Episode 11: Unlocking the superpower of customer data

Matias Vivone  0:06  
Okay, so hi everyone. I'm Matias, sales manager at Wings for You. Wings for You is a customer marketing advocacy agency that provides documentation, consultancy, and content creation to drive success and growth of your customer marketing and advocacy programs. Today, I'm thrilled to have with us Irwin Huebschuan. Irwin, one of the most experienced customer marketing professionals in the industry, Irwin brings over 16 years of expertise, having held director roles in customer marketing and customer advocacy. I had the pleasure of meeting Irwin at Customer Dexcom in Boston last October, where I attended his workshop titled Transform Your Customer Contact Database into a super power. For me, it was an instant aha moment, because at Wins for You, we also deeply value the golden importance of data, and we believe this message needs to be reached to the community. So, welcome to the show, Irwin.

Irwin Hipsman  1:03  
It's wonderful being here. Looking forward to chatting.

Matias Vivone  1:06  
Okay, let's dive right into it. One of the standard points from your workshop was the emphasis on the value of the case customer data, specifically for customer marketers and customer advocacy managers. Will share with us why it's so important for customer marketers, directors, or customer advocacy directors to prioritize their data.

Irwin Hipsman  1:30  
Yeah, the four customer marketing positions I've had at different B2B SaaS companies, the one thing that they all had in common in retrospect was all four of them had okay customer contact database, and if I was a CEO of a company and I went to my customer marketing person and said, "Hey, what's the quality of our customer contact database? And I said, "Well, I think it's okay, that would not be acceptable. First of all, these are customers, and the database should be in excellent shape, not just okay shape. And second of all, either my fear is that most executives won't ask that question, because either they assume the customer contact database is excellent, or they know it's not good, but it's a mess, and who, you know who can fix it, and so as I talk to my customers and prospects, they all say, yeah, it's really important, but it's always on the back burner, because it's one of these things that sort of everyone has responsibility for, but then no one has responsibility for, it's not fun to do, it's very tedious, and up until now there haven't been, you know, companies that will do that for four people, so

Speaker 1  2:44  
the

Irwin Hipsman  2:45  
importance of the customer contact database is a few. One is, if I was a customer of yours, I would expect that you would know the basics, you would know my email address, my company, do I still work for that company, maybe, maybe not, my current title, and where I live, that's where the customer contact database begins to fall apart, is really just the basics of that, of that person's data, because people move, they change, they leave jobs, and every month the database, customer contact database, you know, gets decays about 2% is the data that I see out there. The other reason why some customer marketer or customer advocacy should care is that a lot of people in the company communicate with customers, not just customer marketing, field marketing, product demand gen people commute legal, they communicate with customers, and those teams need to have confidence in the data when they're communicating with customers, so if they want to send an email out to a subset of customers, they want to be sure, yes, that you're able to segment your audience properly, and we're reaching the right people. If we have a field marketing event in New York City, why are we inviting people in London to the field marketing event in New York City, because you think that they live in New York City, so you know a lot of people want to make sure that they have confidence in the data when they're sending it out. Another real benefit of having, you know, a healthy customer contact database is you'll begin to identify those hidden advocates, and during every place I've been at, my theory has been, you know, everyone would agree that for every one advocate you have, there's probably two to three hidden advocates that you don't even know that you should be asking, and so some of the things you can do, particularly finding people's LinkedIn URLs and finding how many followers they have. I would argue if somebody had 1000 followers, they might be a potential advocate, because they, you know, they're out there, they're they're following people, and then the last thing is the ability to generate revenue, so customer marketers are being asked more and more, you know, can you generate revenue, and by having a healthy database, now you can begin to track as people leave. Leave the company, leave the account. So, someone left the account, they've gone to a new company, and sometimes it takes six months to find that out. And if you can get that information over to the demand gen team and say this month, here are 30 people who've left their company, they're now at new companies, or they haven't landed yet, they can start a nurture campaign, and because what happens in sales today is that if a client leaves their, their company goes to a new company, sales just waits for that person to call. It's like, well, why are you waiting? You spend all this time prospecting to people who are never going to buy, and here's the warmest of leads. Somebody used to use your product, why aren't you talking to them right away? So that's, you know, by working with, by creating those leads for marketing, then you know they become, you become a revenue generator, and that's what you want to be.

Matias Vivone  5:51  
I couldn't agree more. I feel that also it's crucial for teams in customer marketing to receive proper training in these areas, right? So to understand the basics on how to handle data, and also, of course, understanding and learning the importance of having good health when it comes to customer data. So now, as we approach 2025 and many companies are planning their initiatives for the year, what would be your top advice for customer marketing or customer advocacy leaders on how to best leverage their customer data for their plans, but also in terms of what are the initiatives that they should be in their priority list for the next year.

Irwin Hipsman  6:36  
Yeah, the foundation of a lot of customer marketing activity is a healthy customer contact database, and the data that I see out there, the research I see says that nobody says their customer contact database is in excellent shape, about 25% says it's good, and everybody else says it's okay, fair, or poor, the health of your database, so the first thing I think to do is to assess, you know, what is the health of your database. So, what I would suggest is take, you know, 100 200 contacts at random from different, different types, so maybe some C levels, some admins, you know, different types, from big companies, small companies, take, you know, get a list of 200 or so, and spend the time and go into LinkedIn and say, do we have people's right company? Do they still work at the company we think they work for? Do we have their right location? Do we have their LinkedIn URL, which we'll talk about in a second, and do we know what their title is? Because when we first met them three years ago, they were a manager, now they're a VP, and that's really useful information to know somebody's a VP, as opposed to just a manager, because VPs are more likely to buy, you know, the managers, particularly if you start thinking about cross sell. So that'd be the first thing, is to just assess the overall health of the database, you know, put the time in, and then take that to management and say, you know, our database is okay, and is that, is that, is that good enough for you? Because you know, an okay database probably impacts about three to 5% of ACV, and so if you went to management, said I believe that, you know, 20% of our database is incorrect, and the impact on our ACV would be 2% Those are all things I can help you assess. I think you would get somebody's attention very, very quickly. So, that's the level one data. Level two data is, you know, is working with the CRM team, but you really can't go to CRM team and say I need these fields without doing some of the heavy lifting yourself. So, you would say we just cleaned up our database. We spent three months cleaning up our database, and we have a plan to keep it clean in the future, you know, quarterly updates, whatever it would be. Now this is what we need to be much more effective. We need a last updated field for titles, because you know, if we don't look at every somebody leased every six months, maybe their title has changed, and we need to know that, you know, quickly. So, but if they haven't been, if we don't know when the last time we looked at it, you know, then we're our hands are tied. We need a field for LinkedIn, so we can get their LinkedIn URL profile, so we can much more easily keep track of them in the future. We need a field that lets us know who the main point of contact is, the admin is the active user, the advocate, the inactive user, so we can start thinking about segmenting our audiences. We need a field to identify C-level people versus VPs versus directors, managers, and specialists. Now, some, you may have some of these already, you may not, but you've, you've earned the right to ask for these things because you spent the time to clean up your database. The third thing would be, and this is further down the road, this might be 12 months from now, we might be having this conversation again, is what data do you want from the platform to be integrated? Into the CRM system, the two pieces of data I think are the most useful. There are many others. Are when was the last time the person, you know, when did they first become a user, and when was the last time they logged in? So, you know, if somebody hasn't has never logged in and you're sending them emails and they never open them, you know, you're not. It's not a surprise. So, by cleaning up the database, one of the real nice side benefits is your open rates will go up. Because when I was a forester, our average email went out to about 1200 people.

Irwin Hipsman  10:32  
By the time I left, our average email was going out to about 700 people. Now, our open rates went up about five to 7% because there were all these people who never opened an email from us, they were inactive user, and we keep on sending them, hoping they're going to send an email, and hope is not a strategy. Let's get them out, so we can see what our real open rate is, which may not be good enough, or may be good enough, but now you have a real open rate.

Matias Vivone  10:56  
I really like that advice. I like these three layers assessment, that's a fantastic advice for the planning on 2025 To wrap things up on a lighter note, if you could put anything, either like a word or a sentence on a T-shirt about customer marketing or advocacy on these topics about data quality or customer data management, what would it be?

Irwin Hipsman  11:25  
There's probably two words. One, one would be outsource, so it's very hard to do this yourself because it's always on the back burner. It's not fun work to clean up the database, and it's expensive. If you were to manually, you know, you have 10,000 customer contacts, or 1000 customer advocates, whatever it is, you know, it would take weeks and weeks and weeks, and the math says it's about $4 a name to manually, you know, find the person, update the CRM, etc. etc. If you, you know, went to somebody, you know who does this for a living, you know, we could do it anywhere from 50 cents to $1 a name, you know, to update the customer contact database, and then once it's updated, then it gets, it's very easy to every six months to check and make sure, because you know the main thing that you'll get, one of the main things you'll get is the LinkedIn URL, and you know now that you've got that, it's a lot quicker to, you know, to uptake that person. The second word I would use is segmentation, because without the segmentation, all customers receive everything, and you know, when I was at Forrester, one of the things that I saw was by doing segmentation, and that's if you know a few levels of segmentation, the level activity with the platform, their title, you know, would be example in their role with the platform, right, they, the main point, contact the admin, etc. Now you're able to shrink those audiences down, so as opposed to typically we would send an email out to 1200 people. By the time I left, we sent it out to about seven or 800 people. And then the open rates begin to go up, because you're not communicating to people who you know they've never opened an email from you. They've became a user four years ago. They've never used the platform. Why are you still communicating to those people? It's time to, yes, they're still in the database, that's fine, but there's no reason to keep on communicating with them, because if you send them one more email, they're not likely to open that email up, and now you have a, now you've got a much more honest assessment as to what customers are thinking about your content, so is our at the end of this exercise is 5% of the people opening your content. Well, you still have a problem. It's not a database problem anymore. It's a, you know, it's a customer communication problem, customer relationship, customer experience problem. 20-5% opening, oh, you're doing pretty good. 50% opening your emails, you're doing fantastic, but without the healthy data, you just don't know, and you know that's that's sort of the eye-opening part of this is the ability to have a clean data opens up all sorts of things, so that when an executive asks you, How healthy is our database, you can with confidence say, you know, on a score of eight to 10, you know we're a score of one to 10, we're an eight. Our database is good shape. That's not the problem anymore. We have other problems that we need to solve.

Matias Vivone  14:28  
Gotcha, cool, wonderful segmentation. Thank you so much, Irwin, for showing us today. But thank you very much for sharing your wisdom and your experience. I'm a fan of customer data and data management, and I appreciate your, your, your knowledge. It's always inspiring to hear from someone with your depth of experience. To our listeners, we hope you found today's conversation as valuable as we did. Remember, your customer data can be your superpower if you take the time to organize, analyze, and leverage. It wisely, it can be a differentiator for your program. Until next time, stay customer focused and detail driven. Thank you.

Irwin Hipsman  15:09  
Thank you, Matias. Bye.