Episode Transcript
Will: Hi, Rebecca. Thank you very much for joining us today.
Rebecca: Thanks so much, Will. Thanks for having me. I'm really excited to be here.
Will: Yeah, we're really excited to have this conversation today. Just to help our audience understand your background a little bit. Can you just tell us what is your role and where are you at these days?
Rebecca: I'm a marketing manager here at Jobber. I'm on the community team within the marketing team, and I've worked a lot on customer advocacy over the past few years and I currently work on initiatives that support and connect entrepreneurs in our community. And I've recently transitioned over some of my customer advocacy projects to other teams, all of which I'm going to chat about today.
Will: And this is a question that's always kind of near and dear to my heart, but how did you get into this role?
Rebecca: So I first started at Jobber on our customer success team. That team is all about supporting our customers, teaching them the product, and taking a consultative approach. So they're really getting the most from Jobber to organize and grow their business. While on that team, it was so obvious that we were really helping people. People really love our product and have a strong connection to it. And we didn't really have any customer advocacy initiatives in place. So I worked closely with our director, Justine Burns, to look at these opportunities for advocacy. So we kicked off our evangelist program and we would send gifts to our customers during moments of excitement or the rare chance there was a bug that they really helped us get down to. We'd send teams pizza parties, things like that. I also worked on some review acquisition on that team, and I worked closely with the marketing team to identify customers to write success stories and case studies on. And then that kind of ended up ultimately formalizing to a role on the marketing team.
Will: A couple questions that I have about what you were just saying there about your path. How did you go about convincing other people to get into this? Because there's always that thing where like we have this idea you're in customer success. It seems so obvious, but how did you actually convince them it was time to start sending gifts and doing these kind of things?
Rebecca: I think that it was something that, honestly, it came pretty easily to win that over with our director and leadership because our customers are so busy. They are some of the most hard working people ever. So if we can help make their days better, build their sentiment and loyalty towards Jobber and build that advocacy to get their reviews out, their referrals out there and really advocating for us, everyone was excited about it, but we did have to start small. You can't just pour tons of resources into something without knowing. So we started small, had a small budget every month, and we tried out some different gift sending and then looked back at what the result was and just kind of kept growing from there.
Will: And what was that key result you were measuring against? Was it a revenue number, a churn number? What kind of idea was it?
Rebecca: Looking back, we've grown a lot at how we've kind of collectively painted that story of the value that we're bringing to Jobber, growing and helping more businesses. So at first it was a pretty qualitative story. Even things like grabbing an email response that came in from someone saying their whole day was made. We looked at different review, how many customers would give reviews after we sent them something. We started sending out referral messaging and just trying to look at every - there's a whole bunch of different qualitative and quantitative value points.
Will: That's a great message to take away that there are so many touch points. It's hard to say, well, customer advocacy is only a bottom line initiative or it's only a review initiative. It just touches in so many places. I just want to take a quick detour. I'm really interested as well in this sharing of customer success stories. I think with more and more companies being remote and more and more teams being distributed, this sounds like a really timely conversation to make sure that those stories are traveling around. Any tips or tricks for people who are trying to develop the same on that?
Rebecca: We have quite a few programs in place to increase internal motivation and just overall customer empathy. So we have a lot of customer facing teams at Jobber. So our sales team, our customer success team, our community team, those teams all have a lot of experience with talking to our customers. But we have our product development teams, our business operation teams, finance that doesn't have as much experience working directly. So we do things like at our quarterly town hall meetings, I work on customer videos. So I interview a customer, ask them how Jobber is helping them and just even non-Jobber related things like what do you like to do on your weekends? Are you a fishing person? Is Jobber helping you spend more time with your family? So really painting that full like in and out of work picture for the team.
And when I work on projects, I'm always trying to look at that opportunity - what would be useful for the team, what would be inspirational for the team. A recent example of a project, I got quite a few like hundreds of videos of customers. So I'm currently working on making those available to our team. And people have reached out to me saying on my coffee break, is there anything I can watch that will help me with customer empathy? Jobber is also growing insanely quickly in terms of employee hiring. So we have a lot of new faces that want to understand our customers.
Another part is just sharing the wins of your advocacy work. We recently connected our reviews and our referral program to Slack. So anytime a review comes in or a referral comes in, we can all celebrate those together. Really painting that picture that internal motivation and customer empathy building is a huge asset and result of advocacy.
Will: Yeah, that's an amazing point. And sharing those wins, right? Because if advocacy is happening, if customers are happy but people don't know about it, is it really happening? It's a lot of value there to build our own organization's awareness of our good work and the value it brings. But I also just love that you have hundreds of customers that are willing to do videos with you and share that with the team.
Rebecca: Yeah, I think that's something to keep in mind as a Customer marketer, Advocacy marketer is sometimes customers truly just want to be involved in the great things you're doing helping you grow your business. If they align and appreciate and recognize your values and missions and you build those relationships, there's been a lot of times where I just ask and kind of just put it out there, real talk, and they're happy to be a part of that. There's always incentives you can provide which are helpful. But we've had a lot of success with just asking sometimes too.
Will: It's clear that building strong community is a big part of the marketing strategy now at Jobber. And it sounds like you've had a very instrumental part of that. But can you tell us about how is this directly contributing to the growth over at Jobber?
Rebecca: So yes, advocacy is a really big part of our strategy. I'm on the community team. I also want to give a big shout out to my senior manager, Molly Milosevic. She's our lead of our community team and has worked a lot with me on building a lot of these things. So we have a variety of channels and our goal is to build the number one home service community that advocates for Jobber and advocates for home service. Some of those channels are our ambassadors, social media events both offline and online, especially offline this past or online this past year and our PR program initiatives like Boost our grant program.
Advocacy across the community team and across our community can happen informally or formally. Whether that's a retweet of one of our inspirational quotes on Twitter, someone sharing out one of our ambassadors posts, a formal share of our referral program by sharing referral link - we also have customers advocating to each other. Things like sharing their experience on us on a higher tiered plan than another customer and kind of just sharing their first hand experience. We try to keep that in mind. And then we also have our PR program which highlights success stories. Really this has contributed to quite a bit of our growth and increasingly so all of those initiatives build up to creating demand and then ultimately increasing sales and then also some more brand centric KPIs. So things like number of social followers, number of times were mentioned in the media and also an increase of conversations about home service overall.
Will: To me, what's so interesting about what you're talking about there is you're building community around Jobber that talks about Jobber, but you're also building community just around the people who are the customers and the users of Jobber. You're talking about that home services market and you're giving them a broader voice. And to me, that's an often overlooked approach. It's often just like, hey, do something for me, I'll do something for you. And we're going to call it community or advocacy. But I like that you're genuinely stepping beyond just the conversation around Jobber and trying to be a champion of the conversation of the industry as a whole.
Rebecca: Absolutely. It's a big part of just Jobber's mission overall. And we want to be inclusive of customers and non customers. So our Facebook group, for example, has customers and non customers in it. And we also realize there's so many different members of the home service community that aren't always going to be customers. So things like vendors or suppliers or business coaches or the end consumer - the more they know about Jobber, the more they know about home service, the more that's better for us, better for our customers and in the end, the local community.
Will: Yeah. And it's an interesting one because as an outsider working in a software industry myself, I don't necessarily think about home services until I need them. And then to think that there of course is a community of people that are trying to figure this out and work together and to know that there's a company out there that's trying to support them. I think it's really cool.
Rebecca: Yeah, a lot of people don't know what home service is or they don't think about them much, but really they're the people who keep our communities safe and running. They're our plumbers, they provide essential services. Electricians, house cleaners provide that mental health lift. There's so many amazing contributions these businesses make. So we're all about being their number one fan and spreading the word.
Will: Now it sounds like you're running a variety of different programs, a lot of cool programs, but kind of where are you seeing the success? Is there any kind of hard data or even softer data that you can share with us on that?
Rebecca: Yes. So our referral program, our customer referral program has given us quite a healthy contribution of our sales coming through the door, which has been great. We actually know that our customers are super supportive. They're always like, oftentimes entrepreneurs aren't, especially small business owners, they're not looking to reinvent the wheel, just looking for whatever has worked for other people. So conversations are happening at supply stores, in the parking lot or maybe on a job site, or at their local B and I group. So we're just giving them tools to do what they're kind of already doing. And with that, and actually especially since we've replaced our internally built program with Sasquatch, we see a 5% higher lifetime value for accounts and then an 18% higher average selling price, which is great for us. And it's great for new customers because sometimes it takes them a while to discover that value on their own so they can get that sooner, that's better for their business, better for their employees.
Will: And that's interesting. People always talk about this idea of higher lifetime value and higher average selling. They talk about these things, but it's so hard to find concrete data on them. In our last episode, we were just speaking to someone who's researching the realm of referrals. But so much of the data comes from bank studies done in the like 50s to 60s. And so it's always wonderful to have data points like that that we can talk about that are replying to modern business models and modern businesses. Anything else that you've seen lots of success in?
Rebecca: Boost My Jobber is a program we launched of March in 2021. And it's all about rewarding great work and home service. And we found that after interviewing customers, we found that oftentimes really small businesses don't need a lot to make a huge impact. The connection to advocacy there is we're building loyalty where we're really showing off our altruistic side. And I think when consumers see that they're more emotionally connected to a brand, they're more bought in and they're going to talk about it with each other, with their communities. And we announced a lot of these recipients. We were able to tell their stories and it was a really great way to select. We individually scored thousands of different applications and it was a really great way to find really hometown heroes that are doing amazing things and then telling these stories and connecting them back to Jobber and home service.
Will: So these programs, I mean, you see the results, they sound wonderful. But you know, there must be some challenges that occur with trying to set these up. Can you share with any of the challenges you've experienced?
Rebecca: Yeah. In the beginning, we were doing a lot of these advocacy programs for the first time. So with our referral program, for example, we had all of these unknowns, unknowns around data, unknowns around the how in terms of building the perfect solutions and unknowns with what our customer habits are. So actually you will were a great resource and help with pointing out from your research, the advocacy funnel and really piecing out how to which specific areas of our customer journey to drill into. So we did that dedicated new resources there. And we also just like getting those resources from your team can always be kind of a journey in itself. So with so many priorities, the teams are busy. With our customer research, we went to our customers and set up customer interviews and surveys and that sort of thing. So that kind of helped us to get over those unknowns.
Will: Yeah, well, I'm glad that I could have helped and I absolutely would just want to echo asking your customer - the number of people that I think are maybe they're hesitant, they're intimidated, they're whatever that is. Customers have the answers about what customers are thinking because they're the customer. And it's amazing to me how often that that's not done. So kudos for making that a big part of that journey as well.
Rebecca: Yes, 100%. That's a tactic I swear by. I bring into all of my projects. So research, research, research. As a marketer, you always have assumptions. So make sure you're checking those assumptions, verifying them, and think about all the different, like who, what, when, where, how, why. And sometimes you just need to talk to five customers, call them 15 minutes, get those questions answered. If you have more time, great. You can build out more comprehensive formal surveys. But sometimes it's just emailing three, five customers, asking them. And it's really amazing how successful messaging has been received when it's messaging that's inspired by that research every time, project after project, it never fails.
Will: Yeah, that's wonderful and just great to hear that it's only three to five customers, possibly. So if someone's time strapped and they're saying, hey, either maybe they've got a smaller company and they don't have a million customers, or they just are time strapped, three to five customers, you think with that 15 minutes apiece, we're talking an hour, two hours. It'll probably take you that long to try to make it up on your own anyways. Might as well get on that call or contact that customer in terms of the results.
Rebecca: Exactly. And this kind of goes back to what we talked about. You don't always have to reward someone for helping out. Oftentimes we always try to position it as this is going to help us help other business owners. And oftentimes people are really excited for that more altruistic side of it.
Will: To me, that speaks volumes about your audience, your community, that they're excited to help other people inside of their community. While we're on the topic of tactics that you would swear by any other tactics that you would offer up to people as something that you think they should really make sure they're doing?
Rebecca: Because customer advocacy, customer marketing is a pretty new thing, it's always changing and evolving. New tactics are being discovered, I think, utilizing your industry connection. So that's one thing that's been a big help for me over the last few years is you can poke your vendors and ask. So I came to Sasquatch earlier this year or I think maybe Will, you actually just introduced me to someone and they we ended up meeting quarterly for quite a while. I meet quarterly with another customer marketer. I'm part of a customer marketer Slack channel. I think oftentimes, advocacy can be a bit of a siloed role. Even though luckily at Jobber we're working so it's more spread out over multiple tactics and channels. But I've been there where it's quite siloed and I think just you're not alone. Leverage those connections, ask vendors, ask people across your team their opinion as well. Just different perspectives inside and outside of your organization.
Will: Yeah. And it's interesting because as you were mentioning, the customer marketing and advocacy marketing roles in many organizations are either completely siloed or being run off of the side of somebody's desk. And there isn't necessarily a team of 15 that you can bat ideas around with and go to the VP and the director and all those things you're kind of maybe just going it alone or doing it as part of your other marketing duties. So that's a great suggestion to try to build those connections. Just jumping back a little bit, as someone who has as much experience as you do now, you've seen a lot of this. Anything that you would do differently, anything that you would suggest that people kind of think about when they may be doing this for the first time?
Rebecca: Yeah, absolutely. In the beginning I think there was probably too much focus on the manual side of things like referral asks, review asks. And so looking back, I would look at automate as much as you can, because it's going to save you time, it's going to be a better probably experience for your customers, for your internal partners, like your sales and CS teams. We definitely had some of that, but I think we could have done even more at the time. Those really personalized interactions can go a long way, which they can, but ultimately those things don't scale. So always looking at where you can scale the most. That being said, I'm a big believer that a certain percentage of your job as a customer advocacy marketer should be non scalable. It should be personalized. And that's really great for relationship building and getting those firsthand insights and research and just checking your assumptions and building relationships so you can continue leveraging them as you do more advocacy work. So firm believer in a big mix of automated and manual, but automate as much as you can.
Will: And do you have potentially an example of one of those really high value manual touchpoints that you would recommend that people do?
Rebecca: Yeah. We have an amazing customer success team at Jobber. And I'm not just saying that from a bias brand standpoint because I was on the team. It's a great team. We really give a shit about our customers and we have such an opportunity there in the one on one phone calls, chats, where they have really great and meaningful conversations when people are on their way to pick up their daughter from soccer after a long day and they just need to ask a question about a Jobber feature. Things like that. Super personalized. So much relationship building there. And I think that's a great opportunity for customer success teams to say, have you heard about our referral program? Like, if you're liking it, do you know other business owners who could use Jobber or have you - Jobber is really growing and we're trying to help more people. So if you ever have a moment, feel free to leave us a review. And those things take your time as a customer advocacy marketer because you need to kind of train and motivate and report back to the CS team on how all those things are going. And then obviously it takes time away from their actual conversations to focus on the product. So you have to make up that value for those things. And actually our success team asks for some of the most like highest converting review asks for quite a while. So manual but successful.
Will: Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. And I think you're just speaking to that. For every one person who asks for a review, there are countless hours behind that in the training, the preparation, the reporting, just to keep that motivation going. It's not as simple as we have a referral program or we have an advocacy initiative. There's a lot to be said about it being promoted internally and externally. And so kudos for doing all that hard work and making sure that that keeps happening.
Rebecca: Yeah, you're so right. And thank you.
Will: Now, to drill into kind of the specifics here for a second. You mentioned you did have an in house program and then you replaced it and you did that with the help of a cross functional team. But from my point of view I see this is a really interesting opportunity to just understand how did you do that? It can't be easy to assemble that cross functional team and to replace another solution. But can you tell us a little about that story?
Rebecca: Yeah. So it was identified as an area of opportunity by our leadership team, by me and we basically had one of our product teams actually was already in this area that was focusing on kind of more growth initiatives. So they were just an obvious great team to be working with. We pulled in biz ops resources and actually we were lucky that there was a couple other cross functional teams that kind of worked on similar marketing and product development projects. So I actually worked closely just getting learnings from other project drivers that they had to share. So we kind of just reapplied those tactics and improved and we had things like weekly check in meetings, monthly check in meetings. We pulled in that we actually got everybody involved in the research that was on that team. So that was really fun or quite a few of them we went through. So everyone was talking to customers, finding out.
We did external research, we did vendor research which is how we found Sasquatch. So lots of different things happening and we set like success criteria. So really clear success criteria. So if there was ever any wavering of the group we could always come back to those and say well that doesn't really fit in here. Or it's a really clear scope success criteria. We also worked in like small, like small kind of bite sized goals to work towards and I think that was really helpful just for overall team morale.
Will: Yeah, I just, you know we go back to that cross functional team and then when our customers live inside of product it is so hard to do anything in a silo. We have to be able to go across those product support, marketing, these are all touch points. And for advocacy as we talk about there's many positive touch points, as many places of value generated but sometimes it's because there's many touch points and there's many places we need to touch that customer along their journey and that cross functional team I think is a very important part of that. So I'm glad to hear that that came together so well and that you had others you could learn from.
Rebecca: Yeah, it was great. It was a really fun project to be a part of. And in case it is helpful, kind of our approach was we took that referral journey and we as a team and we went back to our respective teams and gathered ideas and we looked at what are all the areas that we could improve in each part of the program and then we scored them on effort versus impact and that's how we bubbled up and we kind of had a really good method of prioritizing what would make the highest impact. That was all throughout the funnel, integrated in our product as well.
Will: That sounds amazing. That is the dream right there. To actually have a structure and that little priority that's rare. So amazing to hear that. As we kind of look to the future, we're starting to approach 2022. As you look to the future of customer marketing, what do you think that others should be thinking about? What should they be planning and taking into consideration?
Rebecca: Yeah, I think we talked a bit about it before, but not underestimating the power of customer advocacy and all the different results that can come from it. So that was one of those challenges I spoke to earlier. There's a lot of data, a lot of unknown. So one thing we got to eventually was pulling our advocates or just people who have referred us and then also people who had like similar behavior to those people who have referred us and then the non advocates and we pulled things like the LTV, the ASP, their referral rate, their risk of churn, things like that.
And we were able to clearly paint that picture. So pull out as much as you can. I'm always excited to chat about that sort of thing. But things like customer research. So a lot of advocates I've built, I'm able to recommend them to numerous product teams, leadership teams to talk to, to get more information. So other which would otherwise be like really costly research, pulled in from another separate third party agency or something. So sell all of the value you can of advocacy. That's gonna help you get more resources for your work, get more buy in across the company.
And that leads me to my second point is customer advocacy is something everybody in your organization can play a role in or does play a role in. So your sales team, they're offering a referral worthy experience they're welcoming your referred customers. They can give them that white glove treatment. Your customer success team's giving them that referral worthy experience and can promote your program. Your PD team is making a referral worthy product and your marketing team is selling that product. And just like the more people are bought into the potential of advocacy and here at Jobber, we want to help more and more businesses. Obviously every company wants to grow, but we really want to help more businesses. So the more they're bought into why behind customer advocacy and how they can get involved, I think your programs are going to see a lot of success.
Will: Yeah, that's huge. I mean, getting that buy in. And I love what you said there, talking about the value that's not just hard to track, but the value that people might miss. Like exactly that. While we build advocates, we actually can cut down on customer research costs. But we also have these great people that we can talk to and easily and often get ideas for product or for campaigns. That's a huge benefit that I think many people overlook. And then using that as a way to get everyone to buy in, that's just super smart.
Rebecca: Yeah. And I have really great relationships, some really good friends. We've had customers invite us over for dinner down in Tennessee. We've had so great relationships. You know, we can DM them on Instagram like, hey, what are your thoughts on this? Or on Twitter like, hey, what do you think about this? And then another example is we've recently had a customer or we're about to have a customer lead one of our events at a trade show in Las Vegas. So that saves us time and planning from being there. Things have been a little tricky due to the pandemic, but just endless value adds. So I've actually been inspired by a lot of other customer marketers, the Sasquatch blog, other advocacy blogs out there. It took a lot of time to see all of those pieces, but they're out there and I think the more you can pull them out, the more your programs are going to succeed.
Will: And that just sounds like you're building such a defensible position. You've got real people who are really supporting what you're doing. I mean, to help lead an event for a vendor is a pretty big endorsement. And these are definitely the kind of things that sound like they're not going to get eroded overnight. They're going to be built and hopefully last for a very, very long time, those relationships.
Rebecca: Absolutely. And I'll give a shout out in case he's listening. That's Royce Ard from My Amazing Maid. He's in Georgia. He's a longtime customer and doing really great things. He's such a good advocate. So thank you, Royce, if you're listening.
Will: Wonderful. Yes, absolutely. And we've covered a lot of ground here today and really start to just scratch the surface. This is such a deep area. Any last kind of final thoughts that you want to share with the listeners today around your professional journey in customer advocacy?
Rebecca: Yeah, I would just say that customer advocacy is such an exciting area of marketing to be involved in. It's growing all the time. It's changing all the time. And you can really have a lot of influence within your marketing team and organization and try to prevent that siloed work and reach out to cross functional partners whenever you can. Get other people engaged and involved and executing on customer advocacy strategies. My favorite thing about customer advocacy is that it really allows me to get to know our customers and work really closely with them. So I just think that everyone who's in this role should really see themselves as a really strong marketer with access to a channel that has endless potential.
Will: Well, Rebecca, thank you very, very much for your time today. Before we say goodbye, if someone wants to connect with you or learn more about Jobber, where can they go?
Rebecca: Yeah, so if they want to connect with me, feel free to add me, connect with me on LinkedIn - Rebecca Kapler. If they want to know about Jobber, go to jobber.com. You can follow us on Instagram, Twitter. We have content, fun content going out all the time. We're also always looking for great people to work with. So if you're looking for a marketing job or any other career, check out our careers page on our website.
Will: Well, thank you once again very much for your time today, Rebecca. It's been a pleasure having this conversation. I know our listeners will enjoy it very much. So thank you very much.
Rebecca: Thank you so much for having me. I had so much fun.
