Customer Advocacy for Growth-Stage Companies: Not a Difference of Opinion

A piece on why those who think the egg came first are exactly what’s wrong with tech.

What makes customer advocacy so critical for growing companies to establish relevance and brand authority?

Let me frame the question in different terms, through a classic paradox: What came first? The chicken or the egg?

How this has stumped the masses for generations is truly beyond me. Logically, there’s only one true answer: the chicken.

Here’s why:

Those who argue that the egg came first will say, because the chicken at ONE POINT hatched from the egg, the egg MUST be its predecessor. The contrarian will argue the egg had to be laid by a chicken in the first place. When the two parties establish that both need each other to simply exist, the conversation ends. But what everyone’s overlooking here is that their mutual dependency to initially exist is irrelevant. The most critical (and frankly, only) piece of evidence isn’t establishing existence, but SURVIVAL.

A chicken’s life span does not depend on reproduction. Whether or not that chicken lays an egg or not doesn’t have any impact on whether or not it will survive on its own. A chicken will thrive and cluck and do its chicken thing for an average of 9 years before hanging up its wings and calling it a day.

An egg, however, cannot hatch and develop into a chicken without another chicken to incubate it and care for it. In fact, after only 10 hours, an egg’s survival rate decreases by 98%. The egg totally needs the chicken to survive, hatch, and thrive as a chicken.

Therefore, the chicken had to have come first, or the egg — no matter how great of a chicken that egg could have been — will never see the light of day.

So WTF does this have to do with customer advocacy?

When starting a business, entrepreneurs are often met with a similar paradox:

Which comes first? The product or the customers?

You can’t sell a product without customer demand, and you won’t have customers if you don’t have a product they need. Again, their mutual dependency for establishing existence cancels each other out, forcing us, yet again, to look at the most important piece of this puzzle: SURVIVAL.

In order for a product to be built, a company needs to run through myriad steps — from sourcing investors, hiring developers, establishing a prototype, and eventually standing up a functional piece of technology; all of this driven by customer demand. But without customers continuing to use and advocate for that technology, its lifespan — much like an unincubated egg — is sure to be short-lived. The funding will dry up, the awareness will disappear, and the product will inevitably die like so many other software eggs left in its wake.

This all-too-common oversight is where so many technology companies falter. They pour all their resources into building something so transformational, groundbreaking, and differentiated, they forget the most important step to ensuring product and business survival: customer advocacy.

After all, your customers are the ones who know what your product needs to remain not just relevant, but to survive in a competitive technology landscape. They know what your product is missing, what it does best, how you stack up against your competitors, and even the true ROI it drives. This is the critical 3rd party data technology companies need — but often overlook — to inform pricing, packaging, feature upgrades, roadmap planning, and even ideal customer targeting. The kind of data that not only promotes survival, but most certainly has to be put first.

So how do growth stage companies get their earliest adopters to become advocates? Online reviews.

→ BONUS: Not only do customer reviews serve as that critical product feedback loop you need to survive the growth stage, but the market is downright crazy about ’em right now: Nearly 95% of buyers read online reviews before making a purchase.

Here are three ways you can start leveraging the channels you’re already using to communicate with your customers to begin collecting customer reviews:

1. Outbound: You’ve got your newsletter, your product updates, your promotional emails, and your privacy notices going out like a well-oiled machine to your current customers. Why not throw a review collection campaign into the mix? Use any marketing automation tool to reach out to your customers with a request to leave a review on one of your review site product profiles in exchange for a small incentive. As long as you incentivize everyone (and not just the good reviews), you’re playing by the rules, and you’ll see those reviews pile up in no time (and you’d be SHOCKED to see how far people will go for a $10 Starbucks gift card).
2. Inbound: Currently using an NPS tool to collect high-level satisfaction scores? Strike while the iron is hot: integrate tools like G2 Review Automation with your NPS tool and instantly request a review from anyone who leaves you a score (hey, if they’re already in the mood to give you numerical feedback, far be it for us to limit their voice!).
3. In-person: One of the biggest ways to get your brand and your product into the market during growth stage is attending and exhibiting at trade shows. While you’ve got your customers in-person, set up a review section of your booth, and run a contest. $10 gift card? Donation to charity? One big prize to a reviewer selected at random? You can use your review booth as promotion to drive that valuable traffic, score more meetings, and incentivize your customers in the process!

Fortunately for growth-stage companies, there are turn-key solutions at the ready, waiting to help drive this critical customer advocacy for your product through online review collection. From setting up in-person review booths at trade shows, to driving incentivized review campaigns, and even integrating with NPS solutions to automate review collection to individual product profiles, customer advocacy doesn’t have to be a debatable paradox — but a viable, accessible solution to transform your organization from growth stage to market leader.

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Aubyn Casady is a Senior Product Marketing Manager at G2. Find her on LinkedIn.

To learn more about how you can put customer advocacy first, check out sell.g2.com.