How to leverage advocacy | Priscila Fletcher | TDSU Ep. 66

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All right, I'll jump into it. What's up, lifers, and welcome to The Daily Standup with Lifetime Value, where we're giving you fresh new customer success ideas every single day. I got my man, Rob, here.

Rob, do you want to say hi? What's up, CS athletes? Are you alluding to the fact that I just got back from a run? We all in this room- You're just vamping. That we wear gym shorts to work. Oh, yes, yes.

That's how we introduced each other. We all showed each other our gym shorts. Fitness on top, athlete on the bottom.

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We've got Priscila here. Priscila, do you want to say hi? Hi, everyone. And I am your host.

My name is Dillon Young. Priscila, thank you so much for being here. Do you want to introduce yourself? Of course, yeah.

So my name is Priscila Fletcher. I'm based in New York City. I am a customer success coach, and I'm the founder of Latinos in Success, and that's who I am.

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Thank you so much for being here. So you know what we do here. We ask one simple question.

We want to know what is on your mind when it comes to customer success. Can you please share that with us? Yes. One thing that I think very often is customer advocacy.

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And something in the customer journey that a lot of CSMs don't leverage enough, mainly because sometimes that sits under marketing, product, other teams. CS has little to almost nothing to do with it. There is so much that CS can do.

Mostly have the finger in the pulse the whole time. When there's the wins, when it's the right time to ask for testimonials, for success stories, for referrals, all that kind of fun stuff that generate revenue. All of that can be additional revenue, and revenue that can be generated much faster than usually a sales cycle or marketing can take, right? Collaboration, collaboration with marketing, with product on those.

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It's something that really worked for me in the past. I remember once I had my first OKR, my first 90 days at a company, three success stories in your first 90 days. At first, I thought that was crazy.

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I don't even know them. How am I going to do that? So it forced me to build a whole advocacy program, like collaborate with marketing, collaborate with product, understand what are some of the major wins that we can get here as fast as we can, because I have 90 days. I need to get this going to make sure that I get three success stories here.

So in that journey, I think I learned a ton of what can be done, what are some of the things that you have to do, what are some of the don'ts, what are some of the things that you need to look for, and what to focus for the next three months if that's a quarterly goal that you have. Looking for the customers that are early adopters, that are investing in technology, that know how to use it, that are having success. Putting the map out, how can I achieve success in the next three months with this, let's say, five customers? Because at the end of the three months, then you have the ability to ask for, right? Make sure that they're seeing value, that they get a win.

You can't just ask customers, can you share a success story if they're not being successful with you? So the goal is to make sure that you get them to that success, so that when, no matter what it is, even if it's a win, if it's a small win, get to that point and then you can ask, right? But being strategic about it, knowing what you're working towards, knowing who you're talking to and who you're targeting, that's something else you have to do. And just look at your book of business and let's get five success stories here at this quarter. You got to be strategic, you got to see who's closer to the wins.

Who are the customers that are really leveraging your platform and are willing to put their faces out there? Because a lot of people are successful, but they don't want to show up. They don't want to write anything. They don't want to have their faces on camera or all over, right? So you got to map it out.

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They'll say their company doesn't allow it. That's always a fun one. That's a sneaky, good first 90 days goal, because it demands that you talk to as many customers as possible and understand, how are you successful? What does that look like for you? Blah, blah, blah.

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It demands that you then coordinate with those colleagues in other departments. It also demands that you start to build those programs. So like you were saying, you had to go and actually build that advocacy program.

I think that's sneaky, brilliant, whoever gave you that goal in the first 90 days. I want to give Rob a chance here because the first time Rob and I ever met was at a conference where he was presenting. It was early on in starting your consulting business, I think the first few months.

You were kind of mapping out your philosophy for customer success, for which advocacy plays a really big part. So I want to give you an opportunity to talk here about how much you agree with Priscila, which I imagine is a thousand percent. Yeah.

No, I love this topic and I love it because I see customer success as three big domains. It's retention and all the things that lead up to that. It's expansion and all the things that lead up to that.

And it's advocacy. People often forget that third bucket. They think so much about their hard and fast numbers around NRR, which are retention and expansion.

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They think of all the leading indicators of retention and expansion being like NPS usage, whatever, that they don't stop to realize that there's a third leg to the stool. And if you don't have a third leg to the stool, the stool is going to topple over. I see this all the time.

And I ask myself, why are people not prioritizing advocacy as highly as they could when it is the single most thing that it's the one thing that companies can often do most to drive down their customer acquisition costs, at least from the customer success side of the house? What's up, guys? It's Dillon here. And you know why I'm here. Hat in hand.

I got a favor to ask of you. If you like what we're doing, give us a like on whatever platform that you find us on. And if you want to know when we're dropping new stuff, give us a follow.

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Thanks so much, guys. I'll let you get back to the show. I look at that and I realize that most people just kind of put it on the back burner when there are things on fire on the front burner.

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And that makes sense, right? It makes sense that you would probably want to spend your time trying to plug the holes instead of foster your advocates and build case studies, reference programs, testimonials. I've seen some companies do a cool thing where they have like a wall of love, and it's just this endless page of testimonials. I was thinking of doing that for my own consulting business, but not enough people love me.

The case studies, of course, I've been actually working with this company, Elamir. Really cool company. It's a friend of mine's company.

They make video case studies. He's the guy who founded it. He's great.

He's Emmy nominated, awesome filmmaker. And the amount that impacts the sales cycle, but also the retention cycle too is so helpful that a customer, even a customer who's churning can look and see, oh, wow, this customer who looks like me, thinks like me, acts like me, they seem to be pretty successful. We often forget that people need that role model.

Our clients need that role model in the back of our minds. I do have a warning about putting it in marketing, which I think you'd align with Priscila, but I don't want to talk too much. I don't know, Dillon, if you wanted to add something before I go off on that.

I have a question that I want to take back to Priscila. Maybe you can wrap it up at the end here, Rob. When I think of advocacy, I actually think it's pretty easy to get started because you're already talking to your customers.

All you need to do is add to this flywheel, this one or two questions around, would you ever be interested in speaking about the successes that you've had? This is assuming, like you said, that they have had successes. And the collaboration, this is really the crux of my question, which is how do you define that collaboration? Because it'd be really easy to just shoot a Slack message to your marketing person and say, hey, so-and-so is interested in being a referral or in a case study because of X, Y, and Z, and then just leaving it there. It sounds like you're thinking of something much bigger, maybe a lot more structured to it.

So can you break it down for us just briefly? Yeah. So that's a very important piece because I also worked in companies where that was the process. You just kick it back to marketing and you don't know what happened.

They reach out to your customer when it's not ideal anymore. Maybe that success moment already passed. They missed the train.

So the whole process, like understanding who's going to reach out and when, what's the process here? Are you going to be writing things for them so they can approve? Are you going to collaborate with them? Are you hopping on a call with them? Understanding what's the process so you can break it down as well. Like when you're sending the process, this is the process that we do here. We're going to send you something ahead so you can approve, or we're going to hop on a quick call so you can talk to the team.

Having your pulse and the finger internally as well, just as important because you don't want to like, oh yeah, they're ready now. You never know when they're going to start. And then what happens with like, oh, that's too late now.

And you have to have like, you know, with those things, you need to be quick, right? They don't get better as they age. So if they had success this month, you got to do it as fast as you can. You don't want to wait for something to break.

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And then you're like, you missed your chance. So you got to have a process down, align with the teams. What's the collaboration looking like? Because that's very much a collaboration and marketing understanding that you're on their side.

You're not taking their KPIs or you're not taking their numbers. You're just collaborating. So both teams get one.

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Rob, by chance, was that your warning? That marketing doesn't act as timely as you'd like them to? It's a little bit more than that. That's part of it. I have found, I love my marketing people out there.

I love them. But I have found that it's way easier for someone in marketing to grow detached from the voice of the customer than it is for us in customer success who are getting berated with the voice of the customer every day. So it's manifested in situations.

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For example, there was one time, real quick story. I had to cancel a meeting with my marketing leader who I love to death, great friend of mine. He was like, what's going on? I was like, you have these bugs I have to handle.

We'd been working together for two years. And he goes, we have bugs? I was like, what? Are you kidding? You don't know that we have bugs? How far removed are you from this situation? Why do you think we have a 30 person support team? This is crazy. Stuff like that.

Or there was another time, this is so funny. We laugh about it now, but we released this marketing campaign about how good we were in this one region. On the same day that we failed an inspection in that region, it was the worst timing.

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So that was my fault though. That one I take responsibility for because I wasn't communicating that up the ladder well enough. But my point is to say, this is all so much easier if it just lives in customer success.

But Rob, does customer success need more to do? It's a three-legged stool. I think that if you're prioritizing correctly, you prioritize the legs of the stool. But I think you've also got to... I'm going to bring this analogy up again.

We are on a basketball team and we have to trust that our other team members can do their job. So instead of assuming that they can't or that they won't respect it, wouldn't it be better if we taught them how to? We talk a lot about CS is not a departmental function. It's a philosophy for the entire organization.

Isn't this an opportunity to ram home that philosophy and not just say, I'll do it? You've never seen me play basketball. Okay. All right.

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I think that's when you hand the ball. That's when you pass the ball. But you know that exactly what direction you're going.

You're not just throwing a ball in the air and who's going to catch it. I'm going to throw the ball at you and now it's in your court. Now you take it from here.

I agree with you that CS shouldn't be owned the whole process. You should know the process, you collaborate, you follow through to the important points. But then there's a point where they take over because that's their function.

That's what they're good at. I hear you though, Rob. I wasn't trying to poo-poo your idea.

It's a delicate balance. It's different for every organization. Priscila, that's our time.

It went by so fast. But thank you so much for bringing this to our attention and allowing Rob and I to bicker a little bit. I love this topic.

I hope we can talk about it more. Maybe you can come back again and we can do a round two. But for now, we've got to say goodbye.

Thank you. Yeah, it was great seeing you all. You can see my hand now.

Nice to meet you. You've been listening to The Daily Standup by Lifetime Value. Please note that the views expressed in these conversations are attributed only to those individuals on this recording and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of their respective employers.

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For all inquiries, please reach out via email to Dillon at lifetimevaluemedia.com. Find us on YouTube at Lifetime Value and find us on the socials at Lifetime Value Media. Until next time.