JUNE, 202319(CEO Eric Yuan could find no investors). But Zoom could and did build strong emotional bonds with customers--prioritizing "happy customers" over glittering financial objectives--which drove creation of a superior product and the natural customer evangelism, word-of-mouth, glowing reviews, etc.--that vaulted Zoom to its 42.8% market share in 2020 vs. 18.7% for second place Cisco WebEx. Retention: SAS's Canada division had a sudden, serious drop in customer retention--from the mid-90%s into the mid-80%s. Its "Customer Champions" organized 20 forums in 13 cities that drew 2000 people. Retention fully restored. Acquisition: When he was building Salesforce, CEO Marc Benioff discovered the driver that would later power Dreamforce--perhaps the most potent sales generator in the SaaS industry that he created. Eighty percent of prospects who attended early Salesforce events--where they could talk directly to customers--became customers themselves. 80%! No salespeople required. Expansion: Forrester tried for years to expand its business with a Fortune 50 software client, with no luck. Its approach: send its analysts to give brown bag lunches at the client's headquarters. A new VP of marketing realized that the target firm already had a research firm--Gartner--so prospects at the target firm wondered things like why they needed a second analyst, what's the business case for doing so, how they could sell it internally, and so forth. So the new VP engaged existing Forrester clients that we're double dipping with Gartner, and posed those exact same questions to them, capturing their answers on video--and disseminated them skillfully to the target firm's prospects, which tripled business with the target firm in just 18 months Innovation: Fun fact: where do most successful innovations come from? A knee-jerk reaction would be "from companies," and in particular, their product teams. Not true. Certain customers (sometimes called "lead users") are the source of three times as many successful innovations as those from internal product teams working alone, according to extensive research by MIT (see here and here). For example, 3M's Medical Products division did a side-by-side comparison: co-created innovations with lead user customers achieved 2X the market penetration and 8X the average revenue than the internal product teams. Cost Reduction: When Microsoft's business model was threatened by spiraling customer support costs, its customer community director stepped up and engaged MVP customers to lead the effort to divert support calls to the community--in the face of significant skepticism from Microsoft leaders. This has become common place, but most communities don't come close to realizing the potential that Microsoft achieved: saving $100s of millions in support costs. This is far from an exhaustive list--we have dozens more and expect still more to be developed. We've seen customers successfully address C-suite objectives that no one--not even us--dreamed that customers could pull off.What to do with this informationIf you're a CXO, I suggest you forward this to your customer marketing team and start a conversation with them. If you're a customer marketing professional, I'd suggest that you look again at the above list of transformative initiatives and imagine that these appear on your résumé or LinkedIn profile. Think about the impact on your relationship with the leaders in your firm. And on your career. If that sounds compelling, your biggest challenge is this: your C-suite almost certainly doesn't know about these sorts of hidden potential in the customers you're responsible for. In my next email and follow up communications, we'll show you how to communicate this to them. We'll provide strategies for joining forces with your key customer programs, scripts for communicating to your C suite, and a webinar specifically on this topic and other important guidance from our Roundtable members. The post-pandemic world is opening huge, exciting opportunities. Is there anyone greater than the opportunity to supercharge our relationships with our customers?
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