For business-to-business software companies like SAS, the impact of customers’ advocacy is critical. These influencers can set the tone and provide a consistent positive influence throughout the customer journey. Unfortunately, this type of advocacy is tough to measure and hard to predict.
The challenge
Although a customer may be a single record in your database, she doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Each contact has a connection to others within her business or the industry. Understanding and fostering good relationships can have a huge effect on your retention and loyalty efforts.
During the effort to formalize a new customer journey, the SAS marketing team began to focus on different phases of this cycle. The customer journey contained the following phases:
• Acquisition, which includes need, research, decide and buy
• Retention, which includes adopt, use and recommend
On the retention side, the team knew from anecdotal evidence that some
SAS customers were advocates of the technology and for the company overall. In fact, several SAS geographies and divisions had data confirming the idea that finding and rewarding high-value customers led to big returns. What was lacking was an overarching program for getting customers to advocate for SAS technology.
For a larger effort, the team assessed the customer behavior data, examining those who attended events, provided feedback on surveys, sent ideas to R&D, and generally stayed engaged with the company. From a revenue standpoint, those people were often the ones advocating for the use of new SAS technologies or the expansion of the deployments.
What was less understood was the reach of these influencers and how their activities affected others within the account. With that information, SAS could identify advocates and nurture that behavior.
The approach
The SAS marketing team members started by digging into the data they had on customers. They first identified a segment of the top accounts, which contained more than 20,000 individual contacts. Once identified, the team began to examine the behaviors exhibited by that group:
• Live event attendance
• Website traffic
• Technical support queries
• Customer satisfaction survey data
• Customer reference activity
• Webinar attendance
• White paper downloads
Simply cataloging the behaviors wasn’t enough. The team applied a scoring model for different types of interactions. This allowed the team to weight certain activities, helping further identify which customers were the best advocates –“BFFs” or “best friends forever,” as the marketing team began to call them.
The results
SAS marketing used the information to create a model that is the foundation for customer-focused data exploration. The initial effort helped shed light on how influential advocates can shape retention and additional sales. As a result, sales and marketing worked together to highlight BFFs within key accounts in an ongoing effort to foster better relationships with those key individuals.
Initiatives to locate and encourage advocates used the model to identify within customer organizations. The team then designed campaigns and outreach efforts to give these advocates the tools to foster and expand their influence.
