Flipping the Script on Customer Advocacy - Polly Lambert, Head of Global Marketing, Retail Directions

Customer Advocacy is the ultimate teaming between customer and vendor. Polly Lambert, an expert in advocacy in the Tech Industry joins Sam and Vic to share some thought provoking ideas on how to get the best from your Advocacy Program, whatever size company you are. 

Vic apologises in advance for her whooping - but it is a great example of sub consciously doing the right thing, and learning for next time to make it conscious and deliberate!  (This will make sense when you listen!)

Polly’s definition of Customer Advocacy:

“Using the voice of those who have, to earn the trust of those who could.”

Get a quick view of our conversation and key takeaways in the blog: Flipping the Script on Customer Advocacy - Amplified Group

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Transcript

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Sam 0:09

Welcome to Get Amplified from the Amplified Group, the podcast for tech industry leaders who want to build unstoppable teams to help their organisations execute faster. As always, we're virtual. I'm at home in Buckinghamshire looking out on the sunshine, which is wonderful. I think the last one we did, it was blooming snowing. Thinking, how's the weather in deepest artists, Oxfordshire?

Vic 0:30

I am sharing the same blue sky as you today, Sam.

Sam 0:34

Wonderful. Can't complain. So who's our guest today and what are we talking about?

Vic 0:39

Well, our guest today, Sam, is Polly Lambert, who we've just worked out. Polly and I first worked together 25 years ago, which is yeah, feeling a little bit old from that. So Polly and I worked together to start with in value add distribution, then um worked together again when I was at Citrix, and Polly did some incredible work for me when I was working with Microsoft and running that alliance. And then we worked together again at VMware a little bit. So uh and so she can't shake me off really. So I'm delighted that Polly is here today with us. Oh, Polly. Polly is now head of global marketing for a company called Retail Directions. But what I have asked Polly to talk about is customer advocacy because this to me is where vendors team with their clients and it's getting that connection and that partnership with clients that is so powerful. Um, but I think I think from from what I've understood from the prep that we've done here, Paul, I'm going to be rethinking customer advocacy. So I'm really looking forward to learning some more from you and uh very appreciative of you uh taking the time.

Sam 1:59

So Paul, it's probably not a bad thing for you, you know, that that's a seriously illustrious career punctuated by unfortunate periods of working with Vicky. Um perhaps you'd be so kind as to as to give us a little bit more detail on your career history if that's okay.

SPEAKER_00 2:16

Yeah, sure, absolutely. So um, like Vicky said, uh 25 years in sort of B2B tech marketing specifically. So uh yeah, I mean, going right back, didn't do great at school, hadn't really found my passion, didn't go to university, um, did a sort of business and finance school in the finance uh course in the evening, and there was a tiny little thing in that called marketing, and kind of fell in love with it. Then I went on to study sort of marketing diploma at night school for three years, and that's when I kind of accidentally got a job in IT distribution as a marketing manager. Um I think that's when you and I met Vic back all those years ago. Um and I have to say, you know, met some of my best friends, still friends now, um, in brilliant teams that I work with in distribution. Then ran my own B2B tech marketing agency for around 10 years, um, all round marketing, built a great team, had a couple of kids, downsized, um, and became a consultant on my own and worked as a consultant or freelance contractor since then, really, which has really fitted in sort of very well. Part of my roles I've had have been both client side and agency side. So you kind of get to see both sides of the coin, which has been really valuable in my career. One of those client side ones, you know, I led customer advocacy, customer reference, as it was called back then, um, for VMware in Amir for a couple of years on the on the EUC side initially, and then globally across their portfolio. I did subsequent to that, four years in customer advocacy for one of the top 10 software vendors globally, um, which, you know, real eye-opener, sort of working that length of time for one of those big companies and the importance of using the customer voice, but we'll come on to that. And uh, now I am in a great role which I absolutely love, which is leading marketing globally for um a mid-sized software vendor. So bringing all of my knowledge I've learned over the years together, advocacy being one of them. Um, so yeah, a really exciting time right now, and uh that's that's sort of a potted history of me.

Sam 4:12

Fantastic. What a journey!

SPEAKER_00 4:14

Yeah, absolutely.

Sam 4:14

So maybe we could maybe maybe we could get straight in at the sharp end. And what what is this customer advocacy thing? You know, I thought marketing was just you know sending out nice pictures and things like that to get people to buy stuff.

Vic 4:27

Yeah, sure. I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, Polly.

SPEAKER_00 4:32

I did I should have warned you. Well, you know, you're not wrong. I mean, I just presented it in all hands actually for my for my own company, and I started off with, you know, it's not all about colouring in, so it has got a reputation of uh clearly I'm being incredibly facetious there with that description. All we do is sit with crayons all day. But yeah, I mean, customer advocacy is it's a funny one really because the name of customer advocacy has changed so much over. I mean, when was I at VMware? 2014. Um, you know, it's gone from customer referencing to customer advocacy, customer marketing, customer comms, you know, it's got a lot of different names. But in essence, you know, trying to sum it up, um, which was a really good exercise to do for this podcast, was you know, I kind of sum it up as using the voice of those that have to earn the trust of those that could. So, you know, in essence, it's people that have done it before, using the power of their voice and experience and their passion, you know, whatever the product or you know activity is that they have done before, you know, trying to show others that haven't done it before how to de-risk their, you know, perception of it, add credibility to your own voice. You know, we can you can write corporate brochures till you're blue in the face, but unless you actually add that voice of credibility and authenticity to it of somebody that's actually done it, it doesn't really mean anything. So, you know, it's about customer advocacy, about using a voice of someone that's done it to give confidence and earn trust and credibility, really.

Sam 6:02

I suppose it's it's the why, isn't it? You know, it's telling the story of why somebody selected a particular technology, what difference it made, how that it and I suppose the how, how they got it deployed, and and what benefits they got from it. Yeah, okay, no, that makes sense. So, what's the opportunity for advocacy behind beyond case study?

SPEAKER_00 6:22

I'm going to apologize now to all the uh you know advocacy professionals out there. You know, I may miss something out here. I may I may, it's a such a broad opportunity, it's unbelievable. Um, and it does sort of resonate right throughout an organization. If it's actually adopted as a practice, um, you know, and given the opportunity to release its power, it can go you know right through a vendor, right up to the top level. Um, I'm going to give opportunity in sort of two areas here. You know, there is the opportunity to do case studies and all those traditional things that we that we know and love, you know, having people stand on main stage as a speaker and all those good things, you know, the traditional things. But it's kind of evolved, I would say. The opportunity has evolved. And there is an opportunity to flip the script on advocacy, I think. Um, you know, the traditional way of doing it has been to go to your advocates and uh, you know, those people who have used your technology who you know are happy customers and say, you know, would you do a case study for us? Would you, would you share the success? Would you talk about it? Would you talk about these three things that are really important to us? Um, you know, it's evolved. And it actually we need to flip the script and say, how can we add value to your business? Um, rather than saying, please do a favor for us. So it's about stopping asking for those favours and actually positioning advocacy as a value add as a vendor to say how can we help you? And you know, I was just gonna go on to sort of talking about how you how you can do that. And then the other area I was just gonna chat about was you know what you can actually do with that content, what channels it can be on. You know, there's an opportunity to widen um how you amplify those stories. Um at the end of the day, it is about storytelling. I think you touched on the it's not just the why, it's the how as well. Um, so one thing that you know I found at, I suppose that kind of dawned on me at VMware, but mainly at the software vendor that I spoke about that I worked at for four years, you know, advocacy is not just about going to one person and saying, can you tell us all about how you use this software? Um what became kind of apparent to me is there's three different levels of opportunity to help tell stories, you know, and there's three different agendas, if you like. So, and they are really at there's one at the company level. Um, so you know, what's the agenda at the company level of your customer? What's their agenda at a team level, which is obviously something that Vicky's passionate about and uh, you know, I think it's really, really important. And then there's the individual level. So if we just keep those three levels in mind, you know, company, team, and individual. At a company level, um, you can say to them, you know, what what what is your agenda? What's the message that you want to get across? And when I say company level, you probably want to be engaging with their commons team at that level. So they might plan that they've got, say, two or three key messages they want to get out that year or that quarter or whatever it might be. But an example might be, okay, we've got a huge sustainability agenda. If you put yourself in your customers' shoes for a minute, they might have a big sustainability agenda that they want to get across. Um, how can you build a story around their investment in technology? How does that support their sustainability agenda rather than just talking about your technology? Um, another one I came across, which is a really, really sort of current uh topic, is labour shortages, skills shortages. So this customer, you know, I said to the customer, what do you want to get across in this story? And they said, Well, actually, we're having we're struggling to hire talent at the moment. Um, we'd love this story to talk about how we're adopting the latest technology, um, which will attract, you know, I think it was developers they were after or something, you know, it was quite a technical case study or technical story. Um, we want to showcase how we're an amazing place to work at because we're using and we've invested in the latest technology. So they're just a couple of examples of you know, a company's agenda that they might want to build the story around. Um, does that does that make sense? It's like talking about a company that's I think that does make sense.

Sam 10:30

You know, I've been involved in the production of case studies in the past, and you you're absolutely right, they've always been done from our point of view. And you would pay, you would talk about the benefits that the customer was expecting, hoping to obtain, and how they obtained those benefits, but turning it around and making it about really dovetailing in with their goals that shows the value of your your software, your or whatever you whatever your case study is about far more than simply say, Well, we we we built this widget and it did X for them. So I I really get that. I really get that. That makes a lot of sense.

Vic 11:13

I'm whooping internally here because we've not had this conversation.

Sam 11:19

Can we have that subtitled Whoops Internally?

Vic 11:22

Yeah, we yeah, exactly. But we've just finalised a case study with a team at Okta that we've been working with, and one of Okta's big challenges, and it's it's explays exactly into what you just said, Paul, is um about hiring talent. So there is such a war for talent in the tech industry currently, and they've they are they are like all of the hyper-growth companies that we're working with at the minute, really trying to attract new talent. And actually, the title of their case study is How Okta are winning the war on talent. Yeah, because that's that's their story out. So and the reason that triggered us to do the case study was my god, you are you are hiring such great talent, and I know you've got more to go. Shall we tell your story? Yeah, completely, completely. There you go.

Sam 12:13

Yeah, that makes sense. And and I suppose in telling that story, you're hopefully helping Okta to hire more people because they get the opportunity to put across what a good place they are to be and how they've invested in talent and people and all of that stuff.

Vic 12:27

So yeah, we're telling their story versus us actually and well, I I think it will benefit us, but it was for them.

SPEAKER_03 12:37

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:38

No, absolutely. And and I think the biggest point, you know, really important point is if you align with their narrative, um, they are going to use your story a lot more than if it's just talking about you.

Sam 12:50

And and then it becomes less like sort of pure marketing material, because if clearly if if the the your company's marketing department is putting that out, whereas if it comes from the customer, it's much more powerful.

SPEAKER_00 13:05

Yeah, totally, totally. Yeah, and and there's a couple more examples, you know. So that's at the company level. If we talk about sort of the team level, um, and one of the best ways I can do this is to give give an example. So the software vendor I worked at, um, you know, we did the usual uh quantified stats of improvement. I had to go film a video of them. It was a client testimonial video, and uh, you know, sat down with the head of digital marketing there and uh chatted away. And I said, you know, what do you want to achieve? And he said, I don't want this to be about me, I don't want it to be about the software. He goes, I want to raise the profile of my team that did this. Um, you know, we have the opportunity to roll this software out internally. That's another big, you know, objective here that that helps the vendor. My team did this. They worked night and day doing XYZ to make this work. You know, they adopted new skills to get it to work. I want to raise their profile within my organization. He said, and if you do this video for me, um I can use this video to raise the profile of my team. And that and that was a whole new eye-opener for me. So we got the company level, and all of a sudden we've got you know uh uh a stalwart of digital marketing saying, I want to showcase my team um and what they've done. Um, because they were the word is they were proud of what they did. And and he he wanted the rest of the organization, it was a huge organization, one of the top 10 brands in the world. We were filming that day. But you know, even still a small team, and I think by doing that, other teams then start to go, hey, look at that team getting getting recognition and you know, awareness, and they're on our company internet with their great video and that sort of thing, and they all go, I want a part of that, you know. So you get that whole viral thing internally going on. Um, but yeah, that approach from a team level from the team leader, I found was really interesting.

SPEAKER_03 14:50

I want to go again.

SPEAKER_00 14:52

Go, Vic.

SPEAKER_03 14:53

Go Vic.

Vic 14:55

Just considering this isn't scripted at all, the fact that you've just no, honestly, the fact that you've just used the word proud, the very same team that I'm talking about that we've done the case study with, they did some work last week on their purpose because their purpose was a very business-focused, numbers focused versus an emotive purpose. And I was really pushing them to come up with an emotive purpose. And actually, what was really delightful about the way the team worked together was I did nothing in that workshop, they did it all themselves, and I just felt like a proud mum with how much they'd done themselves. But what they came out with, their statement, I won't go into, but they added they wanted to add a sentence on the end of it, and the sentence they put on the end of it was, we are proud of what we achieve together. And that word proud, they they wanted to have that in there because that's how they feel. They're so proud of the way they work as a team.

Sam 15:53

It's it's back to the the power of why thing, isn't it? You know, all of what we do has to have a why behind it. If that's not awful grammar, you know, it's the reason we're doing something, not just the fact that we're doing it. Obviously, at some point, businesses need to make money, otherwise, they disappear and people don't have jobs, and then that's not a good thing. But there's got to be more to it than just just profitability and trying to sell whatever software or hardware or service or whatever it is. Having that why behind it, that sense of mission, feels to me like the customer advocacy thing really contributes into that. Is that fair?

SPEAKER_00 16:32

Yeah, definitely. And um, and I think you know, there's probably subject of a whole other podcast, really. Um I could talk about, but I think COVID and the last two years has made the human interest element of stories a lot more interesting to people. Um, you know, they just want to understand, you know, the human element, you know, who goes up into making these teams, why are they successful? You know, I think it's just a little a little bit more close to people's hearts these days, you know, what makes up a great team. And are you talking about crowd there, Vicky? I've got there's another example, you know, we did for retail directions where I work now, um, you know, we we picked a retailer that's they're a global retailer, um, and they've done amazing things. They're based in Australia, but they've they've done amazing things in terms of um becoming customer focused during COVID, um, and their response to that, and and how they've kind of adapted their warehouses and their processes and all these things to become customer and staff focused. And uh, we did a blog with, I think it was the CIO there. We did it, he he did a blog and uh with us, you know. So not a case study. We literally asked him to talk about what he did, how they changed, what they was, how they responded, what they're doing differently now. And uh A, it got twice as much engagement on LinkedIn as um any other post that we have put on there, you know. Um, and he was candid in it. I think the one of the quotes that he used up front was, you know, if you'd have given me this scenario six months ago, we'd have told you you were mad. We would we said we'd have said we couldn't have responded, but we did, and this is how we did it. Um, you know, and he got so much engagement from that post personally, and this leads me on to kind of the individual. So we've done company, we've done team, talking about the individual here, really. Um, you know, we created this blog, we posted it, he reposted it, he got he got huge engagement from it. And I was just coming to the point of being proud, you know, someone actually commented in his post on the blog, he put you cannot fail with a great team who are passionate about what they do. And someone had actually commented beneath on his blog about that, you know, being the team and the individual um being relevant to both of those sort of levels. But um, I'm I love storytellers, I love anecdotes, I love you know things being things being real, and I just thought that was a really lovely example of uh using a story.

Sam 18:54

Makes sense. Obviously, these days, you're an acknowledged expert in the world of of case studies and advocacy. Have you ever messed it up in the past? What could we learn from things that might have gone wrong in the early days?

SPEAKER_00 19:07

Customer advocacy has developed and matured as part of a marketer's toolkit. I think failure to collaborate and plan would probably be um one of the things that I've learned. In a customer advocacy role, you need to be, I was thinking about it earlier, you need to be a salesperson, you need to be an account manager, you need to be a consultant, you know, you have to be all of these things and have your finger on the pulse of what's going on in the business. So you have to collaborate with so many teams, um, you know, to raise awareness of what you do in terms of in an advocacy role, the opportunity um that advocacy brings. Um not asking a customer to do something when their software failed at 12 o'clock the night before is always a bonus.

Sam 19:50

Um timing is of the essence.

SPEAKER_00 19:52

Absolutely, absolutely. Um but one important thing is you know, have think about who you're trying to target with this evidence because um you might have different levels within that individual thing, you might have a C level person trying to influence, they want to hear a different message than you know, the business unit leader wants to hear to maybe the practitioner. So if you've got an opportunity, I don't know, to say to get into a really big client, a huge client, um try and amplify multiple levels of voices within that. Don't just sit with one individual, you know, to sell to sell the different side of the story. So you might have the technical person that's responsible for technical implementation is gonna need a different set of, you know, or be interested in um and influenced by more different information than than the C level person might be. So just remember telling that story from multiple perspectives is important. Good point. But moving away from these point-based requests to like, you know, you have to educate your organization to not go 24 hours before, oh, we haven't got a speaker for our event tomorrow. You know, you have to get yourself in those planning meetings. Um, you know, it's something we did really well at VMware actually. Um, you know, we would sync very early on with the comms team and the events team and all the stakeholders um involved uh and try and get what they needed from advocacy. What evidence were they going to need to help them do their jobs better? Um, you know, that's a huge thing. In the in the software company I talked about, you might have five different teams who want a quote about their individual thing. So I don't know, professional services being an example. They might go, we won, we need a quote about how amazing professional services was. Um you need to get all of those stakeholders in a line and get all of their requests together before you have the interview with the customer because it is so hard to reverse engineer getting quotes and evidence. You don't want to go back to the customer 10 times with different questions. So, you know, having that internal Sync and that internal alignment on what evidence you want to get from your client. Um, you know, and that's another um, you know, lesson learned is to, you know, you have to push back. Um, the organization might go to you, well, we want um the client to endorse these five things that we stand for. And uh, it doesn't work like that in the real world. You can't get customers to read your script, they want to tell theirs, as I said earlier on. So you may have to push back and go, well, you know, we might be able to engineer one of those things in here, but there's no way they're going to talk about X, Y, and Z because it's not on their agenda and it's not what they stand for. So, you know, just being aware of that. Another pitfall might be thinking that one size fits all. Again, on the individual level, we are all different. So the three of us here, we might all have different things that we're comfortable in doing. You know, someone might, Vicky used to speak on stage to thousands. I hated it. So, you know, it's different different people, it's horses for courses. So find out a lot about the individuals you're approaching from the account team, find out what they like doing, find out who they are, you know, what are they comfortable doing? They might they might be comfortable in doing peer-to-peer references on a call, you know, they might be that, but they may not be comfortable up on stage, or they may want to be invited to an advisory bureau because they absolutely love innovation and looking ahead at product roadmaps and things like that. So think about what that individual wants.

Vic 23:26

What is coming to mind as you're speaking there is you sound like persons who's responsible for customer advocacy is looking after the customer and protecting the customer.

SPEAKER_00 23:37

Totally. I mean, I've got it written down here, you know, avoid avoid customer burnout. You know, that's the trouble. When you have a very small group of advocates and you're going with those point-based requests, you are going to use a swear word, annoy them pretty quickly. Pretty quickly. And they won't be your friend. You know, in an ideal world, work with the account managers, you know, when they've got a client or a customer, work with them to present the opportunities without any requests. Don't have an agenda, you know, build that into their script right at the very beginning. You know, one other pitfall is don't think that writing it into a contract, a sales contract, that they will be a reference is worth the paper it's written on because it's not the comms, it's not the comms team that signs the uh contract. Um, it's going to be a different point in time when you ask them to uh um you know pick up on that clause that they signed against. Um so don't even bother. You know, it's it's about the carrot rather than the stick. It's very relationships. Yeah, it's very much about building relationships, um, you know, working working with the account teams, um particularly the customer success managers. They are, if you if you're in an organization of a big enough size, the CSMs are the ones that kind of hold the golden key to you know knowing when a customer is um you know ready to be a uh a rock star for you or whatever. Um, but yeah, work out in the organization who's who's gonna help you unlock that golden key. And there were times in VMware Vit where we knew more about what was going on in customers than the account teams did. Oh, yeah, I can believe that.

Sam 25:13

All makes sense. So perhaps you could tell us a bit more about why organizations should invest in advocacy. It must be really hard to quantify the benefits.

SPEAKER_00 25:25

It is a tough one. And um, you know, thinking about it, I mean, I've just engaged a new PR agency actually in um my role that I'm in now. It's a little bit like PR. It's uh how do you quantify that? How do you measure it? It's uh it's been one of those challenging ones. But um, you know, the software vendor I talked about, we actually did a pretty good job of that. And once you start to quantify that and and sort of measure the um impact it has, um you start to turn heads, you know, you can get more investment, you can get more buy-in. Uh, you know, that executive buy-in suddenly becomes a little bit easier, and there's there's multiple ways of doing it. Which sales were closed as a result of using a reference or reference material or a reference conversation, you know, which events did that new client attend where you know somebody spoke at, or what conversations were had, you know, there are multiple ways of doing that. But you if you need to quantify it down to an actual impact on sales and ROI, you know, that that's a way to do that. I mean, numbers will speak to certain people, like your sales director, you know, VP of sales, whatever. If you could say we closed 10 million pounds worth of business because of um advocacy, then you know that is going to turn their heads. But also internally, use the voice of sales teams to help you promote advocacy. Um, you know, I think we got a quote of VMware. I got a quote from one of the sales guys. He said, if I hadn't engaged with the advocacy team, I wouldn't have hit my quota in in you know half the time. Um, so you know, try and get- Why was that? Because he worked with us, he used our services, um, you know, he used our references and advocates, but he also brought references to us. So it was both ways. Yeah, it was it was a reciprocal engagement. And you know, another thing of saying about flipping the script at the beginning, um, you can um turn this around, you know, the amount of times where a client might come, a customer might come to us and say, Look, you know, we've done this in one department, we want to roll this out internally, we want to increase adoption of this that we've just invested in. We've just invested 2 million, whatever it is, in this software in one department. How do I do that? I want a video of us adopting it here, showing the value it's delivered to our organization, and I want to show that to 10 other different countries and see if they want to adopt it.

SPEAKER_03 27:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 27:48

So if you can go to an account manager within your organization or a CSM and go, I can help you multiply that sale you've just done 10 times. Because if we actually showcase what they've done, you know, is there the opportunity for other areas of a global business to adopt it? So you're kind of flipping it and saying, Here's a tool I can help you. Internal, it's an internal reference. It is, it becomes an internal reference. And you know, you can tag it on. I mean, we we had one who came to um the big global you know symposium we had. We had we were filming customers there. We led with that. We actually said, come and do a quick video, it's for your own internal use. Do you mind if I tack on a couple of questions at the end and make this an internal? We'll do an external edit as well. So no extra work for you, Mr. Customer. You can use it internally to increase your adoption. So it's just about, I hate the phrase, thinking outside the box and doing it a bit differently. So, you know, your question was why should they invest? But you know, closing deals more quickly is the obvious one. You plug reference into a prospect at the end of the sales cycle, you know, it makes them help helps make them make their decision more quickly. But you know, there are a lot of other clever ways of using losing it, like I just mentioned.

Vic 29:05

But what you've just said, it goes right back to what you said at the beginning. Because if you're looking at it from a customer's agenda to start with, that's where that internal reference and that's where you can see the benefit. Totally. I mean, it's the what's in it for me factor. Um that's just that's selling, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 29:20

Yeah, it totally. That's what I was saying. You need to be a salesperson, a marketing person, you know, you need to actually sort of think of these things in a different in a different way.

Sam 29:27

Thinking of it having been on the on the receiving end, shall we say, I was quite frequently asked to do advocacy videos and things like that, or stand up on stage and talk about something mostly by Vicky, I think. Um and I'm joking, I'm joking. But it and it it was a benefit to me and my organization because it helped to promote soft cat within the vendor and within the wider community. Um but the request to do it was never ever couched in those terms, I don't think. It was always, would you mind helping us out? Which I was always happy to do, right? Which is which is great. And you know, I was always happy to do that. And you know, I'm I'm a show off, so I like seeing myself on video or being up on stage or whatever, you know, it's and and that's all good, but actually, it would have been probably I'd have probably done more of it had it been couched as more in those terms.

SPEAKER_00 30:24

So I'm totally I mean an individual, yeah, and in at an individual level, you know, have a as saying back earlier, you know, it's about them and and their objectives as an individual, you know, what's their what's their professional agenda? You know, yeah. We've had we've had references or you know, customer um advocates, champions if you like, that have maybe been at an organization, they've gone, they've held their hand up and gone, um, I'd really like to speak an event if that's okay. And you go, Oh, okay, that'd be awesome. But their agenda is in a month's time, they actually want to go for a job interview, put it on their CV, get it on their LinkedIn thing. And sometimes we follow customer champions because we know they're amazing stalwarts for, you know, standing up and we know they're comfortable with certain types of activity, but then you follow them from one organization to another, which is again a salesperson, a good salesperson's trait. Um, so you know, that whole understanding their professional agenda too, and it's about a spin, like you said, Sam. You know, if that had been couched in a different way, um, you might suddenly go, well, actually, yeah. And one other point I wanted to really want to make is minimize the amount of time that these people have to spend doing this. You know, if you can interview somebody for an hour, and we've done this, you have enough content there that you can curate across multiple assets, multiple channels, across six months, 12 months. You know, don't keep going back to them. Have your really smart interviewing and smart questions all lined up so that you can bother them once and you and the content is.

Sam 31:58

That's a really good idea.

SPEAKER_00 31:59

The content's got the ability to be amplified for want of a better word, it um over it's a very good word there. It is. It's got multiple channels, it can go on multiple um formats, you know. So, and if you've got the questions right in the first place, you can help your stakeholders fulfill their objectives for quite a long time.

Sam 32:20

So, you know, I think that makes sense. So this is this is a team effort, right? This is not just the head of marketing or the head of customer advocacy or whatever. This is this is a wider effort.

SPEAKER_00 32:31

Yeah, definitely. I mean, at the software vendor I talked about, you know, you have a team that's responsible for this. And like any business function, it needs objectives, it needs KPIs, it needs a process, it probably needs a platform, whether that's a Excel spreadsheet or one of the you know reference platforms that exist out there, software, there is dedicated software for this. It needs all those good things, but um, it is a team effort, and the more you can educate people in your business about the power of it, you know, it's a ripple effect. Um, it should not be a silo of all the marketing functions. Um, it should not be a silo because you can help, for example, demand gen teams, uh campaign teams, build campaigns around customers. We did that at VMware, Vic. Um, I think it was called People Like Me or something like that, where they use spearheaded campaign, demand generation, lead generation campaigns with the voice of a customer, with a persona. Um, you know, not a generic persona, but an actual person. Um and uh so there's so many different functions across the organization. So I think the virtual team thing plays in here. You know, you can set up virtual teams, you know, maybe have an advocacy champion on the sales team or you know, whatever. You know, you have to kind of have that matrix approach here. You cannot work in a silo, otherwise, it's just not fulfilling its potential as a marketing tool.

Sam 33:58

So, Polly, you're clearly incredibly passionate about this stuff, which is amazing, fantastic to hear, and clearly why we've got you on the show today. Um, why do you love this stuff so much?

SPEAKER_00 34:12

Um I think if it comes down to one thing, it's it's storytelling. You know, I love I love every day working in customer advocacy was different because you're telling different stories about different people. Um, you know, every company you tell a story about has a different objective, you know, a different culture, you know, and uh I just love that variety. Um, you know, and it really, really hit home to me. I I had an example when I was at the big software vendor, you know, I've been writing success stories and and what have you about technology for so many years. And uh we actually got the opportunity to interview um the Red Cross on the front line in the war zone, and we were actually speaking to their journalists and their and their story creators, and it was about mobile journalism in a war zone and bringing stories, you know, to to the uh for in the news and those kind of things and using technology to do that. And all of a sudden, I just that was it for me. It was like a shining moment where I just thought I absolutely love telling stories. This is this is incredible. And when that went live, that story, you know, I was again proud of it. You know, I was really proud to bring, you know, a voice uh to the fore of um, you know, how a company, not a company, an organization in that in that case, charitable organization was doing good with technology. So um, you know, you get days like that where it's it where it's all worthwhile.

Vic 35:37

The power of the storytelling comes back to the human element of it, doesn't it? And making it personal that you can relate to. Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 35:46

And I think there's a key point to add there is you know, trying to educate the people internally that you work with that it's okay to say what went wrong in a story. I think that's really important as well, because um we had some feedback at one of the companies I worked for where people were attending the event, and some of the feedback on the feedback forms or whatever was, you know, we love coming and hearing about your software and what it can do for us, and that's great. But we actually love to hear, you know, in the process of implementation or adoption or rollout or whatever it was, you know, what were the problems, what were the challenges you came across, and how did you overcome them? Um, so having those wrinkles in stories and just spinning that and saying, you know, it's okay for it to have gone wrong, nothing is perfect, and that's another element of storytelling, which is really, really important.

Sam 36:31

Makes it more authentic.

SPEAKER_00 36:32

Yeah, totally, totally. And it's it's an opportunity for the vendor to go, well, actually, we did all work at the weekend, we did all, you know, pull all the stops out. We we sorted it, you know, we overcame it. And overcoming those problems, um, you know, and being ready for the next challenge is is a really important part of stories. So don't make them all shiny and glossy and everything's perfect, you know. It doesn't make them believable, does it? Yeah.

Sam 36:57

Well, that's it. We're talking we're talking about tech stuff here, and you know, I've been involved in enough tech projects over the years, God knows, to know that they very rare rarely go perfectly smoothly. And if you if you try and tell the customer that somebody just clicked their fingers twice and all of a sudden it was all installed, and the you know it's just not believable, is it? Everybody knows it doesn't work like that, right? Yeah, exactly. It's it's like one of those it's you they sadly they use the American, those kind of case study videos where you get it's the fireside chat and you get well, well, Dave, I'm really glad that you asked me that. Yeah, so scripted, so scripted, too scripted, inauthentic, yeah, and you know that's that's the bad side of it, I suppose, isn't it? But so it's traditional to uh move towards a close with uh a list of of our guests' takeaways for people wanting to engage on this sort of journey. So perhaps while you'd be so kind as to give us three of yours, if you don't mind.

SPEAKER_00 38:00

Yeah, totally. So um it's a bit difficult to sum up on such a big topic, but um I kind of had uh, you know, think about your customer's agenda and not yours. Um is probably top of my list. Um, think about the definition of customer. You know, it doesn't just have to be your customer, you can use advocacy internally, you can use it to raise profiles of teams within your organization, you know, you can use it to increase adoption of something by employees. So, you know, the definition of customer can be, you know, not traditional in this sense. And the third thing I think is, you know, it's a dynamic and continual process. You know, if you if you engage with a customer, be with them for life. Think about the lifetime value of that advocate and uh you know their story changes all the time. Um, and uh be prepared to update your version of their story over time as well. You know, it's transformation in progress. So, you know, keep it going, keep that relationship building.

Vic 38:56

That really relates. Um, I remember actually as working on this, and very often the case study was right, the customer has implemented the software now, so now we want the story. Actually, you need it six, 12 months down the line when you've seen the actual impact of what that implementation has done. And it's the same for the work that we're doing. The the fantastic story we've got inside of Okta came, it's two years down the line that you can we can see that they've got zero um attrition within the team, yeah. They're attracting talent.

Sam 39:28

Yeah, because just implementing it is not a success. It's an important waypoint on the journey to success. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 39:38

And you you can even go, you can be even be really brave and go earlier than that. You can, if it's an existing client, like say they've got two bits of your software or whatever, you may want them, everyone scrabbles around for evidence of a brand new something that's just been launched, for example. You can even talk to them about their strategy before they've implemented it. You could say, Why are you considering this? You know, you can be brave and to um connect people on their strategy before they've even done it. Yeah, that's a great one.

Vic 40:05

Um, I have had a thought versus the book. Now, what I didn't say in the intro was all of the last podcast series, we closed with asking about what does great team experience feel like to our guests. Sam, you need to know it was Polly that came up with that idea of team X. Team Experience that came from Paul. So it feels, yes, exactly. It feels uh Sam has just drawn a cross for everyone to know. He's just done Team X.

SPEAKER_00 40:40

Yeah, that's what we were doing.

Vic 40:41

Team X. Yeah, Team X. So it feels that it is an appropriate thing to ask you, Paul, and sorry to put you on the spot, but what does great team experience mean to you?

SPEAKER_00 40:55

Um, so I had a think about this. Um, you know, great teamwork. I I think it's just people pulling together, you know, the old adage of um the whole is greater than some of the parts, really. And uh I think when you have people working together, um you just get passion, you get um alignment to a common goal, you know, everyone's pulling together. And I think Vic, having worked with you as well, I just remember we all had each other's backs. We all kind of, you know, if everyone was if anyone was struggling, people would be there for you. Um yeah, so it's that kind of family mentality in the workplace, um, you know, which really makes you feel confident, you know, that you're doing the right thing and uh, you know, all working together, really. And um, you know, leading a team like that and being proud of a team like that has just been amazing um over the years. Uh, you know, I've really, really got an enormous amount of satisfaction out of seeing that. Thanks, Paul.

Sam 41:53

Fantastic. Thank you very much. Really interesting stuff. As I said earlier, having been on the receiving end of some of some of this customer advocacy stuff, um, it's good to hear how it should be done and get some some serious tips. So, all that remains for me is to say thank you very much for listening. Um, of course, we hope that our listeners will be our customer advocates and perhaps give us a comment or a like and make sure you hit that subscribe button, and we'll see you next time.