Customer Success Playbook Podcast S3 E52 - Katie Smith - From Stagnation to Strategy
May 5, 2025
Katie Smith shares how strategic marketing and constant customer feedback can unlock growth. She emphasizes the importance of listening to customers throughout their journey, moving away from traditional surveys to subtle, everyday interactions. Effective onboarding and engagement are crucial for understanding shifting preferences. By integrating customer insights into marketing strategies, brands can stay agile and refine their offerings, ensuring stronger connections and sustained success even in unpredictable markets.
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volunteer_activism ADVICE
Continuous Customer Listening
Build continuous listening into your marketing to keep your finger on the pulse of customer needs and market changes.
Regularly collect and analyze customer feedback to adapt swiftly and maintain competitive advantage.
volunteer_activism ADVICE
Effective Customer Questions
Ask forward-looking questions at onboarding like "What are you most excited about?" to understand customer goals.
Cover reflective questions during check-ins to capture changes and meaningful impacts subtly without surveys.
insights INSIGHT
Marketing and Customer Success Alignment
Customer success insights should fuel marketing strategy alongside sales data.
Aligning marketing and customer success helps adjust messaging and sharpen value messaging in real-time.
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This episode of the Customer Success Playbook podcast is a breath of fresh Livingston, Montana air. Kevin Metzger sits down with Katie Smith, fractional CMO and founder of Wild Path Consulting, to unpack how strategic marketing and proactive customer listening can transform customer relationships and drive sustainable growth. Katie dives into tactics that ensure continuous customer engagement, especially in volatile markets, and shares actionable insights on how aligning customer feedback with marketing can unlock next-level success.
Detailed Analysis: Katie Smith's marketing philosophy is simple but potent: Always keep your ear to the ground. As a fractional Chief Marketing Officer, she specializes in building scalable strategies by embedding listening loops throughout the customer lifecycle. In this episode, Katie unpacks the critical role of subtle, continuous feedback gathering—from onboarding questions like "What are you most excited about?" to reflective prompts such as "What has changed the most for you?"
She emphasizes integrating these questions into everyday interactions rather than relying on clunky surveys. It's about embedding marketing intelligence into the customer success function. And here's the kicker: Katie makes a strong case that the insights from customer success should be fueling marketing strategy just as much as sales data does. That shift in mindset helps brands stay ahead of the curve—adjusting messaging, realigning offerings, and reinforcing value in real time.
The conversation also touches on the broader organizational alignment between marketing and customer success teams. With fast-moving market shifts, this collaboration isn’t just beneficial; it’s essential. Katie leaves us with a compelling preview of part two, where the focus sharpens on co-owning long-term value across departments.
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The Customer Success Playbook