A reference manager walks into a bar. The bartender rolls his eyes and says, "Let me guess, five of everything?" The manager says, "That was yesterday, now I need 20".
Whether that joke earned a rueful smile or a grimace likely depends on where you sit in your org chart - at the top or near the bottom. Either way, the punchline underscores three tough problems in advocate management:
A spiraling demand for references that’s overwhelming managers and reference management tools, Advocate managers are being forced to meet their needs for referenceable customers by qualifying and pairing advocates hastily and haphazardly,
Underused, overused, neglected and disenchanted advocates are disengaging from companies at a time when these companies need them the most.
These pressures aren’t merely connected, they’re symbiotic. Heavier demand for advocates leads to hastier qualifying, which leads to slapdash recommendations and lousy follow-up. Poor connections disenchant more advocates, which sours more relationships and chokes more sales. Companies then scramble to keep up by – you guessed it – sourcing more advocates.
Let’s explore these issues and peek at one company’s solution.
“Running a company’s advocate switchboard is usually the job of Reference Managers (also called Customer Operations or Customer Marketing). As reference management pains grow acute, more and more companies are minting dedicated, ‘Advocate Managers’ and supplying them with tools and systems they need. For simplicity’s sake we use Advocate Manager as a catch-all title.
Even a modestly-sized company endlessly feeds advocates to the hungry, upturned mouths of its organization: Sales needs satisfied customers with vertical expertise, marketing asks for analysts, product management wants academics for white papers, sales engineers need early adopters and so on down the chain. For companies that are growing rapidly, those internal demands are so often overwhelming for the customer marketers tasked with serving up advocates.
Mining the CRM system for advocates can only take a company so far. Does the system track the advocate’s satisfaction levels? The kind of activities the advocate finds rewarding? What drives the advocate to action? Without good tools and solid processes that interface with multiple people in the organization plus the advocate herself, sorting the best fish from thousands of red herrings doesn’t happen quickly, if at all.
Faced with insatiable demands on one side and an incomplete CRM system on the other, Advocate Managers respond in a perfectly reasonable way: they spend less time qualifying. This leads us to problem #2.
Where there’s volume, there’s dilution – and dilution is as bad for advocates as it is for currency.
Quality dilution impacts reference management in three ways:
The combination of volume, poor screening and thin data can mean:
The revenue machine requires an advocate machine to function at peak performance.
Advocates don’t ask for much. They don’t offer their time and expertise for entirely altruistic reasons, of course, but on the whole they are low-cost solvents that can be applied to all sorts of sticky business problems. The best of these advocates are incredibly useful.
Trouble is, the cascade issues we’ve presented here – zooming demand, ad hoc qualifying, and poor pairings with no follow-up - are damaging advocate relationships.
First, a manic, diluted intake makes the most reliable and convincing advocates – VIPs, champions, whales, whatever you call ‘em – that much more visible and valuable. This leads to overselection, overuse and burnout. (AdvocateHub helps companies red-flag these dangers while boosting advocate engagement and development). Even the most ardent supporter can only be asked for so much, so often.
Second, the hasty qualifying advocates and slipshod reporting makes it difficult to do any of the following:
A disenchanted, unengaged advocate is a double loss. Their support and expertise vanishes and resources must be expended to replace them. And thanks to the viral power of social media, passionate champions can become passionate detractors. Alienating a VIP advocate in this way can damage an organization in many ways.
Motivating advocates with a standardized program, like a loyalty program but for advocacy actions, is a relatively new idea that is rapidly gaining traction. A few forward-looking companies have dedicated resources and applied comprehensive tools to the cultivation and engagement of these vital corporate assets.
One such company is, Zuora, a world leader in recurring billing and payment solutions. Zuora has unified its sales references, marketing references, social proof products and social media participation under the terrific Katrina Wong. Reporting to the VP of Marketing, Katrina is the interface between the people in her organization that require advocates and the advocates themselves.
On the sales side, she ensures that when advocates are required they are well-matched with the right prospects, so that both derive value from the conversation, Zuora gets the outcome they want as well. While she interacts with advocates daily, she has deployed tools that help her communicate efficiently and motivate her contacts to deepen and broaden the types of advocacy activities that they participate in.
Together we are working on a system that recognizes and rewards the advocates based on their activities and contributions, while relaying metrics on strategic and financial success derived from the advocate’s efforts. Katrina’s efforts have clear quantitative benefits, speeding up the sales cycle especially, which both improves revenue production while decreasing sales costs. But the qualitative benefits are also significant. It feels great to work collaboratively with your best customers to move the company forward. Customer advocate programs extend the four walls of the company and invite the advocates in - for everyone’s benefit.
Do you manage customer marketing for your company? I want to hear your ideas. How have you solved challenges by motivating your advocates? How do you measure your success?
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