What's the best way to use Marketo for nurturing your existing customers for up-sell/cross-sell?

[Anonymous]

For 2014, we’re going to focus our efforts on expanding our lead nurturing programs into our customer base for customer upsell/cross-sell. I’m interested in knowing how others manage this. Some questions I have are:

What types of campaigns are you running? Which ones have been most successful? (e.g. cross-product up-sell campaigns, campaigns for customers who are not engaged, etc?)

Do you have different lead scoring for customers than you do for leads?

Do you use custom fields in Salesforce to segment the customer database (e.g. something like lead status but for contacts/accounts) or do you just throw all the customers into one bucket? What about if there are multiple products to sell and customer product configurations vary widely? Do you need to have a campaign for each product you want to upsell?

How do you measure if your campaigns are effective for back to base sales? For leads we use ‘Lead Source’ and base our metrics on how many leads/opps/won business come in from a marketing-generated source. It doesn’t seem like this will work for existing customers. If a sales rep creates an Opportunity from a customer contact it’s going to automatically pull the legacy lead source for that contact, not the customer nurturing info/trigger. We need a way to know if an existing customer Opp. came from a back to base marketing campaign. Any tips for tracking ROI on customer up-sales?

I’m interested in the specifics of how people are doing things. There is a lot of talk about doing customer nurturing but not a lot of info on exactly how people are managing it.

I’d love to hear from anyone in the community who has experience in this area.

Thanks so much!

[Anonymous]

Here are three takeaways I've had from upsell campaigns:

• Its about targeted content.  Your customers trust you, and you know more about them than your competition does.   You  have a unique window to establish their pain points through targeted emails.  You should have specific case studies, white papers, videos that utilize what you know about your customers.
• Lead scoring for multiple products: although this can get complicated, scoring on product interest based on demographics and behavior goes a long way to help the sales team, if the buyers for each product are the same contact.  If you implement this on each product (rather than on customers vs leads) you'll be able to surface the customers with a potential upsell opportunity
• Program attribution over lead source: more than ever, you'll need to use Programs or SFDC Campaigns to identify influence on the upsells.  If you have targeted campaigns to drive the upsells, however, this may be a simple matter of looking at leads engaged with those select programs.  A second revenue model may be useful to you here, if you are only selling the upsell to existing customers.

[Anonymous]

Hi Sheena - How'd it go? Any lessons learned you can share?