A Practical Guide to Customer Lifecycle Marketing for B2B

B2B growth is about more than just acquisition, it’s about retention and expansion. That’s why customer lifecycle marketing is so important. Instead of focusing solely on the buyer journey, which stresses the initial conversion as the goal, customer lifecycle marketing integrates the customer journey, going beyond that first purchase and developing a long-term relationship with the customer.

Below, we’ll show how customer lifecycle marketing aligns segmentation, personalized messaging, and data-driven automation to increase activation, reduce churn, and maximize customer lifetime value (CLV). The result is a revenue-first marketing strategy for B2B businesses where marketing, sales, and customer success work as a unified system.

Align your B2B lifecycle around revenue, not channels

Customer lifecycle marketing requires a company-wide realignment involving multiple teams. This realignment affects every stage of what Forrester calls the Opportunity Lifecycle: presale, pipeline, and postsale. Every stage is tied to revenue outcomes with different teams taking the lead at different stages, while still collaborating with each other around the same revenue-oriented goal.

For customer lifecycle marketing to be effective, it’s necessary for sales, marketing, and CS to all understand that the B2B buying journey is non-linear. Buying decisions are made by multiple stakeholders rather than a single lead. To account for this complex environment, your company will need to avoid funnel-only marketing and work together to map non-linear buyer journeys where prospects may loop back and forth between different stages of the funnel.

As Salesforce points out, customer data becomes central to this style of lifecycle marketing as it helps you understand and predict buyer behaviors. That data allows you to section off your audience and trigger next-best actions that are more likely to resonate rather than trying to fit different types of buyers into a funnel that may not make sense for them.

Again, alignment across teams is key for this company-wide model to work. Marketing, sales, and CS need to work together and share the same definitions, system of records, and KPIs. This alignment prevents siloed goals, which often have the effect of confusing and alienating buyers rather than converting and retaining them.

Define your lifecycle stages and outcomes

Your customer lifecycle should be broken down into steps that all of your teams understand. Those steps can be defined as:

• Reach/Discover: How your brand attracts accounts, such as through content, paid ads, and social media.
• Engage/Consider: How target accounts interact with your marketing, such as by signing up for a newsletter or subscribing on LinkedIn.
• Convert: When marketing passes leads on to sales who then turn them into closed deals.
• Onboard/Activate: This is the Time to First Value (TTFV), from when a new customer is activated to when they receive the first benefit from your product/service.
• Adopt: How you prove the value of your product to buying committees through repeated use.
• Renew: How you ensure customers are satisfied with the product and willing to renew.
• Expand: The way you identify up-sell and cross-sell opportunities through usage and intent data.
• Advocate: Transforming happy customers into promoters of your product/service.

When creating a customer lifecycle, clearly assign ownership, triggers, channels, and KPIs for each stage, which will provide opportunities for B2B customer lifecycle optimization later on.

For example, at a mid-market SaaS company, the “Activate” stage may entail users completing three key actions in 14 days. “Adopt” could be two or more users within the same account engaging weekly with your marketing efforts.

RevOps ensures consistent definitions across CRM, marketing automation, and CS platforms, while marketing, sales, and CS all co-own success metrics.

Activation rate and Net Revenue Retention (NRR) are both important KPIs that you should set up tracking for early on. They can be calculated as follow:

• Activation rate = activated accounts ÷ new accounts
• NRR = (Starting monthly recurring revenue (MRR) + Expansion − Contraction − Churn) ÷ Starting MRR

You should also map the customer journey based on buying group personas. However, avoid overcomplicating the journey with an excessive number of stages (such as 15 or more) or creating reporting gaps by misaligning CRM stages with behavioral milestones.

Choose KPIs that signal value, not vanity

When choosing which KPIs to target, emphasize value over vanity. This means choosing metrics like activation, usage depth, and renewal intent over purely activity metrics, like clicks and impressions. Vanity metrics tend to have little bearing on revenue and are often only relevant to one team rather than the company as a whole.

Some of the most important lifecycle KPIs to track and how to calculate them are:

• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) = Average Revenue per Account x Gross Margin % x Average Customer Lifespan (years)
• Churn Rate = churned accounts in period ÷ accounts at start of period
• CAC Payback (months) = Customer Acquisition Cost ÷ (Monthly recurring revenue per account x Gross margin %)
• Expansion Rate = expansion MRR generated ÷ starting MRR for the cohort

While value KPIs all affect revenue outcomes, they’ll each have different teams assigned to take ownership of them. For example, Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) and RevOps will lead on CLV and Net Revenue Retention (NRR), marketing takes ownership of activation and engagement metrics, and CS owns retention and expansion KPIs. Working together, your teams will build and share a KPI scorecard for each stage of the customer lifecycle so that everyone is on the same page about the most important KPIs to track.

When choosing KPIs, there are some pitfalls you’ll need to avoid. Channel-only attribution models, for example, fail to account for the cumulative effect of the full lifecycle. Ignoring holdouts and incrementality risks overestimating program impact. And be careful about comparing cohorts with different tenures. A 3-month cohort will have different retention rates than a 12-month cohort, making comparisons between the two misleading.

To avoid these pitfalls and build a measurement framework that’s effective, consult with a B2B SaaS marketing agency team that can guide you through the process.

Build the data and segmentation foundation for personalization

In order to create a personalized marketing strategy, your CRM, product analytics, marketing automation, and CS platforms should all be unified to create a complete customer profile. You can then segment this profile by ideal customer profile (ICP), account tier, role, and behavior, while keeping in mind that data quality and consent are essential.

How to build a 360° customer profile and event model

1. Unify identity across platforms: Resolve users and accounts across CRM, marketing automation, and CS tools so that you have an identity match rate of at least 90% on named accounts.
2. Define an event model: Define the key milestones, such as “Account Created” and “Feature Used.”
3. Segment by ICP and behavior: Don’t rely on broadly defined firmographics. Incorporate specific insights like product engagement and buying group roles to create high-value segments.
4. Govern data quality and consent: Ensure your lifecycle is compliant with GDPR/CCPA by tracking regional consent and creating journeys that are connected and compliant with regional rules.
5. Build real-time triggers: Move accounts through different stages automatically by creating behavior-based triggers aligned to ICP.

Your marketing lifecycle journey should feel personalized, but this personalization doesn’t have to be time-consuming or achieved manually. By seamlessly incorporating your tech stack and data flow into the lifecycle journey, personalization becomes automatic. A customer-led SaaS SEO agency experienced in unifying data around revenue can show you how to efficiently personalize customer lifecycle journeys.

Design stage-specific messaging and experiences that move revenue

Effective customer lifecycle marketing should link every stage to value. That means crafting messaging specific to each stage and the targeted buyer in order to better predict behavior and trigger next-best actions. When your messaging and experiences are built around stage and roles, you’ll more effectively grow revenue.

Here’s how to build messaging for the three main stages of your customer lifecycle postsale.

Stage 1: Acquisition and onboarding that accelerates time-to-value

Onboarding is the most important postsale campaign. Customers need to achieve their first “aha” moment as fast as possible in order to maximize retention rates and reduce churn.

You should begin by creating segmented onboarding tracks for different roles and account tiers. For example, executives and technical implementers will have different goals and skills, so messaging should be customized to those unique characteristics.

Automation is essential for a successful onboarding, but it should complement rather than replace human support. Use automation where consistency is paramount, such as sending quick welcome emails and regular check-ins. In-app messages and CS-led kickoff calls, meanwhile, reassure clients that their account is being personally managed by your company.

During this stage, the most important metrics to track are:

• Activation Rate: Percentage of accounts that complete key events.
• Time-to-First Value (TTFV): How long it takes users to experience a significant benefit from your product/service.
• Onboarding Completion Rate: The percentage of customers who finish the onboarding journey.

These metrics will give you early insights into whether or not your onboarding process is effective at retaining customers and where there may be room for improvement. Tackling these metrics early on will deliver expansion potential in the future. Directive’s Customer Retention Strategies for B2B can help you develop more onboarding strategies that improve retention.

Stage 2: Engagement and retention that reduce churn

After onboarding, your focus shifts to ongoing engagement with your customers. This stage is all about reinforcing the initial value you delivered during onboarding so that clients continue to understand the ROI your company provides.

You can start by sending monthly value emails that summarize the key benefits your product or service delivers. For example, these emails can talk about how many hours of work the client saved or the revenue they generated by using your product/service. Value emails can also highlight new features or services that the customer has yet to utilize. Be sure to position the emails as more than just passive check-ins, but rather as a business partner providing useful advice.

Use data during the engagement stage to better understand each account’s satisfaction. For example, assign weights to key events, like login frequency and feature usage depth. If an account’s usage dips below a certain threshold, flag it as “at-risk” and trigger automated alerts to CS who can reach out in order to reduce churn.

You can also use automated nudges and reminders to increase usage and client satisfaction. For instance, when usage drops, send out an automated prompt reminding them of your product’s use-case for their business. For customers who are already engaged, maintain that momentum by sending out milestone messages, such as after 30 days of usage, to highlight features they’ve yet to explore.

Finally, be sure to target executives with Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) that highlight measurable results your product has delivered while providing a value story for how to continue that growth. Executives may have limited day-to-day familiarity with your product/service, but they’ll ultimately be the ones who decide whether or not to renew or expand their subscription.

Stage 3: Expansion and advocacy that compound LTV

If you’ve succeeded during onboarding and engagement, expansion should come naturally. The expansion and advocacy stage brings with it substantial revenue potential. It’s much easier to convince existing happy clients to try a new feature or integration than it is to acquire a new client. Similarly, customers who advocate for your services and promote them to colleagues provide some of the most effective marketing.

Again, you’ll need data to effectively manage expansion opportunities. For example, monitor when customers are approaching plan limits and trigger an alert so that CS can contact them about upgrades. Using data in this way makes reaching out to clients feel more about how your company can solve an issue the client is having rather than trying to pressure them into an unnecessary purchase.

Learn how to identify Product-Qualified Expansion (PQE) opportunities, which are accounts that are signalling a readiness to expand. A PQE can include multiple users from one account requesting features that are only available for higher tiers. Again, this data provides CS with the insight they need to provide a valuable solution to a challenge the client is facing. 

Beyond expansion, you can also nurture clients into advocates. Timing is essential for advocacy. For example, you can request testimonials and reviews right after major success milestones, but avoid asking for reviews too early or during troubleshooting phases. These requests can be easily automated, further reducing the manual work for your teams.

Advocates are also created by building a sense of community around your product/service. Online user communities where clients share ideas and feedback both with your teams and each other fosters an emotional connection to your brand. Similarly, hosting in-person events or virtual roundtables emphasizes your commitment to your clients and helps turn them into promoters of your company.

Customer lifecycle marketing 90-day playbook

A 90-day plan is enough time for most companies to get their customer lifecycle marketing strategy up and running and also build momentum. A customer lifecycle marketing agency can help you build a 90-day playbook that hits the following focus areas and deliverables.

• Weeks 1-3: Align teams, define lifecycle stages and SLAs. Decide on success metrics and KPIs.
• Weeks 3-5: Audit data stack (CRM, MAP, product analytics, CS), perform a gap analysis, and unify your event tracking.
• Weeks 5-7: Create your onboarding journey, develop content outlines, and identify opportunities for automated workflows.
• Weeks 7-9: Launch engagement focus through setting up customer engagement scores and usage triggers.
• Weeks 9-10: Develop expansion workflows by establishing PQE signals and creating upsell offers.
• Weeks 10-12: Measure and refine with a QBR rhythm and lifecycle dashboard.

By the end of your 90 days, you’ll have achieved measurable revenue outcomes that will give you insights into what areas of the lifecycle are working and which need to be further optimized. With this data on hand, you can more easily experiment with new approaches and scale for further growth.

Orchestrate automation and measurement across channels

Once you’ve gone live with your customer lifecycle and data collection, orchestrate automation to deliver messages that resonate with the right people across different channels. This orchestration is achieved through a combination of smart trigger design, experimentation, and reporting.

Automated triggers are opportunities to keep prospects engaged and continuously moving through the buyer’s journey. Find opportunities to set up triggers after crucial events, such as when opportunities move to “Closed-Won” or when product usage drops below 30%.

Set aside around 10% of accounts from a campaign to measure the impact of experimental marketing strategies. To get the best understanding of what works and doesn’t, only test one change at a time and track both leading (engagement) and lagging (NRR) indicators.

Establish a monthly lifecycle review to go over key KPIs, such as conversion, activation, and retention rates. These should be broken down by stage and cohort. Also analyze any experimentation results and set up a plan for next steps.

By establishing a regular cadence of reporting, analysis, and implementation, you’ll be able to successfully operate a revenue-generating customer lifecycle marketing campaign. When your lifecycle marketing is geared toward revenue and built on data and personalization, you’ll unlock the potential for compounding growth through every stage of the customer journey.

Ready to build a lifecycle that powers B2B revenue? Talk to our lifecycle marketing team to help you transform your customer journey into a growth engine.