How Customer Success Can Supercharge Your Advocacy Efforts
In the B2B world, I’ve noticed people tend to refer to relationships between vendors and customers as “partnerships.” This isn’t a good thing because it paints all of these different types of relationships with the same brush. In reality, vendor-customer relationships exist on a spectrum. Some relationships are irrelevant while others are made up of honest, fully committed teamwork.
The latter is a true partnership, and a true partnership is worth striving for with your customers. Why? Because it means they place a high value on your relationship. It also increases retention rates, broadens awareness of your brand within customers’ organizations, and builds true advocates. True advocates are worth their weight in gold because no matter how much marketing and branding you do, new potential customers are going to trust their peers more. Trust is the best form of advertising.
Growing advocates is extremely important for any successful business. Advocates lead to more referrals, they lead to upsells and cross-sells, and if you’re using them correctly, advocates can also result in lead-generation and customer conversions.
That’s why Customer Success exists: we build partnerships by incenting customers to engage with our brand. This requires identifying the right people and opportunities. And those, in turn, require a lot of proactive communication and ongoing candor. Let’s do a deep dive into some specific tasks Customer Success orgs can do to help build these partnerships that eventually lead to advocates.
Identify Hidden Advocates
Without a doubt, some of your current customers can make for great advocates but it’s up to Customer Success to find them. Having a keen understanding of your customers’ usage data is a good way to be able to spot power users who may eventually become advocates.
A lot of companies get excited about how advocacy can advance their needs but that’s not how an advocacy partnership should work. After you’ve identified potential advocates, the next steps include identifying co-marketing opportunities and tailoring them for the interest of the customer. Customer Success Managers should make the co-marketing opportunities aligned with the customer’s agenda for the quarter (or year) because this makes participating a seamless experience for the client.
Maximize QBRs
We know that quarterly business reviews are great moments to convey how much business value the customer is receiving but QBRs can also be used as a way to build advocates. Because QBRs often have wider audiences than the day-to-day interactions of Customer Success Managers, use this as an opportunity to highlight the successes of your connections at the company. Anything that can boost their reputation in front of their company increases the odds of them becoming an advocate. There’s a difference between building up your customer’s confidence and inflating them for the sake of inflating them, so make sure that you’re utilizing relevant data which places the customer’s achievements in proper context.
Keep Advocacy In Line With Actual Success
It’s very easy to get carried away with co-marketing and leaning on your advocates but it’s important to have honest depictions of what’s going on with your customers. In other words, make sure your advocacy material is in line with the actual success of your clients.
Doing case studies or co-marketing assets simply for the sake of hitting predefined Marketing goals can ultimately undermine your efforts. While it’s important to maintain a strong cadence of advocacy material, if what you’re publishing doesn’t match up with what people in the field are hearing, it’s going to bring down your credibility.
When it comes to selling this to skeptical internal teams that may have their own advocacy goals, really break it down into “How does this really benefit your customer?” Tailor the goals to make sense to your customers. Otherwise, you can find yourself going to the same few customers over and over, which can lead to advocacy burnout.
One way Customer Success can help in this area is by bubbling up the best existing advocate sources so that Marketing can make the most with what they actually have. This can mean going deeper with existing advocates, as opposed to stretching to include multiple sources where there may be no substance — three in-depth, honest advocacy pieces are going to resonate more than five fluffy pieces.
Focus on the People
It’s vital to remember that advocacy has to go both ways, as your organization should also be trumpeting your customers’ successes and the individual actors within it. We discussed how you could tailor the co-marketing efforts to help your customers hit their agendas, but Customer Success can take a variety of actions to ensure advocates are gaining value.
Make sure that you’re connecting your advocates with individuals and companies that can be useful for their networking. You really want these partners to feel like being your advocate is advantageous for them … you’re not just trying to send them out there with a sandwich board advertising your brand.
