I pose this question for a number of reasons.

1. It’s my job, so I thought I’d try and articulate it.
2. Many organisations are beginning to see the need to formalise this type of role.
3. There’s significant benefit to your organisation by ensuring the success of your customers.

It’s my Job!

In mid 2013 I started a new role as Customer Success & Marketing Director at Marketing Cube. This was a merging of previous roles, I’d been doing what this role is designed to do for the past 20 years – we just didn’t specifically call it “Customer Success”.

So what is it that I do? I thought sharing what I did this past week would give you a good idea about the role of a Customer Success Manager.

Lead Scoring

I started the week preparing for an Eloqua Lead Scoring workshop with a customer in the Publishing industry. That meant a whole day workshop on Wednesday taking them through a defined process to create a model for scoring their leads. I find this process tends to stretch people’s thinking, it requires them to know or be aware of many aspects of the data they capture through campaigns and other interactions.

At the end of the day, we had a framework in place and they now have an understanding of how the Eloqua Lead Scoring model works. They realised there was data in their NetSuite CRM that wasn’t in Eloqua. However, if they wanted to score on that data, it had to come across to Eloqua. So, I left them with home “homework” and we’ll catch up in the second week of March.

Campaign Support

Over the past few weeks I’ve been working with a new customer in the Information & Telecommunications industry. Their first campaign is a national roadshow with events in each major capital city. I find that building an event campaign in Eloqua is a great way to understand how Eloqua works as a platform. The event management process touches on almost every part of the Eloqua platform, it’s a baptism of fire essentially. In a good way 🙂

I took a number of calls, helped them with modifications to their campaign on the canvas. We updated a few email subject lines based on performance of previous emails. We created certain Segments and also reports via the Insight object. Their first event is this coming up Monday and they’re all set.

Pre-Sales Support

We have a prospect in the Construction & Property Development industry. They’re very excited about Eloqua as a Marketing team, however they have a senior executive well connected to an Eloqua competitor. We spent an hour with the CMO and he helped us ensure the presentation due for next week will hit the right spot and resonate with the executive team.

We revisited the Eloqua Campaign Canvas and built a basic campaign, I always find marketers reaction to the campaign canvas a treat. They love it, it’s visual, easy to follow and an excellent overview of what the campaign will do and the many and varied touch points along the way. I’m brought into these discussions more so as a subject matter expert.

New Customer Kick Off

These sessions are always exciting. This new customer is in the event management industry. They’ve removed an Eloqua competitor and are now installing Oracle Eloqua Marketing Cloud and integrating it with Salesforce CRM from salesforce.com. These sessions are generally technical by nature, my role as Customer Success Director doesn’t really kick off until they have the Eloqua instance up and running.

However, we can start campaign planning before the instance is available, I find that helps ensure the customer has the right assets in place so once we have access to Eloqua, we can hit the ground running.

Road Map Planning

Finally, I had two sessions with long term customers. One meeting was with a CMO and helping him review various campaigns and look at ways we could automate certain steps even further. This was to help eliminate some repetitive steps that took place each Friday. By using the Eloqua Form Processing steps we were able to give their Marketing Support Manager back about three hours in her day.

The other session was with a long term customer who had a couple of new team members who’d been using Eloqua, but they really just wanted to make sure they were doing things “correctly”. In these sessions I find the best approach is to take a current real campaign they’re working on and then building that out in Eloqua. I find the transfer of knowledge works best when they have a real example to work from instead of a hypothetical campaign.

So That Was My Week

There were a few other things, like preparing our monthly Outside The Cube newsletter. I’ve created a 2013 archive for Outside The Cube, we have enough content now that it can be recycled. I’m also working on a joint campaign with Oracle and we have four events in the first week of March. That’s more part of my Marketing Director role. Overall a busy week, but a great week.

I wrote this bog post sitting at Cafe Aurora by the finger wharfs in Sydney, see my pic below.