9
Activate Customers as Brand Ambassadors

One of the preconceived notions you might have first had when picking this book up is that companies create categories. I can understand why—almost every example I’ve shared so far attributes the success of a new category to a specific brand. The tactics that I’ve documented in this playbook are funded and operated by companies who aspire for category dominance. The truth is that there’s a missing party in the narrative here who actually carries all of the leverage and authority to crown a category created—the customer. In the last chapter, I spoke at great length about how central community is to category creation—a vibrant ecosystem made up of customers, non-customers, partners, investors, and other constituencies external to your organization. At the end of the day, a company’s ability to create a category successfully is inextricably linked to validation from its ecosystem—with customers serving as the most leveraged relationships from which to begin.

Consider a company that yells new category positioning into a void themselves with no external validation. Eventually, the company will realize that something isn’t working with that approach and move on to try something new. But what if that same company created a platform for other voices to position the category, with trusted voices from reputable companies? Would that effort create a different outcome? The science says yes—that social proof is embedded in the psychology surrounding market perception of companies and their products. Dr. Robert Cialdini, bestselling author and career researcher of the science of influence names consensus as one of his six principles of persuasion—that people will look to the actions of others to determine their own. A recent survey by Demand Gen Report also revealed that “78% of buyers strongly agreed that they are placing a higher emphasis on the trustworthiness of content source, with 65% having higher preferences for content from industry influencers.”1 This doesn’t suggest that your brand lacks credibility (even though it may in the early days), but customer validation will build and sustain trust and brand equity within your community in very profound and powerful ways.

As participants within your community, your customers are invested in your success. By becoming paid consumers of your products and services, they are literally betting on you to fulfill your vision for the category and emerge victorious as the market leader. This is an especially important observation in the early days when customers may make up the minority share of your community—they’ve arguably taken a bigger chance on you at that moment in time than several years and several hundred customers later. As you invest in their success, you’ll notice that customers will actually want to advocate on your behalf—it’s not a favor asked of them. Recall from Chapter Six that information, novelty, and status are the primary motivations of early adopters in new markets. Companies can create programs that appeal to all three motivators, finding opportunities at every corner to highlight the customer’s greatness rather than their own. With that in mind, let’s explore the different ways that customers create categories.

How Customers Create Categories

While there are entire industries and economies of people who do not yet appreciate your category, there is a small (but growing) audience of customers who do. These individuals will play an instrumental role validating your leadership and the category that you’re creating by leasing you their brand equity. Now a lease is not forever. Later in the chapter we’ll dive into what companies need to do in order to make customers successful, which, in turn, will fuel the advocacy motion for years to come. Here are a few tangible ways that customers can impact category creation.

1. Customers Validate the Pain You’ve Observed Is Real

One of the key tenets of category creation is discovering and popularizing an unmet need in the marketplace. Your content efforts can fuel popularization—recall that articulating the “why” ought to be one of the early focuses of your content marketing strategy. However, in order to truly drive resonance around the previously unrealized pain in the market, your company can’t be the only one talking about it. Whether they react by amplifying your content on social media or respond by contributing content with their own points of view, hearing the stories from customers themselves will create a very important act of validation and halo effect around the category.

By participating in the conversation and, ideally, referring to the category by name, your customers are effectively telling the world that they themselves have felt the pain that you’ve observed, that the solution for that pain lies in embracing this new category, and that your company is leading the effort to eradicate the pain for everyone. Customers may even evangelize your product value as part of the overall solution which can help build brand equity and drive growth—a practice that ought to become operationalized as part of your Customer Marketing organization as time goes on. Their experiences matter, and in B2B, so do their job titles and company logos. The ability to orchestrate conversation through aspirational and leading brands in your industry will serve as a force multiplier for your validation efforts. If Acme Corp is talking about this category, maybe I should pay attention.

2. Customers Co-Author Industry Best Practices

With more companies now enrolled in the mission behind your category, these early customers are becoming the first few practitioners within the new discipline. Whether deploying and battle-testing some of the best practices that your company has published as part of your content marketing efforts, or blazing their own trail in operationalizing the discipline within their own businesses, customers are undoubtedly getting smarter about how to solve the problem that you’ve observed. It won’t be uncommon for them to share what they’re learning with their networks, but providing them with an opportunity to instead share their stories on your platform can provide mutual benefit. The customers themselves will benefit from your emerging brand and the promotional throughput that you’ll leverage to drive visibility of the content. For your company, building a platform for the community to share their learnings with each other will both amplify your thought leadership as credible and contribute to your ongoing ownership of the conversation surrounding the category online.

The reality is that not one customer is the same as another. Each company that you sell to will likely look different—whether that’s the size of the company, the industries and verticals they sell into, or even the geography in which they operate. Aspiring to create content to serve the entire potential of your market completely alone is a fool’s errand. In fact, everything that you are learning and writing about as the category creators is somewhat nuanced relative to where you are in your own category and company maturity. You can’t truly write the “how to” content for your category alone and without the support of the entire spectrum of your growing customer profiles. Imagine being a startup tackling a complex issue for large enterprises—you may observe how to best approach solving the problem, but you are not living that same pain in your business day-to-day. You’d be much more credible allowing customers to share their approach with the world instead—again ideally on your web properties. Your customers will push your thinking on how the category is evolving and will help educate you on where the innovation opportunities lie ahead.

3. Customers Make Your Product Better

Although having a 10x product is not a prerequisite to category creation, you certainly can’t create a category without an actual product to sell into it. One of the outcomes of this whole thing is to sell enough of your product that you can monetize your leadership in the market and actually fulfill the purpose for your category that you’ve expressed in the first place. Who knows, you may even build an outlier, successful company along the way. To get there, your product must eventually become widely accepted as the de facto standard for success in the category. That’s not to say there aren’t other competitive products in the market—it’s just that yours is better.

Customers are paid members of your community, and as such, will have expectations that go well beyond your general audience on how your product itself will enable them to realize the outcomes they were promised throughout the sales cycle. Creating channels by which customers can funnel in feedback to your product teams on their journey with your technology is likely the most powerful method for influencing a roadmap in the early days of a category. That’s not to say that customer requirements should always supersede the vision of the company, but remember that not every company you’ll market and sell to looks similar to your own. As customers get better with the discipline, they will get better at using your products too and will shape how they should evolve to truly lead the market.

4. Customers Crown the Category Leader

We will go into this topic in great depth in the next chapter, but while there’s general consensus that companies don’t create categories, there has been some debate on who within the ecosystem can actually crown a category leader. To this day, some people believe that industry analysts have that charter—and through their inquiries, briefings, and paid public speaking engagements can understand where new markets are forming and which companies are leading them. This research will ultimately manifest into a market map, or perhaps the hallowed two-by-two quadrant that summarizes the net effect of that research. Now you may perceive a bit of cheekiness in my tone here—I do believe that analysts play an incredibly important role in category creation and I’ll defend that case in Chapter Ten. But I also believe that the world has changed since these institutions have been founded and, because of this, customers now have easy access to sharing their voice and publicizing their brand allegiances for all the world to see.

While some of that voice may show up in online review platforms, the broad theme behind the delivery vehicle is that customers are willing to go on the record publicly to cast their votes for the category leader. This can show up when customers will allow you to feature their logos on your company homepage, or agree to conduct a case study on the success they’ve realized with you and your products. Perhaps they’ll agree to speak at your industry conference, sharing their stories and successes of their affiliation with your company in front of a compelling audience of peers. It’s so important for companies in early markets to both deliver success for early customers, but also to create opportunities for them to advocate on your behalf as ambassadors of both your brand and the category at large. This effort can’t start early enough in your company journey. Let’s talk about the role that your company can play in enabling customers across these four critical validation activities.

How to Create and Identify Brand Advocates

Identifying advocates within your customer base is a critical step to activating them as brand ambassadors in the marketplace—but before they’re willing to advocate, you’ll need to make them successful with your products. This may not necessarily happen overnight, but eventually, one of Marketing’s jobs becomes to celebrate the success that customers are realizing in the category and to position them within the growing industry as pioneers. For early stage startups, I’ve seen companies compensate some early customers with equity as advisors and evangelists for the brand—seasoned leaders from well respected companies who would be willing to go on record and advocate while the value on the product side is still being realized. That’s proven to be a pretty good hack to gain instant advocacy and category validation in the early days while the product may still be immature relative to the vision the company is painting.

But for the rest of us, the art and science of making customers successful is a discipline called (drum roll) Customer Success. I know I’m biased as this is the category that Gainsight’s been building for the past seven years, but the reality is that a focus on Customer Success will by its very nature create an army of willing advocates within your customer base. Since I’ve shared the official definition of Customer Success in the opening chapter, a simplified way to understand the concept is as an equation: CS = CX + CO, or Customer Success is equal to Customer Experience plus Customer Outcomes. Experiences are the sum of all the touch points that a customer can have with your company—from the initial conversation with a sales development rep, to the number of emails they receive from your company, and even to the speed of resolution time of the support tickets they’ve filed with you. Outcomes, on the other hand, are a shared (and documented) vision of the customer’s goals for buying your product and what it will take to achieve them before, during, and after the sale. By focusing on these two initiatives, companies can build a Customer Success strategy that creates a passionate fan base of potential advocates and so much more. Figure 9.1 visualizes some of the prescriptive processes (which includes Advocate Engagement) that are based on hundreds of implementations and decades of experience in company-wide Customer Success at Gainsight.

The figure shows Gainsight’s prescriptive framework for cross-functional customer success.

Figure 9.1 Gainsight’s Prescriptive Framework for Cross-Functional Customer Success

Understanding that a well-executed Customer Success strategy will build advocacy is important, but getting started may sound incredibly daunting. Ultimately, founders and executive teams will need to appreciate that while customer success is a top-down, company-wide commitment, a dedicated Customer Success team will need to own the charter—a topic that deserves another book of its own (trust me, we’ve written it). But before you head to Amazon.com, I’ll summarize nine steps for getting started with Customer Success today.

  1. Define Success. One of the biggest steps you can take to create a Customer Success–centric culture is to crystallize what success means for your customers. Many companies sell horizontal products that can be used in a variety of use cases. If you’re a CEO or senior executive, you should kick off a cross-functional process to canonize the common use cases for your offering and define what success would mean to the customer in each of those use cases. A simple way to think about this: If you asked customers, “What does wild success with our company mean to you?” what would they say? Without defining the goal, it’s hard to rally the company around it.
  2. Align Around Success. Next, review your organization and make sure that each functional area knows what it must do to support Customer Success. Your CS team can be the quarterback of the initiative, but it needs buy-in from each department. This could mean reviewing CS feedback each month with the product team, defining and refining sales qualification criteria, or reviewing messaging regularly with the marketing and customer success teams.
  3. Listen to the Customer Success Team. If you’re a senior executive or CEO, you are likely flooded with signals about your business—from customers, partners, investors, and employees. You need to make sure a key part of that signal comes from the Customer Success team, since they are the eyes and ears of your customer base. Establish a regular review of Customer Success issues. Include a Customer Success executive in every executive meeting, every board meeting, and every key strategic decision. And take his or her opinions as seriously as you take those of your sales leader.
  4. Prioritize Customer Success. This is where the rubber meets the road. Every business has limited resources and must make tradeoffs. Is the feature to delight clients always getting deprioritized for the feature to drive demos? Is the project to implement self-service getting pushed behind the channel partner rollout? Is the training for Customer Success managers (CSMs) being postponed for the sales training? If you want to drive Customer Success, prioritize it.
  5. Empower the Customer Success Team. In the same vein, if you’ve created a team to drive success with your customers, take measures to support it. Some things to consider:
    • Make sure the title for the Customer Success executive is on par with the sales leader.
    • Keep your CSM in the loop when a customer escalates to the management team.
    • Let the CSM be the hero with customers if possible (e.g., ideally the CSM will tell the customer that you agreed to their contract change or roadmap request).
    • Make it clear to the rest of the organization that the CSM represents the client’s views.
  6. Measure Customer Success. Customer Success will never be taken seriously if there aren’t agreed upon metrics to apply. Define metrics for your bottom-line results, including gross churn, net retention, and other measures. Make sure everyone is clear on what the metrics mean. And create some early warning metrics such as health score, adoption score, and net promoter score (NPS) to track where customer success is going.
  7. Incent Toward Customer Success. Companies set compensation plans to drive behavior. So if you want to drive Customer Success, pay people for it. Consider adding Customer Success metrics (e.g., net retention, NPS, or health score) to your company bonus plan.
  8. Challenge the Company. Just as you push the company to grow sales and hit quarterly targets, expend as much effort pushing the company to hit Customer Success targets, such as retention, go-lives, satisfaction metrics, or adoption goals.
  9. Celebrate Success. Customer Success isn’t easy. It’s not always in your control, and customers can be challenging. Most companies have great traditions for cheering sales on—gongs, champagne, trips, fun bets. Do the same for Customer Success. Get yourself a CSM gong and send the signal that Customer Success is a top-down, company-wide commitment.

By building a Customer Success strategy, your company will unlock an exciting and powerful business lever that will drive sustainable growth through a variety of methods, including increased retention and expansion revenue. At the heart of it all is a customer who continues to realize positive outcomes with your company that’s delivered in an intentional and delightful experience. For the marketers who are reading this, not only are these successful customers candidates for advocacy programs, but they will want to advocate on behalf of your brand. The next step is to create opportunities for them to do so.

How to Engage and Mobilize Advocates

If you’re like me, asking people for favors can be a very uncomfortable experience. It’s not that I can’t benefit from the help, it’s just in my nature to not want to inconvenience others for my own sake. That’s why it took me a while to really appreciate that advocacy moments are not favors, but opportunities for customers, teammates, or general members of the community to go on the record with their personal stories and experiences. But understanding who should do the asking is an important discussion—typically the Customer Success team is closest to the customer and has the relationship, but marketers are the creatives with program and channel ownership on the other end of the ask. Each organization may have its own preferred process, but incentivizing the Customer Success team to identify potential advocates using health score data and enrolling them into a marketing- owned advocacy program has served us well over the years at Gainsight.

Advocates come in all sizes—senior executives from impressive logos whose endorsement carries high influence, to front-line practitioners who lean into your brand and are passionate users of your products. Both profiles are important. The upper quartile of titles may require a higher touch to manage—perhaps by forming a Customer Advisory Board or by leveraging and investing in an executive sponsor program—but offer significant value in terms of company and category validation and acceleration. Advocates further down the org chart can often provide deeper and far more hands-on perspective. Since it’s likely the case that there are more practitioners than executives in your community, you also can benefit from the sheer breadth of the distribution value they bring to the table. There are some great technology platforms such as Influitive (a category creator in Advocate Marketing) that can help operationalize engagement for the long tail of advocates.2

One way to spark the flywheel for your advocacy program is to incentivize participation or, said another way, to offer rewards in exchange for action. While this strategy may not sit well with some readers, the psychology behind most willing advocates is closely related to that of early adopters as described in Chapter Six. Information, novelty, and status are core motivational drivers for early adopters, but advocates take it a step further by valuing what Influitive refers to as access, power, and stuff. Access means treating your customers as VIPs or rock stars, creating exclusive experiences such as a private networking event or customer-only lounge at your industry conference. Power creates a belief that advocates can actually influence the strategy of your business or category, through programs such as beta access to messaging or product releases in exchange for feedback. Stuff is a bit more material—perhaps gift cards or company swag—that will typically appeal more to the long tail of advocates. With the exception of the last category, you can see that incentives don’t have to be gifts necessarily, but rather, opportunities to communicate appreciation for the vote of confidence given.

With successful customers identified and the engagement mechanics we discussed in place, your advocates are ready to be mobilized. Present them with the right opportunities to create and contribute to the momentum of your category, and you’ll have more than advocates but true ambassadors on the side of your brand. Earlier in the chapter, I discussed how customers create categories—by validating the pain observed in the category, co-authoring industry best practices, pushing the boundaries of your product development, and crowing industry leaders through words and actions. Table 9.1 explains how specific advocacy moments can map to the outcomes that category creators are intending to drive through their customers.

Table 9.1 Understanding Advocacy Moments in Context of Outcomes

Outcome Advocacy Moments
Customers Validate the Pain You’ve Observed Is Real

Early Stage Content Collaboration

Online: blog posts, videos, e-books, podcasts, webinars, etc.

Offline: speaking at events, etc.

Press and Analysts

Content and Program Amplification
Customers Co-Author Industry Best Practices

Early Stage Content Collaboration

Online: blog posts, videos, e-books, podcasts, webinars, etc.

Offline: speaking at events, etc.

Press and Analysts

Content and Program Amplification
Customers Make Your Product Better

Input on Messaging, Positioning, and Roadmap

Customer Advisory Board

Online Customer Community

Roadmap Webinars
Customers Crown the Category Leader

Late Stage Content Collaboration

Case Studies

Testimonial Videos

Quotes/Press Release

Word-of-Mouth

Reference Program

Online Review Site Participation

Social Media Engagement

Referral Marketing

No person on earth has studied the power of advocacy in context of category creation more than Influitive CEO Mark Organ. I wrote about Mark in Chapter One; before founding Influitive, he was the founder and CEO of Eloqua—the creators of the Marketing Automation category. As a reminder, Eloqua had an incredible outcome by going public in 2012 before being acquired by Oracle later that year for $810M. One of Mark’s greatest professional passions includes creating new billion-dollar categories, a topic he has graciously lent his deep experience to discussing in public forums and industry conferences. Now as a “second-timer” in category creation, Mark is driving the creation of customer- powered enterprises at Influitive, whose software and services help companies discover, nurture, and mobilize their advocates to accelerate sales and increase customer lifetime value. This practice, a new category called Advocate Marketing, creates an engaged customer community where advocates convert prospects into customers and new customers into successful customers. Mark was kind enough to share his learnings as a two-time category creator and specialist in the world of Advocate Marketing on how these two worlds converge for companies creating and operating in early markets.

How to Activate Customers as Brand Ambassadors in New Categories

By Mark Organ, CEO and Founder, Influitive

The benefits of being the category leader are clear. The category leader in most cases is worth more than the entire previous category that it evolved from combined. Whether its Salesforce.com in cloud-based CRM versus all on-premise CRM solutions combined or Tesla in all-electric sedans versus all luxury sedans combined, the pattern is stable across markets and times. The company that has the best opportunity to become the category leader is the one that created the category in the first place.

While it is convenient and alliterative to discuss the notion of category “creation,” in my experience that is not quite right. They are first category discoverers, and then popularizers.

Categories first exist in the minds of a group of enthusiasts who see the world differently from everyone else. These are the sorts of people who were bodybuilding with weights in the 1960s, building their own computers in the 1970s, connecting with each other over dial-up modems in the 1980s, purchasing goods and services online in 1993–1996, running their businesses using cloud-based software in 2000–2003, and utilizing influencers to market their businesses exclusively in 2010–2013. The category creator is first a category discoverer, identifying trends among these “freaks” who see the world so differently. Like anthropologists, they understand their mental models, to better serve them.

Anthony discusses the category of Customer Success in this book, a category that I believe will become a multi-billion-dollar one in time. This category is built first upon the community of Customer Success professionals and leaders. When I was CEO of Eloqua, itself a category discoverer of cloud-based demand generation automation software (built upon a community of freakish demand gen professionals), we created one of the first Customer Success departments in 2002. As we were bootstrapped, holding on to every dollar of recurring revenue was mission critical. I was inspired by my work as a management consultant to generate strategic success with our product. There were a few lone voices in the wilderness discussing the need to both ensure that the SaaS product was adopted, as well as drive mission critical goals for companies—and they often put “success” into their titles. Both Salesforce.com and Eloqua called this emerging function “Customer Success” in 2002.

Once understood, the category is then popularized. The massive benefits of the new category is marketed so that more people are converted. If done well, and the underlying technological and other trends are strong, the “freaks” soon become the majority. The best way to popularize the category is with the very people who make up the community in the first place. After all, these people are trusted, use the right language, and are motivated to make the category as large as possible.

As Anthony discussed in Chapter Eight, the smart category creating company also organizes the category community. This can be done physically through conferences, local speaking events and dinners, and online through discussion and community software, public network community participation created on sites like LinkedIn and Facebook groups, and private messaging channels created on mobile technologies like Slack and WhatsApp.

The company should focus on marketing the category, while the community of company advocates should be the ones to evangelize the specific company and products. When we host dinner events for category participants and prospects at Influitive, the rule is that our executives can only discuss the food, wine, children, and hobbies. The selling is done by the happy customer advocates. They are much better at it than the executives, as they are trusted, use the right language, and are motivated. Category conferences that are well done follow a similar model. Gainsight’s Pulse and Influitive’s Advocamp conferences have their creators as primary sponsors and hosts, their logos barely visible. The message is that these events are focused on the needs of customer success and customer marketing professionals first.

When should the category creators organize their community? As soon as possible! The earlier the community is formed, the more likely a company is to glean the benefits of that community both for product development and for marketing. Carl Pei, founder of a category creating smartphone manufacturer, wanted to create a breakthrough in price and performance. A full year before creating a prototype, he created an online community of “smartphone nerds,” who would debate various difficult product design decisions. When the OnePlus One was created, this same community felt a sense parenthood over the product and popularized it. The OnePlus One sold over $300M in its first year, and the company spent less than $3,000 on marketing; all the promotion was created organically in the OnePlus community.

The OnePlus example highlights the principles of what motivates the advocates of the category creator to apply their discretionary work effort on a company’s behalf. Before I started Influitive, I interviewed hundreds of “super advocates” to understand their mental models and what it would require for them to advocate even more than they already did. The results of this research have created our framework for brand ambassador mobilization:

  1. Exclusive Tribe. Why do some people paint their faces and wear the colors when they attend their team’s sporting events? Or tattoo the names of companies like “Harley-Davidson” on their bodies? People long to be part of something bigger than themselves, a movement, a religion they can believe in. They want to buy into a missionary narrative. The Christian community has a powerful narrative of life after death. OnePlus catalyzed it’s community with “Never Settle,” a rallying cry that people deserve to have the best smartphone technology for the price of ordinary devices. Great category communities should have a distinct identity tied to a sense of purpose that encourages the missionaries to join and be active.
  2. Measurable Impact. People perform more activity when they receive feedback on their contributions. Receiving variable rewards for activities is the principle by which slot machines, checking email, and scrolling through a social media feed is so addictive. Well-designed communities provide feedback to participants as to their effectiveness, whether it’s the number of likes on a social media post, the audience ratings of their conference speech, or if the referral they provided has entered a demonstration stage and then closed.
  3. Social Capital. When a community recognizes participants for the good work they have done inside the community, it feels great for the participants. But if by advocating for a category and company, their career and life prospects improve, it can drive an obsessive level of activity. Providing awards, badges that can be displayed publicly on LinkedIn, and activities that are career boosters like speaking and writing opportunities all contribute to social capital.

These are the macro factors that drive community participation and advocacy over the long term. They are necessary but not sufficient for driving maximum engagement. Micro factors ensure that every session that an advocate has with your community increases the affiliation with your brand and inspires investment on their part. Removing the friction to advocate is just as important as increasing the rewards for doing so.

Video game designers have long figured this out, and ensure that users receive their “hit of dopamine” at the right times to increase their level of investment in the game. Smart marketers can leverage the same ideas. In both online and physical presence communities, small rewards—no more than tokens of appreciation—can be provided in exchange for activity. It’s important that these rewards are not seen as pay for performance, but paying for their time. Virtual badges in online communities and lanyard pins at conferences provide valuable recognition but cost nothing. Access to exclusive content and networking also work in both the virtual and real worlds.

The category leaders of the future are more likely to be literally powered by the activities of their customers, which provide an irresistible drive to industry dominance. These companies have their customers participating in every aspect of the business, from product development to customer success, marketing to sales. When there is an army of unpaid but yet very effective people building a company, it is difficult not to win. In this way, the rewards to creating the category become so much better, when also investing in becoming customer powered.

Notes

  1. 1 “2018 Content Preferences Survey Report,” Demand Gen Report, April 2018 https://www.demandgenreport.com/resources/research/2018-content-preferences -survey-report
  2. 2 Truman Tang, “Irresistible Incentives That Motivate and Engage Customer Advocates,” Influitive, March 28, 2014, https://influitive.com/blog/incentives-customer -advocates/