Episode 16: Designing customer advocacy for long-term growth

Speaker 1  0:00  
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.

Iulia Davidoiu  0:14  
So, hi everyone, and welcome to a new episode of the Advocast, where we explore what really drives lasting impact in customer advocacy. I'm Iulia, I'm a senior consultant at Wings, and I'll be your host for the discussion today. So, over the years, I've seen advocacy programs deliver incredible early wins, but I've also seen how hard it is to maintain health and relevance over the years, so today I'd like to tackle just that. What it really means to design advocacy programs with long term in mind, not just what works in year one, but what could still be relevant in year five. And for that, I'm really excited to be joined by Dave Hanson, who is currently working his magic at Siemens within the global customer advocacy program, who's also a CMA mentor and someone who's consistently shaping the way that we think about advocacy strategy. So, Dave, I am so glad we are getting to unpack this together. 

Dave Hansen  1:15  
I love that she used the word magic, because I am obsessed with magic, and so that is a huge compliment to me. Thank you for having me here. A wonderful introduction. I am Dave Hanson. I'm the senior global customer advocacy program manager, is a long title at Siemens. So, I own a customer advocacy program that's kind of targeted at managers, directors, as well as work on our larger portfolio across the whole company, which, as you can imagine, is enormous. I've worked in the field for 20 years, well before it, customer advocacy had an official name or a place, and so I've seen a lot of stuff that works and stuff that doesn't, and you know, I think, like you, I love this topic, because it has a little bit of intrigue, because we're not just talking, if we're talking long-term impact, we're not just talking about, you know, is a customer motivated, does the customer trust you, but we're also talking about, does your company support you, does your company see a long-term vision, if you're in a VC-backed company, are there going to be mergers and acquisitions that spice things up and change what you're doing? So, I love the topic. I'm excited to dive in.

Iulia Davidoiu  2:31  
Perfect. Well, maybe a good place to start is really this, you know, advocacy programs rarely collapse overnight, right? They tend to decay gradually, so a pattern that I've seen a lot in a lot of teams is that they optimize for launch success, so they focus on launching a program on building that and making sure that is a resounding success in the beginning, but they do delay alignment on what health actually looks like long term, so I was curious, from what you've seen, if you've first of all, if you've experienced this before, and also if you have a first sign in mind of what usually is a sign that a program goes in the right in the wrong direction.

Dave Hansen  3:17  
Yeah, I mean, so much I think I can add to this, the first thing that I think we need to cover as part of that over optimization is the idea of its mindset. It's, are you planning for a single season of a show or are you planning the character arc over a series, and that's, you know, a huge part of this. I think what you're saying is we care so much about getting this up and out the door that we're not focused on what is season two, what is he, where are these characters gonna go after they get welcomed, and so yeah, I've absolutely seen that, and part of this is also tied up into the metrics that we care about at launch, you know, I'm thinking about the priorities that could put on, how many members does your program have? How often are those members contributing? You know, some programs then also are rushing into how many customer stories is your program producing, how many references is your program churning out, and a lot of that stuff, you know, takes time and takes building trust. I mean, I could, I could ramble on about this forever, but the other big part to me, and I'd love to hear your take on it too, is just keeping in mind advocacy isn't the end point, and I think it also gets treated that way. Is great, you join this program, we're excited to have you. Will you give us a reference? Great. Next up, Who else can serve us? Advocacy is this life cycle that we have to constantly be treating customers, you know, in this like cyclical manner, where they're, you know, keep getting involved. Agust throughout the whole process,

Iulia Davidoiu  5:03  
correct. And I fully agree with you. I think it's a relationship system, rather than anything else, really, rather than a transactional one. And outcomes are important, right? We do care about how many stories, we do care about how many advocates we have, but that's not the entirety of the program, and it shouldn't be treated this way, and yeah, when we talk about launching and over optimization here, I've seen a lot of teams as well not taken into account how does it affect your customer, right? We're thinking about what we can get from the program, what it means for us, what outcomes can we get, but less what we give to the customer in return, and how do we bring value to them, and not just now, not just for a gift card, but on the long term, so that they continuously grant us the honor of being advocates, right? It's, it's not something that we should take for granted, that is,

Dave Hansen  6:00  
that is so absolutely true. I mean, it's you don't build trust by transactional relationships, by giving somebody a gift card, by giving them a pair of socks. Everyone loves socks, though, to be fair. Everyone loves socks, but right, getting past transactional and turning into this again. Are you planning for a series, are you planning for a season?

Iulia Davidoiu  6:23  
Indeed, and because we talked about, you know, pair of socks and gift cards, we can talk about incentives in general, right? When we say we want to provide value to customers, maybe the first thing that pops into a lot of people's minds is, okay, let me figure out what incentive should I give them, and they go for the usual, but more often than not, they tend to, you know, age poorly. So I'm curious, how do you recognize when an incentive strategy that worked early on is starting to weaken a program instead of strengthening

Dave Hansen  7:01  
it? I wish I could remember who first said this to me, because I think it's one of those things that has shaped my life. Incentives is gifting, gifting is a love language, and a huge part of that is what this, the sage advice that I received was when you slap a logo on it, is it really a gift when you're giving somebody that has your logo on it? Is it just promotion? And I love that so much, because you think about how much we get to know about our advocates, our program members, and you know, I can tell you, you know, I've worked with one of my favorite customers used to do, still does. I don't work with her anymore. That's the used to do. She used to do stage makeup for like horror movies, like B side horror movies, and so she was all about like makeup kits and very specific colors of things, and so my team did a whole bunch of research to get her a very specific makeup kit, as, as one of those incentives. So I think when we talk about incentives, yeah, you can order a bulk amount of socks, you can order a bulk amount of notebooks and water bottles and canvas totes, and all of the things that I have a closet full of that I don't touch anymore. Or you can think about how can we be human-centered with incentives. How can we move off of the transaction of gift giving? Also, I mean, do this, I'll give you this. How can we also move past that, and talk about what are some of those deeper connections. One last example that I did that I think was very effective in a past company that was very research-focused. We produced an annual report that tons and tons of downloads. It was like the annual thing that everyone was downloading and viewing for our advocates. One of the incentives we offered them was the opportunity to have a readout with the team that produced it for their executive team, the opportunity to hear directly from the experts, and so sometimes we're either talking very personal gifts here or we're talking what is that value added to have those insights directly from the person who wrote them, who did the research, was invaluable for some of these companies.

Iulia Davidoiu  9:26  
Those are amazing examples. I really love it when I see, you know, not - it's difficult to say incentives or gifting, just bringing value to customers in a way that they can actually care about it, and they, that takes into account their preferences and what really helps them, and I think.. go ahead.

Dave Hansen  9:46  
Oh, I was just gonna say, I mean, I used to work within compliance - dirty word for many people, and I've seen so many company gifted. Policies, too. If you also think about, I'm not saying everyone knows their gifting policies, because I don't think most people do, but some of these gifting policies are also, if you actually get into them, and if customers actually listen to them, they're so restrictive on what they can actually take. I think the most limiting one I saw was a company cannot, a customer can accept up to $20 in a year, but only if it's something that's shareable across an office.

Iulia Davidoiu  10:29  
Interesting. Here's

Dave Hansen  10:30  
one cookie, please cut it up 200 ways. Perfect. Thank you.

Iulia Davidoiu  10:35  
Well, those are, you know, the exact policies that can help you think about it creatively, right. We don't need to think in terms of monetary incentives, but rather just other things. I don't know, early access, right, to product features or to leadership things like that, that they can care about, and they're not monetary ones, and I think that would also go around, you know, the human behavior, and looking at the human behavior, understanding it, and planning around it would also go in other areas of the program, especially when we build it instead of building it around tools, building it with the customers in mind, and I'm curious to see your take on that, because it's a hot topic, right? What happens when programs are adapted to tools and their processes are adapted to tools rather than to customer behavior and human behavior?

Dave Hansen  11:34  
Yeah, I mean, that's, I think, a pretty simple answer. You end up getting forced into a box, you end up getting forced into something that maybe your customers, your program members, your advocates, they don't want, and so really the better approach is to start with a strategy and start with engagement. When I first joined Siemens, coming up on two years now, it seems like it was yesterday, but it was two years ago, I was fortunate enough to start a couple weeks before Realize Live, which is our big user conference, and I had the opportunity to go to it, and my only goal, my only job during the conference was to just talk to customers and figure out what is that value add, what is it that we can offer, what is it that we can provide beyond what they receive with products and services to actually enhance their experience, so I spent, you know, three days in it was in Las Vegas at the time, and three days in Munich, talking to customers and learning, and so it was asking the questions, kind of starting to, you know, lean on my past life a little bit, and start asking about, well, what do the tools look like, is this, you know, something that is like influitive or base, or you know, what does this actually feel like to customers? And so many of our customers were like, we don't want a separate login, we don't want a place where we have to go, we don't want to be forced, we don't have the time to it. These are folks who are managing multiple solutions across the globe, they're trying to centralize their own data, they're trying to wrangle their own users, they don't need another portal, so very much for our customers, they're like, we don't get enough time to just network, to be together, to be as one, to be able to learn from other industries. I said, Well, I can do that, that's easy, I can, I can connect people, and we don't need to have a place for you to come, a portal to log into a password to forget. We can, we can do this in a kind of a unique, different way. And so we've approached the tool, the program that I've built. We started without tools, we started, it was just being able to kind of go back to that old, we started with a spreadsheet, you know, this is 2026 that we're talking about the age of AI, and I'm talking about building programs through a spreadsheet. We've evolved from there, but still, I mean, what we're offering is still very decentralized. It's, you know, networking a couple times a couple times a month, it's live events, it's been bringing the programming that customers want, so we put such an emphasis and a premium on that programming and the topics we're talking about, as opposed to the platform that we're in.

Iulia Davidoiu  14:11  
Awesome. So, what I'm hearing is that everything goes back to relationships at the end of the day, right? When we think about programs decaying, no matter how many metrics we take into consideration, how many strategies with device for incentives or for tools that we should get the flashiest and the newest ones. It all comes down to how you actually build that customer relationship and how you maintain it, which is a great segue for my next topic, actually, because the case is one side of the equation, right, but trust compounding is the other, and I was saying earlier that, you know, advocacy programs are relationship systems instead of a campaign machine or transactional program, which means that you're managing trust over time and. I'd like to talk about what that trust looks like with a customer five years down the road. What does it mean to nurture that for the long term?

Dave Hansen  15:11  
You know, I am fortunate enough to be surrounded by, like, literally I live with, in a very close radius to two very smart people who both have amazing thoughts on this. The first one, Jenny Azaba, she's not a stranger to most people within our profession. We always joke about the pile and pile and pile of different notebooks that we have of the customers we interact with to keep the facts straight, to keep the those little details that get shared over time, because from a not scalable way, but from a one to one relationship way, being able to reference those notes, being able to show somebody that you listened and that you remember over time is a huge barometer of trust, it's a huge opportunity to be able to say, I see you, I know what you're going with. Oh my gosh, how is Jason already five? Like, that's nuts to me, you know? Whatever those little facts are, so that's that's one of them. The other one, my not actual sister, but my sister Allison Bukowski, again, not a stranger to many here. She's always talking about people before professionals, and the way that she always demonstrates that is she shares who she is as a human before she shares her work, and the way that that opens up those doors and leads to those notebook moments is such a beautiful transition to be able to be authentic, to be able to lay the foundation for long-term trust. So, it starts with that. It starts with seeing people, getting to know people, helping people find a way to open up by sharing from yourself. But trust evolves. I mean, you're dealing with this whole hierarchy of needs, Christina Garnett, you know, from making sure that people are supported, they have the tools that they need, that they're being onboarded properly, that they're able to fly on their own, that they are, you know, kind of progressing up this whole evolution of needs, and so you also have to kind of be that standard bearer across your company to make sure that the people that you're working with, whatever you call them, program members, advocates, are making that evolution. I think that's a strong part of where advocacy comes in, is being that facilitator, being that standard bearer. One of my favorite lifetime examples, though, came from a previous company where we looked at net promoter score, and we could spend another hour talking about the merits of net promoter score or not, but what we did with it was that we tied net promoter score back to a bunch of health factors, you know, license use different solution, use tenure working with us, and tenure was a really interesting one to me, because with that 10 year example, we were able to tighten that promoter score to different age buckets, and we did it by every single year up till we got to like a 10 plus, and we discovered that there's this, this gap where year one people liked us, we were in the 40s, 50s, something along those lines, but year two and three we dropped down to a zero, fine by net promoter score standards, but also not great, like that's that's a red flag that I want to look into years two and three of a contract, or someone's work with us stayed down at zero. You get to year four, all of a sudden you're back into the 20s, and it's climbed basically by 10 points all the way up the scale. So it's like there's this gap, this two year gap that we were able to look at, then to be able to say, what aren't we doing? How are we not supporting these customers? And it was, it was a failure launch situation. Customers felt loved in that first year.

Dave Hansen  19:10  
They've got somebody from implementation who's helping them get onboarded to understand the tools, you know, maybe they had some sort of, you know, technical CSM that they were working with, they have their normal CSM, they have somebody from advocacy welcoming them, they still have that handoff from sales, because sales wanted to see them supported, they have so many people who love and care about them, and then that second year it's just their CSM, and maybe the advocacy person who's hanging around, so that that trust the roads very, very quickly, because all of a sudden they're just kind of left to their own devices, and so we were able to kind of take a look at that and kind of build a more strategic map of how do we keep that same support and love at scale without, you know, eating up into people's times to help turn that around, and it was something we were able to address, but. It takes love and care, and it takes again not planning for a season, it takes planning for a series.

Iulia Davidoiu  20:06  
It does, but your example is very interesting, because in my head, when you were explaining it, I was just thinking about how, how big of an opportunity those results were. Right, you've seen that they are not, they don't feel as loved in year two or three, and it's exactly what you were mentioning earlier, being open and building that report, those notebooks, that's the moment where maybe the advocacy programs are supposed to be, you know, more front and center to the customer, not just by asking, and we can talk about over asking a lot, because that also erodes trust, but by nurturing them, by learning about them, by giving them attention, by, you know, providing them with more value, and so on. That's a great opportunity, although I think it's also hard when you see those results in the beginning, for sure.

Dave Hansen  21:00  
Yeah, little bit of a heartbreak, but data, at least you know it's something you can take a look at, and you can cut it, and you can dice it, and it's an opportunity for growth.

Iulia Davidoiu  21:10  
Oh, for sure, it's what lets you understand trends and what helps you strategize more over the years. We, you talked a lot about, you know, building that report and those notebooks, and how the, how important it is to be open with your advocates in general. And I wonder, you know, people come and go, you can be in a program and two years from now not be there. How do we ensure continuity? How do we make sure that all of that hard work of getting in contact with the customers and nurturing them is not going to be void the moment where you move on to another program? Difficult.

Dave Hansen  21:57  
Well, it's very difficult. I mean, you know, two different things popped in my mind as you're talking about that. The first one is the on me part, and I am so guilty of this, and I saw it happen, and it was also heart-wrenching. Was one of my very first programs that I had built from the ground up. I mean, we had cabs. We were sharing information across the company. Was a beautiful thing. People came to rely on the insights we were sharing. I decided to move on from that company, and within six months, almost everything I had built had been gutted, because people didn't, couldn't see how the pieces work together, or how one person could manage this. They didn't backfill the role because they didn't understand it. That's also kind of where our profession was at that time, in terms of in terms of visibility across organizations. It wasn't well understood. I was the only owner, I had, I was the only one with eyes on it, so it fell apart. It's heartbreaking, is it? it is, I still talk to many of those customers, which is the funny part, because you know, just because I moved on didn't mean my relationships didn't move on. The company at that time even felt so compelled to write a letter to our customers talking about why I was leaving and how they plan to support it, they just, they, it didn't actually happen, it couldn't materialize. And so the big lesson for me, in hindsight, watching that happen, as I had moved on to greener pastures, as they say, was, you need to get more people involved, you have to be transparent, and it was like that was the moment in the next program I built. I made sure that I wasn't the only person doing the work, I wasn't the only stakeholder. This is where pulling in committees of folks, having a having an advocacy committee who's weighing in on what you're doing is huge, bringing in somebody from customer success, bringing in somebody from sales, bringing somebody in from implementation, onboarding, support, product leadership is a huge one, making sure that there's a web of people who are involved in the process, who are involved in the planning, again, beyond one year, we're planning a series to make sure that this not just has a vision to get through today and tomorrow, but for the next five years, making sure that there is an ever evolving roadmap. The other side of this coin, and something I think we do very well at Siemens, we do have a four year plan that we adjust every single year, because things happen, you know, there are mergers, there are acquisitions, there are, you know, department shifts and changes, and all of the stuff that's going to happen no matter what we do. I think that's the end of the day. So, we do have a, we do have a four year roadmap that we evolve, we know where we're trying to get to, we know where we are today, and so we're kind of just adjusting the steps. Are there as we go. That's good. That's great, but the other part is we're changing what's happening to our customers. Our customers aren't staying the same. The same people who I started with, you know, two years ago, who at the time they were in a very specific project-focused role, where they were, you know, project managing an onboarding situation. One of them is a VP now in his company, and his day to day has changed so much. So, how does his relationship with me change? How does his relationship with Siemens change? Because his title, his roles, his focus has changed. I think when we're talking about five years out, you also have to plan for that.

Dave Hansen  25:38  
You also have to plan to make sure that you have programs, not a single program, but you have multiple tiers of things that can meet customers where they are, that a customer can say, you know, I graduated from this to maybe this other program, and we, we do have several tiers of programs, we do have a user-based focused one, several of them, we do have a couple that are actually focused at that tier that I talked about earlier, managers and directors, and then we're building stuff for executives as well, so you kind of have this progression that you can go on again, meet the customers where they are, but all of it comes back to understanding, comes back to the notebooks, and that's kind of how you go from this pilot to start building up that scale. How do you go from a notebook to now all of a sudden we're supporting multiple programs with people who've grown, and that's where you need to start getting into tooling, and again, that's another hour long talk, but

Iulia Davidoiu  26:40  
sure, but you mentioned, and I fully agree with that. You mentioned that it takes a team, right? You need to make sure that you're not the only stakeholder, you're not the only owner of the programs that relate to advocacy. I think that's a very, very important point. Not only, it's more, it not only it's easier when it comes to managing the program when you have a great relationship with the teams that are also your customers internally, but it makes for a better advocate experience as well. And when you flip that on the other side with customers, that they might change their jobs, and not only they might change their daily tasks, but they might go to another company. So I believe that it's important to enable the same thing on their side. Right, you're not working with just one contact from a company, you're not nurturing just one person, should be from a team to another team, so that you can ensure that continuity, which is so precious and so difficult to get a grasp on sometimes,

Dave Hansen  27:44  
yeah, I one of the cool things that that Siemens did is we recently launched or started a preference team, and the preference team is really focused on when a customer is in this situation where they're going to start their research, so we're talking like pre-pipeline here, right? When someone is thinking about thinking about purchasing something, do they have a, do they have a bias, do they have somebody that they prefer in advance? In many cases, it is those customers who maybe worked with us in one capacity and moved somewhere else, so advocacy, you know, feeds into this, like we've got this, you know, highly tuned machine, we're building up advocates, and if they leave, they're coming back around into the preference side of it again, pre pipeline, and that's kind of showing that full continuity of the life cycle, making that full circle around, and so we've, we've actually, since that preference team started, they've become a huge partner for us in our plans and their building and in our councils that we build internally.

Iulia Davidoiu  28:50  
Amazing. I need the blueprint of your program for sure. I need to learn from that. Also, in my mind, a question pops up. So, how do you make sure you built all of this for longevity without creating unnecessary complexity or bureaucracy? Right, because it seems over a complex sometimes, and you, as you involve more and more teams, as you bring more and more initiatives, it's very easy to get lost within them, or to create mountains of documentation that ultimately are hindering the program, so I'm curious, with Siemens in mind, and the great work that you're doing there. How do you avoid over engineering to make sure that the program lasts?

Dave Hansen  29:36  
It's such a good question, and honestly, I'm not convinced I have an answer yet, but I mean, I'll tell you this. I, when we, when we started off, our, the team that I work for were considered a center of excellence, so we're meant to kind of be that strategic lens that the rest of our company can use as they're diving into advocacy programs. Is over the time we saw gaps, and so we started building, because a lot of us are builders at heart, and we like the, we like the ownership of programs, but we started discovering we're talking about the scale of Siemens here, which is why this is a tough answer, because what I'm about to say doesn't apply to a lot of any place I've worked in the past, even I'll speak from my own experiences, only. And when we started building up the center of excellence, we started looking across the company and saying, well, there's a program that we should know about, there's a program we should know about. We hear whispers about a program that's over there that we should probably talk about, and it's finding all of these pockets of advocacy and really good stuff that's been happening over the years, but they've been working in such silos, so I think we have there hadn't been any engineering, we haven't gotten to over engineering yet, you know, so we've got to this place where we can finally be, let's be that kind of clearing house, let's be that central spoke to be able to say this is how these programs tie together, and obviously the worst thing that can happen, and we talked about how over asks erode trust earlier in the podcast already, but the worst thing is over asks from your team is one thing that's controllable, but when you're all of a sudden talking about a siloed program who reaches the same audience who might not be talking to an industry, who might not be talking to a product, who might not be talking to sales. All of a sudden, you now have four arms who are all reaching out to the customer. The customer is like, it's a lot, guys. So, I think there needs to be that central spoke, somebody who can at least start unraveling those threads, and in that case, process and having that documentation matters, and it matters greatly. So we're still figuring out, you know, what that looks like. I think really it's just being able to understand and have this in a blueprint to be able to share and making sure teams are aware of it. That's the other big thing I can speak to that, actually, a little bit longer. Sorry, the way that we divide our team, and again, we have the manpower at Siemens, you know, it's not a team of one or a team of two, we have five full-time people, couple interns, so we have a good size team, but we have a work stream on our team that's built out for customer experience. So programs like mine are customer awards. We have an arm that's focused on customer evidence, so when you're talking about user evidence, when you're talking about g2 when you're talking about peer reviews, when you're talking about customer stories, we have an arm that's handling that and is helping corral all those different teams asking for the stories, and then we have a separate team within our team focused on enablement. How do we champion our internal champions? How do we train those folks? How do we make sure that we're speaking at our go-to market meeting? How do we make sure that we're on the CSM calls? How do we.. what are we saying? What is that message, so that we.. we have, I think, a good workflow to be able to help reach people and start corralling it, and we'll see over time. It feels like we're making a lot of progress, though, and building those relationships and straightening the thread instead of making it all curly.

Iulia Davidoiu  33:27  
It's a process for sure, and yeah, I firmly believe that enablement is where the documentation that you should have is. That's where it shines, right? We don't want to something overly complex. We don't want to have mountains of pages, but we do want to have clarity and use it in enablement. And when I'm thinking about clarity, I think first and foremost about breaks for customers. How do we protect their time? How do we protect them from over usage? Because what you described, with multiple teams coming with the same ask at the same time, or with different asks at the same time, is such a problem still, and it's something that a lot of teams are struggling to get a handle on, so you know, having that governance, having that clarity in place, and constantly enable, constantly educate. Think it's one of the biggest priorities in a new program, but also continuously to make sure that it lives longer. That is a continuous process. A

Dave Hansen  34:36  
really good example of this in action, and how we started to pull this together, and it's not me. I can't take any credit for it. So, a shout out to Hannah Baldwin, shout out to Maria Colusi, and some of the other folks who are on my team. We have room set aside at our user conference, like many other folks, with a video crew to grab those video testimonials. We love them, we appreciate them, and. And that we saw it happening, we saw that, you know, X industry wants to talk to this customer. Well, they're a big user of Teams Interact, so the Team Center X team wants to talk to that man, you know, somebody else along the way wants a video, and all of a sudden we saw, like, why is one customer filling three spots across two different days in the video room. Why can't we bring these teams together to have one? And so that was our team who led this initiative to say no, no, no, no, no outreach goes to the customer until we understand who's reaching out to who and why, and making sure that we can come together to say there's one video slot for one customer. They've also done fantastic work in marketing agreements, and some of some of those other things that go into all of this to making sure that you know customers have marketing agreements in place before they come to that room streamlines that whole process. Anyways, making it one ask, making it one time is such a win.

Iulia Davidoiu  36:03  
Oh, that should definitely be best practice. And it reminded me of team that I work with, where we always try to ensure that with one single interview we would have multiple pieces of content, we would ask the questions in a way that we could, you know, give out to other teams, like what we're sellers interested in, what we're marketers interested in, just so that we only take one hour of the customer's time, because it's already an hour that they give to us out of, you know, love for the product, ideally, so we would not want to go to them within the same year, actually. Well, year, quarter, half year with the same question, like, paid. Want to do another interview? I need to learn more. No, it's one time, and it should be coordinated across multiple teams.

Dave Hansen  36:58  
Comprehensive

Iulia Davidoiu  36:58  
work rate.

Dave Hansen  37:00  
Yeah, get it, reuse it.

Iulia Davidoiu  37:03  
Awesome. Well, I am curious about one thing. If you would have to build a program today, and you would know for sure that you would be responsible for it and driving it, and five years from now, is there anything specific that you would do, and you don't see many people do, or you haven't done before.

Dave Hansen  37:28  
Oh, it's a very big question. I mean, I said this, I said this at the top of the top of the hour as well. I mean, I think as practitioners in this space we all have to get out of the one season mindset, you know, The Simpsons didn't last 20 plus years, whatever it was, because they're thinking about one season at a time, they're able to build these characters who have a place in our hearts over time, who can grow with us, who can change with us, and having that mindset of like, we're not just, we're not just focused on launch, we're focused on the long term. We're focused on the five year and having that roadmap from the beginning, like not building it as you go. Have it from the beginning, have it as a foundation, have that vision. I think that's one of the most important parts that people just miss, because people say, I need to build a program, whether that's an awards program, a reference program, an advocacy program, I have to build a program, I have to get customers engaged, I have to start showing results. Patience is an important skill set with the work we do. You don't build trust overnight, you don't build relationships overnight, and I get that. Oftentimes, it's not our patience, it's the patience of the people around us, but we do have a role to play in building the team that can support us, but setting those expectations, showing the roadmap. If I could tell you, you know, if we just go for this program approach, this one season approach, you know, I can engage 100 customers this year in a meaningful way, and you know, probably get a good number of customer stories from that. Do you want that, or do you want this five year map that includes we can also meaningfully connect to pipelines to growth, and we can actually be this engine and not just the, you know, one trick pony? What would you prefer? Well, everyone's going to take the long term vision. You have to set those expectations, that's where it has to start,

Iulia Davidoiu  39:24  
for sure. And I believe it's so important that when you start building, you have.. I would like to, you know, create.. have a make an exercise of imagination, let's say. So, if I would have all of the resources in the world, anything that I would need. How would my advocacy function look like in the future? And then go backwards from there to see what I can actually do today, right? And then within your QBRs, when you talk to your leadership, when, when you build that business case, you um. Through having that vision in mind, you demonstrate sustainability rather than metrics quarter over quarter. I

Dave Hansen  40:09  
mean something that I love that you said is like, right? If I had unlimited time, time being just a valuable for resources, money, and anything else, like right, I would build multiple programs in conjunction at once and launch them at once to be able to have that to be able to have that whole web again to meet customers where they are, but yeah, it's it's not feasible, so being able to have that activity to be able to map that out, I think is a good starting place, there is a good, there is a good activity that many people can do as well, that is the the effort versus the output, you know, low effort, high output, being able to put that stuff kind of on a map to be able to say, you know, what's the low hanging fruit, what's the moon shot, and what's everything in between also kind of helps plan that out.

Iulia Davidoiu  41:05  
Another thing that I found helps when you're planning on your strategy for one or multiple programs is making sure that for every initiative, every project that you include in there, you force yourself to respond to a simple question, How does this affect my customer? Because if you develop something that affects your customer negatively, they don't have any value from it, then that initiative most likely will not age in a way that you would like it to.

Dave Hansen  41:38  
It's not that I don't have original ideas, I do. I just write, I everything that I bring forward is because a customer requested it. And then I thought about it and said, yeah, let's let's see what meets on this bone, and then we dive into it more. So, 1,000% bring it from the customers, live it, breathe it, we preach it, we have to do it too.

Iulia Davidoiu  42:02  
Exactly, we say we're customer centric, we should really apply that for sure.

Speaker 2  42:07  
Exactly,

Iulia Davidoiu  42:09  
perfect. Well, I think we went through a lot of topics, we could definitely develop them for many, many hours, so we only try to, instead of doing a how-to guide, just touch them lightly and understand what we have seen in your experience and mine. So, thank you so much for being part of this conversation. I really enjoyed it. And if you have anything that you would like to add or further discuss, now's the time.

Dave Hansen  42:39  
No, I'm good. Just thank you again for having me, and for bringing the topic forward, because again, it's it's got a little bit of everything, you know, from internal internal enablement to customer trust, and it's everything that I love about this profession, honestly, it's the variety, the different mindset changes, so love that I could be a part of this conversation with you. Thank you for sharing your insights. Thank you for inviting me. Thank you for hosting this podcast.

Iulia Davidoiu  43:10  
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