Product-Led Advocacy with Ashley Stead

[00:00:03] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to the Advocacy Channel, a customer marketing podcast brought to you by impact.com in today's episode our host Will Frazier sits down with Ashley Stead, Director of growth product at Nesto Group, a leading Canadian tech company building the mortgage ecosystem of the Future. With over 15 years of experience spanning product management, UX research, marketing and operations, Ashley brings a unique full stack perspective to customers marketing and advocacy initiatives. In this episode you'll learn how to think about advocacy as infrastructure rather than one off campaigns and discover practical strategies for building product led advocacy programs that deliver actual results. Enjoy. [00:00:52] Speaker B: Ashley, thank you so much for joining us here on the show today. I am really excited to get into this conversation. [00:00:58] Speaker C: Same, thanks for having me. This is going to be great. [00:01:02] Speaker B: In our intro here we told people a little bit about you and the topics today. But I'd love it if we could just kind of break it down a little bit and help us walk through kind of how you got to a place where we are today. We're going to talk about referral marketing, customer advocacy programs. But how did you get here? [00:01:16] Speaker C: It's a great question. I sort of like a lot of product people just sort of fell into this maybe 15 plus years ago. I started my career as like an analyst. I moved into some marketing roles that turned into operations which turned into UX research. None of these things seem linear. They're all over the place. Right. And about three or so years ago, the company that I'm at now, Nesto Group, they reached out to me on LinkedIn. They were looking for somebody who has like you know, a product management background and technical background, but who's worked with marketing teams and that's kind of my niche. Right. So they wanted somebody with some UX experience because this role in particular was one that worked with our own dev team for product management, but also leads the practice of conversion rate optimization experimentation for all of our brands. So they found me, they found me and I fell into this all by just checking out different roles. Yeah. [00:02:17] Speaker B: And I mean I think that's, that's the story we hear so, so often is, is that it wasn't linear. Right. You know, different stories. But that it wasn't this like logical path. But, but I think, and I'd love your take on this, you know, I think that diversity of experience, that diversity of background is kind of the, the, some of the superpower that, that helps this role. What do you think on that? [00:02:35] Speaker C: I agree. I think it's, I think it's a niche. There's a, there's lots of product people out there that come from a really technical background. There's lots of product people that come from maybe a like project management background or operations. But this sort of niche of product and marketing and UX and this whole thing we're going to probably chat more about today in this full stack marketer lens is just sort of my, my niche. It's something that I'm really passionate about. [00:03:03] Speaker B: Absolutely. And I do want to dive in to some of the meat here. But before we do that, just maybe one thing quickly, just for context of today's show. Should you maybe just tell our listener a tiny bit about Nesto Group just so they understand kind of contextually what we're, we're talking about today? [00:03:16] Speaker C: Yeah, for sure. I'd love to. I work at a company called Nesto Group, Canadian tech big leader. We're building the mortgage ecosystem of the future. Nest Group is the big company and then there's some entities underneath. We've got cmls, we've got Intellify, we have Nesto, we have a marketplace. So what this means is like there's all these different pieces end to end of sort of a mortgage journey and financing solutions and we're really tech driven. So there's lots of offerings that we have in different segments out there. So Nesto Group as a whole has about, I think it's 73 billion of mortgages under administration. So it's pretty big. We, I started at the company when There were like 200 employees and now we're over a thousand. So it's just, and it's been three years. So it's just rapid growth and it's really, really, really exciting. It's a good time to be at the Nesto Group, that's for sure. [00:04:13] Speaker B: Wonderful. That does sound very exciting. [00:04:15] Speaker C: Yeah, I love it all. [00:04:16] Speaker B: So, so yeah, I want to jump in here. You know, you sit within the marketing group but you know, have more of a technical purview, development teams, you know, something we don't normally hear about as often. So I'd love to understand just a little bit of, kind of what that structure is and then, you know, I'd really like to understand like how did we, how did you convince leadership to actually like approve this and, and you know, bring this kind of model into being. So I'd love to learn more about that. [00:04:43] Speaker C: Yeah, there's a lot of, there's a couple models out there, right, for marketing teams where you have dedicated development teams or you have development teams that are within your own department, very less common. I realize and the common scenario is a marketing team that has a shared resource area that's a development team or product team. And then you need to vie for the prioritization for your work to get what you need done. Nesto is awesome in terms of like their stack and the support for especially the marketing team. And they find that having like our own development resources to be the most valuable so that we can move fast. It's one of the core values. So it's kind of a superpower of ours and of the team. So there was really no convincing. However, I did like, I do like to think that I played a part with like the expansion of the development team within the marketing department. And so that kind of happened by. I have this sort of formula, I guess, about when you're starting a new job. It's not nothing that's, you know, crazy or, or really breaking the mold here, but I think that the best place to start is really to find the forum or make a forum of how you can express like the value that your team is adding or that you are adding and make sure that it's really visible. So I, in my experience, I mean, the resources just follow the impact that's being shown and the value that's being added, right? So, you know, hey, our team is taking responsibilities in this area. Or I met with this other dev team and they weren't able. And this is, this is what happened in our scenario. But this other dev team can't take on this work, but we're equipped to take on this work. They're happy to just sort of do a knowledge transfer with us. So that's a really big win. You know, there's this. Now we can move even faster. And so over time we just started taking on more and more responsibility. And our team works on all of the triple W side of all the websites that are underneath the Nesto Group brand. And so it's just really, it's really cool how it's evolved over time, but they're. The way to get the resources is to, you know, show the work, right, show the impact and the value and then the resources will come. [00:07:03] Speaker B: You know, I think there's just so many marketing teams that would love to have their own development organization. And I think that, you know, for some maybe that's possible, some that isn't. But I think there's one thing that we talked about before that I think kind of applies to all of us, but isn't maybe a newer concept to some marketers? And so you talk about this idea of many marketers work in campaigns but you know, you think more in infrastructure, right? Is you know, how do we actually enable this infrastructure with a marketing lens. And I kind of, you know, you use the term product led advocacy, but I'd love it if you could help us understand this lens of infrastructure versus campaigns and maybe then how you've applied that to product led advocacy. [00:07:47] Speaker C: A lot of people think about advocacy and these referral programs as, as a campaign or as something that they can kind of bolt on throughout maybe a journey. And I, I just treat it differently and I think it comes from a very like collaborative space. So everything on my end is all about systems, APIs, integrations, automation, anything that I can do to contribute to a strategy that allows the marketers to be self sufficient. Right. Less we can focus on other kind of development tasks if everyone can kind of be more independent. So that's the lens that I come to this work from. But I also facilitate sort of some discovery that leads us to sort of product led initiatives and like product led advocacy. So a typical session when we're starting something like this, a kickoff or discussions might be me acting as sort of a consultant and we're talking about what's their objectives, what do they have that's available to them already, what have we done already? And then it's really key to bring in people from all different areas of the business because what I find happens a lot of time when you're mapping out a journey or, or to get to a particular objective. Everyone kind of has the same end goal if it's from the same business area or the same flow and everyone wants to sort of connect with the person at the same time or this is a good opportunity, or this is a good opportunity along the way. And what ends up happening is like you're competing with other people's messaging within the same company. Do you know what I mean? Oh, you might have some people on the phone that are talking to them about moving along in a step or you might have some people that are in a center or in an office talking to the same customers about their particular thing. And you really just have to clear this, this out. So what I try to do when I'm start any sort of product led strategy is think about what we already have, what systems we have, what automation we have in terms of like insights to help inform the strategy. Then we kind of break it all out and we talk about, okay, this data is showing us that actually we need to add some micro yeses before each like Big conversion. And what I mean by that is people will take maybe three or four steps to get to the initial conversion and another three or four steps to get to the initial vers. So we break it down really small into steps, by channel, by product, by segment, by, you know, we break it all down and then we start injecting where it makes sense for there to be a call to action related to referral and advocacy, where we already know that they're not ready to take that next big step. So it's all about the micro yeses and truly, truly understanding the data. And the way that you can get that, if you're not even maybe like an analyst, is just sort of get some automation going and get those insights and find a way to get some, some data about what people are doing at which stage. So it's typically a mistake. I see they jump right to the big conversion and they just kind of spray referral messaging everywhere. [00:11:01] Speaker B: I love that. And I think you're right to identify this, this point where we have these competing messages. I think, unfortunately, in my experience, I've worked with a bunch of organizations that, that don't even have the map. Yeah, they don't even know what's happening. Right. And I think they. That's a starting point. It's valuable to do this process. So I kind of would say my views is valuable to do this process. But, you know, you talk about this and there's a very large theme park company where I remember years ago looking at their website, and it was an absolute cacophony of pitches and it was not effective to the customer in any way from what I could see. But I was so clear that I could imagine the boardroom battles that were going on for everyone to get highlighted all at once. And it was just like, it was an affront to my senses. And I was just thinking like, wow, this is corporate politics on, you know, the commercial website. Like, it was brutal. [00:11:53] Speaker C: Wait, there's more you can add this on. And if you try this or don't try this thing instead or don't. Yeah. It ends up being the opposite of what you're hoping to get. [00:12:04] Speaker B: And you know, I think as you're looking at those micro yeses as those steps in the journey, you know, competing interests to kind of talk to the customer. Do you have any methods that help you resolve those inevitable boardroom conflicts or any experience there that that's helped you get clarity for, for that journey? [00:12:21] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, when you work at a new company or you're working On a new initiative, the best thing for anyone to do is to find a whole bunch of subject matter experts in the whole bunch of different areas and build those. So it's not about everyone needs to meet their objectives, everyone needs to talk to their customers. It's really about getting alignment together, not making a decision. Maybe you can help propose. Hey, if you were to chat about your thing here, I think it makes sense because the data is showing that there's a bigger uptick when you do it at this stage, you're already on the phone with them. It makes sense for you to, to do this from, from your sort of sales perspective, but maybe it makes more sense for us from this perspective to talk about this, this, you know, referral or this, this message at this time. So it's collaborative and marketers always are collaborative and that they, in my experience anyways, they'll reach out to people at different times, but it doesn't always happen where you're planning with all of the different people in the room at the, at the same time. So no one's an expert in every single part of the customer journey as much as they say they are. Like the people that are in the operations roles and in the sales roles and in finance, like wherever they are, everyone has a different perspective to add. And so I think it's important to bring everyone in. It doesn't have to be this big, long, arduous process. It's just something that's short, sweet. Hey, where do you find that your messaging makes the biggest impact? And then you can kind of look back and see the data, make sure that you have all the stuff that's available to you. And if you don't, you can test, you know, test to see what makes sense, but you're really working together on that. And that's what I think people need to do more, is involve many, many people, listen to calls, do some experimentation and if you don't know, just, just try to find a way to get the answer and just try your best, you know, so that's a, that's a challenging one because it happens everywhere. There's lots of, lots of opportunities to collaborate a bit more with people that you don't chat with every day. [00:14:31] Speaker B: And I think when we get to that collaboration, especially when we're coming across technical teams and non technical teams, the inevitable question that comes up is, should we build this or should we buy this? Yeah, and I don't know if it's always based solely on the math. I don't want to suggest there's ever ego in the mix, but sometimes there might be, but I'd love to understand kind of how do you look at the build or buy situation? Any decision frameworks or anything to share there? [00:14:59] Speaker C: Yeah, to me there is like a starting point for all of these sort of discussions. If there I kind of have this like best practice rule of thumb that I follow. If it's a differentiator, let's spend a little bit more time thinking about building. If it's table stakes you need to start with, start with the buy, start with there. What ends up happening in terms of like a framework is there's always that evaluation that happens, right? There's always the what is the opportunity cost, what's the development cost, how can it be scalable? How can it have a bunch? Any partnership that we have with platforms or with different companies with their tools is, does it integrate with our systems? Is it easy to use? And exactly like what I said, how scalable is it? So we kind of do that whole exercise and I put a little bit more weight based on if it's sort of the differentiator path or if it's just table stakes path. But what ends up happening a lot is it's sort of hybrid. We work with excellent partners and we leverage their platforms, but then we build pieces that layer on for the differentiation along the journey. So we might have something that we build that's really custom, that is sort of, I call them engagement modules. And that's, that's me just saying like what's going to get somebody to keep clicking and keep interested? Or can we get a piece of data from somebody to help determine what their next steps are? And those are typically the things that our dev team builds to layer on to like build out this differentiated product led like advocacy strategy. [00:16:42] Speaker B: Interesting. Yeah, I mean I think working with those different like thinking about table stakes, thinking about that like differentiator, I think that's a great way to look at it. I think that we've all run into maybe groups that, that want to build and maybe sometimes the table stakes are even like appealing to build because they, on the surface people kind of seem doable. Have you ever had to kind of argue that out of, of somebody's purview or opinion? You know, do you ever have that challenge or is your team very just or all your teams you've worked with just been very pro the logical decision? [00:17:16] Speaker C: No, there's always negotiation and discussions and there's stuff that's happening that it's like, oh, we are buying this you know, despite the case that's made, that happens everywhere. So that's not really new. I think that the job of someone like me on a team is to ensure that we check all the boxes and we understand the capacity of everybody's teams and how fast we need to go or how much time we have and really work with executives to make that decision. You can provide recommendations. Sometimes it's taken, sometimes it's not. But I have an example of something that happened just recently where we needed to move very quickly for this opportunity. And it was like an event opportunity. I was already working on sort of side of desk on what building maybe a platform might be versus buying a platform. And what it ended up happening is exactly what I said. There was sort of a hybrid approach where there was a bit of a build that I worked on, and then there was the buy approach where there was a part that we needed to just go and go fast. And I'm lucky I have the support of our leadership team to be able to move quickly on any sort of build versus buy scenario. But it's just like anything else. There's a lot of discussion, there's even discussion where I'm not involved in. And then it comes back and then I learn a little bit more about this situation. Yeah, there's. There's negotiation that needs to happen, and all you can do is sort of show your work and make the case and, and then, and then just be involved in all the discussions where applicable, and see where, see where it goes. But got to be adaptable. Things change all the time. [00:19:04] Speaker B: We, we talked, you know, as you're talking about that, it kind of reminds me of this, this point we talked about before, which was around this idea of being full stack marketer or full stack product team. And I think that, like, this point of, like, the more you understand that product process, the more you can have those conversations completely. Right. You know, that's a. I think there's a lot of marketers who unfortunately are in the situation where they kind of just have to trust their product and engineering teams. They don't necessarily know how all of that works. But I'd love to understand, like, how do you think about that? Any kind of frameworks, tooling, suggestions for people who want to, to drive or to dive more into understanding product from the marketing perspective. [00:19:48] Speaker C: Yeah, that's a great question. And it's something that I think a lot about, and a lot of people on our team think a lot about, and especially when you're in this. We sort of came from this like startup environment and you're working in tech and everything's fast and, and everyone's moving quickly. So the main goal for our team and our development team is to really empower the marketing team so that they can move quickly and they make really great decisions that are data driven and we keep the underlying tech still robust. So there's a lot of, as you can imagine, like no code, low code solutions that we bring up with the team to help them. So if you take a step back though, I think there's two things that I could touch on to sort of answer that question. One thing is sometimes getting the whole lens of like the product and development piece starts with even even further back which is just process and, and marketing team processes. So there's a lot of free or low cost tools out there to help improve things like planning and automation and prioritization and automation. I mean really not about the execution piece but like how you're getting the data or how are you getting the insights to sort of inform your strategy. So meeting with people and talking to them about like their role and their objectives and their pain points and then kind of get everybody on the same page about how we're planning and prioritizing and then move towards sort of the more technical pieces later. But I bring the marketers along with me with, with all of this work, I make sure that everyone understands the why and the technical implementation. It's like there's no need to gatekeep like anything about payloads and APIs. It's like, hey, we have this thing and if you can find me this, I can connect it this way and I can probably use some of my favorite tools to do it. So there's always this sort of consultation approach and, and I love notion, I love Zapier, I, I love so many tools. Unbounce. There's a, there's a Martech stack out there that works for so many different companies and it's always different. But if there's a will, there's a way. But what I'll say is if you don't have. This is the second point that I'll say. If you don't have someone like me on your team and you don't have technical resource or the product resource to work directly with developers, there's still stuff you can do, you know, and, and one thing that I did for the department a couple months ago, maybe, maybe like two months ago, was in our, one of our department meetings, I was talking about how you can use this prompt. I kind of gave the steps for the prompt. I can share it with you too if you want to share it out with your, your audience or people can connect with me directly to get it, but either way there was this prompt that people can put in to their own like you know, Gemini or ChatGPT or whatever they're using and it's really to help them build like an AI efficiency pipeline for whatever they need it for. So everyone's different, their roles are different and they have different steps and different little micro processes and so you can be more full stack on your own by just like following a prompt. This is, this is what I do. These are the steps that I take. This is the sort of the tools or the stack that I have available to me. If I don't have any, can you suggest other tools? Like what can I automate? You're just, you're, you're doing some discovery using AI tools yourself to help you become more automated and more full stack and, and get the information you need. Anyone can get market intelligence when they understand how to like automate it and how to prompt properly to get what they need. And anyone can kind of get what they need or at least a good starting for a good experiment. So that's where I'd say is a good place to start if you don't have like someone on the team to help facilitate those sort of conversations. [00:23:44] Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's a good point and I definitely think we can, we can share that prompt out, but also we'll, we'll share people how to connect with you afterwards. And I know that, you know, the more that, the more that we play, and I'll call it playing with AI because it always makes me very happy when I see what comes out. I think that big piece of, of not being afraid to prompt a prompt, not being afraid to like, like work to develop a prompt, to think through things to ask AI to help you with your thinking, to then ask it a question based on your thinking. Very, very interesting stuff. [00:24:13] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:24:14] Speaker B: Now I know we know we're kind of talking about, you know, product here, AI. I think you kind of said at the beginning, I just want to come back to it here before we wrap the show up. You know, it's about showing your work, showing the output of your work. How do we stay data driven and how do we, while we're working on these, these projects, we want to stay data driven and tech driven while still being easy for the marketers to use. All of this like any, any kind of key insights there when you're building infrastructure, you're trying to help people make the right decisions and use the right tooling. I'm just kind of curious how, how you present that when a project's, you know, out the door effectively. [00:24:51] Speaker C: When I was talking about sort of the infrastructure approach and how we sort of come together to talk about product led advocacy, a great example of that is in our planning. We really streamlined how we do our planning together and so the data driven and tech driven is just to the core, like how the team operates. So we help facilitate that. When I was talking about things like no code or low code tools to help along the way, that's really keeping in mind that we want to keep our technology and all of our, our, our back end really robust and we just want to assist with scalable options to empower the team to move forward fast. So there's usually just a good amount of collaboration early on in planning. And like I said before, there's a lot of learning that happens along the way and some teaching too. I learned from some of the members of the marketing team when we're going through about some of the challenges that they face and they'll learn from me about some options that might be available to them that maybe they didn't think about before or you something that's in the tool that just came out because there's this beta piece and they can take that on themselves. We do a lot of pairing and work together. So how do you make sure that everyone is data driven and tech driven when maybe people are not as confident when it's, it's related to the product world or the technology world? I mean, you just gotta bring everyone in and everyone can learn from everyone. So it's really about just how do you teach along the way about why this is important and what we want to look for and then learn about how it can meet the needs. So it's just bridging that gap together and understanding like both, both, both areas. Right. [00:26:37] Speaker B: It's interesting as we talk here today, you know, I think that a big message I'm kind of hearing is, is really just an inclusion of all perspectives. Right. Whether that's in designing your customer journey, whether that's in trying to bring people through to understand, you know, how build or buy, or whether that's here to try to make sure we stay data driven and aligned. And I think that's probably one of the most important messages that, you know, that we could share with the audience, at least in my opinion. These are not siloed activities Right. This is to think about this as an infrastructure, to think of this as a complete product play. We need to feel like we're collaborating and not just assigning other teams to it. And I say, unfortunately, in my role, I have seen more than a few tech teams walk into an assignment and be very unsure. Right. It's like, what happened? Who's here? What do we buy? What? And it's like just a lot of who, what, why. I don't know if you've experienced that, but I think that's, that's definitely something I've seen in a big takeaway I'm having here. Now that I've stolen your takeaway, I'd love to know, is there one big golden nugget, one, one piece that you really think the audience should understand here today? Maybe on top of, of that. [00:27:49] Speaker C: Yeah, that's a, that's a, that's a fair comment. It still happens. I mean, but I think the more that you're able to empower the people to do their thing without the developers, in my example, you know, there's. The developers can work on, on some of the, the parts that layered on for the differentiation and as long as, you know, have some sort of consultation then with other people who are like, like super smart in the area that they're in, it goes a long way and it doesn't have to slow down any process. That's the problem that I hear all the time. People are like, oh, I didn't, I didn't have that session because like we needed to move fast. I mean you can move fast and get a lot of opinions really quickly and then just filter them down. Right? So anyone can do that and act as like the facilitator and the conduit to make something happen where you're still making sure that you've got all the, all the info out there. But I guess my, my, I kind of touched on this earlier, but the, the series of micro yeses is something I talk about all the time. When I'm talking about conversion optimization and what, even when I'm talking about this, like anything product led advocacy related, you really need to understand if, if you're in charge of a, a portion of a journey or if you're in charge of the whole life cycle of something, the most important thing that you can do is break it down into smaller chunks and then try your best to get data that you need or at least experiment at a certain point to see what moves the needle better, this or this kind of a message. The more you understand about the steps that people take and how there's different entry points all over the place and who's talking when. The more information that you have about that, the more that you can make this really strong product led strategy. And then everyone has their sort of North Star like the ultimate goal of what they need to get to and how they know that the fast track way is to get there. But I'd encourage everyone to just spend that time thinking about what levers they can pull along the way or like test or validate any hypothesis they have along the way to make sure that your product led strategy is the right time, the right message, the right people, and that you're not muddying it up with something else that could be really, really crucial in the step of a bigger conversion. And that's what I see a lot in this space is people going right for the main conversion in all channels, in all paths, and they're just spraying that message out there and they might change the messaging based on the audience or change the offer based on the audience. I guess that's part of the secret sauce of product led work and product led advocacy work and referral programs is just like when's the right time to talk about it and how can you bring it up without it just being message that you like learn more about or click more about. How can you make it more engaging? So that's sort of the little nugget that I, I want to share at the end is like a, as a tip that there's a way to, to do it. And not everyone's is different. You know, every program is different, every advocacy strategy should be different for, for. So you can't just like take this worked for me. So it's obviously going to work for you. It's. You really need to understand all the paths and then say this is a perfect timing actually because, because they're, they don't have a big conversion that they need to focus on in the next step. We've got this much time with them. This is what they care about at this time. So then start thinking about it that way and then you can just add a little pieces here to sort of delight along the way. So that's the, that's the big one that's in the playbook that I use all the time. [00:31:27] Speaker B: I love that, I love that it's sometimes, you know, in its simplest form those are kind of the micro yeses. But the, the more we ask and introduce and play along with the customer, kind of the more opportunities that we have there. And I think just being intelligent about it obviously, really, really amps it up. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for your time here today. I know, I know I learned a lot here. I've got some things that I've taken notes on that I'm gonna take into my life after this call. So really appreciate the conversation. [00:31:55] Speaker C: Thanks for having me. This was so fun. [00:31:58] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:31:59] Speaker B: Before we go here, I'd just love to share with our listeners. How can they connect with you, you. How can they find you or reach out to you after the show? [00:32:06] Speaker C: Sure. Yeah. LinkedIn. That's a, that's a good path. Ashley Stead. So it's s t e a d you can just find me on LinkedIn. I post, you know, every once in a while something that's kind of funny or the last thing that I think I posted on LinkedIn when, you know, after I've had a lot of conversations about vibe coding versus rapid prototyping, I was giving my follow these steps. You know, these cues will lead you to. If you're in a room and you need to talk about anything related to, you know, one of these tools, you need to sort of read the room and say rapid prototyping versus vibe coding. So anyway, I add lots of stuff on LinkedIn. It's where I love to connect with people. Happy to chat about all things product led growth, product led advocacy. And yeah, it was really great chatting with you today. [00:32:58] Speaker B: You too, Ashley. Well, thank you so much for joining us and I hope to have you back on the show soon. [00:33:02] Speaker C: Awesome. Thank you. [00:33:06] Speaker A: Thank you for tuning in to another great episode of the Advocacy Channel brought to you by impact.com join us next time as we bring on more expert guests like Ashley. If you enjoyed the episode, please review rate and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Want more partnership marketing Insights? Check out impact.com's other podcasts, the Partnership Economy and the Publisher's Playbook. The links are in the show notes. That wraps up another great episode of the Advocacy Channel. We'll see you real soon.