The Best Kept Secret in Customer Success: Customer Advocacy
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Word of Mouth is the Holy Grail of marketing. But it's no longer just a nice thing to have; it's vital to your company. The voice of the customer is more powerful than ever before--not only should you be listening; you should be using it to fuel Marketing & Sales. Anthony Kennada, VP of Marketing at Gainsight, and Vinay Bhagat, CEO at TrustRadius, will teach you how to operationalize Word of Mouth using Customer Advocacy.
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The Best Kept Secret in Customer Success: Customer Advocacy
- 1. The Best Kept Secret in Customer Success: Customer Advocacy
- 2. Anthony Kennada VP Marketing Gainsight Introduction Vinay Bhagat Chief Executive Officer TrustRadius
- 3. ©2016 Gainsight. All Rights Reserved. What is Customer Advocacy? Customer Advocacy = Drive + Amplify Customer Success Retention & Growth Word of Mouth & Referrals Insights to Improve Pulse on your Customers Social Proof & References
- 4. ©2016 Gainsight. All Rights Reserved. Buyers Doing Homework
- 5. ©2016 Gainsight. All Rights Reserved. Source: Walker Sands State of Marketing Technology 2016 Seek Peer Input
- 6. ©2016 Gainsight. All Rights Reserved. In-depth Insights
- 7. ©2016 Gainsight. All Rights Reserved. The Authenticity Imperative Authenticity beats product utility and innovation Communicating honestly about products and services (91%) is more important to consumers than product utility (61%) Authenticity has a positive impact on bottom line 63% of consumers would buy from a company they consider to be authentic, over and above competitors
- 8. ©2016 Gainsight. All Rights Reserved. ROI of Customer Advocacy Ongoing Engagement • Higher Renewals • More Upsell • More Cross-sell Customer Satisfaction • Higher NPS Referrals, References and Social Proof • Leads generated by advocates are four to ten times more valuable than regular leads • With just a 12% increase in advocacy marketing, on average, companies can experience a 2X growth in revenue CSMetricsMarketingMetrics
- 9. ©2016 Gainsight. All Rights Reserved. Customer Success Customer Marketing
- 10. ©2016 Gainsight. All Rights Reserved. Customer Success Strategy MONITOR • Product usage • Feedback • NPS IDENTIFY • At-risk customers • Advocates INVEST • Make them successful HARNESS • Sales & Marketing GROW • Renew / upsell • Upsell ACQUIRE • Net New ONBOARD
- 11. ©2016 Gainsight. All Rights Reserved. The Advocate Marketing Toolkit User Reviews Referrals Sales References Advisory Board (CAB) Video Testimonials Community Social Shares Case Studies User Summit
- 12. ©2016 Gainsight. All Rights Reserved. The Advocate Marketing Toolkit User Reviews Referrals Sales References Advisory Board (CAB) Video Testimonials Community Social Shares Case Studies User Summit
- 13. RICH LIBRARY OF CUSTOMER REVIEWS CUSTOMER INSIGHTSSALES REFERENCES The Impact of User Reviews TRUSTRADIUS DEMAND GEN ASSETS SALES CUSTOMER SUCCESS SALES ASSETS MARKETING ORGANIC SEARCH ON-SITE CONVERSION
- 14. ©2016 Gainsight. All Rights Reserved. Cast WIDE NET
- 15. ©2016 Gainsight. All Rights Reserved. Customer Loyalty • Net Retention • NPS (leading indicator) Customer Led Marketing (Impact on New Sales) • Referrals Attributed to WOM • Social Proof / Influence on Sales • Number of Customer Quotes • Number of Advocates (customers willing to be a reference, speak at events, etc.) Customer Insights • Quality of Learning from Customer Feedback / Engagement The Metrics Behind Customer Advocacy
- 16. ©2016 Gainsight. All Rights Reserved. How Gainsight Did It
- 17. ©2016 Gainsight. All Rights Reserved. How Gainsight Did It
- 18. ©2016 Gainsight. All Rights Reserved. Results 81 in-depth reviews and ratings acquired within a few months Used in deal cycles as social proof point to demonstrate market leadership and accelerate deal cycles Saves time for sales when using reviews on TrustRadius instead of sales references “Before, it could have taken a week to organize a reference call and get on a customer’s calendar. Now, we can point them to TrustRadius and they can read 20+ in-depth reviews instantly.” Lauren Olerich Director, Demand & Customer Marketing
- 19. ©2016 Gainsight. All Rights Reserved. In Closing • Customer Advocacy is the spirit of driving and amplifying Customer Success. • Value created in an advocacy program impact both Customer Success and overall Pipeline Development outcomes. • Solutions available to help build your advocacy stack –Gainsight as the Customer Success platform and TrustRadius as the engine powering User Reviews.
- 20. Anthony Kennada VP Marketing Gainsight Questions? @akennada akennada@gainsight.com Vinay Bhagat Chief Executive Officer TrustRadius @vinaybhagat vinay@trustradius.com
Hinweis der Redaktion
- [VINAY]: Define Customer Advocacy in context… why should marketers care? [AK]: Advocacy really is the heart of the Customer Success operation. Frankly, as a Marketer, this is where we get incredibly excited about our role in driving the lifetime value of our customers. But Advocacy isn’t just marketing’s job, it’s in fact a consequence of Customer Success done right. And the outcome of that consequence? Higher renewals, more up-sells and cross-sells.. But another outcome of Customer Advocacy done right is much more aligned to the metrics that a Marketing organization is accountable to – pipeline. In fact, I would say it’s the secret weapon that is often unrealized by most teams focused on scale. I’ve said it before that “Customer Success is the New Marketing,” and the HOW of that statement is advocacy. So Vinay – why are we having this conversation today? What’s led to the sudden rise in importance of Customer Advocacy?
- [VINAY] No longer a nice to have but instead a must have .... 1] buyers have increasingly adopted consumer-like behavior, completing more than half of evaluation process before contacting sales ....
- [VINAY] ... and seeking opinions from other users/their peers ahead of other content – 84% of B2B buyers start the purchasing process with a referral (LinkedIn), 2/3rd search online for peer reviews and testimonials [Google]
- [AK] At Gainsight, one of our company values is Success for All. We’re big believers that transparency, reliability and authenticity are key to achieving that vision. So one of the things we’re excited about are the reviews that our customers have written about us on platforms such as TrustRadius. What you’re seeing here is an example of one such review. In this case – the customer rated us on a five star scale, on a number of feature-level measures, and also reviewed us in a number of categories including both the positive and the negative. And that’s important to us – that all of our advocacy programs, including user reviews, are incredibly authentic and representative of the true context of the customer’s health. Sometimes the qualitative feedback of where we fall short is more important than the positive.
- [VINAY] 2] Consumers prefer authentic brands and companies who embrace transparency are ultimately rewarded with loyal consumers --- and what better ways to be transparent than through the words of your own customers
- [AK] Earlier I referred to Customer Advocacy as the secret weapon for Marketing teams – here’s why it matters. The benefits of a properly executed advocacy program has strong implications for metrics that Customer Success organizations are ALREADY accountable to – higher rate of renewals, more up-sell / cross-sell, higher NPS. Sounds simple enough, but in fact, many dismiss the potential of certain advocacy programs in achieving that objective. But there’s also a profound impact to marketing-oriented metrics, specifically around pipeline growth. First, leads generated by B2B advocates are four to ten times more valuable than regular leads (TOPO). That should come as no surprise since those leads are generated with social context beyond simply buying intent. This is traditional word-of-mouth marketing at its best. Also, with just a 12% increase in advocacy marketing, on average, companies can experience a 2X growth in revenue (Harvard Business Press). We’ll talk about advocacy marketing in a minute, but this is an astounding fact if you’re looking for a meaty sound byte to justify an investment in Customer Advocacy.
- [AK] From an organizational perspective, Customer Success and Customer Marketing go hand in hand. But how do you draw the line between roles and responsibilities for advocacy? At Gainsight, we think there are two outcomes that Customer Marketers work to deliver: On the one hand, you’ve got customer marketing programs that are meant to drive adoption, renewals, upsells, etc. We are of the belief that that role belongs within the Customer Success organization. It goes by many names – Customer Marketing, One-to-Many Marketing, but it seems that the industry is starting to standardize on Customer Operations as the title for those folks. And it makes sense that it belongs in Customer Success – that’s the team with proper context on customer health and are measured by the outcome of these programs. On the other hand you’ve got Advocacy Marketing – programs that are focused on driving case studies, referrals, references, and so on. We believe this function of Customer Marketing very much belongs in Marketing, as these are the metrics here are very aligned to traditional marketing initiatives. So – now that we’ve built the role profile, how do you operationalize all of this within your Customer Success process?
- [VINAY] Do you want to take a stab at this? Customer Advocacy is an integral part of Customer Success strategy. Customer success drives customer advocacy which in turns drives customer success. It’s an integral part of realizing complete ROI in Customer Success and creating efficiencies/a scalable program
- [AK] So when we double click on Advocate Marketing – within the broader Customer Advocacy context – there are a number of programs in the arsenal that can be used to mobilize your advocate army. Many of these we’ve touched on to some extent, others would require a much longer webinar to cover in detail.
- [AK] But with the experts on the call today – we thought we would dive deep into a business case on User Reviews and the profound impact that a focused program on driving reviews from our customer base has had on our advocacy programs at Gainsight.
- [VINAY] ... and this is how reviews help you amplify customer success via customer advocacy
- [VINAY] – Get started ... Cast a wide net and start now. Customer advocacy is about what all your customers think, not just the happy ones. Learning from unhappy customers will help you make them more successful and turn them into advocates.
- [AK] Choosing the right customer advocacy metrics can be difficult. There are dozens of recommendations out there, depending on what you read or whom you ask. But we think these are a few good ones to start with. The bottom line loyalty metrics in net retention and NPS are ultimately what we’re solving for in Customer Success – but pay special attention to some of these customer-led marketing metrics. Referrals Attributed to Word-of-Mouth: Create a Lead Source in your CRM instance called Customer Referrals and report on that metric weekly. We learned earlier that these leads are 4-10x more valuable than others. Social Proof / Influence on Sales: Can you attribute an advocacy campaign as a touch point somewhere in the sales process? We use Marketo Interesting Moments to get a sense of activities that may have contributed to conversion of new business, but weren’t the “last touch” that pushed that person over the edge. Perhaps they downloaded a case study (social proof) and two days later registered for a webinar, followed by a Contact Sales form fill. That’s influence. Number of Customer Quotes: How many customers have gone on the record about your service? Whether as a case study, review, etc., you can choose the proper instrument based on the programs that you’re running. And finally, Number of Advocates: How many customers are enrolled into your advocacy program? We use Influitive as our platform to manage and mobilize our customer advocates. I report to our CEO Nick on a weekly basis the growth in our advocate population and how many challenges were completed that week. If you want to dive deeper into these metrics – and get a sense of several others – the folks at Topo have a great ebook called the Advocate Marketing playbook that goes into more depth here.
- [AK] We launched our TrustRadius user review program in May 2015 at Pulse Conference – which is the event we host every year for the Customer Success industry. Quick PSA, if you haven’t purchased tickets yet and are interested in attending Pulse this May, I want to encourage you to head to gainsight.com/pulse today and secure your tickets. Pricing goes up by $300 at midnight tonight, so definitely take advantage of the cost savings! Anyways – we had a pretty unique opportunity at the conference during the “Gainsight Customer Session” which was effectively a captive audience of 500-800 of our customers or so all in one room. We thought there was an opportunity here to launch our review program in a big way. At a precise time during that session, we sent an automated email to all customer attendees, requesting that they give us a rating on the spot. Our Chief Customer Officer, Dan Steinman, was on stage and asked everyone to pull their phone out – check their email – and give us a rating for a chance to win a seat on our VIP boat cruise later that evening. We secured more than 44 ratings right there on the spot, and then TrustRadius worked on converting those 44 into full reviews afterwards.
- [AK] Since the conference, we work pretty actively with TrustRadius to contact Gainsight customers on our behalf who are in a “post launch” stage on our platform, are at healthy accounts, and had strong adoption numbers. We really like the combination of leveraging our own instance of Gainsight to identify the right advocates at the right time, and then to work with the trusted third party in TrustRadius to solicit the ask for the review. We now have more than 80 ratings and 30 reviews – with much more on the way. We also look for opportunities to engage customers with an ask for a review at our events. This past February we hosted about 100 Chief Customer Officers at an exec summit in Napa. We set up a table out by the breakfast buffet and were able to secure a couple ratings as they got their morning muffin. What I really like about the platform is that the initial ask is all about the rating – quick, easy. TrustRadius then does the heavy lifting to help convert that rating into a more detailed review. The next step for us, in addition to working with TrustRadius on growing the number of reviews and ratings, is to re-engage current reviewers to ask them to expand their reviews, to comment on specific features, and update ratings in areas where our product has improved.
- [AK] So the results 10 months in: 81 in-depth reviews which we are incredibly excited about. The reviews are used by our sales organization during deal cycles – oftentimes either in lieu of formal references or otherwise a deal accelerant or as competitive positioning. This exercise in fact played a very key role in helping drive our overall business performance for the year. We announced in a recent press release having tripled our ARR YoY and having secured a 157% net retention rate. So obviously we’re big believers in the power of unlocking advocacy as an overall growth lever for the business. Firm believer in Customer Success as an umbrella category being the NEW marketing in this new digitally-enabled world. We’re incredibly excited about where we are headed from here – and excited to be partnering with the folks at TrustRadius to help us realize our ambition.
- [VINAY]