95: Customer Advocacy: How To Turn Customers Into a Growth Lever

Speaker A: It is far better for your customer or your user to deliver the message than you. Period.

Speaker B: Welcome to Marketing Demystified, the podcast that connects the dots for business leaders to drive revenue through effective marketing strategy. We chat with marketing experts on different topics that will help you ramp up your revenue. We stream live on LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube and you can listen to us on your favorite podcast platforms. Marketing Demystified. The podcast is presented to you by Grow Getter, your partner in growth marketing. And here's today's episode.

Speaker C: Hello, everyone. Are you ready to be inspired, informed and empowered with practical tips to boost your marketing efforts? You're in the right place. Welcome to Marketing Demystified. I'm your host, Gemma Cusi, CEO and co founder of Groguetter, your growth marketing partner. Now. So many B2B companies out there are just so fixated on kind of chasing new logos that they're ignoring, ignoring a major growth lever right in front of them. It doesn't require a lot of budget converts faster than anything in the funnel, and it's made up of people who already love your product or service. It's your customers. Today I'm joined by Nick Salvatoriello. Nick, Sal. Nick is currently senior manager of brand marketing and partnerships at growth and over 15 plus years. His work sits across partnerships, customer marketing and brand. And he knows a thing or two about post deal customer advocacy as a growth lover. Today we're walking through what a customer advocacy strategy looks like in practice. How to identify your best advocates, how to measure what's working and the mistakes most teams are making while putting this into practice. So very excited to have this chat today. Welcome to the show, Nick.

Speaker A: Hey, Jen, thanks so much for having me. I know we both were running from time, uh, with our children here at the end of the school day. So it's nice to be able to link up with you here on the east coast and get back to work and talk about some marketing.

Speaker C: Absolutely, yes. I'm very excited to, uh, go from one job to another today.

Speaker A: Got to carry a lot of jobs in this world.

Speaker C: That's right. That's right. Um, I'm so excited to have this conversation. I hear so often people say, you know, a lot of our business comes from word of mouth and that's not something you can control with marketing. And there is a lot you can control with marketing from a customer advocacy perspective. And so I think some practical tips from you on how we're able to think about that. I'm just so excited to dig in.

Speaker A: Ditto. Happy to Share everything, uh, that I know and, um, look to be of service to you and your audience here.

Speaker C: Awesome. So let's start by talking about why maybe customer advocacy matters right now. Um, it's one of those phrases that maybe people use and few teams really operationalize. Um, so before we get into some of those specifics of the strategy, um, I'd love to hear from your perspective, like, what actually is customer advocacy and why is it such a missed opportunity for brands that are maybe not acting on it right now?

Speaker A: Indeed. And I imagine many folks here who are watching or on the line will have a slightly different experience or definition of what customer advocacy is. But ultimately, if you've ever purchase something, especially if it's a major purchase, especially if it's a business to business purchase, you're purchasing something on behalf of your organization or with your organization, you need to do some research. You need to be sure that you're making the right choice. These are valuable dollars that you can't spend somewhere else. And uh, and if you make the wrong choice, sometimes there is a significant consequence to having to undo that. So most of us know from our own experience, before you make a big decision like that, you're going to ask around. So customer advocacy, first and foremost is getting your customers to, to spread your message and advocate for you, to talk about their own experience, to talk about why they chose you, and to talk to other folks in your target market, who you want to join them. But then second of all, customer advocacy can also be relevant to helping the people who sell in your organization by getting some of your best customers. Usually there's some sort of goodwill that's been exchanged between you and them, those best customers, they've been there for you, you've been there for them. And advocacy can be building a team, or perhaps at least emotion, where you can bring in a subset of those customers into the sales process. As I said before, usually if some major institution is buying something from you or elsewhere, they're going to ask to see references, case studies. They may want to literally talk to somebody. They might be willing to watch just a couple of videos. You may invite them to a conference or some sort of event where they can rub shoulders with those people and kind of get off script with those people. But either way, customer advocacy is a strategy. You're doing all of these things as intentionally and on purpose as you can without it feeling that way to the people who are advocating. And the people are being advocated too. So that's how I just kind of set the table about what I believe customer advocacy should look like and feel like, and that shows up in many different formats.

Speaker C: I'm already like, the things that you've just listed off, like, oh, yeah, that's a good idea. Like, I don't know that I've, you know, seen it done in that way. So, yeah, I don't want to get too fast into the tactics. But, um, what would you say or what do you say to people who are maybe concerned about, like, asking too much of their customers or, you know, worried about impacting the work that they're doing actively with that customer versus focusing on asking them to advocate?

Speaker A: Sure. And I should explain a little bit of my background here and how I came to be somebody who is interested and passionate about customer advocacy. And that would begin, uh, in my early days in my marketing career at HubSpot, Inc. I was one of the first few hundred employees at HubSpot. I'm here based in the greater Boston area, and HubSpot grew up and was launched out of Cambridge, uh, Mass. And I joined the customer success team at HubSpot. So we were very much about making customers successful and definitely documenting those as much as we could in the form of reviews, in the form of case studies, getting those folks into events and on webinars, many again, of the tactics that I started to mention. So I got that experience there from, from HubSpot. Um, but then also as I went out into HubSpot's partner channel and started working for some of HubSpot's, um, most successful digital marketing agencies and digital sales enablement agencies, we saw this, again, be something that was worth copying and emulating from the success story that we had all learned from HubSpot's, uh, just really wild hypergrowth, um, during those. Those heady days in the early 2000 and tens. So, um, and again, uh, Jen, hit me one more time with sort of the specific area you wanted to get down into in this area of advocacy.

Speaker C: Yeah, I guess I'm, I'm, you know, as you're asking for customers to participate in this way. Right. Case studies or testimonials. And that's sort of the. Maybe the, the entry level into the more advanced customer advocacy. Um, I'm gonna struggle to say that the whole. So bear with me.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: Um, but as you get sort of more sophisticated in those questions, there's. I often get the, you know, oh, we don't really want to ask that of our customer. We don't want to waste their time or ask too much of them. So, you know, how do you think about that? Um, in that. In your process?

Speaker A: Okay, great. Thank you for, for humoring me and, uh, kind of recalibrating there. So, um, first. First and foremost, remember I talked about the beginning, the, the sales process itself. Customers understand this is something that they want made available to them most of the time for these types of major purchases or even small purchases. People, we purchase something on Amazon, you, you are grateful and you expect that people are going to post reviews and you expect that perhaps you'll be asked to do the same. And there is, for some people, a bit of goodwill, a little bit of altruism. This is what I wanted and needed, and I understood that somebody else had to take some time to share. Maybe it was lost, documented, maybe it was captured and shown off later. So there is a bit of. This is how the work is done. If you use those materials to make your good decision and the decision turned out to be a good one after the fact, that's always important. Right? That's why customer success is such an important goal. Post sale, then it's. Hopefully it's not going to be a surprise when you may turn around and say, wow, you were so successful here. We're making you into a case study now. Can we, can we share this with others? So it's setting that expectation from the very beginning that people do want this and need this, and therefore we all have to play our part, um, if we want to help others make that same decision. That's not going to work on everybody. I can't tell you if I've been in sales how many times that line has been redlined out of my contract. We have the right to tell your story or show it off. No. Or with, uh, written permission only, and I'll take that. But it does not always have to be as formal as that. Sometimes it is word of mouth, people spreading the word. Uh, a customer who figured something out. Do you mind if I mention that in my next call? Uh, things of this nature. So try to think about what a lightweight ask might be. And I have a lot of experience with this. Um, Jen, because I worked in partnerships at HubSpot, and we were pretty early to the party in B2B SaaS for spinning up a partner channel. And many of our customers of HubSpot, who are a lot of SMB customers especially, that was a big focus back then, um, were interested in going into business and teaching other people how to do this. So I'm not saying every product or every company or industry lends itself well to that but perhaps there are some of your customers who kind of want to get into this business. They're so successful that they see an incentive to potentially help spread the word. And it does not have to always be a formal partnership like that. Many people, especially as I worked in marketing, us marketers, we are, uh, craving recognition or at least help awareness of the work that we're trying to do. And we want to be recognized for the work that we're doing. We want to get advice and feedback from our peers. So if you can be a mechanism to help that and tell and help your customer understand this is for the greater good of everybody. It's the greater good of the industry, of that role, of that, that profession, but especially the person, the individual user involved in their brand, if you can get down to that. M. I've rarely had a user that I was working with, let's say using HubSpot, um, or using our agency services at the agencies I've been fortunate enough to represent over the years who did well and didn't want in some way or form to be recognized in a wider way around that. So once again, you can go back to the list of tactics I've mentioned. But of course, just inviting them onto a webinar, inviting them onto a podcast like this, inviting them onto a live stage like, uh, Jen, you And I know HubSpot has done so well with Inbound, Now Unbound. The vast majority of those stages are filled with customer case studies, live customer interviews, panels and so on. Talking about real life experience to their peers. That's what the, that's what the audiences want. Um, that's what people really are seeking. So I just try to position it to folks as you're so great, the world needs to know more about what you've done here, what you've achieved, tool with service and so on. It would mean so much to us if you could inspire the next generation. And I was convincing other agencies to tell other agencies who were following in their footsteps how they did what they did to get to their level. Essentially it could be looked at as giving your secrets of the competition. But you don't position it that way. You position the way I started this answer with this is altruism. This is everybody helping everybody. And I think and um, those agencies knew that they were watching the others who had gone before them and taking the notes before them. So I just think it's, it's helping the community of customers out, showing off great success stories of what you did well to somebody else. And I think if that feels weird to you? Maybe you want to also consider, um, like a metaphor of the business is the mentor. The customer is the star. The business is not the star. We are Obi Wan Kenobi. They are Luke Skywalker. We should be the ones saying, look at this hero here that we mentored, empowered, and made these tools available to. But hear their story, hear their tale. And I've always had that mindset and that's always worked. That's always been a favorable perspective to people going, yeah, you're right. I did figure some things out that, that was tough, but we did get through it and it is worth doing. I would love to help pass it on to, uh, others. They're the hero of the story and we want to help spread that. We want to make them a bit. I used to tell people, I want to make you HubSpot famous around here and spread. Spread you around the ecosystem with this story. And we tell them we can meet you wherever you're at. Is this something where you can do it passively? Written text? Would you be willing to be interviewed, uh, live film? Uh, is it about speaking in a closed, uh, intimate room among peers and stuff with the recorder off? That is. I think the art behind the science of customer advocacy is meeting people where they're at based on what you think

Speaker C: you need to get m. Yeah, that's such a good point of, you know, what, uh, the sort of different levels of participation that different people might be willing or less willing to do based on just their comfort level. And so I want to talk about that, about strategy, actually. Like, what does, you know, rather than just doing the tactics. And this is probably the case across marketing, right? There's, uh, you can do really well at executing marketing tactics, but without a strategy, it's tough to measure and it's tough to have the kind of impact that you want. And I imagine the same as with customer advocacy. Uh, so what does, like, a well constructed customer advocacy strategy look like? And what are the maybe different, like channels and things like that that fit into that strategy?

Speaker A: I'm glad you mentioned that, uh, the channel bit, because when I was thinking, I think about customer strategy, there's probably going to be multiple channels of which that advocacy can show up. Let's start with the most basic in the pyramid, and I'll see if I can in real time here kind of level us up. But let's start with the most basic B2C, which is some sort of positive sentiment usually captured in the form of a review. So if we get folks who are saying positive things. And if you're good and your team is empowered, there's there. They're pinning this down live on a call, let's say. Um, and this has been my experience, I've worked in B2B software a lot of times or B2B professional services, like the agency I'm with right now. So usually we are serving these folks, we are talking to them on the phone about how they're doing with the product or the service that we're assisting their business with. And they say something great, you go, hey, that would be great if you could capture that in the form of an ad. That first channel is just live on the call. We all know with some of the amazing software platforms that have come online that are all at our fingertips, excuse me, fingertips like, uh, Fathom Gong, even Zoom now, you know, has all these live transcribers built in which can then all talk to your AI systems and so on. You can, you can query in real time. Has anybody said anything great about us recently? Did they ask, uh, a question and we gave an interesting answer where there was positive sentiment. So you can be, let's get back to channels. You can be empowering those folks hosting those conversations to listen out for it, pin it down and run a bit of emotion. They could trigger a button, write something down themselves, manually, send it on to you, uh, however that ends up being. And. Or you could have something sort of automated and listening for certain keywords and sentiment and then also having a tag you. And that reminds me, who's you in the first place? I do think you need to have somebody who's the owner, the champion of customer advocacy internally. Like so many of these things that your audience is trying to learn about Jen, if somebody doesn't really own it and drive it, it's probably not going to get done. And lots of people can help, lots of people can be consulted and informed on the RACI chart. But we need a hard, you know, responsible person who's going to say, I'm after a certain advocacy goal and we're talking about right now. We want a certain number of reviews spotted, captured, documented, passed it on, passed on and onto the right receiving areas where those reviews could be. And then let's keep the feedback loop going and letting the rest of the team know about this, this review. Let's go back into Slack, let's go into emails, let's include it in the newsletter, let's highlight it on our, our directory page of wherever we might advertise our product or service. That we've got multiple reviews for this, right? So this reminds us of just fundamental strategy there. We need an owner for this program. We need metrics. And one of the key metrics that will probably want to start with the lowest hanging fruit is reviews and capturing that. But then also, uh, is that, does that person have some, uh, an interesting, unique story or a point of view because of the industry they came with? They came from the type of company that they are, the interest, the uniqueness or the similarity of how their team is organized. Again, I'm coming from my context. You can apply this to yours. Leveling up and saying, there's something about this, this person's personality that we've been working with on this product or service or the company that they represent, the team that they're representing, this product or service makes them uniquely interesting to our company and our customer advocacy strategy. So that one person should be thinking about, uh, and asking around. Usually it's sales leadership, marketing leadership. What are the types of. But also partnership leadership. What are the types of stories, use cases, examples, screenshots, um, role that we want to gather and capture more of in order to open more doors, in order to build more belief and excitement and curiosity among our target market. I mentioned partnerships because anybody's ever been involved with partnerships, and somebody says, oh, there's this great technology that we could help implement for people. Again, I work in the intersection between technology companies and usually professional services firms is where I spent the majority of my career. So that's the partner motion I'm always familiar with. Hey, we've got this great software. Could you tell your clients about it? Or hey, we're a really great agency or professional services firm. Could you tell your technology customers about it? What's the first thing that everybody wants to know on the either side of that table, even just internally, how many examples of doing this? Well, for any, your technology or your professional services firm, if you do, I've always been told we can open a lot of doors for you because we're starving for those. Talk to any business owner or business leader, I could almost say anywhere, and they would say, we need more of what we're talking about today, Jen. We need more of these stories, we need more evidence, we need more angles, we need more hooks into. We know somebody who went through what you went through, or we know others. We need social proof, right? That's another. That's another form of advocacy, right? Just a social proof. So having a person who owns it, starting at the most basic, getting those reviews down Then starting to level up and say, who do we have here? Who's got a bit of a story to tell that we could at least build a slide around, maybe a sound bite around, a podcast interview, a case study, a little video, some screenshots, um, around. And then really the world's your oyster if that works and you've documented a really good use case that you can transport around and arm the sales team with. You now have a willing collaborator in that customer. Usually they're curious about how that went. They want to help bubble it up the chain to their management and leadership as well. A lot of times this is between two software companies. They want to put one on their page as well. You can put one on yours depending on the angles of how you work this. Again, partnerships. But I think it's about figuring out the form, the types of stories you want to tell, the types of social proof you want to capture. What are the different form factors that we can capture that in from sort of lowest hanging fruit and most basic and fundamental all the way up to the most sophisticated. And I don't want to burn time by repeating a lot of those tactics, but you chain them up from there. And I've seen in different organizations this is, it's kind of starts as sort of a, a sales motion, you know. You know, or that the principals in the organization are, are really championing this motion. And then I find it go down to, uh, sometimes can be shown on the customer team or the client team may have a bit of this motion of capturing those reviews or, or flagging a number of case studies. But eventually someone's got to create, someone's got to organize. That's usually going to fall into the marketing department. So the most sophisticated teams I worked with at HubSpot and then also at Drift, which later became Sales Loft, there was always a person or two, and sometimes when we were going gangbusters, there'd be a whole little squad of people around this who are capturing and going after those stories. When the sales or the customer success team hears one, they go in and execute their playbook. So yes, strategy will be what are the templates, what are the frameworks we're going to develop around this for those different formats I was talking about? Yes. You might see Gantt charts or, or PI. Uh, sorry, um, sort of, uh, yeah, like, uh, Kanban board type things moving along. Which, which of these stories are in production, which of these are now drafted, ready for review, and which of these are going to be filled out? And if you really get Going on this sales, sales are going to hunt you down. They're going to say I've got one for you or I need, I've got an order to place for a couple of these types of stories. So I found the uh, demand for these types of stories and anecdotes. Use cases, case studies, social proof is practically unlimited. Unlimited from your go to market team. So it's trying to scale up and produce enough every single week, maybe every single month while still keeping yourself under control here because you only have so many different resources and you have to prioritize because everybody's going to say my opportunity or my particular market or use case I'm looking for is the most urgent. Um, so I'll just pause there.

Speaker C: Oh my gosh, so many follow ups. So much to say. I love like what you described and you know now with technology how easy it is to be able to query your systems for positive, organic, positive, you know, statements or reviews that people have experienced on the phone or on calls with clients and you know, you can go out to people and say hey, do you have anything nice you could say about us? Can I quote you? Or whatever. But if you can pull that out that they've already said it and say hey, you said this on a call a month ago, a week ago, an hour ago, can we use this publicly? 9 times out of 10 those people are going to say yes. What you're describing too, I love the call out that you need to have a champion. But also what I'm hearing is it's embedded throughout the organization that everybody is thinking about this, about how to leverage customers and customer advocacy and really how to put customers first throughout the organization. And when you mentioned that you were at Drift, I met David Cancel many years ago. I was an early Beta Drift user and um, he talked about how like everybody basically in the organization had a, an okr of how many customer conversations they were having uh, in a month or a week. I don't know exactly what the, what the goal was but it was to get people who maybe aren't necessarily customer facing, talking to customers, getting their feedback, understanding what problems they were solving, how they were using the tool. And even he was on, on customer calls all the time and that just customer centric focus for the entire organization. You're going to build relationships with people in a way and listen to their feedback in a way that yeah exactly what you're describing. They want to participate in these programs then and they want to speak on your behalf and talk about how great you are I think I did a case study for Drift during my time being an early beta, beta user because they were, they were doing everything that you're describing to me right now. Um, like really listening, really listening to people really like working to deliver on solving their problems not just by my software or buy my service, but actually buy my software and buy my service because it's, it's going to help you. And now I see how you've implemented it in a creative new way and I want to share that with others. Like just that kind of motion is hard to say no to when you are sort of trying out new, new tools or new services.

Speaker A: Yes. And particularly Jen, when you're asking a uh, typical role that doesn't get this level of recognition traditionally but not usually, uh, it's, that's the, the opportunity and also the challenge. Uh, because usually you can guess a principal, an executive, a customer facing or sales sort of oriented person, they're easily going to talk. But we're looking for credibility, we're looking for peer level discussion. So I often specialized in finding those folks who maybe don't get the recognition that they deserve and say you did something special here and I think we should tell the rest of the world about it. And they're like yeah, I agree. And that gives you just a lot more credibility than the person who's the natural spokesman all the time, uh, who's going to say those sort of canned lines. I think most of us in the market are looking for what's as authentic and down on the street as possible for the person who used or experienced this product or service. And I want to learn from them. I don't want to have a high level summary, uh, and so on. Whenever we're crafting a case study and so on, we have to talk about what are the tools we use, what was the impact that it drove, what were some of the key motions or features perhaps that were a part of all that. But, and after that it's about how did this person overcome, how did this person who's stuck in the middle of their organization under resourced, you know, under leveraged in terms of their power to get other people to do things, how did they pull it off? And if we can get that story, that's, that's just drama 101. That's just far more interesting to see the underdog succeed than the executive. Say once again. Yep, you know, we're awesome. Of course, uh, I, I love those questions. Once you've established the what did you do? Was it worth Learning about and reading and then, like, what were the ingredients? Now I want to get that person to talk about, were you afraid at first? What was. Was there pushback at first? Did you think about giving up? Who was a key person or what was a key moment where suddenly things turned around? You know, was there a plot twist? And you try to dig for that, uh, a little bit ahead of time. And if you're close to your customers, like you just said earlier, that's going to come out naturally. And if you go to your CSMs, you go to the folks who are serving those customers, they're already hearing those stories every day. And a lot of those CSMs are starved for recognition as well, on behalf of their customers. I wish more people could know about this awesome customer here. So when you empower the organization, you give them something they can give the customer that they otherwise wouldn't be able to offer, which is, I have a chance to recognize what you just said. I have a chance to spread around the reach of who you are, what you did and what you overcame. Why not empower people to say, yes, you can. You can say that you can offer that. Don't tell them it's going to be tomorrow. Don't tell them it's going to. Exactly. They're going to be on stage, you know, after the keynote for our conference next year. But tell them, I think you've got something. I want to get you in my customer advocacy team and see what they can do with this from there. And then let us who do focus on the customer advocacy strategy, slot that person into the right spot, because we'll get them recognized if there's a story to be told. But we do want to set people up for success as well, um, and not put people in the wrong stage or in the wrong format where they're not going to look great. The key is the customer has to look great first and foremost. They got to feel like Luke Skywalker,

Speaker C: and there's value in that for them in their internal teams as well. Especially if what you're describing is they're not the typical spokesperson for that business. And maybe their leadership team wasn't aware of the great work that they did. And being. Being able to say internally, I've been featured in this case study or whatever, like, it's. It's a great way to elevate those, your, your actual user and your customer, which is, you know, again, hard to say no to if you're seeking that, um, you know, in your role and

Speaker A: so important if you're in a professional services firm, m like I am right now, because oftentimes you're selling the invisible. People are saying, what is this going to feel like for me? Um, how is it really going to look? And we're pretty maniacal about this at growth. The firm that I help, as you said, run marketing, brand and our partnerships for is that we want to showcase the best customers that we can and to quantify the work that we did, who we did it for, and how it can work for you in the future, and to do that in as many different formats as we can. Reviews, articles, breaking it down, podcasts, interviewing these people. And I'll just segue real quick there. Like, the best organizations that I've seen, that I've tried to emulate, that I've worked at, will build this sort of stairway or a funnel, whatever your. Your metaphor might be, to just level up and level up with somebody. All right, they're pretty good with a snappy review. Okay. They're really great. Give me a longer form interview. I turned into text. Let's even get them. Let's see if we can get them. Just doing a showcase with me to 15 different sellers in my organization who I want to get fired up about what we're doing with this partnership or this particular product or this particular customer segment. Now we're all getting fired up. That went well. Let's go to the broader audience. Like, we're doing a live stream here. Let's get them. Let's get them on the live stream, talking about it. And you just level people up so that by the time they make it to your stage, which I think is like the holy grail of where you want to elevate a customer advocate to. They have already practiced and been refined and vetted, uh, you know, multiple times. Um, and I've seen that work. You know, somebody who shows up on a stage did not get there as their first appearance. They started, you know, they back, you reverse engineer. That was a podcast interview, and then it was a conversation, and then it was a written email and so on. That's. That's another great thing to keep in mind with strategy for customer advocacy. If you're nervous about going from 0 to 60 in this type of thing, you don't have to. You shouldn't.

Speaker C: Yeah, that's smart, actually, because I. I have seen people kind of say, oh, I have stage time at this conference coming up. Let me look at the companies I work with with the most attractive brand names and invite them to come on stage with me. And that's step one. And you don't always know what you're going to get at that point in terms of comfort like comfortability on stage or willingness to participate in the process. So that sort of stairway or funnel or whatever it is is a nice way to kind of build that over time.

Speaker A: Most definitely. And I imagine if you have a, you know, a large brand you're going after. Let's take your scenario and how could we like customer advocatize that thing to completely invent a word right here, right now. Um, and that would be does that person have some stories to tell? Right. Oh, I'm going to be speaking on behalf of the organization we sponsored and so on. Excellent. I want to make you look good and we have to solve for the attendee. Right. Again the customer's the hero, not us on stage. So uh, how can we do that? Do you have stories to tell and could we tell that? Do we make sure those stories are showing up on the slides coming out of your mouth? Can we even get some of those people tickets to come in and, and co advocate for you? Who, who's going to be like oh no, they're calling up on the stage somebody who actually experienced what they're talking about. Oh uh, no, like we're gonna love that. So if you can at least bring that into the slide deck. If not even better, gold star. Have that person there coming up on stage. We actually get, get Jen up here to talk about that. Wow. Holy smokes. Now I'm really listening. Uh, at one agency I worked at. Sorry I'm just on just you get me fired up here at this topic is um, we, the, the principal of that organization took a week off, took the camera person who's in charge of video and just went and visited five or six customers like, like almost a cross country trip for a week. It was extremely like expensive from an attention, you know, time away from the business. But as somebody who was selling for them in that agency at the time, we had such amazing stories emotional at their warehouse, at their factory, at their showroom floor, looking over their shoulder at the screens as they're doing stuff again, selling that invisible, making the invisible visible again. And it's just I have not seen outside of major veteran venture funded few hundred employee on up type organizations do something like that. And that company that I was with was, was like 40 people at the time, uh, when they did that. But it grew us fast because we had amazing sales material. And back to your point earlier about what about hitting these people up all the time. I was too, because I was a seller in that organization. We were asking a lot of favors of the customer team, the marketing team, to pull that through. And I said, is this person mind? We've asked them all. I even think I met them at a conference. I said, thank you so much for appearing on these reference calls and so on. He said, no problem. You guys take care of me, I take care of you. You helped me succeed, you helped my business succeed. You gave me, you grandfathered me in. Perhaps, I'm not saying you have to do that, but at a certain price point and so on, you take care of me in so many different ways. It's a pleasure for me to feed that back and keep that whole thing going, keep taking, keep giving me the best service, give me the best price, and I'll make sure I tell everybody about that. So having a couple of those folks in your corner, just your, your inner circle of heroes and advocates, I think makes a ton of sense. And so then the next time, once we had produced those videos, I talked about, um, the, uh, next time somebody said, can I speak to somebody who's been through this before? I said, here's five different people. Give it to me right now. In your inbox. You can watch those videos, look at the detailed case study that they. That accompanies them, and you can let me know specifically if you have any questions outside of what we anticipated. You asking the typical question asked all the time before we made that video. I'll ask them and send it back to you. Usually that was enough. And that was amazing. M. I'm like, wow, they didn't. They did. They took it. Okay, but. And, uh, very rarely they'd say, okay, I still want to talk to them. But then that's an amazing conversation to go back to that customer. Hey, they watched your video. They asked a couple of very smart questions, and they have just a really specific, unique use case. Would you mind, like, talking to them then? That's a rare special invite of that person who's now on tape. And they'll make that, they'll jump on that call too. So for what that's worth.

Speaker C: Yeah, for sure. Well, and just. It speaks to just identifying the right advocate, right. That, uh, somebody that's actually, like you said, wants to participate. It is excited to speak on your behalf because they've gotten good service and whatever, but they also are talking about a use case that is going to be relevant for other people who are curious about that use case. And so that whole, like, concept of Identifying those, uh, sort of content gaps that you want to fill and working with the right advocates along the way to fill those gaps is going to help you sort of arm your team with the resources that they need. Um, I'm curious what your thoughts are, because I think everything we've talked about so far has been sort of like organic discovery of people saying great things or seeking out specific folks for, you know, uh, to talk about different use cases. But what are your thoughts on incentivizing customers for their reviews or for their testimonials? I know that's a big. It's a thing, right? I don't know how big of a thing it is, but, you know, I'll give you 10 bucks if you, you know, give us a review on this site or whatever. Like, what are your thoughts on that as a part of the strategy?

Speaker A: I certainly understand where the question comes from. I understand why anybody listening or watching would think or want to do that. That's not something that we emphasize a lot here at my current firm that I'm with and not something that was ever a big incentive, frankly, at other organizations I'd worked with, even all the way back to HubSpot. Yes, there were certainly at HubSpot and other organizations, campaigns where on top of the things we've been talking about, they would then eventually, at scale, layer on other sort of incentives. Can you get us a review on Product Hunt or things like that? I think it's. Usually there's a new channel, it's very much a volume game and we need a certain number of reviews to even be taken legitimately on this website or, or not. It's a shame. The websites kind of work that way and gamify. Um, I don't say it's a shame, don't get me wrong. But like it kind of. They give you incentives to give other people incentives. You know, just get a number of reviews on there. They, they know how the game is played, they want activity on the site, they want users logging in and so on. Everybody's had a friend who's hit them up saying, will you please vote for me for this contest? And stuff like that. Um, it feels a little bit like that. So to me, that's not the end all be all silver bullet or even frankly the central focus of customer advocacy. I think that's icing on the cake. It's, it's an additional sort of booster channel in that regard because I remember, I believe it was in the book like how to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie Uh, but, like, as soon as you bring this commercial angle into the one moment of business that I feel is like the best, like, soft feeling, like, you're great, you have worked so hard, and I want to get an opportunity for you to tell your story to others. That's like, again, what, what a mentor does for a really great hero, uh, or for a good friend does for another friend. You know, a hiking buddy does for another hiking buddy. You go over to a friend's house and say, wow, that was awesome dinner, uh, here, but if you invite me back next week, I'll give you 50 bucks. And it's like, what, you just ruined the whole dinner. And I'm not saying that's what we're all doing when we send emails like that, but I don't think we're warming it up and creating this sense of like, oh, yeah, you're pulling for me and I'm pulling for you, and we're partnering here a little bit on growing each other's reach and brand here. It's just sort of like, do this thing for me and I'll make it worth your while. And I just hope that that's not the main and only message your client or customer gets from you this quarter. Um, I would hope it's a, it's an icing on the cake. Add on, you're such a great advocate for us and I know you just use this brand new feature and you've already done so, so much. If you'd be willing to spend a little bit extra time, you know, I'll buy a coffee afterwards and we can talk about it or something like that. I at least want to spin it like that. You know, hey, I'll buy you coffee and we can chat about your experience afterwards or something like that. And whether you have that chat or not, that's fine. But I just don't like the. I know that you're a mercenary and so am I, and therefore I'll give you some money, uh, to do this and you go do that for me for the, for the, for the money. Right?

Speaker C: And it's always the, like, the like, littlest, tiniest bit of something. It's 10 bucks to Amazon or something like that. And it feels very cold and impersonal to me. And you're right, it's the. A lot of these review sites sort of incentivize you to incentivize because there's pressure to get a bunch of reviews on product hunter G2 or whatever. And, um, I, I don't know that it gives you that relationship build. That is the stairway you're talking about. Um, you've got the review and now maybe next you want to do a video interview and maybe a podcast and maybe get somebody on stage. Like, that whole experience is sort of like the review is the last bit. It's transactional and the job is done.

Speaker A: That's right. And maybe it's just comes from my, like, background in partnerships. Like, the partnership motion does not well served from these mentalities. Right. Uh, the partner conversations that went nowhere with me were people who said, you know, here's my great product. Let's quickly do the demo in front of you. And it's going to just save people a lot of money. So why don't. You're going to tell everybody about it, right? It's sort of like, well, do we, do you understand? Like, you're in my house now. You understand what we're trying to do here, what my family's about? And I want to understand what your family's about. Like, I understand we're both trying to do something here, but can we, can we understand the broader picture? Can we be friends first and foremost? Like, that's, to me, that's a partnership. Anything else, uh, what we're straying towards a little bit is like affiliate sort of things. Right. And there's a time and a place for that. The whole industry around that. Right. But if we're talking about true partnership with the customer and then with other businesses, I feel a softer approach, a friend to friend, uh, sort of alliance building sort of mentality, even if it's not literally that, yeah, you're better served with that, that mentality.

Speaker C: Yeah, I totally, totally agree. Um, so how do you think about running these kind uh, of customer advocacy programs as exactly that, as a program and not just like a reactive, hey, we could probably use some reviews. Do you want to do some customer advocacy work? You already talked about there being a champion, but how do you build this into, um, an ongoing program and maybe what are some of the things to watch out for? Uh, to not let it fall off the cliff or, or slip between the cracks, more accurately?

Speaker A: Well, of course, Great question. And that's what you folks listening or watching? We all need to get back to work. Right. And so what, what can I do to help? So the team that I work for now and that I've worked in the past, usually there's kind of two focuses for metrics, which you want to show optically if you've, if you've. Just if either you Were the commandeered or you volunteered. I'm going to help with customer advocacy here in my organization. Two things you want to show your leadership. Number one is, is that you're taking, you're being proactive about organizing the plan, the program. And I think with the help of LLMs nowadays, you can put together a document that pulls in best practices from the brands and the programs that you've seen around who kick butt at this. I've mentioned a few of them on this, um, the session right now. Then you put that program together and you talk about a couple things you're going to do. One is to research and identify the right best fit. And there's certain things we talked about with sentiment. We didn't really talk a lot about demographics and firmographics but of course those types of things, especially if you're in B2B super super important. So we're targeting the right types of people who have the right types of challenges and who we think might be sort of like uh, open hopefully to this type of conversation that you kind of can't really AI your way into all the time or just find signals for. But I think if you can, if you can try to quantify for that, go for it. And then so you want to show I've done my research and then I'm also setting goals for the ability to produce efficiently because everybody costs money and overhead. I mean time focus, everything you do comes at the expense of something else perhaps. So being able to show we're going to produce this style of content, these different style of content we're going to get. We believe we can ship and produce this many different content pieces. So there's a productivity, there's a planning goal and a demonstration you're doing. There's a productivity goal and a sort of demonstration your ability to produce and get uh, to press in time with these types of things. And then of course there's the attribution. How well did this content, did this content even show up in sales processes or uh, or this show up in the marketing. So unique tracking, uh, you know, you type of thing are, are key being able to show attribution and things like the CRM, getting sales reps to even anecdotally mention and thank if you create this team camaraderie, uh mentality hopefully you got that culture, they give you a shout out there. But quantifying as much as you can formally or informally, um, this is how many times what we made showed up in the sales process. Maybe you can't say this was the last touch or this is the thing that tipped it over. But certainly this is the uh, this is an item that was involved and was crucial for the sale as ah, self reported. Attribution has been talked about a lot in B2B. If you can do it, making sure you ask that client, that customer, what was the thing you saw or the thing that made you really convinced you that this was, this was a good choice to go with us, you know, in our offering. And I'll give you a quick anecdote here as we, as we start to wind down, which is uh, I was running marketing and partnerships for another large organization and we were partnered with a tech company and we had a major sponsorship of the conference. We had a uh, there that we got as part of the sponsorship and of course it fell to me and partnerships and marketing and things like that. Fan of customer advocacy, can you help us put together the story? And so I worked with a customer who once again was very interested in getting recognized the work that they were doing. They got a seat at the table with their management with the work that we did and the technology we helped them use. Let's get them to tell the story. They're going to be at the conference anyways. You know, that's another thing. You can triangulate who's already going to be in these areas where you want to be. Let's capture them there, feature them there's. And we did that and then we got a number of folks, a number of clients to show up actually and be in the room. And then we asked them afterwards, you know, what was that key thing that made you want to sign with us? And this was sometimes even weeks or months down the road. And one client was months down the road. I figured this, this thing is long gone, long done. Out of this person's mind and not off of our mind. That the breakout session, the advocacy I'm talking about live at this conference and this person said it was that coming in that room six months ago or something like that and seeing that person's story and how you helped them get this, you showed off the boards and things that they, they were able to show off to management that had them be taken seriously. I wanted that. I wanted to be, I wanted to feel the way that woman felt. I wanted to be taken seriously the way that she'd been taken seriously. And I needed your help. And it's like, wow, uh, that's, that's again, it's just proof in the pudding. I didn't anticipate that that was going to be the case. But there were multiple major accounts. I think there was at least three who were in the room that day that chose to go with us because we did some advocacy and it was, it's sometimes takes some vision with your, your C suite. But our C suite was behind this idea. And they said we want them to do the majority of the talking. I said yes, that's what we need because that's what the people in the room want to hear. Not us, obviously, the, the people with the commercial angle who obviously have a reason to tell our own best story and try to squeeze as much ROI as we can out of this room. Let this person talk about their story, tell the story about how they became a hero and it'll be pretty obvious who helped them out with that. Right. The technology and the firm themselves. And it worked. So I'm just letting you know it can happen for you.

Speaker C: Yeah, for sure. I think it's really interesting when you're talking about measurement and attribution that it's. You're measuring that it's part of the process. Not necessarily that it's the first touch or the last touch or the only touch. Right. Because that uh, doesn't exist. Right. Where especially In a complex B2B Enterprise sale, there's never going to be one thing where somebody, the first time they discover you is some case study video and then they buy without any other touch points. Right. It just doesn't exist. So it makes attribution hard across all marketing channels. But especially, you know, something like this. It's a question I ask all of my guests when we're talking about different marketing tactics and strategies. What does success look like? And I think what you described of is it being used in the sales process is the team itself finding value in it. And then when you talk to the customer, are they mentioning that that helped to tip the scale in one way or another? Um, that combination of. Not just that we can demonstrate revenue generation from this effort because that could be challenging, but we can demonstrate that every single single one of our reps is using this content in their process. And when they started doing that, our win rates went from 30% to 40%. I don't know what it is. Right. Like that kind of thing could be so powerful to prove out the, the efforts internally.

Speaker A: You, you're so right. It's end of the day here. So I missed that part. But it's so key and I, and it's. I probably missed it because it's often the most Elusive. You said it put together, Jen. Right. Is. Is to show that improvement. And it's any partner program I've been a part of that is what me and the head of partnerships, if, uh, I was doing partner marketing or whatever at the time were after, is can we show the improvement? If you work with us, if you let us do our thing, you let us get it. If we let. If we partner and bring a partner in there, the deals go faster, the deal sizes are larger, there's, uh, more retention, what have you. We have to show what you just said there, that impact of if you let us tell the story, if you let us get engaged, if you let us be involved, you see this type of improvement. And we have to find that stat, that, uh, key stat. And then one other point I'll throw out, if I may, that you brought it up the team, which is, why not, if we have a great customer who feels really, um, grateful to us for the work that we've done, and it was identified by a team member that Jen just mentioned, that's a big part of empowering the team, getting them listening and flagging and advocating for their own customer advocates. And you're going to go write that story, make that video and so on. Don't forget. It's also very powerful because that customer is feeling very indebted to the people that they worked with, uh, on your side of your company. Maybe turn the camera around and get that csm, get that account rep, get that marketing manager who, partnership rep, whatever it is, to also get on the mic because that's an individual contributor oftentimes who also doesn't get to have their story told. And they've got glowing things to say about this customer. They've got their own perception. It was so awesome to see this person grow and overcome and things like that. Don't miss that part. And getting that quote in there because you want to show off. That's also part of what we're trying to show off here a little bit, right? How we have staff that care about these people, that recognize these people that are pulling for them from all different angles. The person who sold them, the person who supported them, uh, the executive who heard their story and so on. Get those, get those voices in there and show that it's a. It's a real family, uh, affair here. And then once again, I think what's going to happen is people are going to go, my company doesn't care about me like that. And m. Talk about amazing. Sometimes this is. You don't intend to do this in customer advocacy. But sometimes those advocates are like, are you guys hiring? You know, can I? Or do you guys have a partner program and your best customer app? It's not really the point, but it can happen. It's a sign. Perhaps you've got something that's a snowball rolling downhill here. Uh, is people offer coming out of this program wanting to now stick with your company in any way possible. Can I work with you with the usual one you want, right? You follow, follow them into other logos. But then also that person might come around and want to take an opening at your firm and now they've got intimate knowledge of being a customer of this firm or this industry to bring to the table. That's that's so awesome. Or um, they may want to be a partner with you and help, you know, amplify this and build a whole business around what you're doing. So don't forget that as well. To turn the camera around 360 to everybody who helped them. And then also keep an eye out for what happens when people blow out the top of your, your little funnel here, your little pyramid, uh, here and be ready to maybe catch them as a, as a long term member of your, your ecosystem.

Speaker C: Yeah, for sure. I um, love that, I love that. I mean you don't necessarily want to steal your customers away from there.

Speaker A: Obviously that's in contracts and stuff. You, so you have to be so sensitive about the type of thing. But I just say I have seen that happen.

Speaker C: Like what you're describing, people are just like, hey, what you're doing is really great. And the culture, what you're describing is like a, it's a cultural thing of, you know, recognition and celebration, which we need that so desperately when we're all working really hard. And sometimes the jobs we do are hard and um, you know, can be demoralizing, especially if you're in sales or business development and you're hearing a lot of no's and you're chasing and you know that that's hard. There's a lot of pressure. So building in some of that, like that recognition and hey, you're doing a good job over here. This thing right now maybe isn't working for you, but you know, pat on the back from your biggest customer over here goes a long way.

Speaker A: We're just trying to create like little, little uh, lighthouses for customers who are going through the journey of experiencing our product or our service or our idea, right? And say, hey, there's just keep going. There's some People who've gone before you listen to their story. Oh, okay, I'll keep going. Oh, there's somebody else who went a little bit further. I think I can go a little bit further. Maybe I'll level up, adopt that feature, upgrade, you know, renew whatever it is. Make sure there's a story for all of that. It's far better. I think if you listen to anything that Jen and I've been talking about today, it is far better for your customer or your user to deliver the message than you, period. When I was at HubSpot telling people how to do use your blog. You should create landing pages and stuff. Yeah, they're like easy for you to say, Nick. You're at this going gangbuster startup, you know, surrounded by an army of believers. I'm out here in Wichita, Kansas by myself and my boss doesn't even believe that we should be doing this. I've got like six months to try this. If it doesn't absolutely blow the company, they're going to turn off, you know, so what, what am I to do? Um, and we have to find those stories and say this person was in the same situation or they maybe not it harder than you. And here's what they said. And then can we make you guys be friends and have you guys meet at the same conference together and like forge a friendship? Oh, that's the best. Now they're self perpetuating, self supporting each other and you helped make that happen. I wish for that experience to, for you folks to all feel that if you don't feel that regularly in customer advocacy.

Speaker C: I love that. That's so great. And the, the um, the analogy of the lighthouses, just like right up ahead, there's somebody. I love that.

Speaker A: I think that's a great inshore. And we rode past a lighthouse this morning, my morning row. So it was like on the mine.

Speaker C: There you go. It's perfect. You should use it again.

Speaker A: I will.

Speaker C: Well, thank you so much for coming and having this chat with me today, um, and walking through what a customer advocacy program looks like in practice, I, I really appreciate your time.

Speaker A: Yep. Feel free to hit me up. I'm on LinkedIn. Check out my firm growth. Uh, if you folks are doing anything in the world of HubSpot, in the world of digital marketing, sales, uh, I'm around, I'm always happy to talk shopping about it.

Speaker C: Awesome. Um, yeah, make sure you're following Nick on LinkedIn. And uh, if you enjoyed today's episode, please subscribe to Marketing Demystified. Wherever you get your podcasts and join us next time for more conversations that help demystify the complex world of marketing. We'll see you then.