MarTech Interview with Lindsay Sanchez, CMO at Khoros

How can marketers play a more active role in driving customer retention and brand value in a tough economic climate?  Lindsay Sanchez, CMO at Khoros has a few pointers:

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Tell us about your marketing journey and more about your new role as CMO at Khoros, we’d also love to know: what inspires you most about B2B Marketing?

At Khoros, I lead a team of SaaS marketers that partner closely with other cross-functional teams to drive customer engagement, brand awareness, loyalty and repeat business. I see Marketing as just one cog in the larger wheel of a successful business, and it’s my job and passion to help our team work harmoniously with other functions — especially Product, Sales, and Customer Success & Services — to best address the needs of modern businesses.

I got my start in the larger technology and market intelligence field as an industry analyst and consultant, advising vendors, service providers, investment firms, and enterprises on technology and go-to-market strategies, before transitioning to B2B marketing. My journey in the Marketing world has spanned every domain, from product, solutions and industry marketing to demand generation, partner marketing, brand, communications, and every discipline in between. In the role I held prior to Khoros, I also was fortunate to gain first-hand exposure to running a large Sales team.

My love for B2B Marketing, particularly B2B SaaS marketing, is built on a genuine interest in understanding how technology can impact companies and the consumers or businesses they serve. Over the course of my career, I’ve prioritized direct customer and prospect engagement because I firmly believe that to be a great Marketer, you need to understand and speak a customer’s language, and know how to tailor your content and marketing strategies to address their information needs, preferences and business goals. I’ve worked across banking and finance into the artificial intelligence startup space, but one consistent inspiration in the marketing world is the visibility it offers. You’re able to see and impact all the connected business functions and ensure they stay aligned and working together, rather than siloed.

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How can B2B marketers today drive stronger customer centric journeys: what are some common faux pas you often see in the industry with brands trying to do this?

The most common issue I see is that internal organization structures and functional silos dictate what each ‘customer-facing’ team does to support a prospect and customer through their journey, instead of starting with what the prospect or customer needs. This inside-out approach leads to disjointed messaging, duplicative internal efforts or even roles, and a lack of interconnection across critical engagement points in the customer journey. Ultimately, that approach negatively impacts customer perceptions and experiences, as well as top and bottom line results for the business.

Instead, companies should embrace a mindset that puts the customer first, understanding what they’re looking for along the buyer’s journey.

Marketing, sales, and post-sale teams need to truly partner to deliver the right information, to the right people, at the right time — via the digital and human touchpoints customers prefer. This will drive company scale and efficiency, and much greater value in the way a company interacts with their customers.

To do this successfully, companies need to break from the old-school perception about Marketing as a ‘top of the funnel’ and lead-generation-only function, and adjust the metrics that went along with that perception. Internal teams must recognize that in today’s digital-centric world, marketing is a ‘customer-facing’ function that can help Sales and Service teams drive meaningful one-to-many interactions at every stage of the journey.

What should B2B marketers keep in mind through 2023 as they navigate a tough economic climate?

First and foremost, Marketers must recognize the role we can play in helping retain customers. We all know it costs more and takes longer to acquire a new customer than it does to nurture an existing one. For SaaS companies, customer retention is critical, and nuanced. You have to consider how to make a customer onboarding successful, driving adoption and deepening usage and value over time. Doing so creates customer stickiness and loyalty, and affords a company the ‘right’ downstream to upsell and cross-sell. A company’s focus should never be on one-off Sales, Service or Marketing interactions, nor engaging with a customer only to sell something. Customer-facing teams must help customers along the way to build trust and brand reputation. One of the most powerful ways to do this is to facilitate engagement between your customers — whether they are businesses or consumers — so they can help each other. I’m a big believer in brand-owned communities for this reason. These communities allow customers to engage and answer questions for each other, and to provide feedback back to a brand. Brand-owned communities also happen to help a brand reduce the volume of costly agent calls. One of my personal favorite brand-owned communities is Sephora’s Beauty Insider Community, which is great for highlighting user feedback and makes it easy for customers to share beauty tips and shop.

Another thing B2B marketers should keep in mind is that when marketing budgets get cut, it leads to simplification and innovation. More budget is often not the way to drive results. Most B2B marketers hold a goldmine of owned data that can help determine what is and isn’t working. Take a look at the information you already have to see what needs to stop, start and continue for optimal performance and service of your customers. Use data to objectively test your hypotheses on what outcome a marketing program or tactic program should have, rather than using the numbers to simply prove or justify what you did. By looking at data this way, you can quickly learn, test and adjust. This can save your marketing team time and money and free up space for innovation. It’s also how you establish credibility with Executive leaders and cross-functional teams.

Take us through some of the best B2B marketing campaigns you’ve come across so far and the biggest learnings from them?

Instead of talking about a single campaign, I’ll share a company that I believe does B2B marketing better than anyone. It’s HubSpot. What I love about HubSpot is that they don’t run one-off campaigns. Instead, they built an inbound marketing engine that entices potential buyers to come to them versus the other way around. They also excel at marketing in a way that turns active customers into loyal brand enthusiasts. What is so cool about this is that HubSpot lives and breathes the belief stated in their mission that, “businesses can grow with a conscience, and succeed with a soul — and that they can do it with inbound.” As a Marketer, I get pulled into HubSpot’s blog and website by the practical advice, best practices and templates they offer, and I do this without planning to land on their site because they’re great at content and SEO. Everything they do is in direct service of their potential and existing customers, which is also evident through the HubSpot Community and the myriad of knowledge bases, trainings, user groups and other touch points. I believe good marketing must go beyond a single campaign.

Great campaigns are long-running and well-integrated, with consistent messaging across all channels, including paid and earned media, social, digital and content. Additionally, circling back to being customer-centric, a good campaign places emphasis on building and nurturing relationships.

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If you had to change five things about B2B marketing, what would they be?

First, and not surprisingly, I’d enforce a breakdown of silos between business functions and departments. Silos contribute to a lack of information sharing, duplication of efforts, and a fragmented approach to reaching customers. Next, I’d get Marketers to stop using vanity metrics. Many cross-functional stakeholders don’t understand the potential of what modern marketing can do. Using metrics to try to prove a case causes marketers to lose trust and credibility. Understand first what success looks like for you, and work backwards to determine how best to show the value of your work. Hint: It’s not with page views or link clicks. If you’re honest, open to feedback, and agile enough to adjust based on data, it often leads to a company investing more in a marketing function.

With these strategies in place, I’d also direct focus to ensuring marketing builds programmatic ways to help across the entire customer journey — from top of the funnel, through active deal cycles, to post-sale and loyalty loops. Think about tactics that can help sales accelerate deal cycles or expand deal sizes instead of just trying to put more leads in the funnel. Partner with services teams to bring value post-sale and earn the right to upsell and cross-sell. Next, I’d ensure that all business efforts keep the customer top of mind, rather than focus on traditionally accepted benchmarks like revenue growth or advertising value. These benchmarks are important but fail to keep customer experience as the focus.

Finally, I’d encourage brands to cultivate lasting brand champions by establishing or building up their branded community. Doing so can act as a self-sustaining feedback loop for you to mine insights and data while cultivating a useful space for customer engagement and conversation.