Customer retention is a cornerstone of sustainable growth, but reducing churn requires more than just customer service—it demands strategic marketing alignment. This webinar will explore how to create strong collaboration across your revenue team (sales, service, product, and marketing) to boost customer loyalty and minimize churn.
In this recorded webinar, a panel of Authentic Fractional CMOs will share actionable insights on nurturing relationships, identifying churn signals, and creating long-term value for your customers.
Key Takeaways
- Acquiring a new customer costs 5-7 times more than retaining an existing one. Businesses need to shift from an obsession with new sales to a balanced strategy that includes retention and expansion within current accounts.
- Companies must move beyond a siloed approach where sales focus only on new customers. Effective retention strategies require collaboration between sales, marketing, customer success, and product teams.
- Businesses should leverage customer health scores, churn signals, and cohort analysis to proactively address retention risks. Metrics such as customer lifetime value (CLV), repeat purchase rates, and engagement levels are key indicators.
- CRMs, customer feedback tools, and AI-driven analytics can provide deeper insights into customer behavior, helping businesses personalize engagement and reduce churn.
- Many sales teams are only compensated for new acquisitions. Adjusting compensation structures to include upselling and cross-selling can drive better retention results.
- Regular cross-departmental meetings and shared scorecards help align teams on retention goals. Encouraging knowledge-sharing between marketing, sales, and product teams ensures a cohesive strategy.
Links & Resources Mentioned
- Boost Sales and Revenue & Reduce Churn: The Foundation of Sustainable Growth
- Enhance Customer Experience and Loyalty: The Heart of Sustainable Growth
- Marketing ROI: A Guide to The Big 3 Revenue Metrics
Full Webinar Transcription
Introduction & Welcome
Jennifer Zick: Welcome. Welcome to our Authentic Growth™ webinar. We’re just going to give everybody a moment to roll in through the jump through the zoom hoops and then we’ll be getting started shortly. If you’re planning to attend a webinar today on the topic of retention as the best revenue, then you’re in the right place. We’re so glad to have you with us today. This will be a fast paced hour of conversation with some marketing leaders on our team that bring a lot of great perspectives. I know that you’re going to learn a lot. I always learn a lot every time I get together with our CMOs. So the first thing I want to do is just welcome you all.
I know because I looked at the registration list that we have a really wide mix of guests in the house today and I want to acknowledge that our hope today is that you all get to come away with something of value. And I want to introduce you to who Authentic is because about a third of our guests here today are net new connections. So it’s nice to meet you. I’m Jennifer Zick, CEO and founder of Authentic®. We’re a fractional chief marketing officer firm that works nationally with growing businesses to help them Overcome Random Acts of Marketing® and confidently take the next right step in their healthy growth journey. And today I’m joined with three of our fractional CMO advisors who work with our clients.
And even though we have a really wide range of folks on this call today, including some of our clients and our prospects and our agency friends, we also have some attendees from larger corporate businesses that are still growing and startups. And so our intention today is to share with you a lot of the truths that we lead within the businesses we serve. And for that group of businesses, we’re usually working with companies between 5 and 100 million in revenue and we’re sitting on their executive leadership team and helping them build out their marketing organizations and strategies. So a lot of the perspectives you’ll hear from us today are kind of focused in that kind of a growth phase of business. But Sean and Barb and Peter have worked in startups and they’ve worked in large enterprises.
So we’re going to blend a lot of perspectives today and hope everybody takes away some value. So while you’re here today as our guest, I invite you to take a look at the chat feature. I’m sorry, the Q and A feature. There’s a chat and a Q and A. I want to invite you to look at the Q and A feature and if you have questions as we go along, please drop it there. I’m not going to stop in the midst of our conversation, but we will carve out some time at the end and try to get through some of the audience questions. Make sure that your questions are answered. And if we don’t get to your question in our live event today, please ask it anyway because we’ll try to circle back and get back in touch with you.
So without any further ado, I’d love to give our panelists an opportunity to introduce themselves. We’ll go around this virtual room and then quickly get started in the meat of today’s conversation. So Peter, I’m going to start with you and then we’ll move to Barb and Sean. So tell us a little bit about yourselves. Peter.
Peter Zaballos: Thanks Jennifer. And this is a really great topic today. And as far as my background goes, I spent my career in high growth technology startups in a lot of cases on the west and east coasts. So I’ve been deeply involved in scaling companies from no revenue and then have also held CMO positions at public companies with hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue. So this topic today is one that is super relevant to a lot of the companies I’ve helped and worked with and I’m glad to be here today. Thank you.
Jennifer Zick: Thanks, Peter. Hi Barb.
Barb Bertsch: Hi Jennifer. Thanks for having me. I am Barb Bertsch, Fractional CMO with Authentic and probably for the last 15 years of my career, I’ve really focused my efforts on small businesses and when you’re starting from the ground up and you’re in startup mode, sales is your number one focus. So I’m very excited to talk about this topic today around customer churn because it’s often how many new sales can we get with these small businesses that are in startup mode?
Jennifer Zick: You’re right. We’re going to talk about that and the influx of growth and how things have to change. Awesome. All right, Sean hi.
Sean Syring: Hi. Good afternoon everyone. My name is Sean Syring. Thanks again for everyone for joining us today. I’ve been a fractional CMO with Authentic for almost two years now. Most of my experience is commercial leadership within manufacturing organizations, both in a B2B and a B2C type of environment. I’ve had the chance to lead marketing, sales, customer service teams and so have deeply felt the challenges that we’re talking about today with customer retention and especially for small midsize companies. So I really look forward to digging into the different angles of how we can try to all do this better.
Jennifer Zick: Awesome. And while I’m here to moderate, I always love to participate. Just a sprinkling because my background before starting Authentic was also in sales and sales management and marketing. So these topics are always near and dear to my heart. And as a founder in a growing business, this is a topic that has been essential for us to focus on and this evolution of Authentic. So I think it’s going to be relevant for everybody today. And Peter, I’m going to come back to starting with you again as we dip into this topic of customer retention, kind of drawing on what Barb was hinting at. A lot of businesses, of course, when you start a business and your early growth, it is all about net new business acquisition and net new sales. Because you have to build something. You have to sell to build something.
Customer Retention vs. Net New Acquisition
Jennifer Zick: But sometimes as businesses grow, they stay focused just on net new acquisition. And. And yet the data tells us that it’s five to seven times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to keep the customer you already have. So even though the data tells us that, why do you think so many businesses remain obsessed with net new acquisition and sales and likely aren’t paying as close of attention to the retention aspect?
Peter Zaballos: I think it’s natural. When you’re starting a company, it is all about net new sales. So you build an organization around that new sales and you hire people that are really skilled at finding new prospects, closing new prospects, but beginning and ending the conversation with somebody who has not done business with you before. And it has a need that you can fill, you know, but in a marketer’s role. We’re thinking, of course, about, you know, what is that promise we’re making to that prospect about the problem we’re going to solve for them? And we’re thinking it through generally all the way to the point where they’re satisfied customers.
So I think marketing is in a unique position to be able to help the organization understand how to shift from a net new sales focus to two types of sales, net new, and then to existing customers. And that is a hard pivot to make because it implies two different skill sets. I was the CMO of a public company that was doing almost $200 million of revenue, and that was the first time we added a dedicated function for selling to existing customers. You can see how successful you can become without having to necessarily dedicate the resources. What we found as we scaled this new source of revenue up for us is that you need a completely different approach. You need people that understand that value is already being created with the product you sold them.
And then you’re encouraging them to explore greater use of that product within the company or to explore products that add value to the ones they already have. It’s a really different sales process than finding a customer who doesn’t know anything about you and spending most of your time educating them about the core value proposition. So we found as we scaled customer success based revenue, were hiring more consultative salespeople, more people that had deep product knowledge. So it is a totally different kind of sale. But it naturally follows getting really good at first time sales because that’s puts you in a position of being able to do follow on sales.
Jennifer Zick: Yeah, absolutely. And Sean and Barb, on this same topic, I know I’ve observed in my career and watching a lot of our clients navigate this, the shift from being a sales driven business to a strategic growth business, it doesn’t happen just overnight. There’s all these little incremental changes. And what Peter was just talking about there, the very different skill set between the hunter and the farmer, between somebody who’s winning new business or nurturing and growing existing business. Very different personalities. Where have you seen companies get it right or get it wrong in understanding how to build a sales organization or a growth organization that brings those skills to bear?
Sean Syring: Yeah, I’ll jump in. You know, I think one thing I’d add to your question, Jennifer, and also what Peter said is I think the skill set in the sales team is a really key one to both your points. But I think also, you know, it’s not always retention that you have to think about as your only goal. You know, I find in a lot of companies we tend to overestimate the share of a customer’s business we have. And I think we undervalue the potential size of the opportunity to grow within our existing accounts that we already have. Right. I think it’s easy to overlook the opportunity within our existing accounts for growth. So I think don’t only think about it as a retention issue, but make sure you aren’t missing opportunities for growth.
And I think your approach from a sales standpoint is very different in how you do that. Because I think one of the common themes I think you’ll probably hear today is it’s so much easier to grow within your core business. And expanding into new business segments can be a lot of challenge. I think you have to have that realistic assessment of what are you good at, what aren’t you good at, why are you winning and losing? And I think if you find yourself trying to both retain but also grow within your existing accounts. You’ll make your overall strategy and ultimately customers will stay along for a much longer time.
Jennifer Zick: That’s a really good point. I appreciate how you really helped us see the difference between like winning new business, keeping that business, and growing within that business. And of course, depending on how mature your service and solution set is, that’ll determine how you can continue to grow with that client. So I’ve seen one of the things that small businesses in particular struggle with is they have limited resources for making full time hires of great talented people. So often they’re trying to ask one salesperson to hunt and manage accounts, like just being a strategic salesperson and that generally doesn’t end up being really successful. And we have some nice blend of expertise on this call between B2B and B2C or different kinds of B2B models.
I think one of the things a lot of growth businesses struggle with is understanding the difference between business development, sales, account management, and customer success. What are some of the ways that you help clients navigate what their business model needs for those kinds of personalities or roles or how to make those growth changes when you have limited resources. Any thoughts on that?
Peter Zaballos: I would say that you need to have a really fresh look at where you think you can expand the business within that customer base you have and who is the best. What are the characteristics of the person that can deliver that message? Because I keep going back to you, I think that’s somebody who looks more like a technical product specialist than a salesperson because they can convey what the incremental value of expanding the use of the product is or introducing other products to that organization and have a deep understanding of what are the functions of that organization. How can this specifically add value? It’s a much more consultative sale than on that new sale. So, you know, I think you’d probably look for a completely different makeup of the kind of person that would deliver that message.
Jennifer Zick: That’s so insightful, Peter. Because if we think of, if we step into our own shoes of times when we’ve been the buyers, you expect to be working with a salesperson on the front end of that engagement, but then after that you expect to be served right, have people around you who are going to bring the value from whatever the solution is. And so I think that’s a really insightful point. And I recognize too that I’m adding questions to questions that I’m just like you digging in on this. But we’re going to move on to the next official piece of the agenda. And Barb, I want to start here with you because it was interesting. Just yesterday I spent a few hours digging into Authentic’s data set behind the random acts of marketing assessment that all of our clients take.
We have thousands of responses to these random acts of marketing assessment. And what was so interesting to look at is that whenever we start with a new client, the average client score is lowest. In the area of feeling confident about having data and metrics to guide their decision making, that’s where they feel the least confident or to say it the other way, they feel the most amount of random acts of marketing happening. They don’t know how to measure things. So in terms of client retention, what are some metrics or indicators that teams can pay attention to that could help them identify potential churn patterns or even, you know, to Sean’s point, other side of that coin would be to recognize growth opportunities. But let’s start with that churn and retention concept.
Barb Bertsch: Yeah. Thank you. There are, there are so many really, but it all depends on the technology you have available within the systems in the organization as well as the size and type of business that you have. So on the more sophisticated side, if you have a CRM like a HubSpot, for example, you have the ability to do predictive analysis based on customer health scores. It’s automated, it’s based on changes in purchasing habits, support ticket trends and so on. And you know, from there you can literally automate, okay, let’s say anything under 80%, they’re going to drop into this other area and we’re going to do a win back campaign. So you can set up, you know, all of that to be automated. You can have an entire dashboard that includes a variety of metrics related to customer health.
Other ways to measure without a CRM would be more along the lines of tracking number of return requests or service tickets either through an ERP or even by hand. You know, in a smaller organization, you’re maybe not even going to have an erp, but at least you’ve got a smaller customer base and an ability to do some things by hand in a spreadsheet. If sales is being required to do quarterly updates with key accounts, those can be tracked. Not only that they’re getting done, but it provides a way to have conversations about what they’re hearing, having a plan in place to respond. I think from a marketing perspective, things as simple as open and click rates on customer emails, are they dropping off? Is it the content or is it the Customer truly no longer engaged in the brand.
There are third party apps like Churn Zero that you can integrate into some systems that provide deeper insights and help fight that churn before it even begins. Other questions to ask maybe is there a lack of understanding about the product or service? Are you really killing it in the initial sale? But now there’s service issues. Those are just some examples of areas I see that you can measure.
Jennifer Zick: Yeah. And I appreciate how with all those different examples, it really comes down to like, what is your business model and how is the customer or client experiencing and interacting with your solutions and your team along the way? Because the way you gather feedback in, let’s say a B2B professional services firm like Authentic is going to be different than the way you might get feedback if you are a distributor of a catalog of thousands of products where you’re tracking transactions about those products. So Sean, what are your thoughts on that based on the kinds of businesses you’ve worked with?
Sean Syring: Yeah, I, kind of key in, on the part of your question that talks about indicators. I think, you know, Barb hit on a lot of really good metrics and I think the more you can get some of those leading indicators that are driving those metrics so you can be on the forefront, I think the better you are. And so, you know, I think a good tip is think about what your buyers are looking at and tracking. Right. And so do your customers. What are the buying organizations within those customers watching? Because they can be a good indicator on potential risk. Right. Competitive activity risk. You know, oftentimes in the manufacturing world, you’re dealing with raw materials or dealing with certain cost inputs and really smart buyers are tracking those components. Right.
And so if you start to see different costs going in certain directions, you got to assume as well that your buyers are doing that and you want to be ahead of that. Right. And you want your, most importantly, I think you want your sales team to be armed with that information and be able to handle it on the spot so you can, you know, try to get away from maybe an RFP being kicked off or something else that’s potentially going to kick you out of that account.
So, you know, I thinking about ways to track what your buyers track about and how they think so you can get ahead of that curve and have your team as prepared as possible in those conversations, I think is a good way to not only proactively deter, you know, a customer moving on, but also hopefully kind of build a little bit more of a strategic relationship and Conversation with them.
Jennifer Zick: I love that, Sean. And in the places where you’ve been engaged, either as a CMO consulting with clients or an internal team leader, who’s held that responsibility or which leaders in the company have held that responsibility to like looking around the corner and understanding the mindset of what the buyers are watching or how. Yeah, I think insights.
Sean Syring: Yeah, I think it’s a tough one in the smaller organizations, you’re, you’re, you know, you’re probably not going to have a role in doing that. I think the larger you go, if organizations have things like product or category management, I would often see a role like that can help fill that sort of mold. Right. And then help put that story together for the sales team to use in conversations with customers. But it is something that is harder for smaller companies to do. And so I think the right time to think about that is when you’re doing pricing or looking at the strategy of how you’re addressing pricing within certain accounts. If you don’t have a function that’s got responsibility for that’s kind of a natural way to handle that, you know, that sort of activity.
Jennifer Zick: Good point.
Barb Bertsch: And Peter, I’m sorry, if you do have that talent within the business, let’s make sure everybody’s talking and not just holding all of that information to themselves.
Jennifer Zick: Yes, it’s easy to assume in any size company that what one of us knows, other people know as well. And it usually takes over communication to make information known. Peter, you’ve done a ton of work in the technology space. How do technology companies tend to think about, you know, metrics or indicators of client churn or how to be in front of that.
Peter Zaballos: Well, to go really deep down the customer usage rabbit hole and you know, a pretty frequent methodology is to implement cohort analysis so that you can look at for all the customers that started usage on month or week X, you know, how many weeks past that has that cohort of customers adopted usage. And you know, you’ll start to see groupings of really active users, moderately active users, infrequent users, and people that didn’t activate. And by maniacally focusing on this cohort analysis, you can start to identify trends where you know that a certain category of customers is fine. Like there are these people that are using this every single day. And then you can start directing your attention on who are the moderate users, who are the infrequent users and how to activate them.
Because ultimately that, you know, because all the businesses we run in the tech space these days are subscriptions. So that gives you subscription health indices. And you know, in the early days, this was all done manually. There are companies out there now that let you do this. A lot of CRM platforms let you do this. But I think the real key there is looking at usage and cohorts. But it’s also applying the fundamentals, and I’ll come back to this later too, of, you know, the key to marketing is understanding who is your Persona, what do they care about? What are their problems? And this is where the marketing group can work collaboratively with the product management team, if you have one, because the product managers share the same interest. Did I build a product that people use? Where are they using it?
Why are they using it? So I think that digging deep into product usage trends is a really good way to understand what is the health of that subscriber base and where do we need to pay attention.
Processes and Metrics for Customer Retention
Jennifer Zick: That’s a perfect segue and setup for the next section of our conversation. And I want to turn to Sean to start us off here. But I know you all have different perspectives based on the business models and industries you’ve worked on. Barb, you said earlier, if you have information, don’t keep it to yourself. Peter, you just said the product team wants that insight too. And so I have seen the power of what it means to bring teams together and create the right kind of connective tissue and communication and collaboration so that depending on who’s in the business, sales, marketing, customer success, product development, those teams communicate and can collaborate well together. Sean, what have you seen in your role be effective in creating that kind of collaboration and communication to keep the company moving?
Sean Syring: Yeah, I think it builds well off of what Peter just said. So if I think about being a marketing leader in a small to mid sized company, I think the challenge is you’re not likely to start with clear ownership on customer retention. There’s probably not somebody already defined to do that. So I think your first goal is how do you start to think about structuring organization and process to get that alignment across all the different functions that interact with the customer, because that’s vital to get a collective story on what we’re hearing from customers. So I think you need to figure out a way to make it a regular cadence in your business processes.
You know, somewhere to start is, you know, make sure you have a cohesive understanding of your customer needs and then a way to kind of capture and consolidate that customer feedback. You really want to try to shoot for one source of truth. To get back to the part that Barb made about sharing information, you want a way to kind of collect all that feedback from all the different people that interact with customers. Jennifer, you mentioned marketing, sales, customer success, product innovation, all those are potentially interacting with your customers and are different touch points. And they’re going to learn different things, right? And they’re going to learn different things from the customer’s perspective. And so you know, a best practice would be to house that in something like a CRM, right.
So you can gather all the insights from your customer and then you know, different functions can really use that information in a lot of different ways and hopefully ultimately personalize it to your specific customer. Right. So you can develop a solution for them. That’s best. So you know, first it’s getting that customer feedback loop identified. Then I think you want to make sure you have your right metrics identified that are going to drive retention. So you know, obvious ones on the marketing side are to think about things like customer acquisition cost and customer lifetime value. Those are great ones to balance that trade off between new customer acquisition and retention. But you know, I also have found the more you can drive customer needs into other functions metrics, that’s where you really can start to develop some magic.
I mean you want to try to tie what the customer is looking for into other functions. So I’ll use more manufacturing examples. Right. You might have a customer that is heavily focused on fast lead times. You might have another one who really values you holding extra inventory for them so they can deal with surges in their business. Or some might be interested in new product innovation. Right. They might want to be on the early edge of new products and technology. So you know, if you can identify ways to drive those metrics into other parts of the non commercial operations so they’re focused on meeting those individual needs of customers. You know, that’s where you really start to get kind of that personalized focus metric on an individual customer.
And you know, you start to kind of build those hooks even further, I think into your customer relationships. I think the final piece I would say is just make sure you’re continuing to gather feedback from your customers on how you’re doing. We’re going to cover that here in a second. So I don’t want to go into details of how to do it. But I think to me the key is the point that Barb made before about sharing it across your organization. I think you get more engagement from the entire organization when you provide them feedback on what you’re hearing from customers.
So sharing that knowledge, you know, I think it ultimately leads to more collaboration within your organization and customers, maintaining happiness because the more the other organizations that are delivering product and service to the customer understand it, they’re going to come up with better solutions to potential problems. So I think, you know, highlighting wins, elevating issues and driving urgency and dealing with issues from customers, the more you share that with the right people, I think you’re ultimately going to get, you know, better service for keeping that customer happy and keeping them around.
Jennifer Zick: Yeah, so many good points packed into that. Barb, are you, do you want to chime in on some of this?
Barb Bertsch: Yeah, I agree wholeheartedly with everything Sean said. And you know, to take it a step further, when I get into my initial assessment with a small organization, the first thing I do is figure out if you have marketers are sales and marketing aligned, is that happening Oftentimes, like Sean said, in a smaller organization, there isn’t a big team and roles of customer support, customer experience. Hopefully there’s product management in a manufacturing setting, getting all those people together, taking it another level or another step forward, defining from each of those individuals at a table together, what metrics should we be considering for our conversations. And from there develop a scorecard.
So if you have that scorecard and you can implement biweekly conversations between the heads of each of those groups, that scorecard is going to become your guide to those conversations and, you know, provide that ability for consistent, reliable information around your customer.
Marketing’s Role in Customer Retention
Jennifer Zick: You just answered the question I wanted to ask this group because I was thinking about the reality that like in a very small startup business, the handful of people building that business are talking to each other all the time. So it’s like a mind meld. You just know what’s going on in the business and you’re just kind of flowing. And then you get to the point where the business starts to grow. And once there are actual departments or there’s middle management, the leaders are having one kind of conversation up here. But it’s easy for departments to become siloed pretty quickly. And then the people whose feet are on the ground actually working with the clients, they’re learning a lot, but they’re not necessarily cross pollinating. And then my question was going to be back to you, Barb.
I know a lot of our clients who are just getting to that first phase of like, oh, we have managers now. They’re starting to experience a disconnect they didn’t expect because they didn’t think about that. And they might be running like departmental level tens if you run on EOs or departmental meetings, but they’re not creating that crossover. You just mentioned something about a biweekly meeting, which would be kind of outside of that structure, but so essential to bring those people working together to the same table. So I love that idea. That’s what I always called our connective tissue meeting in my past life. So, yeah. Peter, anything you want to add before? I actually am going to come to you with the next question, but I want to give you a chance to chime in on this.
Peter Zaballos: One of the things we’re talking around is, so who owns this number? And I think we’ll talk about this a bit later. But it’s hard for the head of sales to own this number. It’s hard for the head of marketing to own this number. And in a small organization, it might be the CEO that says, I’m going to be responsible for ultimately owning the retention revenue number until they can dedicate somebody to it. But I haven’t seen it work. Well, when the head of sales has had to own both net new and retained revenue just because of what we’ve been talking about before, the organizations are just not set up to handle both.
Jennifer Zick: You’re exactly right. We actually crossed that bridge a couple years ago here at Authentic, and we’re a small company ourselves, but originally our sales forecasts and growth forecasts were all about net new acquisition. That was the only thing that we had to pay attention to. And suddenly it occurred to me that now we have to calculate and project for what we call carryover and retention and growth revenue. And so thankfully, we have a. We decided at that intersection that our sales and biz dev team would be focused on net new acquisition, and our client services team and the CMOs who deliver the services are focused on retention and growth. And that has created amazing clarity and a better ability to project and manage as well. That ownership is important.
All right, well, coming right back to you, Peter, on process, we’re talking about the importance of gathering insights and the importance of staying close to changing customer needs. But what processes can businesses put in place to make sure that actually happens?
Peter Zaballos: And, you know, I’m going to answer this through the lens of, you know, what would the person responsible for marketing be thinking about and then what would the business think about? But, you know, from a marketer’s perspective, this is the fundamentals. So what are the Personas of these people? And they’re going to be different from the net new buyer Persona. I think here a person is going to have much more depth and clarity around the problems that are solved, how they’re solved by the product and what incremental opportunities exist there. But you really have to begin with a well researched statement of understanding of who this person is, what they care about and why would another product be beneficial to them? And you can do that by collaborating with product management if you have it.
But just like with all the other Personas that marketing teams develop, it’s a lot of one one research. But starting with that, then that can help you inform how you start thinking about outbound materials? You know, can you start generating or taking a role in things like product onboarding, customer onboarding campaigns and communication around that? Can you take a role in crafting product tutorials, interactive walkthroughs like we do this already. When you’re introducing a new product to a new prospect, you’ve come up with a 30 second animation that says here’s the problem this solves and why it’s a great choice for you. You have to take those same skills to an existing customer and say we’re helping you solve the problem. Now here’s an idea about how we can solve another problem for you.
So it’s taking the portfolio of tactics and capabilities you’ve got in marketing and just applying them to this different Persona and a different use case. I think you can also take that same familiar approach and think about, well, how do we know what people are saying about whether or not this product works for them? So you can do surveys and you can orchestrate feedback sessions. You can work with the salespeople to think about, you know, and I think Sean mentioned this quarterly business reviews, get everybody together and talk about how well are we solving your problems. That’s going to reveal incremental problems that could be addressed. And then, you know, be vigilant about LinkedIn, be vigilant about G2 crowd. What are people saying about your product out in the wild and be, you know, be close to that depending on your price point.
I was the CMO of a company where our price point was the low end was six figures and the high end could be eight. So when we bought, when we brought a customer online, we dedicated a Slack channel to them where they could talk directly with our engineers. But it was just another way to know how is the product working for them. So find ways to get out there and understand are you really solving the problem the way the customer expected it to. Customer advisory boards, same Thing I was a member on the data.com advisory board at Salesforce for five years. That was a great way for Salesforce to get understanding, get an understanding of how well was data.com serving our needs.
And you know, ultimately I think you need to work with these customers to come up with case studies that say here is the problem we solved, here’s the economic value it delivered for us. And just like you would use those case studies to get net new customers, use those case studies to evangelize within your existing customer base how incremental value can be delivered.
Collaboration and Communication for Retention
Jennifer Zick: Oh, I love that you unpacked a few account based marketing and selling strategies in there like a Slack channel devoted to key anchor accounts and remarketing those businesses successes back into that enterprise. Those are brilliant strategies for large expansion opportunities. And I’m so glad you brought up the client advisory board because I had it here in my notes like somebody’s got to talk about a client advisory board. But I also jotted down what to do for me and our Authentic team because I had, I honestly had never thought of this. Peter. Like we spend a lot of time as CMOs and I’ve spent a lot of time at Authentic in identifying what our ICP (ideal customer persona) is for our buyer, the initial buyer.
But the truth is once we get into an account, the Personas expand and the people we serve are a different profile and a different subset in terms of being sticky and continuing to communicate our value and demonstrate that value. Because our new sales team is going to work in our case with a CEO and maybe a CFO or COO or head of sales alongside of them in the decision. But once we’re inside the business, we’re working with all the leadership teams and the sellers and the marketers and. And so I’m taking that as a to do so. All right, I would love to give Sean and Barb a chance to chime in on the process but we’re already moving on to the next question cause I’m keeping us diligently on time. So Sean, over to you. Kind of coming back to where we started.
Marketing is often in the same way that businesses get focused on net new sales, often marketing ends up getting pigeonholed as just being to create net new leads, just go create demand, create lead gen. And the marketing team, budget and resources are allocated in that direction and aren’t allocated against that entire customer journey. Or I think it was Peter who said what is? I don’t remember. Maybe it was one of you who said what’s the promise? We’re making and how do we deliver that all the way through to a happy customer. So Sean, how have you thought as a CMO about creating that kind of coverage with limited marketing resources?
Sean Syring: Yeah, I mean, I think I’ll build on a common theme. I think Peter just used it to talk about fundamentals. And you know, I think the first one is to make sure you have a well defined buyer journey that’s mapped out with your ideal customer profile that Peter just talked about. And then, you know, ensuring you have clarity across those functions on who’s doing what. You know, I think so much of our time is spent on the early part of the buyer journey, the acquisition part. And so I think talking a little bit about what you do on that back half. Right. How do you start to implement programs on the back half to make sure that you’re maintaining that position with them.
And you know, I think common strategies that we’ve talked about here already are things like customer experience teams looking at loyalty programs, effectively managing your metrics. You know, to me those are things you kind of have to do the back end of the buyer journey well. But one thing that I see that a lot of companies don’t spend enough time focused on is strengthening their value proposition. What is the value that they’re bringing to companies? So my guess is we’ve got some EOS companies on here. I’m working with a couple of eos run companies now and it gets very easy to fill in the uniques on your VTO and never touch them again. Right. You come to a quarterly meeting, you’re like, yep, those are uniques. That’s what we’re good at. And you kind of take them for fact.
I think small to mid sized companies can sometimes struggle in understanding how to develop and build strategic marketing programs to invent it to enhance that value that you’re bringing after the initial sale. You know, think about what makes your organization different from your competitors and how can you use those to put more hooks into that customer relationship. And again, I think if possible, if you can personalize that to a specific customer. So you know, if you’re in an organization that has a strong R and D or a product development type capability, find ways to engage them in new product development and new product strategy.
If you’re strong financially as a company and you can afford it, leverage that to engage in pricing long term contracts, rebates, reward type programs, use what you’re good at and your competitors aren’t to help to try to find ways to bring more value, I think to that customer. I think retention works best when you have long term value. And so when you’re doing strategic marketing well, I think you want that marketing team to leverage the knowledge of all the customer needs that we’re talking about learning. Right. All, all the different ways we’ve touched on learning what customers need and taking that and their understanding of the overall market and pushing the organization to grow its value proposition. I think that’s one of the best.
You know, marketing is looked at as the one organization that should be spending a lot of its time thinking long term. And that’s really hard in a small to mid sized organization. And so I think the more you can push your value proposition to evolve with what customers want, you’re just going to continue to kind of drive those hooks in further to your customers and build retention and loyalty. And so I think back to your question of what should a marketing leader be doing? I think you need to be thoughtful about how you’re structuring your team. You might not have a full time person, you might have to fill that role in a small to mid sized company to help them think a little bit more long term and how to drive more value.
But think about structuring your team, your budgets and the programs you put together to constantly be doing some work on building that longer term vision. I just think you have to do it or you’re going to lose track to your competition.
Jennifer Zick: That’s right. And one thing I like to encourage clients to think about is not just narrowly marketing sourced revenue or marketing generated revenue, but marketing influenced revenue. And that includes the retention revenue and the growth revenue. And at Authentic, where we have a small marketing team of 2 and a half of us, we have to create programming that can multitask, if you will, like this webinar. We have some of our clients on this webinar today and they’re learning and getting value from Authentic. We have some potential prospects on the webinar today. So when you can create programming that has value, that can serve across the life cycle, it goes further than just narrowly focusing on this thought leadership content is just for new business or this is just for existing clients. If you can make it multipurpose, that gets you a little bit further.
Peter or Barb, anything you want to chime in on this topic?
Barb Bertsch: I do. Just taking that a little step further but kind of going back to what Sean was saying about the customer journey. When you lean in on building marketing Teams as a company is scaling. And one good way that I found to have it become more clear as to what gaps you have on your team. Taking the buyer’s journey and going through each stage of that all the way through where you have a responsibility as a marketer to provide content at each stage. And what is that content? If you draft all that content, you go back through that buyer’s journey and you highlight all the things you don’t have, those are the skill levels that you need in order and the job functions that you need in order to fill those gaps.
Whether you outsource it, whether you hire a full time person, it depends on the company, what your goals are. But of course all of that has to align with the business goals and budgets too. Yeah.
Jennifer Zick: And one of the things that is top of mind for most business leaders right now is also how to leverage new AI driven solutions and match that with human competency to fill those gaps more. And I had a mind I had a brainstorm this morning about a potential future webinar or topic or LinkedIn post or all of the above buts or bots. Do you need a human in the seat? Do you need a robot in the seat? How do we make these things work together? So little preview for those of you attending that might be an upcoming topic. But Peter, anything to add on that piece about covering the life cycle and the whole customer journey to build on.
Peter Zaballos: What Barbara’s saying, if you go back and look at the buyer’s journey, it is really clear that it doesn’t end at the sale, that it’s the life cycle that you’re orchestrating a buying process for. So just everything Barb said.
Jennifer Zick: Yes, we agree with Barb. She only speaks wisdom and truth. One last round of questions for all of you on the panel today before we turn to taking some questions from our audience. And by the way, guests, if you have a question, please drop it into the Q and A so we can see it and we can hopefully find some time to address it while we’re all together. But I’ll start back with you, Barb, Sage Wise Barbara, you know that there are business leaders sitting in this webinar today. Maybe founders, owners, or people leading teams who recognize that Churn is a challenge or that they’re not growing their existing accounts the way they could be growing. Maybe we’ve sparked some ideas for them. But what one piece of advice would you give to somebody who say, who recognizes this is a problem?
Where do I go from here?
Barb Bertsch: One piece of Advice is really hard for me, but I will start with communication. Communicating regularly across the various departments of the organization that touch customers to learn more, whether it’s customer experience, success, customer service, customer support, product development, whatever you’ve got. If it’s just sales and marketing and the CEO sitting at a table, that communication is going to help you go far.
Jennifer Zick: What about you, Sean?
Sean Syring: Yeah, I mean, I think to try to keep it simple and focus on the basics, I think it goes back to having that in depth understanding and knowledge of your customer needs. Right. I think that’s gotta be the starting point. And then focus on constantly evolving that value you’re bringing to that customer by staying ahead of their needs, by using a lot of those techniques that we talked about today. I mean, it’s a simple concept to say understand your customers and bring them value. But it’s really hard to execute when you’re trying to manage a day to day business. And so I think you got to find the resources dedicated to being those thought leaders in your organization.
Jennifer Zick: Absolutely, Peter.
Peter Zaballos: Just building on that. I think once you’ve done that analysis and assessment, then it’s taken the same tools you use to say how many customer interactions produce form fills and how many of those form fills result in sales conversations and how many of those result in revenue. But take that same train of thought that Sean was describing and start quantifying the outcomes. I think in a lot of these organizations nobody owns this and you can get hung up on an argument over who should own it. But I think coming to the conversation with, you know, if we look at these metrics and we think about these conversion rates, we’ve got this much potential revenue sitting there. What do we do about it?
And then to what Barb was saying, having that open communication about that without necessarily having a vested interest in who owns it is going to help the organization figure out, okay, what do we do now? Because now we’re leaving money on the table. Should the CEO pick this up? You know, in the meantime, should the head of sales do it until you can hire somebody? Should marketing do it? You know, that group needs to answer those questions, but we can help them by quantifying the opportunity.
Jennifer Zick: Yeah, that’s right. And go ahead Barb, not just one piece of advice.
Barb Bertsch: We didn’t really get to this. I don’t think it was mentioned at all. But you know, sales are often only compensated for net-new. So what would happen if part of their compensation was around upsell cross sell smart?
Jennifer Zick: There’s actually a question from our audience on. I think part of that I’m going to come back to. But first I’m going to reflect on offering a piece of advice. A little bit of a shameless plug, but it’s based on having served hundreds of companies navigating these realities. The shift from sales driven acquisition growth to retention and expansion growth. If the gap that you have in your business is that you don’t necessarily have a leader who can even own the driving of the conversation and own the bringing people together and analyzing the data, that’s where Authentic can be a really great partner. Bringing in a fractional CMO like Sean, Barb, Peter or someone from our team who understands your industry has been there and done that.
In terms of helping to lead teams through growth can be having that outside voice can make a huge difference in helping you look at it with a fresh perspective. So that’s what we love to do in helping businesses overcome random acts. And we’re here for you. So if anything we’ve talked about today is something you’d like to talk further about, we’d love to hear from you. Meanwhile, this is going to open up that conversation point a bit more. Barb, we had somebody ask how can you encourage sales teams to contribute to retention efforts when they tend to only be focused on net new business? Ding, ding. You know my answer, compensation. But we also talked about how hard it is for that hunter to like to operate in the mode of farming. So any thoughts on that for growing businesses?
Sean Syring: Yeah, I think one thing to think about is because it’s, you know, I think we’ve heard a common theme. It’s not going to be anybody’s one responsibility. And so how do you make kind of the intelligence gathering and the customer feedback easy for the sales team, whether it’s gathering within your CRM or I’ve been in organizations where you have sales teams that put together the greatest reports of visits to customers and trade shows and then nobody does anything with it and so they feel disengaged from people aren’t using their input. So I think you got to find ways to gather that input that’s efficient in doing it, but then also use it and share and communicate common trends that you’re getting from the insights that the sales team’s providing to you about how it’s impacting the business.
I think sometimes your sales team that’s out on the road traveling, spending a lot of time in front of customers, can feel a little bit siloed. And so sharing what you’re learning from other customers, going on customer meetings with them to collaborate and kind of build that, that teamwork on this issue I think is a good way to keep it top of mind. I, I also, you know, had incentives come to mind. Right. I mean that’s the obvious one too, that also helps. But I think there’s small things you can do to facilitate making it just more part of your regular, you know, kind of sales and marketing processes.
Balancing Growth and Retention
Jennifer Zick: I think what I’m hearing from all of you, especially for small, don’t necessarily have a person that can be dedicated to owning every single thing. That communication and collaboration, like having a structure in place to keep the communication going, just communication by itself can create accountability and can inspire that kind of the innovation that growth requires. So communication and having a cadence for it on purpose seems to be a really important theme here. I’m going to take one more question from our audience. It ties into some things we’ve talked about here. But the question is my business has aggressive growth targets and I assume they mean, I don’t know if they mean growth by net new or any kind of growth, but how can I balance the pressure for net new client acquisition while also prioritizing retention?
That’s really kind of a broad question over what we talked about here. But it is true that sometimes you’re operating under leadership that’s focused on net new acquisition. But you know that growth means you need to balance. So any input on that?
Peter Zaballos: Well, I think try and take the same tactics you’re using to support the new and apply them to existing customers so that you can present the salesforce something that looks like a net new sale. But say, you know, at this department of the customer you sold to two quarters ago, we’re seeing an awful lot of interest in the same or similar product. And we’ve quantified that interest in the same ways we quantified it to tell you to go call on them the first time. So let me introduce you to another opportunity that looks like a net new sale to you, but it’s really an expansion sale. But that’s just taking all the tools that we use to identify net new opportunities and applying them to existing customers.
Jennifer Zick: That’s so smart. And for a small business too, a word of caution or a cautionary tale is that we’ve seen a lot of businesses who have been organically successful in their growth so far simply by saying we need to grow.
Sean Syring: Right?
Jennifer Zick: And so every year the owners or the leaders put into the business plan we’re going to grow by X percent. But they haven’t defined where that growth is coming from. So I would say if you’re working in a business that has aggressive growth goals, make sure that the people departmentally understand where the business has decided that growth is going to come from and the rationale for those growth. Growth objectives. Because shockingly, a lot of businesses are setting growth targets that they didn’t ever actually project out with any real numbers or forecasting. And so I would say, you know, be a voice of positive peer pressure within your organization from wherever you sit to define what is this growth made up from?
Is it made up from existing accounts, net new acquisition of what kinds of business, new products, existing services, what’s the mix and how do we get our arms around that mix for clear responsibility? So, any final comments, panelists? Barb?
Barb Bertsch: Yeah, I think everything you just said makes a lot of sense. And to lean in on what Peter was saying, it’s data, you know, if you’ve got access to even a little bit of data where you can, you know, remind that the cost of the cost to acquire new versus upselling and cross selling, you can look at your data of your current customers. What are they buying? What could they be buying? You know, so if you’re, if you look at the value of the products or services that they aren’t currently buying and you can target them to purchase things that they don’t even know you have, maybe that’s just another way to grow without the cost of acquiring somebody new that’s super smart.
Jennifer Zick: And this happened to us recently with our CPA tax advisory firm. I didn’t even know they did anything besides tax advisory. Turns out they have this whole suite of services that could potentially add value to a growing business like ours. But it was just the CPA working with me that didn’t have an incentive to like to educate me on all of that. Right? So sometimes we become blind to the opportunity that’s right in front of us. And the good news for those of you listening, as our marketing team follows up with a recap of today’s event in the video, we’re also going to send some additional resources your way.
So if your business isn’t today using data and metrics or you don’t know how to start or how to formulate those KPIs, one of the assets we’re sending along is a marketing guide on what we call the big three revenue metrics. And that’s going to unpack the cost of customer acquisition, customer lifetime value, time to close on new business and provide a few thought nuggets that might be helpful conversation starters for your team. So but I think we’ve covered a lot of different aspects of retention and growth. Thank you panelists so very much for your time and expertise. It’s always a joy to be in the room with you virtually or in person.
And again for those of you joining us as guests today, if there’s anything Authentic can do to help you carry this conversation into your business, just reach out. We’d love to make sure you have what you need to keep overcoming random acts of marketing or sales or all those aspects of growth and move toward healthy growth. So thanks again to everybody who’s joined us today. Go forth and be awesome. Be a blessing, be blessed and we hope to see you back at the next authentic Growth webinar. Take care.
