Retention as Your Revenue Engine

  

Drew: Hello, Renegade Marketers! If this is your first time listening, welcome, and if you're a regular listener, welcome back. Before I present today's episode, I am beyond thrilled to announce that our second in-person CMO Super Huddle is happening November 6th and 7th, 2025. In Palo Alto last year, we brought together 101 marketing leaders for a day of sharing, caring, and daring each other to greatness, and we're doing it again! Same venue, same energy, same ambition to challenge convention, with an added half-day strategy lab exclusively for marketing leaders. We're also excited to have TrustRadius and Boomerang as founding sponsors for this event. Early Bird tickets are now available at cmohuddles.com. You can even see a video there of what we did last year. Grab yours before they're gone. I promise you we will sell out, and it's going to be flocking awesomer!

You're about to listen to a recording from CMO Huddle Studio, our live show featuring the flocking awesome B2B marketing leaders of CMO Huddles. In this episode, Allyson Havener, JD Dillon and Alan Gonsenhauser outline a customer-led system that ties feedback to product decisions and go-to-market. They explain how listening shows what to fix and why success shows up in adoption and retention, not just pipeline. The payoff is tighter alignment across sales, product and marketing and a growth engine built around the customers you already have. And by the way, you can meet Allyson and JD at the CMO Super Huddle in Palo Alto, California on November 6th and 7th. See cmohuddles.com for more. If you like what you hear in this episode, please subscribe to the podcast and leave a review. You'll be supporting our quest to be the number one B2B podcast. All right, let's dive in.

Narrator: Welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite, possibly the best weekly podcast for CMOs and everyone else looking for innovative ways to transform their brand, drive demand, and just plain cut through, proving that B2B does not mean boring to business. Here's your host and Chief Marketing Renegade, Drew Neisser.

Drew: Welcome to CMO Huddle Studio, the flocking awesome live streaming show dedicated to inspiring B2B greatness. I'm your host Drew Neisser, live from my home studio in New York City. Putting your customer at the center of your organization has long been the mantra of various sages—sages, that is, not stages. Sages. Fred Reichheld's seminal book "The Ultimate Question" turned customer obsession into a trackable number, aka the Net Promoter Score. Tony Hsieh, founder of Zappos, turned "Delivering Happiness" into a cultural phenomenon and a billion-dollar idea.

So meanwhile, a lot of B2B marketers are told, "Just focus on acquiring net new customers," just like they'll say, "Net new, net new, net new," and leave the challenge of customer centricity and customer expansion to others. This, of course, is problematic, and delighted customers can and should be growth drivers. It's a lot to sort out, but fortunately for you, we have three flocking awesome marketing leaders with us to share their insights.

Let's bring on JD Dillon, Chief Marketing and Customer Experience Officer at Tigo Energy, and an industry expert who has graced this stage before to discuss the power of focus and B2B branding on a budget. Hello JD, wonderful to see you again.

JD: Same here, as always. How are you?

Drew: And where are you this amazing day?

JD: So I'm great. The end of the school year, we're starting Little League baseball playoffs, and I am in the Bay Area, California, loving the fun in the sun.

Drew: There it is. Well, that sounds like a good plan. I miss my Little League days. So let's talk about—you're both CMO and Chief Customer Experience Officer. How do you connect the dots between customer insights and growth at Tigo?

JD: At Tigo Energy, our customers are contractors. We sell through distributors to the contractors, basically the electricians and plumbers and folks like that. We're in the solar business, but they're the same types of folks. So for them, the experience is everything. They're the ones who put it on the roof. It's got to be easy for them, and the feedback they give us helps product definition, our service programs, and it's almost indistinguishable. It's one and the same.

Drew: So given that, how are you—and again, which hat do we want to talk about? CMO or Chief Customer Experience Officer—interacting in order to get these customer insights?

JD: Oh, it's absolutely going out with them to sites, going to their locations. I went on a trip to Kentucky, in northern Kentucky, and I had the cat in the barn, because his office is his barn. The cat, whose name is Lucy, same as my daughter's name, up on my lap, and I was petting the cat as I was asking how our equipment can help him do his job better.

Drew: You will go to—no lengths are too much for you to get information. I just hope you're not allergic to cats. So as a result of those things, I mean, connect some dots for us. All right, so you have these interviews. How does that then sort of show up in marketing, show up in product development, in the overall customer experience?

JD: So a lot of these customers are small business people. It's a person and his wife, or a woman and her husband that run a business. Their son might do the work up on the roof. Their daughter is in charge of sales. It's a family business. There are 5,000 of them in the United States, for example. And those people love to be elevated. We do press releases with them. We do case studies. Recently, we gave away an inverter—one of our products—and we did Free Solar Friday, where one of our installers went out to the customer. So we often have a little bit more oomph, even though we're a small company, than these really, really small companies. And if we can improve their experience, give them a little bit of visibility, we get a customer for life.

Drew: And so, I mean, it must surprise them, because usually this stuff is transactional. I've got to—you know, I'm a contractor. I'm doing this work on behalf of somebody, of one of my customers, and I've got to put solar—you know, I have a choice of things, and it feels very transactional, and probably it feels like a commodity. So these things don't feel like commodities. They feel like you're sort of building a very personal relationship with these folks.

JD: Absolutely. And there's one connection that makes it even stronger. Once it's up on the roof, we can monitor it, so we actually can see what's going on on the roof, with the energy production, with the consumption. Interesting little case study—there was the Iberian blackout in Spain, and we were able to watch what happens as the blackout dipped and then went back up. And so we can monitor the eclipse in the United States. We did case studies about that, so we have insight for 25 years into what's going on on the roof that creates a relationship more than just a transaction.

Drew: Do you feel like customer experience at this point is part of your competitive advantage?

JD: I am a "glass is half empty" kind of guy, so no. And I say that purely because it's not good enough. It's a competitive advantage, but not as broad as it should be. I tend to view everything through "How can we improve?" And I'm never really satisfied with anything. It doesn't feel like a competitive advantage, but it probably, for me, never will feel that way.

Drew: Right. But maybe so—you and I have talked about your Green Glove program. I'm assuming this fits in there. Talk a little bit about that and how that has helped pull this sort of whole thing together.

JD: Oh, the Green Glove program is one of my favorite things. About two and a half years ago, we realized that A) we're small, and the switching costs from our competitors to us was difficult, and B) we had some quality reputational challenges in the market. So we fixed that by developing a Green Glove program. It's kind of like we do a check of an installation—think about it like Jiffy Lube. We have a six-point patented check that we do of new installations. We have somebody who—it's "phone a friend"—if the installer's up on the roof and he needs to call somebody, he knows that Mary's going to answer the phone for him, and he knows who Mary is, so he's got help during the installation. And then after the fact, we give it—now I'm dating myself—you remember the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. Yes, we have the Green Glove Seal that this installation was checked via the Green Glove program. And it's marketing our service around our equipment sales.

Drew: And you actually have given people these physical gloves as well, right?

JD: Yeah, wait—oh, wait, there they are.

Drew: Oh, and did I see a logo on there?

JD: Yes, the Tigo logo. Our green gloves.

Drew: Wow. Marketing ideas manifest, right there. Amazing, amazing. All right, let's keep going. In this conversation, I'm going to bring in Alan Gonsenhauser, founder and CEO of Demand Revenue, who's joining the show for the first time. Alan, welcome. How are you and where are you this fantastic day?

Alan: Great to be here. I am wonderful, doing great, excellent weather in New England. I'm in the Boston metro area where it's really nice, and before I talk about me, I have to say something. JD, that's a new one—petting the cat. I'm wondering if you pet the cat with the green glove on or off, but that's a new one.

Drew: Well, we'll bring that one back. We'll bring that one back because you guys are going to have a joint conversation in a minute. But that's hilarious. Yes, so all right, great to be—yes. No, I'm delighted that you could join us. So let's talk about your philosophy on customer-led growth, and how you've seen it drive results for the organizations that you've advised.

Alan: So I like to think of myself as a customer capitalist, and what I mean by that is, you know, your revenue and your profitability is in the rearview mirror. That's how you did in the past. Once you get beyond a certain point and you have product-market fit and you do have customers, your future growth and your future profitability is dependent on the customer experience you engender, and having a remarkable customer experience to your ideal customer profile and retaining them and growing them. So if you want to drive your future financial results, customer-led growth is really critical.

Drew: And it's so funny. Yeah, you and I talk about this a lot offline, about there's so much pressure on CMOs to deliver revenue. It's like revenue, revenue, revenue, but we know that revenue is a lagging indicator, which is problematic to begin with. And we also know that if you have a high churn rate, then you're always chasing your tail. Yes. So yet CMOs still are the—you know, when you ask a CEO and a CFO, what metric do you care about that you want the CMO to care about? Revenue. And it all adds up. Obviously, look, if you keep customers and they don't churn, that's revenue. And I think there's an appreciation for this. And I have heard recently that PE firms are starting to look at valuations a little bit differently based on retention rates.

Alan: Yes, the most important metric to a PE firm is multiple MOIC—multiples on invested capital. And I coach a lot of CMOs to become indispensable, and really to become indispensable, they have to move from being tactical to strategic. And when you're strategic, you have to think about brand, because brand will give you more at-bats and it'll improve your win-loss ratio. Demand. And demand is both new business logos and upselling and cross-selling your existing customers and customer-led growth, creating a remarkable customer experience—you can retain and grow your customers. So strategic CMOs really need to think about all three. If you're just thinking about new business logos and demand, that's part of the equation, but you better make sure you understand your ideal customer profile so you're not bringing in new logos that you can't support properly, because you're going to get churn, as you just mentioned, Drew, and it's going to hurt your brand. So you really have to balance all three and also make sales more productive and drive sales and customer success productivity as a strategic CMO. Does that make sense?

Drew: It does, but it feels like a lot, but I also feel like a truly customer-led organization has a culture of customer centricity. Yes, that enables them to create sort of a flywheel built around the customer as opposed to, say, this notion of demand gen and we think about, you know, buying lists and pushing stuff out. And so I want to focus on examples, if you can, of companies you've worked with where they really were customer-led, where, you know, they had very successful community or a successful customer advisory board, that kind of thing. Because if you get that right, a lot of the demand gen happens because of this other stuff. So talk a little bit about that in your experience.

Alan: Let me give you an example. So I work with a lot of private equity portfolio companies. One of them is FinThrive. FinThrive is a revenue cycle management company. I help them implement what I call Net Promoter Score 3.0, so it's not just having Net Promoter Score as a vanity metric and focusing on the number, but focus on continuous improvement. So what we did is I helped them establish a cross-functional team and the cadence of Net Promoter Score polling of their customers, but not just, you know, getting the score, but looking at the actual—looking and categorizing the comments and segmenting them into promoters, passives, and detractors. And what we did then is we developed cross-functional teams that would actually act on what the customers were telling them, and then worked with customer marketing to actually communicate that we listened, we took action, and thank you for the input. And this is what we did. The results were two things: lower the churn rate significantly, and there's an organization in health IT called KLAS—K-L-A-S—and they poll all the vendors, and revenue cycle management is kind of an oligopoly of companies, and they polled FinThrive and their competitors, and they became number one or number two in every class, product area, and customer success, and this was over a period of about six to eight months. So it really does work, but as you mentioned, Drew, you've got to make being customer-centric part of the culture, and that's got to come from the CEO down and to all functions, even invoicing. I mean, if your invoice looks arcane and people don't understand it, then that's something finance should work on. But all functions need to be involved and really engaged and energized by improving the customer experience.

Drew: So, I get it. You know, I personally believe it. A lot of times there are forces beyond—like, say, PE firms—that are dictating, in many ways, how money should be spent. If you're spending more on customer centricity, if you will, whether it's a better experience and doing some of the things, you might be spending less on outbound. And so these are choices that companies make. So how do you compel or create the argument for that to a PE firm who wants to see growth, and they think—might think—that growth is net new. And they might think, well, in order to get net new, you got to go out there and spend money on net new, put all your money in, quote, demand gen. How have you seen getting these folks who are not necessarily marketers, or not even people who necessarily—they know what they want, they want a company that is growing at this speed and this margin, but they don't know how to do it. So how do you make that case?

Alan: What's helped me a lot, Drew, is I started in finance, so I get along with CFOs really well. And something that really helps is having the right metrics of what good looks like. So when I'm talking with CMOs to coach them, or private equity firms and CFOs, and we're talking about customer-led growth, I bifurcate between short-term growth and longer-term growth, and when I speak about longer-term growth, I'm talking about metrics like customer lifetime value, gross revenue retention, net revenue retention, Net Promoter Score, percent that are, you know, promoters versus passives versus detractors, and what we're doing with each. And when you start to talk about net revenue retention and customer-led growth, you're starting to talk a little more long-term and lowering churn, and that ties to their, you know, multiple on invested capital—most important metric—because most PE firms have a timeframe, an investment thesis, and timeframe of between three and seven years. And so they buy these companies, they want to grow them and either sell them off or do an IPO. So any PE firm worth their salt does care about short-term growth, especially the first year, because their value creation plan and investment thesis—they have to show that they accomplished a lot in the first year—but they have a longer-term time horizon, and they're trying to grow these companies on a long-term value, and the way you do that is through customer-led growth. Does that make sense?

Drew: It does. I don't see it in action very often.

Alan: I do. I think more of it needs to happen.

Drew: All right, so that's good. I mean, the fact that—and again, this is why I keep trying to talk to PE firms, because I need to find the ones that are not driving every CMO crazy out there.

Alan: There's that too. I mean, you know, and not all PE firms are alike. Some just want to screw down costs, but no one ever reduced themselves into greatness. There are some that really, really—a lot of good ones that want to grow companies, want to make them more profitable, more successful, and add value. They all want to add value over time, right? Not all PE firms are alike.

Drew: I guess what I'm missing out there is, and this would be awesome, is Rule of 40. We know we want to grow 20%, we want a 20% margin—that would be Rule of 40, or Rule of 40—and done it through customer-led growth. Those are the—that's the missing part. We, you know, we know outlier companies that have been able to do that, but a lot of them are not PE-backed.

Alan: I can make a recommendation. Yes, you mentioned Fred Reichheld earlier, who's the father of NPS, right? His newest book is called "Winning on Purpose," and I think every CEO, CFO, and CMO should read it. It's all about customer-led growth, and he gives examples. You know, there are a lot of companies that give NPS lip service, you know, "Here's our number," but you're not really customer-centric. He followed those companies that have been very, very successful with customer-led growth. He actually invested money in the stock market and made a lot of money, you know, bifurcating between the ones that are really serious about customer-led growth versus the ones that weren't. So I would highly recommend that book. It's called "Winning on Purpose" by Fred Reichheld.

Drew: Got it, perfect. Okay, well, our third guest, Alison Havner, will be with us in a minute. It's funny. She's kicking off their Demand Exchange, which is a virtual summit, but she'll be here. So let's bring JD back, and let's talk a little bit about how do you make the voice of the customer truly central to your go-to-market strategy? I mean, what are the sort of organizational elements that make this work? And JD, welcome back. Run with that one.

JD: So I believe every company, like it or not, centers around meetings. And at a prior company, we kicked off every executive staff meeting with listening to three calls between our tech support team and the customer. And you can imagine, A, how scared the agents were knowing some of their calls might be in front of the executive staff and B, how insightful it was to hear the dialogue between a tech support agent and a customer on a roof. I do a different version of that here at Tygo, which every meeting I have, I lead with a customer quote, and I try to intersperse good and bad, try to make it feel sometimes positive. Sometimes you hear things like, "I never talk to your sales people, and I don't want to." Wow. So getting the customer voice, quite literally, into meetings and discussions in a group setting, to me, is invaluable.

Drew: I love that. And boy, really, when that becomes the top of the agenda, or at least the CMO... It's, you know, I've said this before on the show, and I've said it many times, that the most powerful way for a CMO to start a sentence is, "I was talking to a customer the other day," and you do that at a board meeting, and like all the eyes will turn and look at you. All right, Alan, in your experience, let's say you've worked with a company that wasn't, didn't have the customer at the center. What does it take? What kinds of things have you found that helped get them there?

Alan: I think looking at what the processes are, there was one company, I won't name names, but finance was kind of controlling everything. And you know, they've gone through a bunch of M&A and, you know, it was a software company, and you know, if people were using more seats than they paid for, they tried to catch them. And some terrible things with customers. And I highlighted that said, "Hey, gotta stop that. Gotta stop that behavior." And how are we assessing what our customers are thinking, and how are we... And normally, the way I convince companies that are not customer-centric, when I find them, I dig right into churn. How much churn do we have? Do you know? Do you know the causes of churn? How much churn is controllable? Do you realize churn is killing your new business efforts? And usually I can get someone's attention, the CEO and the CFO, when I start talking about churn, because that's impacting their revenue and their profitability, and it's kind of probably killing their new business growth. So that's, that's where I would start, Drew.

Drew: Yeah, because if you identify the problem, you're identifying the financial impact of that is gotta be absolutely pretty high. Churn, it feels like it's something that should be easy. Do you find that the companies have this information and they just weren't looking at it, or they weren't tracking it, and then, if they're not tracking it, are there any tricks to getting them to start tracking it?

Alan: Well, like they say, awareness is the first step, and sometimes they're just not looking at it, they're not tracking it, they're not thinking about it, right? They should be. And so creating that awareness is something really important to do, because it can be, you know, killing your sales, killing your future growth, killing your brand. And you know how people perceive you, it's just so important. Yeah, so I think making them aware of what the real impact is, right, of that problem? I mean, when you analyze a problem, first, it's a deviation from expectation. You don't want churn. And then what's the evidence that, you know, churn exists, and you show them some data, and what's the impact? How does it pass the "so what" test? Well, it kills your future growth and profitability, right? And, you know, I can have that conversation any day of the week with the CEO or CFO, and they begin to think about that. "Oh, yeah, maybe we should pay more attention to that." And what I normally hear, or what I've heard a few times, is "I've never heard a marketing person say that." That's why marketing people, just CMOs need to be business people, need to be general managers, need to be thinking about the customer experience, about churn and everything else.

Drew: Well, it's funny. I mean, particularly in software, it would be pretty easy to go to G2 or TrustRadius and look at the reviews, and clearly could see, if your reviews are not way up here, that you could probably anticipate reading the reviews, that you know you're going to have a higher churn rate than you should, particularly if you can do it compared to the competition. Because you don't always know what the competition's churn rates are.

Alan: Work on your own, you should know that.

Drew: And so in your case, JD, the churn is your contractors having a choice, right? So it's a little bit different there, because you know their satisfaction with the experience that they have with you as part of it, but then there's also the satisfaction that their customers have with you.

JD: Absolutely, and how they portray the satisfaction to the customer. So do they blame us? It's easy for them to do if there's a problem. But the metric thing that Alan was just talking about resonated so much, we were growing very well, and the negativity of churn got lost in the growth.

Alan: That can happen.

JD: If you're going up into the right, you're going, "Things are good," right? But there's problems buried that you don't notice. And I went to a customer in Germany, and I remember speaking to him, and he said, and this is a quote, "After about five or six installations we got, we figured out your system, and it worked well." Aha. How many customers? How many installers don't reach that fifth installation? They give up before they give up. And we started digging, and there was churn lost in the positive growth numbers. Interesting. If you continue in that thought, I started a meeting called the weekly churn meeting. Now my culture is such that that's very negative, and we're a very positive, upbeat group of people, to include the CEO, the CFO, everybody. So I switched it to retention. Retention is positive, churn is negative, right? So it's the same thing, by the way, just inverse of the two. So how you position inside your company matters, but looking at the data, not getting lost in the goodness. So I followed the same journey that Alan just described.

Drew: I love it. All right. Well, now we can welcome Allyson Havner, who has joined us. Yay. Hello, Allyson. All right, we're gonna go one on one with Allyson, and then we'll bring you both back. Okay, so Allyson CMO of TrustRadius and a returning guest was previously appeared on the show to discuss moving up market and B2B buying trends. Hello, Allyson, how are you and where are you this fine day?

Allyson: Hi Drew, good to see you. I am in San Francisco, and I'm doing well.

Drew: And so how did the kick off to your Exchange go?

Allyson: Good, yeah. We're hosting our first virtual summit today called the Demand Exchange. And I just finished the opening remarks, we're releasing a kind of state of demand gen report with our friends at Audience Plus. And so we had some of the preliminary results that we started to unveil as a little teaser to start off the conference.

Drew: I love it. Well, is there anything because we are talking about audience and buyers and building trust and keeping retention? Was there anything from that newest report that you want to share with us here?

Allyson: Yeah, you know, I think that, and also, kind of, like in this frame of, like customer-led growth, I think the couple interesting things was, you know, we surveyed over... we had over 2,000 responses to the report, and we kind of vetted, you know, I think we got it down to about like 1,500 that we vetted out. Within those responses, we had over 500 plus, like demand gen titles. And I think where that takes my mind is like how ubiquitous and how just mainstream, horizontal across the company driving demand is, and how important it is, and how it's not just one person in a department, it's really about the entire company and how you're creating that flywheel. And the interesting piece of that, too, was we started to dive into, you know, a lot of people, and the way they do their budgeting. They budget still very like, "Hey, this is brand marketing, and this is demand." And marketers are trying to get away from that. They're trying to think about it more as a flywheel and how they fuel each other. And I think in this kind of like idea of customer-led growth, customers are a great way to do that, and how to essentially embed your customers into all of the... into start of your branding campaigns, your demand campaigns, and you can start to see how they fuel each other for, you know, short-term growth right now, but also thinking about, like, the long term.

Drew: It's funny, I'm all for eliminating this separation between demand and brand, because I think it's created a very bad situation for CMOs, because it's like, "Oh, you're spending money over here which is going to be good for the business, and then you're spending money on arts and crafts, which isn't going to do anything." And the notion all marketing is demand generating in one way or another. What's interesting about the conversation that we had with Alan and JD is that we really sort of got to this place where by focusing on your customers, by supporting your customers, making them feel... doing, going the extra yard, creating a better experience, that became the flywheel. Yeah, and so it's even even more so, like this notion of demand gen as a separate thing is just so artificial anyway. So go ahead.

Allyson: Well, I was just going to say I completely agree with you, and it creates silos, not only within the marketing team, but then also within your organization and how you talk about your campaigns. I think a good example is the demand exchange that we're putting on today. You know, a lot of the topics are not about TrustRadius. Obviously, they're not about TrustRadius. We brought in a lot of different thought leaders. We brought in some CMOs, as you know, Drew, and your session later on today. A lot going on today. But really, this is a brand play for us. We're not talking about TrustRadius, we're not talking about our value prop, et cetera. It's really about creating a community around this idea that demand and brand really work hand in hand. And here are some playbooks to do that. And at the end of the day, it's just trying to create that community. Now, is that going to be potential demand in the long run? Absolutely, right? We're building this community that we can continue to engage, we can continue to have this value exchange with them, but like, if you position it as a brand campaign, it's going to get a lot more scrutiny. But if you kind of paint the whole picture, hey, we're creating this community of demand gen marketers, we can continue to engage them and make TrustRadius synonymous with this kind of demand gen community, et cetera, it makes a lot more sense instead of putting things into silos.

Drew: One of the things that you're... this is your business in that sense that you help aggregate customer reviews and insights and so forth. And I would think that the companies that really lean in and partner with you have a customer-led mentality. I'm supposing that's true, because we all know that if you read a good review and multiple reviews that are honest and might say one negative thing, you are far more likely to buy a product. I mean, this is true for consumers, and it's true for businesses. Talk a little bit about the connection between sort of reviews and customer-led growth. Connect those dots for us.

Allyson: I think about it as scale. So all of us, depending on how big your customer base is... Before I was at TrustRadius, I was at a larger company where we only sold to like the Fortune 1000 biggest advertisers in the world, and so we didn't have a huge customer base. It was hard to get them on the record. You know, it was very ones and twos of when we could get somebody to do some kind of co-marketing, anything with us. Honestly, we would take anything. It didn't need to be a case study. It didn't need to be a testimonial, anything that we could align ourselves with our customers. When I think about reviews, I think it's a way to scale customer-led growth. Because if you think the way buyers buy, they are doing all of this research before they ever even interact with your brand. They're doing it with peer-to-peer conversations. They're doing it in communities. They're reading reviews. They're trying to find out as much information as they possibly can about your product and if it's right for them before they ever answer that email or fill out that form for a demo. And so your customers and reviews are a way to make sure that that information is right at their fingertips and they can get all that information. And that's going to help you get on the shortlist. Because think about it, if you're in a pretty crowded market, and you're putting all this product information, interactive demos, pricing, customer reviews, and I'm a buyer, and I can get all that information. That's a great way to not only build trust, but that's a way to get on my shortlist, because, hey, they made it super easy for me to figure out what they do, how much it's going to cost, and it's validated from peers that are like me. So I really think about reviews and customer-led growth as this scale and you being able to do this and really enabling your buyers to essentially accelerate the sales journey. Right? Then your customers are finding your next best customers for you, almost without you even knowing.

Drew: Which is an ideal scenario. It's word of mouth, it's great. All right, we do have some questions from the audience, but before that, we're going to do a quick talk about CMO Huddles, my favorite topic, not quite my favorite topic, but a favorite topic. So launched in 2020, CMO Huddles is the only community of flocking awesome B2B marketing leaders, and that has a logo featuring penguins. Wait, what? Yes, well, a group of these curious, adaptable and problem-solving birds is called a huddle. And the leaders in CMO Huddles are all that and more. Huddle together to conquer the toughest job in the C-Suite. So Allyson, JD, Alan, you're incredibly busy marketing leaders. I'm wondering if you would like to share a specific example of how CMO Huddles has helped you.

Alan: Well, I coach and help CMOs, and when folks come to me or they have issues, I think you have a lot of great topics that let people talk about what their issues are, what they're dealing with, and how others have worked the same, similar issues, and very similar to what I do when I coach CMOs. So I think having a community is really very, very useful, and you've done a great job with that, Drew.

Drew: Thank you. JD, anything to add?

JD: You bet. So I come from semiconductor and now solar equipment background. And I learned from the SaaS industry about the customer success organization, which is foreign to my background. And I learned that from all of the great SaaS CMOs and CMO Huddles and so cross-industry learning is invaluable.

Drew: I love it. All right. Allyson, anything you want to add?

Allyson: Yeah, those are all really great points. I think about it in the most simplest terms, every CMO sometimes feels like they're on an island and in an echo chamber, and sometimes you forget what it means to be a marketer. So I like to come to CMO Huddles to remind myself what good marketing is, and get inspired by all the other CMOs that are, you know, either struggling or finding wins and just makes me feel part of a larger community and Drew, you do such a good job of running the Huddles and super organized, you make it really easy to be a part of this community. So thank you.

Drew: Thank you. All right. Well, if you're a B2B marketing leader who wants to build a stronger peer network, gain recognition as a thought leader and get your very own stress penguin, I had one somewhere, please join us at cmohuddles.com. All right, let's bring you all back. I want to get this audience question out there. Person says, really appreciate your point on churn being a growth leader lever, not a retention metric. It's easy to focus on top-of-the-funnel wins, but as you said, ignoring churn quietly erodes future profitability. Curious, how have you seen the most successful teams embed churn reduction into their day-to-day decision making? And what's that look like?

Alan: It looks like a cross-functional group, looking at churn rates, like stock prices, and categorizing what the issues are, and looking at the issues that are controllable versus not controllable, and what each function needs to do to drive continuous improvement, and looking at churn as a real key financial indicator of future retention and growth. And if you have to talk about retention instead of churn because of the political environment, as JD brought up, same thing. One's a mirror of the other. But if you're not looking at it, you could be mortgaging your future.

Drew: Right, right? It feels very positive to say we want to improve retention rates. We want to grow them, as opposed to reducing churn. It's just a psychological thing that works. Yeah, exactly. JD, Allyson, anything to add on that? How you make it embedded into day-to-day decision making.

Allyson: So we actually launched a churn survey. So what we've done is we've kind of built this survey like, again, TrustRadius. We love data, we love surveying. We love knowing what's going on as much as possible. And so we created this churn customer survey. So after, I think it's a set amount of months, I can't remember off the top of my head, we send them a survey of, hey, you know, why did you churn and a lot of questions, a lot of quantitative, qualitative questions. And it really helps us fuel and prioritize our product roadmap, our kind of sales strategy, our messaging. And also, part of the questions is like, hey, would you talk to us again, and I think actually, we send it every six months. So it's interesting, because it's embedded in our culture to get that feedback from our customers, the good, bad and ugly, and that fuels, we pump that into the rest of our organization to how do we build a better product? How do we sell our value better? How do we help our customers realize that value better? And then, hey, now that we understand the real root cause, like, it's not just a checkbox or a dropdown menu in your Salesforce reason why there's churn, right? There's a lot of complexity to it. But now that we know that, and we've gotten a lot of this honest feedback six months later, can we re-engage them, and then it becomes a win-back. So we've just started doing this. We obviously have done a lot of closed-lost analysis, but we just reintroduced this survey. It's automated. We get these insights, and now the whole organization is really rallying around it. So that's just one example of how we've actually used churn and created it into this positive momentum within the company.

Drew: Yeah, it's amazing, because, I mean, a lot of times it's finding points of friction. I think Alan, you mentioned invoicing is a great example where it's an opportunity. I mean, it is the most open email you're going to send every month, but most of the time it just has, here's your bill. It's such an opportunity to reduce friction, but folks don't often take advantage of it. You know, it looks like it just came automated from an ATM, it doesn't look like hey, you're a person. You're a company. We value your business. You know, here's how to pay the easiest possible ways with options. So it's all about identifying friction points and then seeing what you can do. JD, did you want to weigh in on this one? Ah, well, with a penguin hat, you better weigh in on it. Thank you for that.

JD: Exactly. So I have to advertise product placement here. You can pay me later. It's tying a customer name to something you're working on. So instead of the flash corruption problem, I just... that's a challenge that we ran into. You can tie and I won't do a customer name, but a specific customer name to the time-of-use challenge that we are trying to overcome internally. You tie a customer name to it which everyone in the company knows the name of the person who churned from that. So I think that gives a face to the problems that you're solving at the company.

Drew: Yeah, make it personal. I love that. Make it personal, put a face on it. We did get a great comment that I want to just read out, and a shout out to Patti Newcomer, who is also a huddler in the community. And it's just so interesting. They had a situation where they were talking to customers and hearing negative sentiment for many quarters, but not doing anything about it. Then they had lots of attrition, and suddenly, whoa, we better deal with this. So, you know, I have, first of all, I appreciate the comment, and for those of you who, chances are, you want to deal with that now.

Alan: Negative feedback is gold. It's a gift. They could just move away and not say anything, right? You won't know. When they give you negative feedback, you can act on it.

Drew: I mean, Jay Baer wrote a great book, "Hug Your Haters," and I remember working—we did customer research for a large cable company, and one of the things that was so interesting is customers that called to complain had a higher Net Promoter Score than customers who didn't call.

Alan: Absolutely. They could be your most loyal customers if there was a problem, but you fixed it quickly, and they know it. They could be your most loyal customers. You have the opportunity to turn it around.

Drew: Beware the quiet quitters, right? It's those folks who give you an opportunity. So it's really interesting and somewhat obvious, but I think it starts with you. You've got to be open to the feedback, and you've got to give opportunities for the feedback. And that's so interesting. Everybody's moving to a world where there is no human at the other end; it's all bots. And it'll be interesting to see where that leads from a customer satisfaction standpoint and customer experience standpoint. It could be better for some. It might not be better for others. I want to know where the "0" button is, the zero button, so I can—with a bot—so there's—I could still talk to a human.

Alan: Bots don't buy yet.

Drew: So let's just talk about cross-functional alignment for a quick minute. It feels like that's everything, but it's so hard. Sales is out doing their thing. Product is out doing their thing. Marketing is out doing their thing. Do you have a specific example of when you've been able to get cross-functional alignment, and if so, how?

Alan: In my case, there are two things: understand your ideal customer profile. This segment, the niche, that you can provide a remarkable experience and make sure everybody moves in the same direction, cross-functionally. I mean, that's kind of where it begins. If everybody agrees on who you're trying to—you know, what are the best customers? Because you'll get the best win-loss ratios on the front end, and you get the best retention and growth on the back end. And you really built to satisfy that—something that helps with cross-functional alignment. And then there are also service level agreements, you know, things like between marketing and sales. You know, if marketing qualifies a hand-raiser the way sales thinks it's a hot lead that helps close, how soon will they follow up? And then it's having a combined planning process. So review that, you know, review each other's plans and make sure they're all moving in the same direction. Start with a corporate strategy—say your three-year strategy—and then your annual plan should ladder up to that. But you have to make sure that the annual plans are consistent across functions. Those are some things you can do.

Drew: Yeah, those are great, great points. Allyson, anything to add on that one?

Allyson: So Trust Radius, we like live and breathe like being cross-functional. So we actually have two—we call them X-teams, and there's a representative from engineering, product, marketing, and the field team. And really, we have our set agenda of what we're talking through. Product leads it, and it's really an opportunity for us to understand, okay, what's driving the product strategy, what's the feedback from the field, what's the roadmap, what's the timeline, what's the go-to-market strategy for that? And so there, you know, each meeting kind of has like a layer of strategy, and then there's a layer of feedback, and then there's a layer of action plan and execution, and it's really helped the team be super aligned and be able to have that feedback loop and that conversation. So I was just talking about that win-loss survey, or excuse me, the churn customer survey. So we pulled all of the data together, we brought it to that X-team. We had a big discussion, and that changed some of the priorities that we had in the queue for product and engineering, and kind of changed our timeline for go-to-market. So I think the more that you can bake it into process, the better. And a lot of what, you know, Alan was saying makes a lot of sense, but you need process and kind of think about it operationally to actually make it happen. Because I think from a, you know, philosophically, we're like, "Yeah, of course, like, we need to be aligned," etc. But when everybody is doing a million things in their day and you're not already operationally obligated, and it's not part of your process, it falls to the side. And so that's what I really focus on with my team. We have like set meetings with our field leadership on campaigns, priorities, etc., and they're very prescriptive in how we run them as well. But create cross-functional alignment in your process and operationalize it.

Drew: Awesome. As I'm thinking about this—and this is, you know, people tend to do what they think they're going to be rewarded on, and they're rewarded on, you know, their bonus, for example, based on pay. And, you know, I look at sales compensation, and I see net new, right? I look at marketing, and I see, you know, pipeline. I guess the question that is sort of, let's align this as we get close to our last question: the metrics that matter most, and how do those translate into comp?

Alan: That's another part of being aligned is having defining what good looks like, cross-functionally and making sure everybody is moving towards the same metrics. And the ones we've discussed, net revenue retention, gross revenue retention, customer lifetime value and NPS are all really important ones. I'm going to add one, and this one came from Fred Reichheld in the NPS work he did I mentioned before. He has a new metric he's calling earned growth. Earned growth is net revenue retention, plus the new business you get from advocates of your brand. If you're creating a remarkable customer experience, your customers will bring you new customers. And if you look at that, and you add that to your net revenue retention, that's your future financial results in many ways. So having a common set of metrics, defining what good looks like, having each function responsible for them, is a way to drive that operational excellence.

Drew: Yeah, and it's interesting, because a lot of consumer companies are still using NPS as part of the bonus calculation. I don't know if any business-to-business companies are, and that's just that's one of those big gaps, but that's an interesting one. All right. Last question for JD, metrics that matter most when measuring the impact of customer-led growth.

JD: What we use is customer count, and then from customer count, you do the churn. So you do the new, the net count, and then you do gross and net, so you subtract out how many left and how many showed up. That customer count is paramount.

Drew: Okay, Allyson, metric that matters the most for customer-led growth.

Allyson: For us, it's really around adoption. We constantly look at how well our product is adopted across all the different use cases. And you know, how many integrations are they using to, you know, access our intent data. And so adoption, especially because we market to marketers. And so the more marketers are in a tool, using a tool, adopting it, that means A) that they're finding value and they care, and B) that we can continue to grow that partnership, learn from them, and so forth. So we look at adoption and kind of across the platform, which is really important.

Drew: Amazing. Okay, final words of wisdom for marketing leaders who want to embrace customer-led growth but aren't sure where to start. Let's start with Alan.

Alan: So like my grandmother used to say, listen to the people. So listen to your customers, act on what they tell you, and then tell them you listened and you made changes because of what they said. And that's a way to drive continuous improvement, not just have NPS like a vanity metric. And don't forget churn. Make sure if you're not all over churn, you should be.

Drew: Okay. JD, final words of wisdom.

JD: Tell stories, both internally and externally. I started off talking about Lucy the cat. Well, that and I sent you, by the way, I sent you a picture of Lucy the cat Drew and that installer told me about how his employees were all either Amish or coming out of rehab. So I came internally and said, "We need to rewrite our manuals for the Amish and somebody out of rehab." Now that made it very personal and made it very you can picture who that person is that you're doing the work for, and that's vivid.

Drew: That is, Allyson, final words of wisdom.

Allyson: Yeah, it starts simple. Don't try to, don't try to boil the ocean. We started doing instead of, like trying to get all these customers case studies, we just did customers. We call them customer spotlights. And we created just a simple campaign to really highlight what our best customers were doing and the results that they were driving. We made it really about them. And we just made this super simple campaign. We make like a webpage. We put it in our newsletter, we do a social post about it, we spiff our customer success team on it, and that's all we did. We just did one campaign, and now we have over, you know, 50 of these customer spotlights. But just start with one simple thing, one campaign that every that's fun and exciting, that everyone can kind of rally around and then build from there.

Drew: I love it, all right. Well, thank you. Allyson, JD, Alan, you're all amazing sports. Thank you audience for staying with us.

 

To hear more conversations like this one and submit your questions while we're live, join us on the next CMO Huddle Studio. We stream to my LinkedIn profile—that's Drew Neisser—every other week.

Show Credits

Renegade Marketers Unite is written and directed by Drew Neisser. Hey, that's me! This show is produced by Melissa Caffrey, Laura Parkyn, and Ishar Cuevas. The music is by the amazing Burns Twins and the intro Voice Over is Linda Cornelius. To find the transcripts of all episodes, suggest future guests, or learn more about B2B branding, CMO Huddles, or my CMO coaching service, check out renegade.com. I'm your host, Drew Neisser. And until next time, keep those Renegade thinking caps on and strong!