I have been thinking about customer advocacy and employee advocacy lately. The two topics are closely related, and they each contribute their own unique benefits to a growing business. Customer advocacy is a public expression of customer satisfaction. It can be in the form of a sales reference or a posted review, or a case study, or even just a ‘thumbs up’ recognition. Many pundits write about how traditional marketing and sales processes are dead. Buyers tune out all of the usual approaches. However, one avenue that is still a powerful influencer in a purchase decision is peer recommendations.
On the front-end of the buying process, shoppers rely upon many non-vendor sources to whittle down the list of potential solutions, and they have more tools than ever to find and evaluate possible vendors. It is estimated that at least 70% of the buying process today is independent research conducted by the buyer before they ever signal to a sales person that they are in the market. Peer reviews and recommendations are among the most powerful influences. In the consumer space, we search for the top 10 products or hotels or restaurants, and we rarely go much deeper. Business shoppers are doing the same thing in their research phase. They look at analyst reports and peer review sites like G-2. The vendors in the top quadrant get the most attention and receive much more mindshare during the research phase than the also-rans. On the back-end of the buyers journey, enterprise sellers know that they will have to produce references, and the strength or absence of the references will make or break their deal. Even after the buyer has gone all the way through their evaluation and selected their preferred solution, they still want to speak to a reference, and a negative message from a peer will outweigh all of their research.
Acknowledging this situation, progressive companies have established customer advocacy programs. Advocacy goes way beyond customer satisfaction. The objective is to drive a public expression of delight. These companies devote significant energy and investment to systematically encourage customers to tell the market how happy they are with the vendor’s products or services. During a shopper’s research phase, the vendor’s objective is to do everything possible to make sure the shopper discovers the customer advocates and forms a positive opinion of the vendor before they entertain a sales call. Most advocacy teams span the entire customer advocacy relationship, and also ensure a pool of ready reference customers to assist in any phase of the sales cycle.
However, just because you establish an advocacy team, it does not ensure you will have advocates. It still takes a village to delight a customer, so the entire company has to accept the mandate to drive customer success, delight, and ultimately advocacy. There needs to be measurable company-wide metrics that keep the focus on advocacy: Top ranking on G-2, number of referenceable accounts, case studies published, positive posts, etc. The key takeaway about creating an advocacy team is the recognition that it is not enough to just delight your customers, you need an institutionalized formal mechanism to engage with customers and convince them to be vocal advocates. Remember that the Net Promoter Score (NPS) is predicated on measuring the percentage of ‘promotors’ versus ‘detractors.’ Advocacy takes it one step further, and drives closet promotors to step up to the megaphone and sing their praise for your business.
The second type of advocacy great companies benefit from is employee advocacy. This is an internal objective to have key influential employees share their satisfaction and commitment with others in the company. Employee advocates are ambassadors that boost morale and assist with recruiting and onboarding new hires. Advocates are spokespeople and influencers, and they reinforce the strategies and vision of the company. What got my attention this week was the virtuous feedback loop between employee and customer advocacy. Simply put, happy customers make happy employees, and happy employees make happy customers. So, what keeps advocacy going?
Advocacy requires passion and vision — clear vision for product and place in the market, and passion about delivering value and winning the competitive battle. Also, to motivate employee advocates to speak up, a clear vision about the team and passion for improving professionalism and the commitment to excellence. Passion causes people to become emotionally invested in success. I saw a quote from Simon Sinek that captured this sentiment: “When people are financially invested, they want a return. When people are emotionally invested, they want to contribute.” We see the financial side in customers when they become unhappy and demand a discount, and we see it in employees when work becomes just a 9:00 to 5:00 paycheck. The emotional investment becomes evident when customers act as references even when they have outstanding issues, and when employees work tirelessly to promote the company and make customers happy, without an expectation of reward.
Emotional commitment is a beautiful thing, and the goal is to drive passion into the outward expression of that commitment through advocacy programs.