Sometimes growth can come from your own optimization efforts. Change your paid search terms and you might squeeze out a few hundred more leads. This is commendable and hopefully every marketer is looking hard at the performance of their various campaigns and programs and working to improve them.
However, in my experience, significant growth comes from a new idea, a new method or a new partnership within the organization. Honing in on the last comment, I just want to remind everyone of the power of cross-functional collaboration. I think most people get that sales and marketing need to work together. There is even a buzz term for this smarketing. But here are three internal partnerships that you may not have thought much about that can truly provide growth for your company.
1. Lunch with Demand Gen Marketing + Customer Success
Customer Success organizations are starting to get pressure to manage P&L. What this means, is that they are starting to be measured on their ability to bring in revenue for the company. Why? Well, companies are realizing that Customer Success is in a much better position than Sales to get new or recurring revenue from existing customers. Customer Success is talking to the customers on a regular basis and can feel out when a cross or up sell opportunity pops up. Even more than that, studies have shown that customers are more willing to make a referral when they are happy. Customer Success is there when the customer completes implementation and when they just pulled a super hero move solving their problem. These are great times to ask for a referral into new business unit or a new company.
The partnership: Demand Gen and Customer Success can work together for a win-win here. Customer Success has the link to the customer. Demand Gen has the expertise on how to operationalize a referral program at scale. Working together, there is a big opportunity to grow revenue and satisfy objectives in both camps.
2. Lunch with Demand Gen Marketing + Customer Marketing
Like Customer Success, Customer Marketing has an inroad to existing customers. They might interact with them for references, at user events or by managing a user community. These are all great opportunities for Customer Marketing to facilitate some extra demand generation. You just need to give them the tools to capitalize on it. The story of this collaboration is illustrated beautifully in this SlideShare presentation: Digital Marketing and Customer Marketing just did something amazing.
The partnership: Demand Gen can work with Customer Marketing to create a customer referral program. Customer Marketing can integrate the promotion of the program into user events, reference calls and in any online communities. Customer Marketing will look good by generating revenue from customers and Demand Gen will be bringing the highest quality leads into the pipe.
3. Lunch with Demand Gen Marketing + Channel Sales
In most companies, the channel group is so siloed from marketing that they’ve no idea what each other is doing. When you stop and think about the fact that both are doing Demand Gen, just using different channels, it seems there would be a lot to share. And that is exactly the benefit of these two groups getting together, to share best practices and see where there are mutual opportunities.
The partnership: The channel group controls partner relationships, including referral partners. If you ask how those referral partners are doing, the answer is usually, they should be producing more. Demand Gen can help with that. By taking expertise in running programs, a referral program can be created to harvest high quality leads from referral partners at scale. Channel Sales gets tracking to direct ROI and Demand Gen gets more high quality leads.
Reach out and schedule a few lunch dates with your colleagues in these departments today. Your growth hack is just an order of Pad Thai away!
