Q: Best practices for lifecycle marketing approach (B2B existing customers)?
Short A: n/a
Longer A:
We tend to market to the ‘Customers’ Lifecycle Stage as if they were another ‘specialized’ segment of our CRM. Main difference is that we typically have LOTS more intelligence on customer behavior than we do on contacts in other lifecycle stages.
That being said, we tend to be hypersensitive to what the customer purchased in the first place, so we generally limit our marketing efforts to customers in that regard. In other words, if a client engages us for HubSpot CRM customization assistance we’ll help them keep up-to-date on relevant CRM customization options as those options evolve over the life of our B2B partnership.
We’ve also had good success using a custom ‘Customer Status’ property for some our HubSpot clients. This custom contact property (and in some cases custom company property for the ABM-centric teams) helps to further refine the customer status without overwhelming the sales team with even more HubSpot Lead Statuses in the default Lead Status property which can quickly become a mess. (
probably also true for Salesforce
)
Example Customer Status Values:
- Delighted
- Need Feedback
- Visit This Quarter
- Gift This Quarter
- Renewal Conversation Time
- Requires Special Handling
- Exit Strategy
Using this approach we can auto-trigger events around these values in our Customer Status custom contact property (e.g., feedback requests, digital gifts, renewal reminder task creation, special handling notification to the service desk, etc.). We’ve found that segregating customer status from the HubSpot Lead Status property opens a world of possibliites for us to further delight customers.