If you’re offering a B2B solution, you should do everything to win as many employees of your customers over as true fans as possible.

You spend a lot of effort and probably also a lot of money on marketing activities aimed at acquiring new customers.

Then you (hopefully) acquire customers. You celebrate it (rightfully). Job done. Not.

The customer rolls out your solution. Everyone in your customer’s team is super excited. Not.

Everyone who should use your product at the customer uses it, they are super engaged with your product. Not.

You spent so much money, time, and energy to acquire the customer, but now all the “land and expand” doesn’t work as you imagined. Probably even keeping the customer at all doesn’t work.

One obvious reason might be that your product is not as great as you thought.

But one reason that is totally underestimated by many founders might be that you didn’t put the energy you need into your acquisition marketing also into the marketing towards your customer’s teams. That is at least 50% of the game:

First, do everything to motivate as many employees of your customers as possible to use your tool and to increase their engagement. So that it becomes irreplaceable for them.

Then, make them fans and ambassadors of your product.

This is how you win the game in the long term and build true competitive moats.

Imagine a customer with a huge base of employees cheering for your solution. How will that affect your churn rate and your expansion potential? You know the answer.

So why you don’t get a bit more creative and put more energy into your “in-customer marketing”? After you convinced your buyer, the decision makers, etc. at the top, you need to convert the base into fans – the users. Bottom-up.

That is too superficial and you want more actionable advice from me? Here you go, how about the following inspirations:

• Organize engaging and fun (important!) workshops about using your product and/or a topic that is valuable for your customer’s team members and that has a strong connection with your software solution. Best practice: Start with a very limited number of early adopters first, let them spread the word about how good the session was, and create pull from other employees who want you to do another workshop.
• Bring in gamification, and organize competitions incentivizing users to do certain things for your solution with prices.
• Offer free keynotes about a topic, you as a founder, are an expert in and that provides tailored value to your customer’s team members. You should be the person they ask to give a speech at a team offsite, all-hands, etc. – and not an external expert they pay for. There are so many industries out there where you could even become the go-to person for everything digital transformation within the teams of your customers. By the way, the quickest way to excel at giving engaging keynotes is my www.coupmovement.com course.
• Give your customers’ employees free stuff. You think of merch? Yeah, okay, why not. But I like to be more creative: A free online course you produced, a virtual AMA session about a topic you could really help them with, or even something that would help their spouses, kids, etc. if it has a clear connection to your business and solution.
• Think of creative ideas that position your customer’s employees as stars and give them recognition: An interview you do with them where they share important knowledge about a topic related to your solution, or even a podcast with them (I advised a friend to do that years ago and now that turned into an amazing customer retention tool for him).
• Build a community within your customer, where people interested in an important topic related to your solution gather together to share knowledge, facilitated by you, or even sponsored by you.
• Not crazy enough? OK, let me stretch your imagination: If your ACVs allow it, how about a small Instagram campaign targeting employees of your customers in a super personalized way?

The possibilities are endless. Marketing shouldn’t stop when you acquire your customer. It should continue within your customer.