Why Your Best Marketers Are Already Your Customers.
Every company has a group of people who recommend it unprompted, know the product better than most of the sales team, and cost nothing. Almost every company treats them as a pleasant surprise rather than a channel.
Advocacy is the only acquisition channel that gets cheaper as it grows, and it is the one most teams have no owner for.
Find them before you reward them
You probably already know who they are: the accounts that renew without a conversation, the people who answer questions in your community, the reviewers who wrote four paragraphs unprompted. Start by listing thirty names. Do not start by designing a points system.
Ask for something specific
"Tell your friends about us" produces nothing. "Would you be willing to spend twenty minutes on a call with a prospect in your industry?" produces a yes about half the time, and that call closes deals no case study will.
- Make the ask specific, small and easy to decline
- Give access and recognition before you give discounts
- Introduce advocates to each other; the network is the value
- Tell them what happened afterwards
Why most programmes fail
They start with the incentive. The moment a recommendation carries a reward, both the advocate and the person listening know it, and the thing that made it valuable — that it was unpaid — is gone. Reward the relationship, not the transaction.
The best advocacy programme we have ever seen was one person whose whole job was remembering customers' names and following up on what they had said. It had no software at all.
