Customer Advocacy Programs: Destination-based or Destination-less?
Nick Venturella is an award-winning customer advocacy marketer who builds thriving online communities. With a background as a musician and artist, he knows how to cultivate fans and drive engagement. He's worked with companies like Workday, Databricks, and Dayforce to achieve organizational goals through customer advocacy.
Is a Destination-based or Destination-less customer marketing advocacy program best? This chat discussed the benefits and approaches for each.
In a nutshell…
A Destination-based program involves having an online gathering space for your customers to consistently engage in your program and participate in advocacy opportunities presented there.
Versus...
A Destination-less program, where there is not a central online gathering space, but communications via emails and surveys collect customer preferences that become advocate profiles. Then advocacy opportunities are presented to customers when their profiles match the opportunity criteria.
So which is best? The answer likely depends, but that’s what is explored in this chat.
Well welcome everyone to our conversation here on destination versus Destination Lists. Advocacy programs. I am Kyle Sutton. I'm the head of strategy and operations here at gradual. And we're we're thrilled to have you join us for this awesome conversation. I will introduce you to to Jerry and Nick here shortly. But before I do want to give us a quick orientation, to our event environment here and ask you a question to get us started.
So on the right hand side, where Angela has has kindly dropped in the chat, you'll see we have our chat and then you have another tab for Q&A. In a second we'll ask you to drop some in the chat. But throughout our our chat today or conversation, please feel free to drop questions into that Q&A. And if there's a question you see that you like that you want to make sure we answer, go ahead and give it a thumbs up with the little button there and we'll do so.
We'll save, a good balance of our our time at the end for a Q&A with, with Nick. So I want to make sure we have those questions. But also during the Q&A, you'll be able to ask your questions live. So there's a hand raise button down at the bottom that you can use as well to say, hey, I want to ask a question.
I'll spotlight you and you can go ahead and ask it. Also, our chat is being recorded, so we'll be able to publish this afterwards. And you're you're welcome to share. So before we kick off I want to do a quick straw poll in the chat. If you are running or have an advocacy program today or engagement program, is it destination based or destination list?
So in the chat you can just put destination or destination lists. And that's going to be our very unofficial poll on on what type of program are running.
Nick's account a destination program I like it used to have. Oh the plot thickens. Angela. Yep. Grant. Gradual is that you are in you are in our current destination for that program. Awesome. Well, please, please feel free to continue to share. Awesome. Moving from destination to destination. Oh, very, very interesting. That'll be a fun, fun circumstance to to talk through if you want to.
Yeah, actually that would be amazing. Yeah. Awesome. Well, please continue to drop things, insights, reactions, resources you have to share and things in the chat as we go. But let's go ahead and and get started. Enough for me and we'll hear from from Jerry and Nick. Jerry is going to fill state. Our conversation with Nick Jewry is the CEO and founder of gradual, but more importantly, a longtime community builder.
Having launched and grown the engineering leadership community and others, Jerry is all about building meaningful connections, and one of those connections is with our special guest, Nick, who he will be facilitating the conversation with. Nick is an award winning customer advocacy marketer who builds thriving online communities with, a background as a musician and an artist, which I learned this morning, also knows how to cultivate fans and drive engagement.
Working with companies like workday, Databricks, de force, to to help achieve their goals through advocacy. So Jerry and Nick, I will hand things over to you and get out of the way and lead you to this wonderful, wonderful conversation. Nick, thanks for thanks for being here. Oh, thanks for the opportunity. Appreciate it. And, Nick, so for the time, you know, I have been learning so much from you, I know for the past couple of months about community building, advocacy, brand building, etc. so, really excited about this opportunity to, to chat it live with you and with, you know, participating attendees to, to share a potentially shared experience
as well in this space. And, to kick things off, maybe we can go to the roots that way when we start, like my organization, you know, be an advocate for women in first place. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It's so so you had to start with the way. Right? So, I would say just if we zoom way out and we oversimplify the whole purpose of advocacy marketing, at least in my opinion, and I think it's a shared opinion for a lot of folks, is ultimately, we're after word of mouth marketing from our customers.
And so customer advocacy, you know, fast forward to modern programs today that exist. It's really about building a repeatable, scalable approach to cultivating superfans that you can leverage as brand ambassadors for your organization. So, so as an example, you know, if you if you go to a movie and you see a great movie, you love the movie.
You tell a friend about the movie, they're more likely to go see the movie because you, their friend told them about it, because you have credibility with them versus the producers of the movie saying, this is why you should see it. It's a great movie. You know, they're biased and that's how that's how it is in the SAS, B2B world as well, is that organizations that build software are biased about how great their software is, and they want they need customers and they want that.
But those customers who are using it and have have learned and, extracted great value from those products. They're a way better person with more credibility to have impact on others, to share their story. And that's that's really customer advocacy. At its simplest form is this word of mouth aspect. And so in the SAS world, you know, now that technology is easy to move from one to another.
You can cancel subscriptions. We're not in the on premise days anymore where it was really tough to own and expensive to own, a software technology and more expensive to switch that. Switching happens all the time. And so that's where you get the rise of customer success functions. And out of that, customer advocacy became this sort of retention model, as well as then leveraging the customer's voice back to to sales and being that word of mouth marketing approach.
So it's really about creating a structure that allows an organization to repeat and cultivate advocates on a regular basis, ongoing all the time. Yeah, a lot of really good brands, in the early days. So they almost, almost, solely rely on the word models to grow. So, head out into the chat is, one of our recent advisors who is, one of the co-founders of Netflix and was there very early.
I also had, Intuit and, Mozilla, some of the, really loud brand. So, according his experience, for a very long time and into it, and also at Mozilla, and Netflix, it's all word of mouth. It's not a B2B business at all. Into into it is. But, across B2B and B2C, word of mouth can work really, really well.
So if you provide something really valuable to your customers, to your users. So I want to bring that back to, like community building and brand building in general. So, we are, if you look at it, the, the grand scheme of things, there's, we see a trend, changing from the change of marketing to, to more of the customer focus in marketing, because we're getting to more of a crop.
Well, crowded marketplace and also a noisy world. So, hearing someone that you can trust about a service, about a product is much more effective. So can you comment on the kind of the, do you see the similar trend in our industry? Oh, absolutely. And I think there's a bunch of factors. So, more and more we became, you know, if we go back to like the pandemic, for example, that forced everyone to go online.
But it also kind of forced everyone to unite in a certain sort of way, through virtual technologies and whatever else. We were all kind of having a shared moment at that time. And so as we as we move forward, though, I think coming out of that, what happened is we started to this is when I in terms of it becoming more mainstream, started to really rear its head and ChatGPT and those things came out and all of a sudden it became this arms race for a lot of organizations to be utilizing AI and be on that cutting edge.
And there was a lot of investment, in those kinds of things. And so happened as we came out of the pandemic and that started to move in that direction, everyone's attention, we all were sort of united for a little bit around this, this sort of tragic common bond of Covid. And then we started to fragment back out.
And it's like some people are working fully remote. Some people are back in the office, some people are hybrid. And now everybody's attention is fragmented and scattered in all these different directions. And oh, there's this brand new technology we we all need to be on top of, and it's becoming this inflection point. And so as a result, I feel like people's attention are just all over the place.
And so more and more, yeah, you're seeing that kind of trend where where it's hard to harness your own customers, let alone prospects and others into, into cutting through the noise, if you will, to to showcase what the real value is. And, you know, it's hard to it's hard as a software organization, I think, to cut through that and, and get your solution to people who really actually could use and benefit your solution.
And so that's where, having communities or having pockets of, you know, collaboration of folks coming together is really useful to cut through that noise and start to hear each other and, you know, be recognized, be seen and heard and those kinds of things which are kind of human condition fundamentals. We all kind of want that at some level.
And so how do you do that? You have to you have to create these kinds of, communities in these destination places to do that. And then you have to have like a go to market plan to, to just try to get through the noise, to get enough of those folks to come in and, and start to have that kind of, a congregation of people around a topic.
But but I think that's kind of the way it works right now. That's that's what we're seeing. Great. And bring us back to the, the topic of this conversation. So we talk about, the destination phase. And this is in this, advocacy programs. How did how how do you define those? What is destination? Yeah. So so I think for the purposes of our conversation, the way we're the way I'm thinking about it is a destination based program is probably is more of, you know, it's it's software, it's technology.
It's a platform. It's an online community. Usually a gathering place for customers to come into. It is a destination that they either seek out or they're recruited to join and they're in there. And that's a place where an organization can provide content, provide, experiences and things to engage those folks. And by engaging them over time, you know, they can present advocacy opportunities that they can participate in that that benefit your organization.
As, as sort of the owner of that community. And then Destination Less is also thinking about technology platforms, but ones that are more communication based and data gathering based in the sense that there's not necessarily a dedicated place for customers to go to, but there's communication that cuts through to get to people's inbox, to ask them questions and build a digital profile on your customers.
In terms of what what are their interests, what are their likes, dislikes, what kinds of activities do they want to participate in, and those kinds of things to where you have a data profile on them. So as advocacy opportunities arise, then, those organizations can present those advocacy opportunities to the right people based on the data they've gathered from them.
So maybe that was a long winded answer. No. Is it really helpful? So for the destination base, so prior to interviews for people to where, they can, self participate in a cell, participate the programs and they go to not only and absorb information and resources, but be able to connect with other, like minded customers to.
Absolutely. So that's that's new, unlocking new value is really, by connecting them between themselves among themselves. Yeah, absolutely. That's and I think regardless, honestly, there between destination based or destination less programs, getting customers to connect with each other is always valuable. Yeah. And why would a organization choose a destination based, versus decision less? Can you share some scenarios that would work well for that?
Yeah. So so just just to share it. My experience working for enterprise level B2B, SaaS software companies, my experience has been on the destination based side, primarily in terms of building communities and destinations for customers to join, gather value and then present advocacy opportunities for them. And so one of the big reasons that that's useful is a is control.
So if you're an organization with a software company and you're trying to gather all your customers in sort of one spot, so to speak, that allows you probably that the most control to do that. And so, the other reason I think it can be really, really helpful is that as you have customers in a destination place, they're choosing to come there.
They're sort of opting in, and they know that when they come there, they're going to find certain aspects of value or they you know, they've been in there once or twice and they know what to expect. So that's why they keep coming back, because there's enough value beyond the product that you sell. It has to be sort of additional value that can help them in their individual roles or help connect them and facilitate connections with other peer customers who are their counterparts at other organizations, where they can gather insights and things like that.
So it provides an ongoing engagement. And my theory is it's really hard to have people advocate if they're not already engaged with your organization on a, on a semi-regular basis. And so that provides that opportunity to have engagement on an ongoing basis, which also means you have multiple opportunities to present your advocacy program and advocacy opportunities that they can participate in on a regular basis without having to reintroduce that program.
So on the flip side, with a destination less kind of approach, it's not it's not that it's wrong or or bad at, at all, but it becomes a more, individualized sort of way of approaching customers to get them to join your advocacy program or participate in advocacy opportunities. And so you're reaching out to them, usually through their inbox.
And that can be really, really helpful. And we could talk about this too, because there's some personas where that's that's the ideal probably way to do it. And you're probably not going to reach them in another way. They're not going to come into a, community kind of thing. So but when you do that, sometimes, you know, you're gathering information about what they would like to participate in from an advocacy perspective, and they may take advantage of those opportunities, but you may if you're not interacting with them on a regular basis, engaging them all the time, you may have to sort of reintroduce your program and the benefits of it and why they're doing this
and why they should even consider participating. And that can sometimes feel like a step backwards. Versus, you know, having a community where you're, you're constantly engaging them all the time so you can stay top of mind. So those are just two aspects that are a little bit different, but it's not the same ones right or wrong. Because, there are different scenarios where one might work better than the other.
What about, the difference between those two, approach in terms of scalability. So as company becomes more mature, as there are more customers, as they're the advocate for advocacy for when it becomes larger. So, and what are the pros and cons for both approach? Yeah. I think you kind of have to, as an organization who might want to develop an advocacy program.
I think you have to start by identifying who you're after, like, what persona of your customers are you trying to, you know, engage to the point that you want them to be advocates is it executives or is it a practitioner level? And then you also have to look at, you know, the size of your organization and your resources that are available to you.
Because I will say, with a community based program, there's a lot involved. And usually it's a little bit more upfront investment in time, energy and money to get that off the ground, get the rest of the organization involved, and participating in a way that can make that really valuable for your customers, whereas you can be a little bit more nimble with a destination less program in terms of, you know, you're really just kind of emailing or using, emailing the kind of software that's that's a little bit of an oversimplification.
So there are softwares out there that are really powerful and amazing that are, that are helping you organize the information you're gathering from customers as you email them and reach out to them. So, that can be a great way to start, especially if you don't have a lot of resources. Or if you're a one person, you know, role for advocacy, marketing, or if you're a startup, you know, just start talking to customers, just start finding out what customers want and how they can help you build an advocacy program together.
If you involve them, they're more likely to want to participate. But as an organization gets bigger and enterprise level organizations, it might make more sense to have a destination based program only because you have a whole lot more customers. And unless you know, if you're after executives, destination less might be the way to go, because it's probably not going to play in a community just because they're busy.
But, you know, if you're after practitioners like the director level or lower, the more frontline workers, that community might be a better way to go, in part because they're in there on a regular basis or asking each other questions. This has support, implications, too. You know, maybe you're deflecting support tickets as well because customers are talking to each other, so they're not submitting support tickets, those kinds of things.
And when you do that, you know, the practitioner level two is you're building a bench of, of individuals at that customer account. That that could be eventually advocates. So if you have a primary champion who's say at a director level, who runs the day to day of your software for your customer company and they leave to another company, well, you may have just lost your champion and your your renewal, but if you have a community where you have practitioners and a whole bunch of other individuals in that same account who are participating, one of them might get promoted and be that next director level.
Or, you can at least find answers, maybe by by the rest of the folks that are in there. Hopefully, if the advocacy program did its job well, the person who left is going to leave and then bring your software to that new company, and then you can, you know, hopefully they're starting that that whole process all over again with you.
So anyway, the decision, unless program is more suitable for when folks get started and have a lot of not have a lot of resources, but also when, you are primarily, interfacing with, executive level people, they're really busy to have time to, to engage on a regular basis in the community anyway. So, and that could be a good choice.
On the flip side, there's a definition there that there's a lot more you can pull off from the community. And there it's kind of a continuous journey from want to just be happy, become a customer and learning and got excited and to a point when they feel I'm ready to, you know, and ready to put their name on the line to, to say good things about a product.
And, as you say, if they have always be in a community interacting and when they get to the exact level, maybe that things can change, like they're already there all the whole time. Now they get used to the, the, you know, acronyms, the, community that way. And, even not become as active, they probably can still, you know, participating from time to time.
Yeah. I would say to in, the destination less, especially if you're going after executives, the audience of customers that you're likely wanting to engage to become advocates is is likely a smaller pool of, of individuals versus, say, a community that is, bringing in a whole bunch of practitioners, multiple practitioners from any one account. And so in that regard to having a destination less, approach, especially if you're after executives, becomes really like it becomes manageable and scalable in and of itself for that persona and that audience.
And you don't necessarily need an entire community. And like we just mentioned before, the chances of an executive coming into a community are a lot less, because they're busy. Their inbox is probably the best way to cut through and communicate to them. But what they do love to do is network with each other. Executives always want to be networking with other executives for their own personal brand for their next role, or just to share strategies and application ideas around how others are doing things.
And so that's where, getting it, like whether it's destination list or not, if your audience is executives getting those executives together and finding ways to do that, and often they typically like in person, if at all possible. So that's just to highlight some more of the differences between sort of the two models. Yeah, I know we have talked about the, a large organization, how to run the ad of the program has, a scale and also the implementation to destination versus listed that, the decision.
But if we take it to the other team that, how did one think about starting a advocacy program from, from the ground zero? Yeah. So, so, I'll just highlight really quickly. So with destination less, I think it's you can be a lot more nimble. I think there's more manual activity that needs to happen with that approach, from the start.
But even if you're in a big enterprise organization, say you're starting from like, if I was starting today from zero at a large enterprise organization, I think what I would do is start with a cross-section of our best customers. Whether it's, you know, 30, 40, 50, 100 customers, I don't know, whatever that cross-section looks like and try to find diverse use cases that the customers are using and diverse industries across that crux, across that, swath of customers that you're looking at.
And I would I would actually have as many conversations with those individual customers as possible. Whoever that whoever the decision maker was to to purchase your product and or their direct reports. You know, if they have a director level or manager level who's sort of operating things and just and because you need to start like if you're going to do a destination based, community based kind of a program, you kind of need to start with a seeded group of customers that can act as your foundation and or your steering committee for what eventually the larger community will become.
And that's why I suggest finding your best customers and a diverse range of those customers, and start having conversations to to eventually. What you're trying to do is pull out the common, the common challenges or things that they would be interested in so you can provide value to keep them engaged on a regular basis. So if you were to look at it like a bell curve, say you have 50 interviews with with customers, and out of those 50 interviews, they told you ten different things that they really need to be successful either in their individual role or for their organization.
Using your product. And you can get like five of those in the middle of the bell curve, that your community is really focused on and able to help them with and provide outsized value, which is, a feature of getting them to want to join and then be engaged on a regular basis. That can be a really great starting point.
But that being said, I think in both instances you start by talking to your customers. The difference is, with an enterprise level organization, having a community based program can offer the longer term scalability that you might be looking for. Again, if you're kind of looking for that practitioner based and building a large bench of individuals from any one account that could be participating in all various levels of advocacy.
So from really, really low hanging fruit, like just amplifying your organization's, social posts, on their own social networks, that's really low hanging fruit. That's that's a way to advocate without being like a speaker on a stage at a conference. But there's all the way that extreme to, you know, someone who might want to present at a conference and really grow their thought leadership and personal brand.
And the idea is that if you can provide that outsized value and concentrate on the individual, I think that's what people really care about, is if you concentrate on how to help them be successful in their professional career as an individual working for that company, that is your organization's client or customer, then that becomes a lot more sticky.
Like everyone cares about their own career path. Yes, they they care about their employer and they wanted their employer to be successful, but they care about their own career path. And so if you can help them with additional value, that helps them be really successful in their role or in their future roles, whatever that looks like. Hopefully with your product, the whole idea of them being engaged becomes a lot more sticky.
And they want they want to participate, but then there's a triple win. So if you help them individually, it definitely benefits their employer. Who is your your customer? And then you by association because they use your product. So I went a lot of directions there. Sorry. That that kind of a lot of ground. Thanks for for the answer.
And, if you look at, going to be encouraging, I think, well, if you can switch talk a little bit, talk about the, sustainability, advocacy programs that there's really like we are adding value to, to our customers so that they, they're open to and they're willing to get, you know, contributing back to the, the company by, products being put in, out of the program.
And those asks so, from a sustainability perspective, how do you look at, balancing giving value to customers and, and getting them back their tactics about, you know, rewards points or, you know, so if you can just, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. So I definitely have, some opinions about so and so I've worked in destination based programs that have had rewards which, which and just for anyone who isn't fully aware of what that means, really is its customers come in.
They're they're doing various act, they're engaging, they're doing activities and say our organization is presenting them with an advocacy opportunity. So like, hey, be a reference, to a prospect and share your story. And that helps the sales organization maybe get that prospect over the finish line, to a closed one sale. And, you know, maybe, maybe there's, there's points or or if they get enough points in a program, they can redeem those points for, like swag items or things that, that the individual might, might want.
And there are programs where there's a whole catalog of, of items and things like that, and that can be useful. I like to stay further away from that. And I think in general, these kinds of programs are moving further and further away from that, in part because there are a lot of regulations globally that are coming up with anti corruption and quid pro quo kinds of, reward types of things.
And it's different in various countries. And so that's something that has to be addressed when you run a program like this. But at the same time I think sometimes it fosters a false, advocate in the sense that if they are only doing something because they know they're going to get something that they want, then, you know, are they truly advocating for the right reasons or the, you know, the reasons you would want them to?
And so I think the best way to combat that is to be transparent upfront. So as you're inviting folks to come in, you're transparent about what the heck this program is and this advocacy program, like it is, it is a mutually beneficial partnership. It is an opportunity to collaborate. You know, us as a software provider and you as a customer who uses that, you know, we can help each other.
So we want to help you be successful in your individual career and your organization be successful. So we're going to provide value for you and a whole bunch of various ways. But as we do that, we're going to also present you with opportunities where you can advocate on behalf of our product. And I say it that way, frame it with presenting opportunities, because we always want it to be a choice of the customer to choose to participate in an advocacy opportunity, mainly because if they're choosing to do so, there's intrinsic value for them.
And they're they're they're doing it because they want to do it versus because they're getting something. Now you can surprise and delight them with, you know, a swag item or a gesture after the fact that they didn't know it was coming. And that might endear them to, you know, really be even, further grateful for the relationship because you are being thoughtful, in a way without, you know, you're acknowledging their participation and that's and they're grateful for that.
And so that's different than, you know, they're knowing they're going to get something upfront. And so I think that that can make it transactional sometimes if there's there's rewards involved. And that may or may not lead to the authentic kind of advocacy that you're actually looking for. Yeah. And, I think at the bottom, this is, essentially, it's critical to get in line with the customer and that we are co-creating a in a innovated product.
So the the company alone cannot it's hard to achieve that without the input support from the customers. And if you, really support you like the product, you want the product to be even better a serves. You know, you can, do more value for, for you are the people that idea that's emerged that you would want to contribute.
So I think that that alignment, you know, like we're we're here to collaborate to begin creating the act, accelerate innovation and, you know, getting better version of the product that that I think that can be helpful, to kind of, companies to mitigate risk of, you know, feelings to adapt, you know. Yeah. And I think in it, you come across as more genuine and authentic as an organization to say, hey, we want to we want to do this with you, and we don't want to pull any punches.
We don't want to have any clickbait here. We want to we want we don't want to manipulate the situation. We want to let you know that, hey, we're going to present things to you and we're going to it's going to be for our benefit as an organization, but we want to make sure we're giving you outsized value that can be of benefit to you, regardless if you advocate for us one time or 100 times.
So I think that's important. And I just saw in the chat Angela had posted, what what is the give take balance? Within within a, a program like this. And I think what you mean, Angela, correct me if I'm wrong. You feel free to jump off me and correct me here. But I think you're you're talking about, like, how much should an organization give in terms of value that's engaging for customer versus the asks?
So is it, you know, every for every three things of value that a customer would get. There's one ask and and though it's not fun to answer is it depends. You know, like anything else, but I would say always on the side of giving more value than you're getting. And I think when you do that, you know, you can't really go wrong.
And I'm not saying rewards and actual items that have a cost, a hard cost, but I'm saying opportunities. For personal branding, like this is something I've worked on recently, is building a whole personal brand education guide for folks because we know that if you build your personal brand, that's probably, in this day and age, one of the best ways to help your career in terms of getting the next promotion or finding the next role or whatever the case is.
So we want to empower people with the opportunity to learn about how how to best build their personal brand in a way that is very, very useful to their individual career. And that coming from our organization now is like a big benefit. It's like, who does that? Like what? What organizations are really doing that? So yeah, they pay attention and they want to come back and things like that.
And so we're always trying to give outsized value in, in ways that aren't something that have a hard cost but might have real, lasting long term impacts for the individual. And that's going to that's going to foster trust a lot longer, a lot quicker. And, and that's going to allow folks to want to advocate, you know, when, when you have those opportunities to present to them.
And that's a really creative idea. Ways to add value. Add value for periods. Create a moment. And those are kind of intrinsic values. People appreciate long time in the long term. So more question from David. Yeah. Okay. So what. Thoughts on enterprise organizations who have acquired multiple companies products with a mix of okay, now you're getting complicated, David.
So. Who? That's a that's a lot. Yeah. Go add some context. So, look at large organizations often, growth through acquisition. Correct? Sure. And, I have worked at multiple organizations where that was the pretty much the only route of growth, as they acquired products with diminishing returns. So it was very much upon customer support, customer success and customer marketing.
Then to,
Kill the churn, and alleviate some of the stress on the new license sales teams. To, you know, keep the company going is is what it comes down to. Right? And what we had were multiple different models, sometimes by product and sometimes by business unit or some other business unit. As another complication. And I see Alison's on the call and she, she knows parts of the organization I'm talking about.
But,
Part of that data collation that you reference in destination Las, I had collated 33 different silos where I was collecting customer data from. So obviously destination list was not scalable, and I needed to bring everything together. But there was a lot of reticence within executive level to make that happen because it was working with, you know, but let me let me pause for a say.
Was it working before that organization got acquired? And now that they're acquired to a larger organization, it's working less because the situation is different. The situation is different, so it is working less. Right. And that was at times hard to prove. But because the argument always was, well, just after acquisition, of course, you see accelerations in churn and, people leaving to go to alternative products as, as the mud is splashed around by the competitive sales teams, etc..
But then, we would often adopt products or in the downward slide. Anyway,
And as more acquisitions came on, it just made the whole challenge messier, to, to manage. And I think the fact then that there were not dedicated resources to advocacy, across the range, you know, in each of these units in effect. But it was they were centralizing those responsibilities. Then having a decentralized system, was was very challenging.
And my question really is.
Anybody got any thoughts on that one? Well, I do have a couple thoughts just based on what you've shared. So I think. So hindsight's always 2020. I don't know if there was ever an opportunity as, as organizations were being acquired, if it was known that they were being acquired to where communication could have gotten out in front messaging, hey, customers, this is going to happen.
This is what's going to happen with your community or, you know, whatever they're involved in. Here's how we're going to solve for that. And it could be over the course of amount of time, you know, two years, three years, whatever. It could be a longer period of time would be like, here's what we're planning to do to solve that.
But for now, it's going to be a little bit messy. We're going to have a few different locations or whatever, you know, just being honest with with customers. But if that was not the case, and it sounds like you're talking after the fact that these things have already happened. So, so that's probably not the case. But could communication like if the organization had the desire to build something that was a destination to to bring all these folks in, if that even made sense?
And sometimes you can do that with a community, and maybe there's 50 different products and each product has a section of community. And so you can have pockets of people who are relevant to that product, all congregating in one sort of subset of the community. Is it possible to build a plan to start to do that and communicate that out to customers?
Because I think just giving customers, a roadmap of where you plan to go can also also often be at least, you know, a little bit of hope that that you're moving in a direction that's going to be more useful for them. Mergers are just messy, and anytime that happens, you're just bringing two groups together and it's like, how do you bridge the gap?
Yeah, yeah. And I think I think our primary, my primary concern was ensuring that there was a unity to. And that didn't mean to rolling that a unity to community. In across the organization, that there was a central point of communication or transfer of information was probably a better way of putting it for the. Sort of corporate wide aspects of, of any program or progress that is being made.
Whilst the individuals are able then to drill down into their respective place in its products, variants of products, etc.. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's tough. I think, unless the organization as a whole is getting behind you in creating, a unified community for all, it's going to be very difficult, I think. And, and the short term solution might be to start with smaller communities around each of the products or, you know, or however you segment that out, but with a goal that, hey, we're going to try to cultivate these individual sub communities.
But the ultimate goal is we want to bring all these folks together, be patient with us. This is going to take time and then build a plan to do that, where you can start to essentially cross-pollinate some of those, those smaller subgroups, because there's probably a lot of value in doing that. And there's probably a lot of profit actually, in doing that for cross-sell.
So indeed, indeed, if, If the wheels were moving at a speed that was conducive to that. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So so it's a tough one. I mean, I'd be happy to like, chat further off line, about this at all, because, these are the kinds of issues that come up and there's no precedent for it, really.
And so, you know, you just kind of have to work through it and work through what might work for your organization. Indeed. And I think that's what I came down to was that there is some every single instance within the organization is different and needs to be handled, in its own way. But there needs to be, as I said, a unity, to, to the, to the destination that everyone's heading for.
And that's, Yeah. I don't mean to cut you. I was just going to say I think the best place to start is going to be internal and individually. Yeah. And just getting people on the same page, like, what do we need to help our customers continue to be our customers, right. Indeed. Yeah. Sorry. Good. I have not realized they have sections of it here, but, but hopefully it gives you some thoughts that, that gives you a better direction.
Correct. Thank you. We appreciate that, David. And I think, I'm loving the back and forth in the in the chat too. I think Allison had some thoughts. And Laney, we have found ourselves, serendipitously in our Q&A. So let's let's keep let's keep rolling with, let's keep rolling with this. Laney asked about, as as we're moving towards a destination based mindset, what are ideas, ways to connect advocates, create that consistent engagement.
If you know we don't have a full fledged destination URL community yet to, oh, okay. You're you're not there yet with. Okay. Well, I would say there's there's a couple of things. And so depending on the size of your organization or whatever, and this is something I think, Jerry and I had talked about in planning, this is just talking a little bit about what is what is quote unquote destination.
It's really any time you can gather your customers online or offline. And so this is maybe an example of that. If you don't yet have an online destination, you can gather people together in physical spaces in local regions where maybe you have maybe there's 5 or 10 customers that are in a local area that might want to get together, spend a couple bucks to, you know, buy some orders or whatever and have them come together and let it be their, their or their sort of meeting to, to connect in and do those kinds of things facilitated by your organization, but get out of the way kind of thing so that that's one thing.
And then those personal connections, you know, follow up with email, you know, do do the destination less approach to follow up with those people when you've had a chance to get them together. If you don't have a dedicated community, LinkedIn is ubiquitous. I mean, it's I wouldn't say it's probably the long term solution, but create a LinkedIn group for customers of your your, you know, your product in a particular location, for example, or, you know, advocate or networking groups say, hey, it's the product X networking group on LinkedIn and just start gathering people and see who shows up.
And then you can start to foster that a little bit. And then when you have a destination now, you can invite those people to come to your destination and be like, hey, we got a dedicated place. This is what's going to work for you. But I would just try to get creative. Or if you have a conference and you're, you're already gathering people at your conference, have some breakouts for just for customers, and maybe you see them with a few customers that you've talked to ahead of time.
And have them invite other customers and just make it an out and networking thing, you know. But but then it's it's about not only creating those opportunities, but then what do you do with those? You know, once that's happened, what do you do then to follow up. Yeah. Yeah. That next that next next best touchpoint or someone else's conference.
We've seen some of the customers are we're like, hey, we're all going to be here. Let's, let's get together and use that. Absolutely. Other other questions. That that people have drop them, drop them in the chat or down at the bottom of your screen next to the smiley face and thumbs up. There's a hand raise button. Feel free to raise your hand and we'll bring you, bring you on to to ask your ask your question.
Listen to the sweet, sweet person. Yeah, I think the Elsa had a lot of great insights on, some of those advocacy, for the connection building and networking opportunities as well. Yeah, absolutely. She would be another great person to do a fireside chat with. No. No plug. Just. Hey, authentic friendship there. Yeah. Email, email incoming.
Allison. Oh, well. But Nick is seriously. And I love that you echoed what I put in the chat. Nick. So see, we we're we're proven that. Yes we do. You do the same with regional meetups. They are wildly successful in my experience. That's awesome. That's all. What are some other what are some of those other maybe, plays that just work for for building that connection.
So the regional meetups as one but any other. Yeah. You know, you know what I yeah one of the other thing. So so this is something that we've done in, in a destination based kind of program, but is really just peer to peer networking. So facilitating a way, whether it's automatic through technology of whatever community platform you're using or you're facilitating it by people getting on a list to connect with one another, but essentially having people identify, hey, I'm interested in networking.
And other people say, I'm looking for people who want to network about X and then connecting those people together, because there's so much learning that happens when you connect customers together, and they all want to build their own network of resources and people. And also if they're thinking about their career, their network of who knows where the next job's coming from kind of thing.
So I think that's always a really helpful thing to do. Whether you can do that offline or online, it's just connecting peers, customer peers together. I love all of that. Yep. Never met me all around them. You all are on the same page. Bring people together. And that's that's the beauty about advocacy in general. These kinds of programs is it typically is the more positive aspect of being in marketing.
You're not necessarily directly trying to sell something, but you're more trying to focus on the people and help them be successful and get connected to each other. And then by association and various circumstances, you know, sales end up happening. Yeah. Then North Star becomes just value delivery. How are we doing doing that other other questions that that people have.
Raise your hand. Drop them in the chat. Probably have time for at least at least one more juicy one.
I have one, I have a question actually. Go for it for for Nick. And I'm sorry because I joined halfway through if I missed it. But how do you dip your toes into community and you know you don't have one at all, but you're looking at sure about getting a platform? Can you sort of start one without investing a ton of money up front?
Nick, on one of like the big tools? I think you can give up this little echo. Alison, you might want to mute your kid. I mean, you got it. Okay, okay. Yep. Sorry. Yeah, I think I think you can. And, I mean, I kind of alluded to this as we answered, Lenny's question was, so if you had if you didn't have anything to start with, like, if you're trying to prove it out, you know, use some of the tools that are available on LinkedIn as ubiquitous.
Most professionals are using that to build a group related to your your your product or your company. And that might be a way to start to at least dip your toe in the water in terms of can I get people together and can I end up presenting value to them in this way? You know, and, you know, in a way that would be useful to them?
And can I then extract their feedback, whether or not it is useful and get some data points to prove out why this might work on a bigger scale? This is one sort immediately. The other could be, you know, using email and just reaching out, finding those top customers and then asking them, how can we build something that would be really useful to you?
My, my biggest thought is always, if you don't have the answer, ask your customers, they'll tell you. So those are just a couple quick ideas.
That's awesome. And I think you answered that, you know, the second half of that of how can we measure that, the value. Value that. Yeah. Oh yeah. I see slack community. That could work too. Yeah. Any any of these tools that are being used by professionals that are pretty ubiquitous and everybody kind of uses, that that allow for these kinds of community type interactions, I think can be, you know, a proving ground for, for this sort of stuff.
They're not always ideal, though, because they don't always have the kind of features, functionalities that that could make a community really, really great and sticky for folks. But, you know, it's a starting point. Yeah. I think most of the conversations we have with people is they've they've sometimes it's, hey, we want to we want to do everything out of the gate.
Other times it's, you know, we've been limping along with a discord community or WhatsApp group and, and want to evolve and grow. Sure. And I would say to you on the small end, if you're a small startup, just talk to customers and you don't probably need a huge, huge platform, at least to get started. But the idea is hopefully you graduate to a point where it makes sense to have a platform because then you can do a whole lot of more other things and you can you can have longer, a longer term success at a larger scale.
Yeah. Know that makes that makes sense. Angela, I love it. Getting into the meta here, the, the connection. Yeah. Connect on LinkedIn. One of the benefits of, of this environment. Two is that the chat in the Q&A that you have, you can come back to and find in your messages in the community at any time, in the future.
So all these insights, ideas, you can come back in and find those. I'm going to bring Jerry back up. But just to kind of close this out and say thank you, Nick, for for joining and being here. It's a lot of fun. I appreciate it. And also thank everyone for coming in to ask those great questions.
And that's the I think that's the highlight, highlight of the, and the discussion here. Also, before we wrap up, so if there are other questions about advocacy in general and our community, even, let us know we are, you know, we're planning for our next few, sessions as well. And, and Nick and I are going to, chat after this to if you have additional questions of advocacy, we can we can follow up on that, actually.
Or, you know, joining us today, it's really, really helpful. Have a good one everybody. And we appreciate it. Thank you. Everybody will share out the recording. Jump in and ask those questions. And thanks for being here today. Nice. Thank you. Oh there you go okay. All right take care everybody. But.