We All Do Support, We All Do Marketing, We All Do Sales

At ArchiSnapper, marketing is not a single person’s responsibility. The same goes for support. We don’t have person A and B on marketing, and person C and D on support.

The people that are doing marketing, are the same people that offer customer support. And in fact, they are the same that manage sales. The only team that’s a bit separate of all these tasks is our development team, although they also help with support.

You must be thinking: “no, not good, it’s not possible for one and the same person to be good in all those things“.

We think the opposite is true: you can’t be good at marketing or sales if you never do support.

Let’s talk about marketing first.

Small side note: We’re talking about the traditional marketing activities here (e.g. content creation, sending newsletters, making product videos). Disregarding that in fact, everything we do is marketing. (Read more about this at the bottom of this article). 

We believe that it’s not possible to be good at marketing without spending a considerable amount of time talking with customers.

To market our product, we have to know our product, and understand how our customers use and value the product. The only way to achieve this is by talking with customers about our product. We listen to the words they use. We help them get started with our app, and call them to understand their exact processes and requirements. We ask them for feedback and what they like about our product. We answer hundreds of small support questions.

So everyone who is involved in traditional marketing activities at ArchiSnapper will spend a considerable time on frontline activities; like calling new trial users, answering customer questions, and giving product demos.

By doing customer support every person in our team really gets to master our product and gets to know every little detail that customers are asking about.

And when that person later gives a sales demo, he’ll be able to answer specific questions like ‘how can I link ArchiSnapper to my Dropbox account‘, or ‘how much RAM does my device need‘.

A salesperson that masters their product/service, understand their customers’ needs, and that can answer any question (technical or not) will have a way better chance of success.

In fact, supporting customers doesn’t only help to become better at marketing or sales. It helps our development team to understand how our customers use our product and what’s important to them (not to us!).

It helps us focus on the value we are generating for our users with a certain feature instead of on writing perfect code and developing things no one needs.

Talking with customers also helps us focus on the right priorities: we don’t need to invent ‘cool‘ features or philosophise about our strategic 2030 plan. Based on day-to-day support, we know what our users need, we know the things they like about our product, and we don’t want to change, and we know how we can improve the product to generate even more value. So that’s what we’re working on, feature by feature.

Everybody being involved in support, makes everyone better in every role.

Take care,

Jerry

Note on “Everything is marketing”:

If marketing is everything we do to get new customers, then everything we do is marketing:

• • a phone call with a customer is marketing

• • making our product better is marketing

• • helping customers with questions is marketing

• • sending invoices is marketing
  • even solving a bug is marketing

• … every single act we do is marketing, since ultimately it all contributes to a buyers decision.

We believe that treating our users well – by offering awesome support, building a great product, answering a phone call in a friendly way – is simply the best marketing we can do.

Happy users give us 5 start reviews and recommend ArchiSnapper to their friends and colleagues. In the long term, this is much more valuable compared to buying ads, for example.