There is nothing more valuable than an advocate who helps bring in new deals, expedite deals in pipe, and close existing deals. What your customers say about you when you’re not in the room is what makes or breaks high growth businesses. We all know that references are crucial in moving deals forward, especially when prospects get to the later stages of the buying cycle and need that extra validation from existing happy customers before signing on the dotted line. But corralling references can be a tricky tightrope to walk. You want to carefully curate and protect your valuable customer relationships without overtaxing them. And when prospects come knocking for referrals, they’re often needed yesterday!
So how do you elegantly dance on this tightrope at scale when you’ve got multiple deals in motion and limited customer resources? I sat down with Brittany Mullen, Senior Director of Customer Advocacy and Engagement at BMC Software to get her take. She shared two golden nuggets of advice that have completely changed how I think about leveraging customer voices. Read on or watch our short video interview below (2.5 minutes).
Episode 4
The Power of Community
Brittany’s first tip was to double down on creating a strong customer community that makes your advocates feel the love year-round. Not just when you need something. No more transactional “what have you done for me lately” relationships. This community should feel like a nurturing home they want to keep returning to and contributing to.
Some best practices here include creating a private online community forum, organizing exclusive in-person events and dinners, sending thoughtful customer appreciation gifts, and overdelivering on support. Make sure there are open communication channels where customers can ask questions and engage with each other and your team.
Facilitate introductions to other like-minded customer advocates who may share common challenges and goals. Get creative in building genuine connections, hosting co-creation sessions to develop product enhancements, and celebrating customer success stories.
When you’ve cultivated this type of thriving community rooted in trust, you’ve got a passionate army ready to go to bat for you and evangelize what you do. They’ll be the first to eagerly raise their hands when you need a reference because they’re intrinsically motivated to pay it forward. No arm twisting required!
Also, remember the power of a strong network. When pairing customers with prospects for a 1 to 1 call, make sure they both understand the opportunity to peronsally connect and grow their own individual sphere’s of influence. This can act as a wonderful motivator for your busy customers.
The Power of Self-Service
Brittany’s second gem around scaling customer advocacy is all about owning your assets. She advises looking at what collateral you can create that allows customers to self-serve reference requests instead of always defaulting to a high-touch phone call.
Because here’s the reality – prospects don’t always need to jump on a call at the early stages of exploring your solution, especially if they just need some basic assurances first. Arm your internal teams with pre-approved customer reference slides, logos, quotes, case studies, and advocacy videos they can access on-demand to move deals forward.
Then protect your customer calls only for later-stage opportunities when prospects need that extra push of confidence hearing directly from an existing user before pulling the trigger. Perfectly time your customer voice to seal the deal.
I loved Brittany’s example of building out a digital asset reference library that serves almost like an internal customer advocacy content marketplace. This allows even solo customer marketers to scale themselves and quickly serve business partners with the tailored proof points they need while still protecting the voice of the customer.
The beauty here is your library can keep growing and expanding over time. Start with core assets like slides, case studies, logos and quotes. Then level up with new formats like podcast interviews, product demo videos, Slideshare presentations, written success stories, and evaluative reports. Repurpose these assets across the funnel.
Keep iterating and adding fresh voices and faces to speak to different buyer needs and verticals. The key is mapping robust customer content to the right stages of the decision journey. Early on, prospects may just need a reassuring case study showing how you solved challenges for someone just like them. But later, they want to hear directly from a customer they can relate to.
Master this mapping, and you can move prospects smoothly through the path to purchase with perfectly timed customer validation.
Conclusion
To recap, if you remember nothing else (though I hope you remember it all!), the two simple levers to pull for scaling customer references are:
- Build an always-on customer community that makes advocates feel genuinely loved and engaged. Then they’ll be primed to jump in as references whenever needed. Yes, this can be done in stages where you can segment and target smaller pockets of advocates to start, then scale the community as you dial in the ideal customer experience.
- Create self-service access to reference assets like slides, logos, quotes, case studies, videos and more. This allows anyone on your team to easily grab the right content that moves deals forward without overwhelming voice-of-the-customer calls.
Rinse and repeat this community building and self-service system, and you’ve got customer advocacy locked in for the long-term, my friends. No more stressful nights sweating over last minute reference requests ever again. Just smooth sustainable success as your customers happily close deals for you while you focus on nurturing the community. Now that’s scaling smart.
