Okay, so I’ve built a couple of things over the years and everytime I think I have a moat, CLAUDE or somewhere drops something to do it for free, or just inclusive of the subscription.
Ideas on what to do? How do I get my first customer if they’re AI proficient?
Okay, so I’ve built a couple of things over the years and everytime I think I have a moat, CLAUDE or somewhere drops something to do it for free, or just inclusive of the subscription.
Ideas on what to do? How do I get my first customer if they’re AI proficient?
We always talk about acquisition as the be all and end all in B2B. We focus on ABM, paid performance, and events. That’s the harsh reality of B2B in 2026.
But what we don’t talk about is the poor Customer Success teams who have to manage the multi-million dollar accounts after the sale is complete. Then, the $50K of marketing spend to acquire that lead and close that sale, churns because we can’t give them enough genuine value to stick around. When we then think about them in our ICPs, we spend another $60-100K over 2-3 years, winning them back, only for the cycle to repeat.
Team, when we’re generating value with sales in partnership, we really need to help Customer teams with managing these accounts through lifecycle marketing and customer marketing.
Theres two key benefits to doing this.
You can generate cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. Think about it as a future revenue engine for further customer ARR. Your pipeline can come from these customers and you don’t need to feel confined to “net new”. Especially in more mature B2B orgs.
You surprise and delight customers so they have a positive NPS. If they’re promoting you, word of mouth can be your best friend. Especially when generating new leads beyond the current customer.
So, here’s some thoughts on how I’d approach the customer lifecycle in B2B today. These are not gospel, and let me know your thoughts below!!
- Email nurtures at a regular cadence. THIS DOES NOT MEAN SPAM THEM. It means capture their interest and preferences on how much they’d like you to talk to them and what about. Then build content in categories that helps them get value from you. It’ll help you keep mindshare and positive attitudes.
- In-app prompting. THIS DOES NOT MEAN PUSH A PROMPT EVERYDAY. Prompting daily would result in prompt fatigue and then ignoring the prompts like ads. It’s about prompting product-led growth features after giving them a free trial for it. It’s about signing up to webinars in a non-intrusive way. It’s about helping them in ways they didn’t already have value. I got 1,000 registrations to a webinar off a single prompt because it was done right.
- Customer events. This is expensive, but my god, customers love it when you host something. Bring them to your office and treat them for a day. Go to their office and bring your sales guys and make it a fun day for them. Do an education session. Teach them about “what more” can be done, without doing a full sales pitch.
And ultimately, just be nice to them. Vendor-Client relationships are delicate. If you can surprise and delight them, leave some brand in hand, and automate things that make them feel good. You’ll prevent churn and see rapid growth. No dollar wasted, no customer lost.
anyone else notice that B2B marketing has a very few jobs but the ones that are going to all senior to executive level? I don’t know what it is but they’re always asking VP and executives to be executing multifaceted marketing campaigns that are too complex for the individuals but then they provide no budget support, ending up as an everything but nothing campaign that doesn’t achieve what it is set out to achieve….
I had an idea where I could turn Claude into a PM for me – it reads all my projects, automates tasks, follows people up, and makes sure we're all accountable to deadlines... The challenge? My Claude only has cowork, and limited connections with M365 & Slack. I can't send emails to myself, and I can't tag myself in slack because it doesn't notify me... I can't create a webhook cause the IT team are required to do that. Does anyone have any good work arounds for this?
And if anyone has set up Claude as a PM, I'd love to hear what you've done to make it effective!