We catch up with Dave Hansen, Sinead O'Grada, Tim Newborn, and Josh Zerkel to talk about the best ways to develop an advocacy program that'll actually make an impact.
How advocacy creates impact
Dave Hansen
Let’s start with the end result, so we can see where we’re headed. What does advocacy mean for you and your organization, and what is its potential impact?
Sinead O'Grada
Customer advocacy really means having the customer at the heart of everything that we do. It’s about listening to and responding to what they need and want, based on the opportunities or headwinds that they may be facing in their market.
When we can show tangible outcomes for our partners and the SMB businesses that we work with – whether that’s helping them to stay open during challenging times, or enabling them to find and retain new employees – it helps us to tell the story of the impact of our program, which in turn creates more buy-in from stakeholders and more opportunities for growth and expansion.
Tim Newborn
Customer advocacy meets people where they are to exceed their expectations, and it does so in helpful and unexpected ways. I think it solves business challenges, both familiar and unique, through the simplicity of an open dialogue between a brand and the people who matter most to you and your business – your customers. That means you can execute better services and experiences, and even work smarter and offer more to your customers.
Not only do we get to listen to what our customers are doing with their solutions and the way that we're helping them, but we also get to hear how we’re helping our customers’ customers. I think it's very beneficial to be able to quantify that because that's ultimately what our customers are hoping to do. If we can help them achieve their goals of delivering better experiences and services, we can truly shine as customer marketers and advocacy professionals.
Joshua Zerkel
For us at Asana, our mission is to help humanity thrive by helping the world's teams work together, and the way that we do that is by listening to them. Customer advocacy programs give us a direct line to our customers to hear what they want, what's working for them, and the challenges they're having so that we can better respond to them, meet their needs, and help them and their teams achieve their missions.
Advocacy puts the customer's voice at the center of how we think and what we do in ways that feel very meaningful and impactful. Beyond what it does for customers, it helps us at the company be more empathetic to who our customers are and what they need.
It's also just nice to hear what customers have to say in an unstructured way. For data-driven companies, which frankly most are at this point, it can be easy to lean on just quantitative data about customers, but advocacy programs let you hear in customers' own words what's going on for them and, ideally, the difference that your company or organization is making.
To me, that's really fun, and I think we're lucky in customer-facing roles to be able to hear the voice of the customer directly, not just as a concept. It just makes coming to work enjoyable because we know that what we're doing helps them.
Dave Hansen
That's awesome. I would just add that advocacy allows us to bridge the gap between organizations. At LRN, our customers are in the ethics and compliance space – there's usually just a handful of them within their organization. They're almost an island. Our advocacy community lets our customers network and meet each other and come together to build something bigger than the sum of its parts.
How to get your advocacy program off the ground
Dave Hansen
We've talked about some of the great outcomes that can come from advocacy, but there's a lot that can go into this. Where should you start? How did you get your programs off the ground?
Tim Newborn
Great question. I think there's often a disconnect between what your company wants to happen and what actually needs to happen – those can be two different things and only your customers can tell you what the difference might be.
Regardless of what your goals are, advocacy starts with learning as much as you can about your customer, about their customers, about your product, and about the foundational business objectives of your organization. That way, you’re not only making sound data-based decisions on how to move forward but also you're asking the right questions to the right people at the right time.
Not to divert us here, but when I was about 15, I had the opportunity to visit the Huntsville Space Centre in Huntsville, Alabama, where I got to view a couple of different types of rockets. I think that there are some strong similarities between those types of rockets and what we do in advocacy.
There are fuel rockets, which are those short-term initiatives that go fast but don't necessarily go far. They rely on the subsystems – like a rush to get quotes or customer stories for our sales team – to kick in so that we can travel the rest of the way.
Then we have ion thrusters, which take longer to build. Like our longer-term strategies, they're more sophisticated and usually require more minds around the planning table. They harness perpetual energy and use the environment around them to grow. An example of this in our world might be building a formalized program to combat customer exhaustion.
Both types of rockets have a vital role and they’re each necessary to complete the journey. It’s often best to build both of them simultaneously. You can start scrappy, but you should also be planning for the future.
Sinead O'Grada
I would absolutely echo what Tim said. Our approach at Meta in general involves piloting and then scaling for long-term impact. That's exactly how we started our SMB advocacy efforts; we piloted the program framework through lightweight channels and forums, before making longer-term investments in infrastructure and tooling.
That pilot and proof-of-concept approach enabled us to prove the program’s value and gain insights on what works and what doesn’t. Then we were able to make a more substantial investment and lay the foundation for ongoing growth.
Dave Hansen
Both of you have brought up great points here. Another thing that was very beneficial at LRN was getting cross-functional buy-in from stakeholders as we built the program – not only after it launched.
One of the fun things about advocacy is there's something for everyone. You have client roundtables, opportunities to weigh in on case studies, and forums for customers to have discussions, and there are different angles and approaches for each of those. So for us, having buy-in from across the organization is super valuable.
Joshua Zerkel
Absolutely. At the beginning, you don't know what you don't know, and especially when you’re new to an organization, you don't always know all the ins and outs of how to get the resources you need.
I had to map out the program that I wanted to create. Then, as I socialized it, I was able to determine which pieces were missing, where I'd need additional resourcing, and where I’d need to loop in the legal team. Even though we had a solid plan at the outset, there was a lot of discovery along the way.
What was nice about that is as I was socializing the program, because I was getting buy-in along the way, it greased the wheels for me to get access to those resources and support I’d need to get the program off the ground.
I think if you go into conversations with a plan and a solid hypothesis, you let people know that you might be asking them for support, and ask if they’d be interested in partnering with you, they’re usually pretty open to it. What I found is people are very excited about programs like these and they often want to participate if you give them an opportunity to do so.
The customers you should bring into your advocacy program
Dave Hansen
Let's shift a little bit here and talk about the audience. When we're building out an advocacy program, are there any segmentation considerations? Which customers get included in an advocacy program?
Joshua Zerkel
I like to think about this in terms of the business goals of each program. It's worth noting here that at Asana, there’s a customer advocacy program that sits under the revenue organization, which is designed to build high-touch relationships with key customers. I run the community program, which serves everybody else – people at companies whose names you know and whose names you don't, and the people who use Asana daily, not just the decision-makers.
Both constituencies are very important, not just for hearing what customers need, but because we have different goals as a business for what we want to do with each of these groups. If you're not familiar with the intricacies of how these programs work, it's easy to assume one program can just do it all, so building alignment within the business about how these different programs can serve these different segments of the market was critical.
When my partner, who's on the customer advocacy side, and I started working together, we were able to intersect our programs in really beautiful ways. Now if you're at one of our customer’s companies, we have a program that's designed for you, no matter what your level.
Having a strong partner within the organization and being clear on how we segment our audience has been critical to the overall success of the programs that we run. As a side benefit, it makes it easier for us to explain within the company what we do and who we're serving
Dave Hansen
The segmentation piece is very important for us too. We serve many different industries, and they all have different regulations and requirements. The experiences we build have to match those varying requirements. And it's not just about the industry – we also serve different roles. As well as ethics and compliance officers, there are also HR and IT people that interact with us, in roles from the associate level all the way up to the C-suite.
We just have one broad community program, but it’s worth paying attention to how the interactions and engagement work from segment to segment. That has also made us start digging into whether it makes sense for us to also create an employee advocacy program, but that’s a topic for another day.
Sinead O'Grada
We’re also looking at segmentation through the lens of diversity and inclusion, whether that's from lived experiences of female entrepreneurs or black-owned businesses. While we offer the same level of programming, we might have some specific content or activations to address the unique needs of different audience groups within the overall program. That really enriches the community interactions and aligns with the way we go to market at Meta.
Tim Newborn
Those DEI touchpoints could come into play in the employee advocacy programs Dave mentioned. For instance, if we're hoping to get our customers more engaged on a cultural level, or we would like to engage with different cohorts, we need to offer them an equitable amount of employees who can speak to that community mindset.
Spinning up employee advocacy programming also creates different inroads for customers and even prospects to engage with our employees. I think, to a certain degree, employee advocacy is a foundational piece of customer advocacy and building that communal interaction.
How to continuously improve your advocacy program
Dave Hansen
Another thing that has been on my mind is the idea of continuous improvement. We need to take a data mindset and look at where people are engaging, how they’re engaging, and whether the right kinds of people are engaging in our advocacy programs. Then we need to test our own theories to continuously improve our programs and drive that engagement. What does your development process look like, and how have you improved your programs over time?
Joshua Zerkel
I wish I could say that our program will be done at some point, but I don't think it ever will be. I've been at Asana for four and a half years, and our company has grown exponentially during that period. That brings all sorts of changes that need to happen to all of the programs within the company.
We've basically upended the program that I lead multiple times, based on what customers are telling us that they need and want out of it. We've evolved the content of our event series based on what they're telling us, based on the attendance numbers that we see, and based on the feedback that we get afterward.
For every single part of the program, there’s a loop by which we can hear from customers what they want, what they need, what's working, and most importantly, what isn't so we can stop doing that.
Simultaneously, we connect regularly with our partner teams within the organization to hear whether what we're doing to support their work is helpful. We want to know what more we could do and how we can modify the ways we share the information we collect. Soup to nuts, are we doing something that meaningfully helps other teams to support our customers?
I don't think the process is ever complete. Community programs and advocacy programs are living and breathing organisms, just like our customers are. In order to meet them where they are and help support them, I build regular opportunities into every program to pause, look at what we're doing, review what's working, jettison what isn't, and come up with something new.
To me, that's part of the fun, although it can be exhausting. It's what makes this mix really interesting and, at the end of the day, hopefully very effective for our customers.
Dave Hansen
I absolutely love the idea of pausing and evaluating. It’s much easier said than done though. Finding the time to pause takes being able to set your own priorities, which I’ve heard you talk about a few times before, Tim – is there anything you’d like to add about that?
Tim Newborn
Yeah, I think some of that comes from my background as a veteran because, after any large operation, we would have an AAR – an after-action review. That is that moment of pause where we’d look at what we did and determine what worked well, what didn't, and what we needed to adjust.
Visual collaboration has also been beneficial for me in getting other people on board to help optimize systems. Right now, I'm having conversations internally about how to structure that and a meaningful way for advocacy. That way of communicating inspires every kind of work across the board.
If you can bring people into something like a Freehand canvas, which is what I use to communicate customer marketing and advocacy, it puts us in the center because we're using the product that we're asking your customers to use. By giving us a full, clear, illustrative picture, it also fosters a sense of empathy that a spreadsheet alone wouldn't allow.
Not only that, but we can put programming in along with CTAs for how to get involved with this programming and how to help if you see that something’s off. That's what I'm looking to structure out by the end of the next quarter for our priority programs. We want to get relevant voices, internally and externally, to help us flag where and how we can improve. Then we’ll then report back to them on what that's going to take to improve and if we need their collaboration.
Sinead O'Grada
Another thing I would add is that you need the space and the willingness to start again or rethink the program when necessary. Hopefully, you won’t have to throw everything out, but you might need to adapt or pivot your approach in response to customer feedback or environmental conditions.
The golden rules of building an advocacy program
Dave Hansen
What's one piece of advice that you would give someone who's on their advocacy program journey?
Sinead O'Grada
Keep your program’s reason for being clear for both the community and the company. It needs to be clear what we are and are not in service of. Inevitably, other ideas will come up, and we need to look at those ideas through the lens of what we're here to do. That helps to filter out the noise and make sure we stay focused on our mission.
Tim Newborn
If you're looking to get people to back your ideas, be bold, be brief, be gone. Customer advocacy has many different throughlines and it's difficult to ask one person to digest all of it if it isn't their primary focus, so get your ideas out as clearly, concisely, and as quickly as possible, and allow for those follow-up questions to come – they’re the touchpoints you need to build a relationship.
Joshua Zerkel
I would add, in addition to what Sinead and Tim have already shared, when you're not sure what to do in your program, ask your customers. You and your team might be banging your heads against the wall trying to figure out what to do. Just ask them! They're the people who will be participating in it.
Your customers probably have lots of thoughts and opinions, so don't be afraid to just say, “We aren't sure what we're going to do next, and we'd like to get your input.” You'll be amazed at the type of feedback that you get and how well it can be actioned.
Dave Hansen
The advice I would give is to start with the end in mind and work backwards. Set those milestones and benchmarks; that’s going to help you to set priorities and make sure that you have the resources and the people in place to reach them.
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