The document is from Waypoint Research Group and is about renewal and repurchase rates from Advocamp 2016. It contains renewal rate data showing that the overall renewal rate for all accounts was 96.77% and the renewal rate for accounts not providing feedback was 77.5%. It also lists the repurchase rate as 22% within 3 months of the initial purchase. The document contains contact information for Steve B. from Waypoint Research Group.
This isn’t a tweak on a marketing campaign.
Who’s here to hear about a “do something different” strategy?
Even if Marketing does a great job filling the funnel, if the customer isn’t a good fit, the bucket will leak. We’ve seen in our research that when you try to engage with these customers, you’ll have problems down the road with case stories, references, etc
Who here is concerned with top line revenue? Who here is concerned with longer term profitability?
Regardless of your short-term or long-term view, we’re all here for the same reason…. We understand that we need an army of advocates, but in order to build it we need to recruit.
Which means we need to ask them… are they with us, or not with us?
If we’re going to ask them, we need to recognize that B2B is different from B2C in many ways. One key aspect of B2B is that it’s generally characterized by a relationship between 2 companies, human or otherwise. So you need to understand the strength of that relationship, which is comprised of building blocks.
Think of each block as an account.
An account lights up red/yellow/or green based on the relationship strength.
You might also have churned accounts (blue)
Or disengaged accounts (wood)
We’re B2B and these are our “customers” – it’s not B2C where they might have been a one-off transaction. When you’re asking your customers if they would be willing to be a part of your Advocate Army, you want COVERAGE. The more the better, right?
Your company works with many accounts, and those accounts have many different profiles –
small vs large
Industry
Regions
Use cases, etc
The aggregate is based on building blocks. And you should be able to see patterns in those building blocks that help you target the right patterns. But instead, here’s what typically happens
Here’s how companies typically ask –
they send a survey, and they get results like this
and in this example they had a ~80% retention rate and couldn’t figure out why the NPS was high but retention so low
they look at the aggregate, but feedback is built on individual accounts (image of building blocks)
We know that there is a relationship – these aren’t Transactional” customers – so we can easy measure census. So we dove in deeper:
and found actual NPS was much lower
i.e. that their NPS didn’t represent the business at all
Then we looked at how well the feedback represented the business and found that silent accounts were 7x more likely to churn
So we see that participation in the feedback effort – with proper positioning – can be a predictor of churn.
AND what do you think more engaged customers do…?
Need to look at the profile of those engaged customers. Do they come from small business or large? From specific industries?
Just like feedback is built on building blocks of individual accounts, account-level feedback is also built on individual contacts
Our friendly client also made the mistake of relying on references that were no longer feeling the love
Diving into their feedback, they weren’t seeing the value. There’s a value equation that needs to be considered – is this about expectations, or execution?
If you want to build your Advocate Army then let’s put it all together:
Existing customers with strong relationships:
Find out which contacts in which accounts are not just “with” you, but also seeing value and success. They are your army
What is the profile of these accounts? How does it relate to strategy?
Existing customers with weak relationships: How much money in that segment? Is it strategic?
So what’s next? START SMALL
Harness – who are the right people to engage with internally? Start with strategy, then pull in CSMs that can get you access to those accounts
Engage
Address
Reveal