Meaningful metrics: How to transform your customer programs into assets that impact business growth

I’m going to share with you today my insights on customer marketing metrics that matter, and how to use them to transform your customer programs into strategic assets that impact business growth.

A little bit about myself first. My name is Kevin Lau, and I'm super passionate about meaningful metrics because they can help you unlock your organization’s true potential, drive momentum, achieve headcount, and acquire a greater budget and resources – the whole gamut.

I’m going to be talking to you about:

• What to measure,
• What you can measure today,
• Data, martech, and integrations, and
• Some pitfalls and challenges.
  

Before we get down to it, I want to emphasize that transforming your customer program through metrics is a journey. It's a journey that's going to take time, effort, consistency, deep collaboration with internal support teams, and resources to help you get over the finish line.

Sometimes it may seem a little scary, and there’ll be moments when you want to bang your head against the wall because you've hit a roadblock, but I can assure you that the journey is worth it. If you're looking for a promotion or you want to make a huge impact in your organization, this is where it begins.

What to measure

In customer marketing, we’re outstanding at creating relationships with customers; we're the go-to when it comes to retaining customers and helping acquire new customers. We even work well cross-functionally to bring in and attract potential customers.

However, where we tend to struggle is measuring and quantifying our impact. If you look at our demand gen teams, they’re miles ahead of us in this regard.

They have all kinds of handy customer metrics showing how they’ve driven pipeline growth and so on, and so it’s no surprise that they typically get three to four times the budget and the resourcing that we do.

If you think about it though, in most organizations, especially in SaaS, 75% of revenue typically comes from recurring business, so the value of customer retention cannot be understated.

We can say that customer retention is more valuable than new logos, but how do we prove this?

I believe that customer retention is much more valuable than new logos, and as customer marketers, we’re uniquely placed to drive that. It comes down to the question of how we prove the value of our programs in holding on to existing customers - Is it the number of customers? The Net Promoter Score (NPS)? The conversion rate?

Once we can prove this with the right metrics, we can get the CMO and CFO onside and unlock our function’s full potential. So how do we decide which are the right metrics? Let me walk you through my four-step process.

Step 1: Ask yourself the right questions

To determine which are the most meaningful metrics to guide your organization’s activities and prove their value, you need to start by digging deep and asking yourself and your team the right questions.

Some examples are:

Step 2: Create shared goals with other stakeholders

The second part of the process, as we just alluded to, is talking to the folks in marketing, sales, customer success, product, and support to align on your goals. Their priorities are going to vary so you need to be able to show the mutual benefits of what your programs can deliver.

Your CMO is most likely concerned with things around pipeline influence and brand awareness, which are going to drive growth in a company.

Customer success is probably going to prioritize value realization, time to value, and customer retention. Product will generally have KPIs around customer feedback and business impact in front and centre.

Engage your internal stakeholders

(This is a circular process, so once you go through measurement to support, the cycle will begin again.)

1. Measurement
2. Marketing - Pipeline influence, brand awareness, retention
3. Sales - Close new deals, customer expansion, more customer stories
4. Customer Success - value realization, customer retention
5. Product - Value realization, customer feedback, business impact
6. Support - Support resolution, case deflection, value realization

Step 3: Be clear with what you want to measure

Now you’ve asked the important questions and aligned with other teams on your goals, it’s time to commit to the North Star metrics that will guide your customer programs’ success. What are the things that you want to be known for? And how do you create strategic pillars aligned to the goals that you have with your other internal stakeholders?

Here at Adobe, our team is divided into centres of excellence around the three pillars of adoption, community, and advocacy. It's all about how we develop and execute programs aligned to the customer journey to drive these three areas and ultimately create customers for life.

• Adoption - Build scalable, digital programs to ensure customers successfully adopt and use Adobe products or services, and renew/grow their commitment.
• Community - Connect customers around the globe through our online and offline communities to drive adoption and value realization.
• Advocacy - Expanse programs to ignite and activate advocacy, increase engagements and loyalty across Adobe’s product portfolio.

When it was time to think about our “North Stars”, these are the metrics that we took into consideration, in line with the three pillars that we have within customer marketing:

Customer adoption score

The first one is the customer adoption score, which you can think of as the flip side of lead scoring. It’s all about moving people down the funnel, turning them from regular customers into engaged customers. It measures the influence on feature and behavior usage, and overall product maturity.

Community engagement score

The community engagement score measures community membership and engagement. It’s based on members going into the community and driving discussions in online forums and leaderboards.

Effective engagement channels for advocacy and retention

How you approach, connect with, and build relationships with your customers is a vital part of the customer marketing machine. Picking when and where you connect with your customers is just as important as how you connect with them.

Customer Marketing AllianceEve Chatfield

Advocacy score

Our last “North Star” is the advocacy score. This measures our customer programs against how they drive impact on business revenue, from new business to retention.

Step 4: Take inventory of your programs

Taking inventory of your programs and making sure they align with your “North Star” metrics is step number four. You may find that there’s some overlap between what your programs do, so it makes sense to streamline them.

Our customer programs have shifted significantly over the last five years. When we went from Marketo to being part of Adobe, in the interest of customer retention we moved away from certain programs that no longer served our core mission.

What can you measure today?

I want to talk a little about how you can start to measure the efficacy of your customer programs more concretely. You may have certain programs or KPIs in your company that we don't have at Adobe, or vice-versa, but this gives you another way to think about it.

Right out of the gate, what are some low-hanging fruit things that you can do today?

Well, typically advocate growth is easy to measure because once you start a program, whether it's a reference program or a user group, you can literally count the number of members that engage in your programs and track that quarter over quarter, year over year, and continue to think about how you want to increase that number.

We’ve talked a little about the community engagement score, but there are other metrics that you can track in the community area. For instance, we have membership growth and how your community is actually deflecting support cases.

And then with customer references, which is I think one of the most common marketing activities customer marketing teams do today, it's all about deal acceleration, pipeline influence, and being able to look at the number of completed references per quarter, as well as the average deal size per reference and how that's increasing or decreasing.

Now with the user groups, it tends to be a little bit more membership-based and attendance-driven. Like with advocate growth, you can look at growth in the number of members and the number of chapters regionally and globally, and you can track attendance over time.

With peer reviews, we started doing something new recently. We take the contract dollar – whatever we spend with, let's say, G2 or TrustRadius – and divide that by the number of reviews per year to find our cost per review. We can also track our reviews over time and see how they are driving demand.

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• Advocate growth - Year-over-year (YoY) growth in number of advocates, YoY Growth in number of advocates in each program.
• VIP programs - Membership influence to ARR, engagement influence to new business and retention.
• Influenceing churn - Accounts with advocates versus without.
• Reviews - Contract revenue/No. Reviews per year = Cost per rating point (CRP), review influence in driving demand.
• Community - Community Engagement Score, quarterly membership growth, YoY membership growth, support case deflection.
• Customer stories - Viewership, form fills, content syndication, social engagement, usage in active deal cycles, cost per asset.
• Customer awards - YoY submission growth, finalist & winner influence to ARR, pipeline of net new advocates & customer stories.
• Direct mail - Campaign cost per swag.
• Customer references - Deal acceleration & pipe influence, No. of completed references per quarter, average deal size per reference.
• Adoption - Protected revenue, in-product guidance performance, nurture engagement, event performance.
• User groups - Membership growth, chapter growth, regular attendance.

With VIP programs, you can look at membership influence on ARR – annual recurring revenue – and also how your engaged members or champions influence new business and retention efforts, whether through references or something else.

There are so many ways to look at customer stories, from viewership to content syndication to social engagement – how they’re performing on Twitter or LinkedIn. You can also work with your sales team to see how the stories are being used in active deal cycles. It’s worthwhile too to pinpoint the cost per asset and measure the average content lifecycle.

From an award standpoint, we're actually right in the middle of our awards program, and we're going through it actively to track and measure success. Another good way is to look at year-over-year submission growth. We also look at the finals and winners and how they’re influencing ARR, and the pipeline of new advocates, as well as new stories that our teams can keep in mind as we wrap up the awards program.

From an adoption standpoint, you can look at protected revenue, in-product guidance, nurture engagement, and other activities that drive engagement.

And then the last one is influencing churn, which I would say is probably the most valuable metric for most of us. If we can look at accounts that have advocates and create stickiness versus accounts that may not have an advocate, we can quantify our ability to reduce churn over time.

Your bosses may ask you for this data, or a QBR will come up and you’ll need to present these metric pieces holistically.

It's great to be able to show one or two things here and there, but eventually, you want to get to a point where you're able to create dashboards so that you can easily articulate the value that you bring to an organization. That's when you start to unlock real potential.

Data, martech, and integrations

Now, when it comes to building out the score, I'll give you an example of how it looks in our particular case.

We've built everything with Marketo Engage as the backbone of our architecture. We have various data feeds, integrations, and APIs built into this. We look at data from Influitive, Khoros, and SFDC, which is our CRM.

We use RO Innovation to manage our customer references, Bevy to keep track of our user groups and customer programs, and then we have Alyce for our swag fulfilment.

We feed all of this into Marketo, which then pipes it out to Power BI, which is the dashboard visualization tool that we use. You could also use Tableau or some other tool, but whichever tool you choose, you need to collate all of this data visually.

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Pitfalls and challenges

Before I wrap up, I want to call out a couple of pitfalls and challenges that you may encounter on your journey to optimizing metrics for your customer programs.

1. Dirty data. In every company I've been at, there's always been some form of dirty data. Beware!
2. Data validation. The good news: this will help you eliminate that dirty data. The bad news: you have to wrap your head around the testing phase.
3. Multiple instances. You also might have multiple instances of CRMs or other marketing automation tools, which can muddy the water.
4. Where does your company data live? Possibly in several parts of your organization – it’s not always easy to track down.
5. There's no clear owner. The areas that you’re trying to track might sit within multiple teams. Think of this as a glorious opportunity to work cross-functionally.
6. Integrations. Some of the data integrations that I’ve talked about can be complex to put into place. If you can get an API, that's great, but not every tool or service has this as a standalone offer, so you might have to customize and build things to create that integration. Remember that it’s a process.

Closing remarks

To wrap up, I want to leave you with some final thoughts to carry with you on your journey to a data-optimized customer program.

• Be clear with what you want to measure.
• Make sure you actively work with your partners internally to align on your goals.
• Keep in mind that you need to align these priorities with your leadership team throughout the entire process and journey.
• Remember that this is an iterative process. Even today, we're still building off of some of the stuff that we did two or three years ago. Just know that it is going to take some time and some patience.