Account-Based Marketing For Dummies

Chapter 17

Aligning Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success

IN THIS CHAPTER

Creating customer-centric content

Collaborating across departments

Managing customer events

For too long, marketing, sales, and customer success departments had different success metrics. Marketing was concerned about generating new leads for sales. The sales team’s mission was to take those leads and entice them to become opportunities, then win the deal, creating customers. Customer success was tasked with ensuring clients successfully adopted the product and service, preventing customers from leaving (“churning”) and keeping them happy. This is how it’s always worked in the B2B world.

Account-based marketing (ABM) flips this model upside down with marketing, sales, and customer success aligned with one mission: Get and keep revenue. The previous standard for B2B marketing teams was looking at a customer marketing program as a luxury. But, as you grow your business, you must ensure your customers are growing with you. ABM makes customer marketing a must-have initiative. It is through communication, education, and events that you turn your customers into advocates. This helps with both retaining your current customers and growing new business.

In this chapter, I show how to put together marketing programs for your customers by collaborating across multiple departments in your organization. I discuss how viewing your customers as prospects who represent potential revenue shifts the focus toward creating ...