Hi, my name is Gal, and I'm the CEO and Co-founder of Crowdvocate. We're going to talk about the seven tactics that will help you hit home runs with your programs.
Here’s a quick look at these tactics before we dive in:
- Create a solid plan
- Maintain solid collaboration with other departments
- Get more nominations and repetition
- Personalize customer engagement at scale
- Walk the walk and talk the VOC
- Track and attribute
- Share your success
Let's get started.
Create a solid plan
The first thing – and I can't emphasize this enough – is to have the right program strategy. It’s so important to go to the drawing board and plan before you start doing anything. Here are a principles to keep in mind:
- Define the strategy and KPIs – What are the goals for the first year? How do those KPIs align with the company's objectives?
- Collaboration is key – How will you collaborate with other departments?
- Talk to customers – What would make it valuable for them to be advocates or champions? What are they expecting from the company? How can they influence and contribute? What are they willing to do?
- Measure and share – You want to be able to track your numeric results and revenue influence, and don’t be afraid to blow your own horn!
- Don't start with the platform – Start with a plan.
Eve Chatfield
Now let’s look at how you can begin to build your plan.
Step one: Understand the strategic goals of your company and make sure that you know how the program contributes to them
I'll give you an example. If the company is aiming for more upsells, your program should leverage advocacy and customer marketing activities to create more upsells. There are several ways to do that. You can upsell to customers who engage in your program. You can capture stories from customers who've already upsold and leverage them in the upsell motion. You could even do upsell reference calls or meetups.
Step two: Show how you’re going to measure the impact of the program
Once you’ve aligned your program’s goals with the company's goals, you have to show how you're going to measure your impact. If, for example, the program is about improving the company’s presence on G2, you want to show what the situation is today, what you hope it's going to be, and how you’re going to measure it. Maybe you want to track the number of reviews, the quality of the reviews, and the types of companies that are leaving those reviews.
Eve Chatfield
Step three: Build a quarterly plan
A year is a lot to tackle at once. Instead, think about your KPIs for each quarter and how you’re going to evolve your program – and make sure you don’t try to do everything in Q1.
Step four: Gradually roll out your sub-programs
Let's say you want to do the three R's – referrals, reviews, and references – and you also want to get customer feedback. Don't do all of that at once. Which elements are you going to start with? Which ones are you going to roll out later? How will you get there? Show how that evolves over the first year.
Step five: Communicate your program and its successes
Your internal teams should know when you roll out a new sub-program and, as it progresses, how it’s going, so share your updates and repeat.
Maintain solid collaboration with other departments
You want to be able to map the stakeholders in each department and what's in it for them internally. Sales is easy – they want reference calls, logos, and customer stories they can use as evidence. But what's in it for customer success, product, product marketing, PR, and event marketing? You want to show how your advocacy program is going to help each team to succeed.
You want to be super specific about how you work with your internal stakeholders. Let’s say you’re setting up a customer advisory board (CAB) – tell your colleagues how many customers you need them to nominate and by what date. Likewise, you need to tell them exactly when and how you’re going to help them.
It’s also important to gather internal feedback. After each activity, ask your stakeholders, “How was that speaker?” “How was that reference?” “How did that help?” That builds collaboration so people keep your program in mind and think about how they can leverage it more.
Part of cross-departmental collaboration is giving your stakeholders access and transparency. They should be able to see inside your CRM or get email updates on what's happening. Let them know about the nominations you’ve received for your reference program, tell them about your most active advocates, and give them updates on the new content you've generated. All of those things will your stakeholders that when you work together, you achieve your shared goals.
Another thing is to give kudos. If somebody is nominating a lot of customers and helping you to meet your reference program’s goals, give them a shout-out. If a CSM helps you get an amazing customer story, share that win. When you give people kudos, they’ll be sure to give you it back and help you more.
Eve Chatfield
Get more nominations and repetition
The third thing is to look at how you’re going to grow nominations and create repetition within your program. It’s a great idea to have multiple methods of growing your pool. A lot of people will just have CSMs or sales putting forward nominees, and sometimes that works, but the issue is you then need to beg them to keep on doing it.
So what are some other ways? Maybe you want to create trigger-based nominations. An easy trigger to think about is NPS. If a customer gave you a score of nine or 10, of course you want to reach out to them. That’s a simple one.
What about other triggers? Maybe they were active in the community – that could be a trigger for you to reach out and ask if they want to be in your program. What about bulk invites for customers that participate in your events? There are a lot of different ways to add more people to your programs beyond nominations.
You want to make sure your whole program is visible to the entire company. That way, teams other than the usual suspects (salespeople and CSMs) can jump in. Think about your product people – if they're doing product interviews or talking to beta customers, couldn't they also nominate them for the program? If the support team closes a ticket and the customer is happy, couldn't they nominate that customer for the program?
You want to have triggers not only for nominations but for repetition. For example, if you’re looking for reviews and you want to renew them annually, just create a trigger for that. One year after a customer’s first review, send them an email saying, “Hey, that review you did last year was amazing. Want to do another one?” Or if one of your advocates goes for an upsell, ask if you can get the story of why they chose to upgrade to this feature.
To create repetition within your programs, make sure that you choose moments that trigger a new ask. You want to make this streamlined and automated; otherwise, you’ll spend hours doing it manually.
You also want to make this repetition valuable to your advocates. For example, you might create a framework where the more a customer engages with your program, the better perks or status they get – loyalty program stuff. You want to make sure they understand that if they do a certain number of activities within a certain timeframe, they can reach a certain tier and get access to certain rewards.
Of course, you’ll need to track everything and see what works and what doesn't. Some triggers will work; some won't. Some nominations will work; some won't. That’s okay. Those learnings will help your program to grow.
Finally, it’s a great idea to reward the internal stakeholders who put forward the most nominations. You might want to create a kind of quarterly competition for the title of nomination champion.
Personalize customer engagement at scale
This is probably the most important thing: customer engagement at scale has to be personalized. You want to create journey-based advocacy and engagement, and it shouldn’t be gated but open to your entire customer base. To build this kind of program, you’ll need to leverage automation to trigger the right call to action to the right customer at the right time through the right channel.
Some people will engage with you by email. Some people will log into a program portal hub. Some people will engage through the community. Some people will respond to in-app messages. You want to engage your customer base, where, when, and how they want you, and you want to personalize that engagement so it's meaningful for them.
Did they just write something in the community? Let's take that and say, “Hey, thank you for contributing to our community. Would you like to speak at an event? Did they just finish a course? “Hey, it's amazing that you finished that course! Let's celebrate! By the way, can you go write a review on G2?”
You want to be able to understand where they are on their journey with you and then contextually reach out based on that last action. That action doesn't have to be advocacy – it can be any kind of engagement. Use that engagement as an opportunity to take them to the next level and it will make a huge difference.
Walk the walk and talk the VOC
Let's talk about walking the walk and talking the VOC. The voice of the customer should be heard inside the company. This is crucial for conveying the right message internally to help you succeed – you want to leverage the voice of the customer and push it to every department.
One way of doing that is creating mini CABs for each division. Why should CABs be only for executives? Why isn't there also a CAB for product, a CAB for customer success, a CAB for sales, and so on? Why can't each department meet with several customers on a regular basis? This is the best way to take customer feedback and use it to create a customer-obsessed company.
Share survey data and review data. At Crowdvocate, one of the things that we do is push reviews into Salesforce; that way, whenever anybody goes to look at an account, they get a fuller picture of how happy the customer is and why. We can also share those reviews in all-hands and whatnot, so everybody gets to hear the voice of the customer.
Eve Chatfield
Track and attribute
Everything we’ve covered so far can drive amazing impact, but without any proof of that impact, it will be very hard to get people to care so you can secure more budget. You need to measure what matters, and, like it or not, what matters is dollars.
At the end of the day, you and your management team need to agree on the KPIs that you’ll track, and several of those (at least) should be oriented to attribution. This is one of the ways in which customer marketing is evolving – by understanding the value we drive in terms of revenue.
You want to be able to show, for example, deal closure rates with and without references, or with and without content. We want to be able to show how reviews have generated leads that converted into closed-won deals. You want to be able to show at an account level not only how many customer stories, reference calls, and referrals they’ve done, but how much all those activities have contributed to your revenue.
I would recommend choosing three to five KPIs to measure and making sure that some of those are dollar oriented. You can't just measure the number of advocates. If you think that's important, that’s fine for one KPI. However, it’s super important to also look at the bigger picture of how your advocates’ activities are influencing revenue and contributing to your business goals.
Share your success
We all need to blow our own horns, beat the drum, or dance the hora sometimes. We want to make sure that everybody knows what you're doing. We're advocating for our customers internally, turning them into champions in their industries, and helping them grow their personal brands. But what about us? What about creating our own brand in our own companies? This is super important, so make sure that you’re also a customer marketer of yourself.
One way of doing that is through reporting dashboards. People love numbers. They love to see graphs. They just love to see that you've created X influence on revenue and X amount of customer stories. When they see it in a revenue number, it clicks differently, so you have to have graphs and dashboards to share every quarter or, better yet, every month.
You also have to elevate others. Give kudos and elevate other teams that help your program because they’ll reciprocate and elevate your program, sharing your success because you're sharing their success.
It’s a great idea to create bite-sized content – even just single slides – to elevate your program’s achievements. You can share this in team meetings, Zoom calls, or whenever you speak to your stakeholders. You could even make a Slack channel just to share your program’s success, then whoever wants to see what's going on can check it out. It’s important to get an executive sponsor to help you with all of this and push your message to the management team too.
That's it! I hope these seven tactics have equipped you with new ideas to generate more value from your advocacy programs and make them super successful.
Turn your customers into raving cheerleaders.
Customer Advocacy: Certified will take you through the foundational skill and knowledge needed to launch and manage customer advocacy programs and excel in your career.
Propel your business growth by prioritizing and supporting your customer experience.
