#announcements

Hey Cara! A lot of the teams that I support use a win slide/deal closing/sales celebration type initiative to motivate sellers to circle back when their customers are mature enough to get into advocacy. These programs all more or less function as an advocacy pipeline and record the high points of the sale and customer—making it easy for customer marketing to go back through the internal content that was developed to get a sense of the story and top reasons why that account would be an ideal advocate (industry, number of users, use cases, etc. - all different depending on what matters to sellers at your company). But the cool thing about these programs is that you automatically create a historical record of when the deal was closed and what was involved in the deal, as it relates to your marketing. So you always have an informative pipeline to lean on when you're looking to activate new advocates.

Happy to chat through what some of these programs look like, because they look a little different at the different orgs (all based on what the sales culture is like and what motivates the teams).

^ More companies SHOULD do this!

At my last org. we did have some discussion around identifying target advocates when their status was still ‘future customer.’ The idea would be for sales, customer success, and influencers, to all work hard to foster a strong and mutually beneficial relationship with them.

Alexie’s idea is excellent.

Curious, though, why do you have to wait for a certain amount of time to pass for new customers to be ready to serve as an advocate?

The entire lead up of the buying process and purchase decision is as important (if not more so) to many would-be buyers as the stat-heavy uses we all love to write about 6, 9, 18 months post-deployment.

Engaging them just as they’re starting their journey not only confirms they’ve made a great decision to work with a vendor that truly values them and is excited to work with them, but it also gives you a built-in excuse to go back to them several months later (sans calendar reminder) to update their story to show the evolution of what it’s like to be your customer.

I'm tracking milestones in the lifecycle at which point we should be connecting...onboarding, launch, user milestones...currently working on how to identify our advocates in SFDC.

@Scott Stransky great point about engaging advocates very early in the relationship. I think a lot of companies certainly can do this. The challenge I see with a lot of my clients is that they're working with enterprise customers where implementation of new technology/products takes a long time. This definitely limits the opportunities for advocacy because a lot of the early-stage customers can only comment on the business-to-business relationship and the acquisition process, but not the product itself. While there is absolutely value in the early relationship and acquisition process, a lot of sellers are not looking for advocacy related to those pieces, they're instead looking for advocates for the nuts and bolts of the solution itself. For my clients to implement an "early stage advocacy" category, they'd also need to fundamentally shift the sales culture in their organizations.

Certainly not an impossibility, but a big hurdle for a lot of down-sized teams that are overburdened by asks at the moment.

Hi @Alexie Glover ! Great points as always! In the companies you work with, which team mostly owns capturing the win slide and high points? Is it customer marketing?

I'm willing to try that, but currently I'm blindsided on our new wins - there's no active feedback loop b/w Sales and us on this. How do you all navigate this?