Speaker 1: 0:25

Hello and welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by MarketingOpscom, powered by all the MoPros out there. I am your host, michael Hartman, flying solo once again. Mike, I'm sure, is recovering from Spring Fling 2025 and is working, I'm sure. Anyway, joining me today to talk about the importance of customer marketing and customer data is Erwin Hipsman. Erwin is the founder of Repetitos, a consultancy which helps clients turn their customer data into a revenue-generating advantage. Prior to that, Erwin started and led Forrester's customer lifecycle marketing practice. Before Forrester, he held several leadership roles in customer marketing, engagement and advocacy. He started his career in sales and account management. So, erwin, thanks for joining me today?

Speaker 2: 1:11

Yeah, looking forward to it. I'm a big fan of OpsCast and just give a little bit of quick background. I've been listening to it all the time and then in the February issue with Kobe Stock, it was you actually who gave this great quote about customer marketing and customer databases and why it's not a priority, and you know there are always campaigns to happen for it. It's in the report itself, that quote, and I just reached out and I said hey, you're talking about 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 appreciate the opportunity to chat with you.

Speaker 1: 1:45

Yeah, absolutely Well, I think it's one of those. We opportunity to chat with you. Yeah, absolutely Well, I think it's one of those. We'll get into this a little bit, but I think the idea that customer marketing was one of the ones where I think a lot of organizations, you know there's a missing opportunity there, right, and I think we'll talk about some of the background and reason why.

Speaker 1: 2:01

But, yeah, so after you reached out, you know, you and I talked a little bit and you were working on you kind of alluded to it a paper that you I think is now published right On the state of customer contact database. So maybe just very top level because we may drill into some more what are some of the key takeaways from this customer contact database paper? And maybe just I think it would be good also because I think when I first heard this from you, I'd like for you to distinguish, when you say customer contact database, what you mean, because I think some people might, like me, have a broader idea of what that means it includes more than what I think you are focused on.

Speaker 2: 2:46

Yeah, so by customer contact database I mean the individuals who, not the accounts at the account level, the individual level, who are those contacts? And there'll be two different types of contacts. Imagine a company like Salesforce. They might have 10 or 15 business relationships that they have within a particular account and then they'll have hundreds, if not thousands, of users. I'm less concerned with the individual users because customer marketing won't communicate with individual users, like I've never received an email from Salesforce about a new product update, even though I've been a user at every company I've been at. Those emails go to their 10, 15, 20 people. They have a relationship with the account, whatever segmentation, and then, if it's important, they'll let us know that there's a change that needs to happen. So it's really those anywhere. You know a small company might be three to four people, a larger company seven or eight people. Enterprise company. You know 15 to 20 people at the account that you need to communicate with and know who they are and keep track of. You know did they leave the company? Do they move to a different location? Do they have a new title? Who are the people you really need to keep track of.

Speaker 2: 3:57

From an account management perspective, and as I've been talking to more and more sort of companies who are interested in thinking about what do I do with my customer contact database challenge, I realized there was no data out there. There's data on everything MQLs and all sorts of things. There was no data. It's like, okay, what is the state 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 a research report that I published last week, and the four key takeaways are, first of all, the average score of customer contact database, and by that I don't just mean how accurate is the locations, it's more everything around it, like do you have an inventory? Can you send out a crisis communication? What are the open rates? What's the health of the database? The average score was not good, it was 47% and, like I said in the report, if we were in high school, it might be parent-teacher conference time, like who's our kid and you know why is he or she getting 47% on this test? And so that was key result number one, not a shock, and everyone I talked to said, yeah, that's about right, but looking at the underperformers versus the overperformers. We were able to say that by doing some of the things that we talked about in the report and I'll talk about the two key ones in a second you can get that score from 47 to 62%. Now we're talking about passing grade. It's never going to be above 80. So you know you're doing pretty well 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 people who scored, you know, in the low 80s.

Speaker 2: 5:33

And the two key factors that would impact the score the highest one's obvious, one's not obvious. So the non-obvious one is you know, do you have a group that meets on a formal, not an emergency, ad hoc basis could be weekly, monthly, quarterly that thinks about and coordinates customer communications as a whole? So here's this group of people in 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 you know. If you don't have that, that's a great way to impact that score, because they're going to ask all the tough questions.

Speaker 2: 6:07

And then the second one is, which is very obvious, is the maturity of the segmentation. The more mature the segmentation you have, the better your overall customer contact data score will be, because it means you're thinking about well, how do we segment our audience? Is it by title? Well, that's, you know, a lot of people tend to segment by title, because that's easy, because you get their titles. What about their role vis-a-vis the product? You know, there are companies where CEOs will log in and be a user. There are companies where the CEO never logs in and they're just. You know, somebody gives them reports. So what are those different personas within the account that you want to be able to track?

Speaker 1: 6:46

So just real quick, something that you hit on that just is this sort of analogous to the concept of buying groups on the pre-customer standpoint. So I don't know if you were in the Forrester part that was serious decisions. But that concept of buying groups that they originated, maybe they popularized, I don't know if they originated it, but that idea of identifying who are the people you need to be involved with to get a win on a deal with a customer, to carry that forward. It sounds like having something similar to that on the customer side is useful as well.

Speaker 2: 7:25

Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean the number one reason when I was managing customer success teams, the number one reason why we lost the deal was we were single-threaded. So you know earlier I talked about you know, small companies needed three to six people in their customer contact database and some of them might not even be users, they might not be involved in the deal. But who are those extra people? And you probably need a new sort 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.

Speaker 2: 7:56

These three are users, these two are influencers and these five are just people we want to keep an eye on. Like are they moving within their company? Did they leave the company? They don't use the product but they may. In six months they may have a new role that all of a sudden uses it and now they've got to learn about your product and you would communicate with them very differently because they're not a user. But absolutely it's that expansion beyond just those five people who the CSMs talk to. Who else do you need to know within the account? Got it?

Speaker 1: 8:29

Okay. So I know you said that you might not be like users of whatever product service you have might not be the primary people you want to focus on communicating with as customers. Do you think that's my? I initially went to the idea of like PLG type SaaS companies right, where it's probably maybe a little bit different because you especially in the phase before, maybe if you have a freemium kind of model where you could have users who are not paying yet their customers, so you're going to be communicating to them, but it's maybe still considered not. Maybe it's a differentiation between a freemium customer versus a paying customer and maybe that's a distinction. But do you think there's a difference there where you do want to do communications to customers, especially paying customers in a PLG-type organization, or do you still think it's most important to have a limited set? Who are your core people?

Speaker 2: 9:34

Well, it depends on the company, obviously, but anybody who you would need to, you'd want to communicate with and, depending on that segmentation, so, like when I was a forester, when I started, the average email there were like 15,000, were that we really focused on.

Speaker 2: 9:52

The average email went out to about 1200 people. I time I left it went out to 800 people. So you know who is that, who's the audience for that particular communication and how do you know, how do you really do that, that deep segmentation, so you're not sending information to think to people that they don't really care about, so you're not sending information to 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 a very different type of communication than somebody else than, like, the admins would get. You know who get a very different, you know, obviously, very different type of communication 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 a healthy customer contact database, because if you don't have the titles right, particularly the titles, then it gets to be a real challenge.

Speaker 1: 10:39

Well, and titles? I mean you said titles are easy to segment by. I would say that, yeah, on the surface it seems like it's easy, but as soon as you start to get any level of detail it can be misleading, because just take the example like we only want to communicate to vice presidents, right, that sounds great, until you start talking about financial services firms.

Speaker 2: 10:59

Of course.

Speaker 1: 10:59

Right, where, like, virtually everybody's a vice president of something, even though that's not really the. It doesn't correspond to the level of responsibility as a vice president in many other organizations, or the size of the organization matters. Right, a vice president at a small organization might be equivalent to a director or even a senior manager at a really large organization in terms of scope of responsibility.

Speaker 2: 11:23

Yeah, a lot of companies have title inflation. We're not going to give you a raise, but we're going to give you a nice title.

Speaker 1: 11:27

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 a lot and I think it's particularly common in marketing and marketing ops too. Yeah, exactly. So that's a whole.

Speaker 2: 11:41

And AI can only do so much, I mean. Ai can drop a list of 10,000 people in a spreadsheet and tell what to do, but there are going to be a lot of subtleties around the edge that's just not going to pick up.

Speaker 1: 11:52

Yeah, so I just want to make sure I understand. So when you talk about customers, you're talking about people who have actually paid for whatever product or service. You Absolutely actually paid for whatever product service. You Absolutely People from companies or organizations or individual people who have paid for your product or service, as opposed to prospects or leads Absolutely yeah.

Speaker 2: 12:17

Prospects in a whole different world. Accuracy I mean I would argue that if I had a customer contact database and let's say I did some basic segmentation my most important people, my medium important people, my least important people you would never segment by that. Let's just keep it simple. I would argue that you probably need 98% accuracy on your most important people and the medium important people may be 90%. The least important people may be 80% and you don't worry about them. You focus on those first two tiers.

Speaker 1: 12:48

But it seems like to me I don't know what like that seems like they would all be higher in terms of the level of quality and trust you have in that data compared to people who are pre-customer stage.

Speaker 2: 12:58

Yeah, exactly like no, you want to know. Location is really important because you start doing events. You know I've worked for swiss companies and they think I'm in switzerland. They invite me to events in London and I'm living in Boston. They never invite me to an event in Boston because they assume I live where the headquarters is. You know that's where it starts hurting people across the organization. Other people not just marketing ops and not just customer marketing.

Speaker 1: 13:19

Yeah, you know, it's funny you bring that up, that idea of location, and I can remember a specific example at a company I worked for where a lead had come in, got routed because there was some data app request from one country to another country, which meant a whole different region for lead, like where the SDR would be.

Speaker 1: 13:55

Sdr picks it up, turns out what happened is and I think of the countries were Australia and India and it'll make more sense. So when it got routed to the wrong place and people were like what happened and it's not a great thing Digging through what happened the data got appended, changed it from Australia to New Zealand or Australia to India. That's because the person actually based on LinkedIn profile or whatever, was in India. But it also was pretty evident by looking at the profile the person worked for the kind of company that was a service provider to other companies, right outsourced type work. My suspicion I don't know that ever got validated was that person was because he put in another company name in australia, like. So my guess is he's working on, being working on as a consultant contractor for third-party company based in Australia, was doing some research for them, and it got rerouted to somebody because company name got changed, location got changed, but that's not really what the intent was right, and so that's the kind of stuff that can go wrong if you're not careful.

Speaker 2: 15:05

And if you have translations, then I'm getting everything in Swiss German, and I happen to, even if I was in Switzerland. I have translations. Then I'm getting everything in Swiss German and I happen to, even if I wasn't Swiss, I do Swiss French. I'm getting everything in German.

Speaker 1: 15:13

Yeah, so I think, yeah. So it's interesting because it makes sense that you really want that customer data. But if a big part of that score you talked about on your report that it was 47%, I'm going to guess that a part of that score you talked about on your report that it was 47%, I'm going to guess that a part of that is because it just wasn't accurate enough to be able to action on.

Speaker 2: 15:33

Okay, now, one of the questions we ask people is you know, how would you rate the accuracy of your database? You know accuracy and usability of it. People may not know the accuracy of it, but they do know the usability of it. They have a gut sense of that.

Speaker 1: 15:46

Yeah, yeah, knowing that our audience is primarily ops type people, something you and I talked about is that it would be good for people in these roles to better understand how to support customer marketing. That's even if a company even has a customer marketing focus at all, which I'm finding less and less common. So one of the suggestions you shared with me was that really you might like, if you're a marketing ops, like, yes, you should be coordinating with sales. You know sales ops if there's a sales ops function in your marketing ops. But your suggestion is like also reach out to customer success or customer support, depending on what you have in your marketing ops. But your suggestion is like also reach out to customer success or customer support, depending on what you have at your organization, and learn how to collaborate with them as well. And then, obviously, a customer marketing team if there is one. So talk about maybe talk a little more about that and why that would be beneficial for our folks in our office.

Speaker 2: 16:43

Yeah, I've thought with a story when I was at a company called Crimson Hexagon. It's not there anymore social media analytics. You know we would go to marketing ops and we need to send this customer communication out. And they go, well, we'll do it at the end of the month. And it's like, well, no, we need it sooner than that. And the end of the month would come. It's like no, we didn't get any emails out the door to the customers. Can I just buy my own email marketing package? And she said, yeah, just do it. So we bought our own email marketing package. It took a year for the marketing office people to realize we had done that because we left them alone.

Speaker 2: 17:21

We stopped asking and then they got really mad at us, like what do you mean you're doing this? We said you know we can't get any emails out to her because we always get pushed to the end of the line. And then they said okay, cancel the contract. We will put you in the line like everyone else. And so in every company I've worked at, I've never had a marketing ops person come to me and say hey, you communicate with customers all the time.

Speaker 2: 17:47

What can we do to help you? What do you need? Well, you know, what would be really helpful is a field in the CRM that lets us know what the person's Gmail address is, because when we first meet them, they put their non-company address in, but once they become a customer, then you replace it with their company address. We want to know what their Gmail address is because when that person leaves, we want to be able to reach out to them because they're a potential lead. But we don't have their email anymore, and now we've got to send in mails through LinkedIn and they don't open them up. Wouldn't it be nice?

Speaker 1: 18:28

And it's like oh yeah, we never thought about that. That's actually a good idea. What's funny is there are now platforms that try to mimic that. You've spent a lot of money, like track people moving. What you just described would be a pretty simple I'm assuming, as long as there's some discipline, like anything else. Right, maintaining that personal email address along with their work email address? Yeah, I mean, I would encourage people to.

Speaker 2: 18:52

I would encourage companies, when they have those landing pages, to ask people for their Gmail address. And then you know, as they move through that, through the pipeline, and they hit a certain stage now let's get their company address, but now you've got both. And it's counterintuitive that you need both email addresses, but now you've got both. And it's counterintuitive that you need both email addresses. But if you think about customers, not prospects, then having their Gmail address is really helpful, because 20% of all people leave their employers every year. Yeah, Crazy.

Speaker 1: 19:20

Yeah, I never even would have thought of that. Like's like, right there, I think is worth worth the time here. Yeah, um, so you, you mentioned the idea of of of being able to do a crisis communication to customers right as a challenge, and I probably said it before, like one of the hardest things to do to fulfill in marketing ops is, hey, we need to send a letter. You send an email to our customers, right, and, as your research is evidence right, most that is a really way harder thing than it should be to do. So take crisis communications in particular Like what can? Why do you think it's so hard for companies to be able to identify those key people? And then what can we do to try to, what can our listeners do to try to help their organizations be better prepared to do that kind of thing?

Speaker 2: 20:19

Yeah, I mean. Think about a B2C company. Think about United Airlines with Newark and what's going on. They have a playbook that says if we have a massive outage in one of our airports, this is how we communicate with the media. This is how we communicate with our customers. This is how we communicate to customers who aren't impacted. These are how we communicate with customers who are impacted. They're literally on their way to the airport, so they've got playbooks because they know that the cost of not doing that is just huge.

Speaker 2: 20:48

B2b companies maybe don't think of their product as being that essential. I would argue that if somebody spent $40,000, $50,000, $100,000 on a product, they want to go in and see the dashboard, go in and use it. And if there's a crisis communication or just a major communication we're announcing a merger we want to let you know because it's going to be in the newspaper tomorrow. That gets to segmentation. Like, who are those people? Because you don't want to send to every Salesforce user that we just purchased a company and here's the impact to you. You want to be able to do some pretty quick and heavy segmentation. Well, these are the people we need to communicate with, and we only need to communicate with companies in North America and we only need to communicate with companies that have this sort of profile.

Speaker 2: 21:34

Okay, that 100,000-person list is now down to $10,000. Now, assuming that there's another part to it, which is the email needs to get written, so that's on corporate comms. So I don't worry about that. Somebody needs to get written, so that's on corporate comms. I don't worry about that. Somebody needs to hit the send button. I begin to worry about that. And then you know, we in customer marketing need to be able to do the segmentation because you know, we know the subtleties. So you know, if the CEO calls the head of corporate comms 9 pm on Friday, on Tuesday and we need an email out by Wednesday, you know, are all those pieces in place or no?

Speaker 1: 22:13

it's a draw.

Speaker 2: 22:13

Everybody has to drop everything because nobody has the playbook. So you know, when I was in customer marketing, I would go to the CMO and say, hey, if we need to send an emergency communications out, do we have a playbook? It's like no, why would we ever need that? Well, what if? Why don't we develop something so that if there is an emergency, everyone sort of knows what we do and once a year we sort of remind everybody what that is? To me, it's an insurance policy for everyone's jobs, because if I was CEO and we couldn't get that out the door and the open rates were only 5% because we didn't know who to send it to, or send it to people who didn't care, that would be, oh my God, why do I have a marketing team? Why do I have a customer marketing team? Why have a marketing ops team if you can't do an emergency communication? So I think it's that awareness and it's the playbook, and marketing ops plays a key role because in some ways, they're the ones who hit the send button.

Speaker 1: 23:04

Yeah. So I'm going to tie this back to one of the things you said is I think what you said is that the companies in your research that were higher rated in terms of their customer database tended to have a cross-functional team that had a regular focus on that. So if I'm kind of putting some things together like one step is just saying we need to have that dedicated team that at least part of their job is to be thinking about customer database, it sounds like having a plan for how we're going to execute on different types of key customer communications, whether it's crisis or whether it's an announcement, whether it's a more general one, whatever.

Speaker 2: 23:49

A product release would be a classic.

Speaker 1: 23:51

Yeah, changing our terms of service or whatever. And then it feels like also a part of that might be what are the gaps in our current infrastructure? Both people process technology probably heavy on technology where if we had to do something tomorrow like this would be prioritized, like these are the things we should go try to. I'll say fix Fix may not be the right word, but fix so that we are going to be able to do those things. So then have that play. It feels like all those things would be really valuable.

Speaker 1: 24:27

And to some degree, not actually that complicated to do.

Speaker 2: 24:30

And that's why that group has such a big impact. If you have that group, your customer 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, michael and Erwin, that was a great suggestion. Let's, you know, let me pull. Let's start pulling that together within you know, within my company. Let's start pulling that together within my company.

Speaker 2: 24:45

And the number one task I would ask them to do is create an inventory of all the one-to-many communications that are sent out from the company. What's product sending, customer success? What are those automated emails that no one's ever looked at in the past three years? What do they look like? Yes, I think you'd be shocked what they look like. So let's get that inventory of the things that we combine. What are the open rates you know? How do we improve the open rates? You know who actually said. You know who hits the send button, who you know who writes the content you know. So there are probably seven or eight things you want to know in the inventory. What platform you know? Because at Forrester we have three different platforms for emails to go out the door. So which platform is on? Who owns that platform?

Speaker 2: 25:26

The second thing I would do is I would do a quick take 400 names at random of your customer contact database and divvy it up amongst a group. Each of us has 50 names. Let's go into LinkedIn and see what does it look like? What's their title? Are they still employed by the company and location? You probably won't be that far off to say, okay, this is the state of our customer contact database. 20% of our people this is what I've learned working with customers aren't employed at the company anymore. 30% we have the wrong title and 40% we have the wrong location. Not worry about fixing it yet, but just assessing it.

Speaker 1: 26:03

Right, kevin, it's almost like a scorecard.

Speaker 2: 26:06

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 figure that out. Those three things alone would keep that group busy for probably 90 days. That's a great 30, 60, 90 for that group, and then you report back to people. Well, you know, our database isn't good. Okay, now let's figure out who do we need to bring in, what resources, what allocation to fix it. Again, it's a journey that could take three or four more months to do, but you at least know what you're doing and we can't do a crisis communication. So let's get corporate comms involved in this. Let them head it up and say, hey, let's figure out what the playbook is going to be.

Speaker 1: 26:48

Those three things alone would be huge. Yeah, and it feels like maybe I'm a step beyond here. I'm going to kind of go back to different points in my career. I was involved with helping customer support teams, kind of not really on the marketing focus, but I'd always felt like there was a great opportunity with customer support teams, like they're interacting with customers on a regular basis. As part of their role should be, or could be, to help improve the health and the quality and the completeness of customer data.

Speaker 1: 27:20

Yeah, so in the process of solving customer problems. They could do that.

Speaker 2: 27:24

Yeah, I mean two things. One, the problem with that is more and more companies are outsourcing their support to AI, so customer support teams are one of the teams that's really getting hurt by bots and AI. Second is that you know when, like you call Blue Cross, blue Shield, they always will confirm is this the right email? Is this the right phone number for you? Do you still live wherever you live Now, because they're updating their database all the time? Yeah, now, who was it?

Speaker 2: 27:57

Venmo did this amazing thing. All of a sudden, just out of the blue, they said hey, we just want to double check. Is this still your best phone number, still your email address? Because they had built it into their system to update, because people do change email addresses to update it. So it'd be a big ask for a B2B company, when somebody logs in, for a little box to come up and says, hey, this is where we have you as located. Is this all correct? I think it's a lot to ask, but I think there are points in various interactions that support would be a good one, even if it's AI and bot At the end of that interaction say hey, we have you as this address. You know, here's your contact information. Can you please update it Now? A lot of people won't, but some people will, and it'll at least help you. You know, get along the way.

Speaker 1: 28:49

You're never going to have a 100% accurate database, but it should be a lot better than it is today. Okay, that all makes sense. Okay, I love this idea of again. I'm just sort of absorbing all this and going like, actually, this doesn't seem like it'd be that hard.

Speaker 2: 29:00

I know that's a funny thing.

Speaker 1: 29:01

It's not that hard. Which brings me to one of the things I learned early on when I kind of transitioned to marketing is this whole concept of that it's much less expensive to retain a customer than to acquire a new customer, right? It continues to baffle me why more companies are not really it feels like similar to the four Ps right that really only one of the Ps matters anymore promotion. But it feels like over the last 15, 20 years, this idea, this very classic understanding that it costs less to retain customers, has kind of been lost a little bit. So what do you attribute that to? Right, like, why aren't more companies and maybe it's more true in smaller early stage companies than it is on growth as a priority than it is at larger enterprise companies? But it still feels like there's this general trend that customer marketing is not really a focus area.

Speaker 2: 30:07

Yeah, there are two types of customer marketers out there and this is an important distinction. If you think about the past 30 years, customer experience is a discipline that's been around a long 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. Customer marketing is the newbie on the block and when customer marketers first came on board, they were really customer advocate practitioners. Their job was references and reviews, referrals, things like that case studies, stories, videos, and I think that and this is a self-criticism we all sort of boxed ourselves into. Well, we're the case study people. We're the people that if you need a reference, call us up, but you know.

Speaker 1: 30:57

It all feeds back into our acquisition.

Speaker 2: 31:00

Right right.

Speaker 1: 31:01

And it's all about new logo.

Speaker 2: 31:03

Because case studies don't go to existing customers, they go for new logos. Yeah, because case studies don't go to existing customers, they go for new logos. Yeah. Over the past few years we're starting to see and I made that pivot I've directed four, started up four customer marketing practices. The first two were customer advocacy, the last two I started pivoting and that's why I'm so passionate about customer contact databases into what's called lifecycle marketing.

Speaker 2: 31:24

Now some companies think of life cycle as from prospecting to renewal. I'm talking about post sales life cycle marketing. So everything from onboarding to nurturing, and that's where, obviously, customer contact databases become really critical things like that. And probably early on, 100% of the people were advocacy practitioners. Three, four years ago it's like 90, 10. Now it's more like 70, 30. And beginning to see more and more customer advocacy people realizing that pure customer advocacy is probably, unless you're at a large company, is probably not a long-term strategy because that's where a lot of the layoffs have been is in that we have a customer marketing team of three we're going to you know they just do stories.

Speaker 1: 32:11

I don't mean to be flip, but not that they just do stories, but the way the executives think about it. Yeah, that is a perception and it's unfortunate, but it's true.

Speaker 2: 32:18

Yeah, so we only need one person to, we still have it. But if one of those people was a 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 out crisis communications or paying attention to it. They're the ones that are doing the one-to-many communication. The product team loves them because product team doesn't have to think about who needs to. They'll write the message, but they're the ones who figure out who needs to get that message. So, as customer advocates transition to lifecycle marketers and I would argue that it'd probably be better for a customer advocate's person to transition to lifecycle because they understand customers as opposed to a marketing ops prospecting person transition over to customer lifecycle. Yes, they'll understand how Marketo and Eloquent all these systems work, but they're not going to understand what motivates customers. So their lens is the operational lens and the customer advocate lens is they're thinking from the customer experience, customer relationship lens, and you could teach the other one. It's really hard to learn the way customers tick within an organization.

Speaker 1: 33:33

Yeah, at the same time I probably have said this dozens of times on the podcast and certainly outside of it that marketing and marketing ops people need to spend more time understanding customers, whether that's through sitting in or listening to sales calls, or sitting in or listening to customer success or whatever their organization has that is focused on retaining customers and helping them. I think it's an important one. I'm a big believer that context matters Exactly Otherwise exactly.

Speaker 1: 34:08

Otherwise, if you don't really understand the context of why you're being asked to do something, you may fulfill the exact thing that you're being asked to do, but it may not actually be what's needed, or there might be a better way to do it.

Speaker 2: 34:20

With customers, context is harder to assess and even more important than with prospects. Because prospects, yes, there is a context, but they're a little bit easier to think about than customers. Because customers will change also what their relationship with you is and what their needs are vis-a-vis your product.

Speaker 2: 34:37

If they get promoted or moved to. You know they're on a special project for three months, so they're not going to use your software. All of a sudden alarm bells ring. They haven't logged in in three months. No. A sudden alarm bells ring. They haven't logged in three months. No, they're perfectly happy, they're just on another project for three months. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 34:49

I mean? I think I mean one another kind of, maybe, thought experiment that people in marketing ops could do is to think about you know what it's like for them with their vendors, right? So how does my view of that vendor change over time from when I'm in their mind, right, a prospect or a potential buyer become a buyer. We purchase something. We now are onboarded and you know, because I think by nature of it is, I think about my own times going through that. Right, the things I care about change over that time.

Speaker 1: 35:28

Right, and I think it's a really important, like what I care about as I'm going through the evaluation to purchase stage. It's going to be like I very much want to make sure, like, will this actually work? Do I believe that the solution will be worth the cost over time and the change effort or whatever that goes into it? Once that I go over that, then I want them to be depending on what it is right I think it's software in particular I want them to be a partner with me and I want them to be responsive. I want them to try to understand me and our business in a level of detail deeper than what it was before, and I think maybe that's the flip. There is like the level of understanding and this is back to your point right, we should have a really high level of clarity about our customers that we don't necessarily need when they're prospects.

Speaker 2: 36:25

And traditionally that's been laid onto customer success managers, as has the health 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 the advent of digital customer success, companies have less CSMs. They focus on the top 10% of accounts.

Speaker 2: 36:43

Everyone else is in a digital customer success mode and and you know the CSM yeah, they'll update the two people they talk to at an account on a regular basis. Oh, you have a new title, oh, you moved. I'll go in there and update. But those people in the buying groups that have been added, those seven or eight other people in the list who don't come to QBRs, they're not going in there and going to LinkedIn and say has something changed for that person? So they're only. You know, if you were to do a database health assessment of your main primary contact, that's probably in pretty good shape because the CSMs probably are updating them. But when you get to that, you know anybody outside the CSMs have that one-to-one relationship nobody's updating it because you know everybody thinks the CSMs do it.

Speaker 2: 37:26

CSMs say we nobody's updating it. Because you know everybody thinks CSMs do it. Csms say we're not doing it. And then everyone says well, everyone's responsible for it. Well, whenever you hear everyone, it means nobody.

Speaker 1: 37:36

Yeah, no, I totally. It's one of my pet peeves whenever I've been. It's like I want. I say this over and over Clarity about decision-making is a game-changer. If you don't have that and you think it's by committee, then there's no one's taking responsibility for the decision, and so it makes it easier for people to abdicate that responsibility. But even worse is decisions that get made, and even at the executive level who really?

Speaker 2: 38:07

who really? Oh, is it the CMO? Who sort of is it under their purview? Is it the, you know? If they have a head of customer success, 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 friend of mine and I asked him, like you know, who's responsible for the update of the database? He goes well, at every handoff I expect to be updated. So when the salesperson first meets, you know gets updated. When the BDR gets updated, when they 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 people are doing that, you know, at each handoff is the problem.

Speaker 1: 38:50

Yes, I mean we hadn't really hit on this, but so I'm going to throw this at you a little bit, because I don't think we talked about it before. It's like how do you, how would your like, how would you recommend to that CFO how to measure that database, health and quality, and then use that to then drive the way? I would think that's like here's how we're going to measure the quality of our customer database. And then all the people that we expect, whether it's tacit or not, to be a part of making sure that score or whatever metrics are going in the right direction, how are they then measured on their part of that Does?

Speaker 2: 39:34

that make sense. Yeah, well, I think it was an open prize report that said that 71% of all companies do not have a data quality understanding, a definition of data quality. So I think, again, that might be something that group, that cross communications group, would do is, let's define what we mean by data quality and what are minimal acceptables, like we talked earlier. You know our key people that's got 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. That isn't integrated.

Speaker 2: 40:17

Well, okay, that should be on our roadmap for a year from now. We should be able to at least tie into the database health. When did they first become a user, when did they first get their username and password and when was the last time they logged in? From a segmentation perspective, that's really important, because if somebody became a user three years ago and they've never logged in, why do we keep on sending them emails like this one they're going to open up. That's how you get from the average email going out from 1,200 people to 800 people and, lo and behold, you clean up your database, your open rate is going to go up five to 10 percentage points immediately.

Speaker 2: 40:56

Quicker than any AP testing quicker than any time of day. Cleaning up the database will improve someone's open rates and give you a much more honest appraisal of your open rates than anything else you could do.

Speaker 1: 41:07

Yeah, I mean yeah, I think the fear that a lot of people aren't familiar with that is like, oh, we're going to miss someone. Or they're like do not hit it again. And I'm like but to your point, right, if that person's never opened something like, why do we hit our head against the wall and go well, this is a much better email, right? It's really not.

Speaker 2: 41:28

They don't give a shit. Let's go back to your question we talked about earlier about doing a little, just a quick assessment. Have people go into LinkedIn, take 50 names each. In a week from now let's go back and report. I mean, there are data processors out there. Most of the data processors want one-year commitments and they'll do a little sample data processors out there. Most of the data processors want one-year commitments and they'll do a little sample. Yeah, we'll do 200 people sample for you.

Speaker 2: 41:52

But I would argue, take whatever cross-section makes sense. You know you're 20% of your biggest accounts, all of the contacts in those accounts. Some will be that first level, second and third level. Let's go to a data processor who will do a one-off for me. Some of them will, most of them won't. I'm happy to coordinate that. And you know, let's give them 2,000 or 3,000 names and now we have some real data. So we have a sense from manually looking at that.

Speaker 2: 42:19

Okay, it's not good, but what does that not good really mean? Now let's take a few thousand names spend. You know it's not a lot of money. I mean we're talking pennies per name, not dollars per name. To do a quick assessment. You know what's the person's first name, last name, company title. You'll get back a report and you'll be able to see drop into Excel and you know, you'll be able to see. Okay, you know. What patterns do we see? What are we doing poorly, what are we doing well? And now you can start defining data quality and also what are those minimum expectations that you know we should never fall below this.

Speaker 1: 42:52

Yeah, yeah, there's a floor, so it's interesting, as you were describing that process. My initial thought, like defining the patterns would be seems like a good use case for an AI kind of tool, and we've talked a little bit about AI and some of the implications of some of this, but what do you see as some of the impacts of AI on this good, bad or indifferent on this kind of discipline?

Speaker 2: 43:20

Well, I have a great quote. It's in the report State of B2B Customer Contact Databases from Ed King, the CEO of OpenPrize. The title of his article blog post was AI will expose your data quality issues and he says AI is likely the one technology that will expose data quality issues the most, which may help raise the awareness and urgency of dealing with your go-to-market data quality issues. Maybe this will finally make the executives care about and invest in data quality. So AI on its own isn't going to. I can't go into chat GPT and say, 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 let that happen, so you need to go 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 do we have the data right? Ai is not going to help you. Interesting, okay, what?

Speaker 1: 44:18

about-.

Speaker 2: 44:19

It'll magnify the issues, because you're and AI will give you all sorts of Even when you scrape LinkedIn, you get all sorts of crazy false positives, like somebody just got you know they work for IBM and they just, you know, join the board directors of their local YMCA, and that's at the top of LinkedIn, and a new job is board directors YMCA. So you know. So AI has got to be smart enough to say okay, and some of the data processors are and some of them aren't. I mean, the data processors use AI and say no, no, no, that's a false, negative. Board directors of YMCA this is where they really are at, even though that's their second job on that title. So if you work with data processors, are they smart enough to use AI to be able to figure some of those things out?

Speaker 1: 45:06

Gotcha. Yeah, it feels like there's a lot of opportunity to help around some of this stuff, but also it sounds like some of the impacts of AI have actually put pressure on the roles and jobs that would be focused on this too. Absolutely, yeah, okay, awesome. So, erwin, I think we're going to have to wrap it up here. This has been a fun and very educational conversation for me. I always enjoy these, even though what our listeners may not realize like I usually talk to these folks before we record and I'm always surprised that, like, oh, there's this thing that came up in this conversation that we actually recorded, which I'm always surprised that, like, oh, there's this thing that came up in this conversation that we actually recorded, which I'm grateful for, that didn't come up before. So I definitely had a few of those and this idea of having a cross-functional team that's focused on this area.

Speaker 2: 45:59

Yeah, not so obvious, but a huge impact because it touches a lot of things.

Speaker 1: 46:03

Yeah, yeah, if our listeners make it this far, to it. Right, just that alone, like taking that idea back to your organization, I think, and articulating why it would be beneficial for the enterprise in terms of the relative level of quality of our database is probably correlated to retention. Of quality of our database is probably correlated to retention.

Speaker 2: 46:30

And you know Well, expansion, yeah, a lot of it impacts a lot of people, even legal. I mean compliance with email privacy regulations. If legal knew what was going on with locations, they would not be happy.

Speaker 1: 46:42

Absolutely Well. Hey, Erwin, thank you so much. So we can certainly put a link to the report, if there's one, in the show notes when we publish that. But if folks want to learn more, maybe talk with you. What's the best way for them to do that?

Speaker 2: 46:57

Yeah, connect with me on LinkedIn. I am the only Erwin Hipsman on the planet, so I'm easy to find. And if you want to, my parents knew about branding way before anyone else. And if you want to get your own customer health score, if you download the report there are links to do it yourself, so go in there and you can generate your own score by answering the same questions that everyone else asks Fantastic, it's anonymous, so it's not a lead generation tool. You can just go in there and do your own health score.

Speaker 1: 47:24

Love it. Love it, erwin. Thank you again. So much, great conversation. I'm sure our audience is going to be the beneficiaries of that. Thanks to our audience for their ongoing support and ideas. As always, if you want to be a guest, have an idea for a guest or a topic, feel free to reach out to Naomi, mike or me and we'd be happy to get the ball rolling on that Until next time. Bye, everybody.