The Customer Success Economy

10Marketing: Your Job Doesn't End with the Lead

The weaving of Customer Success into a company's fabric calls into question: Who owns what when it comes to clients? Who handles which interactions with the customers? How do different departments get visibility into customer data to best drive Customer Success? The Marketing team is often a primary stakeholder in conversations on these topics.

To illustrate how the role of Marketing is evolving in the Customer Success economy, we'll turn to Chris Koehler, chief marketing officer at cloud content management software company Box, and a former Customer Success leader himself.

Marketing in the Helix

Koehler points out the importance of collaboration among customer-facing teams: “There are three legs to this stool and how we think about going to market. You have the CS organization, you have sales, and you have marketing. They all have to be aligned to make sure customers are successful.”

In general, the rise of customer-centric thinking has inspired Marketing teams to reorient their focus toward existing clients. It used to be that Marketing teams could focus on warming up cold leads, then passing them along to Sales—essentially, the top of the “funnel.” But in the Age of the Customer, Marketing teams need to help drive the full Helix—that new model of revenue growth that turns existing customers into lead generators.

“Marketing needs to play a role across the customer lifecycle,” says Koehler. “In an SaaS world where recurring ...