What Happens When Marketing and CS Share a Leader

Hi Reader,

What do you actually measure your marketing team on?

Leads? Pipeline? MQLs?

At Plume, those still matter. But there's another metric Rebecca Stone focuses heavily on: influence.

And once you understand the business, it makes sense.

Plume sells exclusively to internet service providers. There are only around 5,000 potential customers globally, and a net-new sales cycle can take 18 to 24 months, sometimes two to three years.

So this isn't a typical demand-gen motion where you generate a lead this quarter and expect it to turn into revenue next quarter.

Marketing needs to get the right people from the right accounts into the room, build relationships across those accounts, and help create the conversations that eventually turn into revenue.

Rebecca now oversees both Marketing and Customer Success at Plume and has only been in the combined role for about six weeks.

The teams haven't merged.

But the way they're being measured is starting to overlap a lot more.

Marketing is measured heavily on influence.

CS is being pushed beyond renewals and into expansion and revenue generation.

That second shift stood out to me.

I've made this argument on the show before: if CS isn't connected to revenue, it's very easy for the function to get treated as a cost center.

Rebecca is trying to change that.

One of the mechanisms is CSQLs: qualified opportunities identified by CS and passed to Sales.

And then there was probably my favorite metric from the whole conversation: the truck roll.

That's what ISPs call it when a support issue gets to the point where somebody literally has to get in a truck, drive to your house and fix your Wi-Fi.

That gets expensive very quickly.

So Plume looks at whether its products can reduce those truck rolls, shorten support calls and resolve issues before somebody even needs to call.

It's a good example of looking past the standard retention metrics and asking what is actually driving the customer experience underneath them.

What to do with this?

Look at how much of Marketing's scorecard is tied to net-new acquisition versus influence and expansion inside existing accounts. If a large share of growth comes from expansion, the metrics should probably reflect that.
Give CS a measurable role in expansion. That doesn't mean every CSM suddenly needs to become a salesperson. At Plume, one mechanism is CSQLs that CS identifies and passes to Sales.
Find your version of the "truck roll": the expensive, avoidable problem that sits underneath churn, support costs or customer frustration.

This week's episode

E305| What Happens When Marketing and CS Share a Leader

Rebecca Stone is Chief Customer and Marketing Officer at Plume, where she oversees the customer journey from marketing through customer success, retention and expansion. Before Plume, she led revenue marketing and customer solutions marketing across Cisco's $50 billion networking portfolio and previously served as CMO of Meraki.

Here’s what stood out:

Why Plume put Marketing and Customer Success under one leader — [00:03:54]
Why Plume sells only to ISPs and focuses heavily on expansion — [00:04:45]
Why Marketing is measured on influence, not just leads — [00:10:59]
The "truck roll" problem and what it tells you about retention — [00:12:11]
Why losing a customer champion is a major churn risk — [00:15:30]
Putting a revenue-generating component into Customer Success — [00:19:57]
The Stripe analogy: how Plume can influence its customers' retention — [00:27:28]
Using Gong and Claude to build better account context — [00:36:52]
What Rebecca wishes she knew about churn and retention earlier — [00:42:44]

Listen / watch: YouTube · Apple · Spotify

One question for you

If Marketing were measured as seriously on influence inside existing customers as it is on generating new leads, what would your team start doing differently?

Andrew

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Andrew Michael

Host of Churn FM, the podcast for subscription economy pros to learn how the world's fastest-growing companies are tackling churn and using retention to fuel their growth.