Feature
The Gist
- Understanding emotions. Selecting software is both a logical and emotional decision.
- Valuing peer-to-peer. Buyers trust peer reviews and often seek these before purchasing.
- The Influencer strategy. Turning successful customers into influencers can drive growth.
The software selection process is often a logical decision, but it is also often an emotional one. In order to feel confident that you’re the right partner for them, your prospects and customers must be sure that you understand their team’s needs and that they'll receive the appropriate support to be successful.
Adding to the challenge, those making buying decisions have limited time, are immersed in asynchronous and distributed work environments, and can discern when they’re not getting an authentic experience from you. Because of this, buyers are taking more control and turning to peers to validate promises made by solution providers. Think product reviews, referrals and social media. In fact, 85% of buyers reported trusting online reviews as much as personal recommendation and marked peer reviews as the top preferred channel to obtain information on software according to Gartner Digital Markets’ 2022 Global Software Buyer Trends Survey.
One of the most effective ways you can drive higher buying and renewal confidence is by facilitating connections between your customers to learn and hear from each other. As a customer success (CS) leader, you have a unique role to play in driving those connections.
Let’s dive into a framework, programs and incentives CS teams can build to turn their most active, satisfied customers into influencers that drive retention and growth.
Adapting to the New Customer Landscape
In our current world where budgets are conservative, teams are asked to do more with existing resources, and customers have higher value expectations, CS is uniquely positioned to drive continued growth. However, leaders must discover new ways to do this.
In the most consultative CS teams, getting deeply familiar with individual customers’ desired outcomes, product requirements, likes and dislikes and ensuring that they’re getting value from your product as well as feeling valued is the ideal recipe for success. The reality is, depending on the size of your team and customer base, this approach Isn’t always feasible.
So where do you begin? Start by shifting your mindset as a CS leader from facilitating community between yourself and your customers to facilitating community among your customers.
There is tremendous value in creating peer-to-peer connections, resulting in a unique credibility that’s hard to establish otherwise. Shine a light on the most successful users of your product and activate them to be a model for others.
Related Article: Brand Advocacy: The Strategic Importance of Customer Marketing
Build the Framework for Customer Success Influencers
To identify which customers you want to nurture into influencers, it's crucial to clearly understand what you’re aiming to impact. Determine if you’re looking to influence prospect purchasing decisions (new business), adoption and usage of your product (retention and growth), or both. Depending on what you're looking to achieve, it’ll influence your strategy.
Next, identify the ideal behaviors you want customers to exhibit and ask yourself what an ideal outcome from customers using your product looks like. Once you’ve tackled those two pieces, you can identify a set of customers that are not only exemplifying your outlined behaviors, but are also highly engaged and show an affinity for your product. Engagement could look like active promotion or interaction on social media, participation in product launch activities, or leaving reviews with a high satisfaction rating.
As a next step, pinpoint issues your influencer customers could help solve for others in your portfolio. For example, segment customers who have mastered applying a capability to a common role or industry problem and share with customers in a similar position.
Build a strategy within your program that also acknowledges your larger, riskier accounts. Oftentimes there are power users within struggling accounts who can serve as a champion of your product. Lean into this group, leverage those individuals to influence their peers at the company who aren’t using your product as effectively, and turn passive users into advanced users. While a seemingly simple approach, you’ll end up creating a more organic following, scale usage and mitigate broader risk in the process.
Related Article: Content for Every Stage: Maximizing Engagement in the Modern Customer Journey
Establish Customer Advocacy Programs With Incentives
Be thoughtful about how you’ll incentivize participants as people are motivated by different things.
A more formalized advocacy program might incentivize customers by having them complete challenges, such as writing reviews and agreeing to serve as a customer reference, to accrue points or receive badges. These points can be redeemed for company swag, gift cards and even coveted time with a product manager. Some customer advocates deeply value the opportunity to influence product direction and be an active participant in the room where decisions are made. Create a process for them to offer feedback.
Other customers may be more motivated by simple recognition and being seen as an expert. It can be as simple as acknowledging them as a power user, letting them know you’re impressed by what they’ve achieved with your product, and that you’d love to share their success internally with their peers and colleagues. Position their involvement in your influencer program as beneficial for their personal branding as an employee at their company and within their role and industry.
This approach is powerful for two reasons: It not only creates evangelists out of successful customers, but it also establishes a strong bond of trust between customers when they can gain genuine insights from peers with similar use cases.
Be weary of over-engineering your customer influencer program. Simplicity is key throughout every stage of development, from identifying your power users to selecting customers who can benefit from an influencer relationship.
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A Domino Effect of Customers' Shared Positive Experiences
Help your customers help you. Harnessing the power of your most successful customers as influencers is a valuable strategy for today’s customer success teams. Develop a well-structured framework, implement an engaging program with enticing incentives, and leverage customer insights to drive growth and retention.
Scale your time and impact on the business as a CS team while enhancing the customer experience by creating an extension of your team; in some cases, you will find that the customer-to-customer relationship can fill in some gaps better than you can.
