Episode 5: Customer Advocacy and Evidence Programs at scale

Speaker 1  0:00  
Above, welcome to The Advocast, where we discuss all things customer advocacy. Discover the latest trends, best practices, and tangible advice as we talk to some of the brightest and sharpest professionals in the industry. Learn how to turn your customers into advocates to drive sales leads and make a positive impact on revenue.

Host  0:27  
Hi everyone, this is The Advocast and I'm Pablo, your host. Today we have John Emmerich on the show. He's a human-centric storyteller and a marketing strategist with experience winning the hearts and minds of the C-suite. Hi, John. How are you doing?

John Emrick  0:42  
Doing all right. How are you? Thanks for having me.

Host  0:45  
I'm doing all right as well. Thank you. No, we are lucky to have on the show. Thank you for being here with us today. And today we're going to talk about customer advocacy, evidence programs, components, and internal services that should be part of your program today, or in 2023 and value the advocates can get out of the programs trends regarding assets, and much more, and all starts knowing a little bit more about you, John. So I would like to start this whole conversation telling our audience a little bit about your career or highlights, how you end up being part of this customer advocacy in customer marketing universe.

John Emrick  1:31  
Sure, so I've had I've been working in marketing, storytelling, customer advocacy for geez, over 15 years now, and I guess the way I got into it was sort of organic in my process, or the process of me getting deeper into it has been organic as well. So I started off sort of more working on, I guess, I would describe it as traditional marketing campaigns, a lot of content management work at at various agencies, and as my skill set and sort of what I wanted to do became deeper and more intertwined with storytelling and some really sort of broad and deep content work, my career path sort of followed, followed that, followed that sort of expertise, but followed it towards the customer marketing, customer advocacy space, customer storytelling, so on and so forth, and I done that with a whole bunch of different companies or a whole bunch of different industries and companies, the majority of it has been done in tech, but I moved to Microsoft about six or seven years ago after previously supporting them in a vendor role, and when you work for a company like Microsoft, your, your spread, I mean, Microsoft has businesses everywhere, in every industry, across every continent, in nearly every country, that's right, and you get to sort of go deep on so much different stuff, because the base that you're working with is so diverse, and so over time I've been able to touch and work with a whole bunch of different industries, different types of customers, customers in different countries, produce assets in multiple languages, and it's just been a great ride,

Host  3:40  
nice, and they completely agree with you. Our, the audience knows that I'm coming from Microsoft as well, and that's, that's incredible, isn't it? Like them, they reach, I mean, Windows, just to name, of course, we, we, Windows is not one of the products that we were specifically putting a lot of focus, but it's, it proves just how broad is the reach of Microsoft. It's one of the products that's that reaches like almost every human, every country, every city, when it's people recognize and know the brand. But yeah, but other than that, that I think that Microsoft has products in what in consumer side was just like we're same as the Windows, but also the enterprise side. Can you talk a little bit more about the kind of products and services that you were supporting?

John Emrick  4:30  
So, absolutely. So, what's interesting about that is that I work in a unique space in Microsoft, in that I worked for their consulting arm, so Microsoft obviously is a company that is built on selling products, and then our partners deploy those products or resell our products on our behalf, but that's not what I did, and that's not the organization that I worked for, I worked for the their. Were sort of, I would say it's their, it's a consulting wing, but they do far more than just traditional consulting, they would do sort of that deep strategy work, but then they also had actual delivery and engineers who work, customer engineers who worked on the business, so if you were looking to do something transformative, or you were looking to do a massive project, or something that needed net new IP. The industry solutions team that I was on would be the one who would actually do that work, as opposed to it being shopped out specifically to only the partners, and we worked with partners too, but we took on a bulk of that work, and what's interesting about that is that when you're in a company that primarily sells SKUs, if you want to boil it down to sort of like the most tactical bare bones salesy salesy description. It's a little interesting being the person who sells people's time, and what was really fascinating, and I actually think I learned a lot about how to build a great advocacy program, is that not only were we having to sell ourselves externally, but we had to sell ourselves internally to other Microsoft stakeholders who needed to have awareness that we existed, because the company is so huge that you believe it or not, you would encounter people that didn't know what it was that we could bring to the table, you know what our expertise were what our offerings were, and those sorts of things, but then you also had this idea that, in reality, not idea, but reality, that we were expensive, and that, you know, the account, the enterprise account teams, the people who are selling the traditional product stack had to be on board with bringing us into the projects, knowing that it might take a little bit more effort to sell it to a customer, because the project could be more expensive. So

Host  7:11  
cool, and you said something that it resonates a little with me as well. So you need to sell it internally, right? So it's, and I know that I know that, because we talked about this before, this is recording this podcast episode that you also engaged many activities trying to increase the usage of the programs, right? Make sure that the advocacy it was part of the selling processes, and I think that we could have a whole show on this regard as well, yeah. And it's not the focus today, but I think that it's one of the aspects of every program. It's a challenge for everyone running. Don't you agree with that?

John Emrick  7:51  
Absolutely, I would totally agree. I mean, I think there's.. there's awareness is a broad term, right? And there, and it means different things to different audiences, and it's awareness program awareness for your own sellers and your own executives, is who are in your organization, could be ensuring that they know that the advocacy programs or the customer marketing programs exist, and that they should utilize them, but also feed the pipeline, and that you know when we have this awesome engine with a ton of horsepower out there, it does require you to put gas in it, right, for it to run, and that gas is customers, right, like happy customers, so that we can build out the great assets that are then reused to go get more customers, but then there's also this major element of at least what I worked on is that ensuring that whatever that we were producing in this, you know, quote unquote awareness that we were creating was just as valuable, just as resonant, and just as easy to see with other parts of the organization, not only just for the benefit of my own programs, because often we would get, you know, we would get customers into the pipeline who were coming, or into the funnel who were coming from other parts of the organization, but then also knowing that, like, we had all these other examples that people from across the company could utilize, put out in front of other customers, but then also put into things like all of our paid marketing campaigns, and you know, our executive file leadership and stuff like that, so that you know when you're in an organization that is huge as Microsoft, Amazon, Google, name any massive tech company, but some, but probably even smaller companies and mid-sized businesses that you're not forgotten, and that you know your your scope might be specific to the business that you're in, but that doesn't mean that what you produce. Use isn't applicable to the entire company, and that takes work to ensure that people not only know about it, but it's also produced in a way that's useful. So,

Host  10:10  
yeah, and John, you've been around for a long time, we have so a lot of experience driving these kind of problems, and I think that the audience will be will like to see your opinion on how you've seen the work change. What's the train? What, what it's, how it's changing now, and in your vision.

John Emrick  10:33  
Sure. So, I think when I first started, there was this, my personal experience, and this might be different from from from others, but there was a tremendous push towards quantity and push towards can we get as many references as possible, can we get as many wins documented as possible, can we get as many deliveries documented as possible, and can we produce as much public-facing evidence, and that I'm using that as a catch-all term for any sort of asset that you could consider to be a customer story, whether it's a video, blog, slides, traditional case study, it was always about let's get as much as possible, because we need to account for as many scenarios, and ensure that no matter what customer we're talking to, we have something that they could at least, at the, at the very least, could either see their competitor or see themselves in over time I've seen it start to change to emphasize story in quality and and I I think that's for the better I and I and I think that this idea that you need to produce as much or produce and recruit as much as possible to the detriment of really taking the time to put effort into what it is that you're producing, it has been to the detriment of customer marketing, customer advocacy programs across the board, and I think some of that, some of that has to do often as because of where the customer marketing or customer advocacy program sits within the broader organization. I think that when you're, if you're a part of a sales enablement organization, you're going to get a very, very different view of that, as opposed to if you're within an executive org, which was what I worked in at Microsoft, or if you're in some like a traditional marketing org. I think I think that that emphasis, that will, that, that those things are certain things are pushed more than others, depending on where it is you sit, just because you're you're getting a very, very distilled, but also sort of siloed view of what a particular audience needs, and then the other major trend in something that I have seen change significantly is just this idea of making customer advocacy programs and customer marketing programs like actually about your customers and not about you and those two things combined with, you know, sort of ensuring what you're producing is quality, but then also ensuring that it's actually about your customers, in that your entire program is about your customer advocates and not about, like, your own organization, have been the two major things that I've seen start to start to shift over time, but as I was saying, like definitely for the better, like I staunch, I'm a staunch advocate of pardon the pun, to producing, you know, in creating advocacy programs that are actually about your customer advocates and not necessarily about your internal teams or the needs of your internal teams, because I think you'll get to the same spot, like if you're producing content that is high quality, the customers who are consuming it love it, and then also the people who are participating in it love it, all the other stuff will just cascade behind it,

Host  14:45  
totally, and I think that they are very related to each other, right? I mean, this trend, this shift is also from being like numeric, as you said on the beginning, yeah, that was the how I think that that's somehow the genesis of all these, right, the birth. Worth of the customer programs, they started very numerically saying let's produce story or quotes, or you know, a few kind of assets, and let's do as much as possible, and doesn't matter, someone else is responsible for consuming them, right? And then you start to see, no, we don't need just numeric, we need quality, and you are also responsible for making sure that this being used right. If we have great customers and great stores, but it's just sitting there unused, what's really the impact? And with these new trends that you're saying, another thing that resonates a lot with me, it's where it sits. We're going to see different trends, of course. Customer advocacy can sit in also, let's say, customer success. If you are a customer success program, it will be a lot about customer journey, right, interactions and feature activations, consumptions, right? If it's more traditional marketing, we're going to have something, it's more product, you're going to have probably caps, right, customer advisory boards and participation, the road maps, and it's a very broad question, but I agree with you, those two things, and make it about the customer, that's the main one, right. 

Host  16:18  
Yeah, yeah.

Host  16:20  
From being numeric to more strategic, and about the customer, right.

John Emrick  16:25  
Yeah, and also I think when we're rattling off these various organizations that these programs can sit in, you will never be able to appease or meet the needs of all of them, or make them all happy. There you, there will always be someone who feels like this doesn't necessarily work for them, or they would like to see some other type of documentation, or some other type of story pivot, or your point about product teams, like just say the product name as many times as possible in whatever it is that you're producing that's impossible, that's an impossible ask, that's that's in a, that's a just it, a that is, there's no way to meet all the needs, and but I think, though, that if you anchor on these programs are going to do what's best for our customers. You're able to fend that stuff off much more easily, because you can say, like, hey, look, this is driving impact with our customers, but then also, you know, it allows you, well, you're showing impact on customers, and then I think a lot of other people, a lot of the other organizations, sort of fall in line and say, like, oh, okay, like, I guess this stuff is actually good, so maybe we should just figure out how we should use it, not ask this person to create something different, program meets every benchmark. Yeah, so,

Host  17:56  
Yeah, totally, yes. And so that leads us to the next question about designing advocacy programs. So I'd like to see your opinion, and when designing custom advocacy programs, this kind of program that you're talking about, that of course includes evidence as well. What should what we should take into consideration? What's the most important things, or the important things we should take into consideration when designing programs.

John Emrick  18:23  
Sure, so I am particularly passionate about this. I think every, every customer marketing program, every storytelling program, every customer advocacy program, whatever you want to call it, needs to have a singular north star to shoot towards or to aim their entire program at, and that you know will act as the sort of guiding principles will go, or will guide the principles for whatever it is that you do. Okay, I am 100% I cannot be well, maybe I could be talked off my soapbox, but I am adamant, adamant, adamant, adamant that your programs have to return value to your customers in exchange for their participation.

Host  19:12  
Okay.

John Emrick  19:13  
There we're like, we're no longer in a time where you know you can, you know, do this quantity play where we just, we just recruit as many customers as possible, produce as many case studies as possible, put as many customers as we can on a call list, and then just essentially turn them into it, essentially just build these transactional relationships where the customer has, you know, given us some of their time, signed up for some things, but then in the end gets really nothing out of it. I, I don't think that over the long term, I think that will absolutely hamstring and. Potentially kill customer advocacy programs, you burn your advocates out. I think that it's not true. It doesn't build true advocates. You get a lot of just names, and I guess I would describe it as lines on a spreadsheet, or you have a deep rolodex, but it's sort of akin to Yelp reviews, I guess. You miss a ton, a ton of opportunities to go deep on story and go and get back to that quality element where you know you can kick off some really, really rewarding and incredible initiatives with marquee customers or people who are customers who are doing truly transformative work, customers who are having a real tangible impact on on real people's lives across across the across the globe, and that can happen in any number of industries, and with any number of businesses, but if you're not, if your program isn't set up for them to get something out of the process, you're never going to have the opportunity to sort of go deep with customers, it's always going to be this sort of transactional and shallow, shallow program, and at Microsoft, that's where I started to really, really pivot towards was, you know, co-created joint storytelling campaigns that had co-promotion campaign that had like co-promotion behind them, we had marketing strategy behind it. We worked with the customers to land the stories, and this was all tailored towards like what, what, what did they want to get out of this, not what did what did me or Microsoft want to get out of it, but what did HB Antwerp want to get out of it? What did Pescanova want to get out of it? What did General Motors want to get out of this, and that we didn't walk in with, you know, necessarily a set number of assets, or what our tradition, or our traditional sort of storytelling bomb or bill of materials was, we, we came back, we came to them with saying, like, here's how we generally approach things, but let's tailor this to fit you. Let's make this so that these assets that you're going to spend time, you know, really only spend your time giving, like, give spend time helping us build, but also reviewing that you can be proud of them as well, and that you will reuse these, and that you know you will get value in exchange for your participation, and that also leads to them starting to amplify the story work themselves, and just increases your the voice, and quite frankly, I think it also increases the like the believability and the validity, and just the overall impact, right? Like, it's the entire purpose for customer marketing and customer advocacy and storytelling is that your customers are sort of speaking on your behalf, because it's much more genuine and believable voice in the marketing, telling other customers how great you are, but they're more apt to do that if what it is that you're producing, what it is that you've created in this journey that they've gone on with you is rewarding, and they know will deliver them business value,

Host  23:39  
Totally, and I completely agree with that. So, you are answering also maybe my next question, which is about that. How can you return the value to that advocate? And what I'm hearing is one of the most important things that you, that, that in your opinion, what I'm hearing, at least correct me if I'm wrong, is that we should design that clear value, right, for the customers, and make it until the story that they want to tell, not the company, right? I mean, you need to see what is the story that they are telling, because with that, you, they can reuse that, we use that to build more networking, right, with other with other professional executives on the market, they will use to tell their own executives the great things that they are doing. Let's say with Microsoft, that's a very good career branding, and, and, yeah, and, and what else? What else? What are the.. is there anything else that they can get? And the other question is, should we always give the same value to all customers, or they will not like different things? 

John Emrick  24:49  
So, I think you should have a standard set of ways that you can return value in exchange for participation, you know, obviously without. Paying them or giving them free product or anything like that, or free work, because that completely invalidates the programs entirely. But I think you should have definitely have a standard set of things that you do, because I don't think every the process that I was describing, about like these co-created campaigns and joint storytelling motions, I don't think that that necessarily suits or fits every customer in for a whole bunch of reasons, some of it just being like they're not doing something that warrants it, or they're, or to be brutally honest about it, they're not that transformative, or they're not a big enough brand, or any number of things, but I think if you have a standardized way of returning value, it allows you to, it allows you to offer at least something to maybe some of your lighter touch advocates, and you're sort of in through your lighter touch story work, and for a company like Microsoft, it could just be like, how are we going to promote this? Like, help, like, just tell us who's your audience, and we will help you promote, because we had at the top, like Microsoft, there's very few companies that have a bigger megaphone than Microsoft, but if you're smaller, you're probably going to have to do a little bit more work as to, like, how what that would look like for your customers, but I think you can, I think that can be still done in a way that's a framework to get back to just one thing that I forgot to mention when we were sort of talking about that North Star element and sort of this this guiding principle, and that whatever, and that for me it was whatever I am doing, I am ensuring that these this program delivers value. We had stuff that we would ladder up underneath that would ladder up underneath that, and we, my programs folk shifted a focus to be deeply, deeply human centric in sort of approaching all story storytelling, all sort of advocacy points, all customer marketing points to emphasize the human elements and to pull out, you know, the human impact that was in that was it within the work, and what that helped do was that created a very, very clear platform, or sort of starting point to communicate with these customers that we were doing the broader campaigns on, and that we would, I mean, I came to them with the point that, like, the most valuable assets in your company are your people. At least, I hope they are these other people, these other companies that you're selling to, or this other, these industries that you're trying to make waves in, are also people as well, and there's a whole bunch of data that backs us up to about that. How important it is to win the hearts and the minds of the C suite, and we would sort of say, like, this is how we're going to approach your story, the stories, and the assets, and your engagement with the program. You know that we know that you know human centricity resonates, and you know, let's build out your, your asset package, or your plan, or your program from there, and it, it created sort of a singular point that I think every person, since we're all people, could kind of get behind and understand, so

Host  28:45  
Yeah, cool. Completely agree, and also something that you mentioned, but I'd like to just go back to that and talk about that quantity versus quality thing.

John Emrick  28:56  
Yeah.

Host  28:57  
And so what is your experience with that, and when should we focus more on one thing or the other? Maybe on the beginning of a program, you should have one approach, right, to get a little bit more numeric, but then what's your opinion, and how, what's what are the tips that you have for the audience regarding that?

John Emrick  29:18  
Sure, so when you're starting a program, I do, there is an element of it that needs to be about quantity and getting and getting stories produced, references recruited, wins documented, deliveries documented, and getting the stuff centralized and accessible, and making sure that there's enough to just meet the bare minimum of your organization's needs or your company's needs. I also think there's a lot of value in, I think there's a lot of value in starting with a little bit of a quantity play because. I think it gives you the opportunity to run water through your systems. One of the things that's a lot of people don't, at least it's been my experience, but in talking to people who've started customer advocacy programs, is they don't - they underestimate how difficult it is to operationalize, and it's been my experience that it's very difficult to automate below, above the most transactional sort of lightweight cut, like cut touch points, you know, stuff that I don't think has that much value doing, and that you really do have to sort of put in the work to understand, like, how it is that you talk to your organization. How do I sell this program to the organization? I've got enough examples of, like, how this program works that you should bring your customer here too. By the way, we have, if you need support, we have enough. We have enough advocates in our rolodex or in whatever platform we have to help you accelerate and close or to help you produce your marketing material or for you to lead an EBC or for you to produce some thought executive thought leadership, so I do think you have to sort of meet the table stakes or the sort of base needs of of the organization and I think in as I know I'm repeating myself a little bit but in doing so I think you sort of learn a lot about the nuts and bolts the operational or operational elements of of your of your program like at Microsoft and you might be, think you're pretty well familiar with this. It's much, you could email someone 100 times, and they will not open your email, but if you ping them on Teams or call them, you know they're like, oh yeah, sure, this is this customer's name. Go ahead and talk to him. I'll make the intro for you. You wouldn't know that unless you sort of were, you know, pressure testing how it is that you approach things, and you need to have enough. You need to have enough examples or enough sample data to understand what works and what doesn't work, and so that's from starting a program perspective. I do think, though, that once they become your program becomes mature, you need to have a system that identifies either who are your strategic customers who are doing, you know, strategic work or strategically valuable to your organization, and also who are your unicorns, and these are companies that might not necessarily be a huge brand name or a huge PO behind them, or you know, a whole bunch of opportunities associated with them, but what they're doing is so transformative, or is so impactful, that you should put effort into, into getting them.

John Emrick  33:13  
Ensuring that they become an advocate in getting back to that sort of joint storytelling work that I was talking about, so that as they become thought leaders in a space, and that they become disruptors in a, in a space, you are being brought along too, because you, for at least for Microsoft, you might, you're the engine that empowers a lot of this stuff, but it doesn't really matter what industry you're in, or what, what it is that you sell, or what it is that what your core competency is, is just understanding and being able to catch those, those Netflix's, and those, those sorts of things when they're on the rise, you know, or you know, setting up a new market, something to that effect. So, does that make sense?

Host  34:02  
Yeah, totally. I think that this, this totally makes sense. So, as you said, waters, you need water, right, to test the systems, and you're going to know kind of escalation process you need, right, when someone is not answering timely, and how, what is the best moment right to engage with the sellers, and when it's 40% when it's 60% are they checking? Is it through also the kind of education that we're talking earlier? You need numbers right to test all that, but then also for numbers, one thing that I'm sure you agree with, that because we talked about this, which is also the kind of the need for company like Microsoft, since we're talking about Microsoft, that has so many products and so many geographies, right, and sometimes different product flavors, right, different versions that differs a lot, and of course that is. Difficult, if not impossible. Maybe it's not something that you are trying to have in the first moment, but some companies will try to have enough customers in all geography, in each geography, for each product, for each flavor, in each industry, and those things maybe are numeric, right, before even talking about quality and what is the right things to engage and what kind of activity is right to the right kind of customers to kind of role and title that you have, and as you said, you're going to lead something that you said earlier as well, you are using companies like Microsoft and Google and all the companies like this, they are, they are, they are smart, and they are trying to, of course, cut the marketing promise and put a real customer to say that instead of right, if it's you saying, okay, I have a customer, we will not tell the name, but they are great, so it's like it's a marketing promise, even though you're saying that there's a customer before they were not naming, or my product can achieve this and this and that, but the moment that you get a customer, you cut that marketing promise and go directly to the real thing, right? And, and customers trust all the customers, that's the reality. And since you are doing that to sell all of your products in all industries, so you might need customers in all the ashes for all products, so the sales teams and marketing teams can communicate in using those voice of the customers, right? And that stuff isn't it? That's that's that's sometimes it's when it gets very numeric, the game, yeah. The beginning

John Emrick  36:34  
So I have a couple thoughts, so I think that scenario of because what you were just describing was literally an ask that I had, you know, like, and I, I think that gets back to, like, I think it's impossible to meet, truthfully, I also think that it speaks to off, or it's been my experience that it often speaks or spoke to inadequate sales training, sort of extremely shallow marketing programs, and that the the the weight in the responsibility for doing for selling and for marketing was disproportionately put on customer marketing, customer advocacy programs, because sellers weren't trained well enough to be able to talk about a solution that worked for this industry, could work for your industry, and you don't need to see an exact copy of what it is that you know you sold, like I can talk you through the process of why this worked for retail, but can also work for manufacturing, vice versa, and then also some lot of marketing teams are often graded just on, like, how many assets did you produce that use the word, like, use this product name or something to that effect. And one of the best ways that they can hit their goals without actually doing the work themselves is, say, just create some customer customer app assets that just have some some logo on it, and that they used Azure Cock, like Power BI Power, something to that effect, but one thing I did forget to talk about, too. I mean, that you know, being willing to start with a little bit of a sort of starting with a little bit of a quantity play, but then also understanding that this, this, this should not be your goal, is that it tells you what's going to work internally, and it builds up your operational model internally, and stuff, but it also kind of gives it will give you a good idea as to what your customers actually want to do and what they want to participate in, and then that will help better inform, sort of like how it is that you're going to return value to them, you know, as your program matures, and a good example of this, and again, this is something you're probably intimately familiar with, is that I would have customers tell me frequently that, please remove me from your call list, like I will do, I will do something like I want to be like we love Microsoft, we love your products, but I get never-ending phone calls, and this to talk to other customers, and this is becoming arduous. We're also now investing a ton of time in this, and if you want to keep us in this capacity, like, can you? Is there something else that we could do that would, you know, help you and help us, as opposed to just sitting on phone calls with prospective customers, and that's actually. So what started to tip me off towards, like, oh boy, like, is my program really returning value to a customer? Like, are they really getting something out of this, or are they just being burned out? And our, like, our systems had ways to ensure that, like, we would hopefully not do that to customers, but it was nearly ubiquitous. When I would talk to people, they would say, "Well, it'd be nice if we didn't just get customer call requests. And one of the other things that that causes is that the teams who manage these customers and manage those customers' relation, that customer relationship, become afraid of your program, and they say, like, well, all this thing does is just burn people out. They don't, their customers don't perceive any value out of it. I get tons of emails from reference managers or case study people who want to do case studies, and it's just overwhelming, and you know, at this point, you know, you know, getting back to it again, like we're getting no value out of this, and, but Microsoft appears, or whatever company appears to be getting a lot. Oh

Host  41:10  
Yeah that's... I think that this is very nice, very nice point at it. We could do a whole episode only about this, how to prevent reference fatigue, right? Give the deliver the value, not only, I mean, to the customer mainly, but also for these internal sellers, right, that are managing relationship. How can we recognize them whenever they help another, you know, colleague with a wing, let's say, or to position in a magic quadrant of Gartner, right? Yeah, let's say, and all those things, so the value that we are designing should be, of course, for all of the participants in the system, right?

John Emrick  41:51  
Yeah, yeah.

Host  41:52  
And then, of course, reference fatigue, burning out customers with a lot of requests. It also happens because we know that we do all possible to have all the requests, everything regarding customer advocacy coming through the program. We still have all of those requests over the top of your program, right? People that we've just directly go to the seller and say, hey, need your customer, and that's one of the things that can be solved through design as well, and we could talk about this, John, in another episode, because I think that's that can we, that's very interesting and nice, but I would like to go to the very next question, which talks about measurement. How do you know that you've been success? How can you measure the success of your program?

John Emrick  42:47  
Sure, so I think measurement can differ from company to company, and I think that getting back to what we were talking about earlier, it's probably going to be heavily influenced, influenced by what organization or what sort of practice you sit in, right? Like, you work for marketing team, you work for sales team, do you work for a customer success organization, are you in an executive office, but the two, like I had two primary ways that we, that I measured success of the programs, so one, which was internal facing and really only important to Microsoft, but I can explain how the second one, the second one weaves into it, but it was just deals influenced, and, and how much pipeline was this program, you know, influencing, and that, that, that.. sorry, somebody called me on my phone. I apologize, me being in my earbuds, and to your point about having like a centralized engine, and like this comes out when you're kind of building out your programs. Like, how do you, how do you track everything that's coming in, attribute revenue to it, and basically make the business case for your program to exist? And there's a whole bunch of different ways to like track revenue, and I think it's going to be somewhat dependent on what it is that your company does, and how you sell, and like where you track that data, and like how it's tracked, and so on, and so forth. The other one was we measured sort of trends in recruitment and fulfillment, just broad numbers, and that kind of gave us not only like how many, how many references were we recruiting and fulfilling, how many assets we were producing. Again, I know that I've been stressing that we, I've moved away from thinking that quantity is important, but it. At least it allowed you to identify trends, rough ideas of like the health of your program, and then also I think it gave you a pretty good idea as to like awareness internally of your program's availability. What we did, but what I started to pivot towards was really focusing on going back to the customer and ensuring that this program that we had and the streaming that we were going to go on returned value to them, and a lot of our customer storytelling we would come up with joint KPIs that were often inclusive of the customer's business as well, so and we would measure traditional external facing stuff, like, you know, web web views, you know, it mail open open rate, click throughs, time spent on page media coverage, you know, if we were doing something that was thought leadership based or executive thought leadership based, that like we would track on LinkedIn, like how many more net new conversations in this start. I mean, granted, some of that's a little bit anecdotal, but at least we knew we had some idea as to, like, you know, which, which way the ship was sailing, and then with the customers, I mean, we would just bluntly ask them, like, How do you want to measure success for this? Tell us how that's going to influence the assets that we produce, but in the end, we can have a dashboard or a joint dashboard that shows, like, this is how it's working for us, this is how it's working for you, although we're measuring maybe a little bit different things, I can, we can attribute, you know, press coverage, internal, you know, internal chatter, like within your own company, you know, like, it's a lot of, a lot of, a lot of companies wanted to, you know, highlight just that they were doing stuff that was cool and innovative, and they wanted their own, their own teams to know what it was that they were doing.

John Emrick  47:12  
One of the interesting things that I just never thought about, but it was in particular with, you know, sort of mid-sized businesses was they were going to use it as a recruitment tool, and that they were going to go out and try to, you know, recruit new employees, and one of the ways that they were going to do that was showing, like, how cutting edge they were, and they're like, look how trans, look at this transformative work that we're doing, and look at Microsoft, you know, short of, well, maybe not even short of, but you know, this brand that's up there with Nike, Apple, you know, you know, the Disney, like the one of these biggest brands in the world, is going on this journey with us. So I must say something about what it is that we're building and what it is that we're doing, so, so that's that's kind of how we measured. I know that wasn't like a just a bulleted list of like five KPIs managing your advocacy program, but I do really think it has a lot to do with what organization you're in. I think you always, always, always have to tie revenue to your programs. It's like once you get up the executive food chain, it's generally the only thing, it's like one of the only things that resonates with execs, it gets you more funding and more money too. If you can say, like, hey, my program costs $100,000 but it influences 10 million, maybe, and then you know you get more investment from that, but then also, no, I'm just sounding probably like a broken record now, but like working with customers to figure out, like, how is your participation going to move the needle for you.

Host  48:50  
I really love that. That's one of the, that's one of the best answers, actually, got about these when interviewing professionals, because they never mentioned that, you know, like part of your kick, the KPIs we, we've seen, and I know that you, you don't, you have a bunch of KPIs that, when you're measuring about business impact, strategy, quality, and operational, now health of your processes and the engines that you're building, and penetrations in pipeline in the, in the sales organization, right? How many deals overall are using your program. How this is growing, all that, but never heard someone saying we should have what matters to the customer, right? Let's see how they are getting benefits, so if they are, it means that we are as well, right? And how to measure the success of the customers directly, not only our own success for our company, for our program. Love it.

John Emrick  49:49  
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, it's how you build a true advocate, right? Customer selection, I mean, that I mean, it's true advocacy, right? Like you are. You are working for and with each other through the entire process, you know, and it's been my experience, and when you do that, customers, I mean, they're overthink it, it was the biggest differentiator and big in that biggest boom to my programs that I ever, I ever had, like once I sort of flipped it and sort of looked at it through this lens of, hey, in the end this is going to need to drive value for the customer, and then everything's kind of like goes back from there, and like how you measure it, and all the tactical elements of that, but it really became a differentiator.

Host  50:41  
I mean, at the end of the day, if you do that, surely you're going to drive better conversion rates when using the program, better influence pipeline, and everything that is traditional, traditionally known and right in this space. So, really like it. And now we are approaching the end, so we have some questions that I would like to ask about evidence production. I know that John, you have a huge experience driving evidence production as well, right? And across the globe, across several industries, and this is something that the audience usually asked a lot about. How to have, like, you know, this. How to.. how can you measure and manage this production engine across different countries, and have stories from, you know, variety of products and countries? And what are the pitfalls that people should avoid from your experience? So,

John Emrick  51:41  
Sure, so so I think you have, I think great evidence production in producing great stories, and let's say we're using evidence as the catch-all for public facing assets, right, videos, blogs, LinkedIn stuff, because that's the way that I approach it, as opposed to just traditional.

Host  52:06  
John, that's going to be my next question about asset type. So, let's say, oh, different asset types, but yeah, but let's now talk about evidence production as a collective, right, of all these things. Cool. 

John Emrick  52:20  
I think to have an effective evidence production process program, both from sourcing to promoting, sourcing, producing, promoting. I do think it starts with your catch process or your nomination process and your, your nominee, your the way that you receive them, and then how you vet them. I think you need to have a very, very robust and comprehensive way that you determine whether or not something's worth pursuing, the size, scope, and scale of what it is that you're going to produce is going to be based on that as well, and then also I think it helps influence where and how you want to land that content too, or that evidence, and that process needs to be centralized. I wish I could say I have found a super automated way to do it, but I think in the end it does need to have people reviewing it, and you know, actually reading what, and trying, and making, taking time to understand what is coming in through the what is coming into the system, and in that centralization, also make sure that, like, people are using the same tool that you can promote it centrally, and then, as far as, like, the production goes that capture vetting and sort of exploratory process is going to influence the size, scope, and scale of production, and I think you need to have different types of or levels of production that suit the needs of the evidence in the story and the customer or the or I shouldn't say the needs but you should set the scope and the size scope and scale of your evidence production should fit the size development scale of the story right so there are and some of the smaller stuff, I do think you can build some automation around, you can build some tools, you can say, like, look, if this is something that I think is really just a couple of slides about how you know something that a customer is doing, I mean, we had a Power App that would allow that, basically kind of automated that, it. Still take a little bit, it would still take an editor to go through, and someone just sort of ensure that it looked right, and you know, had the had the correct story elements in it, but it was an effort to give something that's a little bit more quick turn, but stuff that was bigger that I think that gets back to like understanding the story, understanding the customer needs, like understanding the needs of your organization, and picking and choosing what is important, what is the important story to tell, as opposed to how many stories can we tell, right? So I think that's kind of the lens that you look through that app, so

Host  55:43  
Perfect, excellent. And what about the asset types? If you see, well, I mean, of course, customer story, that's the main one. That's usually how we also start, right, knowing about the customer and documenting that relationship with your products and with their own industry, how they are disrupting the market, let's say with your products and technology. If that is the story, and then you can create more assets, as you said, right, to maybe promote that you have social, let's say amplifiers, right. What are the kind of assets that you've seen, and the ones that you like the most, and the ones that you would produce next, that you are going to produce in the next product, that next program that you participate in, and

John Emrick  56:31  
Sure, sure, yeah. Sorry, did I cut you off?

Host  56:35  
Yeah, no, no, no. 

John Emrick  56:36  
Okay, you're okay. Cool. I thought I apologize if I thought I cut you off. So evidence just gets used as a catch-all to mean a whole bunch of different things. I think to my earlier point, I think you do need to establish some base level assets that are sort of like the bones or like the framework of your, of your, of your program, and that, and I would encourage people to make those, you know, customer-centric, but also lightweight enough that you know that any, virtually anything you receive or think is worth pursuing can fit into that asset package, and it will not require you to spend a lot of money or a lot of time in producing, and I think that that helps support all the sort of stuff that we were talking about, and I think sort of builds table that builds a table stakes for your for your program. It also gives something tangible for internal organizations to sort of get a hold of that, like there is actually like a core set of assets, so that they understand, sort of like I think that helps teams conceptualize what this pro, what your program is, and what it does, but I think beyond that, I think the story and the customer needs to drive the asset package, and I don't, I don't think you should let platform form factor your website, whatever it is, drive your content. I think that's, that's, that's not a good thing to do in traditional marketing, and just like traditional content, and it's definitely not something good to do in storytelling, and I, in the end, I think it will push you towards producing stuff that might not necessarily be valuable to the customer or might not do the story justice, because something might be better for video and, like, a demo, or something, or a LinkedIn article, as opposed to just slides in a web page, right? So, so I think I think that that gets incorporated into that vetting process that I was talking about, that you know, you need to understand the story. You need to understand, like, what is going to be the best way to tell that story. What's gonna be the best medium, and quite frankly, what's gonna do it justice, and what's gonna be worth your time. I think video is king. I think, unfortunately, it's the most expensive, but maybe generative AI is going to cut the cost of these things significantly here in the very near future, but everything that I ever produced, the stuff that performed the best was stuff that had a good video element, what, and that in that kind of didn't even matter what channel it was going through, whether it was being sent directly to customers or just put up on social media and consumed through that, through there. I, I also tend to think that it, it is. Can be a little bit more forgiving from a storytelling perspective, because it has visuals incorporated with it, and I mean it's, it's not easier to do than than writing, but I think just the medium itself is, is, is a little bit more flexible, and I think people just like videos better.

John Emrick  1:00:24  
Second to that is something that is, we always had success with this, something that gave the opportunity for prospective customers to react to, and something that they felt like they could become a part of, and we executed a lot of stuff, essentially LinkedIn conversations or LinkedIn articles, where we would combine thought leadership from an executive as told through a customer story, more or less, and that would, you know anybody who's consuming that, whether it was prospective customers or just people who were following a hashtag or following following that particular executive, like it, we use it as a conversation starter, and that was really effective for us, but again, you know, just kind of going back to I do think it's, it's absolutely worth taking the time to understand the story, what's going to be the best way to tell this story, and then having a similar exercise with the customer about what's what's going to be best for their business, and letting that influence your asset approach, your promotion approach, so on and so forth, and, and it will probably lead to video and the stuff that I just, I've just said, because that's kind of what everyone's, but it might not, I mean, you might have a different in your business, is people's business, every business is unique, there's a lot of similarities, but, but there are intricacies to everyone's programs and businesses, so something different might emerge.

Host  1:02:06  
Yeah, but I also agree that video is a big trend. It doesn't sound like something new, but the reality is that most of the companies have been doing written stories, and whatever we've been, we've been, we've seen in the market for 2023 our customers, and in friends of the market, they are investing much bigger, much more on videos in 2023 In 2022 oz already bigger than 2021 So it's, it's growing. Yeah, but what I'm hearing is very interesting. Just summarize what you're saying, correct me if I'm, I understood it wrongly, but you focus on the story, and then you see what is the form factor, or the media, or write the best ways to just that worth your time, basically. Yeah, yeah, the story itself, right?

John Emrick  1:02:58  
Yes, I think so, because I think you know, going back to what we were talking about a little bit earlier, just like evidence is a catch-all for, or has been my experience as a catch-all for basically any public facing assets, or public facing public facing activity, and we had customer stories that would come through that their best way to tell the story was at an event and to build something that's like event focused as opposed to writing something because when you wrote down what it was that they were doing, like when you just drafted a traditional case study, like the essence of the story and the essence of what it was that this customer was doing was completely lost, because it was something that people, it was a story that needed to be told in person, as opposed to digested through a written asset, and that was a conversation that we had with the customer, sort of explained our thoughts around that, and it turned out to be extraordinarily effective, and it also gave us, you know, an example of doing something differently, right, and saying, like, hey, let's use this for an event presence, as opposed to just flapping up some copy on the on the on the website. The other thing, too, but not just to keep going on, this is that one of the pitfalls of written going so hard on written traditional written case studies and traditional written assets is that it's been my experience that people become overly bogged down in explaining like the what and the how. Be in like sort of like the very very tactical details of what is happening, as opposed to capturing like the bigger picture of like why, and like what, and and sort of not, and I, in what that does is that tends to lower the audience that your content is speaking to, and that if you're talking a lot about like what and how something was done, as opposed to why something was done, you at least, with since I was so focused on the C suite, you're immediate, you're almost immediately out of like their talking points, and now you're talking about a business manager or a program manager talking, and I think, I think again, focusing on the story and thinking about it from a store like story centric and customer centric approach helps you avoid thinking about it like, how am I just going to write down what they did.

Host  1:06:02  
Love it, and I think that it also has to do with this shift that we've been saying about just numerically think of how many stories I can write, and if you think on the story and then try to see what's the best media for that, it will also allow you, you know, that there are certain industries that they will be, it will be more difficult to get, you know, public stories, public evidence of, you know, product usage. Let's say, and but maybe that customer that has a great story will not be opposed to participating in an event, right? Industry, yeah, just tell that story, they will say, "Okay, I'm government official, will not give you a customer story, because it sounds like the marketing for you in the name of the government, but then, yeah, spitting in events and just tell us great story on how they are doing things, they'll probably say yes to you, right, and if you're only thinking on stories, or as you said, the form factor like this, this word before, he would just probably say no to this customer that has a great story, and you are saying no because you're thinking of a customer story only, not the story itself, right? And the best way to tell it later, love it. So, John, it's been a great conversation, really, really amazing episode. I think that the audience will love it. You have so much to share. I love to do another episode that sometimes with some of the topics that it was in the air, but the very last question is a fun question. Is basically, if you could write anything, any text on a shirt or a mug about customer marketing or customer boxy, what would that be?

John Emrick  1:07:46  
I would write references or people, that's what I would write on a customer advocacy shirt. Yes, because that always came back to one of the battles that I fought at Microsoft all the time was people not understanding that when you recruit a reference, there's a person who sits behind that, it's not, and it's not the same thing as a piece of evidence and company.

Host  1:08:13  
It's a person 

John Emrick  1:08:14  
Or a company, yeah, like there's there's human beings behind this, and since there's human beings, all factors of human condition influence whether or not they want to or will get on the phone with your customers. Totally, oh yeah, I love it. I love it. And, wow, I don't have it yet. I think that there would be something similar to that, or something similar to the value proposition that you're talking a lot. I just like you. I think that's it's the most important thing to design balanced gives and gets, right, clear gives and gets to customers and everyone participating in the system, in the engine that you're building, and it's something I don't have a phrase, I'm not prepared to answer this question, but it would be something regarding that as well. Design clear value prop for everyone involved, like this angel design a clear value prop, I mean, that would

Host  1:09:20  
Clear value prop...

John Emrick  1:09:23  
But it just points up to your head.

Host  1:09:28  
I like it. And if people want to reach out, how can they contact you? Follow up on anything that you said, interested in hearing more. What's the best? 

John Emrick  1:09:37  
Yeah, the best way to follow up with me is on LinkedIn, my public profile. You can just search for me, I'll show up, you'll see my smiling face right here. Cool. Also, if you want to, you can go ahead and email me too. I will probably give my email address out, so that's the letters I and the letter M dash J O H M at. Agust live.com I have an old school Microsoft Live personal email, and I love this stuff. I love talking stories and storytelling and customer marketing. So, I will talk to anyone about anything related to that. So, I also used to own a distillery too, so if you want to talk about booze, talk about booze too. So we can, we

Host  1:10:28  
Can do a podcast with the two things at some point. Yeah, yeah. All right, John. Thank you very much again. It was a pleasure to have you on the show, and we see you next time.

John Emrick  1:10:38  
All right, thanks for having me.

Host  1:10:40  
Thank you. Bye now.

John Emrick  1:10:42  
Bye.

Host  1:10:43  
This episode was brought to you by Wings for You, helping global B2B tech brands unleash the power of their customers' voice. Wings for You customer stories and advocacy programs help you deepen customer relationships, increase retention, and close more deals faster.