Time to End Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success Silos

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Mark Evans: I'm Mark Evans, and welcome to Marketing Spark, the podcast that delivers insight from marketers and entrepreneurs in the trenches in twenty five minutes or less. Marketers spend a lot of time, money, and effort attracting and engaging prospects. We love the thrill of a kill. But once a prospect turns into a customer, we seemingly lose interest. This is despite the fact that it's so much easier to keep an existing customer than win a new one. Today, I'm talking with John McTeague, a customer journey strategist, on how to keep customers happy and loyal. Welcome to Marketing Spark.

John McTeague: Thank you. Glad to be here.

Mark Evans: Let's start off with the initial premise that and I could be wrong here, that marketers love to attract and engage prospects and turn them into or help turn them into customers. But we often forget customers after they're part of the fold. They're fat and happy. We've done our job. Now it's up to other people in customer success and customer service to keep them there. Is that an a correct depiction of what's going on out there generally?

John McTeague: Yeah. I think so. I think, historically, sales and marketing and customer success are really customer success as a thing hasn't hasn't been there for, you know, for many years. It was just customer service or customer support. So, yeah, I think they've they've been siloed for a long, long time, maybe forever, doing their own job. And, you know, as you said, marketing and sales are really focused on bringing in new customers, and then it's somebody else's problem after that. So I I think where we're at is is changing that mindset. And it it's it's not fully implemented yet, let's say that, but it is changing.

Mark Evans: One of the things that I read a lot about these days is the silos between sales, marketing, and the customer success. They all have their different mandates. They all operate differently. In many cases, they don't communicate that well, don't share resources, don't share feedback. And as a result, they're marching to the beat of their own drummer. A lot of people are starting to suggest that they should be morphed together, that there should be an amalgamation, that there shouldn't be any delineation between sales marketing and customer success. Do you subscribe to that view? And if so, how do you make that a reality? How do you merge all these different job functions together so you can move forward in lockstep?

John McTeague: Well, I do subscribe to that, idea, that strategy. It makes perfect sense if you think about it from the customer's point of view. They don't wanna deal with silos. They don't wanna have to be handed off from one department to the next. They don't wanna deal with multiple people who don't know what they're, you know, what they're all about, what their interests are and things like that. So there's a lot of friction that builds up in these handoffs between the initial marketing and sales and and then finally, customers customer support, which I think statistically shows that a lot you lose a lot of business this way. There you know, those those fences between the silos, so to speak, are are high friction, and they do cause problems. They do cause customers to get, you know, unhappy with, your brand and your products and so on. So there are lots of good reasons to merge them. Your question is more about how hard is that to do and what are, you know, maybe what are some of the barriers. But I think if you can do it, it's certainly a great idea to have the three operations meeting as a team, focusing on what the customer wants, exchanging ideas, and staying in communication so that that messaging back and forth is always consistent. People are always aware of what the customer you know, where they are in their journey and and what their interests are and what their challenges are. And they're working together to solve them. So, I mean, it it makes sense from a sort of a logical point of view, but, because it's so organizationally siloed and leaders have their little you know, it's especially true with leaders that they have their fiefdoms and that, you know, they're defending their territory that, you you have big problems in breaking down those walls. So that's kind of the the first step is is, maybe putting in someone above them, a a, you know, chief revenue officer who says, okay, guys. The walls are coming down, and, you guys have to figure out how to work together.

Mark Evans: Lots of different ways that we can go from here, but one of the issues I I believe is the idea of compensation. So right now, if you're a sales rep, you get base plus commission in many cases. If you're the marketing person, you get rewarded based on MQLs or SQLs. And if your customer success, I guess, there's rewards around retention. Maybe it's about upsells. But if everything's gonna be amalgamated, the whole compensation system's gonna have to be reimagined because everyone's gonna have to be in the same boat, be rewarded in the same kind of ways. And so that's gonna be really interesting challenge, both from an organizational structure point of view, but also in terms of compensation.

John McTeague: You know, a sort of a modern day analogy would be a car dealer where you now you have sales reps that aren't on commission anymore. They're paid salaries, and everybody's salary goes up and down based on revenue, based on performance and and profitability. So why not do that with sales and marketing and customer success in any organization? It it you know, I I don't know why that wouldn't be true because they're all working together to attract and convert people into customers. They're all working to keep those customers through retention, and they're all working together to upsell and cross sell and and expand accounts. The only thing that I can think of that would be better than that possibly is having smaller teams focused on specific accounts. So you have, like, an account based team with a marketer or a sales rep, maybe couple sales reps, a customer success person, all focused on, you know, half a dozen, maybe 10 or 15 accounts. And there are they are directly responsible for performance, revenue performance, retention, upsell, cross sell, working as a team, and they're rewarded through a bonus system or however you wanna handle that. Yeah. The advantage is it's much simpler that way, and you're either you're either doing well or you're not, you know, across the board. And you're more focused on individuals, you know, with individual customers and customer accounts trying to help them be successful because that's how you're successful.

Mark Evans: Yeah. I think that makes a lot of sense in the b to b enterprise space where you've got big high value customers that take a long time to come on board. So what usually happens is the marketing people will attract them. The salespeople will develop the relationship, nurture the deal, close the deal, and then customer success will make sure the customer is onboarded and happy. But if you had them working together post sale, The salesperson has a relationship so they can stay involved. The marketer can use their skills to effectively communicate to the customer, and the customer success person can then do whatever it takes to expand the client, to serve the client in different ways. And that could be a very effective way to do post acquisition sales and marketing.

John McTeague: Absolutely. And it is working. There are plenty of companies doing this. But the challenge I think that you're hinting at is in, you know, midsize companies and SMBs. What's the equivalent? You know, you you often don't have enough people to go around even to staff up these teams. Or maybe you have a small ACV, you know, product, and you have thousands, even hundreds of thousands of customers, what's the deal there? So that's a slightly different way of looking at it. But instead of maybe grouping together and working so closely with accounts, those teams instead work on things like product led growth. They work on using more of a technology approach to staying, you know, closely tied in with the customers on their journeys, throughout the process and and, you know, helping them succeed. So, I mean, there are different ways of approaching that, and they do depend on the size of the company and the product that you're selling. But, you know, there there are still ways of doing that without going back to the old ways.

Mark Evans: In the SMB space, you I find that one of the shortcomings of post acquisition activities is the fact that marketing seems to wash their hands of customers and that they're not communicating as effectively as they should. So in many cases, it's a monthly newsletter or a quarterly newsletter. And these newsletters are pretty lame. I mean, there's probably not a lot of time and effort that goes into them. I think a lot of them are simply going through the motions to stay in touch with the customer. But for SMBs, marketing that's creative, engaging, proactive, prescriptive, and really tied to making the customer more successful and making them smarter so that they can use the product in better in different ways, That's a that's just a starting point. That's a fundamental way to really keep your customers engaged and keep marketing as important, engage with your customers too.

John McTeague: I mean, if you think about it, the customer is constantly changing. You know, they have new challenges, new products of their own, new markets, you know, things are happening at that company. And then, you're changing, you know, so your products are changing, your markets are changing. So marketing can be really good at sort of bridging that gap between what happened before and what's happening now, you know, kind of keeping people and not through sort of a stale newsletter, but more like customer stories, you know, doing doing what marketing does well, interviewing customers, writing up their stories, doing great videos and and podcasts, you know, designing up or or, you know, capturing results from their customers and creating really effective content out of that. And then one of the things that we often miss is involving our customers in our own marketing and us in theirs. So by sharing brands, doing things together, like we're doing a podcast now, I could be your customer. And we could be sharing, you know, ideas back and forth across our brands and then distributing them to our audiences, which, you know, it's a win win. So why not do that? You know, why not have marketing more involved in co branding and, you know, initiatives to get the word out on both sides? Try to help all of our customers out at the same time.

Mark Evans: Yeah. I think you're right. I think there are many win win propositions that marketing taste fails to take advantage of when it comes to their customers because customers have tremendous domain expertise and thought leadership that is untapped. What I found is if you reach out to customers and if you try to engage them, they are, in many cases, extremely enthusiastic because they see the upside in two ways. One, they can demonstrate, I made a smart decision by doing business with you, which is great. I'm seen as somebody who is savvy and knows what they're doing. And second, they can promote their own company by leveraging your marketing. There's absolutely no reason why this shouldn't be done more often, but we leave we leave a lot of these these opportunities on the table because we just don't think about it as marketers. We ignore it. It's not as not a priority, not seen as as effective, and there's lots of ways that we just fail our customers when it comes to customer success and marketing.

John McTeague: Well, if you consider like a fifty hundred year old company that's not really digitally transformed yet, a lot of times and there's still many, many of those out there, they don't have that kind of marketing. They don't they're not really doing much digital marketing. They're not really involved in social media and and podcasting and all that. So we can help them with that. And and it's a win again, it's a win win because they have a big audience that's probably not aware of what you do. You can get business quite easily, referral business this way. It's sort of, I guess, you'd call it a hybrid of sort of direct and and referral business. So, you know, there's it can't hurt you to do this, to to sort of get the word out. And marketing is uniquely qualified to do this kind of work.

Mark Evans: Let's shift gears a little bit. On LinkedIn recently, you wrote an interesting post looking at friction and the idea that many companies struggle with their websites because it's just not aligned with what customers want to know, need to know, or align with their expectations. Can you walk through some of the biggest mistakes that companies make when it comes to their websites? Because this is the digital doorway. This is the most important portal to educate, engage, and entertain your customers, yet a lot of companies fail. What are they doing wrong, and what should they be doing instead?

John McTeague: Well, the root cause of this is looking at it from your perspective, not your customer's perspective. So you a lot of companies think of their website as, well, this is this is my brochure. This is my brand. This is what I'm putting out there. And if everybody likes it, they're gonna come and do business with us. The only problem is that's not what your customers want. They couldn't care less about your brand. You know, they probably never heard of you. And and maybe they just run across you through a Google search or a friend tells them about you and, so you go check out their website. That's the first thing you do. And so they don't know anything about you. They they don't have this warm, fuzzy feeling about your company or your employees or your awards. They just wanna know what you do first. You know? Who you are? What do you do? Why should I be interested in? How is this relevant to me? It's almost like a website needs to read my mind and tell me why I should be there. And then make it as easy as possible to find out exactly what I wanna know. So the the really, the key thing is answering my questions. And, the rest, it could be on the website somewhere, but it shouldn't be upfront. It shouldn't be the first thing that that they run into. So a lot of people bounce because they go, what is this? I don't this is not this is not something I'm interested in. And they'll see this gigantic picture of people working and, you know, stuff like that. And it's like, well, I'm not interested in that. We got that. We got people working at desks. I'm here for, you know, to to make more revenue or fix things faster or, you know, something like that. That's the key is is you've gotta think through what your customer's journey is like early on in the process and what are what are they interested in? What are their questions? And and the easiest way to do that is to ask.

Mark Evans: I find it fascinating and troubling at the same time that when you see websites and your first impression is, I don't understand what you do. I don't understand why I should care. And it's marketing one zero one. It really is trying to position yourself in a very simple, accessible way, what you do and why anyone should care. And I'm doing a lot of positioning work these days to try to simplify a company's corporate narrative. And the first thing that I tell people once you develop your positioning is take that and repurpose it for your website because it'll go a long way. But I guess companies are very product focused or feature focused or price focused, and the reality is they're not customer focused.

John McTeague: That's the thing even higher up in the pecking order than positioning, in my opinion. You have to you have to understand the why. You know, why would someone want your product? You know, what is it about them? What is it about their their needs or their their wants or whatever that would drive them towards I guess that is positioning really. You know, what is it? What's the connection between you and them? And and you gotta get that across right away because if you don't, you lose them. Nobody's gonna watch it and even a sixty second video product demonstration or a blog post you wrote about this and that. You know? I mean, yeah, maybe later. But right now, we're just we're just meeting in a in a cock at a cocktail party. You know? And I'm not telling you my life history yet. We haven't gotten there yet.

Mark Evans: Let's assume that your positioning is good, your website works, a conversion happens and a prospect turns into a customer. And a lot of what you write about on LinkedIn has to do with onboarding and the magic of onboarding that turns a customer into an engaged customer. What do you see as the biggest mistakes when it comes to onboarding and what are the must dos? What are the things that a company must do right from the onset to make sure that onboarding is almost like a launch tool into something bigger and better?

John McTeague: The biggest problem people have in onboarding is not knowing what their customers actually want. During the sales process, there's not a back and forth about what your goals are. You know, if you sign up with us, what do you hope to accomplish? And so the onboarding process doesn't reflect that at all. It's it's generic. It's like, this these are the steps we want you to go through to be our customer, which is not what customers want. They wanna solve their problems right out of the gate. You know? That plus to the extent that you can make it personal, like, a work you know, it could be an online workshop or or some live training. You know? And and the to the extent that you actually have someone assigned as either an account manager or or definitely assigned as an account team, that's even better because then they know they're being taken care of. Otherwise, you just get a stream of emails, you know, do this and, oh, I noticed you didn't do that. And, you know, it's like, okay. Leave me alone. I'm trying to get things done here. It's that lack of personalization, that lack of customization. You know, that I think is is typically what drives people away even during a free trial.

Mark Evans: And I think that's one of the negatives when it comes to marketing automation is that we put people into buckets or big giant groups, and we assume that they have the same experiences and the same needs. And the reality is that people buy solutions for lots of different reasons. And I think you're right. When it comes to onboarding, it really is about we know you have or we think you have these specific problems and here's how to solve them using our product. Here's what you do. And then based on people's activity, then you can personalize the onboarding experience. Your emails are a lot more relevant, a lot more personal, a lot more effective. We don't do that. We just hit the button and hit play and let it go from there. And I think, again, as marketers, we we leave a lot on the table. We leave a lot of opportunities untapped.

John McTeague: Yeah. And the the worst thing I've seen is people actually drive forcing you into some sort of tutorial program that you have to go through these steps and sort of get certified as, you know, this and that. I mean, and that's the last thing people want. You know, they wanna skip right to the the thing that they were most interested in and dive in, you know, show some dashboards and and move on, you know, and and so you just can't assume that. You can't assume anything. You have to ask.

Mark Evans: Couple of final question. One has to do with the future of marketing, and this is obviously a loaded question. But, you know, as we move forward and as companies reset or recalibrate their marketing activities, there's going to be some back and forth when it comes to actually how to structure their marketing organizations. Do you do things in house, or do you use freelancers, contractors, agencies, and fractional executive. The mix could be completely different from what we saw a year or eighteen months ago when a lot of companies had big, fully staffed marketing teams. Do you have any thoughts on how things may unfold and how marketing organizations may be structured going forward?

John McTeague: Well, I think it depends on a couple of trends. So one of them you mentioned already, the automation trend. If that continues so the the idea there is that more and more stuff that marketers do gets automated up to and even including creating content, maybe even creating strategy from for SEO and things like that. I mean, if that really continues unabated, that will have a fairly significant impact not only on the size of marketing teams, but, you know, who who works on a marketing team. You're gonna have a bunch of tech people basically and a strategist, but it could go another direction. And I think it actually is heading in this direction. It's just a little slower than I would have liked, and that is in the opposite direction, more human to human, more personal, more brand forward and less about conversion and automation. So those are two sort of competing trends. And I think if that trend starts to win out more, you're gonna see more hiring of content marketers and designers and brand marketers and even customer marketers and product marketers because there's there's gonna be more of this sort of human to human element where you really need expertise at the at the daily level that's hard really hard to automate, and you're kinda seeing that too. You're seeing it that it's harder and harder to find talent out there. So it's it's not quite clear which direction we're going in. And whether or not that's outsourced, that could go either way too because, you know, there are specialty agencies. More and more agencies are are sort of you know, they focus on one or two things and less sort of, you know, agency of record. And then consultants, sort of the same way. You see more specialized consultants in things like product led growth or ABM or something. And then the fractional CMO or c c whatever, I think that's gonna increase because there's more and more change in the marketplace all the time. And you see companies coming and going. You see people coming and going. So you need leadership. Having people available for a short period of time is is at least one good solution to that. So

Mark Evans: Yeah. I I'm I I agree with you. I I see the brand content trend gaining more momentum because as companies look to differentiate, everyone's doing automation. It's table stakes. But if you can carve out a unique and interesting brand through different kinds of marketing activities, I think that's going to be more and more important. And I think fractional, you and I are obviously biased because we're all fractional marketers, but get the strategic firepower that you need when you need it. One final question. Recommendations on a good book that you've you've read recently. And when we can travel internationally, where would you like to go?

John McTeague: Well, I'll I have a sort of anticommercial against sales and marketing books. I don't I don't read very many of them because a lot of them are just kind of methodologies or retreads. But I have I have some exceptions. I recently read product led growth by Wes Bush. That's it's really good. If you're really interested in in how SaaS companies can drive revenue growth through kinda just making making their products more friendly, it's it's a very interesting read. Of course, there's never lose a customer again by Joey Coleman. That's that's kind of a classic read on retention and growth through customer service, customer journey. And then the third one I like is marketing rebellion by Mark Schafer, which is all about this sort of human to human trend that's that's been coming on. And, so your last question's an easy one for me because we actually had our vacation canceled in 2020 to to Portugal and Spain. So we haven't rescheduled, but, we're we're planning to. We we really wanna get to those two places, and you never know. I'm I'm game to actually move somewhere like that one of these days, so we'll see.

Mark Evans: Yeah. I think a lot of us are looking for an escape of any kind, whether it's Portugal and Spain or it's going to the cottage up north or or simply visiting friends again. Doing something different would be would be a great change of pace. One final final question is if people wanna learn more about what you do and and the services that you provide, where can they find that out?

John McTeague: Well, I'm on as you know, I'm on LinkedIn every day. So if you really wanna get my attention, it's just jmctigue is the last part of my LinkedIn profile. And then, www.customerjourneymaestro, maestro,.com is, is where I hang out on the web. Look forward to connecting up with with anyone and everyone.

Mark Evans: Well, thanks, John. This has been a great conversation. Your insight into into the customer journey and all things marketing has been refreshing. It's another example of someone that I met on LinkedIn, reached out to, developed a relationship, and, had jumped onto my podcast. So it's finally good to do something professional together after all our conversations.

John McTeague: Same to you, Mark, and thanks for having me. Enjoyed it.

Mark Evans: Thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. For show notes of today's conversation and information about John, visit marketingspark.co/blog. If you'd like to learn more about how I help b to b SaaS companies as a fractional CMO, strategic adviser, and coach, Send an email to mark@markevans.ca. I'll talk to you next time.