In our recent Business Impact Report, a senior marketing director of a leading global technology company shared the five lessons they learned when transforming a customer advocacy programme in partnership with Wise & Zeal to deliver more than 70 public stories in 2 years.
The five lessons learned were:
- Empower sales and marketing – To ensure sales and marketing teams fully engage with an advocacy programme, take time to understand their needs and develop specific resources to support them, such as an empowerment tool-kit. “Wise & Zeal […] created sales empowerment tools and a virtual roadshow to showcase our revitalised advocacy programme. The team explained how simple the programme was, and removed the majority of objections that the sales teams typically posed.”
- Centre the customer in the story – and the process – Putting the customer and their goals at the heart of the process ensures that more customers want to take part. “It was a game changer for us to have our customers state how simple the programme was to get involved with. The customer is now firmly at the centre of the process.” With a customer-centric programme in place, the client saw a 600% increase in customer advocacy stories.
- Understand why the current programme isn’t working – Invest time in truly understanding why your existing programme isn’t delivering what you need, so you ensure you fix the right problem. “Wise & Zeal went much further than tinkering with tactics. The team scrutinised the underlying problems with our programme, then recommended a re-engineered approach to customer advocacy, and put it into place.”
- Don’t be afraid to use a managed service – they have hidden benefits – As well as delivering fresh thinking and extra resources, a managed service provider can act as a neutral third-party in the story development process “We discovered an unknown benefit in the Wise & Zeal managed service after C-suite executives from our customers told us that working with an independent organisation gave them confidence that their story would be told – not our story as the vendor.”
- Knowledge is power – Ensure that information is available in real-time on how the programme is running. Ideally this would be self-service dashboard reporting so that access to data doesn’t create its own overhead. “Despite it being a managed service, I can check everything – from the year-to-date nominations to how many customers stories we have per region or by product line. We can also confidently predict our future pipeline.”
For more information on the challenges the client was experiencing, and details around the solutions implemented and the results seen, please read the Business Impact Report.
If your customer advocacy or marketing strategies aren’t where you want them to be, simply email us via our Contact Us page so we can set up a conversation to find out more about how we can help.
