By Jan Young
Customer advocacy programs are an often overlooked, yet powerful, driver of business growth and retention of customers. B2B companies with referrals have a 70% higher conversion rate, and a 69% faster close time on sales. Customers acquired through referrals have a 37% higher retention rate. This multiplier effect expands the customer base organically as satisfied customers become advocates and recommend the company's products or services to their network.
If you find yourself searching for customer references as the need arises, ask yourself: Could we do this better? A quick inventory by answering the following questions could produce big results.
How are you communicating the opportunities for customer advocates?
Do your CSMs know what to look for in their successful customers?
Do you have a place to share the stories internally?
Do your CSMs understand how it will benefit their customer and their company?
Are you celebrating your customer, or asking a “huge” favor? (positioning makes a difference)
You don’t have to start with a big program. Start with what you have. Assess, document and communicate your opportunities. Share how highlighting the customer’s successes shines a light on them, on the CSM, and the company.
But the secret to a successful customer advocacy program isn’t making it about your company.
The secret to a successful customer advocacy program is to build it to be intentionally customer and employee centric, and then measure, track, compensate, and celebrate your wins.
Customer: WIIFM
From your customer’s perspective, What’s In It For Them?
Referrals, panels, blog posts, case studies… When a customer participates in these customer advocacy activities, highlight their thought leadership. Help them promote themselves. Other customers will notice and want to mimic their best practices, then you can highlight them. Prospective buyers will want to achieve that success and they’ll want the product that helped them achieve it.
Customers are at least 80% more likely to trust a referral over an ad. This is true across all generations. No matter your customer base.
Employee: WIIFM
From your CSM’s perspective, What’s In It For Them?
When you have an organized process and a “Why”, your team is more likely to engage and get on board with building customer advocates. We all like to be a part of something, to know we are making an impact. When your customers participate in customer advocacy, they get to be a part of your success. When CSMs highlight their customers, they get to be a part of their customers and their company’s success. This also highlights the CSM and their role in helping the customer achieve success.
Also, keep in mind, some people respond to competition, and everyone appreciates compensation for their work. SPIFFs or bonuses are a great way to encourage new behaviors. Once you have an established program, you can make CSQAs and CSQLs a part of variable compensation. Incorporating compensation reinforces company values and priorities the work involved to build customer advocates.
CS Leaders: WIIFM
From a CS Leader’s perspective, What’s In It For You?
As CS leaders know, customer advocacy doesn’t just happen. It relies on a solid foundation of onboarding and adoption, and a strong relationship with the customer and cross-functional teams. Often, we get caught up in doing the work and we fall behind on communicating our impact. We justify our lack of communication by saying “I don’t need the credit. That’s not why I do this important work.”
The problem with that is if people don’t know about it, it’s almost the same as not happening. Or, more bluntly, if a tree fell in the forest and no one heard it, it didn’t happen. And so for that reason and others below, I ask you:
Are you measuring your CSQAs and CSQLs?
CSQA: CS Qualified Advocates
CSQL: CS Qualified Lead
Reason 1: What gets measured gets done. Define your north star and the KPIs that will help you reach it. Start by benchmarking. Modify your KPIs and build them over time.
CSQAs:
Measure the number of advocates you have, their segments, the CSMs who manage the accounts. Then you can start to project goals for how many advocates you want to engage with and how. Be sure to dig into why some customers do not want to be advocates so you can solve for that too.
CSQLs:
Measure the number of customers whose referrals lead to prospective customers and closed deals. Measure how and which CSMs are contributing leads and the close rate. Share best practices. Help your CSMs learn how to identify opportunities, ask discovery questions, and handle objections.
Reason 2: Measuring your CSQAs and CSQLs not only promotes cross-functional team work, it also shows the value of what your CS team brings to your company. How your team contributes to top-of-funnel and post-sales expansions and renewals determines if you are seen as a cost center or a profit center.
Hint: In challenging economic times, cost centers are cut.
If your team is seen as a cost center, you will always be on the defensive. You will always need to justify your headcount, your tools, and your job. If the “WIIFM” of keeping your job isn’t enough: think of your team, think of your customers, and think of your company.
Conclusion
Ultimately, positive advocacy indicates customer satisfaction, loyalty, and the ability of customer success teams to deliver value. It leads to increased sales opportunities and contributes to new customer acquisition. Collaboration between customer success and marketing teams further amplifies the impact of advocacy efforts, creating a positive cycle of growth.
Customer advocacy also has a significant impact on customer retention rates and lifetime value. Track the difference in expansion and renewal revenue between disengaged customers and customer advocates. Engaged customers who actively advocate for a brand become more committed to its success. They offer valuable feedback, participate in beta testing, and provide suggestions for improvement. This level of engagement fosters a strong sense of loyalty and ownership among customers, leading to long-term relationships. Advocacy activities are positive customer experiences.
To effectively harness the power of customer advocacy, companies need to establish structured programs that align existing activities and provide incentives for customer participation. By offering rewards, recognition, or exclusive benefits, businesses can motivate customers to become advocates and actively promote the brand. Creating an open feedback loop and fostering a community of advocates enhances engagement and encourages ongoing advocacy efforts.
Customer advocacy is a crucial aspect of business strategy. It builds alignment across your teams. And by nurturing customer advocates and leveraging their referrals and testimonials, companies can enhance customer acquisition, retention, and overall growth.
The Success League is a global customer success consulting firm that also offers leadership coaching and a CS Leadership Certification program. Visit www.thesuccessleague.io for more on these and our other offerings.
Jan Young - Jan is passionate about lifelong learning, demystifying technology, optimizing teams, processes, and systems, and building effective relationships and communities. Her experience has included working in Enterprise companies and Startups of various stages, and she has advised several founders and startups. She serves on the board of Gain, Grow, Retain as co-lead of the Voice of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion council, and is a Founding Community Lead for CS Insider for which she writes and curates a series called “Inclusive Innovation”, and was recognized as a 2021 Top 100 Customer Success Strategist for her work in the community. She holds a BA from UC Berkeley, and an MBA from Columbia University. In her free time, she enjoys wine tasting, hikes, and Pickleball.