How Marketing and Customer Success Should Collaborate in B2B SaaS

Sansan CS strategist Yamada Hisanori and LEAPT CEO Toguri Shohei argue that Japan’s B2B marketing is built fragmentarily and that CS-to-marketing feedback loops are the fix.

• Japan’s B2B marketing is built “fragmentarily” — companies start with whatever is easiest (ads, SEO) rather than from a full 4P framework, so it looks fragmented but was never whole to begin with.
• Marketing sits farthest from customers in the org chart; even a mid-level marketer may be two layers below the marketing head, making direct customer understanding structurally impossible.
• Standard case studies (導入事例) capture adoption but miss ROI patterns; Yamada built separate “success use cases” (サクセス事例) tracking customers who achieved measurable value after ~2 years, which sharpened personas and sales conversion.
• A 30-minute CS-to-marketing catchup — even informally over coffee — is enough to shift marketing priority: CS feedback reveals which pain points recur most, letting marketers cut through content overload.
• CS-marketing role split should track product price and segment: SMB/horizontal products can be scaled by marketing automation; enterprise/vertical products need CS-led 1-on-1 engagement with marketing in a supporting broadcast role.
• When Sansan added new products, CS had to immediately interview early adopters and push use-case learnings upstream — without that, sales and marketing had no idea how to position the new SKU.
• Customer marketing is essentially 1970s Relationship Marketing rebranded; Toguri recommends studying that literature (available on Amazon) for KPI frameworks that don’t exist yet in Japanese SaaS writing.

2025-06-26 · Watch on YouTube