Will Fraser: Hi Lauren, thank you so much for joining us today.
Lauren Locke-Paddon: Hi. It's so great to be here.
Will: For our listeners that don't know Vocal Video yet, maybe you could just give us a bit of a brief overview of what you're offering at Vocal Video today.
Lauren: At Vocal Video, we have a video marketing platform that lets you capture, edit and share video testimonials from anyone - customers, employees, or experts. What we focused on is making that really easy for anyone. So even folks with no video experience like me can create really beautiful professional videos to use on your website or in social media.
Lauren: And my career in tech was a little bit circuitous. Like I think so many of us that got started now about 12 years ago, I had a scattered background in sales and marketing and a short stint at a naming agency where we actually made up names for a living. I joined a five person software company as the first customer success and marketing hire. At that company, which was called Tech Validate, we had a product that created marketing content and we worked with customer advocacy leaders at B2B companies. From that moment, I was really surrounded by these customer centric people. Hundreds of our customers were creating these customer stories and bringing them to their sales and marketing organizations. And me myself, I was running the customer success team and all our marketing and we were using our product on ourself to create customer stories. We were doing video interviews and we just really had it in our DNA. Even as a small company, customer stories were what helped us close deals, attract new customers. It was just really powerful to see from all angles.
Will: And Tech Validate went on to be just a little bit successful. For anyone who doesn't know the brand there, that's really exciting. And then after Tech Validate, what brought the band back together? I'm always interested in that.
Lauren: So the fun thing is that those five people, three of those five people are actually the founding members of our new company, Vocal Video. But we went on to grow Tech Validate to over 50 people. Our customer success team was a big part of that. We were acquired by SurveyMonkey in 2015 and we continued to work together and expand into some new offerings. I continued to work in customer success and turned my day job into product marketing for a while at SurveyMonkey. And then just a couple of years ago, we got those folks back together again to launch Vocal Video. And now I run customer success and marketing for this new company.
Will: I love that mix of customer success and marketing. I think that's not a common mix that I see sometimes. I see all things revenue - sales, marketing success. But customer success in marketing is such a powerful combination, but not one that I'm overly used to seeing. Maybe you can share what does that role look like? What is your life at Vocal Video being in charge of two very important but somewhat different departments?
Lauren: I think what I've figured out, and I think everyone learns this at a certain point in their career, is what company size person are you? I found out over the last couple years that I am just so energized by being at a small team. At small teams you get to really have the luxury of defining your job and the overlap of what the company is trying to do and what you're good at and excited about. As a small company, every single person is focused on one thing and that's the growth of the company. Customer success and marketing are just two hugely important pieces of that puzzle.
I've always approached customer success as being a part of the revenue organization, which can be a bit of a contrarian view. But for me, they're so interweaved because when you deeply understand your customers and their goals, that's the perfect launching place for creating compelling marketing to acquire new customers and frankly to activate your existing customers. In customer success you own retention and expansion of customers. But I've always had a strong relationship with sales and marketing teams because the word of mouth channel in many businesses is just massive and that comes from your existing customers.
One week I might be doing more traditional customer success - focusing on plans to activate our enterprise customers, working on one-to-many marketing campaigns to activate customers. And the next day or week I might be focused more on the acquisition of new customers, but really incorporating those customer stories and customer insights into all of that.
Will: That makes a lot of sense when you're taking the story from the customer and then immediately delivering it to marketing. I think a lot of companies want to do this - this idea that our customers have these powerful stories. But I feel like this horrible thing happens where they can't seem to figure out how to talk to their own customers. And all of a sudden marketing's talking to an external agency that's going to go interview some customer. How do you think other companies could model this even though they may have a more separated success and marketing department?
Lauren: Yes, definitely. And I fully understand - I saw this at Surveymonkey that at a thousand person organization, everyone needs to be more clearly defined in what they're doing. I definitely had my hand slapped a couple times because I was like "oh well, I can just go over here and talk to this person and we can figure out the project because we're all working on growing the business together." Your listeners here that work at larger companies will be like, "what? That's insane."
Being a bit naive walking into that role, I think there's two things. The building of that relationship really needs to start from a place of respect and admiration between the two departments. And you have to acknowledge that if you're in customer advocacy and marketing and you want the customer success team to deliver you more stories, you can't go in there and ask them to do something extra for free because they really do have a ton of priorities.
One of the things I've seen as a strategy that works well is bringing the customer success folks into the limelight that is usually reserved for sales. You can do this by raising the individual customer success manager's visibility at the company. All the B2B organizations I know put a ton of work into making their salespeople feel really good when they close the deal. But bringing that customer success person into that highlight of like, "hey, they really delivered an amazing outcome. This customer success manager delivered an amazing outcome for our client. They shared that story with marketing. Once we were able to create that story, we were able to give that back to sales. And sales closed all of these deals."
I would not also shy away from using things like sales spiffs. If they are genuinely delivering these outcomes for customers and able to share these stories, valuable stories with marketing, there's no reason that you shouldn't take some of the sales enablement, sales operations, spiff budget and bring that over to customer success.
Will: Just out of curiosity, I want to dive a little bit into that spiff program you were talking about. What kind of stories - is there a bar for the stories that success has to bring or how have you structured those in the past?
Lauren: Yeah, the nice thing about most of the customer success folks I know is that maybe unlike our counterparts in sales, there's not a lot of part of that profile that's all about gaming the system. So you can, I think you can describe what a good story is. Is that something where you've been on a kickoff call and this customer has defined metrics that they're going to be aiming at and in that quarterly business review they've said, "yeah, we've actually hit those metrics and we've exceeded them." In customer advocacy, if you can get a customer to speak to metrics that they've delivered on and over delivered on with your product, that stuff is just gold for your sales team. That is the highest converting kind of customer story, that kind of before and after customer story. Maybe that's like the most valuable story. But I think that this is the kind of thing where I don't think you need to overcomplicate it too much. I think that you can describe and share examples of what a good or valuable story will be and the customer success team will run with that.
Will: Yeah, that makes sense. I think about this for someone who's trying to go get that budget and say, "hey, we need to spend money on success." And I know in some organizations, people will look at Success more like a cost center. But I think as you're saying, if we can tie that back to really to marketing enablement or sales enablement, I think it's a very different conversation. The question that I'm always left with is - so one of my team members is on a call, success team members on a call with a customer and they hear this great story. Right now we go into how do we capture that story, how do we present that story? We gotta get lights, we gotta get the whole rigmarole ready so that we can make this look like a polished case study or story. But is that the way that you find is most effective or what kind of tips and tricks would you have for converting this story that Success has told me about into something that's really effective as a sales enablement tool?
Lauren: I think this is where there's a whole bunch of answers. I think the most effective stories that you're getting from customers are the ones that are very authentic and relatable to the audience that you're trying to reach. Once you have gathered that story and customer advocacy, you're going to have myriad sources of these stories.
Being able to have what I call an ad hoc program where at the opportune moment, a customer volunteers - I do this at Vocal Video, I'll share how I do it. We regularly get customers that write to support and say "oh my God, I've been looking for a product like this for a long time. Thanks so much for doing this." And in my past life, I've seen emails like that, but I've been a little flat footed and like "oh thanks, maybe we could quote you on something and put it on the website eventually."
Lately, I've done this half a dozen times in the last couple months where I get that positive feedback, unsolicited feedback, and then I send them a link to Vocal Video where they can open up our recorder, record their video, answering a couple of questions and then I can get that back. I do some minor edits in our tool and then I post it on our blog. I have the embedded video and the transcript and it's a five minute request of our customers. They're feeling really good in that moment, it's the exact right time to be like, "wow, thank you so much for those kind words. Would you actually use vocal video to record your story?"
It's a very casual and timely way to ask for a customer story. And I recommend having something like that on hand. This is not a beautiful customer advocacy program. This is not something that you're going to roll out maybe with great fanfare, but enabling your customer facing team, whether it's customer success, support or sales, to have a quick and easy and customer friendly way to capture a quote or a video to use in your marketing can actually be really powerful and help you build a repository of stories over time.
Lauren: Of course, I'm also going to put them in a more formal thing if that video comes back, maybe this becomes that marquee video where I might do one or two where I put budget and a freelancer behind this and make something really beautiful. So I think there's a couple of categories. I think you need to be prepared in an ad hoc way and a casual way, that's a very short request of your customer to do something. And then if it's this story, like say it's where it's an incredibly dynamic customer, they have their metrics that they're talking about, then you can put your bigger budget and time towards that.
But I think for all of the work that I've done and that I see customers past and present do, capturing authentic stories is the most critical thing. B2B buyers and all buyers now have a second sense of what is scripted or coerced and they can just immediately pick that out.
Will: And we've all watched a little too much reality tv, right.
Lauren: It's just gone like, you know, I know when I scroll through Instagram, who are the paid influencers. I know more or less what the fake Amazon reviews are. And so capturing authentic and relatable stories is priority number one. The bad trend we saw during COVID was recording zoom calls with rambling zoom calls with customers and then just posting those online as if anyone was going to read them. And feeling good about that, I guess, is authentic content. But I think that we have a responsibility as marketers to take the raw, authentic data that we're getting, content that we're getting from customers and turn that into something that is palatable, digestible, often a little snack. By taking that authentic content and producing it, we do a service to the customer to amplify their story and actually reach the audiences that we're looking to engage with.
Will: And I think it's interesting. The authenticness of the non scripted is valuable for sure. And I think that does resonate with us. I think the other piece that you're kind of mentioning in there is that you send a link or you ask for a video or a quote and that raw format of it - it may not have a freelancer going to do a recording with all the lights and cameras and mics that you might dream of, but there's still a lot of power just in that story. And I think we've all gotten, the quality of our cameras on our computers are probably all pretty good living in a mostly remote, technical world these days and there's a lot we can do just quickly and we don't have to make a big rigmarole out of it. And if it is really amazing, sure, maybe we'll double down. But I love that idea of just having a quick way to capture a story. You get a positive thing - how do we capture that, how do we use that? And not getting caught up in too much hullabaloo around this idea of how do we make this look super fancy? Because the content is the ruler here. It's the one that we really want is that awesome, authentic story.
Lauren: And I think that gets into what you can evaluate. Say you're coming into a customer advocacy program that already exists. If they're capturing stories in this very ad hoc way, that's amazing. Then the next step is making that more programmatic and seeing, okay, can we trigger, can we look at a milestone of when someone gives us the 9 or 10 on the NPS survey and can we automatically send that out? Those are the building blocks that I see. But often I'll see folks want to get too complicated first. And in the meantime, they're letting all that positive feedback that's coming in manually, they're just letting it kind of slip away. Those are customer stories that are being missed.
So in the meantime, while you're building this beautiful six month long program where all the emails are going to be automatic, there's an opportunity cost to letting some of those go. I always recommend doing some of these simple things first and then you get a lot of learning. When you're the one manually sending an email, I edit my emails after they work and don't work. Ah, that's the email - there's the template that I'm going to put in my programmatic campaign. There's just a lot of learning to be had in that simple approach.
Will: I think that's always a wonderful message for us as marketers - we get creative and the creativity is wonderful but sometimes the creativity starts to outweigh the possible outcome or just the risk in that early stage. I think that's always important for us to take a look at and just how do we do this simply and just start, right? Just collect the story, just share a story. It's almost like just take a quote and put it in a tweet. Like just start with something and build from there.
Lauren: And that even just like that example of taking a quote and putting it in a tweet - that's such a good reminder actually right now because it's very easy to let you know, I manage our social media right now and it's very easy to let a week go by without posting anything. Anyone who's been remotely allied or worked in social media knows that the velocity matters. You should be putting content out there all the time and amplifying a customer story. On social media, I see our customers do it. We do this as well. It's easy, it's great for everyone, makes everyone look good. And it's also the type of thing that your prospective buyers who might be following you will actually take pause and note and that will be like one of their little data points on a buyer's journey.
Will: So now we're talking about the buyer's journey and we're talking about, of course all of this is really at the end of the day, we're trying to help new people discover and trust the brand in the product before they are a customer. How do we go to our management teams, how do we go to the budget review and make an ROI argument or make a business argument for this kind of behavior? Because yes, we can start ad hoc. But at some point everything costs something and somebody's going to come check in on us. So how do you suggest we do that?
Lauren: So the return on investment from customer advocacy has a couple of different layers. I wish that we could take a customer story and just see exactly what the ROI on that customer story was. That would be highly beneficial to me in my past companies, in my current companies. If I could say, "yeah, you know, you'll just guarantee close deals 10% faster with customer stories." And it's a no brainer decision for hiring more customer advocacy managers or buying all the software I've ever been associated with.
What I think we need to do, and this is interesting because I think that for a lot of marketing there was the pendulum swung over to the side where we thought we could measure everything. We were just having marketers becoming data scientists. Like if we can just track everything, we would know what works and that's what we can put our investment in. I think we are now swinging to the other side. We see a lot of this trend about dark social on LinkedIn. The pendulum is swinging back more to trusting our gut on some of this.
And so the common sense and sort of human nature principles - we know that at the bottom of the marketing funnel people want to see someone like them that has had good results with your product. This is the whole foundation and purpose of customer advocacy and marketing - we want to share customer stories. We know that that de-risks investment for people. We understand that this makes selling easier. And we understand that this is going to help you acquire new customers.
At the bottom of the funnel, it's going to be one of the last checks that people can see. And so from that point I think that we can, when we go and have those conversations about the budget we need for our organizations and our headcount to do this effectively, I think that we can kind of use that as table stakes. We all agree that customer stories are good, that relatable customers stories help our customers buy faster from us. Our buyers understand the risk that they're getting into and convert at a higher rate.
Lauren: But I think the thing that is often not said is how customer stories can help you in all other parts of the funnel. So everyone thinks about the customer reference - the classic thing is like "can my sales team give you a phone reference at the bottom of the funnel? Can I deliver a happy customer? Connect that happy customer with a salesperson so they can have their prospect talk to a happy customer?"
I think we get pigeonholed in that in customer advocacy. And it's frankly not useful, it's not scalable. It is really powerful, it's a big piece of the puzzle for many of these large buying decisions. But I think what we can do is bring into the story all the other places in the marketing and customer engagement funnel where these kinds of customer stories become valuable.
So you might create a case study or a video with a customer, but then think about using snippets of that and talk with your demand generation team. Those customer quotes that can be put out on social media, those short vignettes that can be turned into blog posts. On the customer success and engagement side, how can you take the stories about highly successful stories and use those as instructive guides to our other, our existing customer base so that they can be inspired to see even more return on investment with your product?
And so I think that's the single area that I see missing from many of those proposals - showing how the investment and customer advocacy is not just this bottom of the funnel investment, but actually can be shared across marketing, sales and customer success and that all of those departments can benefit from it.
Will: You know, I really like that idea of how do we take these advocacy motions, how do we take these customer stories and then how do we go back to our other counterparts and actually get them to support us? So like you said, maybe demand generation is like, "yeah, actually this is going to become a really important part of our Q2 initiatives." Or perhaps you do go to the success organization and they're like, "oh, back to success organization, where this story may have originated even, and help use that to prepare ways to engage people in their educational content or to come on out to their webinars or whatever it might be."
I really like that. And we kind of touched on this a little bit about starting these programs. And it kind of sounds like you're really an advocate of like a keep it simple approach. Do you think you really need much budget to get started in a program like this? Is this something that you think would be wise to start off the proverbial side of our desk, prove it out a little bit and then show up and ask for a little bit of that budget?
Lauren: I think that doing some of the manual prototyping prepares you to walk into that conversation for a budget in a very meaningful way. When you're creating this proposal or thinking about a program, having a little bit of that proof that this kind of thing would work for your customer base and your particular kind of buyers - it really de-risks the person who's cutting the check or setting aside the budget for this a lot.
I also find that that is something that helps you move up in your organization. I happen to have been lucky to work with my colleague Steve, who's the CEO. This is just one of our foundational beliefs in running marketing and customer success is that we should be spending a good amount of time on the stuff that we know works. And we know that there will be diminishing returns from certain parts of marketing.
Lauren: So we should always have some part of our budget and attention focused on experiments with the full understanding that some of these things fail. And so when you're carving out budget in terms of dollars for these kinds of initiatives, you also have to be able to pitch the budget of time with your leadership team, because otherwise your day will be 100% full of the stuff that the company has always done and that works. And so I think it's on us in drawing that back, saying, you know, our goal is to create stories that are going to help our sales team convert leads at a higher rate.
And we know that there are a certain number of these things that we're going to do. But what I think we also need to do is spend 20, 25% of our time experimenting with this new concept. If this works, this has the chance to totally deliver higher conversion rates than anything we're already doing. So there's like some of that risk versus return. And I find that leaders and budget holders are very receptive to that. They know that if we don't take any risks, we're not going to be able to reach the growth targets that we have.
Will: Absolutely. I think that's a very valid point as well. And I think sometimes just being able to call that out on its face value to just, yes, this is something we want to test. This may or may not work perfectly, but we're going to learn something. Years ago I heard the idea that one in six marketing tests is truly successful as a needle mover. And obviously stats can be made up out of anything. But what I loved was the idea they said, okay, if one in six is going to be successful, your goal is actually to test faster than other people. And I always find that cultures where you can get high speed testing with an expectation that yes, some of it will fail because that's why it's called a test. If you can cultivate that culture and drive that as part of your proposal, that is a very compelling argument in the right place, I think.
Lauren: And I think that's why marketing draws these creative people. Right? And we all love, I think we all love to read about best practices. There's an allure that you might be able to find the silver bullet in some incredibly smart people who are out there creating content. But those people didn't become successful by doing the exact same thing that their company had always been doing. The truth is that for each company and product and type of customer, there's something a little unique and a little bit of magic needs to happen to figure out what exactly that go to market motion is and what that type of content is.
And I would bring that back to customer advocacy organizations too. In our last call we chatted a little bit about our referral program and we had a lot of success in our pre-launch beta with folks sharing about us on social media because the incentive was that we would move them higher on the waitlist. And that really worked. And then for our current referral program, now that we're in general availability and have lots of customers, we've tried a monetary incentive and it turns out that word of mouth is a huge channel for us. People are talking about us and sharing this with their friends. There's a little bit of virality built into some of our plans, but the money incentive - we get all the time we hear from customers "Yeah, I told like five of my friends about you" and we're like, "well did you use the referral link so you can get some money when they sign up?" and they just don't care. So our next version we have to spend some time focusing on what kind of incentive does actually move the needle for our buyers.
Will: Well, and there's some really interesting stuff that we've seen on that one, which is, I think, sometimes counterintuitive, which is when the customer really likes your product and they really get value from your product, the friction actually isn't on the existing customer side. It's on the new customer side. And so while we focus a lot on this idea of, like, oh, I'm asking someone to refer - well, yes, in some cases, this is a big ask, but in other cases, like you're saying, sometimes the customer just really is altruistically attached to the product.
And then this piece that we've seen is the reward for the new customer is really not even a reward - it's about lowering the friction as absolutely low as possible. And so we've seen some interesting data coming out around that. Just this idea that it's not necessarily as dependent upon paying the referrer as we might think. And often the referee is the one where we can get the most bang for our buck. With that said, there's also some really exciting stuff we've seen around people building points programs that are dedicated to swag, where people connect to the brand and when they really have a brand like that, and that's not all brands, but if you're lucky enough to have a brand where people want to wear your swag and they want to be associated with you, there's some really exciting stuff there as well on the unique rewards that can come up for sure.
Lauren: Yeah, that's definitely in the conversation - like, well, what if we make really cool T-shirts or like, there's some other things that we could do because the people are out there referring us and they're like, "yeah, you keep the money."
Will: That's far too kind of a customer base. That definitely speaks volumes of your customer base, for sure. This has been a wonderful conversation. I feel like we've covered so many things. Is there anything that you were hoping to share with the audience today that we haven't gotten to?
Lauren: Let's see. I think what did - yeah, I mean, this has just been so fun with you. Those big passions of mine right now are really about the authenticity. And I think that that's one thing that needs to be included in the pitch that I see in many B2B organizations.
So often there are huge amounts of resources put towards creating these marquee customer stories where you've got someone at Lufthansa who's going to do a video for you and that can just suck up entire months of employee time. And no one somehow at larger organization thinks about their employee time as money, even for very well compensated employees. And at the end of that three months, you've got one beautiful case study or video and it is relatable to a very small total addressable market that might not include 90% of your customers. So I think that getting more of these authentic, relatable stories from the people that you're at, getting a broader set of these stories represents such a massive potential. So big recommendations for considering authenticity and that idea that you should take an honest look at your current activities and see what you can do from the simple and kind of low hanging fruit respects before you dive into very complicated and sophisticated programs.
Will: You know, and I think you just made a point really worth clicking in on there - is that relatable, right? I think that we can all get excited. We see a brand that's really cool to us, whatever, or the board or whatever it is. And it reminds me of - I spend some time down in LA, you start to realize you can figure out where a show is being produced simply because the number of posters and billboards promoting a show goes up exponentially the closer you get to where it's actually being made. Which makes literally no sense other than the fact that it makes everyone involved feel good.
Will: And I think sometimes that's what happens when we see these big logos where you're like, "oh my gosh, you know, Lufthansa, this is going to be amazing." And in reality, you're like, Lufthansa is also our only airline customer, our only customer out of Germany, whatever it might be. And you realize, like, yeah, it's cool. But Tom's Hardware does not concern themselves with Lufthansa. And it can be a little bit misleading.
Lauren: It's so true. And it's easy to get guilty of that. It's very shiny. But we do have a responsibility in customer marketing and advocacy to create and amplify stories that really are relatable to the prospective buyers that we're going out to. And I think that's what's been really interesting for me at this current role, is that we're working with giants. We're working with Google Cloud and HP and some of the biggest brands in the world, but we're also working with one person, solopreneurs. All of those folks need customer videos in their marketing.
And you would expect that the really big Fortune 5 companies that we would work with, you'd expect they would have plenty of budget to create these customer videos, but they also need Vocal Video. They're not creating those marquee videos. They have plenty of budget to do that, but they still have so many product offerings and people to serve and marketing launches to do that having an easy and fast way to take those stories from customers and bring them to market is still just a really imperative activity for them. So that's another learning that's been fun here.
Will: Absolutely. Well, I think this has been wonderful. I think we cannot talk enough about the authenticity of our customer stories and really just how to pull that into every stage of your customer life cycle, whether that's advocacy or demand generation. And absolutely, I think this is a point that if you take nothing else away from this series of podcasts, this point here can really change the way that someone thinks about customer advocacy, whether they run a full, big, full-fledged program or whether they're just trying to interweave this into their existing marketing and success operations. Before we say goodbye today, where can people find you? Where can they find Vocal Video? How can they connect and learn more?
Lauren: Yeah, please check us out vocalvideo.com and you can send me an email directly. My email is
[email protected]
Will: Wonderful. Well, thank you very much again. Look forward to talking to you again in the future and having you back on the show.
Lauren: All right, take care. Have a great one.
