By Mark Organ, CEO and Founder, Influitive
More leads. That’s what every marketer wants. Dump more leads into the top of the funnel and more customers will fall out the bottom, or so the theory goes.
Companies are investing hundreds of millions of dollars building software to fill, optimize, organize and analyze every stage of that marketing and sales funnel. More emails, content and social media posts are churned out every day, contributing to the overwhelming noise that buyers must tune out in order to make a purchase decision. It’s no wonder that few executives answer their phones or read all of their emails these days.
By Mark Organ, CEO and Founder, Influitive
More leads. That’s what every marketer wants. Dump more leads into the top of the funnel and more customers will fall out the bottom, or so the theory goes.
Companies are investing hundreds of millions of dollars building software to fill, optimize, organize and analyze every stage of that marketing and sales funnel. More emails, content and social media posts are churned out every day, contributing to the overwhelming noise that buyers must tune out in order to make a purchase decision. It’s no wonder that few executives answer their phones or read all of their emails these days.
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
When cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead made this observation, she was likely thinking more about fighting oppressive rulers than about what makes deals close faster.
But this sentiment is just as true for marketers. With so much focus on building that marketing machine, it’s easy to overlook the impact that individual people make. Buyers increasingly say recommendations from people they know and trust are the most influential factor during the decision-making process. And according to SiriusDecisions, the B2B software buyers’dependence on knowledgeable peers — people just like them who are already customers — has more than tripled.
The value of customer advocacy first became clear to me while I was the founding CEO at Eloqua, then an early leader in marketing automation. In response to a suggestion by an investor, our team analyzed why some accounts closed in days while others dragged on for months. In most cases, the fastest deals had the highest level of interaction with Eloqua’s best advocates. Through this analysis we found that referral leads were about 10 times more valuable than typical leads.
Not wanting to miss a great opportunity, I made it my mission to search for an existing tool that could manage a program designed specifically for these advocates, in order to drive more referrals. I was disappointed to find that the best tool available at the time was the Net Promoter Score. Though an incredibly popular tool, it focuses only on the likelihood of future referral, rather than taking concrete action to drive increased buzz, positive sentiment or those elusive referral leads.
I yearned for a better way to enlist our passionate advocate army in the effort to build our company. The ‘Yelpification’ of B2B in the years since and the shift to the social web has made it even easier for buyers to access reviews, testimonials and opinions from trusted peers, broadening the ways advocates can help and thus increasing the value they drive.
More than a decade later, this process now has a name: it’s called advocate marketing. Referral leads. Peer reference calls. Five-star online reviews. Social media buzz. Feedback for product, service and marketing teams. Advocates do it all, and it’s time to put measurable, repeatable and advocate-centered processes around this increasingly critical function.
Although white papers, case studies and other collateral from the marketing team can be somewhat effective, a recent study by the CMO Council found that 91% of B2B buyers do not trust content from vendors. Advocate marketing, on the other hand, focuses on the customer’s perspective and experience, untainted by the hand of sales or marketing. The customer’s word is now the gold standard. It’s the only thing that can validate a company’s value and offering in the marketplace.
The first example I saw of effective advocate marketing was during a Salesforce.com City Tour. At that event, a happy Salesforce customer, champagne flute in hand, sold me on the merits of a great product. Not her company’s product, but Salesforce. Seeing this interaction, thoughtfully orchestrated by Salesforce, is when I truly got it: the idea that companies shouldn’t simply hope that a prospect might connect with a relevant advocate; they should proactively facilitate those interactions. The experience should be seamless for both prospects and advocates.
Today, every LinkedIn group, Quora thread and Twitter stream is the online equivalent of that event. Peers are connected to one another over great distances through multiple social networks. Happy customers can (and do) answer questions and share their experiences anywhere at any time.
Even better, they will do more of these activities if you simply ask them to. Companies with advocate marketing programs have found that, on average, each engaged advocate refers a high-quality lead every 3.5 months, provides feedback about four times per month, and performs upwards of 40 social actions each year.
Multiply those figures by hundreds or even thousands of happy customers, and you can begin to understand why notable visionary marketing leaders like Tom Wentworth, CMO at Acquia, and Meagen Eisenberg, VP of Demand Generation at DocuSign, are betting big on customer advocacy to fuel the growth of their companies.
Driving revenue today is no longer about turning out more content, sending more email blasts, or making more calls. The way people buy has shifted dramatically, therefore companies must change the way they sell. Instead of turning up the volume on your marketing machine, it’s time to mobilize your advocates and let them do the heavy lifting for you.
Mark Organ is the founder and CEO of Influitive, a firm that helps companies mobilize their advocates to produce massive increases in referral leads, reference calls, social media participation and more. Prior to Influitive, Organ was the founding CEO of Eloqua.
