Transcript: Lifecycle Marketing Campaigns and Tips for Achieving Cross-Functional Alignment with Myriam Diarra

On this episode, I was joined by Myriam Diarra, Head of Customer Lifecycle Marketing at Drift. She shared how she spent her first several months at the company observing and mapping out the customer journey, her top tips for getting cross-functional alignment and some of her favorite campaigns that her team has launched. Without further ado, here’s my conversation with Myriam. 

Margot Leong: Hey Myriam, thank you so much for joining the show today. I’m really excited to have you on.

Myriam Diarra: Thanks, Margot. I’m glad to be here. 

Margot Leong: Let’s hear a little bit about your background and sort of your journey to how you got into your current role over at Drift. 

Myriam Diarra: Sure. So I now have about 12 years of B2B marketing experience working for startups, mid-size and global companies. And to get where I am today, I have worked in various marketing roles in the technology services and printing industry, and really found my sweet spot in lifecycle marketing after I realized that I actually partnered on the day to day with a lot of the function I worked for, so demand generation, integrated marketing, account based marketing, product marketing. 

So everything started in Paris, in France, where I was born and raised and I graduated from the American Business School over there majoring in marketing with a minor in finance. And after my graduation, my first important marketing role was partner marketing manager at a global corporation, Xerox.

So I was responsible for managing a network of partners and collaborating with them on co-marketing initiatives that consisted in highlighting the value add of their solutions to the Xerox product. After a year, I moved to a product marketing role, still in the printing industry, and this is where I developed my expertise in understanding the value of a product and translating this into marketing material and supporting documents to help existing customers understand better the value of a solution or a service. I really enjoyed this role, but for a personal reason, I decided to eventually move to the United States with my husband and pursue my marketing career.

And I had the privilege of working for six years at Dun & Bradstreet, which is a global leader in the data and analytics space to help businesses make the right decision when it comes to improving their business performance. So I joined the Demand Generation team in the small business unit and I led the lifecycle marketing. 

So for the very first time, I was launching dedicated campaigns and programs to existing customers to drive upsell, cross sell, went back and really built a machine of automated programs leveraging the data we had. This is where I really was able to build my expertise of leveraging data for more informed marketing that led to more efficiency and better results.

After six years at Dun & Bradstreet, which can be a very long time for someone of my generation, I felt I was ready for a new challenge and really go back to the roots of what was driving me. You know, help a company build that customer lifecycle marketing machine from scratch, which is still quite not popular in a lot of businesses, but Drift is a company that is very unique and creative in its way of approaching the business challenges when it comes to driving pipeline and revenue. 

They seemed to be the perfect fit for me to apply and adapt what I had learned over the course of my career. So I was honored to join Drift ‘s marketing team as the first head of customer lifecycle marketing, and really being responsible for marketing to existing customers throughout the different stages of the post-purchase journey.

Margot Leong: With customer lifecycle marketing, I think a lot of times, you know, when people think about it, it’s more often thought about from a B2C perspective, but not necessarily as much in B2B. At the same time everybody talks about existing customers, retention, keep that loyalty. So I’m curious from your perspective, why is it that B2B lifecycle marketing is not that popular still?

Myriam Diarra: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more with what you said, and I think the beauty of Drift is we do B2B, but we approach marketing as a B2C company and really put in place that human touch and those experiences that you would do for a customer to a business. So bring that experience, that approach, that way of doing marketing to the B2B space. That’s where I think this has been something that has been working for us. 

More and more businesses are understanding that yes, we need to acquire a lot of new businesses, but retaining, especially in the current economy, retaining existing customers is key. And more and more businesses are allocating resources to marketing teams to have the staff being able to maintain that and support the sales team. Because a lot relies on the sales team too, to retain customers a lot, rely on the customer success team, but marketing is a big role in that space and I think it hasn’t been taking advantage of to its full potential.

Margot Leong: I’m really excited to dig into that piece of how the nuts and bolts work there. To move back for a second, say that you were talking to your grandmother about what it is that you do, and she’s like, Hey, Miriam, honestly, I have no clue what it means to do lifecycle marketing. How would you explain what it is that you do to a layperson, to your grandmother? 

Myriam Diarra: I would say at Drift, the goal of customer lifecycle marketing is to develop a loyal and active and an engaged customer base and ultimately retain them. But how do you do that? 

We have to acknowledge that there are different stages in the journey from the time you purchase a product or a service to the time you need to renew or maybe part ways and go to another company. 

And during those different stages, which is going through onboarding: as soon as you buy a product, you are onboarded. You are being made aware of the key features, the value, the benefits and then you engage with the brand, you engage with the products. You’re making sure you stay up to date and the company makes sure that they bring to your attention all the things that will add value to what you have. 

And then comes this stage where it’s the expansion and then we start talking to you about potential added service or product that would make even your experience better with the brand. In that stage, we assume that you are a happy customer, that you’ve been benefiting from the service. And then once we look at opportunities to maybe have you expand your offering, then we look at how we can retain you. And this is a retention stage. 

So each of those stages, we have marketing programs that we’ll put in place to help get each customer the best experience.

Margot Leong: Got it. How many people was Drift when you joined? 

Myriam Diarra: Drift had about 200 people when I joined back in February 2021. And we went through that big expansion, and I think we reached a point where we were close to over 500 employees. So it was a huge increase in terms of employees and staff. And it was great. And that’s really helped build that function and also partner with different teams to help allocate the resources and execute on marketing dedicated to customers. 

Margot Leong: What did you do in your first few months to kind of assess the landscape to even understand what is it that I should be doing next basically?

Myriam Diarra: Yeah, so I came to Drift to build that lifecycle marketing function. And the state of the business, we had a marketing team, I think it was big enough, but we had a lot of function that were being built and we were still figuring out how to work together, have processes to really be more productive. There was already some marketing done to customers that was part of the demand generation motion. 

 But if I had to break it down, my first month I was in observation mode and doing my homework. That meant absorbing as much information as I could from key functions. I interviewed key leaders. I interviewed employees in marketing, but also cross-functionally. So I met with sales leaders, leaders in sales operations, in product, in customer success to name a few. And really my goal was to assess the current state, what’s working, what’s not working when it comes to communicating with our customers, when it comes to addressing their needs and challenges. This first month was to identify challenges and opportunities to help me picture the current state and then think of the future state, outline the steps and define the priorities to get there. 

My first month was also a lot of review of existing marketing activities and performance. As you can imagine, we didn’t have a lot for customers but it was trying to optimize what we currently have and really push the team to do more on that side. 

Then came the exercise of mapping the post-purchase communication journey. And this is a big exercise that just does not involve marketing, but a lot of teams, and again, all the team that touch a customer, you wanna have them as part of that exercise because you wanna have a holistic view of what is happening from a customer glance. So that post-purchase communication journey involved our customer success team, our product team who surveys our customers once in a while, try to collect feedback, our sales team who also run their own sales campaign to customers. How are we making sure that we align on the messaging between sales and marketing? And obviously within marketing, we had different teams communicating to customers.

Being able to go through that exercise really helped me understand a few challenges that we had. Having two different marketing teams sending newsletters to customers about the same topic to the same person two days apart. That was something that we were not really looking into until we had the full communication journey.

And the goal was really to have that by persona, to really understand too, are we not communicating enough to that persona? Not even the persona, but at the contact level. Am I only talking to the users of Drift? Am I not talking enough to the decision makers and influencers? So it took a very long time to get to what I would say was a good current state to be able to then work on the future state of that journey. 

Margot Leong: How long do you think that it took you, once you were finished with the observation portion, to then wrangle all the teams and work on the mapping where you felt like it was at a good point to then start executing? 

Myriam Diarra: I would say three months. So really 30 days to observe our current state, and then what also took time is getting the buy in on a lot of different sponsors and leaders because when you picture the current state, and then you recommend a future state, obviously I needed the buy in from different people, the marketing sponsor, which was our CMO at the time, it was very important. And because I really needed to sell my ideas in order to secure budget and resources to, down the road, execute on all that. 

But also the marketing team that would help execute on the changes that I was envisioning. I think it’s very important to really look for that buyin and it takes time, a lot of back and forth, more brainstorming, more strategy session, and then also the buy-in of the team that we provide air cover for. 

Customer life cycle marketing is basically a team in marketing, but we provide air cover with scalable marketing programs to sales and customer success. So I really wanted to shift from this idea of marketing, come up with big programs and things, and then we go to sales and the customer success team and say, Hey, this is what we’re putting in market. I really wanted to have them involved because again, they all touch customers at point in time in the journey. And how can we ensure that we align as much as we can? 

So getting their buy-in or sometime their objections, to be honest, was very helpful in getting that close to the final future state and obviously being able to move from the ideation to the execution and generate quick wins.

Margot Leong: The subject of getting buy-in could be a whole, separate, hour long conversation. Especially when you have, sales, for example, involved or customer success. But I’m curious, was there anything that you learned that you think would be helpful for others generally for getting alignment going forward?

Myriam Diarra: There are three tips that I can share today that have worked for me and I’m still using today. And I’m always grateful for the experience I had at Dun Breast Dun & Bradstreet because it was not the first time when I came to Drift, and I think that had an impact. 

But number one tip: involve cross-functional teams early on in the planning stage. Do it as you see fit. I set up a lot of brainstorm sessions. I collected input from the sales team via Slack or feedback via Slack too. But at least it becomes the true collaboration and those teams feel part of the big picture and they really help with alignment from the very beginning versus putting all the efforts executing on programs and then have sales team that are discrediting the work or customer success complaining. Really involving them early on in the planning stage.

Number two, it’s really not an easy one, but is, to my opinion, is the one who has the most impact, is to find the champions and advocates within the cross-functional team that you work with. So I’m gonna take the example of the account managers team and we have the team that are broken down by segment: enterprise, mid-market and growth.

We now have, as of today when I’m talking to you, Margot, we now have identified advocates and champions in each of those teams to help us enable the team, but also really cheering up marketing programs, and it helps in creating positivity and good energy. On the customer success side, it took more time, but we now have good champions to help us convey the messaging and making sure that it makes it all the way to the customer success managers. 

And you keep doing that, even in marketing, you need champions in the team that you work with. Because it will make your life easier down the road.

And the last one, which is really important in any role you’re going to, is over communicating, sharing updates on your team initiative, the positive outcome, results. Number one, you will create momentum. And number two, you will build credibility. And I think in my case, I have, depending on the team and the seniority, I have biweekly or monthly updates that I share via email, Slack, even Drift videos leveraging our own products during meetings.

And this is really how I also encourage my team to do with their teammates at their level is overcommunicate. You’ll never do anything wrong by over communicating. 

Margot Leong: From so many leaders that I’ve interviewed in the past or the podcast, the last point around the over-communication piece is really salient. It’s something that seems to distinguish a lot of people who are successful in the field around constantly communicating, constantly promoting your team’s progress and having almost a systematized way of doing it versus thinking, oh, okay like, yeah, actually would be good to let people know what we’re doing. We have to keep the steady drum beat of people knowing about what we’re doing and all of that, it seems super, super valuable.

Myriam Diarra: And I have to say, it’s not easy. These are not easy to accomplish. I mean, even until today, we’re still sometimes having to push. But that would be the three tips I would give to anyone who’s trying to have influence and the buy-in of different teams and different people within the company. 

Margot Leong: I can imagine too, that the overcommunication aspect, right? Because you are the leader of your team, you’re heading up customer life cycle, the things that you start to focus on become more around how do we work on getting these champions? How do we get alignment? How do I provide air cover for my own team? And one of these things is overcommunication. So it’s this idea of moving from executing to actually, I have a team and now my job is to make sure that they can smoothly execute without sort of other things getting in the way essentially. 

Myriam Diarra: You get it, right? You just recapped this very well. I see my role as really showcasing the work of my team throughout the company and really evangelize the good work that they do. Because I do have great marketers in the team, and I think it’s very important that they feel supported. And I remember when I was a marketing manager, sometimes you feel like you’re doing so much, but there’s not much visibility. No one is really aware, and I wish back then I had a manager who would basically do that, just take my work and expose it and acknowledge who’s doing it. I think it’s very important too, but that’s the role of a manager definitely. To make sure the company is aware of what is happening in your team. 

Margot Leong: Something really interesting you mentioned, and something that you said was the most impactful around getting alignment was finding those champions and those advocates within that cross-functional team that you work with. A lot of our audience is people that are doing this dual role of customer lifecycle marketing and also customer advocacy. Of course, advocacy is all about identifying the champions and advocates within your customers.

And now you’re talking about finding the champions and advocates within these teams that you’re working with. I’ve developed relationships within, let’s say, customer success. And so you start to get a sense of who’s excited for what you’re working on. I’m assuming that those are the people that would be good champions and advocates. 

In that case, do you then say to them, hey, basically would you be open to being one of our champions internally for this? How do you move from, I’ve identified them as a champion and then move to, okay, would you be okay to help us promote this internally when we do new things? Is it as specific as that or is it something that just naturally happens once you build those relationships? 

Myriam Diarra: It actually depends. I had both examples here at Drift where it would be more of a natural flow with the sales team, the account managers, where, as you said, when you are in meetings and where you’re presenting the marketing programs, you can see who’s very excited, who’s starting to use the resources that you’re putting together and who’s getting results.

And these are the people I really want to follow through. A perfect example is we recently ran an ABM program to some of our enterprise and main market customers. We have that great marketing campaign. We went to a sales meeting to kick off the the marketing program and let them know of what the gift was, what was the approach, the strategy. We had email sequences ready for the sales team to use to follow up after the marketing outreach. 

And one of the account managers really stood out by using the supporting materials and email sequences we put together within a week. And he was able to generate three meetings, and I used his success story in every single communication moving forward. So praising him, first of all for leveraging the marketing program and being able to generate meetings which would lead to opportunities in pipeline.

And then when they see that you actually value their work. I think sales, sometimes they make me think of my children, they need attention, right? So it’s all about making sure that you give them the right amount of praise and acknowledging the extra work they do. 

Marketing, we do ask them to do more, right? They have their schedule, but we come in and say well, we have this new marketing program we want you to push too. So acknowledging that in the communication, that person became a natural champion that we really used for when we wanna tell a success story of how our programs are helping sales. 

And then on the other side, with the customer success team, I’ll be taking the onboarding team where we came up with the welcome package and we really needed a leader in that space to help the team really share a link with the customers that they were onboarding. They are the one that are, on a day to day, talking to those customers during the onboarding stage, and it would make more sense if they were the ones sharing that great news of, Hey, Drift is welcoming you. Here’s a gift for you. Versus coming from marketing who they never heard from before. 

But we needed that partnership. We needed them to really incorporate our messaging in their communication and their flow. And finding an onboarding leader, I had to go straight to this lady and tell her, would you be the right person for me to work with to help our customers get even a better experience with the customer success team. It’s all about how you position that. We do this to serve them, to make them be look even more successful. And I had her buy in very easily and she became basically that champion. Every time we wanna communicate about the onboarding program, she would be our point of contact and we’ll make sure that the team is aware.

So these are two different examples . One I had to really ask and be straightforward. Another one naturally came. And this is what can happen for people who may experience that. 

Margot Leong: In your experience around getting champions or advocates internally to help out, is this something where you’ve experienced, on average, more positivity or more negativity around making those asks or cultivating people to help promote things internally?

Myriam Diarra: I would say I started having more positive outcomes when I started applying the number one and the number three tips that I was mentioning before. So cross-functional teams, involvement early in the planning stages and over communicating. By over communicating, you make your teams work visible to cross-functional teams, right?

So it’s no longer you would come to an employee from a different team and ask, Hey, I need a favor. We know at a company level that people have eyes on what you’re working on. And I think that it’s not that it puts some pressure on some of the people to help but it facilitates the buy-in in doing things that you already presented at a company level that it’s to help the customers right, to help the team and to serve them and to help them be more successful. 

My pitch to the sales team is always, we are here to help you drive pipeline and meeting books and revenue, and these are programs that will help you. I have to say we have a champion, but the majority is still really challenging to get them to adopt our programs. I started having more positive outcomes when I really communicated and involved those teams in our work. 

Margot Leong: That makes sense. You’re essentially laying these foundations and building things brick by brick. I totally agree. I think one of the first bricks has to be bringing them in on the planning stage. Or else if you did number two, they might feel a little bit blindsided. You’re asking me to promote something, I literally have no clue where this is coming from, or I don’t know what this is about. I had no involvement in this, so that totally makes sense to me.

Myriam Diarra: They will feel part of the big picture and during those planning stages, this is where you can lay the vision of what you’re up to. Yes, we’ll have a marketing program and then we will need some accountability from some of the teams. So I think you set the expectation from the very beginning and then it becomes easier to work with those teams. 

Margot Leong: We talked about first the observation stage, then the mapping stage, and then now it’s the execution, right? What programs are needed? What tools are needed? If you wanted to share maybe a few examples of some programs that you put into place at Drift based on this mapping and getting that up and running.

Myriam Diarra: Sure. My team is really responsible for two main business goals, really drive expansion pipelines. So drive revenue from our customers, but also indirectly influence the NPS and that promoter score, the customer satisfaction and the sentiment and retention. So these are really two different areas where we have marketing campaigns to address both. 

Our expansion goals, we have marketing campaigns to upsell our customer, cross sell, upgrade. And one great event that we’re still experimenting with, we’re at I think edition number three of that, is really targeted to top enterprise customers.

And one of the challenges we heard from our sales team is, especially with the virtual environment, working from home, digital work, it’s really hard to get a hold of an executive, book a meeting, get their time, and really get them to buy and get entrusted into some of the solution and especially for our sales persona.

So what we tried to do with that is really hear the challenge they had and come up with a creative way to create a venue, basically to let our sales team speak to those leaders in a more intimate way with a nice experience, social networking, but also bring educational and strategic conversations in that space.

So it’s a very limited event. Up to 15 leaders in a room that will for an hour and a half have a few account managers speak to them. And we tested that back in April, our first edition. We went through a couple of editions of messaging, tweaking experience. But what was very important here in terms of executing is it required the whole marketing team. It was an event, but we needed to create emails, right? We needed to create a landing page so that people could sign up. We needed to create email sequences for the sales team to invite customers themselves. And then we needed to work with a third party vendor for experience, social networking. And this was a lot of pieces to put together for a marketer.

And you can see that to do this well, we have to be organized and we use a project management tool called Asana, where we track all of the different tasks that need to be executed. That will be a great tool to remind our marketing managers if we’re behind on the projects. But it’s also a great way to communicate with different teams in marketing without having to send a bunch of emails back and forth and track everything in one place. And I think that’s what really helped us be able to execute as well as we could on that. 

But this is something that stood out for our expansion. And we had a great outcome. The leaders were praising, we were able to give some leaders that they were not able to get a hold of by sending emails to attend a nice event and learn more about Drift and create opportunities for pipeline.

Another program that I’m very excited about is the welcome kit that we launch a couple of quarters ago. And we’re now expanding to a broader audience of our customer base. It’s been a challenge. When I came to Drift, we didn’t have any welcome kit for our top enterprise customers and coming from Dun & Bradstreet where I had already worked on something like that.

This is what I like about the beauty of customer lifecycle marketing is you can be very creative and fun and still think of how do we generate revenue? How do we make the experience for our customers great? So we came up with this welcome kit package by brainstorming with our creative team, our copywriters, our content team. We needed to have the buy-in of our CEO back then because he was very picky and for good reason on what we would put out the door that would represent Drift.

But we came up with a very nice, fancy package with nice gifting for customers and we were able to target key accounts within those customers. That has been something that we’ve been exploring for quarters and now expanding to our growth customers, which is more like small businesses.

Margot Leong: For the welcome kit, which of the two goals would that be under? Would that be around expansion of revenue for existing customers? Or would that be around influencing NPS and satisfaction or a mix of both? And for something as early on in the journey as a welcome kit, how do you think about measuring success of that kind of initiative? 

Myriam Diarra: The welcome kit would more directly influence the NPS and customer satisfaction and sentiment, but indirectly influence revenue because those kind of programs by themselves don’t bring revenue or pipeline, but they help plant the seed for the rest of the journey, right? If we’re able to set the right expectation from the very beginning by having a wow experience. Oh wow, I’ve received this great welcome kit. It’s already set the tone and the expectation of what their journey will look like with Drift. 

And we go into that loyalty phase, right? So we do have some surveys that we send to our customers after they’re onboard with Drift. And it’s about checking those who receive a welcome kit versus who did not receive a welcome kit. Do we see some sort of better input or better experience? Do they give us a better score? So it’s part of a process that will influence the satisfaction or the NPS during those reviews.

Margot Leong: I’m curious how you think about experimentation from a budget standpoint. As more teams find out about the good work that you’re doing, partly through the overcommunication tip that we talked about, they probably start to get more and more ideas around, we have this challenge reaching these types of customers, can we try and run an experiment here? Or another team comes up and says, Hey, I’d love to try this. 

I’m curious how you balance experimenting with some of these programs versus overall priorities. Even within those two goals, there’s probably dozens, hundreds of different experiments you could launch. And yeah, I’m curious how you parse that out basically. 

Myriam Diarra: That’s a very good question, and I think that brings us back to that early stage of planning. And if you remember at the very beginning, I was telling you, I need the buy in of our marketing leaders because I need to be able to secure budget and resources. Once I have my budget, I’m able to prioritize where I will be investing and spending the money.

For instance, the only reason why we would expand the welcome kit just now is because I had budgeted, for the first three quarters, we will only target the enterprise. That’s the budget we have. We have our budget for the year, right? But we didn’t necessarily use all the inventory that we were anticipating to use, so now we can open this to more. What I’m trying to say is most of my decision in trying and testing is really tied to the budget that we have. And customer lifecycle marketing is not always the team with the most budget, right? It’s usually demand generation.

 We don’t have a big budget, but it’s just how you plan from the very beginning, how do you plan to use that? So I have X percent allocated to loyalty, delight, and surprise campaign, and I have X percent dedicated to expansion. And once I have that, I will stick to it through the whole year. And never be afraid to push back on a few things as long as you have a good explanation and reasoning behind it.

Margot Leong: Because you have the budget laid out pretty early, that it also helps when different teams are knocking on your door and saying, Hey, like, I wanna try this, or Can you help me with this?

 You can basically say, Hey, we have a very specific budget, a set bandwidth, right? And so based off of priorities from the leadership level, we have set these specific priorities out. They align to the business. But maybe we can put yours into the future ice box, right? 

 It’s helpful when you can say, I only have a certain amount of budget for these specific things. I can’t really change that very much. 

Myriam Diarra: And that’s it. And a perfect example is when we launched the welcome kit. I had our sales team in EMEA coming and saying, Why are we only launching this in North America? It would be great for our customers in EMEA and it’s only last quarter that I got back to them and say, I have the budget. Now I can relocate how I use it and maybe do 50% for North America, 50% for EMEA. 

These are things that can happen, but I would have to compensate if I wanted to test something different and maybe do something that we were planning, less of it. So these are things that are also trade offs like that again to try to really show partnership. I always also think of, does it make sense for the business? Does it make sense for our customers? Is it a nice to have or must to have? And I think a challenge is, as you said, prioritization. 

Margot Leong: Yeah, absolutely. Because the team that’s asking for it. For them, it’s a must, right? Yes. But for the business, it might be a nice to have, right? That will never change at the course of human history is that question. 

 And then Miriam, one of the last questions I wanted to ask you about is around metrics, right? So how do you think about reporting success? What are the metrics that you are specifically looking at? Assuming of course that NPS is probably one of them, but are there other core metrics that you’re reporting on?

Myriam Diarra: Sure. There are two sets of metrics that I report on. There are metrics that my team is directly accountable for, and that would be all the metrics that are tied to expansion pipeline, so driving pipeline opportunities, engaged accounts. Basically when we have marketing campaigns, how many accounts are we able to drive response from? How many meetings booked? We’re able to help the reps. What is our return on investment on those programs we’re investing in? These are really the metrics that the team is directly accountable for. 

And then there’s another layer if you look at the program level, but then there are also that set of metrics that we influence indirectly, and that’s where retention and NPS come into play because the delight and surprise programs that my team runs along with some expansion campaign, influence customer satisfaction and perception of the brand, and ultimately retention. 

At Drift, retention and NPS sit with the customer team, where the customer success team lives. So that’s why we indirectly influence it in the marketing, but they really are accountable for those metrics in our company. So this is high level what I report on. 

And then there are also other metrics that I look at and report for at a program level by marketing channel, whether it’s an email, an event, a direct mail, or paid ads, which paid ads is a more recent marketing channel that we’ve been using because we’ve seen some success in conversion and click through. But then that would be what I reviewed with my team versus what I report on to the next level. 

Margot Leong: And how big is your team currently and what are they focused on? 

Myriam Diarra: We are currently a team of three, which I hope to grow next year. And I have to say, I feel very lucky to work with such talented marketers, but the reason why we can do so much without being too big of a team is, we rely a lot on cross functional work to execute. And we even rely an external creative agency. At one point, I had onboarded an agency to help us speed up the process of getting things out the door. 

But customer life cycle marketing is the right balance of marketing strategies to drive expansion pipeline, but also delight and surprise. So the way the team is organized is, I currently have one marketer who owns expansion campaigns and goals and programs. And one marketer who owns most of our loyalty and delight campaigns and programs. So that loyalty marketer really works more closely with the customer success team, with the onboarding team. The marketer on expansion really works much more with the sales team and the revenue enablement. 

And the reason why I structured the team like that is, I always describe our team as we are here to serve our customers, but provide air cover to our internal team.

Margot Leong: This has been such an incredible conversation, I think just some really good stuff in here. One last question is, where can people connect with you if they want to pick your brain on more of this lifecycle marketing stuff? 

Myriam Diarra: Thank you. People can connect with me on LinkedIn. I’m happy to connect and continue the conversation. Brainstorm, share advice or share my experience much more. But yeah, LinkedIn is a great way of getting in touch with me.

Thanks for tuning into this episode of Beating The Drum. For more interviews with advocacy leaders and tips on creating customers that will sing your praises, head on over to our website, beatingthedrum.com. If you enjoyed today’s show, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and don’t forget to rate and review us. If you know someone that would be a great fit for the show, I would love to hear about it. You can reach out at beatingthedrum.com. Take care, everybody. 

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