How Customer Advocates Can Drive Marketing Strategy
WANTED: A MODERN APPROACH to marketing your products and services. Many buyers today have mostly made up their minds about you before they ever engage with your sales or marketing efforts. How then do you establish connections with buyers who increasingly rely on others to make up their minds? As we know, they’re often turning to anyone but you—their friends or colleagues, their expanding social media networks and other sources such as bloggers, independent communities of their peers, and content aggregators, as well as traditional outside venues such as analysts and industry media.
This applies not just to your existing markets. As companies expand their reach into new markets or new global regions, the problem is compounded because they have no presence, don’t speak the language, and typically have limited marketing budgets. The upshot? Your business is losing customers even though the solutions you’re seeking are right in front of you, in your products and services.
By including customer advocates in your marketing efforts, and in particular in the conversations you’re having with your market, you can meet these challenges. Organizing and deploying such a marketing communications strategy starts by rethinking your approach in terms of the opportunities this new world is creating—which are considerable for companies who become skilled at engaging with their customers to get the word out.
Effective ways to frame your approach to marketing include creating “marketing gravity,” accelerating customer engagement, and becoming an industry thought leader. In this chapter we will explore each of these steps, as well as examining companies that are already doing these things, such as Hitachi Data Systems, Eloqua, Microsoft, and SAS Institute (Canada). Let’s begin with the first step—grooming your customer advocates to attract new customers.
Create Marketing Gravity
More useful than a “push-pull” approach to marketing communications, which suggests some sort of wrestling match, is an “attraction” strategy, which can be formulated as marketing gravity—a concept developed by über-consultant Alan Weiss and his community of individual and small-firm management consultants.1 His group is as effective as any I’ve encountered at establishing and building long-term relationships with key customers.
For our purposes we’ll adapt Weiss’s concept to illustrate how your customers can help you establish and build those relationships. The idea is to build a picture of how marketing communication looks for your firm in today’s world of easy access to information and two-way conversations, and then see where your customer advocates can enhance your firm’s gravitational pull.
For example, figure 4-1 depicts a B2B firm that provides products and services. This one illustrates just a few of the possibilities—I’ve seen one marketing gravity chart that contained more than 130 “gravitational pull” items.
FIGURE 4-1
Marketing gravity
Source: Adapted from Alan Weiss, The Consulting Bible: Everything You Need to Know to Create and Expand a Seven-Figure Consulting Practice (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2011).
Using this chart as a guide, you can identify individual gravitational pull based on your business and industry. Then think through how customers in your market access information and conversations about your industry, or how they might be open to being engaged.
That bears repeating: be sure to look specifically for ways to bring customer advocates into marketing gravity. As you can see, they can play important roles in most, if not all, of these attraction tools. You can interview them in your newsletters or company magazine, feature their experiences in teleconferences, and promote them to media outlets or industry analysts (which place high value on customer experiences when reporting about product releases or industry trends). Customer videos are exceptionally powerful tools for engaging buyers, as we’ll see in chapter 5, even in early product marketing campaigns such as beta or early adopter programs.
Unleashing this peer information and dialogue into your market in a timely, high-impact fashion requires an organized and systematic effort—not unlike a modern media company—within your own company. The following section focuses on the second step of the process, which will help you select and prioritize marketing gravity efforts in a way that maximizes their attraction.
Accelerating Customer Engagement
The second step for launching an attraction approach to marketing is the accelerant curve (figure 4-2).2 This useful framework helps you to think about how you can accelerate the creation of mutual, high-value engagement with key customers.
In the accelerant curve, you combine effective, staged aspects of your marketing gravity plan with your value proposition. The idea is not to regard all marketing gravity efforts as equal in value, but over time to determine which will make it easiest and most compelling for prospects to engage with your firm, and then accelerate the process of moving them rapidly from the initial education stage (on the left of the curve) to the most intimate and profitable exchange of high mutual value (on the right).
For customers who don’t know you, you start at the left, making it easy to engage with you with three or four inexpensive or free offerings. As you progress to the right, you’re providing more value (from demos to introductory products or services to more comprehensive products and services) and, often, more intimacy (personal service, access to rapid response, access to advisory boards or executive forums and the like). Note that the key accelerator is trust—which naturally evolves through this incremental staging of your engagement with the customer.
FIGURE 4-2
The accelerant curve
Source: Adapted from Alan Weiss, The Consulting Bible: Everything You Need to Know to Create and Expand a Seven-Figure Consulting Practice (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2011).
If it is particularly effective, your accelerant strategy has “leaps,” or stages of engagement so effective that the prospect jumps or leaps directly to the most intimate and lucrative stage of engagement at the far right after having interacted with you in only one or two initial stages.
These constructs, marketing gravity plus the accelerant curve, are exceptionally versatile. They can be used to penetrate new markets, penetrate a single large customer more deeply, or reengage existing customers who are drifting away. But to really ratchet up your appeal to customer advocate-marketers, consider how you can become a guru of sorts in your own industry.
Be the Influencer: How to Become an Industry Thought Leader
Influencer marketing—finding and engaging with the influencers, mavens, connectors, network hubs, and the like in your marketplace and getting them to say positive things about you—is now just the ante-up in the current media-saturated environment. The Web has created a platform in which bloggers unaffiliated with traditional media or analyst firms can create large followings that are quite attractive to marketers. Many companies make it a major priority to reach out to them.
What never seems to occur to companies, however, is that they are the ones who should be the influencers and thought leaders. Think about it: your own firm probably has access to customers who are in the trenches every day, facing and solving (hopefully with your help) the real-world issues confronting your industry. In addition, your firm has professional business, technical, and process experts who are working side by side with your customers to help them find solutions.
This is the sort of information that outside influencers such as analysts and industry media crave. And you have it. Why depend on a marketing communications strategy that feeds such powerful intellectual property to mediators? Why not be the influencer yourself?
If you have your act together—if you have customers who are achieving great things with your help and are passionate about your services, and your experts are among the best in the industry (and these are the price of admission in many industries)—then you’re well positioned to become a thought leader. Although there’s nothing wrong with developing good relationships with outside influencers or the media, why depend on the kindness of strangers?
. . .
Is Your Company a Thought Leader?
| • | Your firm constantly disseminates powerful intellectual property (IP) that focuses not on your offerings but on the important issues in the industry. |
| • | Your IP suggests approaches—solutions to such issues that might come from anywhere—not just your firm’s products and services. |
| • | Your primary sources are great customers or clients and a tremendous track record—but you’re not limited to those. |
| • | Unlike many others in your industry, you’re able to make complex topics simple, free of jargon, pragmatic, and always with clear business outcomes in view. |
| • | You’re able to make the implicit explicit. For example, you can tease out underlying assumptions widely held in your industry that might be leading people astray. |
| • | You can also make the explicit implicit. That is, your IP provides guidance and actual examples of how practitioners in the real world can take great ideas and incorporate them so thoroughly into their firm that it becomes implicit knowledge, or second nature. |
| • | You’re in the public eye. Over time you are looked to as a major authority—if not the authority—in your field. |
| • | You’re able to change others’ perspective—and sometimes change the conversation—in your industry. |
| • | You build your own substantial following and audience. Your IP is quoted and cited frequently by the media because they can’t ignore you. |
| • | No one doing business in your industry can afford not to listen to you. They may not agree with you and may not use your products and services, but if they ignore you, then they aren’t taken seriously by their peers. |
| • | You grow a substantial body of work containing proprietary material, over time. |
| • | You coin phrases cited by others. |
. . .
Before I describe how one company, Eloqua, became a thought leader, let’s take a moment to look at what being a thought leader actually entails. Companies that manage to assume such pundit status in their industries generate a regular, steady stream of high-value intellectual capital (using customers and clients with great track records as primary sources). But they also make sure that the intellectual property they disseminate focuses on critical industry issues—not the company’s own offerings. The sidebar “Is Your Company a Thought Leader?” summarizes these and other ways that companies foster thought leadership in their industries.
Eloqua’s Markie Awards: Fast Track to Thought Leadership
Eloqua, the marketing intelligence and demand generation firm, is emerging as an important thought leader in its rapid-growth but highly competitive market. As chief technology officer Steve Woods points out, one key is that the firm showcases its customers, their knowledge, and their experience. The vehicle is its well-publicized Markie Awards.
Every year since 2006, Eloqua has hosted the black-tie event for its customers and others in the industry, providing a strong foundation for building its position of thought leadership. These events are a big deal, with awards given out in some twenty categories. The statues that award winners receive were designed by the same firm that designed the Emmy Awards. “We decided that if we were going to do this, we’d do it right,” says Woods. An industry panel selects winners representing the best of the best in the industry—whether they are Eloqua customers or not.
“We take pains to make sure that our winners really are the best and that people understand in-depth why they won,” says Woods. And that’s the key to the powerful thought leadership mojo the Markies create for Eloqua. Not surprisingly, the Markies draw significant media attention.
Eloqua also develops industry-leading best practices in marketing, collected from dozens of winners and finalists—some of which are its customers, many of which are not. Its most successful marketing campaigns in 2009, in fact, were thought leadership pieces based on knowledge gleaned from award winners. For example, Eloqua issued a vendor-neutral, highly successful Social Media Playbook that captured information about how its clients and other leading users of social media use those tools. The Playbook offers clear, pragmatic information about the use of such tools as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. This was not promotional material, but pragmatic, useful, and easy-to-understand information that cut through the clutter and confusion of how social media works for marketing executives struggling to make sense of it all.
Meanwhile, a second highly successful thought leadership effort, Eloqua’s Infographic campaign, provided an additional tool—a social media content “grid”—that marketers can use to think through and plan their own efforts in new media.
Such campaigns were tremendous successes for Eloqua. Both created large spikes in traffic to its sites—and those numbers carried through to generate proportionally large spikes in revenue.
. . .
These, then, are the building blocks of a customer-driven marketing strategy in today’s world: (1) establish your company’s attraction with marketing gravity, (2) apply an engagement-accelerant curve that fits your business and market, and (3) establish thought leadership. Throughout each of these steps, emphasize content from your customers.
The following sections set forth examples of how three firms—Hitachi Data Systems, Microsoft, and SAS Institute (Canada)—are successfully using some combination of this three-pronged approach to get the word out about their offerings (and the passionate customers they’ve won as a result) to penetrate new markets and to restore lagging customer retention rates.
Hitachi Data Systems: Moving from Best-Kept Secret to Top of Mind
A few years ago, data storage solutions provider Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) faced a problem. As Brian Householder, senior vice president of worldwide marketing and business development, put it, “We have many passionate customers. But no one in our industry knew about it.” The team lacked the presence of larger, older, and better-funded rival EMC.
To tackle the problem, Householder and his team addressed a number of critical issues involving the firm’s brand. The team had learned that, in their communication with customers, HDS employees in sales, marketing, and other areas were describing some thirty different versions of the firm’s brand to customers! Obviously they needed to get on the same page. Also, in thinking about the sort of brand conversations they wanted to have in their marketplace, Householder and his team needed to decide what specifically they wanted to achieve in the company’s new branding effort, what HDS should talk about to get there, and how the firm would get the message out. Needless to say, HDS’s passionate customers would play critical roles in finding the answers to these problems.
What follows are lessons gleaned from the steps that HDS ultimately took to rapidly build its market presence.
Start with a Consistent Brand Message That Addresses What’s on Customers’ Minds
HDS began by developing a single consistent brand message, which became “Data drives our world. Information is the new currency”—a clear appeal to the growing realization in the C suite that technology is playing an increasingly strategic role and can differentiate a firm. HDS placed adherence to the brand message into the firm’s MBOs (management by objectives). “If we can’t outspend our competition, at least we can make sure we’re all saying the same thing,” says Asim Zaheer, vice president of corporate and global marketing. In its efforts to get the message into its marketplace, HDS established a goal: gain mindshare in the C suite at large enterprises. “To do this, we needed to make sure that our content was interesting, different, engaging, and provided immediate value to readers,” says Zaheer. “And above all, not just another sales pitch.”
Here’s how they proceeded.
Develop Content That Provides Solutions and Shows You Can Provide More
HDS invested considerable time into thinking through what key issues were on its customers’ minds. For example, in 2010, costs were a big factor for CIOs. “So we provided them with information to help them reduce costs,” says Zaheer. “The message that we project is, ‘We’re not just a vendor. We’re a business partner.’ ”
Place Your Internal Experts Front and Center
HDS placed Hu Yoshida, its well-respected chief technology officer, in the limelight to attract high-level audiences. With a blog that showcases his expertise, Yoshida gives C-level readers insights into current trends in topics such as private-cloud computing, virtualization, storage management, and other issues critical to the intended audience. His focus is on helping them think through important issues, not on touting HDS solutions. Unsurprisingly, his blog is attracting audiences in significant numbers. Yoshida brings two advantages that no journalist, blogger, or other outside influencer can match—deep expertise (that’s how he got his job with HDS) plus regular, direct access to customers and their issues. These provide a powerful basis for assuming a position of thought leadership.
Execute a Theme-Based Communications Strategy That Emphasizes Customer Stories
Zaheer and his team made a conscious decision to take a thematic approach in their communications. “We didn’t want to do one-shot posts or white papers, but instead to develop themes so we could create ongoing conversations.” The themes they picked were, again, top of mind to the CIOs, CFOs, and executives running operations that they wanted to reach. “We want readers to get the message that HDS is thinking holistically about solutions to their issues, and not just selling our stuff,” says Zaheer.
Important in all HDS thought leadership efforts are customer stories. “If our audience is a bank CFO, we’ll talk about a large bank on Wall Street that tackled the issue we’re addressing, and how it did so,” says Zaheer. What’s more, the firm kept customers closely engaged as it rolled out its content, keeping them informed, getting their input and feedback, featuring their stories, and putting them on stage at its live events (more on this in a moment). For customers and prospects who were located where HDS didn’t have a presence, the firm took a variety of new and old media steps to rectify that situation.
Like Salesforce.com, which engages with the forgotten end user, Zaheer and his team also wanted to consciously penetrate deeper into the organizations of the customers they wanted to attract. In addition to developing communications that C-level executives will want to read, HDS continues to “go deep” into current issues to attract the more technical people (who will be implementing and living with HDS solutions), to create credibility with them as well.
To Reach Customers, Find Out Where They Are
Zaheer and his team also spent time thinking through how to get the intellectual property HDS developed to its intended audience. One obvious step was to ensure that HDS blogs and other content show up high in Google rankings of the terms that HDS prospects are searching on, such as “storage virtualization.” That was achieved first and foremost by having a highly respected CIO putting out exceptionally valuable content.
And because HDS knew that its customers and potential customers communicated on Facebook and Twitter, the firm established a presence in these places with a “facebook.com/HitachiData Systems” page and an “HDScorp” Twitter account, respectively. Unlike many such corporate “social network” pages that fall into the trap of being “all about us,” HDS addressed issues it knew its customers were facing. For example, the Facebook page might post a link to “What will be the top tech trends in 2011?”—a blog post by Yoshida. Or it might link networkers to an e-book describing the “Big Five Benefits” of installing a “one file and content storage family” for firms thinking of making that transition. Tweets might include a link to an article on how much money you could save in your data center.
HDS also syndicates content through popular publications and content aggregation sites that reach its intended audience, such as CIO.com, TechTarget.com, and Searchstorage.com. Still, where appropriate, HDS uses traditional marketing outreach channels such as telemarketing, targeted mail, and e-mail lists to disseminate its ideas and promote events that it hosts.
“We’re also engaging with influencers in the blogging community,” says Zaheer. “Most of them are technical, so we flew a dozen top bloggers in for a ‘geek day’ at our headquarters.” HDS takes what it calls an “open kimono” approach with such bloggers, allowing them to play with the firm’s technology to their hearts’ content and to talk directly with top HDS officials.
Leverage the Power of Live Events
Like Salesforce.com, HDS found that live events are exceptionally powerful marketing tools. The firm started aggressively, with some forty seminars in major cities around the world, under its revitalized brand theme “Data drives our world. Information is the new currency.”
When HDS launched the seminar series in Santa Clara, California, in 2010, Zaheer and his team expected perhaps 150 or so attendees. But 300 showed up, attracted to the firm’s growing thought leadership already established on the Web and other channels. They also came because HDS customers (that is, peers of the audience) were on the agenda. In addition, the events included HDS partner firms such as VMware, Brocade, and Cisco—which further emphasized that, rather than a vendor sales pitch, attendees were going to get a comprehensive view of solutions to their issues from their peers.
Subsequent seminars have attracted on average between 150 and 200 attendees per city—and more than one thousand in some global market cities. The mix of attendees is typically twenty or so customers, along with thirty prospective customers at the VP level and above, who are also invited to bring along their teams.
As for costs and outcomes, the good news is that live events are relatively inexpensive on a per-attendee basis. HDS reckons the cost at around $275 per head. The results are more than worth it. In less than two years, 13,000 attendees have participated. HDS is closing on average $1 million in new business with new accounts at each event (not including add-on business with existing accounts).
Also, when HDS puts out major “product refreshes” to keep a product line abreast of evolving customer needs, acceptance has substantially improved as a result of the firm’s new approach to marketing. Previously, HDS suffered a serious dip in revenue for the product line that could reach into the hundreds of millions of dollars. “But by reaching out to our audience like we’ve done in the information seminars and other thought leadership efforts, we’re managing to avoid that dip,” says Zaheer.
Next we’ll look at Microsoft and how it leverages a customer-advocate marketing approach to expand its global presence.
Microsoft: Penetrating and Gaining Market Share Where You Don’t Speak the Language
A major challenge for any company is to enter new markets, which often have different customs and norms, along with their own language and ways of communicating. This is particularly true for companies striving to expand into global markets, and it can be an expensive and time- and labor-intensive proposition.
Just ask Microsoft. Even with its piles of cash, the software giant had to get creative when it came to attracting customers in new global markets. That’s why Microsoft developed its Most Valuable Professional (MVP) program to tap into an important opportunity: local markets have their own pundits and influencers. These are people who are knowledgeable about the industry, are relatively easy to find, and are known by and can influence others in the market to consider new solutions. Microsoft wanted to find and engage them.
Originally developed to help customers provide product support for each other and recognize and reward those who had been particularly helpful (as well as cut its own support costs), the Microsoft MVP program has since evolved into a full-fledged and scalable marketing gravity generator for the firm, particularly in new markets. The idea is to locate and reward top influencers and technology-community leaders in these markets—who might be thought of as “customers plus”—and begin to engage them in appropriate ways to help inform the market about what Microsoft products can do.
A Few Influencers, a Big Impact
Today, Microsoft has identified and groomed about four thousand MVPs in ninety countries covering about one hundred technologies and some forty languages. This is a tiny number compared with Microsoft’s customer base, but they create a substantial impact. Note the thought leadership traits that the MVPs, working with Microsoft, exhibit:
| • | Local MVPs speak the local language and understand local norms—and eventually they teach Microsoft the same. |
| • | MVPs are far more willing than the average buyer to share relevant Microsoft news and information about offerings to local technical communities, neighbors, and friends. |
| • | They provide exceptional input and actionable feedback on what the market needs and expects from Microsoft products. |
| • | They provide a superb cohort of beta testers for new features and products. “MVP participants account for less than 1 percent of all the beta testers, but they find 27 percent of the bugs that need to get fixed,” says Nestor Portillo, who runs the MVP program. |
| • | MVPs provide more than 20 percent of the content—such as white papers, Webcasts, and the like—on Microsoft’s Web sites and forums, which are the major technical resource and content destinations for Microsoft developers, information technology (IT) professionals, and consumers. That means that Microsoft’s far-flung technical communities have access to critical information helping them to create software and implement solutions for customers in global markets. |
Each of these has an impact on Microsoft’s bottom line. Yet Portillo is quick to point out that it’s not about the amount of money immediately saved or generated by these efforts. “It’s about sending the right message: we’re helping MVPs help their communities, in their own way, using their own language. And we’re helping the MVPs grow their own reputations. Ultimately, it’s about getting the right content to our customers.” (Note that Portillo touches here on the concept of communities. I call this community marketing and will cover it in depth in chapter 6.)
Finding and Cultivating MVP Influencers
Here’s how Microsoft develops MVPs for marketing on the front lines.
Define MVP Criteria
Particularly in newer markets with unfamiliar cultures and where your company might not be well known to the population, you can’t rely solely on your company’s own content and on customer references from home markets to create gravity. You need the right locals. Portillo and his team find them by looking for people who are highly technically adept—often in creative ways—with the Microsoft product in question. In addition, they have a considerable span of influence.
Specific criteria for choosing a Microsoft MPV include community leaders that are
| • | Available and easy to access |
| • | Independent |
| • | Deeply knowledgeable about the technology in question |
| • | Able to help others |
| • | Very professional in their interactions with peers |
| • | Able to speak the local language and understand the local ways of disseminating knowledge in nontechnical language |
Embrace an Expanded Concept of Advocacy
Microsoft MVPs need not be customer references or even customers who might be particularly willing to recommend Microsoft—which is particularly noteworthy. Microsoft is not just looking for “raving fans” but rather for prominent influencers who will give Microsoft products a fair hearing. “We just require that our MVPs are at least neutral in their attitudes toward Microsoft,” says Portillo. Obviously, local Microsoft customers are often candidates for MVP status—but the program also welcomes those who aren’t customers but might be at some point.3 This illustrates a more advanced and more credible concept of advocacy in our increasingly transparent world.
Find Your MVPs, and Let Them Find You
Portillo and his team use a variety of approaches:
| • | Listen. Portillo’s team monitors communities in important markets around the world. “Technology is making it increasingly easy to find and monitor conversations and interactions in communities. And it’s a high priority for us to continue to improve our listening capabilities.” As Microsoft becomes increasingly adept at monitoring community interactions through social media sites or other local media, it becomes pretty clear who the influencers are. |
| • | Develop good listening tools. Listening tools such as Jive Market Engagement or Radian 6 are becoming increasingly good at letting Microsoft know how wide a span an MVP candidate has. These tools keep track of how many forums he or she participates in, what is the message and tone conveyed relative to Microsoft and its competitors, and how much commentary and other engagement the candidate receives. |
| • | Embrace self-nominations. MVP candidates, by their nature, are frequently not shy about letting you know who they are. MVPs include independent consultants, academics, big corporation employees, small business owners, doctors and lawyers, and more. “One of our top Excel MVPs is a firefighter in Osaka, Japan,” says Portillo. |
| • | Encourage referrals. A prime source for referrals are other MVPs (influencers tend to know who other influencers are), industry events or conventions (Portillo and his team look particularly for recurring keynote and other speakers), and internal Microsoft employees, particularly those working in the local market. |
| • | Mine user groups. This can be accomplished online or in person. For example, says Portillo, “In certain parts of Latin America or Southeast Asia, it’s difficult to get Internet access—so user communities will meet live. We’ll support those meetings with resources, and often wind up with exceptional MVP candidates.” |
MVPs can be widely followed bloggers or people who are active on forums or relevant social media sites such as Facebook or Linked In. They can include industry speakers, authors, and third-party Web site owners. “‘Mr. Excel’ runs a Web site that sometimes gets more traffic than our own Excel page,” notes Portillo. “Now there’s an MVP candidate!”
The ways in which customers can help a firm increase marketing gravity and help move new buyers through the accelerant curve are limited only by a firm’s creativity and its ability to truly listen and learn.
Let’s look now at how SAS fosters customer advocates in its marketing efforts.
SAS Institute (Canada): Engaging Customer Advocates to Retain Existing Customers
SAS Institute (Canada), Inc., the Canadian subsidiary of the highly respected SAS Institute, found itself with a daunting problem a few years ago. The firm had enjoyed robust retention rates—in the high nineties—for years, but those had fallen to the mid- to high eighties in the early 2000s.
Wally Thiessen, who leads SAS Canada’s customer engagement programs, worked with a small marketing team to turn this around. “As we looked more closely at the problem, we discovered a knowledge gap: our customers often weren’t aware of important solutions that our software could provide them. We realized that we weren’t engaged enough with them.”
Here is what SAS Canada did to improve customer engagement—and retention.
Recruit Customer Champions to Build Learning Environments
The idea was to bring key customers, which SAS Canada styled as champions and super champions, together with other customers and SAS experts into a sharing and learning environment that would attract more and more customers. That combination allowed Thiessen and his team to narrow the knowledge gap and help address issues that SAS Canada customers were having, as well as to generate substantial marketing gravity to change their and the market’s declining perception of the value of SAS solutions.
Give Customer Champions Leadership and Organizational Roles
SAS Canada had a few user groups at the time, but they weren’t particularly dynamic or well organized. Thiessen and his team started by forming executive committees of local key customers selected from the user groups in thirteen major cities throughout Canada, and worked with them to hold two customer forums each year in their respective cities. The committees helped develop agendas and located speakers (other SAS customers or SAS experts) who would appeal to their audience, and afterward shared best practices that emerged. In addition, they worked with executive committees in the largest cities to conduct other specialty forums on various subjects of interest.
For its largest customers, SAS Canada created a key account program so that Thiessen and his team could work with these customers one on one. It also designated as customer “champions” those who participated in or contributed to these efforts. “Super champions” were those who participated in more than one program. In addition, Thiessen’s team launched an e-newsletter.
What motivates the champions to do things such as serving on an executive committee to help run customer events? SAS’s best customers cited the following reasons:
| • | To develop peer relationships |
| • | To achieve industry recognition |
| • | To gain the opportunity to share their success with others |
| • | To improve their personal development |
These customers and forums became the tools for a powerful marketing gravity effort. Thiessen’s team has developed and leveraged 275 champions and nearly 50 super champions. The customer forums they help to organize draw more than two thousand customers and prospects per year. The e-newsletter has more than five thousand subscribers. Between events, champions keep the conversation going with lively online forums, including an SAS wiki and pages on Facebook, LinkedIn, and other sites.
Focus Events and Content on Customer Issues
SAS Canada has found that specialty forums on topics ranging from data mining to health care to management have a greater impact on increasing demand generation than standard user meetings. “That’s because they’re specific and focus on topics that attendees are hungry to learn more about,” says Thiessen. “For example, our Data Mining Forum focuses on how to apply data mining techniques and approaches to address business challenges—not about SAS software usage.” Attendees learn from SAS customers as well as noncustomer practitioners—which reinforces that SAS is not conducting a sales pitch. But as it turns out, the meeting is held at SAS, most attendees use SAS, and many presentations refer to SAS to reinforce the company’s dominance in this market space.
Thiessen’s team takes the same approach with its Insights newsletters, which provide information not just on SAS usage but also about conferences, Webinars, and other events in the SAS community.
Find Ways to Cut Costs (Customers Can Help)
Managing these initiatives isn’t expensive. Thiessen and a team of just three people manage to oversee all this activity—involving SAS Canada’s three hundred prime customer businesses—on a limited budget. Here are some ways in which they save money:
| • | Speakers at the customer forums are often local—which appeals to audiences who want to learn from peers with whom they can build relationships. |
| • | SAS experts who do travel to speak at the forums also attend client or prospect meetings while in the city. |
| • | Customer executive committees do much of the groundwork for producing and managing the forums; Thiessen’s team supports those efforts. |
| • | A well-designed online communication management system saves SAS staff the time it would take to talk directly to the executive committees every time a general message needs to go out. |
| • | Forums are often held at customer sites or universities to save room rental and audiovisual costs. |
The upshot for SAS? This closer, more personal engagement between SAS Canada and customers, and among customers themselves, was key to solving the company’s retention problem, which climbed back to the high nineties by 2007. Customers who weren’t getting what they needed from their SAS software realized they weren’t alone, and that they had a peer community to draw on for support. They also learned about capabilities in their software they weren’t aware of, which enhanced its value to them.
The champions and super champions, who served on executive committees, were key to this turnaround. “Partnering with individual customers in a host of different ways strengthens ties and stickiness to our software,” Thiessen says. “Without these champions, it would be impossible to have the ties we’ve developed with our customer base.”
SAS has found too that the company’s customer engagement efforts provide powerful attraction to SAS Canada’s market outside its customer base. SAS Canada champions and super champions, along with presenters and panelists who participate in the forums or are interviewed in the customer e-newsletter, begin learning how to articulate the value of SAS solutions. They become natural candidates for customer references and public customer advocates.
Marketing’s New Role: Engagement Throughout the Customer Life Cycle
Marketing’s traditional role in demand generation ends when it hands over a qualified lead to sales, or so it is generally thought. But that approach creates far too limited a view of the impact the marketing department can have on the business by continuing to engage with customers after they buy. In fact, the decision to purchase should be just the warm-up when it comes to marketing’s engagement with the customer. (See figures 4-3 and 4-4.)
The following subsection examines ways to extend marketing’s relationship with buyers.
Turn Buyers into Passionate Advocates
Delivery, support, and services, working with the marketing department, try to take key customers (strategic or otherwise highly valued) through an agreed-upon progression, through which the customer becomes:
FIGURE 4-3
Marketing’s traditional relationship to the customer stops when he or she buys
FIGURE 4-4
Marketing’s new role: engagement throughout the customer life cycle
Properly engaged buyers can turn into customer advocates, influencers, and contributors, thus dramatically increasing marketing gravity.
| • | Satisfied: The solution works acceptably well. |
| • | Retained: The start of a long-term relationship, but not necessarily loyal, because there may be no acceptable alternatives available. |
| • | Loyal: But perhaps with a limited scope of services. |
| • | A promoter: Very willing to recommend your firm to a colleague or friend. |
| • | A trusted adviser (mutual relationship): Customer and vendor work together to improve and expand scores of services. |
| • | A trusted partner (mutual relationship): Relationships graduate to the C level, and these customers are open to the vendor offering solutions for any item on the customer’s agenda. |
As key customers progress through these stages, their value extends well beyond what they purchase: they become exceptionally valuable contributors to your marketing gravity efforts (and the ways in which they can do so are limited only by a company’s creativity). What’s more, these advocates, when properly engaged, increase their loyalty as purchasing customers.
For example, in the early stages of the relationship (even before they buy), customers may be willing to participate in a community that contains your other customers. At some point when you’ve proven that you’re going to provide value, they may be willing to provide references to help the sales department close deals. Later they may be willing to give you a testimonial. As your value and relationship grow, they may be willing to shoot a video and begin to open up their network to provide referrals to their peers whom they think you can help.
As your mutual success continues, and the value you provide becomes tangible, they may be willing to create with you a more detailed case study of their company’s lessons learned with your product. Or speak to an audience at industry events about, among other topics, the role you played in their success. Or they might contribute to your newsletter or blog or agree to interviews with the media.
As time goes on, they may agree to serve on your advisory boards, providing you with insights into their future needs and those of the marketplace. As the relationships go up the hierarchy at your key-customer accounts, C-level customers might do many of the above activities as well as serve on executive boards that provide invaluable information that guides your strategy.
All these, in a phrase, are the ingredients for building exceptional marketing gravity and accelerating customer trust, intimacy, and value creation. What kind of value? Your key customers will experience, among other benefits:
| • | Improved delivery and service |
| • | Better innovation and more strategic solutions over time |
| • | Access to peer interaction and relationships, by participating in your communities, boards, conferences, and the like |
| • | Personal and professional recognition: speaking at industry events, being quoted in media, and so on |
These are just a few of the benefits customer advocates will see and experience. But you can look for ways to provide even more. For example, if you’re a large enterprise, you have the resources to reward the customer’s team with complementary tickets to conferences and other networking and learning experiences. And if you’re a small new firm, just surviving is a benefit to your customers. That alone makes it more likely that they’ll refer business to you.
. . .
Properly understood, the threats that marketing faces in today’s world—where customers check you out long before they’ll talk to you, and in which customers barely understand the increasingly complex solutions you sell—represent superb opportunities. For many firms, the door is wide open to rise above the din to a position of thought leadership in their industry and penetrate global markets, to learn the skills they’ll need to engage customers and the people who influence them, and to harvest reams of valuable intelligence and turn it into knowledge.
None of this is simple to do. But companies who work to pursue customer-advocate marketing venues will differentiate themselves far beyond the competition. In the next chapter, we will look at how customers can turn the Web from a threat into an opportunity for your company.
Key Tasks
Engaging Customer Advocates to Drive Your Marketing Strategy.
| • | Reframe traditional “push-pull” marketing by using an attraction approach through customer advocacy. Put customer content and stories at the forefront. |
| • | To focus customer advocacy efforts, develop and maintain a marketing gravity chart and an accelerant curve that lets everyone in your organization know what you’re doing to attract customers, and how you can accelerate the process most effectively. |
| • | Establish thought leadership to escape dependence on external influencers and to exploit one of the most compelling branding opportunities in today’s world for any firm: the IP you can create through your passionate customers combined with your best-in-class internal experts. |
| • | Think expansively about how you can marshal customer advocates. They can help you get the word out about your firm and its offerings, penetrate new markets, and retain existing customers. |