As you think about content you can create for your customers, you need to focus on the job they hired your product to do. If you send your customers content that isn't relevant to the job they hired your product to do, they're just going to get angry. Todd Hockenberry, owner of Top Line Results experienced this himself. I have a really great example because this just happened to me yesterday. I bought a car three years ago, I won't say who it was from, but I bought it from a certain dealer. These guys, they understand their value now is to provide an ongoing service, so they're trying to create these loops with me. They want me to come back and service my vehicle there. They want me to buy my next one there. One of their new tricks is, they always call and say, hey, we've got something special and there's this big demand now for your vehicle. It's three years old and there's a lot of people who want to buy this, so we'll buy your vehicle back, and what they're trying to do is get you to trade it in to buy a new one, to get you to keep that payment rolling forever. Well, I'm a buy-and-hold guy when it comes to cars. My last car, I drove 250,000 miles, so I keep them. I buy them, I own them, and I keep them as long as I can. This car's only three years old and I'm going to have it for another 10 years probably. So they call me every month for three months trying to get me to sell my car to them. I told them, I said, "Please make a note in your CRM, you have a CRM, right?" They said yeah. "Make a note in there that I am not going to sell this car anytime soon. Do not call me again." I did it three times. I said I'm running out of patience. The third time, I said, "If you call me again, I promise you I'll never step foot in your dealership again, ever, for anything." They call me again and I said that's it. I said I warned you, you couldn't put the notes in the context. I'm never coming back to a dealership again. I would never buy anything from you again, and I said I hope you're recording this call and your management hears it. Sure enough, the boss called me an hour later and she was apologetic every way up and down. She was great and she said she was going to send me a little something, like a certificate for some free service or something like that. But I told them, I warned them and their customer service follow-up people, betrayed the trust they built for three years, and I was happy with them. The only issue is I loved the vehicle , they did great service, but their marketing just about killed it. One mistake ruins the entire experience. This is a crucial idea to keep in mind as you implement a post-sale content strategy. If you help people do the job they hired your product to do, they'll love you for it. But if you try to help them do some other job, they'll just get frustrated. Here's what that car dealership should have done. I want simple, fast, easy, accessible service to my vehicle that I'm going to keep for a long time. Help me keep this thing going for 10 years because I just told you what I want. Usually, I have a plan. I mean, if they were smart, they would have come back to me with a plan and said, "Sir, you're one of our buy-and-hold buyers that keeps the vehicles for a long time. We have a specific program that we set up for that to help you, so here's what we're going to do. We're going to send you service recommendations every three months. We're going to give you offers, and if you commit to staying with us, I'm not even trying to sell you a program. We're going to keep that vehicle running for 200,000 miles." You get it. It could be anything. But you got to think about it. Number 1, how many companies even think about that stuff after the sale? Really put themselves in the customer's shoes and think about it. You're right, if you throw it over to marketing, marketing will do what marketing does, but you don't want to have a marketing department like that. If they're aligned with sales services, if the whole company's aligned as an endowed organization using the principles that we're talking about, then you should avoid that. It all goes back to understanding your customers and the jobs they're trying to get done. That car dealership was trying to solve for car owners who want to always have the newest model, but Todd was looking for longevity. Conceivably, there's also a third category of automotive customers who prefer to do maintenance themselves. For those customers, providing a program of regular maintenance would be just as infuriating as the upgrade offer was to Todd. Instead, they might want to get content explaining how to do that maintenance, and they might want offers for factory direct tools and parts. Ultimately, your customers should feel like you're invested in their success. Here's Kathleen Booth, Vice President of Marketing Strategy at IMPACT Branding and Design. I want to be a partner to the companies I work with. I don't want to be a vendor. I think we've really done a lot of soul searching over the last decade of providing services to our customers. We've thought so much about what is it that makes customers successful because our mission, our purpose as a company is helping our clients win. How do you know what kind of content your customers need? Ask them. Sometimes the most helpful thing you can do is check in with your customers and ask them what they need. Here's Ross Brockman, Co-founder of Downeast Cider House. It sounds a little corny, but it has to be a good situation, both sides have to get what they want out of it. Sometimes a place we'll just need attention, the fact that you went in there, that somebody took time out of their day to stop into your bar and say, "Hey, how's everything going?" Is there anything that you need? Is there anything that you haven't been getting out of us that you want? Just the fact that you went in there and did that and they appreciate that is enough. If you can't ask your customers directly, check-in with the people at your company who can. Just as marketing can work with sales to get a better idea of what prospects need, marketing should also be working with customer support to understand what customers need. Here's Josh Harcus, founder Huify and author of A Closing Culture. I really feel like customer success can be stemmed as more than this, but it can be stemmed on expectations. How well were their expectations set and how educated were they when they came on as customers. Marketing has a massive role in that because what you communicate on the website or what you don't communicate on the website can actually hurt you a lot down the road. Really at the end of the day, it's what do people need to know to make a good, well-informed decision to buy and then to trust basically the company they're buying from. That plays massively back in customer's success, and if customer success isn't providing good feedback back into marketing, there's no loop, there's no feedback loop. Because customer success absolutely knows what's coming from marketing and they know what the customer is experiencing because the customer's like, "Well, I saw this on your website that this happens," and you're like , "Well, yeah, I know. I don't know why it does because we don't actually do that." They're like, "Well, that's why I bought," and you're like, "Well, how about this?" Help your new customers fire their old solution and help all of your customers see opportunities to hire your solution over and over again. But always be sure to keep your focus on the job each customer hired your product to do. If you do these things, your customers will love you for it and they will buy from you again and again, and that will provide your sales team with a wide new world of high-quality leads to work with.
