Customer Feedback as Business Driver with Katlin Hess, Director of Customer Marketing at G2

Will (00:00.182)

 

Katlin, it’s so wonderful to have you here on the show today. Just thank you so much for joining me.

 

Katlin Hess (00:35.489)

thank you for having me. Excited to be here.

 

Will (00:38.71)

Now, you’ve got a really interesting role and you kind of sit at a really interesting place around the idea of the voice of the customer. But before we get into that, I think you have kind of an interesting journey as to how you became the director of customer marketing at G2. And I’d love if you could just share that with our listeners, except before we jump into it.

 

Katlin Hess (00:59.02)

Yeah, so I feel like my journey to customer marketing is sort of like a lot of others where it happened almost by accident a little bit. my first job in SaaS was at a really small higher ed tech company. We had, I think I was employee number 25 and as I was leaving there, I was the head of marketing, managing everything from demand, Jen content development, product marketing. and I was doing a lot of customer things, but I didn’t even know that customer marketing was sort of like a dedicated focused area that I could grow into. so, I, you know, was looking to leave. My company had gotten acquired. lot of things were changing. And so was talking to a VP of marketing and he’s just kind of like a networking conversation. He said, you know, tell me what you like to do. What are your favorite parts of your job today? And everything I listed was customer marketing. And he was like, it sounds like you’d be a really great customer marketer. We don’t have a role for that today, but you know, we’d love to keep in touch with you. And I think it was like two weeks later, he called me.

 

Will (02:04.085)

Hmm

 

Katlin Hess (02:14.582)

and said, you know, we’d love for you to join to help us build up our customer marketing function. What do you think? And so started there, really got to build customer marketing from the ground up. And as part of that, one of my main focus areas was G2. And so was working with a G2 account manager. I’d also worked with one when I was at TargetX and she posted that they were looking for a director of customer marketing at G2. She reached out and was like, hey, I think you could be a great fit. What do you think? And then ended up making the jump over. So it’s been pretty cool to go from being a customer and like super fan of G2 to now getting to do customer marketing there too.

 

Will (02:58.058)

Yeah, I mean, now you’re kind of at the Mecca, you’re at the place where it’s all about customer marketing. So, I’d love to understand, how does being on the other side in some ways, but also still being on the customer, you kind of got that visibility of both sides of this equation. How does that change your approach to customer marketing and customer feedback?

 

Katlin Hess (03:14.689)

Yeah.

 

Katlin Hess (03:20.16)

Yeah, it’s so interesting because when I first started, it was like, well, this is super easy. My team also owns customer education. And so as we were thinking about what kind of content do we want to be developing, what are our themes of our webinar? It’s like, what do I wish I had access to, you know, six months ago, a year ago when I was a customer. Now I’ve been a G2, gosh, almost three and a half years, which is crazy. And so as I get further away from being a customer power user, it’s how do I lean into the voice of our customers? How do I talk to the people who were in my shoes when I was sort of informing this strategy to use that to inform what our education or our content looks like going forward? But it’s really cool too, because I am still a G2 customer. My team also owns generating reviews about G2 on G2, which is like super meta. But we’re going through the same process a lot of our customers are. We’re doing email outreach campaigns. We’re building review asks into our lifecycle communications. We have an ask. Like if you sign into the back end of G2, there’s a pop-up that says, what do you think of G2? Would you be willing to leave us a review? So in the same way our customers are having to think about that, it’s something that we’re focused on too. So it’s… Yeah, I guess in terms of how it helps me think, it’s just like, I was that customer voice for a little bit and I could feel how powerful that was and having that perspective was. And so now I put a lot of emphasis on like, what are our customers actually dealing with? what do I think they’re dealing with three and a half years removed. And the other cool thing is like so many of our customers are customer marketers who are trying to do the same thing at their organizations. And so they’re always willing to share their feedback or just give me some perspective.

 

Will (05:20.822)

That’s awesome. I love just how meta that is. It’s like you’re just living in like the, yeah, it’s very, very cool. You know, one of the things that I’m interested in is there’s so much AI generated content existing these days and you’re talking about, you know, prompting people for reviews and honestly, I even just saw internally with a little review process here, but you know, how are you filtering or ensuring the authenticity of those reviews? I’m getting curious how you see AI as a, well, whatever you see it as, as far as getting those actual customer reviews in today.

 

Katlin Hess (05:56.941)

Right. Yeah, I think, we, we view it more as like an assist or not a writer, right? And so in the same way, well, I don’t know. One of the ways I use it is like, I’m trying to write this promotional email or landing page copy. And so here’s my, kind of messy brain dump version of that. So it’s still me. It’s what I think or what I want to be included. And I’m using AI to help me polish it or maybe reorganize my thought in a way that’s easier for someone else to consume. And I think we would think about review generation in that same way. So we still want it to be that customer’s experience, that customer sentiment. so G2 actually has a few levels of checking for authenticity. One is we have a, it’s an AI review reviewer that makes sure that, and I don’t know the specific percentage, but that a certain percentage of the review is allowed to be, you know, AI. The other percentage has to be in that customer’s voice. But we do also have a team of humans that are our review moderation team. And so they’re making sure that those reviews that are coming through are authentic, that it’s not like, you know, the computer’s opinion of what this product or service is. It’s actually.

 

Will (06:55.062)

BLEH

 

Katlin Hess (07:22.894)

someone’s real human voice and opinion. And it’s okay if it’s polished by AI.

 

Will (07:29.558)

Yeah, it’s interesting that I didn’t think about that part well, like there’s a difference between polished by AI and generated by AI in the review space. That’s a very, very important nuance. And I’m sure it’ll be interesting for customer marketers as they continue to go down the road, which is, know, how many of the people who they’re asking for feedback from are just users of AI. And therefore they’re kind of pumping in their six key points and saying, please write me a review that I can now send to them. That would be a very interesting tone change potentially in our customer marketing over there.

 

Katlin Hess (08:05.006)

Yeah, and that’s something that we’re exploring from a product perspective too, is like, how do we make it easier for your customers to leave a review on G2 with some of those AI assist features? So more to come from us too. Yeah.

 

Will (08:18.502)

Now, when we were talking before the show, you shared a really cool AI use case that you’re using actually internal in your company, an internal chatbot. That’s really kind of a streamlining a request that I’ve heard so many people have problems fulfilling, which is this, know, give me a customer story about blank. Maybe you can just tell us about that and how it works and maybe some of the results you’ve been seeing. I think this is just fascinating.

 

Katlin Hess (08:38.124)

Yeah.

 

Katlin Hess (08:45.324)

Yeah, so we feed the chat bot our case study library. So it has access to all of our long form written content. It also is connected to our internal call recording tool. And then we feed it our own G2 reviews. So those reviews about G2 on G2 that my team’s generating and our sales team or marketing team or whoever is looking for customer proof can go in and ask the chat bot. Hey, do we have a case study about, you know, this specific use of G2 or do we have anything from someone in this specific industry? And it will surface the most relevant proof points for our sales team and for a marketing team. And if you’re a customer marketer, you’ve probably gotten that slack, right? That’s sort of how I came to this. I was spending a lot of time like, Hey, Caitlin, do we have a case study about this or?

 

Hey, I’m working with this prospect and I really want to send them a case study. What’s the most relevant one to them? And I was, you know, racking my brain thinking like, okay, well that one was pretty good. And it talks about this use case, but it’s not the right industry, but we have this one. That’s the right industry, but not the right use case. And so let me try to, you know, make a recommendation. the Slackbot does all of that for me and for our sales team. And so I was actually just looking recently and,

 

Will (10:01.227)

you

 

Katlin Hess (10:13.866)

It’s something like 90 % of our overall revenue team is using the chat bot at least once a month. And then it’s, and I need to verify this with someone from marketing ops, cause I ran the query myself and it said that 78 % of our prospect conversations have a mention of a customer success. So our team and it’s, it’s also kind of interesting because at G2, we care so much about customer voice. And that’s the value that we’re selling and instilling in our customers is how powerful customer voice can be. And so our sales team is all about it. They totally understand what we’re trying to do. And they’re really excited about when they can take a customer success and use that in their sales process too. So I’m not surprised it’s that high, but I was excited to see that those results were pretty great, honestly.

 

Will (10:53.974)

Mm.

 

Will (11:11.062)

Yeah, I mean, I think we’ve all had that request come in and then two hours of our life disappears as we get back an answer that we’re like, yeah, that’s probably the best, like, you maybe I don’t know every single case study. I didn’t watch every single call recording and things like that. So I think that was such a fascinating application of customer voice and of AI all in one spot. So very cool. mean, probably what we should expect to see from G2, but also just very cool to see that actually.

 

Katlin Hess (11:21.038)

Yeah, it’s pretty close.

 

Will (11:43.318)

One of the things that you would also mention, which I think is a problem, another problem we all face, is just this idea of fragmented communications to our customers. So great, we’re finding the voice of the customer, we’re finding those points, but we’re still sending these disparate messages from all sorts of different places. And I know that we would talk for you, you can’t talk about this, we haven’t tackled this problem a couple of times, but maybe you can just help us understand this problem a little bit more. Maybe there’s some ways you’ve gone about it.

 

Katlin Hess (12:14.828)

Yeah. And, want to start by saying like, this is something that I’m, I’m actively working on here at G2 too. Like it’s, it’s something that is not, like I’m not going to give a secret formula and then it’s going to be fixed. It’s like everybody has to be invested in. And, the easiest way I have found to do that when you’re working with sort of cross-functional partners and everyone has maybe slightly different goals.

 

Will (12:29.535)

Hahaha.

 

Katlin Hess (12:44.442)

is bringing it back to the customer experience. Like it’s really easy to get everyone on the same page, especially when you work at a place where like everyone really cares about the customer experience. is anytime you’re having that conversation, like it’s not about you hitting your goal instead of me hitting mine or me hitting my goal instead of you hitting yours. It’s what’s going to provide the most value to our customers. And so starting the conversation from there sort of takes the you versus me out of it. But when I when I’ve tackled this in the past, like the first thing I usually do to get buy in is just an audit. Like, I start to document and catalog, like, what are all of the communications we sent to customers last month? And what are all of the systems that we’re sending those emails from or, you know, in app messages from? And like, instead of telling people no, or like, I’m doing this so I can stop you from sending all of these disparate messages. It’s like, I just want to know, like, let’s just let’s just get. And so once you have it all, and this happened to my last company, we just put it in a spreadsheet. And it was like, my gosh, this is a crazy, like, CS is sending emails, marketing is sending emails, product is sending emails. And we weren’t talking to each other about when that was happening. And so

 

Will (13:50.378)

Yeah.

 

Will (13:56.416)

Mmm.

 

Katlin Hess (14:11.16)

From our perspective, it’s like, well, why does it matter? Like you sent that email and I sent this email and it came from a different tool, but like the customer doesn’t know. They just know that they’re getting six messages from us in the same week and they’re all about totally different things. Which one are they supposed to pay attention to? And so my first step is always catalog. Let’s just understand where we’re at. No judgment, no whatever. This is just it, state of things. Second, it’s like.

 

Will (14:37.056)

Mm-hmm.

 

Katlin Hess (14:41.452)

Let’s all get aligned. What are each of our goals? What are our business goals? Like, what do you care about as an individual person coming to this table? And then what’s our customer care about? And what do we know they need to be successful? What do we know they care about the most? Where are we able to add value and help them achieve their goals? And then you work backwards, right? Like you start from the customer goals. Ideally, your team goals match, you know, that it’s helping your customers achieve their goals. And then what is the ideal state from a communications perspective flow wise? And maybe it is that you keep all of those messages, but the timing changes and the audience changes and you can get really granular and really specific. And because it’s your customers, you know, a lot about them. You know, ideally their role, you know,

 

Will (15:20.181)

dot

 

Katlin Hess (15:36.684)

what products they have, you know, what their goals are. And so like working backwards from what are our customer goals? What’s the ideal state? How do we get them there? So it’s a, an ongoing, really heavy, really big conversation. And depending on the people in the room, it can get a little heated too. and I think that’s where I lean on, like, this isn’t about us. It’s not about me. It’s not about you. It’s about the customer and what’s best for them.

 

Will (16:04.276)

Yeah, I like that idea of just like trying to just catalog it. Let’s just get a sense of it, right? We don’t know if it’s a problem. We don’t know if it’s… Yeah, right? Now there’s almost no company in the world that isn’t probably having some disjointed customer communications, but maybe we don’t. Maybe we’re totally fine, right? Yeah, I that I’ve struggled more than once to try to get a sense of like how we’re sending, who we’re messaging and how we’re messaging people at companies that I’ve been at.

 

Katlin Hess (16:09.334)

Yeah, yeah. Not gonna tell you now. Yeah.

 

Katlin Hess (16:18.626)

Sure.

 

Katlin Hess (16:23.566)

Yeah.

 

Will (16:32.214)

And I think that without that kind of a mapping, you can either get really cowboy or really conservative messaging. Or if people are like, well, we send a lot of messages and they have no idea what they’re sending. So it’s just like, let’s send less. Or you get the like, just keep firing them. And it is not necessarily the win there either. Yeah.

 

Katlin Hess (16:40.451)

Sure.

 

Katlin Hess (16:52.812)

Yeah, yeah, like how can we make a decision if you don’t know where you’re at? That’s the ultimate. Yeah. Cool.

 

Will (16:59.813)

Right. Yeah. Now I think one of the things that’s really interesting when it comes to customer advocacy and customer marketing in general is really just like trying to measure the success. Now I think you’ve got some pretty interesting numbers already coming out of that chatbot. That’s pretty wild and honestly better than most people I’ve ever talked to have this idea of how many interactions they’re touching. But what are you seeing there for metrics and measurement of the work you’re doing?

 

Katlin Hess (17:25.932)

Yeah, it’s tough in customer marketing, right? Because so much of our work can be a little fluffy, right? Like it’s relationship based and it’s how your customers are feeling about you and how you’re capturing that sentiment. And so sometimes, and I’m super guilty of this, we can fall into like, well, I produce 12 case studies, or I had 30 acts of advocacy last quarter. And I think that conversation gets us to a point. And to get to that next level, it’s like, but what was the impact on revenue? And that can be a little bit harder. So my tip there is like, and this is, I’m not going to speak for all customer marketers. Something specific to me is I am not great at the data side of things.

 

Will (18:06.39)

and bright.

 

Katlin Hess (18:18.894)

I am a relationship marketer and I really like where I find value is in talking to our customers and getting people excited about our product. And I, I’ve heard it described as like vibe marketing. but it’s something that I’m working on really deeply is like, how can I connect my programs to metrics and how can I connect them to metrics that aren’t just vanity metrics? And so one of the ways I’ve done this is by becoming really good friends with our marketing ops person. And so, one of my old bosses, she’s a former CMO at G2 when she and I were talking about this, she was like, well, Caitlin, you don’t have to know how to pull the report. You don’t have to know how to find the number. You need to know what question you want to ask. And so my question is always, what is the impact? Customer marketing programs are having on revenue. And so that’s kind of what I came to Sarah, our head of marketing ops with. And she was like, well, let’s see what we can look at. so this quarter, for example, one of the things that I’m sort of struggling with with the chatbot is it’s directing people to, sometimes it’s a call recording. And so there’s not a page that they’re sending a customer to, they’re copying and pasting a snippet. They’re sending it in an email.

 

Will (19:33.162)

Hmm.

 

Katlin Hess (19:42.766)

or they are going directly to our website, not to our sales enablement tool, which gives me more tracking and visibility. And so how we’re sort of backing into it this quarter is page views of any of our pages that are customer stories that are tied to opportunities that closed in the last quarter or renewals that closed in the last

 

Will (20:08.979)

Mmm.

 

Katlin Hess (20:10.272)

And so we’re getting, we’re having to sort of like back into it a little bit differently than I normally would. But I wouldn’t have even known that was possible if I didn’t have the conversation with marketing ops. And so I think coming back to that, like, what is the question that I want to answer? What’s important to the business? And then finding those people who are the data experts who can sort of help you back into what that is. So I don’t know if that totally answers your question. This is not my sweet spot, but it’s something that I’m working on and trying to grow into.

 

Will (20:42.582)

No, and I think that that’s a really interesting place, especially as we keep tying in this AI story that it’s more about asking the right questions and it’s less about knowing how to get the data yourself. But I’ve always found that, especially when building out analytics suites, is you’ll kind of get this generic, like, I need analytics, I want to see all the data. And you’re like, yeah, that’s not really how it works. I need to know the question you’re looking to ask. And if I know the question, I can get to the answer.

 

Katlin Hess (20:47.256)

Yeah.

 

Katlin Hess (20:50.733)

Yeah.

 

Will (21:08.554)

There’s an infinite number of questions, so show me all the data isn’t really a strategy.

 

Katlin Hess (21:13.934)

Yeah. Yeah. Or like, sometimes I’ll default to like, well, that would be impossible to track. So we definitely can’t track it. And that’s just like, because that’s not how my brain works. That’s where I go to. But I feel like when I go to Sarah, she’s like, oh yeah, well, let’s see what happens if we pull this, this, this, and this, let me connect all of those and give it to you in a dashboard. It’s like, awesome. I’m glad I didn’t talk myself out of this. Right? Like it’s possible.

 

Will (21:22.462)

Right.

 

Will (21:37.79)

Right. Yeah, wow.

 

Katlin Hess (21:43.662)

You might just have to get a little creative.

 

Will (21:47.2)

And I like that. That’s a really good, lesson right there for sure. know, changing gears a little bit here, you have such an opportunity to, to watch others, other customer marketers, right? Like you have that ability to have visibility into a lot of different customer marketing groups. What do you see as kind of the commonalities or the patterns among companies that are really excelling at leveraging their customer marketing? You know, I just kind of curious if you’ve got some insights there you can share.

 

Katlin Hess (21:53.24)

Yeah.

 

Katlin Hess (22:14.742)

Yeah, I think it’s, it’s like a culture of feedback, right? Like, you’d be hard pressed to find a company that wouldn’t say we’re customer centric. think every company would say they’re customer centric and believe it and probably act on it in a lot of different ways. But I think the ones that are thriving or seeing the most value from customer voice is they treat it like a like a voice in the room. so from a customer marketing perspective, I always say it’s like, with great power comes great responsibility. Like I get to talk to a lot of customers every day, I get to learn what they’re doing, what’s important to them, but I’m also hearing like where they’re stuck or where they’re stalling. And so for me, it’s when I’m invited into those rooms, it’s not to represent my voice. It’s like,

 

Will (22:53.968)

Hahaha

 

Katlin Hess (23:12.706)

this is what I’m hearing directly from our customers, or this is what we’re seeing from a data perspective when I look at adoption metrics. And this is exactly where we’re seeing that stall. And so how can we fix it? And then how can I connect them, whoever it might be, how can I have them hear it from our customers? And the companies that I’m seeing thrive, like they’re taking that seriously from the top down. And that’s often like, people think about reviews for the most part, you think of them as like, that’s a great marketing tool. That’s something I can use on my website and social campaigns in a sales deck. But the companies that are like really nailing it, they’re like, that is customer feedback. And I’m using review content to feed like, okay, how are our customers talking about our products? So it’s feeding product marketing.

 

Will (23:48.182)

Hmm

 

Katlin Hess (24:08.114)

Or are there themes coming out when we talk about like where they’re struggling and how can I use that to influence product or product roadmap? Like, tell me what’s missing. and so a lot of times, people will get caught in like, I only want positive reviews and I’m going to use them for marketing. And that’s the only like reviews fit in this bucket, but it’s when you expand that and you open it up, like I want reviews from all my customers. Plus it’s a better buyer experience too.

 

Will (24:16.96)

Mmm.

 

Katlin Hess (24:37.858)

When you’re asking all of your customers for reviews, you’re getting like a true authentic picture of what customers like, what they don’t like, maybe what a best fit customer looks like or doesn’t look like. And I think the companies that are thriving, they get that. It’s a customer feedback voice tool, not just marketing.

 

Will (24:57.002)

Yeah, so much of you said there just resonates so deeply, right? mean, like you said, it’s like, every company wants to say they’re customer centric, right? It’s kind of like, I joke, but I’m looking forward to the day that I get a resume that says not a self-starter requires supervision. No one’s gonna say that. But to truly live the customer centric life and to really want to hear the good and the bad, I think is just so rare.

 

Katlin Hess (25:06.252)

Yeah. Yeah.

 

Katlin Hess (25:16.11)

Yeah.

 

Will (25:25.908)

And then even more rare is actually like having that feedback, much of the time, they’re of like messaging out to customers, messaging back from customers. It’s so hard for all the teams are so rare for all of the teams to be taking that in and then really trying to analyze, you know, how do we use that? So, right. How does marketing use that? How does product use that? How does, you know, sales use it? How does everyone use that?

 

Katlin Hess (25:34.371)

Yeah.

 

Will (25:51.882)

So think that that’s like a really, really valuable thing to say, kind of really is those teams that are our voice of the customer centric believe in call and not just customer centric, right? Yeah.

 

Katlin Hess (26:01.464)

Yeah, no worries about that.

 

Will (26:04.694)

As far as being that ultra customer centric group and bringing it into the company, do you have any tips for groups that want to make their businesses a little bit more, how do we help some businesses or some people out there listening to this show who are like, yes, I absolutely agree with this, but how do I actually make that happen in my company? Any thoughts there?

 

Katlin Hess (26:24.044)

Yeah. Gosh, I think it’s a few things, right? And it’s just continuing to be that voice and surfacing your customer voice in all of the places that make sense. for us, have two different Slack channels that I’ll call out. One is a direct integration between G2. So anytime someone leaves a review on G2, it gets piped into a Slack channel that’s internal that our whole company has access to. so we, well, I look at every single review that comes through and if there is something that we want to respond to, so maybe it’s a specific product request or challenge that they’re facing or something about the support team or even better is like, my CSM is awesome. You know, shout out Lauren. I’m going to tag them in that channel and I’m going to tag their manager and say like, Hey, wanted to make sure you saw this. And so I think step one is just like making it really visible. that other Slack channel is our G2 customers channel. And that’s where our sales team or our CS team will flag. Like here’s a really cool thing that one of our customers is doing. And so one that’s super helpful for me because I can use that to feed my customer story program.

 

Will (27:24.342)

in

 

Katlin Hess (27:47.352)

But it’s also really cool for other CSMs or other account managers to see like, here’s a real world, you know, live in the field customer example that I can now pull from when I’m talking to another customer. And I think just getting, like starting the habit of that and being responsive to it and spotlighting the people who are doing that really well. Like I also sometimes do, I call them internal case studies. So if I have someone on our sales or CS team who’s doing something really cool, they’re using a customer story in a unique way, or they used it and they’re tying it back to a win, I’ll spotlight them and be like, hey, want to share a win? Jeremy used a lot of, or a great quote here and closed the deal. And so now I am calling him out as like, this is something that’s really cool. He had a big win. Don’t you want to be like Jeremy? Like, let’s build a little bit of FOMO. But I think that was a long answer. The short answer is just like make it as visible as possible and then get people to engage, get them to care about it by calling out the specific things that tie back to their role or their goals.

 

Will (28:46.376)

Right. Yeah.

 

Will (29:02.166)

Yeah. Wow. Okay. We’ve covered a lot very quickly here. I think some of this is amazing. Like all this is amazing what’s going on. Just hugely prosensitizing customer marketing, getting it into the hands of the entire company, enabling that through whether it’s kind of the internal cases you’re talking about or through AI coordinating messaging, a lot of stuff going on for yourself at G2 and customer marketing in general.

 

Katlin Hess (29:05.742)

All

 

Will (29:29.908)

there was kind of one takeaway that you could leave our listeners with today. There’s one piece of advice that you go, whatever, 10 years back in time, give yourself as career advice or advice in this field. What do think that advice would be?

 

Katlin Hess (29:33.39)

Yeah.

 

Katlin Hess (29:44.43)

Oh man. I think it’s, can I say two things? Okay. Okay. There’s like an external and an internal. So externally, I think taking the time to talk to as many customers as possible. Um, and not just the customers who you’re doing a case study with, although those are great customers to talk to. And you learn like what works really well.

 

Will (29:51.744)

Sure, we can definitely do We can definitely go for it too.

 

Katlin Hess (30:12.386)

What are they doing that maybe other people aren’t? how can I take that and not just use it in a case study, right? Like, how can I use that to inform my outreach or my promotion of something else or an educational piece of content? There are so many things that I wouldn’t know if I didn’t have those conversations with our customers. And I would say beyond just like those conversations too, it’s like, where else are you getting customer voice? So is it reviews? Is it an NPS survey? Is it your community? But just like not losing that connection to the front line. And I’ll call myself out too of like, I know that I knew a lot coming in because I was a customer, but what was I missing? And you’re not gonna get that anywhere other than directly from your customers. And then two, would say like in customer marketing, we’re only successful when we’re truly cross-functional. And so I work really closely with obviously everyone on my marketing team. So that’s something else. Like I’m starting to see a shift, but a lot of times customer marketing teams are really, really lean. And so I am working with our content team, our design team, our product marketing team, our demand gen team to get my initiatives fully integrated into our, you know, outreach motion.

 

Will (31:10.646)

Mmm.

 

Katlin Hess (31:35.774)

and our intake motion. so like working cross-functionally, they’re so important, but even more important is like getting the. The trust and the buy-in and the relationships with my account managers, my CSMs and their leaders. And just really like, because I have those relationships, it’s so much easier to infuse customer voice into everything we’re doing. And then they’re feeding my flywheel too so I, I’ve talked about this before. feel like extraordinarily lucky at G2. I have had the opportunity to say like, that customer doesn’t feel right for a case study right now, which I’ve never in a million thought I would be able to do. But I feel like because our, our account teams understand what I’m trying to do in customer marketing, they see the value of it in helping other customers in feeding sales. But so much of that is because.

 

Will (32:18.784)

Mm. No.

 

Katlin Hess (32:34.51)

I’ve built strong relationships with them first. so building that building those. it’s, guess relationships, I should have started here. If I’m going to sum it up in one piece of advice, it’s the importance of relationships and customer marketing, both with your customers, but also internally. So long, long answer to a short question.

 

Will (32:38.198)

Mmm.

 

Will (32:43.701)

Yeah.

 

Will (32:53.238)

No, I love it. I think that’s a great place for us to wrap up this episode. mean, if customer marketing isn’t about relationships inside and outside of the company, you kind of what is it all about? And I think that that’s just so important for people to remember. You know, this is about people talking to people. And I just love that as a way to wrap up this episode here. For people who do want to stay connected or learn more, what’s the best places they can find you?

 

Katlin Hess (33:22.094)

Definitely LinkedIn. So feel free to add me. Love to talk about customer marketing, love to share best practices, things that I’m seeing and always happy to connect with other customer marketers.

 

Will (33:35.83)

Wonderful. Katlin, thank you so much for your time here today. I know I’ve learned a lot. I’m sure our listeners did too. So just thank you so much for all your time.

 

Katlin Hess (33:44.278)

Yeah, thanks for having me. Great to be here.