A well-structured customer marketing team is a crucial part of achieving success and growth and our panel discussion, Building & Structuring Your Team for Success, at the Customer Marketing Summit provided key insight.
Our panelists included: Aunalisa Arellano, Head of Customer Marketing Manager at Filevine, Chad Mack, Director of Customer Marketing at Dell Technologies, and Elizabeth Raffa, Senior Customer Marketing Manager at HackerOne.
Together, they highlighted several factors that make a successful customer marketing team, focusing on structure, they also touched on the importance of cross-functional collaboration and providing growth opportunities for their team.
This insight can be split into two main themes:
- Maximizing team performance and growth
- Building a strong foundation for your team
Building a strong foundation for your team
Defining roles and responsibilities within a team is key to creating a working culture that promotes and encourages collaboration and growth.
Our panelists here share their insights on their own experiences building and nurturing their teams.
One key takeaway they shared is that setting the right expectations and goals is absolutely crucial. Elizabeth Raffa stresses the importance of keeping an eye on larger business goals and ensuring that the team's efforts align with these objectives.
A huge part of this, she highlights, is setting the right expectations, building up your team whilst keeping in mind what is realistic and achievable, and communicating this all back to leadership to ensure streamlining and transparency.
A key message Elizabeth integrates into this strategy to keep her and her team focused is thinking of herself as:
‘The advocate for the advocate, advocating for our customer advocates and making sure that we're looking at the big picture, instead of being reactionary to things as they come up.’
Chad Mack similarly emphasized the need to prioritize requests and parse through the noise to focus on what is most critical to achieving success. By creating a sub-structure with leadership levels he further narrowed the scope.
This structuring of his team also allowed for leadership opportunities and growth and cross-functional exposure. He expands on this by saying:
‘I shuffled the deck, and gave people opportunities to work on different product sets, expand their skills, and their subject matter expertise and different products in the tech space.’
Another important aspect of team structure is building trust with the organization and stakeholders. Aunalisa Arellano shared how she had to build trust with her organization and establish foundational elements to ensure success.
This trust also is key in structuring your team and providing opportunities for career advancement, fostering an environment for growth and development.
Aunalisa Arellano encourages her team to select projects that interest them and offers stretch opportunities. She told us:
‘I always like to make sure that there's ample opportunity for people on my team to select which projects interest them so that they can either take on tasks that are a challenge or stay in the realm that they felt the most comfortable in, because I know that success to everybody is different.’
In highlighting the value of customer marketing at her company, Hacker One, Elizabeth Raffa explains the opportunities for growth that come with it. Placing education at the forefront of these opportunities, her company encourages learning, as it benefits her, her team, and the company as a whole.
In conclusion, customer marketing leaders understand that structuring a customer marketing team requires setting clear goals, building trust with stakeholders, prioritizing requests, and providing opportunities for growth and career advancement.
These insights are absolutely invaluable for any marketer looking to maximize their team's impact and achieve success.
Maximizing team performance and growth
When it comes to unlocking customer marketing success, our panel had some crucial tips for how to maximize team performance and growth, based on their own experiences.
This included providing opportunities for skill development, cross-functional collaboration, and ongoing feedback and coaching.
According to Aunalisa Arellano, finding a mutual goal and providing value to stakeholders is key, she said:
‘If people aren't caring, and that common goal isn't working, I try and find somewhere where I can provide value to them.’
Elizabeth Raffa emphasized the importance of having cross-functional collaboration to streamline messages, keeping the tone of voice and information consistent, and ultimately saving time.
Following this, Chad Mack stressed the value of partnering for success to prioritize customer relationships, not only within organizations but the field as well for identifying potential customer advocates and showing their value.
Focusing on the field allows the company to show the value of customers, Chad explained:
‘We don't want to just tell the rosy beautiful picture at the close of the implementation. We'd rather be with them throughout the course of their experience, and then understand their pain points and document those and share those in some way with our other customers in the community.’
These customer marketing leaders shared some final key takeaways to help other customer marketers structure their teams effectively.
Aunalisa shared some great tips on setting the baseline for customer marketing success. She recommended tracking every act of advocacy and rewarding top customers, setting standards to ensure customer-generated content is being diversified, and reporting metrics to the leadership team. This sets teams up for success by streamlining them, helps avoid customer fatigue, and fosters customer advocacy.
Elizabeth's advice was all about staying fully focused on goals and priorities to set yourself up for success. She stressed the importance of having a strategic plan handy and referring back to it as new initiatives are introduced, pulling attention continuously back to the main goals.
And finally, Chad's number one takeaway was to:
‘Do what you do best and outsource the rest’
This piece of advice particularly is so important for customer marketing teams, as safeguarding customer relationships needs to be the number one focus, everything else can be determined by focusing separate teams on what they do best.
Final thoughts
The information and advice that these customer marketing leaders provided on our panel discussion hopefully has given you new ideas for how best to optimize your team!
Investing in the ongoing education and professional development of your team fosters a culture that encourages creativity and rewards innovation.
Additionally, it's important to establish a cross-functional team that collaborates successfully with other departments as this ensures streamlining and that the whole organization is working together towards common goals.
By adopting a strategic plan to stay focused on the main goals and priorities, you can clearly define your team’s objectives.
As well as this, your team must have the ability to be flexible and adaptable to the ever-changing needs, trends, and technologies of the customer marketing industry. Making sure these strategies are being continually reassessed, keeps your team ahead of the curve.
