Text us your thoughts on the episode or the show!
In today's episode, we talk with Irwin Hipsman, founder of Repititos, to explore the often-overlooked world of customer marketing and the critical role of customer contact data. Irwin shares findings from his recent research report on the state of customer contact databases, revealing why so many organizations struggle with poor data quality and how it impacts customer communications, renewals, and crisis response.
Together, they dive into:
- The definition of customer contact databases and why focusing on individuals—not accounts—is crucial.
- Key findings from Irwin's research, including an industry-average database health score of just 47%.
- The importance of cross-functional teams in maintaining healthy customer data.
- Actionable steps ops professionals can take to assess, clean, and maintain customer data health.
- Why better customer data translates directly into stronger customer relationships, higher retention, and better crisis management.
Whether you're in marketing ops, customer marketing, or revenue operations, this conversation offers practical insights that can help transform your organization's approach to customer data management.
Access the customer health score assessment here.
Access Irwin's report here.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hello and welcome to another episode of OpsCast
brought to you byMarketingOpscom, powered by all
the MoPros out there.
I am your host, michael Hartman, flying solo once again.
Mike, I'm sure, is recoveringfrom Spring Fling 2025 and is
working, I'm sure.
Anyway, joining me today totalk about the importance of
(00:21):
customer marketing and customerdata is Erwin Hipsman.
Erwin is the founder ofRepetitos, a consultancy which
helps clients turn theircustomer data into a
revenue-generating advantage.
Prior to that, Erwin startedand led Forrester's customer
lifecycle marketing practice.
Before Forrester, he heldseveral leadership roles in
customer marketing, engagementand advocacy.
(00:43):
He started his career in salesand account management.
So, erwin, thanks for joiningme today?
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Yeah, looking forward to it.
I'm a big fan of OpsCast andjust give a little bit of quick
background.
I've been listening to it allthe time and then in the
February issue with Kobe Stock,it was you actually who gave
this great quote about customermarketing and customer databases
and why it's not a priority,and you know there are always
campaigns to happen for it.
(01:08):
It's in the report itself, thatquote, and I just reached out
and I said hey, you're talkingabout customer contact databases
.
Would you have me on?
I'm just a regular solopreneur,not a fancy guy, not on the in
crowd, and I really appreciatethe opportunity to chat with you
.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
Yeah, absolutely Well , I think it's one of those.
We opportunity to chat with you.
Yeah, absolutely Well, I thinkit's one of those.
We'll get into this a littlebit, but I think the idea that
customer marketing was one ofthe ones where I think a lot of
organizations, you know there'sa missing opportunity there,
right, and I think we'll talkabout some of the background and
reason why.
But, yeah, so after you reachedout, you know, you and I talked
a little bit and you wereworking on you kind of alluded
(01:43):
to it a paper that you I thinkis now published right On the
state of customer contactdatabase.
So maybe just very top levelbecause we may drill into some
more what are some of the keytakeaways from this customer
contact database paper?
And maybe just I think it wouldbe good also because I think
(02:07):
when I first heard this from you, I'd like for you to
distinguish, when you saycustomer contact database, what
you mean, because I think somepeople might, like me, have a
broader idea of what that meansit includes more than what I
think you are focused on.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
Yeah, so by customer contact database I mean the
individuals who, not theaccounts at the account level,
the individual level, who arethose contacts?
And there'll be two differenttypes of contacts.
Imagine a company likeSalesforce.
They might have 10 or 15business relationships that they
have within a particularaccount and then they'll have
(02:45):
hundreds, if not thousands, ofusers.
I'm less concerned with theindividual users because
customer marketing won'tcommunicate with individual
users, like I've never receivedan email from Salesforce about a
new product update, even thoughI've been a user at every
company I've been at.
Those emails go to their 10, 15, 20 people.
They have a relationship withthe account, whatever
(03:06):
segmentation, and then, if it'simportant, they'll let us know
that there's a change that needsto happen.
So it's really those anywhere.
You know a small company mightbe three to four people, a
larger company seven or eightpeople.
Enterprise company.
You know 15 to 20 people at theaccount that you need to
communicate with and know whothey are and keep track of.
(03:26):
You know did they leave thecompany?
Do they move to a differentlocation?
Do they have a new title?
Who are the people you reallyneed to keep track of.
From an account managementperspective, and as I've been
talking to more and more sort ofcompanies who are interested in
thinking about what do I dowith my customer contact
database challenge, I realizedthere was no data out there.
There's data on everything MQLsand all sorts of things.
(03:48):
There was no data.
It's like, okay, what is thestate of customer contact
databases?
And everyone will say, yeah,it's not that good, but what
does that really mean?
And so I endeavored to do aresearch report that I published
last week, and the four keytakeaways are, first of all, the
average score of customercontact database, and by that I
don't just mean how accurate isthe locations, it's more
(04:11):
everything around it, like doyou have an inventory?
Can you send out a crisiscommunication?
What are the open rates?
What's the health of thedatabase?
The average score was not good,it was 47% and, like I said in
the report, if we were in highschool, it might be
parent-teacher conference time,like who's our kid and you know
why is he or she getting 47% onthis test?
And so that was key resultnumber one, not a shock, and
(04:36):
everyone I talked to said, yeah,that's about right, but looking
at the underperformers versusthe overperformers.
We were able to say that bydoing some of the things that we
talked about in the report andI'll talk about the two key ones
in a second you can get thatscore from 47 to 62%.
Now we're talking about passinggrade.
It's never going to be above 80.
(04:57):
So you know you're doing prettywell if you're in the 60s and
70s.
We had some people who scored,you know, in the low 80s, the
60s and 70s, with some peoplewho scored, you know, in the low
80s.
And the two key factors thatwould impact the score the
highest one's obvious, one's notobvious.
So the non-obvious one is youknow, do you have a group that
(05:17):
meets on a formal, not anemergency, ad hoc basis could be
weekly, monthly, quarterly thatthinks about and coordinates
customer communications as awhole?
So here's this group of peoplein marketing, ops, customer
marketing, customer success,product marketing, whoever it
would be.
They get together and say, okay, how are we communicating with
customers?
So if you have that, then youknow.
(05:38):
If you don't have that, that'sa great way to impact that score
, because they're going to askall the tough questions.
And then the second one is,which is very obvious, is the
maturity of the segmentation.
The more mature thesegmentation you have, the
better your overall customercontact data score will be,
because it means you're thinkingabout well, how do we segment
our audience?
(05:59):
Is it by title?
Well, that's, you know, a lotof people tend to segment by
title, because that's easy,because you get their titles.
What about their role vis-a-visthe product?
You know, there are companieswhere CEOs will log in and be a
user.
There are companies where theCEO never logs in and they're
just.
You know, somebody gives themreports.
So what are those differentpersonas within the account that
(06:20):
you want to be able to track?
Speaker 1 (06:22):
So just real quick, something that you hit on that
just is this sort of analogousto the concept of buying groups
on the pre-customer standpoint.
So I don't know if you were inthe Forrester part that was
serious decisions.
But that concept of buyinggroups that they originated,
(06:43):
maybe they popularized, I don'tknow if they originated it, but
that idea of identifying who arethe people you need to be
involved with to get a win on adeal with a customer, to carry
that forward.
It sounds like having somethingsimilar to that on the customer
side is useful as well.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Yeah, no, absolutely.
I mean the number one reasonwhen I was managing customer
success teams, the number onereason why we lost the deal was
we were single-threaded.
So you know earlier I talkedabout you know, small companies
needed three to six people intheir customer contact database
and some of them might not evenbe users, they might not be
involved in the deal.
(07:21):
But who are those extra people?
And you probably need a newsort of role for them, so who
might be called buying center?
So I've got you know, let's say, 15 people in my customer
contact database.
These three are users, these twoare influencers and these five
are just people we want to keepan eye on.
Like are they moving withintheir company?
Did they leave the company?
(07:42):
They don't use the product butthey may.
In six months they may have anew role that all of a sudden
uses it and now they've got tolearn about your product and you
would communicate with themvery differently because they're
not a user.
But absolutely it's thatexpansion beyond just those five
people who the CSMs talk to.
Who else do you need to knowwithin the account?
(08:05):
Got it?
Speaker 1 (08:06):
Okay.
So I know you said that youmight not be like users of
whatever product service youhave might not be the primary
people you want to focus oncommunicating with as customers.
Do you think that's my?
I initially went to the idea oflike PLG type SaaS companies
(08:28):
right, where it's probably maybea little bit different because
you especially in the phasebefore, maybe if you have a
freemium kind of model where youcould have users who are not
paying yet their customers, soyou're going to be communicating
to them, but it's maybe stillconsidered not.
Maybe it's a differentiationbetween a freemium customer
(08:51):
versus a paying customer andmaybe that's a distinction.
But do you think there's adifference there where you do
want to do communications tocustomers, especially paying
customers in a PLG-typeorganization, or do you still
think it's most important tohave a limited set?
Who are your core people?
Speaker 2 (09:11):
Well, it depends on the company, obviously, but
anybody who you would need to,you'd want to communicate with
and, depending on thatsegmentation, so, like when I
was a forester, when I started,the average email there were
like 15,000, were that we reallyfocused on.
The average email went out toabout 1200 people.
I time I left it went out to800 people.
(09:32):
So you know who is that, who'sthe audience for that particular
communication and how do youknow, how do you really do that,
that deep segmentation, soyou're not sending information
to think to people that theydon't really care about, so
you're not sending informationto people that they don't really
care about.
And so in a PLG world, yeah,you know they might be that user
, might be a segment that gets avery different type of
(09:52):
communication than somebody elsethan, like, the admins would
get.
You know who get a verydifferent, you know, obviously,
very different type ofcommunication from each other.
And that's, you know that gets,you know that's, a much more
mature organization than most.
And you can't do that without ahealthy customer contact
database, because if you don'thave the titles right,
particularly the titles, then itgets to be a real challenge.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
Well, and titles?
I mean you said titles are easyto segment by.
I would say that, yeah, on thesurface it seems like it's easy,
but as soon as you start to getany level of detail it can be
misleading, because just takethe example like we only want to
communicate to vice presidents,right, that sounds great, until
you start talking aboutfinancial services firms.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
Of course.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
Right, where, like, virtually everybody's a vice
president of something, eventhough that's not really the.
It doesn't correspond to thelevel of responsibility as a
vice president in many otherorganizations, or the size of
the organization matters.
Right, a vice president at asmall organization might be
equivalent to a director or evena senior manager at a really
(10:56):
large organization in terms ofscope of responsibility.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
Yeah, a lot of companies have title inflation.
We're not going to give you araise, but we're going to give
you a nice title.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
It's like oh, but I'm still doing the same thing.
Yeah, I haven't used that term.
That is a term I have used alot and I think it's
particularly common in marketingand marketing ops too.
Yeah, exactly.
So that's a whole.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
And AI can only do so much, I mean.
Ai can drop a list of 10,000people in a spreadsheet and tell
what to do, but there are goingto be a lot of subtleties
around the edge that's just notgoing to pick up.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
Yeah, so I just want to make sure I understand.
So when you talk aboutcustomers, you're talking about
people who have actually paidfor whatever product or service.
You Absolutely actually paidfor whatever product service.
You Absolutely People fromcompanies or organizations or
individual people who have paidfor your product or service, as
(11:49):
opposed to prospects or leadsAbsolutely yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Prospects in a whole different world.
Accuracy I mean I would arguethat if I had a customer contact
database and let's say I didsome basic segmentation my most
important people, my mediumimportant people, my least
important people you would neversegment by that.
Let's just keep it simple.
I would argue that you probablyneed 98% accuracy on your most
important people and the mediumimportant people may be 90%.
(12:18):
The least important people maybe 80% and you don't worry about
them.
You focus on those first twotiers.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
But it seems like to me I don't know what like that
seems like they would all behigher in terms of the level of
quality and trust you have inthat data compared to people who
are pre-customer stage.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
Yeah, exactly like no , you want to know.
Location is really importantbecause you start doing events.
You know I've worked for swisscompanies and they think I'm in
switzerland.
They invite me to events inLondon and I'm living in Boston.
They never invite me to anevent in Boston because they
assume I live where theheadquarters is.
You know that's where it startshurting people across the
organization.
Other people not just marketingops and not just customer
(12:55):
marketing.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
Yeah, you know, it's funny you bring that up, that
idea of location, and I canremember a specific example at a
company I worked for where alead had come in, got routed
because there was some data apprequest from one country to
another country, which meant awhole different region for lead,
(13:16):
like where the SDR would be.
Sdr picks it up, turns out whathappened is and I think of the
(13:38):
countries were Australia andIndia and it'll make more sense.
So when it got routed to thewrong place and people were like
what happened and it's not agreat thing Digging through what
happened the data got appended,changed it from Australia to
New Zealand or Australia toIndia.
That's because the personactually based on LinkedIn
(13:59):
profile or whatever, was inIndia.
But it also was pretty evidentby looking at the profile the
person worked for the kind ofcompany that was a service
provider to other companies,right outsourced type work.
My suspicion I don't know thatever got validated was that
person was because he put inanother company name in
australia, like.
So my guess is he's working on,being working on as a
(14:20):
consultant contractor forthird-party company based in
Australia, was doing someresearch for them, and it got
rerouted to somebody becausecompany name got changed,
location got changed, but that'snot really what the intent was
right, and so that's the kind ofstuff that can go wrong if
you're not careful.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
And if you have translations, then I'm getting
everything in Swiss German, andI happen to, even if I was in
Switzerland.
I have translations.
Then I'm getting everything inSwiss German and I happen to,
even if I wasn't Swiss, I doSwiss French.
I'm getting everything inGerman.
Speaker 1 (14:50):
Yeah, so I think, yeah.
So it's interesting because itmakes sense that you really want
that customer data.
But if a big part of that scoreyou talked about on your report
that it was 47%, I'm going toguess that a part of that score
you talked about on your reportthat it was 47%, I'm going to
guess that a part of that isbecause it just wasn't accurate
enough to be able to action on.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
Okay, now, one of the questions we ask people is you
know, how would you rate theaccuracy of your database?
You know accuracy and usabilityof it.
People may not know theaccuracy of it, but they do know
the usability of it.
They have a gut sense of that.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
Yeah, yeah, knowing that our audience is primarily
ops type people, something youand I talked about is that it
would be good for people inthese roles to better understand
how to support customermarketing.
That's even if a company evenhas a customer marketing focus
(15:43):
at all, which I'm finding lessand less common.
So one of the suggestions youshared with me was that really
you might like, if you're amarketing ops, like, yes, you
should be coordinating withsales.
You know sales ops if there's asales ops function in your
marketing ops.
But your suggestion is likealso reach out to customer
(16:04):
success or customer support,depending on what you have in
your marketing ops.
But your suggestion is likealso reach out to customer
success or customer support,depending on what you have at
your organization, and learn howto collaborate with them as
well.
And then, obviously, a customermarketing team if there is one.
So talk about maybe talk alittle more about that and why
that would be beneficial for ourfolks in our office.
Speaker 2 (16:20):
Yeah, I've thought with a story when I was at a
company called Crimson Hexagon.
It's not there anymore socialmedia analytics.
You know we would go tomarketing ops and we need to
send this customer communicationout.
And they go, well, we'll do itat the end of the month.
And it's like, well, no, weneed it sooner than that.
And the end of the month wouldcome.
It's like no, we didn't get anyemails out the door to the
(16:44):
customers.
Can I just buy my own emailmarketing package?
And she said, yeah, just do it.
So we bought our own emailmarketing package.
It took a year for themarketing office people to
realize we had done that becausewe left them alone.
We stopped asking and then theygot really mad at us, like what
do you mean you're doing this?
We said you know we can't getany emails out to her because we
(17:05):
always get pushed to the end ofthe line.
And then they said okay, cancelthe contract.
We will put you in the linelike everyone else.
And so in every company I'veworked at, I've never had a
marketing ops person come to meand say hey, you communicate
with customers all the time.
What can we do to help you?
(17:25):
What do you need?
Well, you know, what would bereally helpful is a field in the
CRM that lets us know what theperson's Gmail address is,
because when we first meet them,they put their non-company
address in, but once they becomea customer, then you replace it
(17:45):
with their company address.
We want to know what theirGmail address is because when
that person leaves, we want tobe able to reach out to them
because they're a potential lead.
But we don't have their emailanymore, and now we've got to
send in mails through LinkedInand they don't open them up.
Wouldn't it be nice?
Speaker 1 (18:05):
And it's like oh yeah , we never thought about that.
That's actually a good idea.
What's funny is there are nowplatforms that try to mimic that
.
You've spent a lot of money,like track people moving.
What you just described wouldbe a pretty simple I'm assuming,
as long as there's somediscipline, like anything else.
Right, maintaining thatpersonal email address along
(18:25):
with their work email address?
Yeah, I mean, I would encouragepeople to.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
I would encourage companies, when they have those
landing pages, to ask people fortheir Gmail address.
And then you know, as they movethrough that, through the
pipeline, and they hit a certainstage now let's get their
company address, but now you'vegot both.
And it's counterintuitive thatyou need both email addresses,
but now you've got both.
And it's counterintuitive thatyou need both email addresses.
But if you think aboutcustomers, not prospects, then
having their Gmail address isreally helpful, because 20% of
(18:52):
all people leave their employersevery year.
Yeah, Crazy.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
Yeah, I never even would have thought of that.
Like's like, right there, Ithink is worth worth the time
here.
Yeah, um, so you, you mentionedthe idea of of of being able to
do a crisis communication tocustomers right as a challenge,
and I probably said it before,like one of the hardest things
to do to fulfill in marketingops is, hey, we need to send a
(19:20):
letter.
You send an email to ourcustomers, right, and, as your
research is evidence right, mostthat is a really way harder
thing than it should be to do.
So take crisis communicationsin particular Like what can?
Why do you think it's so hardfor companies to be able to
(19:41):
identify those key people?
And then what can we do to tryto, what can our listeners do to
try to help their organizationsbe better prepared to do that
kind of thing?
Speaker 2 (19:55):
Yeah, I mean.
Think about a B2C company.
Think about United Airlineswith Newark and what's going on.
They have a playbook that saysif we have a massive outage in
one of our airports, this is howwe communicate with the media.
This is how we communicate withour customers.
This is how we communicate tocustomers who aren't impacted.
These are how we communicatewith customers who are impacted.
They're literally on their wayto the airport, so they've got
(20:18):
playbooks because they know thatthe cost of not doing that is
just huge.
B2b companies maybe don't thinkof their product as being that
essential.
I would argue that if somebodyspent $40,000, $50,000, $100,000
on a product, they want to goin and see the dashboard, go in
and use it.
(20:38):
And if there's a crisiscommunication or just a major
communication we're announcing amerger we want to let you know
because it's going to be in thenewspaper tomorrow.
That gets to segmentation.
Like, who are those people?
Because you don't want to sendto every Salesforce user that we
just purchased a company andhere's the impact to you.
You want to be able to do somepretty quick and heavy
(21:01):
segmentation.
Well, these are the people weneed to communicate with, and we
only need to communicate withcompanies in North America and
we only need to communicate withcompanies that have this sort
of profile.
Okay, that 100,000-person listis now down to $10,000.
Now, assuming that there'sanother part to it, which is the
email needs to get written, sothat's on corporate comms.
So I don't worry about that.
(21:21):
Somebody needs to get written,so that's on corporate comms.
I don't worry about that.
Somebody needs to hit the sendbutton.
I begin to worry about that.
And then you know, we incustomer marketing need to be
able to do the segmentationbecause you know, we know the
subtleties.
So you know, if the CEO callsthe head of corporate comms 9 pm
on Friday, on Tuesday and weneed an email out by Wednesday,
(21:42):
you know, are all those piecesin place or no?
Speaker 1 (21:49):
it's a draw.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
Everybody has to drop everything because nobody has
the playbook.
So you know, when I was incustomer marketing, I would go
to the CMO and say, hey, if weneed to send an emergency
communications out, do we have aplaybook?
It's like no, why would we everneed that?
Well, what if?
Why don't we develop somethingso that if there is an emergency
, everyone sort of knows what wedo and once a year we sort of
remind everybody what that is?
(22:11):
To me, it's an insurance policyfor everyone's jobs, because if
I was CEO and we couldn't getthat out the door and the open
rates were only 5% because wedidn't know who to send it to,
or send it to people who didn'tcare, that would be, oh my God,
why do I have a marketing team?
Why do I have a customermarketing team?
Why have a marketing ops teamif you can't do an emergency
communication?
So I think it's that awarenessand it's the playbook, and
(22:36):
marketing ops plays a key rolebecause in some ways, they're
the ones who hit the send button.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
Yeah.
So I'm going to tie this backto one of the things you said is
I think what you said is thatthe companies in your research
that were higher rated in termsof their customer database
tended to have across-functional team that had a
regular focus on that.
(23:01):
So if I'm kind of putting somethings together like one step is
just saying we need to havethat dedicated team that at
least part of their job is to bethinking about customer
database, it sounds like havinga plan for how we're going to
execute on different types ofkey customer communications,
whether it's crisis or whetherit's an announcement, whether
(23:23):
it's a more general one,whatever.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
A product release would be a classic.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
Yeah, changing our terms of service or whatever.
And then it feels like also apart of that might be what are
the gaps in our currentinfrastructure?
Both people process technologyprobably heavy on technology
where if we had to do somethingtomorrow like this would be
(23:48):
prioritized, like these are thethings we should go try to.
I'll say fix Fix may not be theright word, but fix so that we
are going to be able to do thosethings.
So then have that play.
It feels like all those thingswould be really valuable.
And to some degree, not actuallythat complicated to do.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
And that's why that group has such a big impact.
If you have that group, yourcustomer contact database health
school will be higher.
The three things you know.
Let's say you don't have one.
It's like, oh my God, michaeland Erwin, that was a great
suggestion.
Let's, you know, let me pull.
Let's start pulling thattogether within you know, within
my company.
Let's start pulling thattogether within my company.
And the number one task I wouldask them to do is create an
inventory of all the one-to-manycommunications that are sent
(24:27):
out from the company.
What's product sending,customer success?
What are those automated emailsthat no one's ever looked at in
the past three years?
What do they look like?
Yes, I think you'd be shockedwhat they look like.
So let's get that inventory ofthe things that we combine.
What are the open rates youknow?
(24:47):
How do we improve the openrates?
You know who actually said.
You know who hits the sendbutton, who you know who writes
the content you know.
So there are probably seven oreight things you want to know in
the inventory.
What platform you know?
Because at Forrester we havethree different platforms for
emails to go out the door.
So which platform is on?
Who owns that platform?
The second thing I would do is Iwould do a quick take 400 names
(25:07):
at random of your customercontact database and divvy it up
amongst a group.
Each of us has 50 names.
Let's go into LinkedIn and seewhat does it look like?
What's their title?
Are they still employed by thecompany and location?
You probably won't be that faroff to say, okay, this is the
state of our customer contactdatabase.
(25:27):
20% of our people this is whatI've learned working with
customers aren't employed at thecompany anymore.
30% we have the wrong title and40% we have the wrong location.
Not worry about fixing it yet,but just assessing it.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
Right, kevin, it's almost like a scorecard.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
Yeah, and the third would be if we have a crisis,
can we get an email out the door?
Let's look at that and figurethat out.
Those three things alone wouldkeep that group busy for
probably 90 days.
That's a great 30, 60, 90 forthat group, and then you report
back to people.
Well, you know, our databaseisn't good.
(26:03):
Okay, now let's figure out whodo we need to bring in, what
resources, what allocation tofix it.
Again, it's a journey thatcould take three or four more
months to do, but you at leastknow what you're doing and we
can't do a crisis communication.
So let's get corporate commsinvolved in this.
Let them head it up and say,hey, let's figure out what the
playbook is going to be.
Speaker 1 (26:24):
Those three things alone would be huge.
Yeah, and it feels like maybeI'm a step beyond here.
I'm going to kind of go back todifferent points in my career.
I was involved with helpingcustomer support teams, kind of
not really on the marketingfocus, but I'd always felt like
there was a great opportunitywith customer support teams,
like they're interacting withcustomers on a regular basis.
(26:46):
As part of their role should be, or could be, to help improve
the health and the quality andthe completeness of customer
data.
Yeah, so in the process ofsolving customer problems.
They could do that.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
Yeah, I mean two things.
One, the problem with that ismore and more companies are
outsourcing their support to AI,so customer support teams are
one of the teams that's reallygetting hurt by bots and AI.
Second is that you know when,like you call Blue Cross, blue
Shield, they always will confirmis this the right email?
(27:22):
Is this the right phone numberfor you?
Do you still live wherever youlive Now, because they're
updating their database all thetime?
Yeah, now, who was it?
Venmo did this amazing thing.
All of a sudden, just out ofthe blue, they said hey, we just
want to double check.
Is this still your best phonenumber, still your email address
?
Because they had built it intotheir system to update, because
(27:44):
people do change email addressesto update it.
So it'd be a big ask for a B2Bcompany, when somebody logs in,
for a little box to come up andsays, hey, this is where we have
you as located.
Is this all correct?
I think it's a lot to ask, butI think there are points in
various interactions thatsupport would be a good one,
even if it's AI and bot At theend of that interaction say hey,
(28:07):
we have you as this address.
You know, here's your contactinformation.
Can you please update it Now?
A lot of people won't, but somepeople will, and it'll at least
help you.
You know, get along the way.
Speaker 1 (28:26):
You're never going to have a 100% accurate database,
but it should be a lot betterthan it is today.
Okay, that all makes sense.
Okay, I love this idea of again.
I'm just sort of absorbing allthis and going like, actually,
this doesn't seem like it'd bethat hard.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
I know that's a funny thing.
Speaker 1 (28:38):
It's not that hard.
Which brings me to one of thethings I learned early on when I
kind of transitioned tomarketing is this whole concept
of that it's much less expensiveto retain a customer than to
acquire a new customer, right?
(28:59):
It continues to baffle me whymore companies are not really it
feels like similar to the fourPs right that really only one of
the Ps matters anymorepromotion.
But it feels like over the last15, 20 years, this idea, this
very classic understanding thatit costs less to retain
(29:20):
customers, has kind of been losta little bit.
So what do you attribute thatto?
Right, like, why aren't morecompanies and maybe it's more
true in smaller early stagecompanies than it is on growth
as a priority than it is atlarger enterprise companies?
But it still feels like there'sthis general trend that
customer marketing is not reallya focus area.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
Yeah, there are two types of customer marketers out
there and this is an importantdistinction.
If you think about the past 30years, customer experience is a
discipline that's been around along time More B2C, but
certainly in the B2B world,customer success has been around
15 years more in the B2B world,less in the B2C world.
(30:03):
Customer marketing is thenewbie on the block and when
customer marketers first came onboard, they were really
customer advocate practitioners.
Their job was references andreviews, referrals, things like
that case studies, stories,videos, and I think that and
this is a self-criticism we allsort of boxed ourselves into.
(30:26):
Well, we're the case studypeople.
We're the people that if youneed a reference, call us up,
but you know.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
It all feeds back into our acquisition.
Speaker 2 (30:37):
Right right.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
And it's all about new logo.
Speaker 2 (30:39):
Because case studies don't go to existing customers,
they go for new logos.
Yeah, because case studiesdon't go to existing customers,
they go for new logos.
Yeah.
Over the past few years we'restarting to see and I made that
pivot I've directed four,started up four customer
marketing practices.
The first two were customeradvocacy, the last two I started
pivoting and that's why I'm sopassionate about customer
contact databases into what'scalled lifecycle marketing.
(31:01):
Now some companies think of lifecycle as from prospecting to
renewal.
I'm talking about post saleslife cycle marketing.
So everything from onboardingto nurturing, and that's where,
obviously, customer contactdatabases become really critical
things like that.
And probably early on, 100% ofthe people were advocacy
(31:23):
practitioners.
Three, four years ago it's like90, 10.
Now it's more like 70, 30.
And beginning to see more andmore customer advocacy people
realizing that pure customeradvocacy is probably, unless
you're at a large company, isprobably not a long-term
strategy because that's where alot of the layoffs have been is
in that we have a customermarketing team of three we're
(31:45):
going to you know they just dostories.
Speaker 1 (31:47):
I don't mean to be flip, but not that they just do
stories, but the way theexecutives think about it.
Yeah, that is a perception andit's unfortunate, but it's true.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
Yeah, so we only need one person to, we still have it
.
But if one of those people wasa customer lifecycle market, it
Lifecycle market is like oh,that person is, they're helping
us identify people to cross-sell.
They're the ones sending outcrisis communications or paying
attention to it.
They're the ones that are doingthe one-to-many communication.
The product team loves thembecause product team doesn't
(32:17):
have to think about who needs to.
They'll write the message, butthey're the ones who figure out
who needs to get that message.
So, as customer advocatestransition to lifecycle
marketers and I would argue thatit'd probably be better for a
customer advocate's person totransition to lifecycle because
(32:38):
they understand customers asopposed to a marketing ops
prospecting person transitionover to customer lifecycle.
Yes, they'll understand howMarketo and Eloquent all these
systems work, but they're notgoing to understand what
motivates customers.
So their lens is theoperational lens and the
customer advocate lens isthey're thinking from the
(32:59):
customer experience, customerrelationship lens, and you could
teach the other one.
It's really hard to learn theway customers tick within an
organization.
Speaker 1 (33:10):
Yeah, at the same time I probably have said this
dozens of times on the podcastand certainly outside of it that
marketing and marketing opspeople need to spend more time
understanding customers, whetherthat's through sitting in or
listening to sales calls, orsitting in or listening to
(33:30):
customer success or whatevertheir organization has that is
focused on retaining customersand helping them.
I think it's an important one.
I'm a big believer that contextmatters Exactly Otherwise
exactly.
Otherwise, if you don't reallyunderstand the context of why
you're being asked to dosomething, you may fulfill the
(33:51):
exact thing that you're beingasked to do, but it may not
actually be what's needed, orthere might be a better way to
do it.
Speaker 2 (33:57):
With customers, context is harder to assess and
even more important than withprospects.
Because prospects, yes, thereis a context, but they're a
little bit easier to think aboutthan customers.
Because customers will changealso what their relationship
with you is and what their needsare vis-a-vis your product.
If they get promoted or moved to.
You know they're on a specialproject for three months, so
(34:17):
they're not going to use yoursoftware.
All of a sudden alarm bellsring.
They haven't logged in in threemonths.
No.
A sudden alarm bells ring.
They haven't logged in threemonths.
No, they're perfectly happy,they're just on another project
for three months.
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:26):
I mean?
I think I mean one another kindof, maybe, thought experiment
that people in marketing opscould do is to think about you
know what it's like for themwith their vendors, right?
So how does my view of thatvendor change over time from
(34:47):
when I'm in their mind, right, aprospect or a potential buyer
become a buyer.
We purchase something.
We now are onboarded and youknow, because I think by nature
of it is, I think about my owntimes going through that.
Right, the things I care aboutchange over that time.
Right, and I think it's a reallyimportant, like what I care
(35:09):
about as I'm going through theevaluation to purchase stage.
It's going to be like I verymuch want to make sure, like,
will this actually work?
Do I believe that the solutionwill be worth the cost over time
and the change effort orwhatever that goes into it?
Once that I go over that, thenI want them to be depending on
what it is right I think it'ssoftware in particular I want
(35:31):
them to be a partner with me andI want them to be responsive.
I want them to try tounderstand me and our business
in a level of detail deeper thanwhat it was before, and I think
maybe that's the flip.
There is like the level ofunderstanding and this is back
to your point right, we shouldhave a really high level of
(35:56):
clarity about our customers thatwe don't necessarily need when
they're prospects.
Speaker 2 (36:01):
And traditionally that's been laid onto customer
success managers, as has thehealth of the customer contact
database and most companies.
If you were to ask.
Well, who's responsible for it?
Oh, csms, they do that.
Well, first of all, with theadvent of digital customer
success, companies have lessCSMs.
They focus on the top 10% ofaccounts.
Everyone else is in a digitalcustomer success mode and and
(36:23):
you know the CSM yeah, they'llupdate the two people they talk
to at an account on a regularbasis.
Oh, you have a new title, oh,you moved.
I'll go in there and update.
But those people in the buyinggroups that have been added,
those seven or eight otherpeople in the list who don't
come to QBRs, they're not goingin there and going to LinkedIn
and say has something changedfor that person?
(36:44):
So they're only.
You know, if you were to do adatabase health assessment of
your main primary contact,that's probably in pretty good
shape because the CSMs probablyare updating them.
But when you get to that, youknow anybody outside the CSMs
have that one-to-onerelationship nobody's updating
it because you know everybodythinks the CSMs do it.
CSMs say we nobody's updating it.
Because you know everybodythinks CSMs do it.
(37:05):
Csms say we're not doing it.
And then everyone says well,everyone's responsible for it.
Well, whenever you heareveryone, it means nobody.
Speaker 1 (37:12):
Yeah, no, I totally.
It's one of my pet peeveswhenever I've been.
It's like I want.
I say this over and overClarity about decision-making is
a game-changer.
If you don't have that and youthink it's by committee, then
there's no one's takingresponsibility for the decision,
and so it makes it easier forpeople to abdicate that
(37:36):
responsibility.
But even worse is decisionsthat get made, and even at the
executive level who really?
Speaker 2 (37:43):
who really?
Oh, is it the CMO?
Who sort of is it under theirpurview?
Is it the, you know?
If they have a head of customersuccess, is it on their purview
?
Is it VP of sales?
I mean, who actually, you know,sort of thinks about the health
of their database?
I was talking to a CFO friendof mine and I asked him, like
you know, who's responsible forthe update of the database?
(38:06):
He goes well, at every handoffI expect to be updated.
So when the salesperson firstmeets, you know gets updated.
When the BDR gets updated, whenthey become a client, you know
the onboarding person updates it.
When it gets handed off to CSM,the CSM checks.
It's like none of these peopleare doing that, you know, at
each handoff is the problem.
Speaker 1 (38:26):
Yes, I mean we hadn't really hit on this, but so I'm
going to throw this at you alittle bit, because I don't
think we talked about it before.
It's like how do you, how wouldyour like, how would you
recommend to that CFO how tomeasure that database, health
and quality, and then use thatto then drive the way?
(38:49):
I would think that's likehere's how we're going to
measure the quality of ourcustomer database.
And then all the people that weexpect, whether it's tacit or
not, to be a part of making surethat score or whatever metrics
are going in the right direction, how are they then measured on
(39:09):
their part of that Does?
Speaker 2 (39:11):
that make sense.
Yeah, well, I think it was anopen prize report that said that
71% of all companies do nothave a data quality
understanding, a definition ofdata quality.
So I think, again, that mightbe something that group, that
cross communications group,would do is, let's define what
(39:31):
we mean by data quality and whatare minimal acceptables, like
we talked earlier.
You know our key people that'sgot to be 95%.
Our not so key 90.
Our less key 80%.
And what do we mean by that?
You know, do we just mean the?
We just mean the location,title, employer, or do we mean
utilization?
Well, we don't integrate.
(39:52):
That isn't integrated.
Well, okay, that should be onour roadmap for a year from now.
We should be able to at leasttie into the database health.
When did they first become auser, when did they first get
their username and password andwhen was the last time they
logged in?
From a segmentation perspective, that's really important,
because if somebody became auser three years ago and they've
(40:15):
never logged in, why do we keepon sending them emails like
this one they're going to openup.
That's how you get from theaverage email going out from
1,200 people to 800 people and,lo and behold, you clean up your
database, your open rate isgoing to go up five to 10
percentage points immediately.
Quicker than any AP testingquicker than any time of day.
(40:36):
Cleaning up the database willimprove someone's open rates and
give you a much more honestappraisal of your open rates
than anything else you could do.
Speaker 1 (40:43):
Yeah, I mean yeah, I think the fear that a lot of
people aren't familiar with thatis like, oh, we're going to
miss someone.
Or they're like do not hit itagain.
And I'm like but to your point,right, if that person's never
opened something like, why do wehit our head against the wall
and go well, this is a muchbetter email, right?
(41:04):
It's really not.
Speaker 2 (41:05):
They don't give a shit.
Let's go back to your questionwe talked about earlier about
doing a little, just a quickassessment.
Have people go into LinkedIn,take 50 names each.
In a week from now let's goback and report.
I mean, there are dataprocessors out there.
Most of the data processorswant one-year commitments and
they'll do a little sample dataprocessors out there.
Most of the data processorswant one-year commitments and
(41:26):
they'll do a little sample.
Yeah, we'll do 200 peoplesample for you.
But I would argue, take whatevercross-section makes sense.
You know you're 20% of yourbiggest accounts, all of the
contacts in those accounts.
Some will be that first level,second and third level.
Let's go to a data processorwho will do a one-off for me.
Some of them will, most of themwon't.
I'm happy to coordinate that.
And you know, let's give them2,000 or 3,000 names and now we
(41:51):
have some real data.
So we have a sense frommanually looking at that.
Okay, it's not good, but whatdoes that not good really mean?
Now let's take a few thousandnames spend.
You know it's not a lot ofmoney.
I mean we're talking penniesper name, not dollars per name.
To do a quick assessment.
You know what's the person'sfirst name, last name, company
title.
You'll get back a report andyou'll be able to see drop into
(42:13):
Excel and you know, you'll beable to see.
Okay, you know.
What patterns do we see?
What are we doing poorly, whatare we doing well?
And now you can start definingdata quality and also what are
those minimum expectations thatyou know we should never fall
below this.
Speaker 1 (42:29):
Yeah, yeah, there's a floor, so it's interesting, as
you were describing that process.
My initial thought, likedefining the patterns would be
seems like a good use case foran AI kind of tool, and we've
talked a little bit about AI andsome of the implications of
some of this, but what do yousee as some of the impacts of AI
(42:52):
on this good, bad orindifferent on this kind of
discipline?
Speaker 2 (42:56):
Well, I have a great quote.
It's in the report State of B2BCustomer Contact Databases from
Ed King, the CEO of OpenPrize.
The title of his article blogpost was AI will expose your
data quality issues and he saysAI is likely the one technology
that will expose data qualityissues the most, which may help
raise the awareness and urgencyof dealing with your
(43:16):
go-to-market data quality issues.
Maybe this will finally makethe executives care about and
invest in data quality.
So AI on its own isn't going to.
I can't go into chat GPT andsay, okay, here's my 10,000
customers.
Tell me where do they live,what's their current title and
where do they work.
Linkedin isn't going to letthat happen, so you need to go
(43:40):
in there and once you have it,then you can start using AI to
help with the segmentation.
That's a huge use case, I think, for it.
But that basic foundational dowe have the data right?
Ai is not going to help you.
Interesting, okay, what?
Speaker 1 (43:55):
about-.
Speaker 2 (43:56):
It'll magnify the issues, because you're and AI
will give you all sorts of Evenwhen you scrape LinkedIn, you
get all sorts of crazy falsepositives, like somebody just
got you know they work for IBMand they just, you know, join
the board directors of theirlocal YMCA, and that's at the
(44:16):
top of LinkedIn, and a new jobis board directors YMCA.
So you know.
So AI has got to be smartenough to say okay, and some of
the data processors are and someof them aren't.
I mean, the data processors useAI and say no, no, no, that's a
false, negative.
Board directors of YMCA this iswhere they really are at, even
though that's their second jobon that title.
(44:36):
So if you work with dataprocessors, are they smart
enough to use AI to be able tofigure some of those things out?
Speaker 1 (44:43):
Gotcha.
Yeah, it feels like there's alot of opportunity to help
around some of this stuff, butalso it sounds like some of the
impacts of AI have actually putpressure on the roles and jobs
that would be focused on thistoo.
Absolutely, yeah, okay, awesome.
(45:04):
So, erwin, I think we're goingto have to wrap it up here.
This has been a fun and veryeducational conversation for me.
I always enjoy these, eventhough what our listeners may
not realize like I usually talkto these folks before we record
and I'm always surprised that,like, oh, there's this thing
that came up in thisconversation that we actually
(45:24):
recorded, which I'm alwayssurprised that, like, oh,
there's this thing that came upin this conversation that we
actually recorded, which I'mgrateful for, that didn't come
up before.
So I definitely had a few ofthose and this idea of having a
cross-functional team that'sfocused on this area.
Speaker 2 (45:35):
Yeah, not so obvious, but a huge impact because it
touches a lot of things.
Speaker 1 (45:39):
Yeah, yeah, if our listeners make it this far, to
it.
Right, just that alone, liketaking that idea back to your
organization, I think, andarticulating why it would be
beneficial for the enterprise interms of the relative level of
(46:00):
quality of our database isprobably correlated to retention
.
Of quality of our database isprobably correlated to retention
.
Speaker 2 (46:07):
And you know Well, expansion, yeah, a lot of it
impacts a lot of people, evenlegal.
I mean compliance with emailprivacy regulations.
If legal knew what was going onwith locations, they would not
be happy.
Speaker 1 (46:18):
Absolutely Well.
Hey, Erwin, thank you so much.
So we can certainly put a linkto the report, if there's one,
in the show notes when wepublish that.
But if folks want to learn more, maybe talk with you.
What's the best way for them todo that?
Speaker 2 (46:33):
Yeah, connect with me on LinkedIn.
I am the only Erwin Hipsman onthe planet, so I'm easy to find.
And if you want to, my parentsknew about branding way before
anyone else.
And if you want to get your owncustomer health score, if you
download the report there arelinks to do it yourself, so go
in there and you can generateyour own score by answering the
same questions that everyoneelse asks Fantastic, it's
(46:54):
anonymous, so it's not a leadgeneration tool.
You can just go in there and doyour own health score.
Speaker 1 (47:00):
Love it.
Love it, erwin.
Thank you again.
So much, great conversation.
I'm sure our audience is goingto be the beneficiaries of that.
Thanks to our audience fortheir ongoing support and ideas.
As always, if you want to be aguest, have an idea for a guest
or a topic, feel free to reachout to Naomi, mike or me and
we'd be happy to get the ballrolling on that Until next time.
(47:23):
Bye, everybody.
Hello and welcome to another episode of OpsCast
brought to you byMarketingOpscom, powered by all
the MoPros out there.
I am your host, michael Hartman, flying solo once again.
Mike, I'm sure, is recoveringfrom Spring Fling 2025 and is
working, I'm sure.
Anyway, joining me today totalk about the importance of
(00:21):
customer marketing and customerdata is Erwin Hipsman.
Erwin is the founder ofRepetitos, a consultancy which
helps clients turn theircustomer data into a
revenue-generating advantage.
Prior to that, Erwin startedand led Forrester's customer
lifecycle marketing practice.
Before Forrester, he heldseveral leadership roles in
customer marketing, engagementand advocacy.
(00:43):
He started his career in salesand account management.
So, erwin, thanks for joiningme today?
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Yeah, looking forward to it.
I'm a big fan of OpsCast andjust give a little bit of quick
background.
I've been listening to it allthe time and then in the
February issue with Kobe Stock,it was you actually who gave
this great quote about customermarketing and customer databases
and why it's not a priority,and you know there are always
campaigns to happen for it.
(01:08):
It's in the report itself, thatquote, and I just reached out
and I said hey, you're talkingabout customer contact databases
.
Would you have me on?
I'm just a regular solopreneur,not a fancy guy, not on the in
crowd, and I really appreciatethe opportunity to chat with you
.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
Yeah, absolutely Well , I think it's one of those.
We opportunity to chat with you.
Yeah, absolutely Well, I thinkit's one of those.
We'll get into this a littlebit, but I think the idea that
customer marketing was one ofthe ones where I think a lot of
organizations, you know there'sa missing opportunity there,
right, and I think we'll talkabout some of the background and
reason why.
But, yeah, so after you reachedout, you know, you and I talked
a little bit and you wereworking on you kind of alluded
(01:43):
to it a paper that you I thinkis now published right On the
state of customer contactdatabase.
So maybe just very top levelbecause we may drill into some
more what are some of the keytakeaways from this customer
contact database paper?
And maybe just I think it wouldbe good also because I think
(02:07):
when I first heard this from you, I'd like for you to
distinguish, when you saycustomer contact database, what
you mean, because I think somepeople might, like me, have a
broader idea of what that meansit includes more than what I
think you are focused on.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
Yeah, so by customer contact database I mean the
individuals who, not theaccounts at the account level,
the individual level, who arethose contacts?
And there'll be two differenttypes of contacts.
Imagine a company likeSalesforce.
They might have 10 or 15business relationships that they
have within a particularaccount and then they'll have
(02:45):
hundreds, if not thousands, ofusers.
I'm less concerned with theindividual users because
customer marketing won'tcommunicate with individual
users, like I've never receivedan email from Salesforce about a
new product update, even thoughI've been a user at every
company I've been at.
Those emails go to their 10, 15, 20 people.
They have a relationship withthe account, whatever
(03:06):
segmentation, and then, if it'simportant, they'll let us know
that there's a change that needsto happen.
So it's really those anywhere.
You know a small company mightbe three to four people, a
larger company seven or eightpeople.
Enterprise company.
You know 15 to 20 people at theaccount that you need to
communicate with and know whothey are and keep track of.
(03:26):
You know did they leave thecompany?
Do they move to a differentlocation?
Do they have a new title?
Who are the people you reallyneed to keep track of.
From an account managementperspective, and as I've been
talking to more and more sort ofcompanies who are interested in
thinking about what do I dowith my customer contact
database challenge, I realizedthere was no data out there.
There's data on everything MQLsand all sorts of things.
(03:48):
There was no data.
It's like, okay, what is thestate of customer contact
databases?
And everyone will say, yeah,it's not that good, but what
does that really mean?
And so I endeavored to do aresearch report that I published
last week, and the four keytakeaways are, first of all, the
average score of customercontact database, and by that I
don't just mean how accurate isthe locations, it's more
(04:11):
everything around it, like doyou have an inventory?
Can you send out a crisiscommunication?
What are the open rates?
What's the health of thedatabase?
The average score was not good,it was 47% and, like I said in
the report, if we were in highschool, it might be
parent-teacher conference time,like who's our kid and you know
why is he or she getting 47% onthis test?
And so that was key resultnumber one, not a shock, and
(04:36):
everyone I talked to said, yeah,that's about right, but looking
at the underperformers versusthe overperformers.
We were able to say that bydoing some of the things that we
talked about in the report andI'll talk about the two key ones
in a second you can get thatscore from 47 to 62%.
Now we're talking about passinggrade.
It's never going to be above 80.
(04:57):
So you know you're doing prettywell if you're in the 60s and
70s.
We had some people who scored,you know, in the low 80s, the
60s and 70s, with some peoplewho scored, you know, in the low
80s.
And the two key factors thatwould impact the score the
highest one's obvious, one's notobvious.
So the non-obvious one is youknow, do you have a group that
(05:17):
meets on a formal, not anemergency, ad hoc basis could be
weekly, monthly, quarterly thatthinks about and coordinates
customer communications as awhole?
So here's this group of peoplein marketing, ops, customer
marketing, customer success,product marketing, whoever it
would be.
They get together and say, okay, how are we communicating with
customers?
So if you have that, then youknow.
(05:38):
If you don't have that, that'sa great way to impact that score
, because they're going to askall the tough questions.
And then the second one is,which is very obvious, is the
maturity of the segmentation.
The more mature thesegmentation you have, the
better your overall customercontact data score will be,
because it means you're thinkingabout well, how do we segment
our audience?
(05:59):
Is it by title?
Well, that's, you know, a lotof people tend to segment by
title, because that's easy,because you get their titles.
What about their role vis-a-visthe product?
You know, there are companieswhere CEOs will log in and be a
user.
There are companies where theCEO never logs in and they're
just.
You know, somebody gives themreports.
So what are those differentpersonas within the account that
(06:20):
you want to be able to track?
Speaker 1 (06:22):
So just real quick, something that you hit on that
just is this sort of analogousto the concept of buying groups
on the pre-customer standpoint.
So I don't know if you were inthe Forrester part that was
serious decisions.
But that concept of buyinggroups that they originated,
(06:43):
maybe they popularized, I don'tknow if they originated it, but
that idea of identifying who arethe people you need to be
involved with to get a win on adeal with a customer, to carry
that forward.
It sounds like having somethingsimilar to that on the customer
side is useful as well.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Yeah, no, absolutely.
I mean the number one reasonwhen I was managing customer
success teams, the number onereason why we lost the deal was
we were single-threaded.
So you know earlier I talkedabout you know, small companies
needed three to six people intheir customer contact database
and some of them might not evenbe users, they might not be
involved in the deal.
(07:21):
But who are those extra people?
And you probably need a newsort of role for them, so who
might be called buying center?
So I've got you know, let's say, 15 people in my customer
contact database.
These three are users, these twoare influencers and these five
are just people we want to keepan eye on.
Like are they moving withintheir company?
Did they leave the company?
(07:42):
They don't use the product butthey may.
In six months they may have anew role that all of a sudden
uses it and now they've got tolearn about your product and you
would communicate with themvery differently because they're
not a user.
But absolutely it's thatexpansion beyond just those five
people who the CSMs talk to.
Who else do you need to knowwithin the account?
(08:05):
Got it?
Speaker 1 (08:06):
Okay.
So I know you said that youmight not be like users of
whatever product service youhave might not be the primary
people you want to focus oncommunicating with as customers.
Do you think that's my?
I initially went to the idea oflike PLG type SaaS companies
(08:28):
right, where it's probably maybea little bit different because
you especially in the phasebefore, maybe if you have a
freemium kind of model where youcould have users who are not
paying yet their customers, soyou're going to be communicating
to them, but it's maybe stillconsidered not.
Maybe it's a differentiationbetween a freemium customer
(08:51):
versus a paying customer andmaybe that's a distinction.
But do you think there's adifference there where you do
want to do communications tocustomers, especially paying
customers in a PLG-typeorganization, or do you still
think it's most important tohave a limited set?
Who are your core people?
Speaker 2 (09:11):
Well, it depends on the company, obviously, but
anybody who you would need to,you'd want to communicate with
and, depending on thatsegmentation, so, like when I
was a forester, when I started,the average email there were
like 15,000, were that we reallyfocused on.
The average email went out toabout 1200 people.
I time I left it went out to800 people.
(09:32):
So you know who is that, who'sthe audience for that particular
communication and how do youknow, how do you really do that,
that deep segmentation, soyou're not sending information
to think to people that theydon't really care about, so
you're not sending informationto people that they don't really
care about.
And so in a PLG world, yeah,you know they might be that user
, might be a segment that gets avery different type of
(09:52):
communication than somebody elsethan, like, the admins would
get.
You know who get a verydifferent, you know, obviously,
very different type ofcommunication from each other.
And that's, you know that gets,you know that's, a much more
mature organization than most.
And you can't do that without ahealthy customer contact
database, because if you don'thave the titles right,
particularly the titles, then itgets to be a real challenge.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
Well, and titles?
I mean you said titles are easyto segment by.
I would say that, yeah, on thesurface it seems like it's easy,
but as soon as you start to getany level of detail it can be
misleading, because just takethe example like we only want to
communicate to vice presidents,right, that sounds great, until
you start talking aboutfinancial services firms.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
Of course.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
Right, where, like, virtually everybody's a vice
president of something, eventhough that's not really the.
It doesn't correspond to thelevel of responsibility as a
vice president in many otherorganizations, or the size of
the organization matters.
Right, a vice president at asmall organization might be
equivalent to a director or evena senior manager at a really
(10:56):
large organization in terms ofscope of responsibility.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
Yeah, a lot of companies have title inflation.
We're not going to give you araise, but we're going to give
you a nice title.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
It's like oh, but I'm still doing the same thing.
Yeah, I haven't used that term.
That is a term I have used alot and I think it's
particularly common in marketingand marketing ops too.
Yeah, exactly.
So that's a whole.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
And AI can only do so much, I mean.
Ai can drop a list of 10,000people in a spreadsheet and tell
what to do, but there are goingto be a lot of subtleties
around the edge that's just notgoing to pick up.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
Yeah, so I just want to make sure I understand.
So when you talk aboutcustomers, you're talking about
people who have actually paidfor whatever product or service.
You Absolutely actually paidfor whatever product service.
You Absolutely People fromcompanies or organizations or
individual people who have paidfor your product or service, as
(11:49):
opposed to prospects or leadsAbsolutely yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Prospects in a whole different world.
Accuracy I mean I would arguethat if I had a customer contact
database and let's say I didsome basic segmentation my most
important people, my mediumimportant people, my least
important people you would neversegment by that.
Let's just keep it simple.
I would argue that you probablyneed 98% accuracy on your most
important people and the mediumimportant people may be 90%.
(12:18):
The least important people maybe 80% and you don't worry about
them.
You focus on those first twotiers.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
But it seems like to me I don't know what like that
seems like they would all behigher in terms of the level of
quality and trust you have inthat data compared to people who
are pre-customer stage.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
Yeah, exactly like no , you want to know.
Location is really importantbecause you start doing events.
You know I've worked for swisscompanies and they think I'm in
switzerland.
They invite me to events inLondon and I'm living in Boston.
They never invite me to anevent in Boston because they
assume I live where theheadquarters is.
You know that's where it startshurting people across the
organization.
Other people not just marketingops and not just customer
(12:55):
marketing.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
Yeah, you know, it's funny you bring that up, that
idea of location, and I canremember a specific example at a
company I worked for where alead had come in, got routed
because there was some data apprequest from one country to
another country, which meant awhole different region for lead,
(13:16):
like where the SDR would be.
Sdr picks it up, turns out whathappened is and I think of the
(13:38):
countries were Australia andIndia and it'll make more sense.
So when it got routed to thewrong place and people were like
what happened and it's not agreat thing Digging through what
happened the data got appended,changed it from Australia to
New Zealand or Australia toIndia.
That's because the personactually based on LinkedIn
(13:59):
profile or whatever, was inIndia.
But it also was pretty evidentby looking at the profile the
person worked for the kind ofcompany that was a service
provider to other companies,right outsourced type work.
My suspicion I don't know thatever got validated was that
person was because he put inanother company name in
australia, like.
So my guess is he's working on,being working on as a
(14:20):
consultant contractor forthird-party company based in
Australia, was doing someresearch for them, and it got
rerouted to somebody becausecompany name got changed,
location got changed, but that'snot really what the intent was
right, and so that's the kind ofstuff that can go wrong if
you're not careful.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
And if you have translations, then I'm getting
everything in Swiss German, andI happen to, even if I was in
Switzerland.
I have translations.
Then I'm getting everything inSwiss German and I happen to,
even if I wasn't Swiss, I doSwiss French.
I'm getting everything inGerman.
Speaker 1 (14:50):
Yeah, so I think, yeah.
So it's interesting because itmakes sense that you really want
that customer data.
But if a big part of that scoreyou talked about on your report
that it was 47%, I'm going toguess that a part of that score
you talked about on your reportthat it was 47%, I'm going to
guess that a part of that isbecause it just wasn't accurate
enough to be able to action on.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
Okay, now, one of the questions we ask people is you
know, how would you rate theaccuracy of your database?
You know accuracy and usabilityof it.
People may not know theaccuracy of it, but they do know
the usability of it.
They have a gut sense of that.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
Yeah, yeah, knowing that our audience is primarily
ops type people, something youand I talked about is that it
would be good for people inthese roles to better understand
how to support customermarketing.
That's even if a company evenhas a customer marketing focus
(15:43):
at all, which I'm finding lessand less common.
So one of the suggestions youshared with me was that really
you might like, if you're amarketing ops, like, yes, you
should be coordinating withsales.
You know sales ops if there's asales ops function in your
marketing ops.
But your suggestion is likealso reach out to customer
(16:04):
success or customer support,depending on what you have in
your marketing ops.
But your suggestion is likealso reach out to customer
success or customer support,depending on what you have at
your organization, and learn howto collaborate with them as
well.
And then, obviously, a customermarketing team if there is one.
So talk about maybe talk alittle more about that and why
that would be beneficial for ourfolks in our office.
Speaker 2 (16:20):
Yeah, I've thought with a story when I was at a
company called Crimson Hexagon.
It's not there anymore socialmedia analytics.
You know we would go tomarketing ops and we need to
send this customer communicationout.
And they go, well, we'll do itat the end of the month.
And it's like, well, no, weneed it sooner than that.
And the end of the month wouldcome.
It's like no, we didn't get anyemails out the door to the
(16:44):
customers.
Can I just buy my own emailmarketing package?
And she said, yeah, just do it.
So we bought our own emailmarketing package.
It took a year for themarketing office people to
realize we had done that becausewe left them alone.
We stopped asking and then theygot really mad at us, like what
do you mean you're doing this?
We said you know we can't getany emails out to her because we
(17:05):
always get pushed to the end ofthe line.
And then they said okay, cancelthe contract.
We will put you in the linelike everyone else.
And so in every company I'veworked at, I've never had a
marketing ops person come to meand say hey, you communicate
with customers all the time.
What can we do to help you?
(17:25):
What do you need?
Well, you know, what would bereally helpful is a field in the
CRM that lets us know what theperson's Gmail address is,
because when we first meet them,they put their non-company
address in, but once they becomea customer, then you replace it
(17:45):
with their company address.
We want to know what theirGmail address is because when
that person leaves, we want tobe able to reach out to them
because they're a potential lead.
But we don't have their emailanymore, and now we've got to
send in mails through LinkedInand they don't open them up.
Wouldn't it be nice?
Speaker 1 (18:05):
And it's like oh yeah , we never thought about that.
That's actually a good idea.
What's funny is there are nowplatforms that try to mimic that
.
You've spent a lot of money,like track people moving.
What you just described wouldbe a pretty simple I'm assuming,
as long as there's somediscipline, like anything else.
Right, maintaining thatpersonal email address along
(18:25):
with their work email address?
Yeah, I mean, I would encouragepeople to.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
I would encourage companies, when they have those
landing pages, to ask people fortheir Gmail address.
And then you know, as they movethrough that, through the
pipeline, and they hit a certainstage now let's get their
company address, but now you'vegot both.
And it's counterintuitive thatyou need both email addresses,
but now you've got both.
And it's counterintuitive thatyou need both email addresses.
But if you think aboutcustomers, not prospects, then
having their Gmail address isreally helpful, because 20% of
(18:52):
all people leave their employersevery year.
Yeah, Crazy.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
Yeah, I never even would have thought of that.
Like's like, right there, Ithink is worth worth the time
here.
Yeah, um, so you, you mentionedthe idea of of of being able to
do a crisis communication tocustomers right as a challenge,
and I probably said it before,like one of the hardest things
to do to fulfill in marketingops is, hey, we need to send a
(19:20):
letter.
You send an email to ourcustomers, right, and, as your
research is evidence right, mostthat is a really way harder
thing than it should be to do.
So take crisis communicationsin particular Like what can?
Why do you think it's so hardfor companies to be able to
(19:41):
identify those key people?
And then what can we do to tryto, what can our listeners do to
try to help their organizationsbe better prepared to do that
kind of thing?
Speaker 2 (19:55):
Yeah, I mean.
Think about a B2C company.
Think about United Airlineswith Newark and what's going on.
They have a playbook that saysif we have a massive outage in
one of our airports, this is howwe communicate with the media.
This is how we communicate withour customers.
This is how we communicate tocustomers who aren't impacted.
These are how we communicatewith customers who are impacted.
They're literally on their wayto the airport, so they've got
(20:18):
playbooks because they know thatthe cost of not doing that is
just huge.
B2b companies maybe don't thinkof their product as being that
essential.
I would argue that if somebodyspent $40,000, $50,000, $100,000
on a product, they want to goin and see the dashboard, go in
and use it.
(20:38):
And if there's a crisiscommunication or just a major
communication we're announcing amerger we want to let you know
because it's going to be in thenewspaper tomorrow.
That gets to segmentation.
Like, who are those people?
Because you don't want to sendto every Salesforce user that we
just purchased a company andhere's the impact to you.
You want to be able to do somepretty quick and heavy
(21:01):
segmentation.
Well, these are the people weneed to communicate with, and we
only need to communicate withcompanies in North America and
we only need to communicate withcompanies that have this sort
of profile.
Okay, that 100,000-person listis now down to $10,000.
Now, assuming that there'sanother part to it, which is the
email needs to get written, sothat's on corporate comms.
So I don't worry about that.
(21:21):
Somebody needs to get written,so that's on corporate comms.
I don't worry about that.
Somebody needs to hit the sendbutton.
I begin to worry about that.
And then you know, we incustomer marketing need to be
able to do the segmentationbecause you know, we know the
subtleties.
So you know, if the CEO callsthe head of corporate comms 9 pm
on Friday, on Tuesday and weneed an email out by Wednesday,
(21:42):
you know, are all those piecesin place or no?
Speaker 1 (21:49):
it's a draw.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
Everybody has to drop everything because nobody has
the playbook.
So you know, when I was incustomer marketing, I would go
to the CMO and say, hey, if weneed to send an emergency
communications out, do we have aplaybook?
It's like no, why would we everneed that?
Well, what if?
Why don't we develop somethingso that if there is an emergency
, everyone sort of knows what wedo and once a year we sort of
remind everybody what that is?
(22:11):
To me, it's an insurance policyfor everyone's jobs, because if
I was CEO and we couldn't getthat out the door and the open
rates were only 5% because wedidn't know who to send it to,
or send it to people who didn'tcare, that would be, oh my God,
why do I have a marketing team?
Why do I have a customermarketing team?
Why have a marketing ops teamif you can't do an emergency
communication?
So I think it's that awarenessand it's the playbook, and
(22:36):
marketing ops plays a key rolebecause in some ways, they're
the ones who hit the send button.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
Yeah.
So I'm going to tie this backto one of the things you said is
I think what you said is thatthe companies in your research
that were higher rated in termsof their customer database
tended to have across-functional team that had a
regular focus on that.
(23:01):
So if I'm kind of putting somethings together like one step is
just saying we need to havethat dedicated team that at
least part of their job is to bethinking about customer
database, it sounds like havinga plan for how we're going to
execute on different types ofkey customer communications,
whether it's crisis or whetherit's an announcement, whether
(23:23):
it's a more general one,whatever.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
A product release would be a classic.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
Yeah, changing our terms of service or whatever.
And then it feels like also apart of that might be what are
the gaps in our currentinfrastructure?
Both people process technologyprobably heavy on technology
where if we had to do somethingtomorrow like this would be
(23:48):
prioritized, like these are thethings we should go try to.
I'll say fix Fix may not be theright word, but fix so that we
are going to be able to do thosethings.
So then have that play.
It feels like all those thingswould be really valuable.
And to some degree, not actuallythat complicated to do.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
And that's why that group has such a big impact.
If you have that group, yourcustomer contact database health
school will be higher.
The three things you know.
Let's say you don't have one.
It's like, oh my God, michaeland Erwin, that was a great
suggestion.
Let's, you know, let me pull.
Let's start pulling thattogether within you know, within
my company.
Let's start pulling thattogether within my company.
And the number one task I wouldask them to do is create an
inventory of all the one-to-manycommunications that are sent
(24:27):
out from the company.
What's product sending,customer success?
What are those automated emailsthat no one's ever looked at in
the past three years?
What do they look like?
Yes, I think you'd be shockedwhat they look like.
So let's get that inventory ofthe things that we combine.
What are the open rates youknow?
(24:47):
How do we improve the openrates?
You know who actually said.
You know who hits the sendbutton, who you know who writes
the content you know.
So there are probably seven oreight things you want to know in
the inventory.
What platform you know?
Because at Forrester we havethree different platforms for
emails to go out the door.
So which platform is on?
Who owns that platform?
The second thing I would do is Iwould do a quick take 400 names
(25:07):
at random of your customercontact database and divvy it up
amongst a group.
Each of us has 50 names.
Let's go into LinkedIn and seewhat does it look like?
What's their title?
Are they still employed by thecompany and location?
You probably won't be that faroff to say, okay, this is the
state of our customer contactdatabase.
(25:27):
20% of our people this is whatI've learned working with
customers aren't employed at thecompany anymore.
30% we have the wrong title and40% we have the wrong location.
Not worry about fixing it yet,but just assessing it.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
Right, kevin, it's almost like a scorecard.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
Yeah, and the third would be if we have a crisis,
can we get an email out the door?
Let's look at that and figurethat out.
Those three things alone wouldkeep that group busy for
probably 90 days.
That's a great 30, 60, 90 forthat group, and then you report
back to people.
Well, you know, our databaseisn't good.
(26:03):
Okay, now let's figure out whodo we need to bring in, what
resources, what allocation tofix it.
Again, it's a journey thatcould take three or four more
months to do, but you at leastknow what you're doing and we
can't do a crisis communication.
So let's get corporate commsinvolved in this.
Let them head it up and say,hey, let's figure out what the
playbook is going to be.
Speaker 1 (26:24):
Those three things alone would be huge.
Yeah, and it feels like maybeI'm a step beyond here.
I'm going to kind of go back todifferent points in my career.
I was involved with helpingcustomer support teams, kind of
not really on the marketingfocus, but I'd always felt like
there was a great opportunitywith customer support teams,
like they're interacting withcustomers on a regular basis.
(26:46):
As part of their role should be, or could be, to help improve
the health and the quality andthe completeness of customer
data.
Yeah, so in the process ofsolving customer problems.
They could do that.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
Yeah, I mean two things.
One, the problem with that ismore and more companies are
outsourcing their support to AI,so customer support teams are
one of the teams that's reallygetting hurt by bots and AI.
Second is that you know when,like you call Blue Cross, blue
Shield, they always will confirmis this the right email?
(27:22):
Is this the right phone numberfor you?
Do you still live wherever youlive Now, because they're
updating their database all thetime?
Yeah, now, who was it?
Venmo did this amazing thing.
All of a sudden, just out ofthe blue, they said hey, we just
want to double check.
Is this still your best phonenumber, still your email address
?
Because they had built it intotheir system to update, because
(27:44):
people do change email addressesto update it.
So it'd be a big ask for a B2Bcompany, when somebody logs in,
for a little box to come up andsays, hey, this is where we have
you as located.
Is this all correct?
I think it's a lot to ask, butI think there are points in
various interactions thatsupport would be a good one,
even if it's AI and bot At theend of that interaction say hey,
(28:07):
we have you as this address.
You know, here's your contactinformation.
Can you please update it Now?
A lot of people won't, but somepeople will, and it'll at least
help you.
You know, get along the way.
Speaker 1 (28:26):
You're never going to have a 100% accurate database,
but it should be a lot betterthan it is today.
Okay, that all makes sense.
Okay, I love this idea of again.
I'm just sort of absorbing allthis and going like, actually,
this doesn't seem like it'd bethat hard.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
I know that's a funny thing.
Speaker 1 (28:38):
It's not that hard.
Which brings me to one of thethings I learned early on when I
kind of transitioned tomarketing is this whole concept
of that it's much less expensiveto retain a customer than to
acquire a new customer, right?
(28:59):
It continues to baffle me whymore companies are not really it
feels like similar to the fourPs right that really only one of
the Ps matters anymorepromotion.
But it feels like over the last15, 20 years, this idea, this
very classic understanding thatit costs less to retain
(29:20):
customers, has kind of been losta little bit.
So what do you attribute thatto?
Right, like, why aren't morecompanies and maybe it's more
true in smaller early stagecompanies than it is on growth
as a priority than it is atlarger enterprise companies?
But it still feels like there'sthis general trend that
customer marketing is not reallya focus area.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
Yeah, there are two types of customer marketers out
there and this is an importantdistinction.
If you think about the past 30years, customer experience is a
discipline that's been around along time More B2C, but
certainly in the B2B world,customer success has been around
15 years more in the B2B world,less in the B2C world.
(30:03):
Customer marketing is thenewbie on the block and when
customer marketers first came onboard, they were really
customer advocate practitioners.
Their job was references andreviews, referrals, things like
that case studies, stories,videos, and I think that and
this is a self-criticism we allsort of boxed ourselves into.
(30:26):
Well, we're the case studypeople.
We're the people that if youneed a reference, call us up,
but you know.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
It all feeds back into our acquisition.
Speaker 2 (30:37):
Right right.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
And it's all about new logo.
Speaker 2 (30:39):
Because case studies don't go to existing customers,
they go for new logos.
Yeah, because case studiesdon't go to existing customers,
they go for new logos.
Yeah.
Over the past few years we'restarting to see and I made that
pivot I've directed four,started up four customer
marketing practices.
The first two were customeradvocacy, the last two I started
pivoting and that's why I'm sopassionate about customer
contact databases into what'scalled lifecycle marketing.
(31:01):
Now some companies think of lifecycle as from prospecting to
renewal.
I'm talking about post saleslife cycle marketing.
So everything from onboardingto nurturing, and that's where,
obviously, customer contactdatabases become really critical
things like that.
And probably early on, 100% ofthe people were advocacy
(31:23):
practitioners.
Three, four years ago it's like90, 10.
Now it's more like 70, 30.
And beginning to see more andmore customer advocacy people
realizing that pure customeradvocacy is probably, unless
you're at a large company, isprobably not a long-term
strategy because that's where alot of the layoffs have been is
in that we have a customermarketing team of three we're
(31:45):
going to you know they just dostories.
Speaker 1 (31:47):
I don't mean to be flip, but not that they just do
stories, but the way theexecutives think about it.
Yeah, that is a perception andit's unfortunate, but it's true.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
Yeah, so we only need one person to, we still have it
.
But if one of those people wasa customer lifecycle market, it
Lifecycle market is like oh,that person is, they're helping
us identify people to cross-sell.
They're the ones sending outcrisis communications or paying
attention to it.
They're the ones that are doingthe one-to-many communication.
The product team loves thembecause product team doesn't
(32:17):
have to think about who needs to.
They'll write the message, butthey're the ones who figure out
who needs to get that message.
So, as customer advocatestransition to lifecycle
marketers and I would argue thatit'd probably be better for a
customer advocate's person totransition to lifecycle because
(32:38):
they understand customers asopposed to a marketing ops
prospecting person transitionover to customer lifecycle.
Yes, they'll understand howMarketo and Eloquent all these
systems work, but they're notgoing to understand what
motivates customers.
So their lens is theoperational lens and the
customer advocate lens isthey're thinking from the
(32:59):
customer experience, customerrelationship lens, and you could
teach the other one.
It's really hard to learn theway customers tick within an
organization.
Speaker 1 (33:10):
Yeah, at the same time I probably have said this
dozens of times on the podcastand certainly outside of it that
marketing and marketing opspeople need to spend more time
understanding customers, whetherthat's through sitting in or
listening to sales calls, orsitting in or listening to
(33:30):
customer success or whatevertheir organization has that is
focused on retaining customersand helping them.
I think it's an important one.
I'm a big believer that contextmatters Exactly Otherwise
exactly.
Otherwise, if you don't reallyunderstand the context of why
you're being asked to dosomething, you may fulfill the
(33:51):
exact thing that you're beingasked to do, but it may not
actually be what's needed, orthere might be a better way to
do it.
Speaker 2 (33:57):
With customers, context is harder to assess and
even more important than withprospects.
Because prospects, yes, thereis a context, but they're a
little bit easier to think aboutthan customers.
Because customers will changealso what their relationship
with you is and what their needsare vis-a-vis your product.
If they get promoted or moved to.
You know they're on a specialproject for three months, so
(34:17):
they're not going to use yoursoftware.
All of a sudden alarm bellsring.
They haven't logged in in threemonths.
No.
A sudden alarm bells ring.
They haven't logged in threemonths.
No, they're perfectly happy,they're just on another project
for three months.
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:26):
I mean?
I think I mean one another kindof, maybe, thought experiment
that people in marketing opscould do is to think about you
know what it's like for themwith their vendors, right?
So how does my view of thatvendor change over time from
(34:47):
when I'm in their mind, right, aprospect or a potential buyer
become a buyer.
We purchase something.
We now are onboarded and youknow, because I think by nature
of it is, I think about my owntimes going through that.
Right, the things I care aboutchange over that time.
Right, and I think it's a reallyimportant, like what I care
(35:09):
about as I'm going through theevaluation to purchase stage.
It's going to be like I verymuch want to make sure, like,
will this actually work?
Do I believe that the solutionwill be worth the cost over time
and the change effort orwhatever that goes into it?
Once that I go over that, thenI want them to be depending on
what it is right I think it'ssoftware in particular I want
(35:31):
them to be a partner with me andI want them to be responsive.
I want them to try tounderstand me and our business
in a level of detail deeper thanwhat it was before, and I think
maybe that's the flip.
There is like the level ofunderstanding and this is back
to your point right, we shouldhave a really high level of
(35:56):
clarity about our customers thatwe don't necessarily need when
they're prospects.
Speaker 2 (36:01):
And traditionally that's been laid onto customer
success managers, as has thehealth of the customer contact
database and most companies.
If you were to ask.
Well, who's responsible for it?
Oh, csms, they do that.
Well, first of all, with theadvent of digital customer
success, companies have lessCSMs.
They focus on the top 10% ofaccounts.
Everyone else is in a digitalcustomer success mode and and
(36:23):
you know the CSM yeah, they'llupdate the two people they talk
to at an account on a regularbasis.
Oh, you have a new title, oh,you moved.
I'll go in there and update.
But those people in the buyinggroups that have been added,
those seven or eight otherpeople in the list who don't
come to QBRs, they're not goingin there and going to LinkedIn
and say has something changedfor that person?
(36:44):
So they're only.
You know, if you were to do adatabase health assessment of
your main primary contact,that's probably in pretty good
shape because the CSMs probablyare updating them.
But when you get to that, youknow anybody outside the CSMs
have that one-to-onerelationship nobody's updating
it because you know everybodythinks the CSMs do it.
CSMs say we nobody's updating it.
Because you know everybodythinks CSMs do it.
(37:05):
Csms say we're not doing it.
And then everyone says well,everyone's responsible for it.
Well, whenever you heareveryone, it means nobody.
Speaker 1 (37:12):
Yeah, no, I totally.
It's one of my pet peeveswhenever I've been.
It's like I want.
I say this over and overClarity about decision-making is
a game-changer.
If you don't have that and youthink it's by committee, then
there's no one's takingresponsibility for the decision,
and so it makes it easier forpeople to abdicate that
(37:36):
responsibility.
But even worse is decisionsthat get made, and even at the
executive level who really?
Speaker 2 (37:43):
who really?
Oh, is it the CMO?
Who sort of is it under theirpurview?
Is it the, you know?
If they have a head of customersuccess, is it on their purview
?
Is it VP of sales?
I mean, who actually, you know,sort of thinks about the health
of their database?
I was talking to a CFO friendof mine and I asked him, like
you know, who's responsible forthe update of the database?
(38:06):
He goes well, at every handoffI expect to be updated.
So when the salesperson firstmeets, you know gets updated.
When the BDR gets updated, whenthey become a client, you know
the onboarding person updates it.
When it gets handed off to CSM,the CSM checks.
It's like none of these peopleare doing that, you know, at
each handoff is the problem.
Speaker 1 (38:26):
Yes, I mean we hadn't really hit on this, but so I'm
going to throw this at you alittle bit, because I don't
think we talked about it before.
It's like how do you, how wouldyour like, how would you
recommend to that CFO how tomeasure that database, health
and quality, and then use thatto then drive the way?
(38:49):
I would think that's likehere's how we're going to
measure the quality of ourcustomer database.
And then all the people that weexpect, whether it's tacit or
not, to be a part of making surethat score or whatever metrics
are going in the right direction, how are they then measured on
(39:09):
their part of that Does?
Speaker 2 (39:11):
that make sense.
Yeah, well, I think it was anopen prize report that said that
71% of all companies do nothave a data quality
understanding, a definition ofdata quality.
So I think, again, that mightbe something that group, that
cross communications group,would do is, let's define what
(39:31):
we mean by data quality and whatare minimal acceptables, like
we talked earlier.
You know our key people that'sgot to be 95%.
Our not so key 90.
Our less key 80%.
And what do we mean by that?
You know, do we just mean the?
We just mean the location,title, employer, or do we mean
utilization?
Well, we don't integrate.
(39:52):
That isn't integrated.
Well, okay, that should be onour roadmap for a year from now.
We should be able to at leasttie into the database health.
When did they first become auser, when did they first get
their username and password andwhen was the last time they
logged in?
From a segmentation perspective, that's really important,
because if somebody became auser three years ago and they've
(40:15):
never logged in, why do we keepon sending them emails like
this one they're going to openup.
That's how you get from theaverage email going out from
1,200 people to 800 people and,lo and behold, you clean up your
database, your open rate isgoing to go up five to 10
percentage points immediately.
Quicker than any AP testingquicker than any time of day.
(40:36):
Cleaning up the database willimprove someone's open rates and
give you a much more honestappraisal of your open rates
than anything else you could do.
Speaker 1 (40:43):
Yeah, I mean yeah, I think the fear that a lot of
people aren't familiar with thatis like, oh, we're going to
miss someone.
Or they're like do not hit itagain.
And I'm like but to your point,right, if that person's never
opened something like, why do wehit our head against the wall
and go well, this is a muchbetter email, right?
(41:04):
It's really not.
Speaker 2 (41:05):
They don't give a shit.
Let's go back to your questionwe talked about earlier about
doing a little, just a quickassessment.
Have people go into LinkedIn,take 50 names each.
In a week from now let's goback and report.
I mean, there are dataprocessors out there.
Most of the data processorswant one-year commitments and
they'll do a little sample dataprocessors out there.
Most of the data processorswant one-year commitments and
(41:26):
they'll do a little sample.
Yeah, we'll do 200 peoplesample for you.
But I would argue, take whatevercross-section makes sense.
You know you're 20% of yourbiggest accounts, all of the
contacts in those accounts.
Some will be that first level,second and third level.
Let's go to a data processorwho will do a one-off for me.
Some of them will, most of themwon't.
I'm happy to coordinate that.
And you know, let's give them2,000 or 3,000 names and now we
(41:51):
have some real data.
So we have a sense frommanually looking at that.
Okay, it's not good, but whatdoes that not good really mean?
Now let's take a few thousandnames spend.
You know it's not a lot ofmoney.
I mean we're talking penniesper name, not dollars per name.
To do a quick assessment.
You know what's the person'sfirst name, last name, company
title.
You'll get back a report andyou'll be able to see drop into
(42:13):
Excel and you know, you'll beable to see.
Okay, you know.
What patterns do we see?
What are we doing poorly, whatare we doing well?
And now you can start definingdata quality and also what are
those minimum expectations thatyou know we should never fall
below this.
Speaker 1 (42:29):
Yeah, yeah, there's a floor, so it's interesting, as
you were describing that process.
My initial thought, likedefining the patterns would be
seems like a good use case foran AI kind of tool, and we've
talked a little bit about AI andsome of the implications of
some of this, but what do yousee as some of the impacts of AI
(42:52):
on this good, bad orindifferent on this kind of
discipline?
Speaker 2 (42:56):
Well, I have a great quote.
It's in the report State of B2BCustomer Contact Databases from
Ed King, the CEO of OpenPrize.
The title of his article blogpost was AI will expose your
data quality issues and he saysAI is likely the one technology
that will expose data qualityissues the most, which may help
raise the awareness and urgencyof dealing with your
(43:16):
go-to-market data quality issues.
Maybe this will finally makethe executives care about and
invest in data quality.
So AI on its own isn't going to.
I can't go into chat GPT andsay, okay, here's my 10,000
customers.
Tell me where do they live,what's their current title and
where do they work.
Linkedin isn't going to letthat happen, so you need to go
(43:40):
in there and once you have it,then you can start using AI to
help with the segmentation.
That's a huge use case, I think, for it.
But that basic foundational dowe have the data right?
Ai is not going to help you.
Interesting, okay, what?
Speaker 1 (43:55):
about-.
Speaker 2 (43:56):
It'll magnify the issues, because you're and AI
will give you all sorts of Evenwhen you scrape LinkedIn, you
get all sorts of crazy falsepositives, like somebody just
got you know they work for IBMand they just, you know, join
the board directors of theirlocal YMCA, and that's at the
(44:16):
top of LinkedIn, and a new jobis board directors YMCA.
So you know.
So AI has got to be smartenough to say okay, and some of
the data processors are and someof them aren't.
I mean, the data processors useAI and say no, no, no, that's a
false, negative.
Board directors of YMCA this iswhere they really are at, even
though that's their second jobon that title.
(44:36):
So if you work with dataprocessors, are they smart
enough to use AI to be able tofigure some of those things out?
Speaker 1 (44:43):
Gotcha.
Yeah, it feels like there's alot of opportunity to help
around some of this stuff, butalso it sounds like some of the
impacts of AI have actually putpressure on the roles and jobs
that would be focused on thistoo.
Absolutely, yeah, okay, awesome.
(45:04):
So, erwin, I think we're goingto have to wrap it up here.
This has been a fun and veryeducational conversation for me.
I always enjoy these, eventhough what our listeners may
not realize like I usually talkto these folks before we record
and I'm always surprised that,like, oh, there's this thing
that came up in thisconversation that we actually
(45:24):
recorded, which I'm alwayssurprised that, like, oh,
there's this thing that came upin this conversation that we
actually recorded, which I'mgrateful for, that didn't come
up before.
So I definitely had a few ofthose and this idea of having a
cross-functional team that'sfocused on this area.
Speaker 2 (45:35):
Yeah, not so obvious, but a huge impact because it
touches a lot of things.
Speaker 1 (45:39):
Yeah, yeah, if our listeners make it this far, to
it.
Right, just that alone, liketaking that idea back to your
organization, I think, andarticulating why it would be
beneficial for the enterprise interms of the relative level of
(46:00):
quality of our database isprobably correlated to retention
.
Of quality of our database isprobably correlated to retention
.
Speaker 2 (46:07):
And you know Well, expansion, yeah, a lot of it
impacts a lot of people, evenlegal.
I mean compliance with emailprivacy regulations.
If legal knew what was going onwith locations, they would not
be happy.
Speaker 1 (46:18):
Absolutely Well.
Hey, Erwin, thank you so much.
So we can certainly put a linkto the report, if there's one,
in the show notes when wepublish that.
But if folks want to learn more, maybe talk with you.
What's the best way for them todo that?
Speaker 2 (46:33):
Yeah, connect with me on LinkedIn.
I am the only Erwin Hipsman onthe planet, so I'm easy to find.
And if you want to, my parentsknew about branding way before
anyone else.
And if you want to get your owncustomer health score, if you
download the report there arelinks to do it yourself, so go
in there and you can generateyour own score by answering the
same questions that everyoneelse asks Fantastic, it's
(46:54):
anonymous, so it's not a leadgeneration tool.
You can just go in there and doyour own health score.
Speaker 1 (47:00):
Love it.
Love it, erwin.
Thank you again.
So much, great conversation.
I'm sure our audience is goingto be the beneficiaries of that.
Thanks to our audience fortheir ongoing support and ideas.
As always, if you want to be aguest, have an idea for a guest
or a topic, feel free to reachout to Naomi, mike or me and
we'd be happy to get the ballrolling on that Until next time.
(47:23):
Bye, everybody.
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