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we want to welcome you to the customer success webinar series brought to you by client success I'm Brent Peterson customer success strategist here at client success client success is a customer success management platform that helps leaders and CSM's retain and grow their customer base through communication and collaboration across customer journey during today's webinar we will hear from Sara masam senior customer success manager at lupillo and Sara is one of the 2017 customer success innovator of the Year finalist we're excited to hear from her the customer success innovator of the Year award is open to all customer success professionals innovators submit their innovation present their innovation to a panel of judges and three finalists for the award are selected by the panel of judges the finalists are invited to the cs100 summit to present their innovation and the winner is selected as the participants of the cs100 summit vote confidentially for the innovator of the year today's webinar is definitely designed to be a collaborative session so we encourage you to use the Q&A feature in the webinar to submit questions Sarah and I will pause at a couple of intervals throughout the presentation to answer questions and we will save some questions for the end as well we will be recording the webinar today and it will be sent to your inbox later this week it's my pleasure to welcome Sarah Masson Sarah we're excited to hear from you thank you so much Brent I am excited to be here speaking with the entire client success community about the customer advocacy ladder now I joined loop he is our first customer success manager so over the years I've gotten to view a lot of different processes practices and innovations that our team has put into play my personal favorite is our customer advocacy ladder now before I tell you about our advocacy ladder I'm going to tell you just a little bit about myself I work in Toronto Canada so if you notice the accent that is why I am in fact a Canadian and I work with this phenomenal group of lupillo employees that we call loopers now we're a really really collaborative Bunch which I personally love because participation is probably my favorite thing in fact I love to participate so much that as a young undergraduate student I was a cohort of about 400 people and I very quickly developed the nickname of that girl in the front row so I love to participate and when you love to participate as much as I do you quickly become pretty comfortable being uncomfortable me and embarrassment are old friends but there are some people I would not risk embarrassing that's my customers and those lovely loopers that you saw in that photo so how could a customer success manager embarrass their customers or their teammates well like any good customer success professional let's start with my customer I could overburden my best customers retail to them for a reference call for the third time this month suddenly they're doing everyone's least favorite thing and saying no nobody likes to reject people I don't want to put my customers in that position I can also ask my customers to write a review before they really have any experience working with me suddenly once again they are stuck telling me no or pretending they didn't read my emails which is not good for either of us I could also ask them to write a review and give them absolutely zero ideas so they're a great customer they want to help me out but suddenly they're sitting there staring at a blank screen with writer's block and frustrated they're getting coffee and then going back to that blank screen and it's not fun they feel embarrassed but perhaps worst of all I could take a customer who loves going to bat for me who is always there who I know I can rely on and put them on the call to be arrested prosper and on the other end of the line if their direct competitor that is not something I want to do to any of my customers what about those lovely loopers that we saw in that photo what can I do as a customer success professional that might actually embarrass people across my organization well I could take one of my sales teams prospect that's well vetted they've gone through multiple demos they have buy-in from all of the right stakeholders all they need is a reference but that reference customer is actually an unhappy customer the prospect is embarrassed the customer is probably pretty embarrassed you had better believe that it's very least that salesperson is really embarrassed and even me the girl in the front row is suddenly turning red I can also work with my marketing team to develop resources that are beautiful pretty well granted but with stories that fall flat no clear success metric no compelling use cases and suddenly it looks like we can't prove ROI with our platform or I could have our sales team point their prospects to review websites where the last review is from April three years ago suddenly people are wondering are we even still open or we asleep at the wheel what's going on here the pretty embarrassing position put people in so if there's so much risk inherent in advocacy why bother investing in an advocacy ladder well when I say advocacy I don't just mean somebody who loves Rubio's so much they just want to shout it from the mountaintops what I mean is a tangible request that we know drives our business forwards advocacy without process is chaos it's messy it's difficult frustrating and I have lived through that chaos so I'd like to invite all of you to join me in my time machine don't worry we're not going back to any embarrassing hairstyles or wardrobe decisions we're going to 2016 fairly recent January 2016 to be precise now I've just joined lupillo I'm employing number 10 and we're a pretty small company at the heart of our organization we have always put customer success and our customers first which means that we want to provide that best to the class experience and we're investing heavily in our customer relationships but the only people managing those customer relationships are myself and our CEO Zac so we were doubling down on those customer relationships and we knew we could get advocacy from those relationships because we were investing so heavily but like most young companies there was a lot of process backing that up so what that means is there was no prioritization or organization when it came to advocacy requests so anytime you had a happy customer you wanted to pursue some form of advocacy it became a conversation so I'd have a phenomenal call with a customer and I turn to our CEO then I can I say a Zack this customer they're really happy we delivered this amazing solution we have a new process I'm excited what should we do should I maybe ask them to write an online review maybe they could be a reference I mean they were really really happy maybe I could ask them to do a key study with us and so we'd go on and on and we'd come to a decision and then I start writing an email and sometimes I search by inbox and use an email I sent in the past there was just a much chance of it being a really good email but then not so good email so here we were reinventing the wheel every single time and we were kind of spinning our wheels strength to keep up with all of this advocacy and maintain all of our customer relationships that we knew were the heart of our business so with all of this work we were putting into advocacy we obviously had really diligent measures in place except we didn't so there was no measurement of the advocacy happening we knew it was important so we were doing it we decided view would worry about measuring it later now what about the customer experience I said that was at the heart of our decision what did that look like well we were investing in doubling down on creating these superstar customers where we went to bat for them we always went above and beyond and we develop deep and meaningful personal connections with these customers and once a customer had reached that stage we would approach them and ask them to be reference customers for us but like I mentioned younger companies smaller pool of customers and we were waiting for them to be really really devoted to our relationship and ingrained in our company before we asked them to be references for us and that we had a pretty small pool of reference customers but like most fast-growing SAS companies we wanted to grow quickly so our sales team was bringing all of these great prospects in and they wanted to speak with reference customers so as you can see small pool of customers big group of people who wanted to talk to these reference customers we weren't going to say no to these prospects which means we were putting a heavy burden on our best customers the relationships that we've invested the most in that we had really devoted the time to curate it we were now risking by not having strong process in place to back up how we managed customer advocacy we knew something had to change and so we worked to create customer advocacy ladder now by doing this we made sure that we had clear defined time line for our customers we were reducing risk and ensuring we weren't missing opportunities we introduced clear processes so those conversations we were happy having after a happy customer call they didn't have to happen anymore we knew exactly what advocates you asked to put in and when we also introduced email templates so there was no more sifting through my inbox and finding an email that I thought was pretty good I had very clear templates to rely on for different stages in the advocacy lifecycle now by using templates and processes I was saving time that I could then reinvest in other things which means effectively we have increased the capacity of every CSM on our team by giving really strong processes and templates and removing any ambiguity from this equation now we talked earlier about of the risk inherent and advocacy by introducing all of these processes we reduce that risk most people approach all of the risk they see in advocacy by not approaching our customers but as we saw having a small pool of advocacy customers hazards own risks so we were cognizant of all of that but my absolute favorite thing that we did with our customer advocacy ladder is kept our customer centricity true as we built this and we made sure that every single stage of the advocacy ladder bra value not just us not just to our sales team but to the customers we were interacting with as well now today I'm going to show you behind the curtain and walk through loopy O's customer advocacy ladder but before we do Brent I'd love to turn it over to you for any questions so Sara I'd like to ask just one question here that I think will help understand what you're going to present here but you this the advocacy ladder need to be a complete and formalized process or is it something that you can kind of pick and choose pieces of it and implement those pieces that's a fantastic question and I am big on something that we call jab jab hook and that is you always start small I never want people to start by building outcome massive process without testing things and knowing that they'll work so introducing small bite size pieces is absolutely the way that I actually approach most things that we do on our customer success team so if you really like the process for the first rung of our ladder I would say start there there's no reason you need to have a formal process behind the entire ladder to get started great any other questions oh no problem okay so now let's go behind that curtain the first rung of loopy OHS customer advocacy ladder is to write an online review now we have two preferred review websites G to crowd and kaptara so we'll reach out to our customer and ask them to review their experience with our platform and team on one of those to review websites in terms of timing we're putting that requesting or considering it for a request as soon as a customer exits onboarding and that's because it's a really high touch stage in the relationship we know exactly what success metrics we were looking for we've considered the risk fairly low we have a really high buildup of those reviews already in terms of value for lupillo we're driving on lead generation brand awareness and trust building but what about the values for our customer well whenever possible we like to work with G to crowd on their initiative G to crowd gives to make sure that they're actually donating money for every review received so our customer can leave this experience feeling really good not only did they help other people discover a lupillo but they also helped donate to charity eat all it took them was a few minutes of their time so it's a really positive experience overall for our customer now you might have noticed I said the first trigger point s when we're considering this customer for advocacy sometimes we'll have a customer and they'll be exiting onboarding things are looking pretty good they're just not quite where we want them to be so in that situation can I just ask my customer anyway no we our customer success professionals we never compromise our relationship with our customers to put them in this advocacy ladder that is not what we're about we are not interested in forcing our customers up this ladder but we don't want to miss out on opportunities either so what we'll do is delay that request by a month and then we'll reconsider it and if the customers still not ready we'll delay it again by doing this we're ensuring that we're not leaving any opportunity on the table we're putting our customer relationship first and we're making sure that our review websites are now seated with reviews from the entire customer lifecycle so our customers are writing that review on their experience with our platform and our team and we know that's important because like I said we invest in those customer relationships once we've got that review written we'll schedule our next rigor and that brings us to the next rung of our advocacy ladder not to be a reference for us this reference situation I'm not on the call I'm directly connecting a late-stage sales prospect with one of my customers so in terms of risk a little bit higher how do I know what my customer is likely to say when they're given full license to speak freely without me there well they just wrote a review I was pretty public I have a good idea about what they care about and what they're likely to talk about so in terms of timing this is coming in three months after that first request we want to give a little bit of time to the other requests should not be quite so top of bind but still keep things timely make sure that we're not letting go of these opportunities now in terms of value for lupillo that's pretty clear we're helping to build trust and close deals I don't think anyone needs an explanation about why it's so valuable to help close deals what about our customers they're spending time sometimes these calls we've heard go up to a full hour talking to somebody else well for our customers because we've grown the number of reference customers available we're now doing really targeted curated pairing so we're connecting people in the same industry in similar rules and our customers are constantly telling us that they love doing these reference calls because they're growing their network in a highly curated way and they're learning from these companies as they talk to them now there are two stages left of our customer advocacy ladder and I are what I'd consider to be elite advocacy asks which means sometimes customers get stuck at the reference stage so that's fine we'll let them sit there for a full six months we'll actually let them sit there for a full year but I mean eventually something's got to give right we want to get to that next rung of our ladder so can you just bump them up to the next rung no we never compromise our customer relationship to force them up this ladder we our customer success professionals and we put the customer first time's the time is right and the relationship is there and our customer is using our platform in compelling and exciting and innovative ways and my customer is ready to write a case study now when it comes to a case study we wait six months from the last request but it's always a full year after our customer signed up with us so that's a 13 month mark and that one-year mark is really really important and that's because what tends to happen is the one year mark your customer just renewed so that means your term risk is way down you know they're invested in this relationship you also know they're not going to try to use that case study as a bargaining chip on that renewal this is a really important time and we have great success metrics you already have proven ROI of that first year so the story is just really rich and compelling at that stage now in terms of risk a little bit higher because it's a really big investment of time why we're waiting till the one-year mark and it's why we're always doing a discovery call to make sure that there's a really compelling story there in terms of value for us we're driving at lead generation very clear proof of ROI and thought leadership for the industry and for our customers but what about the customer that's doing this case study with us well for them we are shining a spotlight on the phenomenal work they are doing we're not just making our first where look great we're making our Court contact or customer champion look phenomenal because we know they're doing really creative exciting and innovative things and we want to make sure that's showcase now this is a great resource for our champions to you when it comes to any time they're looking to build their careers I have one more rung to my customer advocacy ladder and it's what I would consider to be a Big Kahuna of advocacy ask the customer spotlight webinar now in this webinar I'm taking one customer and putting them in front of all of my other customers and a select group of sales prospects so in terms of risk yeah we're talking a pretty high risk here how do I know that this customer not only has stories to tell I can draw you in I want them to be compelling and exciting and engaging but I just wrote a case study with them we have spent a lot of time together lately I know that I can get you excited about the really cool stuff they're doing now with these webinars there's an extra value that we don't see with anything else and that's because it is a live webinar it's really easy with a quote even a review huh you know make a few tweak but the amount of trust that you can build in a live webinar when someone speaks about their experience can be replicated many of these other forms we're also not posting these on our website this is not publicly available information it's a gated resource that our customer success team reuses but our prospects know they are getting in on a very scarce resource so for a customer success team we can use this for content marketing but from a sales perspective creating that scarcity in that excitement so webinars count great but how does this actually play out what is a spotlight webinar look like well could be me talking to you Rob wonder who works at IBM Watson health walks us through the entire journey from his first day and he's the new guy and things are messy and chaotic and everything's kind of flying everywhere and so he introduces just a little process because remember he's the new guy it goes really really well so he keeps going and he implements another one and then he implements lupillo and he keeps going all the way through to when his former company merged was acquired by IBM Watson health and that acquisition went seamlessly and their processes folded beautifully into this massive organization or it could look like me talking to Christie Fitzgerald he works at sprinkler now sprinkler has over 200 people collaborating on RFPs if you don't know a lot about RFPs that is a lot so she joins our audience to tell them about how they have this beautiful marriage of process culture and technology that allow them to scale this collaboration so what are our customers getting out of this well they're learning from experts in their field they may not have a lot of other opportunities to connect directly to the experts and leaders who are doing really creative compelling and innovative things here we've been really really lucky that everyone has done a webinar with us has I actually shared their contact information so our customers can follow up directly with them after these webinars so for lupillo this is how we chose to build our advocacy ladder we have a review a reference a case study and then a customer spotlight webinar french does anyone have any questions about this advocacy ladder got some great questions and thank you for laying out the steps to your ladder so clearly first question here is from nyam I hope I pronounced that name right how much of loopy OHS advocacy ladder is automated that's a phenomenal question so I think when it comes to advocacy as long as you're dealing with a mid touch to high touch kind of customer relationship you don't want any automation everything is a semi automated approach where we know when those touch points should happen we have templates we can use as a starting point or as a resource but I don't want any advocacy requests going out before there are eyes on it and somebody sending that and making a decision about whether it's the right time could be that you know that customers and they're crazy busy season and next week will be way better we know we'll get better results if we have that human intervention set great and a low touch environment I imagine as long as you were careful about it and built the right filters and right triggers you could also automate certain steps especially maybe the first thing and the first problem absolutely or you could choose an automation approach where you automated follow-ups so in a lower touch or a tech touched kind of customer success relationship I think that has a lot of application great now we did have a question from Jennifer about the review sites you mentioned you mentioned G to crowd and kaptara as your two main review sites that you focus on we like those as well and I just mentioned several others in the chat window other review sites that are commonly used include Gartner's pure insight it's small business software advice and I'm sure there are others as well those are some good review sites that I'm familiar with absolutely era Frances hasn't asked another question as well what are the KPIs you use to determine how successful this latter is that is a great question so I have a few slides on that that we'll be talking about shortly but I think that what's really really exciting is that we are now using advocacy as a core metric we're tracking our team on so every single advocacy win is tracked and we are keeping track of how many advocacy requests each CSM is achieving on a quarterly basis so advocacy wins is the main KPI we're looking at we know that when it comes to application case studies are used in basically every single sale that happens we know references are using about 50% of our sales that are closing reviews bring a lot of people directly to our platform so we know we're getting a lot of value from these advocacy requests the main thing that we're tracking is how many each CSM is able to basically close excellent thank you no problem one more cut one more quick comment on the review site as you begin an advocacy ladder if you are just starting out Sarah would you recommend as I would focusing on maybe one or two review sites exclusively and building up a substantial base reviews with one or two absolutely I think that focus is incredibly important here because then you have the ability to if a place sales prospects prospect to ask for a reference on the first call you can point them to a single review website where they can get a really thorough detailed overview of their experience and let them know that you will happily connect them with a prospect or with a reference customer but a little bit later so you get a lot more value out of these review websites when you have one or two that have a really substantial base of reviews that's been built wonderful questions here but I'll I think we'll save those for the end okay perfect so we've looked at the lupillo advocacy ladder now I'd love to talk a little bit about the problem that we solved here with our advocacy ladder we've managed to amplify our brand awareness effectively position ourselves against competitors most prospects down the sales funnel and levered advocacy to build customer relationships instead of risking them by implementing really strong processes we've made sure that we're not sending advocacy requests before it would be appropriate we also are making sure that we're sending vetted approved emails that has a high conversion rate we're creating compelling resources and not leaving opportunities on the table we've also managed to reduce the burden on our reference customers by making sure that we have a really big pool of reference customers available when it comes to reviews we're giving people to spark of an idea so they can avoid that dreaded writer's block and we're making sure that we're never reaching out to people too soon before they'd have anything to say we've cleared the fog when it comes to those resources so they all have really compelling stories that can be shared and very clear success metrics now when it comes to our reviews we've made sure that they never grow stale and they stay very very fresh we've also reframed the reference experience from something where you could have a contentious experience or an unhappy customer a situation where you always have a really great experience for everybody on the line now some of you may be sitting at your desks and thinking yeah those are cute pictures but show me the numbers so let's dive in today's 36 percent of our customers have written a review 30 percent of the more references for us we've developed seven case studies we hosted four spotlight webinar and we have our fists coming up in about two weeks thanks to our advocacy ladder we have a strong presence on g2 crab and kaptara now on g2 crowd you were named as a runner-up for mark sasnett's where we went head-to-head against 64 they're big named tech companies we've been named a high performer in our category and listed on the top b2b canadian tech list now for those reference customers not only are they being paired with really strong fit people but we've also managed to reduce the load from about once every quarter to closer to once every six weeks now as a team every single advocacy request we're putting in is tracked so systematic scalable very clear tracking which means we can use this as a core metric for everyone on our team and it's reducing the load on the customer success managers because they have no more ambiguity they know what to send and when now there may be some of you who've been watching and are interested in creating your own advocacy letter now if so I hope you know the keyboard shortcut to take a screenshot if not you're going to get a recording of this webinar so you can just zoom to this next slide but I have a few steps you can follow here now the first is to identify the advocacy asks that drives value for your organization on every single step of our advocacy ladder we identify the value that's being created if you can't articulate the value it does not go on your ladder next you want to rank those advocacy asks by risk and investment from your team and your customers team you want to know which advocacy asks should proceed other by how long then you'll want to create email templates and test them there is no point in creating a beautiful process driven approach and then using resources that don't convert from there identify the trigger points as you saw we have a trigger point that are time based but also potentially based on the last advocacy ray request so be flexible play around with them see what works for your customers now the last step is really really important you probably have customers today there may be opportunities that haven't been captured yet so evaluate that existing customer base you don't want to hit them up for three advocacy requests all in one week but get them started on that ladder see where there are opportunities you can take advantage of today now I mentioned that one of the things I love is every time we've done a customer spotlight webinar the person who shared their contact information I wanted to do the same for the client success community today so feel free to reach out to me you have my email here and my LinkedIn information I'm happy to answer any questions that the audience has now if you've been listening and thinking Gubbio sounds pretty cool and wonder what they do we are a SAS company as I mentioned they stay out of Toronto Canada and we help the people to respond to RFPs RFI's and security questionnaires faster and more efficiently so we really scale that process and allow people to collaborate and automate as much of that as we can so if you do any RFP as your security questionnaire to really fantastic software I definitely recommend you check it out or email me with questions and I just wanted to thank all of you so much for taking your morning afternoon lunch hour whatever time it is for you to walk through the advocacy ladder with me today it's been fantastic and Brett why don't we turn it back over to you for any questions we do have several great questions here that I think we'll be able to answer so we'll try and get to as many of these as possible and thank you Sara also for the excellent presentation Michaela asked have you ever included a product feedback interview in your advocacy options that's a really great question so as an organization we are known for being very feedback focused most of our customers know that their feedback is sort of constantly you log followed up on and so once they've been brought into product feedback conversations they've all kind of been like thoroughly excited this like out of their mind very excited to get the opportunity to get in front of our products team so for us that's already happening organically it wouldn't quite fit into our ladder but if this is something you're finding challenges with today I think it would be a really high value addition to your advocacy ladder great and as you mentioned it should be a major positive for the customer right the opportunity to give their feedback and participate in the process should be a major relationship so they're absolutely other end oh go ahead Heather asked how are GSM is being measured is there an incentive structure tied to the advocacy ladder right now there is no incentive structure tied to advocacy it's a core measurement we're looking at I haven't spoken to other leaders of customer success teams who are building out bonus structures around advocacy I think what I've heard most often from other people I'm talking to you is that it's typically bonus based instead of something that might be a little bit more Commission based excellent okay so it's an auction it's something to consider yes we're not doing it but I have heard from others that they've implemented it awesome and and I am asked we like to ask customers to speak at events for us where would you place this on the ladder for example would this be a rung above webinars so I think that would depend on the different items that you put onto your ladder but absolutely that seems like it's a really high investment activity you probably have a smaller pool of customers that are already sought leaders who are speaking out at these conferences I would that is likely towards the top end of the ladder if not at the very top I would consider that to be a elite advocacy ask and I love some of the ideas that are being brought up here because it shows that there are many ways you can customize and build your own ladder you know yours may be 2 steps it may be 10 but there are some great concepts in here that will work for your business that you know maybe we haven't mentioned so keep bringing those up one more question here from Andrew Andrew asks how might your customer advocacy strategy be different when dealing with enterprise customers versus SMB customers and I think we addressed this a little bit but maybe we could kind of recap what we said about how the strategy differs with enterprise versus SMB customers absolutely so earlier we were talking about the approach to force reaching out to these customers if you're dealing with SMB you might have more of a tech touch approach where you're willing to do a little bit more automation here automation for the initial outreach automation for the follow-up you could do things like when someone's hit certain success criteria with your platform or with your team those emails are sent automatically I would also say that you might want to focus more so on the scalable advocacy requests so things like webinars you need to have some sort of phone call human relationship there to make sure that that customers ready and confident and will look right after this webinar so that might be a better fit for more of an enterprise relationship whereas SMB you might focus on more review website so I would say you want to focus on those things that needs less human intervention at that side of the scale wonderful now jumping back to the KPIs that we mentioned amuro's asks about the KPIs and ask is each advocacy win when a customer goes up to the next rung or is it when they complete the latter oh that's a great question so it is next rung I think that one thing see if the ladder would be a little bit a little bit too much to wait until that webinar was hosted and we want to make sure people feel motivated along the way so we want to give them those wins program instead of waiting in the very end of the letter wonderful and one more question here Monica asks about how often you reach out to a customer for reference what is the recommended cadence and is oh that's good oh this is when someone's agreed to be a reference how often we're reaching out to them to leverage that reference request for us this number used to be a lot higher when we had a smaller pool of reference customers it was probably once every six weeks or so I would say that's definitely on the high end I prefer about once per quarter roughly um a sort of a general guideline but this might be restricted by what pool of reference customers is available to you this is one area where I think focusing on just one review website if you don't already have a good base build-up can be very high value because that way if you have a really really early-stage sales prospect you can say hey we have all of these great reviews online if you can go there once or later in this cycle will absolutely connect you with a customer we just want to be respectful of everyone's time awesome Dana has a comment you know maybe not all customers are are destined to make it to the top of the ladder you find that to be the case that this is not everyone even really can make it to the top absolutely and that's completely ok if you ever got some rude sitting at one stage of the ladder that's fine that's also where if you have to review websites you could say they wrote a review three months later they're not going to be considered for the next year but maybe they would write another review on that other review website so you can get creative even if company staying at the same stage of the ladder into how you can continue to build advocacy that relationship well thank you Sarah this concept is excellent your presentation was wonderful clear as to why you were a finalist in this competition if you'd like to open the invitation to participate in the 2018 customer success innovator of the Year award you can find the forum on the cs100 summit website and we'll make that available shortly as we mentioned previously a recorded version of this webinar will be emailed to everyone who registered for the webinar client success is here to help we are incredibly passionate about helping you deliver value for customers through customer success processes and because of our passion we built industry-leading technology to help you we have many other resources available I would highly recommend visiting the