Get Started With Customer Advocacy

Develop a customer advocacy program to transform customer satisfaction into revenue growth.

EXECUTIVE BRIEF

Analyst perspective

Customer advocacy is critical to driving revenue growth

Customer advocacy puts the customer at the center of everything your organization does. By cultivating a deep understanding of customer needs and how they define value and by delivering positive experiences throughout the customer journey, organizations inspire and empower customers to become evangelists for their brands or products. Both the client and solution provider enjoy satisfying and ongoing business outcomes as a result. Focusing on customer advocacy is critical for software solutions providers. Business-to-business (B2B) buyers are increasingly looking to their peers and third-party resources to arm themselves with information on solutions they feel they can trust before they choose to engage with solution providers. Your satisfied customers are now your most trusted and powerful resource. Customer advocacy helps build strong relationships with your customers, nurtures brand advocacy, gives your marketing messaging credibility, and differentiates your company from the competition; it’s critical to driving revenue growth. Companies that develop mature advocacy programs give themselves strong competitive advantage in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

Emily Wright
Senior Research Analyst, Advisory
SoftwareReviews

Executive summary

Your Challenge

Ad hoc customer advocacy (CA) efforts and reference programs, while still useful, are not enough to drive growth. Providers increase their chance for success by assessing if they face the following challenges:

• Lack of referenceable customers that can turn into passionate advocates, or a limited pool that is at risk of burnout.
• Lack of references for all key customer types, verticals, etc., especially in new growth segments or those that are hard to recruit.
• Lack of a consistent program for gathering customer feedback and input to make improvements and increase customer satisfaction.
• Lack of executive and stakeholder (e.g. Sales, Customer Success, channel partners, etc.) buy-in for the importance and value of customer advocacy.

Building a strong customer advocacy program must be a high priority for customer service/success leaders in today’s highly competitive software markets.

Common Obstacles

Getting started with customer advocacy is no easy task. Many customer success professionals carry out ad hoc customer advocacy activities to address immediate needs but lack a more strategic approach. What separates them from success are several nagging obstacles:

• Efforts lack funding and buy-in from stakeholders.
• Senior management doesn’t fully understand the business value of a customer advocacy program.
• Duplicate efforts are taking place between Sales, Marketing, product teams, etc., because ownership, roles, and responsibilities have not been determined.
• Relationships are guarded/hoarded by those who feel they own the relationship (e.g. Sales, Customer Success, channel partners, etc.).
• Customer-facing staff often lack the necessary skills to foster customer advocacy.

SoftwareReviews’ Approach

This blueprint will help leaders of customer advocacy programs get started with developing a formalized pilot program that will demonstrate the value of customer advocacy and lay a strong foundation to justify rollout. Through SoftwareReviews’ approach, customer advocacy leaders will:

• Enable the organization to identify and develop meaningful relationships with top customers and advocates.
• Understand the concepts and benefits of CA and how CA can be used to improve marketing and sales and fuel growth and competitiveness.
• Follow SoftwareReviews’ methodology to identify where to start to apply CA within the organization.
• Develop a customer advocacy proof of concept/pilot program to gain stakeholder approval and funding to get started with or expand efforts around customer advocacy.

What is customer advocacy?

“Customer advocacy is the act of putting customer needs first and working to deliver solution-based assistance through your products and services." – Testimonial Hero, 2021

Customer advocacy is designed to keep customers loyal through customer engagement and advocacy marketing campaigns. Successful customer advocacy leaders experience decreased churn while increasing return on investment (ROI) through retention, acquisition, and cost savings. Businesses that implement customer advocacy throughout their organizations find new ways of supporting customers, provide additional customer value, and ensure their brands stand unique among the competition.

Customer Advocacy Is…

• An integral part of any marketing and/or business strategy.
• Essential to improving and maintaining high levels of customer satisfaction.
• Focused on delivering value to customers.
• Not only a set of actions, but a mindset that should be fostered and reinforced through a customer-centric culture.
• Mutually beneficial relationships for both company and customer.

Customer Advocacy Is Not…

• Only referrals and testimonials.
• Solely about what you can get from your advocates.
• Brand advocacy. Brand advocacy is the desired outcome of customer advocacy.
• Transactional. Brand advocates must be engaged.
• A nice-to-have.
• Solved entirely by software. Think about what you want to achieve and how a software solution can you help you reach those goals.

SoftwareReviews Insight

Customer advocacy has evolved into being a valued company asset versus a simple referral program – success requires an organization-wide customer-first mindset and the recognition that customer advocacy is a strategic growth initiative necessary to succeed in today’s competitive market.

Customer advocacy: Essential to high retention

When customers advocate for your company and products, they are eager to retain the value they receive

• Customer acts of advocacy correlate to high retention.
• Acts of advocacy won’t happen unless customers feel their interests are placed ahead of your company’s, thereby increasing satisfaction and customer success. That’s the definition of a customer-centric culture.
• And yet your company does receive significant benefits from customer advocacy:
  • When customers advocate and renew, your costs go down and margins rise because it costs less to keep a happy customer than it does to bring a new customer onboard.
  • When renewal rates are high, customer lifetime value increases, also increasing profitability.

Acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing customer (Huify, 2018).

Increasing customer retention by 5% can increase profits by 25% to 95% (Bain & Company, cited in Harvard Business Review, 2014).

SoftwareReviews Insight

Don’t overlook the value of customer advocacy to retention! Despite the common knowledge that it’s far easier and cheaper to sell to an existing customer than to sell to a new prospect, most companies fail to leverage their customer advocacy programs and continue to put pressure on Marketing to focus their budgets on customer acquisition.

Customer advocacy can also be your ultimate growth strategy

In your marketing and sales messaging, acts of advocacy serve as excellent proof points for value delivered.

45% of businesses rank online reviews as a top source of information for selecting software during this (top of funnel) stage, followed closely by recommendations and referrals at 42%. These sources are topped only by company websites at 57% (Clutch, 2020).

With referrals coming from customer advocates to prospects via your lead gen engine and through seller talk tracks, customer advocacy is central to sales, marketing, and customer experience success.

✓ Advocates can help your new customers learn your solution and ensure higher adoption and satisfaction.
✓ Advocates can provide valuable, honest feedback on new updates and features.

“A customer advocacy program is not just a fancy buzz word or a marketing tool that’s nice to have. It’s a core discipline that every major brand needs to integrate into their overall marketing, sales and customer success strategies if they expect to survive in this trust economy. Customer advocacy arguably is the common asset that runs throughout all marketing, sales and customer success activities regardless of the stage of the buyer’s journey and ties it all together.” – RO Innovation, 2017

Positive experience drives acts of advocacy

More than price or product, experience now leads the way in customer advocacy and retention

Advocacy happens when customers recommend your product. Our research shows that the biggest drivers of likeliness to recommend and acts of customer advocacy are the positive experiences customers have with vendors and their products, not product features or cost savings. Customers want to feel that:

1. Their productivity and performance is enhanced and the vendor is helping them to innovate and grow as a company.
2. Their vendor inspires them and helps them to continually improve.
3. They can rely on the vendor and the product they purchased.
4. They are respected by the vendor.
5. They can trust that the vendor will be on their side and save them time.

Note that anything above 0.5 indicates a strong driver of satisfaction.
Source: SoftwareReviews buyer reviews (based on 82,560 unique reviews).

SoftwareReviews Insight

These true drivers of satisfaction should be considered in your customer advocacy and retention efforts. The experience customers have with your product and brand is what will differentiate your brand from competitors, drive advocacy, and ultimately, power business growth. Talk to a SoftwareReviews advisor to learn how users rate your product on these satisfaction drivers in the SoftwareReviews Emotional Footprint Report.

Yet challenges exist for customer advocacy program leaders

Customer success leaders without a strong customer advocacy program feel numerous avoidable pains:

• Lack of compelling stories and proof points for the sales team, causing long sales cycles.
• Heavy reliance on a small pool of worn-out references.
• Lack of references for all needed customer types, verticals, etc.
• Lack of a reliable customer feedback process for solution improvements.
• Overspending on acquiring new customers due to a lack of customer proof points.
• Missed opportunities that could grow the business (customer lifetime value, upsell/cross-sell, etc.).

Marketing, customer success, and sales teams experiencing any one of the above challenges must consider getting started with a more formalized customer advocacy program.

Obstacles to customer advocacy programs

Leaders need tools to overcome several specific barriers:

• Stakeholders are often unclear on the value customer advocacy programs can bring and require proof of benefits to invest.
• Efforts are duplicated among sales, marketing, product, and customer success teams, given ownership and collaboration practices are ill-defined or nonexistent.
• There is a culture of guarding or hoarding customer relationships by those who feel they own the relationship, or there’s high turnover among employees who own the customer relationships.
• The governance, technology, people, skills, and/or processes to take customer advocacy to the next level are lacking.
• Leaders don’t know where to start with customer advocacy, what needs to be improved, or what to focus on first.

A lack of customer centricity hurts organizations

12% of people believe when a company says they put customers first. (Source: HubSpot, 2019)

Brands struggle to follow through on brand promises, and a mismatch between expectations and lived experience emerges. Customer advocacy can help close this gap and help companies live up to their customer-first messaging.

42% of companies don’t conduct any customer surveys or collect feedback. (Source: HubSpot, 2019)

Too many companies are not truly listening to their customers. Companies that don’t collect feedback aren’t going to know what to change to improve customer satisfaction. Customer advocacy will orient companies around their customer and create a reliable feedback loop that informs product and service enhancements.

Customer advocacy is no longer a nice-to-have but a necessity for solution providers

B2B buyers increasingly turn to peers to learn about solutions:

“84% of B2B decision makers start the buying process with a referral.” (Source: Influitive, Gainsight & Pendo, 2020)

“46% of B2B buyers rely on customer references for information before purchasing.” (Source: RO Innovation, 2017)

“91% of B2B purchasers’ buying decisions are influenced by word-of-mouth recommendations.” (Source: ReferralRock, 2022)

“76% of individuals admit that they’re more likely to trust content shared by ‘normal’ people than content shared by brands.” (Source: TrustPilot, 2020)

By ignoring the importance of customer advocacy, companies and brands are risking stagnation and missing out on opportunities to gain competitive advantage and achieve growth.

Customer advocacy benefits

Our research benefits customer advocacy program managers by enabling them to:

• Explain why having a centralized, proactive customer advocacy program is important.
• Clearly communicate the benefits and business case for having a formalized customer advocacy program.
• Develop a customer advocacy pilot to provide proof of concept (POC) and demonstrate the value of customer advocacy.
• Assess the maturity of your current customer advocacy efforts and identify what to improve and how to improve to grow your customer advocacy function.

“Advocacy is the currency for business and the fuel for explosive growth. Successful marketing executives who understand this make advocacy programs an essential part of their go-to-market strategy. They also know that advocacy isn’t something you simply ‘turn on’: … ultimately, it’s about making human connections and building relationships that have enduring value for everyone involved.” – Dan Cote, Influitive, 2021

Get Started In Building Customer Advocacy

Advocacy Powers Growth

"88% of customers repeat purchases and 60% of customer lifetime value comes from people referred by advocates." - Gray Group International, 2020

B2B buyers continue to put greater trust in their peers and third-party reviews. More than ever, companies will need to proactively engage their customer advocates and put resources toward creating positive customer and advocate experiences to remain competitive.

Are you struggling with any of the following symptoms?

• A lack of diversity of advocates/references
• Overusing a small pool of advocates, risking burnout
• A lack of compelling stories and proof points to close business
• Long sales cycles
• Inadequate customer advocacy program funding

Or are you lacking an approach to overcome key obstacles?

• Stakeholders are unclear on the value customer advocacy programs can bring and require proof of benefits to invest.
• You don't understand how to implement customer advocacy.
• Efforts are duplicated or roles and responsibilities are unclear among departments.
• Ownership and collaboration practices are ill-defined or non-existent.
• There is a culture of guarding or hoarding customer relationships or high turnover among employees who own these relationships.
• Customer advocacy governance, technology, people, skills, and with/or processes are lacking.
• You don't know where to start with customer advocacy.

If you answered yes to any of these, Software Reviews' approach will help you get started with building customer advocacy (CA).

SoftwareReviews' Approach

This process will set you up for future benefits when you build your advocacy program.

Step 1: Build the Business Case

Critical Components

• Make program merits/successes clear to leadership and stakeholders.
• Understand and document any risks or threats to pilot success.

Key Insight
Get key stakeholders onboard - especially Sales!

Step 2: Develop Advocacy Requirements

Critical Components

• Use SoftwareReviews' CA Maturity Assessment Tool to identify the current state and where to start.
• Understand key resources and personnel required.

Key Insight
Identify the highest priority segment for generating acts of advocacy.

Step 3: Create Action Plan & Pitch CA Pilot

Critical Components

• Set clear objectives and narrow scope.
• Define clear success criteria and metrics.
• Create realistic timelines and a roadmap with key milestones.

Key Insight
Always link your CA efforts back to retention and growth.

Reap Key Benefits

• Understand how concepts and benefits of CA apply to your organization.
• Identify and remediate gaps in current CA efforts
• Define clear scope and objective for CA pilot.
• Increase coordination between Sales, Marketing, Product, Customer Success.
• Gain stakeholder approval and funding for CA pilot.

Deliver Key Outputs

• Customer Advocacy Current-State Assessment
• Customer Advocacy Pilot implementation Plan Template
• Executive Presentation on CA Pilot

CA Definition: Customer advocacy puts the customer at the center of everything your organization does. By cultivating a deep understanding of customer needs and how they define value and by delivering positive experiences throughout the customer journey, organizations inspire and empower customers to become evangelists for their brands or products.

Who benefits from getting started with customer advocacy?

This Research Is Designed for:

• Customer advocacy leaders and marketers who are looking to:
  • Take a more strategic, proactive, and structured approach to customer advocacy.
  • Find a more effective and reliable way to gather customer feedback and input on products and services.
  • Develop and nurture a customer-oriented mindset throughout the organization.
  • Improve marketing credibility both within the company and outside to prospective customers.

This Research Will Help You:

• Explain why having a centralized, proactive customer advocacy program is important.
• Clearly communicate the benefits and business case for having a formalized customer advocacy program.
• Develop a customer advocacy pilot to provide proof of concept (POC) and demonstrate the value of customer advocacy.
• Assess the maturity of your current customer advocacy efforts and identify what to improve and how to improve to grow your customer advocacy function.

This Research Will Also Assist:

• Customer success leaders, marketing and sales directors and managers, product marketing managers, and advocacy managers/coordinators who are responsible for:
  • Gathering customer references and testimonials.
  • Referral or voice of the customer (VoC) programs.

This Research Will Help Them:

• Align stakeholders on an overall program of identifying ideal advocates.
• Coordinate customer advocacy efforts and actions.
• Gather and make use of customer feedback to improve products, solutions, and service provided.
• Provide an amazing customer experience throughout the entirety of the customer journey.

SoftwareReviews’ methodology for getting started with customer advocacy

Insight summary

Customer advocacy is a critical strategic growth initiative
Customer advocacy (CA) has evolved into being a highly valued company asset as opposed to a simple referral program, but not everyone in the organization sees it that way. Customer success leaders must reposition their CA program around growth instead of focusing solely on retention and communicate this to key stakeholders. The recognition that customer advocacy is a strategic growth initiative is necessary to succeed in today’s competitive market.

Get key stakeholders on board early – especially Sales!
Work to bring the CEO and the head of Sales on your side early. Sales is the gatekeeper – they need to open the door to customers to turn them into advocates. Clearly reposition CA for growth and communicate that to the CEO and head of Sales; wider buy-in will follow.

Identify the highest priority segment for generating acts of advocacy
By focusing on the highest priority segment, you accomplish a number of things: generating growth in a critical customer segment, proving the value of customer advocacy to key stakeholders (especially Sales), and setting a strong foundation for customer advocacy to build upon and expand the program out to other segments.

Always link your CA efforts back to retention and growth
By clearly demonstrating the impact that customer advocacy has on not only retention but also overall growth, marketers will gain buy-in from key stakeholders, secure funding for a full CA program, and gain the resources needed to expand customer advocacy efforts.

Focus on providing value to advocates
Many organizations take a transactional approach to customer advocacy, focusing on what their advocates can do for them. To truly succeed with CA, focus on providing your advocates with value first and put them in the spotlight.

Make building genuine relationships with your advocates the cornerstone of your CA program
57% of small businesses say that having a relationship with their consumers is the primary driver of repeat business (Factory360).

Guided Implementation

What does our GI on getting started with building customer advocacy look like?

Build the Business Case

Call #1: Discuss concepts and benefits of customer advocacy as they apply to organizational goals. Plan next call – 1 week.

Call #2: Identify key stakeholders. Map out motivations and anticipate any concerns or objections. Plan next call – 1 week.

Call #3: Discuss opportunities, risks, and risk mitigation tactics. Plan next call – 1 week.

Call #4: Finalize CA goals, opportunities, and risks and develop business case. Plan next call – 2 weeks.

Call #5: Discuss approach for gaining buy-in from CEO and head of Sales. Plan next call – 2 weeks.

Develop Your Advocacy Requirements

Call #6: Discuss your organization’s readiness for customer advocacy. Plan next call – 1 week.

Call #7: Review the SoftwareReviews CA Maturity Assessment Tool. Assess your current level of customer advocacy maturity. Plan next call – 1 week.

Call #8: Review gaps and pains in current CA efforts. Discuss tactics and possible CA pilot program goals. Begin adding tasks to action plan. Plan next call – 2 weeks.

Call #9: Discuss ideal advocate profile and target segments. Plan next call – 2 week.

Call #10: Discuss price, timing, and ROI. Plan next call – 3 weeks.

Create Action Plan and Pitch CA Pilot

Call #11: Discuss CA pilot scope. Discuss performance metrics and KPIs. Plan next call – 3 days.

Call #12: Develop implementation plan for pilot program. Plan next call –2 weeks.

Call #13: Review and finalize implementation plan and metrics. Plan next call – 3 days.

Call #14: Review final business case and coach on executive presentation. Plan next call – 1 week.

A Guided Implementation (GI) is series of calls with a SoftwareReviews Advisory analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization. For guidance on marketing applications, we can arrange a discussion with an Info-Tech analyst. Your engagement managers will work with you to schedule analyst calls.

SoftwareReviews offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

Included within Advisory Membership:

DIY Toolkit

“Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful.”

Guided Implementation

“Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track.”

Optional add-ons:

Workshop

“We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place.”

Consulting

“Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project.”

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