256 - Customer Marketing Is Your Hidden Growth Lever (Holly Higgins, Customer Marketing at Nectar)

You're a startup founder. You think your product is amazing and feel like more people should be buying, but the road is long and slow. It feels like you're stuck. There's always one thing I ask startup founders. Have you talked to your customers? They almost always say, "Hey, yes, we talked to our customers all the time." But what I find is they're either selling or trying to improve their product. These are not customer-focused conversations if we can get curious about our customers, then we can uncover critical insights that will help us build to the next round. I'm Anna Firmanov and welcome to Building with Buyers, a show about startup growth, where I'll explore how customers help startups build to the next round. Holly Higgins is Senior Customer Marketing Manager at Nectar. Nectar sounds delicious, doesn't it? We were just talking about Nectar with my kids the other day. We were talking about honey and they were like, "Is honey sugar? How is honey made? How do the bees make it? How does that process even work?" We had that conversation going on. Nectar, it's not what you think. It's an employee recognition and rewards platform for companies investing in culture. You're selling into the HR department. Holly, welcome. First of all, welcome to the show. Thank you. I'm excited to be here. Good. If I'm not mistaken, 58.7 million in funding. It's a pretty large company, 245 people, 245-ish people at the organization. I am exploring the role that customers play in helping companies build to their next level of growth. Of course, who better to bring on than someone that is running this stuff, running customer marketing. The reason that just stopping and going back to why am I exploring this? Why are customers so important to me and should be important to companies beyond just the revenue factor? People don't stop to consider how important their customers are. It seems like as a marketer, we're always chasing net new. To me, that's what it seems like. We need more. We need more. We need to build up a funnel. But the bottom of funnel, that's where I always recommend that companies start with their go-to-market strategy. Who are these customers? Understand that. They're important. Then of course, customer marketing comes into play because trust is so pure-led and a lot of growth still comes from referrals and word of mouth and bottom up adoption and all of that stuff. Customers are so important. I talk about how customers are your moat because they're unique to you. They're unique to each company. That's why it's really important to really understand them. Be knowledgeable about them. It goes beyond product research. I just wanted to give that background. I think I'm going to do this every episode because I think it's just an important message to continue to share and continue to just beat this drum. So, Holly, thanks for waiting through that. I want to learn more about you. Tell me about your role. Tell me about your responsibilities. I just want to learn more about what's on your mind and your goals for this year. Awesome. Yeah. No, that's such good context. I think you are spot on. I've listened to a couple episodes and customers are a very massive part of product-led growth and customer-led growth. They're a huge growth engine. Anyway, I love all the topics that you've been covering. Nectar is like you were saying at the beginning with sweetness. I think they're tagline right now. I'm newer to Nectar, so I might butcher this, but it's making culture sweet. The fastest way, so I love Nectar for one reason. It is a software that does what customer marketing does for product. It does that for employees. The fastest way to get customers to love your brand is to get employees to love their job. Nectar started as a rewards and recognition platform where they could build employees could go shout out to coworkers and celebrate the wins and all that. From there, they really doubled down, listened to what does culture drive for a business? What okay hours are driven by employees being super happy? Then that took them into building nominations and to challenges so that employers could say, "Hey, this is the behavior we need our employees to repeat. Let's go reward that. Let's go recognize that." That took them from being a software solution into all of a platform. Recently, they are launching new features, which is why they brought on a customer marketer. That's my role right now, is coming and being that part of the, "Hey, we're going from a solution to now a solid platform in an actual culture growth lever." That makes a lot of sense. Then what will you be responsible for? As I know, you kind of just joined, but what's your take on your responsibilities and your goals for this coming this year and into next? Yeah. That's a good question. That was one of my goals. You're like, "I don't know." No, just kidding. Good question. You should ask my boss. They basically have her handing over the life cycle and they're saying, "They understand that so when you're building a customer marketer role, they're either brought on as a, "Hey, we have our churn issue and we would like you to come fix the leaky bucket," or they're brought on as a proactive growth motion. I'm very grateful to have been brought on as a proactive growth motion prior to a churn issue. As a, "Hey, customers love us. We want to know why. What's the difference?" Hey, what is keeping customers from getting the full value? There's a lot of those metrics that I feel like a lot of startups don't track. Nectar is now at the point where they need to start tracking that. What is the average customer life cycle? What is the average life cycle value? Honestly, I've been brought on to take Nectar's marketing to the next level where we can take the customer voices and have them be our cheapest sales team and our best marketing. I think that's the most exciting role a customer marketer. The other problem solution is a little less exciting, so the balance. Well, I apparently was a customer marketer at some point in my career because I was brought in to help fix the leaky bucket problem and I did focus on life cycle marketing. I guess I did have a stick in customer marketing because we throw all these terms around. I knew I was doing marketing, some people called it growth marketing. Some people called it life cycle marketing. People know, so it's customer marketing, but we did. We focused on the leaky bucket problem and it was like customers that would buy and then they would never come back. That's an example. I'm trying to figure out how to get them back. When back program, for example, that's from when I was covering that. But there are so many different programs and levers you can pull, I'm sure, but that's cool that you're kind of your role is more focused on the let's continue the momentum, right? What are the opportunities we're missing? Because we're on a growth trajectory, but now we need to kind of put more fuel on the fire and become more efficient effective at this, right? If I'm understanding. It's so funny. I think every company has customer marketing, but they don't know it. And until it's like a call-down strategic role, it's just kind of a motion that is reactive. It's usually like a fire hose. And then once it's called out as a strategic partner, that's when it becomes like a growth lever. So when I got to nectar, for example, they were like, we're excited to have a customer marketer. We've never done this. I get there and they have an advocacy program and they have case studies and they have them. Yeah, so they do it. They're doing a bunch of stuff. You've got to do a lot of customer marketing. You just hadn't seen the fact that you were proactive customer marketer. So yeah. So tell me like now that you've kind of gotten into your role a little bit and you know what your goals are, what you're going to be responsible for. You came on to the team and you saw that nectar is already sort of incorporating customers as part of their growth efforts. Just not calling it customer marketing. So what does that look like? You mentioned that there is an advocacy program. There's like case studies like tell me more about how customers are incorporated. It is my favorite thing. Every time I talk to someone when I realize I feel like a customer marketer is a really good internal marketer of the customer voice. So they go around and share this stories. The customer success are hearing some of the negatives. They're hearing maybe poor feedback. So they might be losing some of their positivity and their desire to go solve problems. And product is hearing from sales that they lost this deal because they don't have this feature. And anyway, customer marketing can come in and say, hey, like customers for us, this is our really happy story. What's weird about coming into nectar is their customer obsessed in the very best way. That's not weird. That's where what we all should strive for. It's great. It's true. And yeah, it's what we should be striving for. I just don't think I expected it. So for example, our awesome CSM was speaking in front of my desk the other day. Just I overheard a conversation and she was talking to the VP of product and she was explaining one of these pain points that a customer had experienced and also like a win that they had in a recent call. And the VP of product said, yeah, I heard that story and she was like, how did someone tell you? And he's like, oh, I just listened to calls on the drive home. And I was like, the VP of product listening to CS calls, not sales calls, CS calls, and developing better product for a customer. Like that is a customer we're going to dream to come into where everyone is genuinely listening to the customer story. Good and bad. And I think a lot of growth gets missed when companies are hearing positive feedback. We love your product, whatever. And not asking the follow-up questions of why. What was your alternative? Instead, we just hear it as like a vanity thing. And we're going to go put it on a billboard somewhere. But taking the exciting positive feedback and turning it into a deeper conversation and actually listening to the responses. And okay, but what does that mean for your business? How does that affect your company's bottom line? Because we know how those positive stories impact our company's bottom line. But anyway, going in deeper to those conversations, that's I think where I can play a big role. Yeah, I love to hear that. That it's not just the, you know, sales is re-listening to their sales conversations or marketing has their separate siloed voice-to-customer conversations or customer success has their conversations. But this idea of really sharing how it's hard, I think, for companies to be unless people like you're had a product does that on their car ride home and they're like really interested in hearing, like what are those guys talking about on their call? I don't think this happens as much. But I really do think that if you are a customer obsessed, you're going to take the time and you're going to listen to those conversations. You're going to, you're going to want to listen to them or have some kind of milestone meeting around that where you talk about like, okay, what did you guys learn? Okay, what did you guys learn? Or in Slack, like sharing quotes, you know, it doesn't seem very hard, but making it systematic, like a systematic effort and part of the culture, I think is not something that I see or hear about often. So I'm really, I didn't know this about nectar. I kind of was like, okay, great. They hired a customer marketing person like they must care about their customers. And I was thankfully right. But now hearing that from you, it seems like they really do, they do value customer related efforts and take the time and listen to and ask questions like, why? Why is that that's great? That's positive, but why? That's really important too. Exactly, and that's the, I think it's such a fun role to be in. I think any good customer marketer is going to take the conversation of, I mean, a very important KPI for customer marketer is to know time to realize value. How, and they should be actively creating programs of CS and product to shorten that time. So if we obsess over how fast they experience success in the product, that's a great, great, great thing, but really deepening it and understanding how fast their success in the product showed up on their company's bottom line. So taking it past our KPI into their KPI, that's where a strategic partner in customer marketing can really help grow a business. That's really interesting. So it goes beyond just time to value within your product, but time to value within your team, within your company, like, what does that look like? So great, you got to the value, saw the value, but then how else does that trickle out? What's the trickle out effect of that? Like the bigger impact in your role, right? But I'm sure that there's tons of different value that you're getting if you're in something that's as complicated as culture, employee culture. There's different outcomes that come from using a tool like that. So that's a great call out. So I heard you mentioned kind of like the, I didn't know I was coming in here, but it's great to now know how customer obsessed they are here at nectar. Tell me more about how customers are incorporated into growth efforts, marketing efforts, like the tactical stuff. I'd love to hear more like we could start with what is already there, like the customer advocacy program or any of the research efforts that they've done or any of the content efforts, like tell me what excites you the most. So what excites me the most right now is they get it because like I said, nectar, the platform for HR to be customer marketers internally. And so to bring on a customer marketer and for example, feedback loops within product, very important for customer marketers to make sure that feedback is getting to product and to CS and the positives to marketing and all that stuff. And that's what the nectar platform does is also make sure that we have engagement surveys for employees. And so they get it. They get the fact that hey amplify your biggest wins, your customers biggest wins are your products biggest wins. And your employees biggest wins are your companies biggest wins. So it's just kind of a funny, I almost feel weird sometimes the fact that they get my job so well because that's what their product has for companies for employees. And so the decisions when you are customer obsessed internally the decisions are easier than you can get sharper product gets better because the customer truth is just like in the room it's felt. Hey, it's Anna host of building with buyers. I started the show because I found that customers play such an important role in business growth, but they're often overlooked. We're so focused on net new, but the thing that makes you unique is not your product. There are so many companies solving the same problem and they have customers too. The thing that makes you unique is your superfan customers. That's your mode. Most positioning and messaging is guesswork. I'm a customer insights and strategy advisor and I help my clients by interviewing their customer super fans and translating those insights into clear and compelling positioning and messaging that specific people care about. So you get deeper engagement with customers and prospects, increased inbound to demos, better sales conversations, increased word of mouth and closed deals. If you're done guessing, stumbling along and want to be more customer obsessed, reach out. I'd love to help. And now back to the episode. Can you speak to any like creative customer marketing efforts? Yeah. So one of my favorite things that we were trying to do at bamboo, for example, was they had these amazing customers who had cool swag, for example, like a really cool water bottle company and partnering with them for something. I mean, when you have a case study, that's a great within good name on it. That's a really good, but when you're standing at a trade show, if you could hand a prospect, a packet of starbursts and say starbursts is an employee or a customer. And if you hand them starbursts with a quote from their HR professional, like, hey, it doesn't relate to the product, but it relates to the brand recognition. And that was something we were starting up over at. Bamboo HR was to say, hey, these are our very notable customers. And I'm going to swag with them and take their product, which is recognizable and put a quote from their HR team to show maybe a smaller customer who is trying to build up to that level of recognition and they're the HR team and they can say, hey, well, I could go on to their website and scroll and see the little tagline like, hey, these are who use us, but in person at a trade show, being able, like, physically touch someone's product and say, hey, their HR pro knows the pains I feel and is using the software as a solution. That was emotionally retrying, was making more of a physical case study, showing of who was using the product to solve the problems of the same industry. So you're kind of like building the connection even further because you're using your customer's product within your marketing efforts. And so they're happy about that. You're happy to showcase their stuff because you like it. And that builds that nurtures the relationship further. Is that kind of what you were getting at? Yes. Yeah. And it just creates kind of a more physical, tangible moment of, hey, that's a recognizable customer. Yeah, not everybody knows though that that's a customer, like that could be just like, oh, it's swag that and I know this company, but it doesn't always click. Like, oh, wait, that's a customer or how do you make it kind of like well known that this is actually not just swag for swag sake that you recognize a brand, but it's also our customer. Right, we were trying to put a quote of the HR professional, like proud customer of, yeah, that's cool. I like that. What about like content? Any content, collaborations that you've worked on as a customer marketer, because what is marketing, marketing is content, right? So bringing in customers to be part of that content, anything you can remember that you've done before. Customers in content is honestly the best. If I can get a customer to jump on a podcast or whatever something that we're running up with at nectar is just going and talking to them. They just have a brand new video that one of their customers is the Arizona Diamondbacks and they have a video of their entire team talking about the platform and how, you know, they're not necessarily desk workers. They're running around solving problems at the games and they're traveling with teams and so having a platform that is mobile as well. So they went and they did a little custom cleat and made it nectar branded and went and did some video with them. And I think as AI is taking a lot of the like personal conversations away, actually going and building experiences and having those face-to-face conversations with customers and not necessarily to get anything out of it, we did end up with video and all of that. But those videos were so authentic because we took the time to have a conversation with them and to really listen and I mean our CEOs from Arizona. And so it was potentially like a big dream of his to go and have that conversation with the Arizona Diamondbacks and to meet some players. But for us, it was such a cool way to see how we had played a role into the Arizona Diamondbacks. And anyway, having that really cool moment in authentic conversation, which now is a video that we can share with sales teams and news and marketing. I love that. And I mean, companies don't need to have customers that are like Arizona Diamondbacks to make cool content and to make it personal and to have those more personal one-to-one. Of course, it's amazing if you do have customers like that because how fun, but it's not necessary. I think that the richness from the how customers talk about the transformation they're getting. Like you said, it's mobile and this is like a unique customer, right? Because it's like a team and they're always on the go and they're doing something completely different from other customers, probably. But it's still really valuable for them in a unique way and they talk about that. That is the goal is to pull that out and it's unique for each customer. So I think it could be for big customers, could be for small customers. But the point is like to find what's unique about them and to pull out that transformation. Yeah. I don't know if you had anything. Yeah. Well, that's 100%. I don't think it has to be necessarily a recognizable name. It's a recognizable win. Just hey, they won with this software or they won with this program that we launched. Another really cool thing that we are starting up is taking a customer and we use customers and sales a lot. Everyone does. I think tell me more about that. What does that mean? Jumping on phone calls, getting customers to come and join the conversation and I mean happy customers are the cheapest sales team. So if you can get them on the phone with your sales people and winning acquisition, that's a motion that I think many companies are doing. How do you get customers to spend time to jump on sales calls with you? Is that the advocacy program? Do you reward them in some way? And if so, like what's the strategy there? So super nice nectar has points. So it's actually within our own platform that we're able to give them some points for jumping on a sales call. I think something that a lot of companies are missing is the fact that a happy customer genuinely wants to help that company. Like if I love a platform, I genuinely want them to succeed. In fact, I want to work there because I want to help them succeed. And so if I can't be part of their org chart, I'm more than happy to jump on a sales call and help them sell the product. So that's what we found. Because you never know, right? Things change and like if you build these relationships, maybe one day you will work at that company. But I think this is like a critical thing that companies don't quite believe. They don't believe it. They're like, oh, we're bothering our customers. Let's not bother our customers because they have a lot of stuff going on. But if you're creating fans, not just customers, if you're creating partners, not just customers, that's where things shift and people aren't annoyed and they become helpful. And yes, you can reward them. I love this is super interesting to hear that there's points in your platform. I mean, I knew that already because it's in a recognition and rewards platform. So obviously, there's points in there that's already kind of part of the system. But they're that you're using it for customer advocacy and customer marketing purposes and giving these points out, game of fine, the engagement from customers, I think is an untapped thing for many companies. I think that it is such a powerful thing because I mean, kids or adults, we love rewards. I really think that. Like, give me that gold star for a job. Well, darn, that's why you guys are growing, right? Employees want recognition. They want rewards and you don't have to be a recognition rewards platform to create this like reward system and gamify the engagement from employees, from customers, from your ecosystem, from partners, from influencers, from whatever. And so for you guys, it probably makes a lot of sense because you've got that built into the tool, but I also think people outside of this whole rewards platform thing to do so much with gamifying that experience. So 100%. That's like advocacy moves into community and making sure that we can celebrate each other's wins. And a very happy customer really wants to help you celebrate that your win and getting rewarded for it is obviously very nice. I know that, I mean, bamboo didn't have that built in and we had a reference program where we could jump on the call with a happy customer and have them connected to a salesperson and have them have that authentic conversation. And we would just send them something and send them so. Oh, like a thank you gift, right? So it doesn't always have to be like gamifying your platform. It could just be like a thank you gift. Or I think that's like a simple way to start. Amazing. Anything else that you wanted to mention related to because I love how we started to dig in to some of this like customer lead content, some of this customer advocacy. How do you get customers involved in the sales process? How do you get customers involved to help your growth efforts? Because they already love you, right? So why would you sleep on that? That to me doesn't make any sense. And why do marketers sleep on? This is a horrible way to say it. Why do customers sleep on customer or why do marketers sleep on customers? Totally wrong. Probably will remove me saying that. But really that's what I'm finding is that we're more again, we're more focused on the net new and we're forgetting about our customers and how important they are beyond product, beyond product research. They tie in so well to your go to market strategy. Have you done customer research as part of your customer marketing role? I honestly am curious because I don't know if that's like on you or is that product marketing or like where does that sit? It will probably come to me. It has not happened yet for me. But yeah, I was going to say about what you were just saying with getting sales and whatever is a company that is customer obsessed. The sales team sees the value of a happy customer joining the sales call. It's such an easy motion to repeat and to have them, especially when they believe that the customer is happy. When you're selling something you know will help the customer, you have a customer joiner. We are transitioning that motion to the back end of having almost like a mentee. So someone who's been successful in building a good culture on board with us. Help us because, boo, I love that. Yeah, the sticky product, every company has an amazing platform and I love B2B. I'm obsessed with software. I have a couple of favorite. I'm dressing up for one. I'm dressing up as Pendo for Halloween. Like, I love software. You are? Yeah. I love that. I should dress up as a B2B software platform for Halloween. My kids will be like, what is wrong with you? And then I'll make them dress up as B2B software. Truly. And so, I mean, I love software. I think what makes it sticky is strategy and how you use it. And so bringing a happy, successful customer who has been successful to their bottom line with our platform and having them help on board the newer customers and have everyone needs a buddy just like at work. You need to have a mentor. You need to, you know, make connections and everyone needs to work best. You need that connection and build the community. And then people want to strategize together. And the very successful companies are having those round tables where people aren't talking about the software. They're talking about, okay, software, great. Let's talk about our problem. The whole transformation. Yeah. Like, everything that comes into play plus the software, yes, but there's more to it than just the software. I love that. Like the buddy program. There's also something to be said around people want to be the heroes of their career, right? I understand how to do something. I am a winner in this industry. And they're going to feel good if you ask them like, hey, can you just like teach other people, right? At a certain part of your career, you just want to help other people. I mean, not everybody does, but a lot of people do. That's kind of how you feel like you're an expert. You want to give back because you have this expertise. So it's kind of a win, win situation for everybody. The buddy program, right? The new person gets the benefit there. And then the person that's sharing expertise feels good about it because they're able to share wins. And then they look like they're amazing and at their job, which they probably are. So. And then of course, for the company, it's awesome because it's like you do you like you help our customers because you know what you're doing probably more than we do. Not just the platform. We know the platform. You know much more of how to integrate it with everything else that's on your mind with all the other decision making you have to do. So so smart. Have you used AI in your customer marketing role? And if so, I'm just curious how I get gold when I saw this question. I mean, everybody just wants to know. You know what I mean? I am very pro AI. And that's a I could probably fill seven hours worth of just talking about AI. All of my friends eyes are rolling at the idea of you even asking me about AI because it is it's a very big passion of mine. I actually posted about it on LinkedIn yesterday, but I was very anti AI because I did not want to do more. And that was what they're like, hey, use AI so that you can do more. And I was like, you know what? I don't want to do more. Yeah. I am sprinting at marathon lengths. And I'm tired. And I just wanted to stop running. And AI has given me the stamina of, hey, let's automate and win or lose quicker with AI and experiment faster and all those things. And AI has made me more human, which I think has really been a huge marketing growth for me. How has it made you more human? I'm curious. I don't know how to explain this other than I've been focusing on doing as much as possible in my day to day, that's not scalable. Because AI is doing what's scalable. And I want to have these one-on-one conversations. I want to talk to a company and help them learn about product led growth and learn about customer led growth and help them become customer obsessed. And I want to hear my customer's voices. And I want to become obsessed with my customer's voice. I want to do that. And it's not very scalable. Unless you, you know, have AI read-gong, transfer grips and all that. I think I want the person level. And so I'm focusing on just bringing those like very human moments and being human as often as possible and letting AI take all of the not human things off my plate. I very much relate to you, Holly, on that front because it's the work that I do, right? Like, customer research and strategy is that's what I do. And I spend hours with customers when I have clients and I talk to them and I ask them questions and I just look over like what did everyone say? And what are the patterns and what's the weird stuff that's coming out? That's the work that I do. It is not scalable. Companies are going to come out and they're going to say, I don't know, we don't need you anymore because we've got an AI tool and it can just do the customer interviews or it could come up with a persona. And you don't have to talk to people anymore ever again and I would be upset because I love talking to people. I love, maybe that's why I have a podcast with 250 plus episodes because that's also talking to people and asking questions and listening to the answers and trying to find patterns and trying to find the weird stuff. It's the same thing. If it was taken away from me, I'd be very upset. So I don't think that it will be, I honestly don't, Holly, I don't know how you feel about it. I don't think that there are always going to be people that want to take the easy route. This is the hard route. The hard route is the unscalable stuff. It's like when Airbnb, when they were just starting out and they would go into people's homes and they would help their customers take the photos so that the photos looked good and the customer could rent out their place. That's the unscalable stuff that you start with in the very beginning to build those meaningful relationships with your early customers. There's stuff that you just continue on like this. That's not scalable and you use AI for the scalable, for the automations to make your job easier, but taking away that human to human contact and connection and the conversation and relationship stuff like, I don't get it. I don't get it, Holly, I don't know why someone would want to just like go to chat GPT or cloud and ask them like come up with who my customer is and how I should talk to them. I don't agree with that. What I do think is nice is using tools like dovetail, for example, to feed in the conversation that you had and then see what do you think the insights are and compare that to my insights. What did I find to be interesting? What patterns did you find? Then together we collaborate on something and make it more efficient and more effective. That's my stance on it. For example, you asked about reference programs and getting your happy customer on a phone call. Well, that's easy. I can have AI listen and I have a couple tools automating G2 reviews and Reddit thread and LinkedIn posts and when we're mentioned, I'm notified. Now I don't have to research and go dig and look at product metrics and figure out who's our happy customer to get on the phone with the sales team. That's all automated. Now I am now freed up time to have the one on conversations, to listen to the customer and I think companies, the more human I can sound, the better I can help my company stand out because everyone's leaning into AI and having that optimized voice. I want authentic voice. I want human interaction as much as possible. AI has made me more human because I'm able to get research. I guess time to output way faster now because I can have it research an idea and I can lose quicker and redo all of my thoughts quicker. But I have so much more time to sit and listen to a human and have those really, really authentic conversations and bring in human touch, which I do believe is making a big difference. I totally 100% agree with you. So when you're asked to do more because you have access to AI tools and there's less people on the team because you don't need as many people, for example, right? I just worry that we're going to do even less of that human connection and spending. So that's the other thing that's kind of on my mind, too, is now that we have access to AI tools, it should be that way. I love how you say how AI has made you more human. I totally get that. I think that's the direction we should be headed in. But I don't think everybody's headed in that direction. I think because marketers are just getting more stuff put on their plate so they still don't have time to be more human. It's like more time to figure out more integrations and automations and all that stuff, which is unfortunate. But I do think this is where the focus should be as like, where is the value? Where is your value? Where is my value? I think the value is in how can we be more human given that we now collaborate with AI tools? Yeah, I love that. And my LinkedIn post was, hey, your hackathon of coming up with the next big thing. That's a great idea. Why don't you spend 48 hours with your team? Automate the scalable AI things. And then now that I just freed up some time for them to now be more human and to do those big ideas because the hackathons that come up with the next big thing and they don't, we have no time to iterate on them. We are too busy scaling and ramping up and all those trigger words. But I quoted James Clear's book and his idea of becoming one percent better. If I automate one percent of my work every week, just one percent. By the end of the week, I'm 52 percent more human. If I take that time and make it more authentic, I'm 52 percent more human than my coworker. If the whole marketing org does that, we are 52 percent more human than our competitors. Yes. Don't we want to be more human? Isn't that the goal? As humans, we should want to be more human versus more robotic. I don't know. I think that's the case. But Holly, I loved this. I loved learning about the different things that's like on your mind because one of the things I'm doing right now is talking to customer marketers and really just finding out like, what are you working on? What does customer marketing mean? What does it entail? I didn't even know that I was a customer marketer back in the day when I was doing like the plug the leaky bucket stuff. But apparently I was. And so just learning from people like you, different things, different plays, different creative plays, where customers become a part of growth efforts. I love hearing those examples. And then of course, AI. As we conclude, I want to definitely ask, like, is there anything maybe you have a question for me? Maybe you don't. Anything that's on your mind that you want to ask me because I've asked all the questions. I do have a question. What took you so long to get me on this podcast? What was your roadmap to seeing the value of customer marketers? I know that it's a newer thing. It's a newer thing for companies. I'm just wondering you as an individual, what brought you to, hey, customer marketing is a growth lever. Why? And let me learn more about customer marketers and how that can help. Holly, it has been a journey. When I started the podcast in 2020, it was called modern startup marketing. And all I was doing, like each season, I would kind of focus on a theme. And it was for, you know, startups and marketing and growth efforts. And what are you doing? What are you doing? What's everyone doing? And what's working? What's not working? Then I, season five, I renamed the show to building with buyers. And the reason is because modern startup marketing is just too broad. There's a lot of marketing podcasts out there. What's my spin on this topic of marketing? And my spin really comes from the work that I do. I believe in it so much. I believe in how important customers are. And so building with buyers sits on top of that belief. It's not just research for the sake of research, the work that I do actually impacts growth. What else impacts growth when it comes to buyers? And I was, and I got curious about that. And it's not like I didn't hear about it before, but it was never a consistent thing I focused on. Now it has become a consistent thing I focus on because I find that when companies get customers, they roll over to customer success. And that is such a lost opportunity, like great customer success. They're with our best people, but there's so much other stuff we could do with them. And also customer research gets neglected at, we do it in the beginning, like audience research, who might find this product? Interesting, valuable, right? But then we kind of were like, okay, we kind of got signal. We know enough already. We don't have to do it ever again. Wrong. You do the market changes. Your customers change. Your customers are using AI. How does that transform their work? Right? There's new stuff coming in new competitors show up. So it's a constant iterative thing. And that's kind of how I grew into this exploration of now really just focusing on how do companies build to that next level of growth with their customers. And there's more, of course, I could explore with customers, with community, with partners, it's ecosystem marketing could be like the bigger idea around this. But for now, I'm sticking to customers because I am just scratching the surface. You mentioned customer marketing is new to companies. Is that true? Is that something that just kind of like started up recently? Or what's your understanding of that? I think customer marketing is a startup function within established companies. Every time I talk to a customer marketer, they're like, well, we're kind of like almost embarrassed because they're at a big company and they're like, but we don't X. We don't, whatever. We don't have a community. We don't have a customer, all of our net new events. We don't have, we don't have people call it. It's honestly, that's so fascinating. So it's like a little startup within an established organization and they're just kind of starting to spin this stuff out. That's fascinating. I did notice that, though. I noticed that customer marketing or customer love teams are not really part of early stage companies, but they are part of established companies and they kind of act like, okay, we got to start this up because nobody was thinking about this. Come on guys, we got to put our heads together and like start these programs. So that's fascinating and that helps me as I look for more people. Is there anyone that you can recommend that's doing customer marketing? Well, like, do you look up to any companies that are doing this well? I have to think really hard. There are a lot of them. There are. Okay. I would love to learn more about these companies that are doing this well and have experience with this. So wonderful, Holly. Thank you so much for joining me. I loved our conversation. If anybody wants to find Holly, she is on LinkedIn. I'll include the link in the show notes. Nectar, you could go to nectarhr.com and this was great, Holly. I learned a lot from you. Thank you. Thank you. I really, I love this. It's awesome. Thanks for listening to this episode of building with buyers. New episodes drop weekly, so make sure you're following wherever you get your podcasts. You can find me on LinkedIn and a Fermanov. Visit my website to learn more about how to turn customer insights into positioning and messaging. Your buyers will understand FermanovMarketing.com and don't forget to leave a review if you're loving the show. [MUSIC]