Transform Customer Advocacy into Revenue

Many decision makers begin the software buying process with a referral or a word-of-mouth recommendation. Business leaders are increasingly referring to third-party resources to arm themselves with information before choosing to engage with a solutions provider. These trends prove that satisfied customers are now your most trusted, powerful resource to achieve sustainable business growth. Brands that dismiss the importance of customer advocacy risk stagnation and forgo the opportunity to gain a competitive advantage in their industry. Customer advocacy is no longer a nice-to-have but rather a critical necessity for B2B software providers.??

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What is Customer Advocacy??

Customer advocacy is an integral part of any business strategy. It is essential to maintaining high levels of customer satisfaction, delivering value to customers, and fostering a customer-centric culture throughout the company. Customer advocacy also helps build strong customer relationships, enables credibility for marketing messaging, and differentiates your company from the competition. Businesses that implement successful customer advocacy programs reduce customer churn rate and increase ROI through retention, acquisition, and cost savings.?

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Customer advocacy can fuel your growth strategy. With referrals coming from customer advocates to prospects through your lead generation engine, customer advocacy is central to sales, marketing, and customer experience success. Advocates can provide valuable, honest feedback about your solution and they can also help ensure higher adoption rates and satisfaction among new customers.?

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Advocacy happens when customers recommend your product. As highlighted in our research below, the biggest drivers of likeliness to recommend and acts of customer advocacy are the positive experiences customers have with software providers and their products, not product features or cost savings. Customers are more likely to recommend a software when the solution creates business value, helps them to innovate, as well as enhances performance and productivity. Customers also want to partner with a platform that is reliable, respectful, and trustworthy.?

Common Obstacles to Implement Customer Advocacy Programs?

Getting started with customer advocacy can be challenging if senior management does not fully understand the business value of implementing a customer advocacy program. Without receiving buy-in from stakeholders, customer success professionals and marketers may lack the funding to activate customer advocacy programs. In addition, customer-facing staff may lack the necessary skills to promote customer advocacy or feel the need to “own” the customer relationship. Lastly, an organization that lacks a strategic approach towards customer advocacy is likely to duplicate efforts within the Sales, Marketing, and Product teams since ownership, roles, and responsibilities are not clearly defined. Here are 4 insights to kickstart your customer advocacy program:?

#1 Position Customer Advocacy as a Strategic Growth Initiative?

Customer advocacy has evolved into being a highly valued company asset as opposed to a simple referral program, but not everyone in the organization sees it that way. Customer success leaders must reposition their advocacy program around sustainable business growth instead of focusing solely on individual metrics like retention. The recognition that customer advocacy is a strategic growth initiative is necessary to succeed in the competitive market.?

#2 Align with Key Stakeholders (Especially Sales)?

Collaborate with key stakeholders and align your priorities and objective during the early stages of building your customer advocacy program. Sales and Customer Success are the gatekeepers that can unlock the doors to deep customer knowledge which can help turn customers into advocates. Once you are able to effectively reposition your customer advocacy efforts towards business growth and convince stakeholders like the CEO and Head of Sales to support your initiative, wider buy-in will follow.?

#3 Identify the Highest Priority Segment??

When you analyze your customer base, which segment is most likely to renew their subscription? Identify similarities between your most loyal customers, such as business size, industry, or role. By uncovering the highest priority segment, you will be able to generate growth within the priority segment, communicate the value of a customer advocacy program, and set a strong foundation to expand the advocacy program to other segments.?

#4 Focus on Providing Value to Advocates?

Many organizations take a transactional approach to customer advocacy and focus on what their advocates can do for them. To truly succeed with customer advocacy, business leaders need to provide value to their customers first. One way to achieve this is by taking a customer-centric approach when it comes to prioritizing feature upgrades, designing a helpful onboarding program, and helping customers achieve measurable results.??