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The Playbook to Building a Customer Reference Program with ...
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Our net retention rate was over 130%, so we have this really great pool of customers that all we needed to do was kind of find them. One great way is to figure out who your advocates are or who are the people that love your product. We’ll talk in a couple minutes about how do you actually find those people. Another great opportunity is improvement versus the prior provider. Many times your customers maybe choosing your service because of some sort of pain that they had in the past. If you’re able to identify the customers who had really explicit pain with their prior provider that drove them to choose your solution, these are going to be really great customers to enlist as advocates as well. “Another way that customers become advocates is a personal relationship with the account team.” Great support experience. Then finally, one that I love and we spent a lot of time talking about a Talkdesk is this notion of overcoming a challenge together. I think often we think about the customers that have experienced pain with our company as customers that we need to kind of tiptoe around or that may be unlikely to want to be an advocate for us. But honestly, it’s generally the exact opposite. When you are able to overcome a challenge, and sometimes it’s even Talkdesk’s fault, right? Let’s say we messed something up in the implementation. We thought we were going to be able to do something in a week and it takes 10 days or 14 days.
QUESTION 9: How does that relationship work? “whoever owns the relationship is often the one who starts to promote the advocacy program.” QUESTION 10: You were talking about the references and getting them ready, but let’s say if an AE has all the accounts, does it often happen that the AE actually bypasses you guys and reaches out to their accounts directly?
I need to know how do customers become advocates, right, so that I can try to harness that. Then we’re going to need to talk about how do I find them, what are the tactics that I can use to identify who my advocates are. Then once you’ve started to identify like what is the composition look and feel size of my advocacy pool, then we’re going to talk about what do you actually do to start building that program out. In terms of answering the question, how do customers become advocates, we can probably all relate to this emotionally, right, because we’re all buyers of one service or another. The number one reason is going to be love for your product. This is something that when I joined Talkdesk I was so fortunate. Engagement with our product was already so high. “Another great opportunity is improvement versus the prior provider.” This also ties, by the way, into a really good presale process around documentation of new business opportunities. What’s the pain point? Why are they going to choose Talkdesk over another provider? What are we trying to solve for? Making sure that all of that is documented on the new sale opportunity allows us to very quickly mine that to identify who may be an advocate for us. Another way that customers become advocates is a personal relationship with the account team. They’re going to develop a really close relationship with a sales representative. Hopefully, you’ve got a good client services team, a customer success or support organization that’s building one-to-one relationships. You can seek to find customers that that talk about those relationships as well.
Our net retention rate was over 130%, so we have this really great pool of customers that all we needed to do was kind of find them. One great way is to figure out who your advocates are or who are the people that love your product. We’ll talk in a couple minutes about how do you actually find those people. Another great opportunity is improvement versus the prior provider. Many times your customers maybe choosing your service because of some sort of pain that they had in the past. If you’re able to identify the customers who had really explicit pain with their prior provider that drove them to choose your solution, these are going to be really great customers to enlist as advocates as well. “Another way that customers become advocates is a personal relationship with the account team.” Great support experience. Then finally, one that I love and we spent a lot of time talking about a Talkdesk is this notion of overcoming a challenge together. I think often we think about the customers that have experienced pain with our company as customers that we need to kind of tiptoe around or that may be unlikely to want to be an advocate for us. But honestly, it’s generally the exact opposite. When you are able to overcome a challenge, and sometimes it’s even Talkdesk’s fault, right? Let’s say we messed something up in the implementation. We thought we were going to be able to do something in a week and it takes 10 days or 14 days.
Right? We have to be brave enough to just kind of throw it out there and ask the question bluntly. We can also ask informally during a catch-up call, a site visit, personal email out to a ballgame, would you be willing to be an advocate for Talkdesk? Then a third thing that you can do is incorporate it into the contract. Either in a new business deal or in a renewal engagement, there’s always that negotiation that’s happening. What am I going to give? What am I going to get? One of the things Talkdesk likes to think about at that contractual phase is, okay, so a customer may be asking for discount or customer may be asking for like specific payment terms that we don’t offer, whatever it is, we can say, “Okay, well, if we’re willing to give this few, might you be willing to be an advocate for us?” “This is a really great way to find your advocates because generally speaking, the customers who sign up and come out to the happy hour or the luncheon or whatever it is, they like you.” What are the considerations? I want to spend a couple of minutes on each of these because I’ve debated them and we’ve also changed our tactics a little bit overtime at Talkdesk. The first one that we go back and forth with a lot and it is a basically philosophical decision is, is this going to be an incentivized program or is it going to be a rewarded program? An incentivized program, you often use a software solution, one that’s very popular as Influitive, that you encourage people to join this program, and they know that if they do whatever it is, the customer reference call, the case study, the live presentation, the webinar, the onsite visit, that they’re going to get something, right? It’s almost like a point system where if you do this, then you get Y. That is an incentivized program.
People who you find that are repetitively thanking your support team, they’ve got an emotional connection to your organization, these are great people to target as advocates. NPS surveys. We run a NPS survey right within Talkdesk. We get a couple of thousand responses every single month. We look at those in real time. We’ve got a Slack bot set up and we see every NPS survey that comes through one by one. Those are great people for us to engage with to be advocates. This is for references, but also the broader advocacy program. Targeted customer feedback surveys. This is actually something that we’ve only just started. We’re identifying what we consider to be our primary contacts for our customer relationship, technical users, business users, budget decision makers, primary administrators of the product. “CSM, account manager, AE, whoever is kind of running point as the quarterback of the relationship, they can also just ask.” Right? We have to be brave enough to just kind of throw it out there and ask the question bluntly. We can also ask informally during a catch-up call, a site visit, personal email out to a ballgame, would you be willing to be an advocate for Talkdesk? Then a third thing that you can do is incorporate it into the contract. Either in a new business deal or in a renewal engagement, there’s always that negotiation that’s happening. What am I going to give? What am I going to get? One of the things Talkdesk likes to think about at that contractual phase is, okay, so a customer may be asking for discount or customer may be asking for like specific payment terms that we don’t offer, whatever it is, we can say, “Okay, well, if we’re willing to give this few, might you be willing to be an advocate for us?”
We’re sending them surveys that help us collect key information for the marketing team, the product team, but also general feedback on the services organization. Positive sentiment around that and willingness to fill that survey out, these are going to be people who are willing to be your advocates. The way we normally do this as companies is really this fourth bullet, but there’s so much else that we could be considering, but let’s not forget the one-to-one relationship. CSM, account manager, AE, whoever is kind of running point as the quarterback of the relationship, they can also just ask. They can ask formally in a QBR setting. You could create some slide where that says, “Talkdesk customer advocacy program. Here are the benefits to you. Here are the benefits to us. Are you willing to sign up?” “We can also ask informally during a catch-up call, a site visit, personal email out to a ballgame, would you be willing to be an advocate for Talkdesk?” That’s another point in time where you can start to engage around that topic. Then finally, local event attendance. Talkdesk has invested a lot in the last year in local event attendance for both customers and prospects. This is a really great way to find your advocates because generally speaking, the customers who sign up and come out to the happy hour or the luncheon or whatever it is, they like you. They’re good folks to talk to, to engage with in your advocacy program. Now, we’ve talked about who your advocates are and how you can find them. Now, we need to start thinking about, I’m ready to build and scale my advocacy program, what are the things that I need to be thinking about? What are the decisions that I need to make as I build that program out?
You are very well established and you don’t necessarily need to run this program. My guess is that if you guys chose to attend today’s session, these do not apply to you, so I’ll just kind of move forward into – think about how you actually build a customer reference program. I’ll come back to some of these buts a few minutes later. You’re going to create a customer reference program, but there needs to be some criteria boundaries in order to supply customer references. We’ll talk a little bit about how you create those boundaries and norms with the sales team. Then you should also really be striving to amplify your advocate’s voice through 1:many activities. “Those one-to-one customer reference calls are really critical, but there is so much more that you can do to amplify their voices to create many opportunities for them to share their voice with multiple prospective customers.” Those customers are some of our most powerful references because we get to bring them in and they tell the story not only of what it’s been like to work with Talkdesk over many years, but they also get to tell our innovation story for us. So much of what Talkdesk sells on is innovation and trust. To be able to have a customer who’s been with you for years and even from the early days to come in and tell that story with you is, is really helpful. Now, I joined Talkdesk kind of in the second stage, which is, hooray, you’ve got enough customers that you’re able to do references potentially at scale. It’s really nothing a little bit of elbow grease can’t solve. At that point, often you’re using your customer success team, your AE team to really kind of manually manage this process there.
Frankly, my honest reaction was like, “Wait, isn’t it the sales team’s responsibility to be closing this customer? Why do I have to go ask one of my customers that I’m trying to protect and focus on kind of core Talkdesk product advocacy or product adoption? Why do they need to be involved in that process?” I don’t know if any of you have ever experienced that, but me coming into Talkdesk, I wasn’t familiar with this. A lot of what I’m going to talk about today is my learning experience and how we went from a relatively small customer reference program to what we have today, which is really kind of a humming machine. “There are very few situations in which customer reference programs aren’t going to be really, really critical to your new business sale cycle.” You are very well established and you don’t necessarily need to run this program. My guess is that if you guys chose to attend today’s session, these do not apply to you, so I’ll just kind of move forward into – think about how you actually build a customer reference program. I’ll come back to some of these buts a few minutes later. You’re going to create a customer reference program, but there needs to be some criteria boundaries in order to supply customer references. We’ll talk a little bit about how you create those boundaries and norms with the sales team. Then you should also really be striving to amplify your advocate’s voice through 1:many activities.
Frankly, my honest reaction was like, “Wait, isn’t it the sales team’s responsibility to be closing this customer? Why do I have to go ask one of my customers that I’m trying to protect and focus on kind of core Talkdesk product advocacy or product adoption? Why do they need to be involved in that process?” I don’t know if any of you have ever experienced that, but me coming into Talkdesk, I wasn’t familiar with this. A lot of what I’m going to talk about today is my learning experience and how we went from a relatively small customer reference program to what we have today, which is really kind of a humming machine. “You’re probably going to have to be doing customer references unless there’s very small contract value, right, where there’s not a ton of pressure in making the right decision on the part of the prospective buyer.” You are very well established and you don’t necessarily need to run this program. My guess is that if you guys chose to attend today’s session, these do not apply to you, so I’ll just kind of move forward into – think about how you actually build a customer reference program. I’ll come back to some of these buts a few minutes later. You’re going to create a customer reference program, but there needs to be some criteria boundaries in order to supply customer references. We’ll talk a little bit about how you create those boundaries and norms with the sales team. Then you should also really be striving to amplify your advocate’s voice through 1:many activities.
Hi, everyone. My name is Gillian Heltai. I’m the senior vice president of client services at Talkdesk. At Talkdesk today, the client services organization is 90 people strong and we are responsible for making sure that our customers both in the pre-sale and the post-sale process are able to design and then achieve their desired outcomes. I’ve been at Talkdesk for a little over two and a half years. In that time, we became the first-ever or the youngest company ever to enter the Gartner Magic Quadrant, the Gardner CCaaS Magic Quadrant. We raised $100 million. We became a unicorn. Really importantly for the purposes of today’s topic, our average deal size increased by three 3.5X over that two and a half years. “we’re going to need a reference for this customer that we’re trying to close to help us help sell the deal.” Frankly, my honest reaction was like, “Wait, isn’t it the sales team’s responsibility to be closing this customer? Why do I have to go ask one of my customers that I’m trying to protect and focus on kind of core Talkdesk product advocacy or product adoption? Why do they need to be involved in that process?” I don’t know if any of you have ever experienced that, but me coming into Talkdesk, I wasn’t familiar with this. A lot of what I’m going to talk about today is my learning experience and how we went from a relatively small customer reference program to what we have today, which is really kind of a humming machine.
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Our net retention rate was over 130%, so we have this really great pool of customers that all we needed to do was kind of find them. One great way is to figure out who your advocates are or who are the people that love your product. We’ll talk in a couple minutes about how do you actually find those people. Another great opportunity is improvement versus the prior provider. Many times your customers maybe choosing your service because of some sort of pain that they had in the past. If you’re able to identify the customers who had really explicit pain with their prior provider that drove them to choose your solution, these are going to be really great customers to enlist as advocates as well. “Making sure that all of that is documented on the new sale opportunity allows us to very quickly mine that to identify who may be an advocate for us.” Great support experience. Then finally, one that I love and we spent a lot of time talking about a Talkdesk is this notion of overcoming a challenge together. I think often we think about the customers that have experienced pain with our company as customers that we need to kind of tiptoe around or that may be unlikely to want to be an advocate for us. But honestly, it’s generally the exact opposite. When you are able to overcome a challenge, and sometimes it’s even Talkdesk’s fault, right? Let’s say we messed something up in the implementation. We thought we were going to be able to do something in a week and it takes 10 days or 14 days.
Right? We have to be brave enough to just kind of throw it out there and ask the question bluntly. We can also ask informally during a catch-up call, a site visit, personal email out to a ballgame, would you be willing to be an advocate for Talkdesk? Then a third thing that you can do is incorporate it into the contract. Either in a new business deal or in a renewal engagement, there’s always that negotiation that’s happening. What am I going to give? What am I going to get? One of the things Talkdesk likes to think about at that contractual phase is, okay, so a customer may be asking for discount or customer may be asking for like specific payment terms that we don’t offer, whatever it is, we can say, “Okay, well, if we’re willing to give this few, might you be willing to be an advocate for us?” “This is a really great way to find your advocates because generally speaking, the customers who sign up and come out to the happy hour or the luncheon or whatever it is, they like you.” What are the considerations? I want to spend a couple of minutes on each of these because I’ve debated them and we’ve also changed our tactics a little bit overtime at Talkdesk. The first one that we go back and forth with a lot and it is a basically philosophical decision is, is this going to be an incentivized program or is it going to be a rewarded program? An incentivized program, you often use a software solution, one that’s very popular as Influitive, that you encourage people to join this program, and they know that if they do whatever it is, the customer reference call, the case study, the live presentation, the webinar, the onsite visit, that they’re going to get something, right? It’s almost like a point system where if you do this, then you get Y. That is an incentivized program.
Our net retention rate was over 130%, so we have this really great pool of customers that all we needed to do was kind of find them. One great way is to figure out who your advocates are or who are the people that love your product. We’ll talk in a couple minutes about how do you actually find those people. Another great opportunity is improvement versus the prior provider. Many times your customers maybe choosing your service because of some sort of pain that they had in the past. If you’re able to identify the customers who had really explicit pain with their prior provider that drove them to choose your solution, these are going to be really great customers to enlist as advocates as well. “You can seek to find customers that that talk about those relationships as well.” Great support experience. Then finally, one that I love and we spent a lot of time talking about a Talkdesk is this notion of overcoming a challenge together. I think often we think about the customers that have experienced pain with our company as customers that we need to kind of tiptoe around or that may be unlikely to want to be an advocate for us. But honestly, it’s generally the exact opposite. When you are able to overcome a challenge, and sometimes it’s even Talkdesk’s fault, right? Let’s say we messed something up in the implementation. We thought we were going to be able to do something in a week and it takes 10 days or 14 days.
You are very well established and you don’t necessarily need to run this program. My guess is that if you guys chose to attend today’s session, these do not apply to you, so I’ll just kind of move forward into – think about how you actually build a customer reference program. I’ll come back to some of these buts a few minutes later. You’re going to create a customer reference program, but there needs to be some criteria boundaries in order to supply customer references. We’ll talk a little bit about how you create those boundaries and norms with the sales team. Then you should also really be striving to amplify your advocate’s voice through 1:many activities. “Years from now they’re going to be your absolute best references.” Those customers are some of our most powerful references because we get to bring them in and they tell the story not only of what it’s been like to work with Talkdesk over many years, but they also get to tell our innovation story for us. So much of what Talkdesk sells on is innovation and trust. To be able to have a customer who’s been with you for years and even from the early days to come in and tell that story with you is, is really helpful. Now, I joined Talkdesk kind of in the second stage, which is, hooray, you’ve got enough customers that you’re able to do references potentially at scale. It’s really nothing a little bit of elbow grease can’t solve. At that point, often you’re using your customer success team, your AE team to really kind of manually manage this process there.
People who you find that are repetitively thanking your support team, they’ve got an emotional connection to your organization, these are great people to target as advocates. NPS surveys. We run a NPS survey right within Talkdesk. We get a couple of thousand responses every single month. We look at those in real time. We’ve got a Slack bot set up and we see every NPS survey that comes through one by one. Those are great people for us to engage with to be advocates. This is for references, but also the broader advocacy program. Targeted customer feedback surveys. This is actually something that we’ve only just started. We’re identifying what we consider to be our primary contacts for our customer relationship, technical users, business users, budget decision makers, primary administrators of the product. “CSM, account manager, AE, whoever is kind of running point as the quarterback of the relationship, they can also just ask.” Right? We have to be brave enough to just kind of throw it out there and ask the question bluntly. We can also ask informally during a catch-up call, a site visit, personal email out to a ballgame, would you be willing to be an advocate for Talkdesk? Then a third thing that you can do is incorporate it into the contract. Either in a new business deal or in a renewal engagement, there’s always that negotiation that’s happening. What am I going to give? What am I going to get? One of the things Talkdesk likes to think about at that contractual phase is, okay, so a customer may be asking for discount or customer may be asking for like specific payment terms that we don’t offer, whatever it is, we can say, “Okay, well, if we’re willing to give this few, might you be willing to be an advocate for us?”
We’re sending them surveys that help us collect key information for the marketing team, the product team, but also general feedback on the services organization. Positive sentiment around that and willingness to fill that survey out, these are going to be people who are willing to be your advocates. The way we normally do this as companies is really this fourth bullet, but there’s so much else that we could be considering, but let’s not forget the one-to-one relationship. CSM, account manager, AE, whoever is kind of running point as the quarterback of the relationship, they can also just ask. They can ask formally in a QBR setting. You could create some slide where that says, “Talkdesk customer advocacy program. Here are the benefits to you. Here are the benefits to us. Are you willing to sign up?” “We can also ask informally during a catch-up call, a site visit, personal email out to a ballgame, would you be willing to be an advocate for Talkdesk?” That’s another point in time where you can start to engage around that topic. Then finally, local event attendance. Talkdesk has invested a lot in the last year in local event attendance for both customers and prospects. This is a really great way to find your advocates because generally speaking, the customers who sign up and come out to the happy hour or the luncheon or whatever it is, they like you. They’re good folks to talk to, to engage with in your advocacy program. Now, we’ve talked about who your advocates are and how you can find them. Now, we need to start thinking about, I’m ready to build and scale my advocacy program, what are the things that I need to be thinking about? What are the decisions that I need to make as I build that program out?
QUESTION 9: How does that relationship work? “whoever owns the relationship is often the one who starts to promote the advocacy program.” QUESTION 10: You were talking about the references and getting them ready, but let’s say if an AE has all the accounts, does it often happen that the AE actually bypasses you guys and reaches out to their accounts directly?