How to Stay Customer-Centric in Marketing

Episode Transcript

As you know from our previous discussions of the Agile marketing framework, who we do work, for, and who we do it with is one of the three main components of Agile marketing. The first part of that, who we do our work for, overlaps with another of the main components, what we do, when we start talking about the customer.

Because as marketers, we should always be focused on delivering value to our customers. Sure, we need to contribute to the top line of the business. If there's no revenue, then none of us have a job at, the end of the day.

But one of the best ways for, us to do, that is by being laser-focused on delighting customers. and prospective customers.

But the problem with that is that many marketers are so buried under other people's opinions and demands that they've forgotten what their customers even look like, much less what might delight them. So in this episode, we're gonna talk customers. Who are they, like really?

How do we keep our focus on them when everybody else is screaming really loudly? And why all of this is critically important. And of course, we're going to see how Agile marketing helps us do all of that. So let's get started. Welcome to The Agile Marketing Edge, the first podcast dedicated to turning Agile theory into real-world marketing breakthroughs. Every week, we unpack the how behind Agile, from building high-velocity workflows and slashing waste to measuring what really matters and scaling success across teams. You'll hear quick-hitting strategies you can deploy today, plus candid stories from marketers who have traded chaos for clarity and never looked back.

So lace up those virtual hiking boots, limit your WIP, and let's start ascending. This is your weekly shot of practical, no-fluff Agile insight so you can deliver more value with less busy work and love your marketing again. All right.

First, let's start with why customer-centricity in marketing matters so very much. It doesn't seem like we should have to talk about this, but we really do, because it's so easy to get caught up in just doing stuff as a marketer, because there's so much stuff that we need to do.

We could easily fill a 40 or 50-hour workweek with a lot of really what feels like important activities, and none of them might ever actually be felt by a person who might buy what we sell.

And so, really explicitly talking about who is our customer and how do we maintain that feeling of connection with them is actually really, really important. It should not be taken for granted.

And actually, in my experience, the best way to talk about this whole connectivity to the customer thing is by talking about what it looks and feels like when we lose that connection, because very few of us want to admit that we have lost that connection.

Customer-centricity is very fashionable. We're supposed to be customer-centric. So most of us are not willing to say that we're not really serving the customer and that we spend most of our time doing whatever sales or our  CMO or the head of that really important business. unit told us to do. So let's talk about what it's like when marketers have been forced, oftentimes against their will, to serve people who are not actually the real customer who pays our company money for its goods and services.

Here's the first thing that happens. Marketers lose their joy. They are no longer excited about the work that they do. It's just stuff that they produce.

And what happens when that happens is that what they produce is just blah. It's uninteresting and it's not gonna make a splash.

It's not gonna make any impact on the world. And you might think, "Okay, whatever, that's not that big of a deal," especially if you are a non-marketer. But think about, as a consumer, how much stuff you get bombarded with day.

Today modern marketing is a tooth-and-nail, no-holds-barred, bare-knuckle brawl for the even smallest amount of attention of your potential customers.

If you're not interesting at all, there is no point even getting in the ring. You're gonna get knocked out. You are gonna lose. And you know who doesn't make interesting stuff? Burned-out people' who hate their jobs because they' spend all day explaining to Dave from sales what a landing page is and why, no, he doesn't actually need another one. And I figure this goes without saying because this is an Agile marketing podcast and most people listening are probably marketers, but just in case there are any non-marketers in the audience, I'm gonna say it. Gen AI also does not make interesting stuff on its own. In the hands of a smart, capable, creative marketer, gen AI can be an amazing tool.

But you will not win the fight for attention with AI alone. Yes, it helps,Yes, we' should all be using it, but it will not make up for grinding your marketing team into the ground with unrelenting, asinine requests that have nothing to do with what the customer actually wants.

In those situations, the collateral and the creative that are produced become an internal rather than an external mirror.

They're all about what the company wants to be perceived as, instead of what prospective customers need, what their pains are, what their desires are, and their dreams are. It's all internal corporate mush, and not connected to the customers.

So, the last thing that happens when marketers lose connection to their customers is that we get into this us versus them dynamic between marketing and other departments.

Because they're always coming to us with landing page, email, microsite, creative, ad, whatever it is. They, always need something, right? And we always have some other important. thing that. we feel like we need to be working on. And so it's this always which will win, tug-of-war situation, and it creates a lose-lose kind of dynamic. Somebody's always going to be feeling left out. So, we end up having these internal fights instead of looking for opportunities where there might be good overlap or intersections or opportunities for reuse, or dare I say, cross-functional collaboration.

So, when marketers become these like short order cooks or order takers, then you lose these organic opportunities that might otherwise bubble up if we were allowing them to be the champions of the customer and look for moments across lots of teams where the customer could become ascendant and could be central to what a lot of people are doing. And we could have efficiencies, economies of scale. All of these things could happen because we're letting marketers stay focused on the customer and not just becoming a churn and burn landing page factory.

Okay, so marketers losing their creative spark, bad.

Marketing becoming an internal mirror instead of an external one, bad. Creating an us versus them dynamic, also bad.

All bad. So, what are we gonna do about it? The first thing we're gonna do is grab a hold of one of my favorite coaching phrases, which is, if you can't fix it, make it visible.

I'm gonna say that again because it's really good. If you can't fix it, make it visible. One of the most powerful Agile practices out there is visual work management.

All that means is getting the work out into the open where everyone can see it. There's a lot of ways that that can happen, but the most common one is a Kanban board.

We'll link in the show notes to a super deep dive on how to build one of these if you don't have one yet, because it's not really that complicated, but it can take some time the first time that you do it. But once you have one, you can start to tag your work items or tasks or the little cards and things that live on your board based on who the work is being done for.

For example, you might have business unit one gets a little green label for everything that they have requested. Everything we're doing on behalf of business unit one is green. Everything that sales wants us to do gets an orange label.

Everything that is an executive request is labeled with a yellow tag, and so forth and so on. However many you need to document the different kinds of requests that you get, that's how many colors that you need. When I used to coach teams, uh, in person, back in the pre-COVID days, we would use fun little animals to represent different parts of the business. And however the marketing team felt about you, uh, indicated what kind of animal sticker you would get. But these, these days when we have digital boards, it's just probably gonna be a color.

So, this is really important stuff because we can then differentiate these kinds of internal,  I don't want to say nice to have, but I'm gonna say it, nice to have requests from mission critical value add customer-centric work that oftentimes originates from marketing itself. And that type of work should have its own color as well. And in a perfect world, what we would want to see is that useful value add content, eye-catching brand building stuff that people are gonna sit up and take notice about, that color, the color that represents that kind of work should be the most prominent thing on your board. The other stuff is still gonna have to be there. It's never gonna go away completely because people need marketing's help. We're really cool and important and we do valuable work, so they need our help and that's fine. But we need to make sure that the bulk of what we're doing is focused on the customer....adding value, making an impact, and cutting through all of the noise that's out there to actually reach our customers.

So, once you have that visualization in place, you need to make use of it. So just having it is nice, but information needs to be deployed.

This is a really powerful tool to have when you're in conversation with leadership. And now, you got to be careful about how you deploy this because you don't want to make it a confrontation.

You don't want to try to turn this into a blame game. Just make it an observation about what the board has made visible. Something like, "About 40% of our time is going toward work for our internal business units as you can see by the fact that 40% of the cards are purple. It's really delaying the launch of that campaign that our Q3 targets are really dependent on. You see how few yellow cards there are? Those are all the work tied to that campaign.

Does this feel like it reflects the organization's priorities right now?" No judgment, no blame. Curiosity, right?

We're, we're having a joint exploration of what the visualized work is telling us. And it won't take too many of these kinds of conversations to really have an impact, and once you start to create broader visibility around what's happening, the next step is to bring together all of the people who are gumming up your board with their requests at key moments and get them to talk to each other about their priorities that are impacting marketing's priorities.

Because if sales doesn't know that the biggest and most important business unit in your organization is planning a massive product launch the same week, that sales has their biggest, most important sponsored event of the year, of course they're all gonna bombard you' with demands for stuff at the same time.

They are not bad people. They are not doing it just to make your life harder. They are really just trying to prioritize their own most important activities, and this just happens to be that those are happening at the same time. But if we bring people together and allow these intersections to bubble up, then we can plan for it and we can deal with those kinds of overlaps in advance instead of just getting buried under the avalanche of stuff once it's already too late to deal with it. And this is why people is another key component of the who pillar of Agile marketing. We've got to get these real, actual humans together.

Even if it's not physically together in a room, even virtually together, helps remove some of these issues, and they're going to happen in modern knowledge work in organizations.

When you have teams of people, these things are going to crop up. There's no getting around it. The only way to deal with it is to have these conversations. All right. So sticking with the concept of people, let's talk in greater detail about how we figure out who our customer really is. And strictly speaking, right, the customer is the person who ultimately buys the products or services that your company makes. They are the person or the business, if you're B2B, with money, and you're trying to convince them to give it to you instead of somebody else.

And in a perfect world, those people or those people at businesses would be the only people we worried about in marketing. And in smaller organizations or smaller marketing teams, sometimes that's still the case.

When we're small enough to keep from getting derailed by external requests, sometimes that persists. But as soon as you get beyond a very small team of three or four, and definitely once you get into matrixed organizations and bigger multinational global companies and marketing has become much more of a service-oriented function that has responsibilities to other groups, that rosy picture of pure customer-driven action is just gone. And in those situations, we start to treat other people in the organization as if they were our customer when they're not.

So, these four groups tend to become customer proxies, and for good reason. So, the first group is sales, which is pretty obvious. Marketing and sales work very closely together, and sales communicates so frequently with the customer that it's easy to treat them as a stand-in for the customer, but they are not our actual customer.

They are a stakeholder for us, and we should listen to the feedback that they bring us, but we can't allow their voice to take the place of real direct interaction with our customer.

The customer needs to override whatever sales wants if those things come into conflict.Similarly, we often have product, if you are in kind of a software, tech-type marketing role, or maybe a particular business unit. If you're in more of a, maybe financial services or maybe a pharmaceutical, uh, marketing role, you've got different, uh, products that are being developed, different drugs and things. Those folks that are making the stuff that you are then gonna have to market can sometimes feel like they are your customer, but in fact, they should really be a collaborator, not the ultimate authority on how you go to market.

Because the internal excitement that we feel about a product or about a feature does not always equate to external relevance.

We have to try to tease those two things apart and make sure that what we're doing as an organization is actually in line with what the customer wants, and this is why marketing should be such a powerful role and we should have such a strong voice and such an important seat at the table, because we can be this neutral party in this conversation.

We did not build the thing, we did not build the feature or the product that is being marketed, and we are not the end user. We are in the middle of those two things, and so we can arbitrate and really help to guide and steer what's built and how it is positioned and marketed. That's what we are here for, right?

But we can only do that role, one, if we're respected and allowed to do that role, and two, if we make sure that we don't treat product or business unit heads and those sorts of people as if they were our customer. Collaborator, yes. Customer, no.

The third group um, I'm laughing 'cause I can think of so many times that I've seen this happen. The third group that we often start treating like our customers are executives.

The number of times that I've coached marketing teams when they'll be like, "Well, we were really on track for some, for hitting our goals this sprint, but then the VP really needed these slides," or, "The VP really needed this report updated," or whatever executive needed this, that, or the other thing. Executives are not our customer, and it's hard to say no to these folks. I get it.

But we have to build up the courage and the capability to push back. on these kinds of requests when they endanger our ability to deliver customer value, and we have to do it respectfully and ideally using data and with the visualized work that we talked about earlier as our backup, because it's not just, "I'm too busy, I can't do your request." Right? It is, "Here's everything that's going on right now.

What of this work would you like me to pause or not do in order to take on your deck or the updating of thes- of this PDF?"

Those are the types of conversations we need to have when executive demands come in, because they are not our customer. Yes, we need their blessing. Yes, we need their buy-in from time to time, but that does not mean that their work is the only work that matters or that their opinion gets to override everything else.

You're probably familiar with the, uh, HIPPO acronym, H-I-P-P-O, the highest paid person's opinion. That tends to override everything else, and it should not.

Just because the CMO likes yellow on everything, yellow shouldn't go on everything. The highest paid person's opinion should not override what you know the customer wants.

Again, can be challenging to have these conversations, I know, but if we want marketing to be that respected voice of the customer and to be able to keep driving the value add, break through the noise work that's the only hope that organizations have to make an impact right now, we've got to hold our ground and do the kind of work that we know needs to be done.

All right, last one. The last internal group that we tend to treat like our customers even though they're not is legal and compliance.

Yeah. Again, I get it. These people have sway. They often have real power over the work that we do. We need to make sure that our relationship with these folks is one of gatekeeper.

Right? They, they have an important role to play to make sure that we are not getting sued when we put things out into the market, but that means they are, like I said, a gatekeeper, not the message architect. Because just like when we have AI be the only driver behind our creative, if we let' legal and compliance be the driver behind messaging and creative, it's gonna be all blah and neutral and unremarkable, and it's not gonna break through the noise. At the end of the day, our customers want clarity, not caveats.And legal likes caveats a lot. And so we, again, marketing is the balance between what is safe and compliant and what will resonate with the customer, and we have to walk that line. That's what we do.

But we've got to be able to push and pull at the right. time. And again, having data, having visualized work, and having proof of past impact is, gonna help us to have these conversations in a respectful and effective way with legal and whoever else comes our way.

Okay. So these people are not our customers, but I do, want to share a quick story about how sometimes we get pulled into situations where we, we do have to treat them like they are. And I'll never forget this team that I was coaching who we were talking about this very topic of pushing back on work that wasn't important, uh, in the grand scheme of things, and definitely wasn't more important than the big strategic initiatives that this team was working on, and I said, "You know, just say no."

Right? Say that you aren't going to do it. You've got to sometimes, like, put your foot down and draw the line. And what they said was, "If we don't do it, someone else will."

Someone else will just run off and make the landing page or write the email or create the social post or whatever it' was and put it out there' and now marketing would have no visibility into it. No tracking, no idea if it's brand compliant, no ability to integrate it into larger campaigns, and so they had gotten into this bad habit of doing everything they were asked rather than risk those kinds of rogue activities, happening.

And it's very interesting to me because in tech, in software, no one can log in and push code to production.

That's an insane thing to think. Right? You can't log in to the backend of my Asana software that I use for project management and push a new feature out to the users around the world. No one can do that.

But people do f- roughly the equivalent of that in marketing shockingly often.

So, part of it is this disrespect of what marketers do and this feeling that just about anybody could be a marketer. Uh, I think some of this is evolving with AI and this feeling that anyone can vibe code, anyone can vibe market.

We're all capable of doing all the things, right? But now it's even more important that we emphasize the value that our expertise and our experience as marketing professionals brings to the table, and that means operational rigor is going to set us apart. The ability to show our work, to show what we're doing and why it matters, and to measure the impact that it's having is more critical now than ever.

So, I'm gonna lo- uh, leave you with two things that you can do to help you get out of some of these, "I have to say yes to everything, I can't push back on everybody, doesn't matter who the customer is because I have to serve everybody all the time regardless of what they're asking me to do." Two things that you can do to start to unwind that situation, and the first is to get serious about your backlog. And we talked a little bit about backlogs in an earlier episode, and these are the engine of a good Agile marketing team, but these are also an illustration to people outside of your team what you're working on and what the highest priorities are.

Ideally, you get senior buy-in on the overarching structure of your backlog. So you can have a quarterly view of a backlog that might say, "These are our top three to five priorities for the quarter."

If you use OKRs, objectives and key results, these would be your OKRs. Right? These are the goals, the big rocks that you're trying to accomplish over the course of the next 90 days.

And if you have published and visualized and agreed that these are the big priorities, everybody's signed off and we're all in agreement, then you can use that to measure incoming requests against. "Oh, good. Thanks for bringing me this new landing page, Dave, that you want to build. Which of our five priorities does it ladder up to?"

And if they can't point to which priority it ladders up to, it's much easier to say, "Great. I'm so glad you're here, and this is gonna get done, but it's going to get done after the high priority work that is driving value for our customer as agreed in these high priority OKRs that we all signed off on, and your work is definitely important and I am going to get to it after the customer-focused work is done." Backlogs are enormously powerful tools for navigating these tricky conversations. You have to build it, right? You have to have it before Dave comes to you with his landing page request, but once you have it, then it can be your b-Your absolute best tool for dealing with these kinds of requests.

All right. And the second tool, if you can get a hold of one. This one's harder because it's not totally in your control, but if you can get a heat shield manager, do that too.

So, if you can get someone a level or two above you to buy into these same kinds of concepts, like share this episode with them maybe, and help them understand how overwhelming and unfortunate it is that you are inundated with work that is taking you away from customer centricity and forcing you to do less value added work.

They can become your advocate internally and help you not even have to have the conversation about whether this request ladders up to a larger organizational priority, because that person will never even get to you. They would have to go through your heat shield manager first, and they'll bounce right off of your heat shield.

Those are the absolute best kinds of managers to have, where they protect the people who are heads down focused on delivering value to the customer, and the manager is protecting their time and their capacity. So, if you can get one of those, awesome. If you can't, then I would say your backup second option is to get really good at saying, "Not right now."

I'll get to that, but not right now. Take the request. Don't say no. Don't get a reputation for pushing people away. Take it, but don't start it. Put it in your backlog, but don't start everything the minute that you get it. That alone will help pull some of the load off of you. But the ultimate goal for all of this, right? The customer centricity, the pushing back on non-value adding work, all of it is here to make marketing matter in your organization.

We have an important role to play now more than ever. We have to be the intermediary between what's going on inside the organization and what the customers outside want to hear. There's so much noise and so much

AI generated slop in the world, it's harder than ever to break through. And unless we are really strategic and clever and creative about what we do, we have no shot.

And so the only way we can do those things is if we have capacity in our days. So get serious about making marketing matter in your organization. Show ROI, speak business, demonstrate that you are a serious function that makes a serious impact, and don't let people push you around. You do important work and you deserve respect.

If you're needing some guidance on how to do this tactically day-to-day, more specific tools you can use like the backlog that we were just talking about, we have a course called Personal Agility for Marketers that I teach, and we'll put a link in the show notes if you wanna get into that. It's short, sweet, just a couple of hours worth of work, and it's really designed to help marketers take back their time and take control of their days and take control of their careers. This is a course I wish existed 10 years ago when I was a drowning content marketer, so I made it.

We'll put it in the show notes. I hope to see you in it one time. In the meantime, thank you so much for being here and until next time, please remember, your struggle is real, but so is Agile marketing.