to the startup. Recognizing a customer’s value and understanding how it further enhances your product/service so that you may gain more customers in the future is what I define as “customer marketing.”
Customer marketing is not merely producing customer success stories, testimonials, and lists of references. Customer marketing should aim to strengthen the startup’s relationship to the customer. Asking a customer to spend some time on the phone with your marketing folks so that a success story or case study can be written is not going to strengthen your relationship. That is simply an act.
Great startups have a maniacal focus on putting the customer at the center of their universe. Picture a big circle in the middle surrounded by a bunch of smaller circles. The big circle is the customer. The smaller circles represent a variety of functional roles – from customer support to sales to finance to engineering. The entire picture represents “customer marketing.”
With that in mind, here are my “5 Laws of Customer Marketing” …
LAW #1 – Learning from customers is not enough. You must apply it.
Customers will tell you the good and the bad. Norman Vincent Peale once remarked that “the trouble with most of us is that we would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticisms.” A customer who expresses criticism about your products is potentially your most valuable customer. S/he may be the customer who sings praises about you later on to prospective buyers. Most of the good stuff can be applied to fine tuning outbound marketing efforts. Much of the bad can be applied to strengthening your products/services or even your support organization. Learning for the sake of knowing is useless. You must apply it. Thus, what you learn from customers must be quickly shared across the entire organization. Which means you must …
LAW #2 – Let your entire organization access the customer. Do not limit customer interaction or access to sales teams
While there is a valid benefit to guarding customer access, it is almost always in the best interest of the company to encourage continual, open dialogue between the customer and all parts of your organization – not confine it just to the sales team. Don’t burden your customers by forcing them to interact with multiple people within your company. But, do make sure that every part of your organization is accessible to your customers.
LAW #3 – High quality, low volume. You need DEEP relationships.
Trying to establish a bunch of shallow relationships with customers for the sake of gathering data is not only useless but potentially futile (see Law #4). The key goal is not simply to compile information to help make decisions. Rather, your key motivation for investing heavily into customer marketing is to turn a handful of your most devoted customers into your most powerful evangelists. Putting a couple hundred .pdf case studies on your website looks nice but it means very little in influencing purchase decisions. I cringe when marketing execs put up a slide that lists a litany of new case studies that were created as if this were some sort of achievement. All it tells me is that a ton of money was burned. At NetScaler, we made single PowerPoint slides for each customer case study and it was enough. If you must write lengthy case studies and lay it out onto a nice, glossy collateral piece to show that marketing is busy, busy, busy (!) … create 5-6 of ‘em and call it done. It’s not what your customers say in case studies that matter. It’s really what your customers say privately about you to their peers that make a bottom line impact. Realistically, only about one-tenth or less of your entire customer base will be open to forming a “deep” relationship because it is a pretty big investment of time. But, to establish any level of relationship, you must …
LAW #4 – Do your customers a favor – not the other way around.
Each time you contact a customer to ask for a favor (whether to be a reference for a prospective customer or answer some questions for a pending case study write-up), you are spending a portion of your finite equity in the relationship. Figure out ways to contact customers to do them the favor and you’ll begin growing infinite equity to tap into. Which leads to …
LAW #5 – Start by making your customer a superstar within his own organization and industry.
Let’s be frank. All too frequently, we brainstorm ways we can exploit a customer. We convince a customer to buy our product. Then, we want (or, expect) them to help us sell our product to another customer. In so doing, we’re forgetting the most critical part of the true value of customer marketing … the CUSTOMER! Build value in the customer before you look for ways to leverage the customer. I’ve had one customer (ShopNBC’s VP of interactive services) who once sent a lengthy email to my (NetScaler) CEO thanking us for giving his IT projects exposure to his own management team and turning it into a strategic function instead of an operational one. He wrote us the email after his CFO read about his team’s work in several industry magazine articles … articles we had worked on together. The kicker? He was made CTO and wanted to credit us in part for his promotion. Four years later, I still remember how I felt when reading that email letter.
- John
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