The Evidence Gap: Original research by UserEvidence after surveying 619 B2B buyers, sellers, and marketers.
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How to Get Leadership Buy-In on Customer Marketing Technology

It’s often difficult to get leadership buy-in for customer marketing technology, as it’s hard to demonstrate its value without actually implementing it within your enterprise. That tech might be just the boost your organization needs to accelerate sales and drive revenue, but that needs to be proven to leadership before they make a decision. With 68% of CMOs expecting their spending on Martech to increase during 2022, management might just be prepared to splurge on the right platform. But that poses a new question: how do you prove what the right platform is?

Customer marketing technology helps marketers do their jobs more efficiently and effectively with innovative solutions and intuitive features like automation, content generation, and more. By utilizing customer martech, marketers can reach buyers with trustworthy and reliable collateral (like customer success stories or video testimonials) to convert them into loyal customers. While these all sound like great benefits, management might not be so easily convinced to adopt martech into their tech stack. What leadership needs to see is how the platform will:

  • Skyrocket conversion rates
  • Grow revenue
  • Increase customer retention

By proving these metrics, your marketing team can win over management and use new, top-of-the-line martech. Let’s dive into some tips on gaining leadership buy-in and discover how customer marketing technology can transform your marketing strategy.

What type of technology boosts customer marketing?

The customer marketing technology landscape is vast, containing various platforms that do it all: automation, asset management, content generation, video, and more. With so many options available, customer marketers need to do diligent research to determine the right platform for your team’s needs. This platform you choose should streamline your daily operations, improve efficiency, and drive revenue growth.

With the right technology, like UserEvidence, customer marketers can automatically gather, review, and share credible customer evidence, data, and success stories. By centering a pitch around customer evidence-infused collateral, buyers will become more trusting of your business and more likely to make a purchase. Allowing potential buyers to discover genuine success stories from existing customers with similar use cases and pain points builds trust while providing them with valuable information about your product or service. Customer evidence enables marketers to demonstrate value to buyers through the voice of the customer instead of run-of-the-mill sales collateral.

Check out all 9 categories of our full customer marketing technology landscape to learn more!

Use social proof to prove ROI

For management to even consider buy-in on customer marketing technology, they need to see how the new technology will impact topline revenue. To do so, customer marketers need to provide the ROI of their current tech stack. This may convince management to expand the team’s marketing budget, allowing for additional martech (including customer marketing technology!). In fact, calculating ROI makes marketers 1.6 times more likely to secure budget increases for their marketing initiatives. With this in mind, it’s crucial that you prove your existing tech stack’s ROI to get management’s approval for your new tech.

When looking at your existing tech stack, consider the value that it provides to your organization. Does it drive revenue? Does it increase conversions? Companies who are already using their tech stack to derive information like this are in a better position to get an increased marketing spend for the following year.

For example, say you want to introduce the UserEvidence platform as your team’s new customer marketing technology. Before approaching management with this request, you can gather data that shows your existing tech stack’s ROI. By providing this information to management, you can show how effectively your existing tech stack works, and how adding customer martech can further enhance the stack. (You might also want to mention to management that UserEvidence’s average time to achieve ROI is 3.7 months ).

Share relevant customer success stories

Do you ever notice how other companies are using customer success stories to pull in prospects and convert them into customers? These organizations (including your competitors!) are using customer marketing technology to leverage customer success stories in their marketing collateral. When you approach management to ask them about customer marketing technology, be sure that they consider all the other companies in your industry that use this tech to fill in the gaps in their marketing material.

Try framing it like this to management: Say that your company has an infographic that shares all the benefits that your organization provides to customers. It’s important to remember that other companies in your industry have a similar infographic, except their material has loads of customer stats, success stories, and testimonials that specifically address buyers’ pain points and use cases. Which infographic is more appealing to consumers? And which company do you think used customer marketing technology to beef up their marketing material?

For instance, consider these customer snippets that Yellowbrick gathered using UserEvidence, pretty cool right?

Management wants to know how investing in a new platform will accelerate sales and revenue growth, and testimonials (like the ones above) showcase this beautifully. With glowing customer reviews and success stories, your enterprise can cater to today’s buyers who have an insatiable appetite for research. In fact, 93% of buyers read online reviews before making a purchase! With reliable and trustworthy reviews of your product, you can set your business apart from competitors by demonstrating your value through the voice of happy, existing customers. Once management sees all the things customer marketing tech can do for your organization, they may be more likely to give you the green light on adopting it into your tech stack.

For more examples, check out UserEvidence’s full Research Library of customer success stories, testimonials, statistics, and more.

Track progress post-implementation

Once the new technology is in use, the work doesn’t stop there! It’s vital to monitor and track KPIs to ensure the new platform is working for your organization. By tracking KPIs consistently, you can continue proving the value of customer marketing technology to leadership. KPIs like return on digital investment, new technology adoption and performance, and more provide relevant insights that allow you to track the platform’s efficacy.

KPIs also allow you, your team and management to track the effectiveness of your new technology at scale. For example, insights allow your team, as well as management, to see if the platform is bringing in more leads, increasing conversions and revenue, and even increasing customer engagement or retention. Internally, KPIs can include increased efficiency and productivity among team members. All of these insights culminate into powerful KPIs that indicate the overall performance of your new technology.

Without these KPIs, it would leave you in the dark on key insights that should influence your customer marketing strategy. Customer marketing technology isn’t just about the platform itself: it’s about how it helps you and your team meet your goals and drive revenue. Tracking KPIs allows you to see exactly how your martech enables your team to succeed.

Final thoughts

While getting buy-in from leadership can be tough, a few of these tips can help marketers prove the value of customer marketing technology to management. By providing tangible evidence of ROI and customer success stories similar to your own use case, you can get leadership on board with the latest innovative customer marketing platform. And by demonstrating the value that the platform will have to potential buyers, management can see exactly how this technology can increase revenue, leads, and customer retention.

Book a demo to discover how our customer marketing technology can change your marketing strategy for the better.

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