There are so many ways to tell your company’s story through your customers. And the stories are out there along with customers willing to tell them in one form or another. But companies continue to struggle when it comes to getting those captured stories—customer content—into buyers’ hands.
According to a recent trend report from the Content Marketing Institute, 85% of B2B organizations attribute their success to content marketing. Customer-based content, such as a case study or video testimonial, serves to validate that a product or service works as advertised and addresses the prospect’s business need. In fact, the Second Annual State of Sales report from Salesforce.com notes that 57% of survey respondents listed high-quality content as an important sales driver.
In a recent study by research firm Televerde, more customer content was the fourth highest response from B2B salespeople to the question, What can Marketing do to help you win more deals?
- 1 Better Messaging
- 2 More Qualified Leads
- 3 Better Marketing materials
- 4 More Case Studies and Testimonials
A solid benefit of written or recorded content is that it multiplies the customer’s investment in telling their story. A customer can provide an interview for a video or case study illustrating their success with the potential for it to be used over and over again without additional time commitment. Preventing overuse of your VIP customers helps ensure you can still tap them for one-on-one calls or site visits when they’re needed to seal deals.
So where do you tell your Sales and Marketing to find content? Most likely the answer is not simple. The content is likely scattered between the company website, Dropbox folders, intranet drives, etc. Further they probably aren’t tagged in a way that supports the kinds of searches commonly used to support specific opportunities and marketing campaigns. Your internal content consumers don’t have the time or inclination to rummage around for the perfect story or piece of content. They need a sophisticated yet simple-to-use way to search and share customer content capability built right into the CRM solution they already use. The right application puts the right content at the right time just a few clicks away.
A purpose-built application for storing, categorizing, sharing, and measuring content impact on opportunities is a huge advantage for people who leverage it (and those who develop content). By efficiently locating the most salient customer content to address a prospect’s concerns at any given point in the sales cycle, salespeople can optimize their time and move prospects forward. Content helps build a context for buyers of how your customers use your solution and the types of business problems that were solved. Setting the stage with customer content means that live calls that occur later in the sales process are more informed and useful.
When selecting the right application to enable your content curation and sharing capability, keep these two things in mind:
As this infographic illustrates, a mature advocacy program is responsible for continuously identifying advocates, maintaining accurate advocacy data, protecting customer relationships, and aligning with top company goals to accelerate growth.
The infographic contains six key components. Here's a description of each for you to translate into your own talking points.
Every advocate starts as a customer.
The journey begins when account teams, customer success managers, support teams, and services organizations create positive experiences that build trust and confidence.
As customers achieve success, some become enthusiastic supporters of the company, its products, and its people. These customers are identified as potential advocates and introduced to the advocacy team.
The advocacy team interviews these individuals, learns about their experiences, captures important details about their interests and expertise, and creates a searchable advocate profile.
The result is a discoverable advocate: someone who can be found, matched, and engaged when the business needs credible customer voices.
Without this process, valuable customer relationships remain hidden inside co-workers’ heads or team spreadsheets, unavailable to the broader organization.
Great advocates are rarely discovered by the advocacy team alone. It’s really just too much to ask of any one part of the organization. Every customer touchpoint plays a part in cultivating and retaining advocates.
Customer success managers see customer enthusiasm firsthand. Account teams hear success stories during business reviews. Support teams witness customer loyalty. Product teams interact with passionate users who influence future direction.
A successful advocacy program creates a systematic way for all customer-facing teams to identify and nominate potential advocates, as well as a means for customers to self-identify..
Think of it as building a talent pipeline.
The broader the participation across the organization, the stronger and more diverse the advocate community becomes.
This collective effort ensures the advocacy database reflects the full spectrum of customer success stories across industries, products, geographies, and use cases.
The advocacy team serves as the steward of the organization's advocacy data.
Their responsibilities fall into three primary areas.
First, they recruit continuously. Advocates change jobs, priorities shift, and customer enthusiasm naturally evolves over time. Maintaining a healthy advocacy community requires constant replenishment.
Second, they keep information current. Customer stories, product deployments, business outcomes, and willingness to participate all change. Outdated advocacy data quickly becomes unreliable.
Third, they measure and report value. Advocacy programs must demonstrate their contribution to business outcomes such as customer acquisition, retention, and expansion.
Beyond maintaining records, the advocacy team actively shapes the composition of the database to align with company growth objectives. This is essential if the program is to be seen by executives as a strategic lever vs. a low-level function an intern can run.
If the company’s strategic direction includes expanding into healthcare, launching a new product, selling through a new channel, entering Asia, or targeting a specific buyer persona, the advocacy team ensures the advocate population evolves accordingly.
In many ways, they function as portfolio managers for one of the company's most valuable assets: customer credibility.
Most organizations initially think of advocacy as a sales resource.
Sales certainly benefits from customer references, but advocacy creates value far beyond the sales organization.
The common thread is credibility.
Advocates provide something no marketing budget can purchase directly: authentic proof from real customers.
Most mature advocacy programs include additional components that extend value for both advocates and the business.
These activities are connected mechanisms that strengthen relationships, increase engagement, and create additional opportunities for customers to contribute.
Together, they help transform advocacy from a transactional activity into an ongoing customer experience.
The ultimate purpose of customer advocacy is not activity.
It is business impact.
In Summary
Advocates are valuable assets. The advocacy team's job is to make sure those assets are available when needed, protected from burnout, and aligned with the organization's most important priorities.
When done well, customer advocacy transforms customer success into measurable business value. It is an enterprise capability built on trusted relationships, reliable data, and authentic customer voices.
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