Building vs Buying Customer Advocacy Tools: Salesforce or Dedicated Platform? | CMAweekly Customer Marketing and Advocacy Slack

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Building vs Buying Customer Advocacy Tools: Salesforce or Dedicated Platform? | CMAweekly Customer Marketing and Advocacy Slack

Paola
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Hi Kevin S., you could totally start off with a POC in Salesforce so you can start capturing data. What we did was created a flag in the Contact record in Salesforce that said "Advocate?" Public or Private. Public = Public story Private = Internal only or accepts reference calls In a past life, before we moved over to Slapfive, we had also tried logging activities to get the "history" of an advocate. In another life, we also had a click list that we can select the type of activities they were interested in doing. The hard part is the guardrails piece to it when it comes to building it internally, and can be a challenge if your marketing ops isn't fond of creating a ton of fields in Salesforce. Buying a purpose-built solution will definitely have a lot more built out workflows and can help you with identifying net new advocates to your program. I would recommend asking this question in the 🔒[private feed] channel so others can give you feedback on the tools other CMAs are considering 🙂 If you're not in the above private channel, you can ask Mary Green for access!
Mary Green
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Great question, I'm excited to see the answers. Also, Sponsors, you may post saying you'd be happy to discuss, but outreach needs to lay with the OP. Kevin, Can you agree to keep the discussions in no-vendors confidential, please? (if you'd like to join the no-vendors channel. (I believe you have before).
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Amy Shever
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There's also a very good recent (December) webinar Evan Huck and Kevin Lau led about technology tools that may be helpful. I am pretty sure it was recorded.
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Kevin S.
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Can I be invited to that channel, Mary Green?
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Tiphaine Coupel
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Hi Kevin, really interested in your questions as I'm pretty much in the same situation right now. Some kind people also brought insights if you'd like to check the thread: https://cmaweekly.slack.com/archives/C06JXSTARJR/p1767696304788939 Hi Mary Green, I'm interested in joining the prival channel as well if possible + by the webinar led by Evan & Kevin.
Evan Huck
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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.
Kristine Kukich
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Going to use the Friday call on Jan 30th to speak to how I used SFDC/Gainsight to do this the last time in order to build proof of concept to automate with a tool later. 11am Pacific/2pm Eastern https://us06web.zoom.us/j/4029861639
Jen Doyon
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Hi Kevin S. This can easily be done in Salesforce, and I've seen it set up a few different ways. First, as everyone has mentioned, gauge how supportive the SF admin/team will be. If you have a good connection with tech ops, this is not a huge lift. Within the contact record, customers can be designated as CAB member, advocate, etc. with a simple drop-down field, plus an open text box for historical notes related to those activities. I would add a date field for when the advocate was last touched to teack the need for revalidation. One option is to use Tasks, where you can add multiple Task types such as recruiting, requests, case study development, etc. Within those Task types, you can add steps for process workflows. You can make these fields visible by permissions so if you don't want a certain group to see your notes, that is possible. As for a threshold, I'd say once you get to 500 records in a spreadsheet, it's time to automate in some way. Ideally, a customer platform will have more functionality and in the long run will make your life easier, but you'll also need someone to own/admin/ and keep that updated as well. I've attached a pin you can wear around the office to start building that relationship! 😄