Episode 9: Building customer communities that drive retention and growth

Host 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. Learn how to turn your customers into advocates to drive sales leads and make a positive impact on revenue.

Host 0:29
Hi everyone, this is The Advocast, and I'm Pablo, your host. Today we have Lauren on the show. She's a professional with several years of experience building successful communities, and she's here with us today to share some of her experience on the matter. Hi Lauren, how are you doing?

Lauren Turner 0:46
I'm doing well. Hi Pablo, great to see you.

Host 0:50
Good to see you.

Lauren Turner 0:51
It's Friday the 13th — hopefully nothing spooky.

Host 0:55
Nothing spooky will happen today, hopefully. And by spooky, I mean failures on the equipment or anything like that, internet connection. Hopefully everything's going to go smoothly today. So, thank you very much, Lauren, for being with us on the show. I'm looking forward to this episode, and we have three different moments today. First, we always start our episodes by getting to know a little bit about you, your career highlights. That's going to be the very first question. And then we're going to talk a little bit about communities. As I said to the audience, you have several years of experience building communities of different sizes with different roles, and we'll explore all that: what makes a community successful, things that people should take into consideration when building one. And of course, if you are planning for one in 2023, there's still time, right? It's still January, the beginning of January, and you can use Lauren's tips for that. So let's go to the first question. We'd like to understand a little bit of your career highlights and how you ended up in this area of customer marketing, customer advocacy, and communities overall.

Lauren Turner 2:14
Yeah, absolutely. It's been a pretty circuitous route. I've actually done pretty much every type of marketing throughout my career. I got my start as the one-person marketing department at a series of tiny startups, and that gave me some really great exposure to all different types of marketing: demand generation, PR, customer marketing further down the line, even going as far as web design and things like that.

I pivoted after being the one-person shop to product marketing, because it gave me the opportunity to combine the creativity of putting together really interesting campaigns with the analytics behind it. Coming from a tech background, where I was working in very engineering-driven companies, there is always that push to validate what you're doing as a marketer, so it doesn't just feel like you're putting pretty pictures in front of salespeople. That's what prompted me, first of all, to take a couple of years to go to business school and really learn more of the math and the analytics behind it, but then to apply it as a product marketer, where I could use both the creativity of putting the campaigns together with the strategy and the analytics to be able to not only validate why we're doing what we're doing, but to show the results and how that would have a greater impact on the overall corporate strategy.

As a product marketer, one of the core things I was really focusing on was translating the jargon into plain English, and being able to make the products accessible to end users. That's always been a big thing for me. As someone who's really into tech, I love playing around with different products and learning the geekery behind it, but understanding that if you can't explain to your grandparent what it is you do or what your product is doing, then you're speaking at a level that's probably higher than a large percentage of your potential buyers, and you need to be able to make things clear and concise.

Host 4:28
That's a great thing. And when you said you've been working for highly engineering-driven companies, right — this happens, that most of those companies tend to look for a solution at a small table, very far away from customers, right? And sometimes this goes on for years and years. I guess that being a customer marketer, trying to validate or trying to plan with customers — with real customer participation — is something that was hard for you. And I'm saying that because you told me, of course, in previous meetings, that that's one of the things you felt you should start changing a little bit, right?

So you said customer centricity is a very important factor for you in organizations, mainly tech organizations that are looking internally, sometimes more than having a good balance between customers and internal ideas, etc. And it's very important also for marketing teams, as you say, right? How should we communicate those things? And sometimes communication, of course, is not only a letter or a campaign — it's how they will consume the products, right? The interface communicates, and it should be easy, as you say, for any age. So tell me a little bit about that. What do you mean by that? What's your experience? What do you have to share with our audience about that?

Lauren Turner 6:03
Yeah, absolutely. And I would say that one of the key fundamentals of product marketing, or customer marketing, is actually keeping your ears open and your mouth shut. It's really learning from your customers and understanding and empathizing with their experience.

It's so common when you see product managers or engineers getting together in a room — kind of as you alluded to before — thinking, okay, we've got this really cool idea, and then they build on their own ideas, and it becomes almost an "if we build it, they will come" Field of Dreams situation. But what they're thinking from their own perspective is not necessarily going to jive with what is happening in the market and what the customers actually need. When you have that disconnect, you end up having to backpedal a lot, and it costs a lot of money to have to either recreate a product, relaunch something, or have major levels of customer education to convince people of the value of a feature that the customers may not have asked for or care about.

It's so much easier to start with that alignment from the beginning, before you're really going to launch, to bring your customers on board and to talk to them to better understand: what is your day-to-day experience using a product? What do you wish you had? If you could wave a magic wand and create exactly what you needed in order to make your day easier, what would that look like? And then keep the engineering team abreast of those needs. Understanding that you can't survey everybody, but have a good sample size, and really understand deeply what that experience is like, and then build to that.

And with that, you can't have entirely customer-led growth, because then you might not have the innovation, and there are always great ideas that you're going to want to capitalize on. But they do need to work together in lockstep, and that's one of the core fundamentals of being a customer-centric company: that it's not just caring about your customer and having your customer in the back of your mind, but actually having your customer have a seat at the table for all of the major areas where strategic decisions are being made.

Host 8:30
Yeah, it's not like you build something, then say, hey, give me your feedback, do you like it? No — or maybe they will say yes, right? It doesn't matter. It's about participating before that.

Lauren Turner 8:41
Exactly. And if they say no after a certain point, the product has already gone through so much development, and there's so much pressure just to get it out the door, even if it isn't what customers want. It's going to be like, well, it's the opportunity cost of having to start over, and you're like, all right, we know that it may not be perfect, but we have to put this out there, because it's what we

Host 9:00
yeah, yeah,

Lauren Turner 9:02
and then you're not going to get the kind of reception that you want. Whereas if you had just had the customer along the journey in the first place when developing that product, or really got that feedback as an iterative process, as opposed to "we're just about to launch, do you like it? Oh, please like it, please like it, please like

Host 9:19
it." Yeah. And for our audience as well — we have a lot of people on the IT side — this is not incompatible with Lean Startup. It's totally the opposite, it's very compatible, right? We know that when you are launching traditional products that are not, let's say, startup companies — like, I don't know, an ice cream shop — you can do a survey. You can say, hey, what's in this neighborhood? What kind of flavors do you like? How much do you pay on average for ice cream? Those things can be surveyed, and then you build your ice cream shop with the right flavors, the right product, the right place, and the right price.

In a startup, you cannot do this kind of survey, because very often you are creating innovations that people are not familiar with yet. So you're creating something new that you are betting they will adopt, right? But you still can — that's part of the conversation we had last time, right? So what I'm hearing is that even in those situations, in highly innovative companies like the companies you've been working for, you can still do that in an iterative manner, right? Always talking to them, getting their feedback, building just a little bit, and getting feedback, and keep building. And that's not only for product development. I think it's for everything, right? Do we have a limitation for that kind of — okay.

Lauren Turner 10:45
I don't think there is. One of the core bits of customer feedback that I got while at Click was — we'd recently launched a customer newsletter, and we were looking to start rolling that out with a core group of customers, and then gradually expanding that to the entire customer base once we felt confident that it was going to be providing the content that everyone was really going to benefit the most from.

So we had our first launch, and then we used the UserTesting platform — we'll give them a little plug here. I worked at UserTesting for a little under three years in customer marketing, and they're a great way to get deep qualitative customer feedback. So we used that platform to run customers through the tasks of reading this newsletter. Rather than a survey question of "on a scale of one to five, how would you rate how useful this is?", you're actually asking open-ended questions about the content. If you were to reorder the content from the most interesting part of this newsletter to the least, what would you put where? Tell us what you think about this layout. Tell us what you think about the graphics. What would you put here instead if we didn't have this? And then you're really getting that deep dive and walking in your customer's shoes to understand what their thought processes are as they go through this marketing asset.

So we were able to take that feedback and make iterations from one newsletter to the next, with some fairly drastic changes based on that feedback, and it actually doubled the click-to-open rate in a month. And it's even one step beyond A/B testing, because if you're doing an A/B test, you get a little bit of insight — between those two options, what's going to work — but it doesn't give you the why. You might have a customer click on a particular link because they found it the most compelling, or because they may have just received an email on that topic previously and it was interesting at that moment in time, but it wouldn't have been at some other point. Or maybe their cat walked across the keyboard and it registered as a click. On the other end of that laptop, you're not really going to know until you're actually talking to them, to understand why they clicked on something, what they found compelling, and what you might want to change.

Host 13:04
Totally, cool. And I think that, of course, based on the career highlights you shared with us, you do that because you invest a lot in communities, right? Community is a big word — well, not a big word, but it's a word that can mean many things to different companies, different groups. They call them online communities, offline communities. They will sometimes call something a community when it's not, when it's a group that you put together, and you did one activity and probably nothing else, and they don't know each other, and you don't know them very well. And nevertheless, some companies will call that a community.

Now, moving to those specific topics on communities, we have some hard questions that our audience would like to know. And thank you again very much for being here and answering those hard questions about how to succeed and what would make it fail. That's the section we are in right now. And the first one, of course, is: what is the value that a company gets when they are building communities?

Lauren Turner 14:18
Sure. I think it goes back to what the ultimate goal of the community is, and the value will come out of what those goals are. For some companies, the purpose of a community is essentially going to be crowdsourced tech support. So if that main goal is not to create a tribe of customers who are sharing ideas and really feeling connected to something, but really just to offset your support costs so the customers can help each other out — that's a very worthwhile and tactical goal.

It's going to be a very different set of operations if your overall goal for the community is to create this feeling of belonging, where customers can connect to each other, grow their careers, and really build that long-term loyalty with your brand. That's going to involve a lot more work, that's going to involve a lot more cross-functional activity, and it shouldn't necessarily sit with just one person, because you need to have all hands on deck for that type of community.

It's so critical to have communication across all of your different functional areas in the company. If that is the community that you're looking for, you need to have your customers informed of what's going on. You want to give them product updates, you want to give them opportunities to provide feedback, you want to learn from them and be able to have them share ideas with other customers that can help them advance their careers. If you're providing the baseline education, that's great. I mean, that's a really good start. You're helping to create affinity for your product as a tool to get your customers where they need to go. But if you can go one step beyond that and really understand who your customers are as people, and connect with them and help them grow their careers, then you've got a customer for life. Whether those customers stay at the company they're currently at or move on, they're going to have that connection to your company, and they're going to try to bring you on board with their next job. I've seen that happen multiple times with our stars within the community, because it's more than just viewing your product as something that helps them in their job — it's something that helped them build their career.

Host 16:33
Totally. And you're talking about an opportunity to promote career branding with your products, right? When they are taking courses, participating in analyst relations, being speakers in webinars or in your events, or helping other users — maybe that's what your community is for, right? Or giving feedback, giving their inputs into the roadmap of the product. They feel important. You're giving them status, recognition, empowerment. Those are all things that we talk about in customer advocacy, right? Those are things that customers are usually seeking, and you can give that through communities and community activities.

Lauren Turner 17:20
Exactly. And so much of it, honestly, is just about the way that those activities are positioned. I've seen a lot of folks, especially in customer success, look at these opportunities as favors or asks: oh, you know, we don't want to put a lot of burden on our customers by asking them to take all this time to put together a presentation and speak at something. And they can get a little squeamish about it. If you're looking at it as customers doing you favors, then yeah, it is going to come across as some kind of burden for them to bear.

But if you're looking at those activities as, no, no, we're not asking you to do work for us, we're asking you to put yourself on a pedestal that is going to give you notoriety as an expert in your field. We are offering you this opportunity for a broader platform that you can get beyond what you can normally do at your company, and you're going to be positioned as a thought leader. Who wouldn't jump at that opportunity? And it's the same activity. It's just about the way that you're positioning it.

Host 18:23
Yeah, it can happen that some customers say, "No, I'm not interested in that." But then it's maybe just a matter of making — we call it, with some of the customers that we work with, a customer advocacy success plan, right? You start slower. Okay, maybe there's something else that they should do before. A customer who never spoke about your product and never took any course isn't an expert yet, even though it's their career. Maybe you can give them some courses first, right? You prepare them slowly, and then there will be a point where they will say yes. Totally, because, as you said — and I agree with you — maybe I would say it's the main fuel that moves advocacy activities: that opportunity to share the great things you're doing with your product, like great brands. Usually we're talking about good brands that are advocating for how they're disrupting the market, the industry. So you are sharing that from a leadership position, right, as you said, with evidence, from a leadership position with your peers on the market. I mean, that's very attractive for most of these companies that are doing advocacy.

Lauren Turner 19:35
Absolutely. And to your point, you need to meet your customers where they are. I have a graphic that I use in a lot of my presentations of a pyramid, where the base of the pyramid is your table stakes. Do you have a basic understanding of the product? Are you using it on a regular basis? And then from there, you might have your customers become fans, so this is where you might ask them to give product feedback or write a review. Then you have a third level, which is where you have your actual advocates, and these are folks who might be more interested in writing some customer-generated content, or speaking at a conference, or writing something on your behalf, or having a little bit more of a public presence. And then at the very top of your pyramid, you're going to have your super fans, so these might be people in your customer advisory boards, or people who you're putting in front of press or analysts.

A big part of customer marketing is really understanding who within your customer base fits within those areas of your pyramid, and then designing either a program or some level of communication that tracks to each one of those levels. Just to give a dating analogy: you wouldn't want your first date to be having this person be your guest at your sibling's wedding. That would be completely out of line and would creep everybody out. But if you've been with someone for a long time and they're your partner, that's sort of the standard thing that you would ask them to do. It's the same thing with customers. You want to really understand what their baseline connection to your brand is, and then you offer them opportunities that match up accordingly.

Host 21:08
Yeah, that pyramid — we also call it the pyramid of advocate needs. And the other thing that came to my mind when you were saying that a little earlier: one of the differences — of course, there are more differences between loyalty and advocacy, but one of them — I'm talking about people who think that, as you said, no, I don't want to give the customers more work, I don't want them to put together a presentation. That's one of the differences with advocacy, right? If your program is just giving benefits, inviting them to social cocktails or sending them gifts or handwritten CEO letters, that's not an advocacy program. You need the advocacy activities as well. That's the balance, the gives and gets that we are building: things that they will get, and things that they will give you, the company, that will form them as advocates. Those activities are very important, so they are being formed and forged as advocates. And you, as a company, want as many customers as possible doing that for you, to promote customer retention and all these other promises of customer advocacy programs, right, in communities, let's say.

Lauren Turner 22:26
Absolutely. And I've actually seen it flipped around too, where a lot of companies will think about setting up a community as: once you have your community stood up, then here's where you're going to be able to extract value from customers. We're going to get our customers to do all of these things for us — without really thinking beforehand about what we are giving our customers.

Host 22:47
Exactly.

Lauren Turner 22:48
And it's not about squeezing every last drop of advocacy from customers that you can. What you're really trying to do, in order to build those long-term relationships, is demonstrate the value of your product and your company to your customers. If they're really bought in, then that advocacy is going to come naturally, because they're going to care enough about your product and your company to want to speak on your behalf. But the value has to go toward the customer first, and that's so critical.

That's partially why I always talk about having your community be this cross-functional thing. And yes, it can be managed by one person or a team, but if you're not looping in your customer success teams, your product teams, your executive teams, and your engineering teams to keep them abreast of what's going on in the community and make sure that everyone's on the same page, then you're going to have this very disjointed brand experience, and your community isn't really going to be able to hold up over time.

Host 23:50
Totally. So that comes to my next question, which is one of the hard questions: in your opinion, what makes a community strategy succeed or fail? And I guess that you're already touching on one of those things. One of the things we were talking about in our previous call is that it cannot be — I'll make two questions in one, because I think they are very similar to each other. What are the roles of community management? I mean, to drive a community, what are the roles that we need? And also, what are the factors that would make a community strategy succeed or fail? Because I think they are very close to each other as well, because it's about structure, of course. If you think that it's just one person, not senior enough — let's say without the right seniority to drive that — then your community is probably going to fail. But I'd like to hear from you.

Lauren Turner 24:50
Yeah, no, you touched on that really well. I think a really important part of community management is being an internal evangelist for your customers. So it's not just the day-to-day managing of the community. It's going back to all of your different stakeholders in the company on a regular basis, presenting at those sales meetings, presenting at your executive team meetings, and letting them know: here's what the word on the street is in the community, this is what our customers are concerned about, these are the problems they're having, this is what they want to do with the product, and these are some ideas that they have. Making sure that everyone's on the same page, and having that buy-in from all of those different stakeholders, especially at your executive level, is really critical.

It's more about having the community be your hub, and then all of these other parts of the business be your spokes, and then presenting opportunities for all of these other stakeholders to get involved. They all have their day-to-day jobs. You don't want to have everybody in the community at the same time, because it's inefficient and can make a mess of things, but you do want to make sure that there is that cross-collaboration. For example, you're going to have communications coming from your product marketers, you're going to have communications coming from your sales team and from customer success. You want to know what all of those communications are, so that they can be streamlined if you're putting them into your community. That way your customers aren't overloaded and bombarded with too much stuff, and you can see where you have the opportunity to consolidate some of that messaging.

But it can also provide opportunities for your executives to really get into your community and see what it's like from the perspective of an end user. One of the things that I've done running communities would be to have a series of meetings — we might do them monthly, we might do them quarterly — and it might be an ask-me-anything kind of meeting, where we would have a member of the C-suite sit there as part of a Zoom call, and end users would be able to ask whatever questions were on their mind. Not only does this give those customers the opportunity to really reach out to an executive that they wouldn't have access to ordinarily, but it also helps the executives really understand what it's like from the ground, and these are the things that your customers are concerned with. In their normal sphere of influence they might not necessarily get to talk with these end users, because they're probably working with other executives most of the time. So having different representatives from these different functional areas within the company coming in as guest speakers or guest talks within your community is a really great way to keep everyone aligned and on board, and also to provide insights that these different functional areas might not necessarily get otherwise.

Host 27:53
Yeah, and what I'm hearing is also a lot of feedback loop, right? To have that feedback loop with the other departments. First, of course, getting them to participate in defining the goals, so you know what you want to achieve with that community — that's what you said at the beginning. But then after that, during the activities, you're going to hear feedback, you're going to hear the thoughts of the customers, the desires and dreams of those customers, and then you're going to tell them. And if nothing happens, maybe the customers will not feel motivated to keep giving feedback, right? "Okay, I told you already, why are you asking me again six months later, a year later? You didn't even tell me what happened with my previous feedback."

Those things are tricky, and it will happen if you are alone, disconnected from the rest of the company. As you're saying, that's one of the things that are very important, and I agree with you completely. Have this council of people that needs to be part of at least the strategic meetings, right? As you said, you gather this information, you give it to them, and you treat that together, and you do what needs to be done. I completely agree with you.

And I would like to move to the next question, which is: does every company need to build a community? What's your opinion on that?

Lauren Turner 29:25
I think ideally companies should have a community, but if there isn't the infrastructure and strategy to support it, then it's not going to work. A community isn't something that you just stand up as a checkbox feature of, like, okay, everyone's doing it, so we need to be part of the cool kids and do it too. Check, we've done it. Next

Host 29:48
thing. No.

Lauren Turner 29:49
You know, like any other function within a company, there needs to be a major strategic reason, and it has to feed into the ultimate plan of the business. So standing up a community just for community's sake is not necessarily going to work. You need to be planful and mindful about what that community's reason for being is, and who's going to be in it, and how do we grow it, and who are the most important people in this community — because just because you have the numbers doesn't necessarily mean that they're the right people.

I've seen this several times with various communities that I've run, or my team has run, where you have customers who are joining the community from a join link or something, and you can say, okay, we have these numbers. But those customers may be using a legacy product with no intention of upgrading to the new one, and what you really want is the customers who are using the latest version of your product, so that they can talk about it and help evangelize, so that you end up getting more of your new business coming in. So it's less about the quantity and more about the quality.

That's one of the things that I've always really doubled down on when building communities: you want to start with a core group of customers who you already know are your advocates. These might be people who rated you an eight, nine, or ten on your most recent NPS survey, or customers who've been hand-selected by your customer success folks or your account managers, because they know these people and know that they're going to be really good advocates. These are the people who you want to use as your baseline community. I'm talking 20 people. You play around with them for a couple of months, and you throw different content at them, and you say, okay, look, we're looking to plan this community, and because you are so important to us, we want you to be along for the ride in building this strategy out. What do you think of the organization of this community? What do you think about the type of content we're putting in there? And you build it with them.

Once you have enough activity going on within this core group, so that you're not constantly having to poke the bear in order to get things going, that is when you start expanding into inviting other people into your community who may be the neutrals, or may not have a strong opinion about your company or your product, and you grow it organically from there. But if your initial goal is, oh, we want 10,000 people in a month, and you're just spamming all your customers with a join link — okay, you might get a couple thousand in your first group, but if there's nothing compelling in your community to keep them going back, you're not going to have your community grow, you're not going to get that activity, and now you've just burned your opportunity to reach out to these people, because they've tried it once and they're done.

So there needs to be patience involved there, especially at the executive level when building a community from scratch. You're not going to get this huge stream of activity overnight. You need to make sure that there is a sustainable core of activity there before you really start building out, and people need to be okay with that.

Host 33:13
Totally, yeah. So one of the things I'm hearing so far is that there is one type of customer that we want in our community. Of course, it matters — the goals of the community always matter, because they're going to determine the kind of customers, the profile of customers, right? The products, where they are, which industries, how long they've been using the products. That will define the goals, with the stakeholders that you're going to sit at the table with, and you look for this population of customers where they are.

But what I'm hearing is that you prefer to start with people that are already your advocates. You mentioned talking to customer-facing roles, right? So people that they know, and that we know as a company, are maybe people who did customer stories with you lately. You know that they have a great use case, and they are great advocates to go public with you. They're doing advocacy activities already on a regular basis, that's great. So invite them first.

But then, what if you need the other stakeholders? You have product teams, you have maybe the support team, let's say customer experience there, and they want to know how the experience is, and about the channels, to see if you have the right channels implementing those products, and to see feedback from the customer and how they're reacting to those things. So we have those stakeholders, and then they say, "You know what, Lauren, I want C-suite. I don't want only users of our product." Let's say it's a product that changed logistics, right? So you have a COO of the company who participates in the decision-making of getting your product, but then he's not using it, he's not a user of your product. In those cases, and for some reason it is important — what's your opinion? How do you get them to do activities with you, to be engaged throughout the year with you and do also customer advocacy activities, testimonials for your company?

Lauren Turner 35:30
In my experience, executives really have such limited time to be able to engage outside of their regular day-to-day that it's going to be an uphill battle getting them to be involved in community activities, which I think fundamentally are really more for end users and people who have that day-to-day contact with your product.

For executives, I think what gets them more excited is to be seen as thought leaders in the industry, and that's where I think customer advisory boards really come in. When you're putting together executives in a group with other executives in the industry to really talk about the big-picture issues that are driving the business, that is going to be a lot more interesting to them, and that also helps your company with its bigger strategic goals.

So I would never want to bother an executive who's not working with my product day to day about your function, because they're not related to it, it's not their deal. But if you wanted to talk to that executive and say, hey, we're looking at expanding our product into this new market that you're familiar with — what are your thoughts about the opportunity for taking this strategic pivot and bringing the company into this new market? Or we're looking at acquiring a company so that we can expand our product portfolio, is that something that would be of interest to someone like you and your market? Talking to them about those issues, or even talking to them about what is the most important list of things that you're looking at when signing on a new vendor, if this person isn't yet a customer, and understanding what's going on in the head of the decision-maker — that is the kind of activity and the type of conversation that you're going to be much more likely to get your executive to engage in.

But as far as being part of an online community where people are doing activity challenges and writing on discussion boards and stuff, that's not really their thing. To try to force them into it is going to be an uphill battle that probably isn't going to yield the results you want.

Host 37:51
It doesn't mean that you don't need a community, because you do need a community — a CAB can be a community, and it should probably be a community, but with a different kind of activities. They are not collecting points by doing activities, they're not using apps to say, "Oh, I have opportunities." It's not like that, of course.

But as you said at the beginning, you need to see where they are and meet them where they are. So in our language, you basically have a CASP — a customer advocacy success plan — with the right set of activities for the right set of roles and advocates that are important to your company. So a CAB is one of them, and it's a community by itself. You want to have activities throughout the year, you want them to share among themselves, you want to give them opportunities to meet your executives in meetings — a small one, so it's still a community. So, I love your answer. Thanks for sharing this.

And here we go to two more questions before we change to the last part of this podcast. It has been great. The last two questions: one is about the stakeholders, then we're going to talk about tech stack. But the stakeholders — what are the stakeholders that you think are usually at the table for a company? Let's say we're talking about an IT-based company. It doesn't matter if it's healthcare; you have technology to get to your customers and give them services, etc. In this kind of company, global companies, what are the stakeholders or departments inside the organization that you think should take advantage of communities and be part of a customer advocacy council in a customer advocacy community? What are the stakeholders? Product

Lauren Turner 39:48
teams, customer success, customer support. If you have a separate function for onboarding or customer education, then definitely you want that, because that community is going to be a really great channel for educating your customers. Your executive teams — exactly, your executive team you want to have involved. They might not need to be involved in every meeting or every decision, because they have a lot on their plate, but you need to at least keep them informed of what's going on.

And engineers, to some extent, largely to keep them abreast of what the end user experience is, so that they're more closely tied to the product. They don't necessarily need to engage in the community, but if you invite them to lurk in discussion boards, they can at least see the kind of questions that customers have, and it gives them better insight as they are developing.

But honestly, I would say everyone should be in there, actively or passively, just to be able to observe what your customers are thinking — except I would put a caveat around sales. Sales, I think, should be able to observe and see what's going on, where they can identify where there might be upsell and cross-sell opportunities. But it is critical for a community to be a safe space for those customers, and if they go in there and they feel like they're being pitched to, it's going to make them uncomfortable, and they're not going to be honest or authentic, or even likely to stay. So you need to put those guardrails around your sales folks. Let them see what your customers are talking about, and you can present things as educational material — hey, here's what the next level of support, or next level of service, or your next higher bronze, silver, gold level can get you — so that they can learn on their own. But don't push.

Host 41:59
It's like a feedback loop again, but to sales now. Now to product, to sales. Because, of course, during those activities, we as community managers, as advocacy managers, as customer marketing managers — we have so many titles in our roles — we have this unique opportunity to grab information that no one else in the organization is getting. We have the desires of the customers much more than the support team does.

Sometimes, just like myself — I always give this example because we are all consumers — my bank, I won't say which one. Let's say I don't have any complaint open, I don't have a support ticket. But if someone from the advocacy team comes to me and says, "Pablo, we'd like you to give a public testimonial," I would say no. Probably on the last NPS I said nine or ten, and I don't have any tickets, so for the company everything looks so good. But actually the advocacy team has this unique opportunity, when they are asking, "Would you engage in advocacy activities?" — and maybe my answer is different. That's because your department doesn't have the sensibility to see that I'm okay, maybe I'm passive. I'm not even a promoter, I'm not a detractor either.

But being passive — that's one of the goals of customer marketing, right? To break through with those passive customers and transform them into promoters. Because as a passive, if another bank comes to me and says, "Pablo, here's a big discount, come to us, change your bank," I'll say yes. I have no commitment to my bank. I'm not doing any activities. Maybe I don't even realize the full value that the engineering team, the product team behind the bank, designed for me, because no one is watching that correctly. And I would just jump ship. And between this

Lauren Turner 44:02
is a great experience, and yeah, I'm not having problems.

Host 44:07
Exactly. And I'm not an advocate. Don't take me wrong, I'm a nine, but I'm not your advocate. And those are things that, having this unique opportunity, we need to give back to sales and to support. That's the importance of the feedback loop. And for sales, of course, we have these opportunities to know where they are going, what their desires are, and those are maybe all ideas for, at some point, not aggressively, having the sales teams go and help them. Again, if you think of how the sales teams will help them succeed, and not sell the next thing only — how they will help them succeed in their careers, as you're saying — then we are totally aligned, and we have probably good things for sales, and they will also, of course, end up doing sales.

Lauren Turner 44:55
A community can also be a sales enablement tool, so

Lauren Turner 44:59
that

Lauren Turner 45:00
when your sales team is pitching a prospect about the value of your company, there's so much that they could say. Like, hey, not only are you getting this fantastic product that's going to help your company reach its goals, but you're going to have your end users supported in all of these different ways. You're going to have your customer success manager, if it's a large enough account, holding your hand throughout the process. But we have this community of X number of other customers who will be there helping your users better understand best practices, learn from each other, and grow. There could be rewards involved. And that in and of itself can be a differentiator from your competitors, and a selling

Host 45:45
point. Totally. And not to mention, of course, the basics. We are talking about something else here — the basic support to sales is support with testimonials, right? Customer-to-customer calls, RFI and RFP support. You want to bring in someone who will say, "I'm interested in connecting with this customer," and you're helping sales and marketing directly.

But we're talking about something else, right? This kind of information, this customer experience that customer experience isn't capturing, that support isn't capturing, that the product teams aren't capturing — but we do. We are customer advocacy programs, and you can give it through a loopback channel that we can establish as customer intelligence, information that will serve them. Just one example: one of our advocates who was advocating for Volkswagen, let's say, just changed to Ford, right? And Ford doesn't have this product yet. Go there and sell this product to Ford, and bring this advocate to the table. He's going to be at least a good influencer. Just one example that no one else will have, and you can give it in the format of customer intelligence to your sales teams.

Lauren Turner 46:58
That happened multiple times, especially if you're working with a platform where you have rewards that customers can redeem. If you have a customer who typically has not been redeeming rewards and they're suddenly cashing out on everything, that's a really interesting signal that they may be on the move to a new job. That's a great opportunity to reach out to that customer and say, like, hey, I've noticed that you've just redeemed $100 worth of gift cards — cool, good for you, what's going on? And that can signal that they're moving on, and then you can help them come prepared to their new job with all sorts of information about your company, and you can help land that new account.

There may not be any other way that you would know that this customer is moving on, and the community can be fantastic for that. Because normally, if they have a relationship with you, they'll reach out to you and say, "Hey, Lauren, just want to let you know it's been great working with you. I'm no longer going to be at this company as of two weeks from now, and here's where I'm headed." And then you appreciate them for that information. You stay in touch with them, and then you immediately alert the account manager and the CSM, so that you can give them the tools, and when they're ready, they can take your product with them.

Host 48:18
Cool. Yeah, there are so many things that we can do with the community. The community needs to have all these goals, and we have this opportunity to take it to so many places and take advantage of it in different ways — while we are making them happy, of course, and keeping them with the status they are seeking, the recognition, the empowerment they need, and all that stuff that's part of the pyramid of advocates' needs.

But now, a little bit about the programs. In activities, we mentioned randomly a number of activities that can be done with communities and programs. You mentioned CAB, right? I would call it a program by itself, but it's like a sub-program of a customer advocacy program: a customer advisory board, CAB. And we talked about some activities like customer-to-customer calls. So what's your experience with these different programs? What are the programs available as tools for community managers and advocacy managers with communities?

Lauren Turner 49:28
Absolutely. So I would again use the community as your core, where all of these sub-programs can spiral out from. This is where you're going to be recruiting customers for these various other activities.

What I've seen work really, really well: regional user groups, especially in areas where customers are more comfortable meeting in live spaces, so this gives them the opportunity to network and learn from each other and really build that stronger relationship. I've done Ask the Expert series, where typically I would do them monthly, and you might have a different executive from your company, or a guest speaker if you can bring them on, to talk about a topic of interest to your customers, where they can have an open Q&A.

Networking and social activities — so you can do things like virtual escape rooms, or virtual cocktail parties, or things like that, which are just meant for your customers to be able to get to know each other better and have some fun. That can help especially your more introverted folks be brought along that journey a little bit faster, because you're not asking them to do shop talk right away. Those are really effective.

Ask-me-anythings with your executives give your customers opportunities to speak to the head of product, or to get that exposure to the folks who are really, at the end of the day, going to be able to fix their problems. Those have been really useful.

Surprise-and-delight programs I've launched, so this might be a surprise and delight. So, basically, like,

Host 51:11
yeah,

Lauren Turner 51:12
so if you wanted to provide a gift for a customer based on a milestone that's important to them — if you can find out that your customer has been promoted, or they had a baby, or they moved, or some other thing that you want to celebrate. Or you can use that on the user side too. If you have your analytics going, and your product analytics are saying that these are your top users of the month, for example, who've done whatever the activity is that you find valuable, you randomly send them a gift card, or a link to choose from various gifts, to say, hey, you're in the top 5% of our customers this month, this quarter, and we want to reward you for that. The idea is that it's unexpected and that it's tied to behavior that is meaningful to them, and that can also help open up the floodgates of conversation and help build long-term loyalty as well.

Host 52:15
Perfect.

Lauren Turner 52:16
And then you have other ad hoc activities that you can do, too. If there is one particular narrow stream of product feature development that you want to get feedback on, or you're starting a new campaign — let's say you've just gotten some new budget for outbound advertising, and you want to see what the reception of that ad is going to be before it goes live — you might want to tap a group of your customers for that, and then have that be kind of like a testing lab, where you have your common pool of customers who you can draw from when there's something that you want them to give feedback on. So there are lots of different activities that you can do within your community that will track to various interests of the customers in the community and are still really valuable to your company.

Host 53:08
Totally. So it's been a great episode with lots of tips. We've been talking about how to engage different roles at different levels, what kinds of advocates, and even the number of advocates we should start a community with. We've been talking about tools — no, I think we didn't mention that. I think that was the last question: what is the tech stack that is available out there for community managers? And that's the very last one before the fun question that we have for every guest on the show. Let's wait for it, but let's talk a little about tech stack.

Lauren Turner 53:52
Sure. So at your core, you need to have a good email platform. I'm most familiar with Marketo. I've found tying your community into your in-product notifications is incredibly useful, because you're meeting your customers where they are. So a product like Pendo. For community, I found Influitive to be absolutely incredible, because you can tailor various activities to the individual, you can slice and dice your customer populations in a million different ways, and you can really personalize that experience and capitalize on the analytics that are built in to help guide your strategy moving forward. If that is too high a level of investment for an SMB, then you can start small with something like Slack — just any easy place where you can get your customers talking and you can work with them will be a place that you can grow from.

The most important part, for whatever you have in your tech stack, is that it's all connected, because you want to be able to have visibility into that customer activity across your different stakeholders in the company. You want your salespeople to know who your most passionate advocates are, so that they know who to tap when they're going to have those demand calls. You want your CSMs to know who their rock stars in the account are, because typically you might have your CSMs only working with a couple of people within an account that may have 1,000 users, and so your super users within your community may not be one of those people that your CSM regularly engages with. So you want to be able to have them aware of who else in that account is going to be really valuable to your company. To be able to have all of that centralized — usually Salesforce, I'd say, is the central place for that. But it's far less impactful to have all of these different tools if they're not all integrated.

Host 55:56
Not integrated. So it's painful sometimes, sometimes not, but it's important, right? Invest in connecting those tools. And the other thing you're saying, that I'm hearing at least, is that it's important — the kind of feedback, the kind of information, how you structure the information that's being produced with the experience in the communities, and how you give it to different departments, so they can take it into consideration in their decision-making as well. That will grow sales and marketing, that will fine-tune campaigns, etc.

So, Lauren, thank you very much. Here we are on the very last question of the day. It's a fun question. Picture that you have the opportunity to write a customer marketing, customer advocacy phrase on a shirt or a mug. What would it be?

Lauren Turner 57:12
Educate, activate, elevate. These are the three steps of advocacy. You're educating your customer, so that they are on board, they understand your product, they're getting the value out of it. Activate, which is where you're encouraging them to speak on your behalf. And then elevate, because you're helping them grow in their career through this advocacy, and you're helping not only to bring them to the next level, but to really give more visibility to their industry and to what it is they do. So it's about starting small, building that loyalty first to the product, because that's going to be the most accessible thing to those end users, but then as you grow your relationship with your customers, they're going to be building a stronger tie to you and your brand, and that is going to propel them to being leaders in their field, and then they'll have you and your company to thank.

Host 58:19
Lauren, it was a great episode. Thank you very much. If people want to contact you, how can they find you? They probably want to know a little bit more about your experience on a one-on-one basis, or chat with you. What's the easiest way to find you?

Lauren Turner 58:39
Sure, I'm on LinkedIn. My email is lauren.turner@gmail.com. I was an early adopter, so I have my own very, very generic name as my email address. I'm happy to speak with anyone. I'm very passionate about community and customer marketing, and I wish all of you the best.

Host 59:06
All right. Thank you very much. And for our audience, have a wonderful day, and see you next time. Bye now. Bye, Lauren.

Host 59:14
This episode was brought to you by Wings4U, helping global B2B tech brands unleash the power of their customers' voice. Wings4U customer stories and advocacy programs help you deepen customer relationships, increase retention, and close more deals faster.