Building a Community of Customer Champions

Over the past several years, Zoom has pioneered a new and world-class experience for video conferencing. While they certainly built great software, what they really pioneered was optimizing for a great customer experience which was best described as “Customer Love.” I believe that while Zoom was successful for many reasons, the concept of “customer love” was what truly set them apart. It was sincere, authentic, and heartfelt customer happiness and laid the foundation for a vibrant customer community. One that I was lucky to be a part of during the early years and saw come to life in ways that I hope enterprise software companies can look to learn from.?

During my time at Pure Storage, I discovered that we had built a great company culture, but we’d also involved our customers and partners in understanding how we worked rather than keeping them at arm's length. We were transparent about what we were excited about, and what we worked on and most importantly always prided ourselves in being able to build customer champions. One of our biggest problems in the early days at Pure was the sheer number of customer contacts who wanted to come work for us!??

At Moveworks, our product was deployed across a variety of customers, but where the environment was very similar. Building long-running customer relationships with customers when the category barely exists and you are an early-stage company is very difficult. We understood clearly the commonalities with each of their customers. Not just that they were Moveworks customers but that they all had challenges in deploying company-wide changes with newer solutions. So we built out a community called Moveworks Champions, which helped promote customer collaboration and, in turn, led to higher retention rates and stronger partnerships as people learned from each other. When building a customer community, make sure it is about actually building a community. Think about ways to connect one customer who can learn from another.??

These experiences provided me with an important vantage point — that the next generation of software companies need to focus not only on how they turn their customers into champions but how to turn those champions into a community. How do you make happy customers and turn them into a cohesive group of advisors and advocates? It’s a consideration many early-stage startups overlook.?

How enterprise software is being sold to companies today requires not just a single point of contact but multiple lines of business and sometimes multiple buyers. Some are more involved in the decision than others, and the more players are involved, the longer it will take to sell the product. If you believe your product is of high value and high impact, you should identify an internal champion early on in your sales motion and foster that relationship throughout — someone whose life you can change for the better with what you have to offer. These champions within each account -- one or two from each of your first ten customers -- serve as the initial makeup of your customer community. Part of your initial customer acquisition plan should be a strategy and timeline for getting these 10-20 people in a room together.?

Customer champions are usually not executives. They have multifaceted day jobs and limited time. This is an opportunity for them to provide input, network, hear other customer stories, get tips and build their own personal brand. What these people do and say will be instrumental for the long-term success of the engagement, so you want to create an environment in which they benefit from being your champions.

There are countless ways to organize an event or gathering for your early customer champions, but the best ones always check these five boxes:?

1. Most importantly, a good customer community event allows for customer stories to be shared — good, bad, or average. The objective here is a sort of “group therapy” session. No product is perfect. Whether it’s a fireside chat or a customer panel, provide a safe, productive forum to discuss what works and what doesn’t. Whenever and wherever customer stories are shared, include a wider swath of your own employee base listening in from the sidelines. The closer your team gets to the customer, the better — even if it’s just in the background.?
2. Make sure you have founders present to be able to talk through what you’re doing, the product roadmap and a detailed company update. This provides a level of insight and transparency to your champions that others might not get, the objective being that they will advocate for you as a vendor. Longer term, it’s important for them to know why they should stick with you and your product.?
3. Give insight into the entire company, and bring in a variety of guests to speak with your customer community. Include the engineering team from time to time. A mistake many companies make is that they don’t provide enough context to sell the value of their product fully. What are the “ingredients”? Why is it so difficult to build? Building a great product is really hard, and in order for a customer champion to represent your product internally, they need to understand its nuances and complexities. If a customer knows that a specialist team worked on a particular feature, that can instil confidence and help the customer understand the mechanics of your offering. Create a sense of connection between the builders and users.?
4. Make your leaders accessible early on. When I was an early customer of Okta, I heard from the founders often. Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, probably knew every CIO at every early customer whenever I attended the CIO event at Boxworks. Eric Yuan of Zoom came to Pure Storage and met our IT team while we were deploying as an early customer. And then, at the first Zoomtopia conference, he served coffee to attendees.? The founders of Moveworks were huddled with our team at Pure Storage on the day we were going to launch and were always present when we hosted the Moveworks Champions. Dhiraj Sharma of Simpplr was in the conference room as we deployed.? These kinds of personal investments of time and effort build incredible customer champions and a true sense of community. Of course, this is a balancing act — your early customers are critical to your early success, but as you grow, you simply won’t be able to dedicate the same amount of time to each one. Even though this approach doesn’t scale longer term, it’s essential at the outset.
5. And finally, show appreciation -- always. Provide personal, thoughtful and most of all, useful gifts. Nobody needs or wants more swag. Spend adequately and appropriately, showing that you appreciate their time. This helps build loyalty and partnership.?

A strong community of customer champions is the lifeblood of an early-stage sales organization. They’re the folks who can help diffuse conflict if there is tension, who can navigate internal politics, and who can position your product within a context that is most meaningful to their colleagues. They can speak to VCs as you seek further funding and become the basis for your earliest case studies. These communities are built over time and built on authenticity. They are impossible to fake and hard to succeed without. Be sure you’ve spent ample time fostering and nurturing yours.