During Pulse Europe, 2018 (https://www.gainsight.com/pulse/europe/2018/) the Gainsight Client Outcomes Team organized a Circles of Success Program, featuring group discussions for the attendees focused on key topics and challenges. We wanted to keep the conversation going on Community.





One of the topics we discussed was Advocacy Management. Here are a few of the questions and the corresponding topics that we discussed:





1. What customer activities do you consider advocacy? Who owns advocacy?





2. What creative things have you implemented to drive advocacy?





3. What about your customer experience creates advocates?





4. How do you leverage your customer advocates?





5. What points in the lifecycle or touches do you identify advocates?





6. How do you prevent “reference fatigue”?





7. How and where do you track advocacy events?





8. Do you provide any incentives for your customers to become an advocate? Which incentives have you found more useful than others?





9. Do you expire advocacy assets such as case studies after using them for a certain period of time?





10. Do you educate your customers on how they can create advocates in their businesses? (e.g. channel or B2B)





11. How are others building their advocate groups without use of a community/software platform?





12. What ways have you found to be most useful in keeping them engaged?





13. How can you drive operationalized customer advocacy across all customer facing teams?





Following points were discussed:





• Some of our customers are leveraging our Sponsor Tracking features to follow advocates as they move or change jobs





• Needed to find a way to operationalize when a sponsor moved





• One group mentioned that they bake advocacy requests into the contract and the customer has to pay a higher premium if they will not advocate





• The group was very wary about reference fatigue and had to be very careful not to abuse the customers who have been willing references in the past





• Good conversation around what the proper incentives were for being a reference. Some of the options were:.gift Cards, Discount on licenses, Spa Days. For some cases there were no.gifts allowed as there were government contracts involved





• None of the groups had a great platform figured out for managing and referencing/tracking the collateral they collected





Please also follow this thread if you're interested in additional Circles of Success activities related to Advocacy Management.