ha just got the same one - love the invite format seemed so exclusive and personalized - good inspiration. Mark Huber went either last year or 2 years ago - seemed pretty fun
cool opportunity actually - of course not without some risk and discomfort - but this is going to become increasingly common with AI where leaders are going to ask you to rethink your comparative leverage in an AI context. obviously not knowing many of the details - here's how I'd approach:
If content/proof points are important - you still need to find a way to get this done - but you just can't spend a ton of time on it. luckily content creation I'd argue isn't super high complexity anymore and so you can start to automate/autopilot/templatize scale it - you'd still want to do a handful of high production stories/videos with the top customers every year - but use some sor of scaled way to capture feedback from customers and transform it into content. Obviously a platform like UE would help but if you can't make that work wire up Typeform and then just dump into into Notion or Airtable or Claude something w/an AI front end reps can search.
With a bunch of content and a self-serve channel for reps to consume that content, that should help protect your time to go run some more ambitious customer marketing programs. A light advocacy program that can spin off reviews to review sites, ID references, speakers, referrals is high impact
Move some of your customer storytelling skillet into a lifecycle / customer enablement / adoption channel - ie get customers to do webinars and blogs on best practices and new feature adoption. then this content can be used to nudge/activate users to adopt more.
Get really specific on how content and advocactes can help drive expansion - e.g. identifying advocates in bigger accounts that can help you get introd to x-sell opportunities. create collections of content/proof for add-on products you're trying to attach
But yea out of all the things that you can create some leverage on and automate - content is definitely one of them - and you're right you have to keep it going it just can't suck up all of your day - you need that time to go make some progress on programs that align to the big company OKRs (e.g. GRR and NRR)
Super stoked to launch our community-led content hub - The Outpost by UserEvidence. As we grow in maturity and sophistication as a customer marketing function - we're excited to build the stage where we can feature the top minds in this community - ie you! We'll be focused on putting out peer-led content and webinars that are super practical to help you develop in your career, and so we can all move the function and category forward! First 3 sessions are all fire - featuring Emily Coleman (cracking the code on measuring revenue impact of customer evidence), Irene Yam (running the perfect virtual CAB) and Cache Walker (building a reference program where you don't need references) We'd love to feature more of you as well so ping us if you have a good topic in mind! https://www.linkedin.com/posts/evanhuck_the-outpost-activity-7432454820709609472-9bgN[…]m=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAGs7KgBysTtLv7zfeLvU9EnO2yVyM9WtAQ
team has been cooking - great work!
yea generally want to look at "events" or " signals" that are a proxy for customer stokedness (should be a word if it isn't) and then orchestrate some timely delivery of the ask right after that signal - could be product usage, NPS, renewal, any N number or behaviorial or heuristic signals really. If you build some ongoing logic that then automatically delivers the asks at these opportune moments - then you build positive reviews throughout the year vs scrambling at the last minute.
the coolest advocate incentive i've seen (this wasn't for a review more of a top tier advocate reward) was a Blackstone Grill in the summer which got my attention, haha
yea we have a lot of data on this since we drive hundreds of reviews off the back of our surveys - $25 is definitely the most common and generally the sweet spot. Agree $50 doesn't move the needle or at least diminishing marginal returns (certainly doesn't double conversion rate). I like Sarah's angle of using a less common # as a bit of a pattern interrupt. More specific swag (e.g. airpods) can also be more effective than giftcards, but you need some gifting tooling to make that scalable.
Here's the webinar we (UserEvidence) did w/Kevin on evaluating Customer Advocacy Platforms - https://userevidence.com/how-to-evaluate-customer-advocacy-platforms-without-getting-burned/ Always cool to start with w/e you have internally - though I'd def recommend Airtable or some more modern AI-enabled table-like thing (smartsheet, notion, etc) on top of SFDC (w/ a direct integration or Zapier) - building purely in SFDC is frustrating and your solution will just get more kludgy over time as you add to it. Generally Advocacy tools are going to start around $25k/yr for the cheapest - but you at least get some good best practices and knowledge and help w/implementation. So obviously depends on the scale of the problem to solve on how bought in the company is on investing in advocacy/customer marketing. And keep in mind there's generally a few pillars of advocacy:
content creation - e.g how do we create customer proof points/evidence/stories at scale, organize those, and distribute/share them w/the GTM teams
Reference Mgmt - if you get more than 5 reference requests a month then you might start to look at solutions to handle the matching of prospects w/customers that can speak directly to the prospects concerns, handling the scheduling, managing burnout etc
Proactive advocate engagement/activation -ie getting advocates to do stuff on your behalf - post on social, do video testimonials, give referrals, etc
(sometimes) Community - which can be a great channel to engage advocates (or the advocacy platform might have integrations w/big C community platforms like Gainsight, HigherLogic, Bevy, Verint, TightKnit, etc)
But yea if you have 300+ customers in a business above ~$15M ARR, I'd at least start looking at the platforms for inspiration on what to build. And comparative advantage is a thing - you're job isn't to build customer marketing software - you're job is to engage customer and drive retention, advocacy, content, etc, etc - so whatever the fastest and best path is that can handle the scale of your company is the answer.
booooost! yea we finally got our 2-yr old sleeping thru the night last week and I'm a new man - my Oura ring is no longer concerned about my wellbeing haha.
not sure how other CEOs feel (imagine probably the same if you're an earlier stage startup) - but for me at least we want to know. Customer experience (esp in this market) is absolutely the most critical pillar and differentiator for a young company, so a start-up CEO is going to be hyper-focused on it. And since most of us have often managed large teams and developed younger employees, we're nuanced enough to know how to handle it delicately and not make it a big blow to the CSM (unless its egregious of course and it needs to be more drastic action). You never know what folks are going through in their personal lives, so we always approach it with benefit-of-the-doubt first, and try to create productive coaching and learning moments from it. So don't feel bad like you're throwing someone under the bus - we'll be able to navigate it elegantly and productively. Also -sometimes you just get personality/working style misalignment between customer and CSM, and so switching in another CSM can be an easy win for everyone and it doesn't have to be interpreted by the employee personally as a dig/flaw. So it's always worth bringing it up to the CEO or VP of CS - we want to help and direct feedback is a really important channel when your team gets large enough where you can't be on every account.
