What does it take to get your customers tripping over themselves to be in case studies, video testimonials, social clips, and speaking events with you?
For Cas Feder, it’s all about authentic, ongoing relationships. Cas has learned a lot about building relationships with customers in her 10+ years of experience in marketing and customer advocacy, most recently at HubSpot.
Some of her tips include:
💥 Gain trust through authentic relationship building
💥 Partner with your legal team
💥 Generate a continuous stream of new stories from existing champions
💥 Create an enjoyable experience
Here’s a look at our conversation with Cas.
Q&A
Q: What is customer advocacy?
Cas: Every advocacy professional will have a different definition. Customer advocacy is a practice within customer marketing that focuses on providing your top customers with personal branding opportunities, peer networking, rewards, and recognition. Leveraging the power of customer advocacy requires building authentic relationships, which is the foundation of any customer advocacy program or initiative.
Most of the initiatives and programs that you’ll want your customers to participate in bank on those initial interactions with you and other members of the advocacy team. That’s when they start looking forward to how they can stay connected and what else they can do to promote your product or service. So building an authentic relationship is very important.
“Leveraging the power of customer advocacy requires building authentic relationships, which is the foundation of any customer advocacy program or initiative.”
Q: Why does building that authentic relationship with your customers matter?
Cas: It really comes down to trust. I use the word “authentic” when talking about relationship building because you’re able to gain your customers’ trust when they feel you want to build a genuine connection and you actually care about them.
Customers can often feel nervous about sharing their success story with you because they are representing their company. They don’t want anything to be taken out of context or published before it’s been reviewed and approved.
You want them to trust that you’ll position them and their company in a positive light regardless of them sharing the honest hardships and challenges they dealt with prior to using your product or service, or even things they may still struggle with today.
We’ve all been there, right, when we get a little too comfortable and say something that we worry we shouldn’t have. Establishing that trust and demonstrating to your customer that they’re a collaborative partner in the process often puts them at ease, especially when you can reassure them that you have their best interest in mind.
“Establishing that trust and demonstrating to your customer that they’re a collaborative partner in the process often puts them at ease, especially when you can reassure them that you have their best interest in mind.”
Q: Are authentic relationships all you need to drive advocacy projects forward?
Cas: I wish the answer was yes. No matter how great your relationship with an advocate is, it’s not only up to that individual to make the decision about whether they can work with you. Of course, you absolutely need their buy-in, but it’s that legal bit that really matters. Whether it’s through a sales agreement, partnership agreement or a separate consent form, your team needs to gain the necessary approvals to move forward.
I often say hold off on doing anything with your advocates until they sign on the dotted line, because you don’t want to run into a situation where you invest hours into a case study, video testimonial, or ad, and find out that you can’t actually use it.
“Hold off on doing anything with your advocates until they sign on the dotted line, because you don’t want to run into a situation where you invest hours into a case study…and find out that you can’t actually use it.”
Q: How easy or hard is it to gain legal approval for the activities you want your customers to engage in?
Cas: I think one of the relationships that professionals in my space don’t often talk about is the relationship between the advocacy team and the legal team. The legal team is your partner in crime (or in this case, anti-crime).
If you can work with your trusted legal team to develop consent forms and legal language to include in your agreements that enable you to do the most with your customer, that’s always the best place to start from.
I’ve been in the position where my team or legal team was overly cautious about the customer and made the consent form so restrictive that it required so many hoops to broaden the scope of usage down the road. It’s always easier to start broad, and see how the customer’s legal and comms team feels about it and let them make the suggested adjustments for you to take back to your legal team.
This is where the relationship with your legal team comes in handy, because the more they get to know what the customer advocacy team is trying to accomplish and understand the customer relationship component better, the more it will help in the long run.
I would also add that if you can find a connection point with the customer’s legal team and build a relationship with them, you might even get more from the relationship than you initially thought.
Q: Once you’ve built that connection with your customer and their legal team, what’s next?
Cas: There’s one step prior to reaching out to your customer that I think advocacy teams should consider: what type of champion and engagement you’re looking for.
For most advocacy professionals, you want to find champions who you can continuously engage with. I’d add on top of that, and what I’ve found useful, is finding those champions who are continuously innovating with your product or service.
Why? Because after that initial case study, video testimonial, webinar, etcetera, you can go back to them three, six, 12 months down the line and they’ll likely have an entirely new story to tell. Maybe they’ve added a new use case, integration or team. And oftentimes advocacy professionals don’t realize that you don’t have to go out and find new customers each time you want a new story. If you have these innovators in your program, you can always go back to them and see what exciting new things they’re up to.
“You want to find champions who you can continuously engage with…champions who are continuously innovating with your product or service.”
Q: Any tips for finding and recognizing these innovators?
I always like to share an example from my time at monday.com. One of our top champions was Chris Funk, from Zippo Manufacturing Company. When I met Chris he was the Senior Product Manager of Innovation, with a few product development project use cases. As we got to know each other, I saw that he was adding new use cases, new integrations, new dashboards, trying out new features as they were released. The impact was evident both from what he shared with me and what I saw in the product usage data.
Over our three-year relationship, he participated in video testimonials, case studies, conference sessions, webinars, quotes, and the list goes on. And each time a new element was featured. His story never got old. And within the three years of us working together, he was promoted to Director of Product Innovation, which offered an entirely new perspective in how he engaged with the platform. And again, a new story to tell.
So I’d say, look for the champions who are utilizing a lot of your features, who have a genuine curiosity and interest in expanding their usage and knowledge of your platform. If you have the ability to look at the usage data, that’s a good reference point or talking to their Customer Success or Account Manager to learn more about the client and whether they see growth potential there. Or more simply, asking the champion directly.
“Look for the champions that are utilizing a lot of your features, who have a genuine curiosity and interest in expanding their usage and knowledge of your platform.”
Q: Now that you have all of this great content, how do you make sure it’s leveraged and distributed?
Cas: The best way to do that is to make sure that the content you’re creating is in alignment with what your sales and marketing teams need. I could write an entire e-book on the important elements of distribution, but I’ll save that for another time.
I will say building relationships with the two different departments is incredibly important. If you look at it from a sales enablement standpoint with case studies, you want to see that the case studies you are creating are relevant to the deals that your sales team are trying to close. So, make sure you sit down with all the relevant teams on a regular basis to ensure you’re hitting the nail on the head with what’s a priority for those teams.
Q: Any final advice?
Cas: Partnering with you on advocacy initiatives should be a fun and enjoyable experience for your advocates. I always emphasize this in my interactions with customers. Their time and efforts on advocacy initiatives aren’t part of their day job so if you can make it a welcome distraction, you are going to have a very happy and motivated advocate who wants to continue collaborating with you.
“Partnering with you on advocacy initiatives should be a fun and enjoyable experience for your advocates.”
About the expert
Cas Feder is a customer advocacy leader with over 10 years of experience leveraging the power of storytelling and relationship building to drive brand evangelism. She has a successful track record of developing and executing B2B mid-market and enterprise advocacy programs from scratch. Cas has worked with well-known brands across several industries around the globe, including Nissan, Cartier, HSBC, Hulu, and many others.
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