Will Fraser (Host): Hi and welcome to another episode of the Advocacy Channel, a customer marketing podcast by Sasquatch. I'm your host, Will Fraser and this is episode eight. In today's episode, I'm thrilled to have Scott K. Wilder join us on the show. Scott is an advisor to global technology companies and has over 20 years of experience developing customer marketing programs for companies like HubSpot, Google, Marketo, Coursera and Apple. In our conversation we chat about the importance of coordination between teams, a product approach to customer marketing, and how customer advocacy doesn't only include the customer, but also includes your employees and your partners. Hi Scott. Welcome to the Advocacy Channel.
Scott Wilder: Thank you for having me today. Looking forward to the conversation.
Will Fraser: Absolutely. And thank you so much for joining us. We've been really looking forward to this one on our side as well. One of the first questions that I like to always get from people is really, what does customer advocacy mean to you? What is that definition that you like for customer advocacy?
Scott Wilder: Yeah, it's obviously a great question. So I think everybody can be an advocate, right? So all your customers have an opportunity to be net promoters or hopefully not detractors. And when I think about customer advocacy, I think it's about how you engage with your customers and even beyond your partners to employees and partners and really think through about what you can do for them and hopefully they'll play it forward and help you out.
Will Fraser: Yeah, I think that employee note is one that I don't always hear a lot. That's really interesting - how do you see customer advocacy and the employee coming together in companies today?
Scott Wilder: There's been a lot of research done which shows the happier your employees, the better they'll do and not just on the job, but in terms of representing you with your customers. But more important than that, these days there's just a lot going on in the world. And I think really having companies focus on what they can do for an employee in terms of their learning, their mental and physical welfare, and then maybe they'll become advocates for the company. If they feel like they're spending 8, 10, 12 hours a day in a place that they really like, then hopefully they'll play it forward and either promote your company or promote your products.
Will Fraser: That's a super smart way to think about it there. Like I said, it's not something I necessarily hear people bring together with advocacy, but bang on, from my point of view.
Scott Wilder: And this just isn't like we think about advocacy, we think about gamification and getting content out of people. What I try and do and what I've learned at Intuit was - I spent about 10 years at Intuit so it influences a lot of my DNA. They really focus on learning and understanding what people want to learn in their roles and where they want to go with their careers. They have this model called Learn, Teach Learn. So if somebody learns something, they can teach to others. If you're really helping them be successful in their careers, then they're going to help somebody else.
Will Fraser: Yeah, and I love that. Learn, teach, learn. You just touched on there quickly your time at Intuit and maybe not all of our listeners know your career path. Maybe you could share some of your professional background because I think it's quite impressive and will help people understand some of the things we talk about today.
Scott Wilder: For years I was doing e-commerce and digital marketing at big companies like Apple and AOL. Then at Intuit, I was doing the same thing, working on their first small business e-commerce site. About halfway through my journey there - anybody that manages a website at a large company has to deal with product managers and marketing managers saying we need more content. Because I was working in the 90s, I basically said, show me the money, I need resources to create content. When everybody said they didn't have the budget, I created an online community that scaled overnight to 2 million people. I did community for Intuit and Google, then went to Marketo.
At that time, I felt like I only had one power - community, because I had been doing that for four or five years. So I decided to develop a growth marketing skill. There's something called the T-shaped marketer which has always influenced me - you can go broad but focus on two or three things. So I did community and growth marketing at Marketo, Adobe, Udacity, Coursera. At Udacity, because of my experience in community and advocacy, I decided to lean more into customer marketing.
And as we're seeing now, there's a huge wave, a huge growth going on in the customer marketing space. I recently joined Crowdvocate because I could continue on that journey for customer advocacy and ride this wave. My role there is customer engagement because there's an opportunity to bring together all the ways people learn about customer marketing and advocacy.
Will Fraser: It's interesting, you touch on customer marketing and this growing wave around it. We are hearing about this in a bunch of our episodes. It's almost hard to believe sometimes that customer marketing is just getting its time in the sun. Like it feels like for the last decade plus, people have talked about many of the core principles, but they've struggled to act on them. Have you seen the same around customer marketing or something different?
Scott Wilder: Yeah, I totally agree. I was just looking at my desk, I have an article printed out from 2005 talking about customer marketing being the next big thing. For me it's a little surprising, especially if you've done work in retention marketing or loyalty marketing. There are a lot of similarities. These things tend to come and go, peaks and valleys. But you know, I am surprised. But it's also a great opportunity. Maybe the pandemic has put it top of mind because at the end of the day, it's all about the customer. What we're trying to do at Crowdvocate is take some of those B2C loyalty plays and bring them into the B2B market, help companies be customer-led in their interactions and figure out how to automate that whole experience.
Will Fraser: And it's interesting you mentioned that it might be new to technology companies. This is a trend I think we're seeing, which is that strangely enough, these maybe what you might think of as not as innovative brick and mortar businesses as they're moving to digital experiences - it feels like they're more familiar with that motion than a lot of the technology companies I speak to, where they've maybe been more focused on acquisition and the top of the funnel. It's just an interesting observation. It sounds like you're seeing as well that the technology companies are learning this today.
Scott Wilder: I completely agree. When I started my career at American Express when I was really young, they were very sophisticated in terms of retention marketing because they have all that rich credit card data. For years I've been telling people, if you want to learn about good loyalty marketing or retention marketing, and they're not the same but they're closely aligned, go to the other industries whether it's B2C, financial institutions - they're great schools to learn about loyalty marketing.
Will Fraser: Yeah, absolutely. Now, one of the things you have such a rich background of looking at everything from growth marketing to retention marketing, loyalty marketing. One of the things that I think is really interesting is we're seeing more and more of this exist inside of a product. It's inside of an experience. And one of the things we had talked about in a previous conversation was really around the onboarding experience and how this plays into customer advocacy. I'd love you to share what you shared with me before around that topic.
Scott Wilder: Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about onboarding - I think our conversation started it, so thank you. I tend to be a bit of an archeologist and think about how we handled certain activities in previous companies. I find that when companies develop onboarding, they go into a room and come up with this really great plan, but then that's it - it's a one and done experience. I really believe that onboarding is something that when you create it, you should learn from it and tweak the process as you go through it over time. It can start in the product, even start before the product. Again, I'm coming from a SaaS world, so that registration process, especially if you have single sign-on. I think the first thing is to take that evolutionary approach and you have to almost put it on your calendar to say once a month we're going to look at the metrics and see how we can improve it.
Will Fraser: And what I like that you touched on there briefly is these moments of community coming into onboarding and education coming into onboarding, of course product adoption coming into onboarding. I feel like those can live as separate islands in the world today of customer marketing and advocacy. Any thoughts or experience around that?
Scott Wilder: Man, you must be looking over my shoulder because I've been writing a lot about this lately. Let's look at community, education and knowledge base like a key triad in many companies. There are very few companies I've worked at where the leaders of those teams have been in the same room on a consistent basis. And they're all trying to do similar things - they're helping a person get an answer to their question. It's kind of a personal mission for me to try and get these people in the same room. I like acronyms, so I'm calling it the COP now - the Content Operations person who can consistently get these people in the same room.
Alan Adler has written a lot recently about ecosystems and trying to get the individuals in your company who interact with different customer types or different people types together. One person might interact with partners, one with customers, one with advocates. Get them all in the room. He's even advocating his acronym - not mine - a new CEO, the Chief Ecosystem Officer.
Will Fraser: Well, and I like that idea, the COP or the CEO. That idea of someone who's just helping bring those groups together because like you said, their mission is the same, but obviously their point of view is a little different. I kind of personally connect to that COP one because I feel like there's a little bit of keeping it in line and trying to organize that group so they're on the same message and collaborating.
Scott Wilder: Completely agree. Every employee's heart's in the right place - they all want to do the right thing. The problem is, say you manage the academy and I manage community and we go into these meetings and we put up our engagement metrics, but sometimes we forget that it could be the same customers. So I think it starts with having that COP or CEO - CEO is probably a gentler way, COP is harsh. And then secondly, having shared metrics is another thing. Let's face it, we're all really busy, and getting that time on the calendar when people are in the same room or zoom, they can partner together. I'm really blessed now that I work at a small startup because you can get all these people in the same room easily whereas in a large company, there's a lot of stuff going on.
Will Fraser: Yeah, you might be aiming for the quarterly or annual meeting and it gets a little bit harder to keep those things on the rails. So we're kind of talking this as though these roles exist, but this really seems like a future looking view today. Right. That this isn't something you're normally seeing in organizations just yet, but something you think will emerge over the next few years. Is that fair?
Scott Wilder: Yeah, they definitely don't exist today. When I left HubSpot two months ago, I really made a personal commitment to start writing about it and seeing what I can do to help this. And if people don't believe in it, they can ignore me. But I had been working with Crowdvocate for over a year. Gal, the CEO there, he and I talked a lot about where customer marketing is going, where the industry is going and we were very aligned in our vision. One thing that we're doing that is different, we've actually split marketing - we have somebody who's in charge of marketing, responsible for the brand, positioning, top of the funnel website as well as product content. Then we have myself who's responsible for thought leadership, best practices, how to sort of approach. We're trying out this model. In a smaller company obviously we're talking to each other, but we're also trying to break it down into smaller pieces.
Will Fraser: You know, that's interesting seeing that split, especially product content going to one side and then this other side being more around that leadership message. For me one of the big complexities happening in customer marketing is that we have so many different ways to approach the customer now that you do separate this into different piles of work than we may have traditionally. And I guess where I look at that is that I see continual development around product and more of a productized approach to these programs where they're becoming more complex and much more like you are a product manager. Is that something that you guys are talking about, something that you're thinking about today?
Scott Wilder: I love the way you're thinking about it because I do think about this as a product, as a product-related journey. That's where that growth marketing experience really comes into play. I think of this as how you treat it as a product. That involves everything from the research you're going to do up front to figure out what people want, how you position it, the branding behind it. And then as a product you want to go into a beta stage and really figure out what works. I think a really key part of this and a trend in product is co-create, co-innovate. How do you get your customers involved in this process? What I used to do is invite customers and prospects to my staff meetings so the team could hear what they wanted and then you can move into an MVP stage. Don't try and boil the whole ocean at once. Start simple, have an MVP mindset. And this is where the growth marketing really kicks in as well - experiment. Don't be afraid to try things. Take that AB or ABC approach to experimenting and be data driven.
Will Fraser: For sure. It seems that the product approach though, is probably the more difficult one to find today. And that is maybe newer to people in customer marketing. And I think you just nailed it with MVP and Don't Boil the Ocean. The number of well-meaning conversations I've had where someone has shown up with the most complex design you've ever seen for a program, and you're just thinking like, have we tested that anyone's interested? Have we started with a basic question and a basic conversation?
Scott Wilder: Very much so. When I was at Udacity, we built some AI into the product and the product was the classroom. When individuals were thinking about maybe not completing a course, we served up certain types of content. And we started really simple. Less than 50% will finish these courses, whether it's Coursera or Udacity. The numbers are even much lower than that. But it was in our interest to help them with their career and to cheer them on or provide content that keeps them going. The marketing team didn't claim to have all the product know-how. So we actually partnered with product on that and we were very clear that someday we really believe this is a marketing activity, but we want to learn from you.
Will Fraser: Yeah, no, I think that's amazing. Is it Brinkner who's been pounding on digital transformation? You know, it's one of the things again we talk about customer marketing, how many years it's been talked about and it feels like the wave is just actually starting. The adage I learned was marketing is product, product is marketing - you can't separate the two anymore. But what you're doing there is very innovative to actually partner properly with a product team and really be able to drive a combined outcome.
Scott Wilder: Yeah, when I was at Adobe, they had the idea of creating these small growth squads. Growth squads and product growth has been written about starting like 2014. But these guys basically did an experiment with one of the photography products and they put this cross-functional team together of five people and said, like Amazon talks about having this single-threaded focus, you guys have to focus on the first 30 days that somebody has this product and improve onboarding and retention. We came back to them and said we want to focus on the first 24 hours. The great thing was we had people from five different disciplines. This was their job. Their managers cleared their calendars and said, you need to solve this problem. That's where the magic happened. We sat together, we worked really closely.
Will Fraser: And I think that's this idea when we get to customer centricity, where everyone actually in the company is trying to be customer centric. They have different views of it. And when you bring together those different views, we can really build that maybe it's the first 24 hours or whatever it is that we need to do to help that customer be successful. At the end of the day, advocacy starts with a customer trying out a product. No one is born an advocate. Each one of those teams is helping us build these customers and their path to success.
Scott Wilder: Yeah, advocacy - definitely in most cases they need the product, but you can also have fans who just are aware of what your product is. The challenge is to build that advocacy program. We focus a lot on the best advocates. And I think you and I once talked about, I'm a big believer in the rising advocates, the future advocates, and then there's people who have just shown an interest. They might not be talking about your product because they're introverted. Really taking this systematic approach to identify the different levels or different types of advocates.
Will Fraser: Absolutely. That's such an interesting reminder for people. Whether that's like you said, someone who's a little more introverted or someone who's just kind of figuring it out. Anything that you're kind of seeing around that rising advocate about how you would identify them or how you would nurture them that you're finding effective?
Scott Wilder: Yeah, I use the term common currency and so find a common currency for all the different interactions you have with people. And then trying to figure out what's the score for that action. On the acquisition side, we're really good at that because we score all the different types of lead score. It's almost like an equity score. One person I know calls it a customer equity score. I'm working on something called their relationship index model. Assigning scores to them, figuring out tiers. It's a good way to organize your thoughts, but it's also that "hey, I want to get to the next tier" motivation.
Will Fraser: Well, Scott, this has been wonderful. Before we go, is there anything else that you'd love to share with the audience today?
Scott Wilder: Thank you for inviting me. I feel honored. The Advocacy Channel is great. I have been binging a lot since you first contacted me. If anybody has any questions, they can always find me on LinkedIn or email me at
[email protected]. Together with people like yourselves, let's grow this industry, let's grow customer marketing, let's accelerate the growth of advocacy.
Will Fraser: Absolutely. And thank you very much for your time as well. Some very powerful and wonderful insights here that I know I've learned something today. I know that our listeners will learn something as well. And I'm sure we'll be having you back on the show as soon as you let us.
Scott Wilder: Anytime. Thanks.
Will Fraser: Thank you. Bye Bye.
