The CMAweekly newsletter is sponsored by our Exclusive Partner Champion. This month Champion wants to get to know the community, be sure to join us on Jan 17th at 1 PM EST to learn more about Champion, Jeff, and Gianna, and how they hope to participate in our community this year.

Welcome to the New Year. I’m so happy to be out of 2023; it was a rough year of trying to build our community, helping those dealing with career issues, and listening to the struggles of our space.

But, December showed signs of progress, hiring, and many LinkedIn posts of landing new positions. I’m looking forward to our space finding a new normal and progressing as we serve our awesome customers.

This is going to be a long newsletter; here’s what I’ll cover:

• Influitive’s Been Acquired

• Top Predictions for 2024

• Events in January 2024

• Call for Jobseeker Support

Participate in our weekly poll

Influitive’s Been Acquired

On Thursday, Dec 21st, a community member shared that Influitive was acquired by Jigsaw.

And honestly, it’s been at the top of my mind ever since.

Here’s what I’ve learned:

• The new CEO was assuming the role - Kathy Slowinkski

• It was a quiet acquisition, even though there was a press release, a post from Jigsaw’s CEO on LinkedIn

• Customers did receive an email telling them about the acquisition. They have a scheduled call on January 5th to learn more.

• Several Customer Success Managers were let go. I’ve spoken to a few.

• Some Sales, Support Services & Software people were released, as well.

• ESW Capital owns Jigsaw Interactive (the buyer), and they have interesting business practices, including releasing several teams and moving operations overseas.

• ESW Capital is considered a Private Equity company.

• David Sroka of Point-of-Reference mentioned the acquisition on LinkedIn and said in a comment, “The technology will at least live on in the education market.”  

• Yesterday, Dan Cote shared a message that seems to indicate moving on from Influitive.

My reaction: I am fairly stunned (still). I thought I had misread the headline.

Industry Struggles

For the past year, I’ve heard rumors and hints about how well companies in the Customer Marketing & Advocacy space are doing business-wise (there’s always chatter in Direct Message).

In general, there seems to be a struggle with sales, retention, and getting budgets, and managing accounts where the main user was part of a RIF. Even the companies doing well (or at least haven’t shown the impact of the above-mentioned aspects) were seeing sales take much longer to close.

Customer Concerns

Influitive has been a mainstay in the space for several years, and it seemed unlikely they would have a massive business change because of the economy.

To be fair, I can’t say this was a result of the recent tech funding and RIF spiral.

It does, however, look like a concern for customers, given that most of the Customer Success Managers are gone, and ESW Capital’s history shows operations like Success could be moving overseas.

Additionally, at least one of Influitive’s competitors has already jumped on the opportunity to convince customers to move to their service instead. I can’t imagine that’s a viable option for most customers, and this competitor’s product is no comparison for the features and technology currently included with Influitive.

Call for Support

With the size of Influitive’s customer base and the amount of time they’ve been in business, it appears that dozens of people will be (or are already) out of work, in our industry.

Let’s try to help these displaced colleagues find new positions.

* I spoke with several sources about the information in this article and have not included any information from anyone still employed by Influitive.

Call for Job Seeker Support & Participation

Please, please, please join the Slack, post jobs, post what you can do to help others find work, share your LinkedIn so others can look through your network, and say if you’ll do mock interviews, resume reviews, cover letter reviews, etc.

Jobseekers - ask for help, reach out to people in the community that have offered to help. Send me updates of how your interviews went so I can share poor experiences with others. I'll even post to ask others to leave feedback on a company so you don’t have to.

2024 Predictions & How They Change Your Existing Plans (From SaaStr, too)

Jason from SaaStr says that CS is forever changed, Marketing was the third highest hit department, and Revenue focus is here to stay, as are Profitable SaaS teams, 200MRR = 700 employees.

“Now, plenty of SaaS leaders saw Q2’23 in particular as their low point, and saw growth reaccelerate at least a smidge from there. So there is plenty of reason for at least modest optimism for 2024.” - Jason Lemkin (I’d love to see this pan out).

Net New ARR Growth is Starting to Rebound

Final quote from these posts: “I really can’t fully predict where all this will go.  What makes sense to me is AI and technology and automation and efficiency won’t truly eliminate the role of the CSM, the SDR and customer support.  But it may cut the number of folks doing these roles in half, and force them to do more.

And what feels like the end of an era — and I do think it is the end of an era here — is usually just the start of a new beginning.” - Jason Lemkin

His Updates from 2023:

The End of Customer Success - Another post from Jason on how Customer Success is changing and becoming part of the sales/revenue focus. (Are we that far off as CMA’s?)

Revenue Growth Plummeted - this could be why a lot of CMA’s have been asked to focus so much on finding revenue among customers.

Predictions from Behind-the-Community-Scenes

Based on Community activity and interactions, here are my predictions for our space for 2024

More Hiring - but lower salaries. As companies realize they do need Customer Marketing & Advocacy, they’ll open new positions and start working on this space again.

The goal is likely to be two-sided: increase Customer satisfaction & drive customer revenue. Unfortunately, the high # of laid-off individuals in our space means we will take lower salaries 😢 

Major Focus on Revenue as a part of our responsibilities. Over the past year, I’ve seen this become an even bigger part of our discussions. CMAs want to know about Expansion and I’m booking more calls to bring in experts to share.

More Focus on Driving Adoption & Retention. I think this speaks to Jason L’s comment on Customer Success having been let go and a lot of companies looking for ways to automate support.

Many in the advocacy space have mentioned advocacy being a type of Success at Scale, and the focus on Adoption and Retention that has grown over the past year is indicating a shift of permanently relying on other post-sales professionals to contribute to these previously held CS responsibilities.

More Community & Customer User-Generated Content. For those companies that can jumpstart community and customer UGC without a massive investment, I think more community efforts and roundtables will pop up. PS: I have a course on this 😀 

Events

FEATURED: Meet the Sponsor with Champion on Jan 17th 1PM EST

Open Discussion Jan 5th 2PM lu.ma/cmafridays

Planning for 2024 with Taylor Bogar (ChiliPiper) Jan 10th 2:30 PM EST

Sarah Moody - Revenue Expert Friday Jan 12th 2PM EST - topic TBA

Open Discussion Jan 19th lu.ma/cmafridays

Katlin Hess, G2 - Reviews & Onboarding Comms Friday Jan 26th 2PM EST

NEW! Submit your events for inclusion in this newsletter - Free

Freebie of the Week

Give Customers the Option to Share: Shannon Howard shared a Slidedeck of Advocacy Opportunities for Sharing (a deck to use when speaking to customers about participating)

Strategy/Approach: (from me) I used a similar deck with customers in a past advocacy & community program, where I’d invite them to a call to learn about their experience in the space, with our product, etc., and on the call I’d ask if they wanted to share their experience with others. If they said Yes - here are the options!

Finally - jump into the community and share your goals for the New Year!

Talk soon,

Mary