Customer Advocacy Fuels Customer-Driven Growth

Drew: Hello, Renegade Marketers! If this is your first time listening, welcome, and if you’re a regular listener, welcome back. Before I present this episode, I’m thrilled to announce the first-ever in-person CMO Super Huddle that we’re hosting in Palo Alto on November 8, 2024. The theme is “Daring Greatness in 2025” and we’re rocking a full slate of inspiring speakers with ample time for networking. Tickets are on sale now, so grab yours at cmohuddles.com. It’s gonna be flocking amazing!

You’re about to listen to a recording from CMO Huddles Studio, our live show featuring the accomplished marketing leaders of CMO Huddles, a community that’s always sharing, caring, and daring each other to greatness. The marketing leaders of this episode are Tejal Parekh, previously of Upside, Rebecca Stone of Cisco Meraki, and Suzanne Reed of LBMC. These Huddlers joined us for a conversation on customer advocacy, from where it sits in the organization to marketing’s role to what success looks like. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to the podcast and leave a review. You’ll be supporting our quest to be the number one podcast for B2B marketers. Okay then, let’s dive in!

Narrator: Welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite, possibly the best weekly podcast for CMOs and everyone else looking for innovative ways to transform their brand, drive demand, and just plain cut through. Proving that B2B does not mean boring to business. Here’s your host and Chief Marketing Renegade, Drew Neisser.

Drew: I’m your host Drew Neisser, live from my home studio in New York City. Most businesses profess to love their customers. However, only a few have figured out how to transform brand love into advocacy on a consistent and scalable basis. Fortunately for you, we have three amazing CMOs as guests to share their approach to turning satisfied customers into persuasive marketing machines. With that, let’s bring on Tejal Parekh, who is the CMO of Upside, and a returning guest who previously appeared on the show to discuss customer marketing – some consistency there. So hello, Tejal, how are you and where are you?

Tejal: Hello, hello. I’m doing really well. Excited to be here. Thank you for having me. And I’m in San Francisco Bay Area, sunny out here.

Drew: Alright. Well, it’s funny, in the pregame, we were talking about this subject of customer advocacy and just why it’s so important but often neglected. So talk a little bit about from a structural standpoint, where you see customer advocacy sitting in the organization, who should own it, and where does the budget come from?

Tejal: Sure, there are a few elements to customer advocacy. So there is the identifying of advocates that typically sits with customer success/talent management. And this is typically done through nominations from CSMs, or you pick your promoters, your advocates based on engagement scores and NPS, and there are a variety of different ways. So there’s the identifying of advocates, and then there’s how do you turn these advocates into evangelists for your company. How do you amplify their voices? How do you give them a platform? That component, that specific area where you’re essentially thinking about it in a programmatic way, that is typically owned by marketing. And I’ve seen this at the last four companies now – my teams have run this. What I find is still very critical with these programs is even though marketing will own the programmatic aspects of it and how to essentially scale it, the goals are still often jointly owned, either with the CSM group or account management, depending on what your ultimate goals are from the advocacy program. So the simple answer is yes, programmatically, marketing should own it, but the goals should be jointly owned across the board, depending on the right stakeholders.

Drew: Well, in truth, you want the customer at the center of the organization, ideally, and so everybody owns it, but the problem we know is that if everybody owns it, nobody owns it. So there’s these dotted lines that you’re talking about, but there’s also issues like territorialness. “Wait, they’re my customer. Why are you talking to them?” Right? And so that’s one battle that I hear CMOs talking about. There’s the “Hey, we think there’s a better way,” or there’s just all sorts of things that come in the way of doing right by the customer and sort of liberating them to be able to be the advocates. What we didn’t get at initially is, where does the funding come from? I mean, does that come right out of your marketing budget? Or do you have a separate budget because there’s co-ownership or at least that sort of goes over here?

Tejal: Yeah, you know, I’ve used a variety of ways to ensure that this critical element of marketing gets funded. When there’s some program in place and I’ve come in to take over, I find that it’s a lot easier when you carve out some of the marketing budget upfront when you’re going through the budgeting and planning cycle, either end of the year or earlier in the year. I mean, when I was overseeing product marketing, we actually ended up launching the program. We ended up going and asking for funding for this net new program. We had a lot bigger vision. We wanted to do something very creative. And so for something like that, we ended up asking for a pot of funds, which ultimately marketing did own, but it was fully supported by the customer success org.

Drew: Right. And if it does have its own budget, then it has its own sort of metrics that go with it and what that looks like. Because, again, the outcome here is—and maybe I should ask you that—what’s success look like? We’ve identified these folks. We sort of got them evangelizing in some way or another, but what’s that look like?

Tejal: Yeah, so I think it’s nuanced, right? The response to something like that would be nuanced. Success will depend on what you’re trying to accomplish with the advocacy. So, for instance, I’ll give you a couple of examples. When you’re thinking about cultivating C-level advocates, that would typically be done through a customer advisory board, like a CAB, and for something like that, the goal at the very early stages could be simply something as basic as “We want to make sure that we’ve enrolled X number of advocates and that they have engaged with us,” and you get to define what engagement looks like. As the program matures—you know, a couple of quarters in, a year and two years in—then you start to add layers of more meaningful, impactful metrics, such as: can we get referrals? How many referrals did we get? Did they speak on our behalf? Did they talk to industry analysts on our behalf? So those metrics will start to get added as your program matures. 

And then there’s the other piece of advocacy as well, which oftentimes people don’t talk about as much. But if you think about scaled advocacy, user advocacy has, again, a variety of different forms, such as advocacy through user review sites like G2, Capterra. For something like that, again, going after it in a programmatic way matters, and success for something like that could be as simple as, “Hey, did we get the X number of users talking about us around the categories that we cared about?” And I’ll again use a prior example here, where we did launch a program for customer advocacy, getting the user reviews, and within a couple of quarters, we had more than 100 people talking about Meta’s workplace product, and especially talking about the particular category that we were interested in. So I think it varies depending on what your goals are from advocacy.

Drew: Yeah, and probably maturity, right? In terms of you’ve identified these folks, you’ve brought them together, as you described it, in a customer advisory board, which typically are a little bit smaller than a large-scale thing. Then there’s some goodness that’s happening behind the scenes here. I’m imagining one is that particularly with customer advisory boards, they’re giving you input. You’re responding to that input. Hopefully, they’re making the product better for themselves. The advocacy part comes because, hey, they listen to me and so forth. But then there’s always this dream of, can we scale it, right? And that’s this moment where sometimes it gets problematic, and I know we’re going to talk about that more in a moment. The user review thing is such an interesting play, because I know on some of those websites, you can actually go and solicit reviews, but it then says “solicited review,” right? So there’s that question: can I trust this review? So how do you do it—is there a way to do it organically so they actually do it, and they’re doing it because they want to, not because you either paid them or incentivized them or something?

Tejal: You can prompt them so you don’t need to incentivize them. But you can certainly prompt them to write the review. And there are smarter ways to go about it. You can certainly look at it in terms of who are some of your most engaged users, who are the highest adopters in product notifications just to them, as reminders, “Hey, do you love this product? If you do, it’d be fantastic to get your review.” So I think there are smart ways to do it, but again, it’s about what capabilities you have as an organization and what you’re trying to achieve.

Drew: Awesome. Okay, alright. Well, we’ll come back to you, but right now we’re going to bring on Rebecca Stone, Senior Vice President of Customer Solutions Marketing at Cisco, and an industry expert who’s graced our stage before to delve into the topic of sales enablement and branding for large enterprises. Hello, Rebecca. It’s great to see you.

Drew: It is great to see you as well. How are you and where are you?

Rebecca: I’m doing good. I am in Marin County, which is just above San Francisco.

Drew: Awesome. Well, let’s start with—I mean, just your title, Customer Solutions Marketing—that feels like it’s the tip of, you know, the beginning of a customer advocacy program. But talk a little bit about that role specifically, and then let’s get into advocacy.

Rebecca: So I handle marketing for the Cisco Networking portfolio of products, which is about 70-80% of the overall Cisco portfolio. That is where I own the full remit from demand gen all the way through product marketing, and then I also own some of the messaging around cross-architecture solutions with other parts of the Cisco portfolio. Customer advocacy for Cisco Networking is definitely part of my remit, and then we work with the broader Cisco marketing team on advocacy overall for both our products as well as the Cisco portfolio in general.

Drew: So you’ve got your fingers in this pie of advocacy, but talk a little bit about the programs or what you’ve done, or how are you approaching advocacy?

Rebecca: So I think there’s a lot that’s actually similar to what Tejal talked about previously. How we think about advocacy is, if you think about the one-to-many down to the one-to-one approach of customer advocacy, there’s different layers of how you engage. I think a customer review site like TechRadius, or any one of the other ones that she mentioned, is definitely like the one-to-many, where you are trying to get as much advocacy as you can in, I guess, as impersonal a way as possible. It’s more through emails and not necessarily through individual touch points. 

And then you work your way up through maybe an online site that you own, that is a customer advocacy site where you’re pulling in customer feedback and customer community sites. That’s still one-to-many, but it’s slightly more personal than a third-party review site. Above that would be starting to get into the more personal thing. So I think about CABs and individual one-to-one relationships, where you’re building customer advocacy, and each of those things requires a different focus and a different relationship, both with the customer and with your sales and CX teams in order to manage through that. 

You know, you asked who manages, who owns the budget? I think sales and CX clearly own the relationship to start with, but oftentimes, what happens in customer advocacy is those relationships start to distribute to other executives throughout the organization as you get more exposure to them, it starts to distribute to the people within marketing who are running those advocacy programs. And so the deeper the relationship becomes, the more people become involved in that relationship. But you should always be sort of centering around that sales or CX, whoever owns the relationship, centering around that person and making sure that they’re in the know of what else is going on everywhere in the organization.

Drew: One of the conflicts that I see a lot—interested in your point of view on this—is that you have someone whose title might be customer success, but they’re incentivized to sell more. They’re not really there to make sure that the person uses the product and is successful. And so there’s a little bit of a problem when we talk about advocacy in particular because you’re kind of looking for something else. You want to be satisfied and you want to feel so good, they share it. There is a point in time where what you’re measuring, like more revenue per customer, gets in the way of what you might want from an advocacy program. So talk about how you walk that line and how you make sure persistently you’re doing this right.

Rebecca: I think it’s important to call out that different organizations are organized differently. So in some relationships, sales owns all of that, right? Like any additional revenue that comes from a customer is sales, and customer support is truly there in a support capacity to make sure that we’re driving adoption or that we’re driving customer satisfaction. So I think a little bit of that, Drew, depends on the organization and how that organization is set up. 

At Cisco, it’s a little bit of both, depending on what part of the portfolio we’re dealing with, because there are some that are more SaaS-based, and so support needs to drive more of an adoption motion. And then there’s some where they are selling services, then it’s more of a customer services type of organization. And so we have a little bit of both. I think our account managers at Cisco are truly the ones who own the entire relationship. And yes, they drive revenue, but they also own the relationship, and there’s more specialist sales that are driving individual revenue. 

And so we do truly see the AMs as our partner—the AM as an account manager—as our partner in that. But that’s why I do think marketing is so important in customer advocacy, because, as with a lot of other things, like whether it be product marketing and messaging or the customer relationship, we have to take more of a neutral approach to the customer and see the customer both as an opportunity to talk about our products. But honestly, a lot of times, what I find with customer advocacy is what other customers find most valuable is that those customers who are advocating for us advocate for us in the context of the ecosystem that they are working in. So they might have competitor products, they might have different products that they find more central to their priorities than our products, but as long as they weave in the examples of how our products fit into their ecosystem, that’s what’s valuable. And the other customers find that more valuable than them just talking about our products.

Drew: So interesting. And it is this complex thing. I had a revelation the other day, and maybe I was just incredibly stupid before, but someone framed… 

Rebecca: I doubt that

Drew: No, quite possible. If my wife were here, she’d say “totally possible.” Customer success is – is the customer successful? And I never really looked at it like that. Customer success often comes out as “Oh, this customer is saying nice things about us.” Those are very different things. And so within customer success, are they really looking to see if they’re using the product in a way that is helping them become a hero in their organization? That’s what customer success is, right? But it’s… anyway, it’s a funny little thing. But I was like, “Whoa, that’s a light bulb.” So now advocacy, and the purpose of advocacy, in theory, is to release – enable the customer who’s happy to release their joy out into the world, right?

Rebecca: I think what I would challenge there is, yes, you want them to talk in a positive way – absolutely, I’m not questioning that about your products – but it’s also just as valuable for customers who have had challenges. Let’s say with implementation, and have learned from that in helping other customers learn to not make the same mistakes. So it’s not like you just want to talk about all of the good things. You want them to talk about their journey to using our products, and what they’ve learned in that journey, whether it be good or bad, and that helps to build the loyalty because you, as an organization, come off as a trusted partner. Rather than that we’re just trying to sell you something. We actually want – I do believe in every company that I work for – that our products can help our customers. We want to make our customers successful, and we have to take that approach to customer advocacy as well.

Drew: Such a good point. I’m so glad you brought that up because there are several studies, and I remember one of our clients years ago was a cable service provider, and any interaction at all, whether it was with a call center or the helpline, even if it was negative, ended up with a jump in Net Promoter Score, because as long as they got it resolved. Secondly, on a review site, if you only see positive reviews, you’re quite inclined not to believe them. If they’re all positive, it must be fake. So a couple of real ones that you addressed and said, “Hey, you’re right, we can do better” goes a long way. So really great point. Thank you for sharing that. Alright, well, we’re going to come back to you. 

Let’s bring on Suzanne Reed, who’s patiently been waiting. 

Suzanne: Hello! 

Drew: Hello! Suzanne is the CMO of LBMC and has previously joined us to shed light on the intricacies of content marketing and managing your marketing mix. So, Suzanne, welcome back.

Suzanne: Thank you.

Drew: And so how are you, and where are you?

Suzanne: I am doing great, and I am in Nashville, Tennessee, so I am all the way on the other side.

Drew: Alright, well, at least you’re bringing a little balance here, because with New York, we got West Coast, kind of south, north – awesome. Alright. Well, you’ve heard our first two esteemed panelists, if you will. What sounded familiar and what’s different with what you’re doing at LBMC?

Suzanne: I think Rebecca and Tojal really did a great job of summing up. And I think about both of them – they kind of had products, right? They have a tangible product, whereas I’m in a world of service, and it’s professional service, so it’s even a little more unique and specialized. But I think we all agree, customer advocacy sits everywhere in the organization, but I strongly agree that the marketers, kind of as the voice of the client and the advocate for the client, always have a heavy role. And here at LBMC, I think we play kind of that connector, that hub, if you will, among the client service teams, among our sales teams. 

So it’s everyone’s responsibility. But retention has become – and I believe personally going forward – we’ve talked a lot about talent retention, talent ambassadors, talent marketing, if you will, talent brand. We’re getting ready to get back to client-centric, client retention, client lifetime values. I think that’s becoming much more top of mind in discussions as I talk to other CMOs and, quite honestly, even other Chief Growth Officers, Chief Revenue Officers. We know keeping our current clients is the best way to grow and the best way to stay sustainable. 

I think it also talks about that continuity of having marketing. And I think Rebecca brought up a great point – the sales is going to bring it in, your client account teams might do some servicing, but they typically have a revenue goal. So where’s the continuity of that third party to basically make sure we’re following that client journey, that customer journey through the entire cycle? And we’re not just getting the positive remarks, we’re getting that true feedback that we can then utilize for content and messaging and brand visibility going forward.

Drew: You know, as you’ve talked about it, I mean, I think with professional services, having customers who will advocate on your behalf and be references is everything, right?

Suzanne: Absolutely, absolutely everything. And you made a great point earlier – if everything’s always positive, people kind of question how legit that is. I think our ability to recover when there are issues is important. We do utilize some user reviews, but we are sensitive to that because it is sometimes sensitive information. However, when clients do that for us, or they do refer, which we have – a large percentage of our business comes from referrals – that means even more in our business world because of the professional services aspect.

Drew: Put some bones, if you will, or meat on the bones of your advocacy program at LBMC.

Suzanne: We, I think, are very traditional in that we’ve been very much about the NPS. That’s been huge – if they’re willing to promote, that’s a very easy way for us to indicate the advocacy of our clients and get that solid number, right? Here’s the ones we know. But I think over this next year, we’re actually laying in what I would consider a true client satisfaction survey, where we’re going to add on to that NPS. From there, that’s going to feed back into our client account service managers, who are the ones that actually take care of – they’re kind of the boots on the ground with our service teams that take care of the clients. And then we are also adding in – I was glad to hear you all talking about the Client Advisory Board – adding that in to really make sure that we’ve got a group that we can bounce ideas off of, get some real feedback, both good and bad, to know how we need to move forward. We think of advocates as people who will give us honest, credible feedback to make LBMC better and to make us easy to do business with, so that we can ensure that we’re doing the best job for our clients as possible. And I love what you said regarding client success – really it’s their success, and we lean on that heavily because if the client is not doing well, then they’re going to use less and less of our services. And so that’s a huge testament to us when they do well and have success.

Drew: So many good things. I do want to make a point on the NPS thing. For years, folks that just relied on that one score drove me crazy because it’s just this moment in time without any depth whatsoever, right? It’s like, “Oh, why are you happy?”

Suzanne: It’s a balance sheet. It’s just at that particular time – tomorrow, the whole world could change, right?

Drew: And particularly since, like, if you call a wireless telephone company right after you’ve had an interaction, they will measure your Net Promoter Score. And the odds are at that moment, you know that it’s about this one individual. You’re going to be nice, but it’s not going to really give you much detail at all. It’s just, “Hey, are things good or are things bad?” And I think it all depends. There are so many different places where you have customer touch points that you need to get a much deeper thing, and this means having ongoing dialogue with your customers, right? And obviously, having a way of managing that because it feels like when customer advocacy programs fail, all of the customer information is just sitting out there with somebody like a salesperson. It’s not getting looped in.

Suzanne: Correct. So how do you listen for the client feedback intent, and then how do you distribute that information back out? I do think that’s exactly where marketing kind of plays again as that hub and that connector. If we rely on one source, we’re going to probably get led down a bad path, right? So it’s client satisfaction feedback, it’s NPS, it’s social, it’s listening, it’s anecdotal information from sales, from the client service teams, etc.

Drew: Yeah. And as you were talking about that, I was thinking about the fact that if an account manager owns that feedback and they’re the filter, well, guess what they’re going to do? They’re going to say everything’s wonderful because that’s their job to make sure that everything is wonderful. So not exactly. And similarly, if it’s a salesperson who maybe owns it, and their job is to increase revenue, they’re not going to necessarily worry about the satisfaction at the moment, other than hopefully, they have enough that they can sell in more.

Suzanne: Yeah, or I’ve always argued the salespeople will always give us that negative feedback because they want to make everything as easy and limited as possible around them being able to get the sale, right? So you’ve got to be careful where you get that feedback from. And is it true customer sentiment, or is it more team member sentiment?

Drew: And so this is why, in my mind, trying to move the customer relationship into a place that is sort of a neutral zone would be ideal. I know it’s next to impossible, but I live in an idealistic notion. Because if we are getting real feedback and getting suggestions for improvement, and sometimes there’s just bad chemistry between individuals, we can filter that and be aware of it. Then, as an organization, we can grow. Ultimately, your happy customer is going to lead to more. So alright, well, now that we’ve solved this problem completely, we could just wrap up, but we’re not going to, because I’m going to bring all of you back and I’m going to talk about CMO huddles for a second.

CMO Huddles was launched in 2020. My God, we’re four years old! CMO Huddles is a close-knit community of over 300 highly effective B2B marketers who share, care, and dare each other to greatness. Given the extraordinary time constraints on CMOs, everything about CMO Huddles is designed to help leaders save time and empower them to make faster, better decisions. 

Tejal. Rebecca, Suzanne, you’re all incredibly busy marketing leaders, and you’ve been with us for quite a while. I’m wondering if there’s any specific circumstance that you want to share that would shed light on some way that maybe CMO Huddles has helped you.

Rebecca: I think even though my time has gotten more and more limited, I am still in the Slack channel all of the time, and a lot of the CMOs that I have made friends with from previous meetings, I’m still in contact with and still ask for advice on a regular basis. So I continue to see value in all of the connections that you are giving to us and managing for us, and appreciate it.

Drew: Well, I appreciate that. Rebecca was with us from literally day one, in her kitchen, in her laundry room closet. 

Rebecca: That is true! 

Drew: Oh my gosh, and yeah, we’ve… it’s funny what that first year was like because it was so intense, but delighted that you’re getting value out of the Slack and continue to have those colleagues to help you through it. Tejal?

Tejal: I’ve been with CMO Huddles for a few years now, Drew, and I think similar to what Rebecca shared, the time has gotten more and more limited to engage with the community, but every single time that I just like to chime in on Slack or respond to someone or ask a question, this is a community of very knowledgeable, experienced set of executives that I just feel that this has been my tribe any time I have come across any kind of hard-to-solve problem. So I value that a lot. And as you know, many CMOs will tell you it’s hard to find peer feedback or exchange ideas with someone when you’re the CMO at the company. It’s harder to find other equally experienced marketers who can give you that different point of view. And I find the CMO Huddles very valuable in providing that.

Drew: I love that. Thank you for sharing that. Suzanne?

Suzanne: I think one of the major things that I’ve really enjoyed, and I continue to see, is that it just helps us validate our thoughts or commiserate as we’re all struggling with some of the same challenges, whether it’s internal as being part of the leadership teams, or whether it’s budget or whether it’s just economic shifts. Having that team to be able to commiserate with and validate thoughts, it’s truly beneficial, and I have considered it to be very value-added.

Drew: Well, thank you for that. Well, if you’re a B2B CMO, why are you going it alone? Do yourself a favor and check out cmohuddles.com. We’re happy to offer you a one-month guest pass. So check that out. Okay, let’s get back to exploring what success looks like. What’s all come on camera? Could you share a story of how you’ve leveraged customer advocacy to drive the business forward? And you could be in the current role or in the past. And let’s start with Suzanne because you were the last up.

Suzanne: You know, this is a very simple, pragmatic way, but that’s kind of my MO. We have used customer advocacy in just doing some content with clients, getting on video and actually advocating for us. Several have been very high profile that have basically said, “I have used them at every company I’ve started” or “I have been with them for 25 years.” And you know, in the professional services world, there’s not many better customer advocacy comments than someone who has leveraged us at every business that they’ve started or used us. One of them was even our economic director at the state level. So again, just to me, a very pragmatic way to use a client.

Drew: For content and getting them on video is so interesting. Rebecca?

Rebecca: I’ve worked in a number of companies where we have large enterprise customers that we sell to. And as many CMOs probably know, it is very hard to get those largest of the large enterprises to be advocates for you. And one of the things that I found successful is we started to do a series of road shows where we got people to attend. Through attendance of those road shows, we built relationships with those people. Those relationships turned into “okay, maybe I’ll talk for 30 minutes at one of those road shows that’s going to be in my area” to “okay, maybe I’ll travel with you to another one of those road shows,” to being able to speak at some of our largest events, and being willing to place more public stories. So a lot of times, just in the same way that sales has to work, it is about building the relationship, building the trust that you’re going to use that relationship in a way that is valuable for the person as well as valuable for your own company. So I think that, from a large enterprise organization perspective, is probably the best experience that I’ve had in the past that I’m really proud of – getting those big companies to, Suzanne’s point, who are really willing to go up and say, “We use you, and we couldn’t do our jobs without you.”

Drew: It’s funny because as I’m listening to what I’m hearing is this is very much like a sales journey, in that you’ve got to build it, and you’re delivering value initially in order to get the value later. So you know where you want to go, but you know it’s a four-step process, not one. You can’t just say, “Hey, want to do a testimonial for us?” You got to earn it. I think that’s so interesting. And I hadn’t really heard of the road show to the relationship to the “Hey, you want to speak at the next road show? Hey, you want to speak at our conference?” So this is interesting part, because this is in this world of speed to hero, right? How quickly can you make this person look like a hero within their industry or organization? And in this case, it’s not fast.

Rebecca: I have not found a single solid customer advocacy program that is an overnight success. It takes time to develop and a lot of effort to develop.

Drew: Yeah. Well, if any of you are watching the Franklin program, what you realize is that he totally got that. It took him a long time to build the relationship with France to become the advocate that they were. Adams, on the other hand, wanted to ask for the order the day he arrived. Didn’t work out. He got kicked out of the country. So there. Now, Tejal, your thoughts on what success look likes?

Tejal: Suzanne talked about content. Rebecca talked about road shows and building relationships. We’ve done both of those at some of the previous roles that I’ve had, and 100% vouch for that. It’s one of the most effective ways of giving them the voice to talk about your company. One other piece that we didn’t talk enough about that I’ve again found very helpful is when you have their thoughtful advocates engaged through a program such as the customer advisory board. Their feedback to you on your product roadmap, on your messaging – if we are looking to redo certain messaging, does that resonate? All of that is incredibly valuable that you’re not going to easily be able to replicate through any other forum. So that’s the one piece that I’ve seen extremely successful when the program is done right. The other piece that, again, I don’t think we talk about enough, which is when you’re thinking about especially in B2B enterprise products, you often work with analysts. AR is an important program for you, and leveraging your most thoughtful advocates and placing them in front of those analysts, having them talk about your products, having them give the nuanced feedback about the product to the analysts – again, can work wonders for you. It has helped me in the past win some favorable opinions with analysts. And again, you cannot do that on your own without your most powerful advocates. I think those are some of the other angles that often get overlooked when we talk about advocacy.

Drew: I’m so glad you brought up analysts. We probably need to do a separate show on it, but it is an issue for so many companies because they are an important influencer in so many markets. But the notion of getting a client to come with you – I know that’s not new news, but it’s a great reminder. It speaks to all of this, which is your customers are far more believable than you are, than anyone in your organization, no matter who it is, and that’s a hard thing sometimes for people to swallow. Like the CEO might think “I’m the most believable person.” No, no. Stay back for a second. Let your customers do the talking. Okay, so how – this is a question that someone in our community asked actually via our Slack channel – how do you manage social channels with customers? You know, some folks certainly in B2C land these days, you know, create a separate social tool and use it, and some B2B brands do that as well. But how are you approaching social channels? And maybe Rebecca, does that play out in your world given it’s enterprise?

Rebecca: Oh yeah. I mean, we definitely use social, and I think we use it in a variety of different ways. There are customers who come and ask questions and are complaining sometimes about something, so it is a customer service channel in some ways, and we have some processes for managing that experience. We also use it from an advocacy perspective. We have a great thing for one of the parts of the business – Meraki customers share their pictures of what we call “Meraki in the wild.” So just our products that are out and about wherever they see them. It’s all technology and hardware technology, so like a lot of our switches that have nicely styled versus very messy cables and the before and after. So just some kind of fun, engaging things that are aligned to what our audience cares about. We use it as an engagement tool to just build the brand and loyalty of those customers, you lknow, “Hey, we actually understand what you’re doing and how you’re doing it,” and that has turned into some great advocacy online for us.

Drew: It’s funny, it could be a little chicken and egg, because in an ideal world, it was the customer who might have said “Meraki in the wild” first, and then you adapt it and let them go. But yeah, sometimes you have to plant the seed and let them run with it.

Rebecca: Yeah, and we give away things like socks and silly things for people to share, to share those pictures, to kind of increase the engagement and things like that. You have to think about that as a way to get your customers to advocate for you.

Drew: Tejal or Suzanne, you want to weigh in on social?

Tejal: I’ve not seen a lot of success. We’ve tried different platforms, sometimes our own channel, sometimes relying on Slack as a community. What I’ve found, similar to what Rebecca shared, is with the executives, it’s hit or miss. You’re going to be able to connect with them through more of a one-on-one forum, or sometimes through email, believe it or not. With users, I think it’s easier to create a Slack group and engage them through that. There’s a sense of community, there’s a sense of just exchange of information. So I think depending on the audience, you’ll have to try out what’s going to work for that particular audience. With exact audience, that’s harder than I would say users.

Drew: Interesting. Okay, so let’s focus for a second on – and so the reason why I wanted to have this conversation, particularly with the three of you, is that by talking about customers and customer advocacy, we’re saying that the CMO cares more about than just short-term revenue pipeline and so forth, because those are all lagging indicators. Customer satisfaction, on the other hand, is really what’s happening in the real world. Because if you see a change in customer satisfaction, that’s a frontline indicator things are good or bad, and certainly with advocacy, you have the same sort of equally important bellwether. So what are you – how are you measuring it and advocacy overall? And do you use any tools? And how do you also translate that into the language of the board, which is revenue, revenue, right? And how do you get them to see that this nurture program, like in your case, Rebecca, you talked about this long-term road show thing, eventually ended up in advocacy, and that was all good. How do you put that into business value? And is it even possible?

Suzanne: I absolutely think it’s possible. And I think the way we talk about it is your customer advocacy, or just in general, talking about our clients’ retention is key, and that’s an immediate driver to growth. Because the more clients we lose, the more we’ve got to go back out to fill that bucket back up, and it makes it harder for us to achieve top-line growth, and it impacts your profitability. So when we’re talking to the leaders, the board, we’re just talking about smart growth, and smart growth starts with retention of your clients. And how do you do that? You’ve got to make sure they’re engaged. I don’t think there’s one customer advocacy tool. I think you got to look at a myriad of things. I think you’ve got to know, are your clients engaged, especially your top 100? Going back to the principle of 80% of your revenues probably coming from 20% of your clients, making sure you’ve got that group locked down. I think it’s your NPS. I think it’s monitoring social, and then I think it’s just being, as we like to say, self-aware of what’s going on, and kind of looking at all of those in tandem, and then measuring your customer lifetime value so that you’ve got several factors driving those things you can talk intelligently about where your customer advocacy really sits at the top of the house.

Drew: Rebecca, how about you in terms of measurement and translating that into business value?

Rebecca: Yeah, so I think there’s a couple of things. We own NPS for, again, certain parts of the business, so we are able to track satisfaction scores overall. CX does own, from a particular link, “Hey, when a customer calls in, are they satisfied with that call and the resolution of the complaint?” or whatever, but we have an overarching NPS that we look at and follow. I think the second component of it is, I think everybody, CEOs even, get the concept. And this is why I think it’s really important to get those larger organizations, those bigger companies with the brand names that people recognize. I think CEO on down recognizes that having that as an advocate – there’s not a lot of like, nobody’s gonna say, “Oh no, don’t have Walmart” – I’m not saying Walmart is a customer, I’m just – it’s a big customer – like, “Don’t have Walmart on the webpage.” I think everybody understands that large organizations with strong brand affinity are good for you to attach yourself to. And so there’s not a lot of having to explain that. If you get that success. Now, because it takes so long and because it is a slower process, sometimes you have to stave off the “Well, why are we spending our time here and not on something else?” But if you have the patience, eventually it pays off. And then people are like, “Oh, I get it,” but it sometimes takes a little bit of “Don’t look over here, look over here.”

Drew: This is the problem with a lot of marketing – it takes time, right? And this is the problem. And with in a short-term world, it gets very difficult.

Rebecca: So that’s why I think it’s good to do things like, if I’m tracking NPS on a quarterly basis, I can show you that in real time every quarter, like how that is working. I can show you the feedback that we’re getting from things like customer advisory boards in the immediate that people feel like. So you just have to balance the short-term value that you drive with some of those things that are longer term, and they may not – like a lot of people outside of marketing as an organization may not even see a lot of that background work that you’re doing until it comes to fruition in a year or two. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. It’s just that you have to also be focused. You have to be balancing the short term with the long term.

Drew: I have heard of businesses that can equate a quarter-point change in NPS with actual revenue and business, or at least project it. Have any of you experienced that, where you could look at NPS and see that and correlate it kind of directly with revenue, one way or another?

Rebecca: I think we can from a retention perspective because we know how much it takes to acquire a customer, and we know how much less it takes to retain a customer, and NPS is tied directly to retention for us. And so from there, it’s easy to correlate that, you know, the more customers that are happy, the fewer customers we have to get into the top of the funnel.

Drew: Right, because they’re not falling off the back of the truck. So we can start it as a base, and we can – they’re not only keeping them as a revenue stream but possibly growing them. Okay, so far, we’ve covered the fact that customer advocacy is a joint effort across the organization. We’ve talked about the ability that it can be measured. We’ve talked about the ability that it sometimes takes longer than people might want. So you have to bring some focus to it. Okay, so final words of wisdom for other CMOs when it comes to developing a strong customer advocacy program. And Suzanne, since you were last, you get to go first.

Suzanne: I would just say, repeating what Rebecca said a few times, that it’s a long play, but you need to have some short goals and a long goal.

Drew: Long play. So have some patience and sell that in. This is going to take some time, but I suspect part of this is showing them what success looks like. And I love what Rebecca said earlier on – it’s like nobody complained if it was, you could say, Disney’s a client. That’s going to look good. Nobody’s going to say, “Oh, that’s terrible. Don’t do that.” Okay. Now, Rebecca, final words of wisdom.

Rebecca: I would say customer advocacy is a must-have for marketing, and make sure that you are investing in the people and the time in order to build a strong customer advocacy program. Doing that requires a series of many-to-many and all the way down to a one-to-one relationship. Think about how you’re building each of those.

Drew: From a skill set perspective, I love it. Okay, Tejal?

Tejal: I would say that in addition to everything that Rebecca and Suzanne shared, this is often overlooked as a program, but it pays when done right. It pays so many dividends. It’s important to figure out, even if you start at a small scale, start somewhere, get it going, because it takes time. It takes time to turn it into something that will pay off dividends in the long run.

Drew: You’re going to start no matter what. We got to start down this road of customer advocacy. And I want to remind – this is something I say in huddles all the time – one of the things that a CMO can say in every boardroom that will get the pencils to drop and be quiet is, “I was talking to a customer the other day.” It is guaranteed to get their attention because ultimately, everybody realizes that without customers, we don’t have much of a business. Thank you, Tejal, Rebecca, Suzanne – you’re all amazing sports, and thank you audience for staying with us.

To hear more conversations like this one and submit your questions while we’re live, join us on the next CMO Huddles Studio. We stream to my LinkedIn profile—that’s Drew Neisser—every other week!

Show Credits

Renegade Marketers Unite is written and directed by Drew Neisser. Hey, that’s me! This show is produced by Melissa Caffrey, Laura Parkyn, and Ishar Cuevas. The music is by the amazing Burns Twins and the intro Voice Over is Linda Cornelius. To find the transcripts of all episodes, suggest future guests, or learn more about B2B branding, CMO Huddles, or my CMO coaching service, check out renegade.com. I’m your host, Drew Neisser. And until next time, keep those Renegade thinking caps on and strong!