Episode Transcript
Will: Hey Pablo, thank you very much for joining us on the show today.
Pablo: Thank you. My pleasure to be here.
Will: You know, I'm really looking forward to this conversation. Obviously this is a topic that's near and dear to my heart, but before we get into it, I was hoping that you could just help our audience just know a little bit more about your business about Wings4U. If you give us a quick overview, I think that'd help everyone a lot.
Pablo: Yes, for sure. So Wings for you, just to start with that, this is a company, it's a marketing agency that's been around working with big customers like Microsoft, Twitter and Riverbed and big names like that. I would say lots of IT companies, but not only IT companies in this tech based enterprises. And we've been doing customer advocacy and customer evidence programs for over 10 years. So that's the core, let's say, business of Wings4U.
Will: And you're talking about some of these bigger brands. Do you find yourself working with some smaller brands as well or is it primarily kind of those big enterprises that you work with?
Pablo: No, we have a fair mix of those right now. Any company that has ambition to go global and has customers also everywhere that are selling solutions, those are right now our best fit, let's say the kind of customers that we are highly specialized, as I say, tech based companies and the size ranging from hundreds to thousands of hundreds, let's say.
Will: And just out of curiosity, do you find kind of like the big company, the bigger companies have very specific needs that the smaller companies don't, or is it a very similar kind of needs across that entire range?
Pablo: Yeah, so that's an interesting question. I do think that those are different needs usually, but not always. Again, that depends on the kind of product and the kind of market segment that that company is focused in. We've seen and we've been working with companies that are small, but they have a strong B2B and play inside, meaning that they have account managers, they have sales team that spread across different countries and they are attending customers in different continents.
In those cases, I think it doesn't change too much. I mean the kind of needs of this company has, is very similar to company IBM sized, let's say. You know, Telefonica, those kind of big companies that even though might sound, sometimes they are B2C like Telefonica, they have also a strong and big B2B play inside that as well.
So the needs are different. So just to keep maybe exploring a little bit more about this topic, the smaller companies that are there, they are not fitting this description that I just gave you. They are using maybe working with consumers directly or the SMB segment is strong for them. Usually the kind of programs and the kind of assistance, the kind of program they will build is more focused on communities, community building, forums online, create ways to incentive behavior and drive behavior of those consumers to help each other and of course provide referrals.
And basically a lot of automation is necessary to run this kind of program. And when you are talking about B2B and those enterprises, doesn't matter the size of the company necessarily. The kind of play is something that I call, we call it wings for you a lot as managed kind of advocates play. Meaning that you have a role, it's reference manager, advocacy manager. Depending on what you are doing with your program, you can call it differently. But you have this role that will drive the initiatives with specific advocates and with less automation.
Will: You know, and I think that's a really nice delineation you have there, that we have these more programs that are automation centric and ones that are more managed. And I do see that there's actually room for some companies to run both. It might be a Telefonica where they actually have both markets or it might be a business where you have some actions that make sense to be fully automated and some that are more to be managed. But I think it's a nice delineation.
I think before we go in, I got a bunch of questions to ask you based on that. But before we go further, I'd love to just kind of get your sense of what is a customer advocacy program because I've yet to get the same answer twice. And I'm always curious about what you see kind of is a customer advocacy program.
Pablo: That's a very interesting question for sure. And even though I will give you my view, I'm not claiming that is the only definition for that. And again, I think that the best advocacy program, first of all, it's the one that makes sense to the organization that's running it - it's not one thing fit all sizes. And it really needs to see this specific case.
But for me, first of all, customer advocacy is - I would define as a sales and marketing strategy that leverage the positive voice of the customer to influence buying decisions. I say that again - sales and marketing strategy that will leverage the positive voice of the customer to influence buying decisions. That is one of the definitions for customer advocacy and you can have a specific kind of program, of course.
That's more B2B but it would also feed the community side of it. But when you go to customer advocacy program, it's a way to do that systematically and intentionally and with measurable results in measurable ways to see how all of the investments that you are doing towards creating a network of advocates is returning to your company. Usually we're talking about revenue at the end of the game. Everything you are doing, it could be translated to revenue. And it should. Why not?
Will: You know, I really like your definition there. I think that I've seen people really confuse community and advocacy. I think I've seen people look at advocacy, I don't know, just they separate it a little bit further from that. It is using the voice of the customer, as you said, to drive a buying decision. And that also frees up what it can be. Right. It doesn't have to be any one specific program. You know, we really have that flexibility. And I think that's the power of customer advocacy. We can have programs that drive it, but we also kind of have dark advocacy, if you want to call it that, which is like the untracked advocacy that exists in the world. But if you stimulate either of those and they drive to a buying decision, then I would agree with your definition that that is an advocacy program.
Pablo: Yeah, for sure. So I think that it's all about the intention. That's the reason I usually try to separate what is customer advocacy and what is the program. You can have customer advocacy practices at your company.
Pablo: One of the first things that when we are talking to customers that wants to implement a program, one of the first things we explore are those customer advocacy practices. All of any company is doing that. If today you are spending to purchase a bottle of wine to reward a customer that you like, of course, depending on the country, that's not something you should do. It's not going to be welcome. But not compliant maybe, but depending on the country, that would be necessary.
So let's keep using this bottle of wine example. That's a customer advocacy practice. That's a low hanging fruit you can get. I mean you probably have ambassador programs, like loyalty programs. You can have customer advisory boards, maybe that's running already by the product teams. Maybe you have enterprise voice of the customer for different things.
So one of the nice things to do when you're starting a program is recognizing those practices because you're going to probably start with that. You just need to encapsulate right into your program and give it same experience for those that are navigating through those practices and you are starting to have a program. And then of course when you have this standardization of the process, you can start measuring that as well. Operational health metrics, strategic metrics. That's another topic of course. But yeah, it's a topic by itself. But this is one of the things that I like to say. So I agree with you as well. That's a great definition and a great add to the definition.
Will: Yeah. And I like where you're going with that. That you know, we have this ability to kind of almost - we might already be running advocacy actions. You know, there may not be a program yet, but we might be taking actions that are going to help drive advocacy. Now when you're working with a group, maybe they're at that stage, they are doing some kind things and they're starting out. What kind of programatization, what kind of programs would you kind of take someone into as their first step into advocacy? As an intentional program?
Pablo: Intentional. Okay, that again, that depends a lot. Let's go back to the community. Because maybe the community is what makes sense to your company. And there is - and it's a great initiative.
So but I think that it's also some - the kind of initiative that it's hard to start. Usually if your company, if you have those two segments, SMB is important to you, but you also have the enterprise segment. I think personally I've seen that it's a much better project to start, you know, as a pilot, I mean in the automation side and community sides.
Pablo: Doing a pilot, it can cost millions of dollars for the community. When you start driving behavior of a community, we're talking about a community of 1,000 people to start really being able to have some movement.
But when you were talking about the managed advocate side, that's more B2B. Again, Enterprise segments, you can start small, you can start small and you can start doing, let's say, what's the classic, right? C2C calls how to promote one customer, get on the phone with another customer and recommend the product. And also the events.
The marketing teams, usually they are needing, they need quotes, they need pictures, they need use case. They need speakers. So you start with that as well, providing the kind of speakers. And maybe the PR teams, they need customers as well, so you try to do copr.
The other thing that's very important that many pilots are not including, and that's something that I always think that why not, is the recognition activities. Sometimes that's a common error that I see on those pilots is that when they are starting their customer advocacy programs, they think of all these that I call advocacy activities, like the C2C code that I mentioned, speaker for events. But they forget to include the other things, which is the recognition activities that will be together with the advocacy activities. And then you are forging an advocate.
That bottle of wine that I just mentioned is one example of that. Another example is courses, training, certification. Some tech companies that we work with, these official certification programs and sometimes they give away courses and why not to think on those customers that you are trying to forge as advocates and maybe giving a course a training is one of the recognition activities. So you get both and you start selecting your potential advocates that you want to work with and then you have a pilot. Of course I'm not talking about Martech, I'm not talking about the platforms. But in a nutshell, let's say, yeah.
Will: Pablo, you're speaking my language there. Because you know, I think that this pilot idea is often, especially in tech, can get overlooked a little bit. Where we want to start with the tool, we want to start with a platform and we want to start with technology. And really, you know, at Sasquatch, we build a platform that helps automate large parts of, you know, all sorts of different product led growth programs. But you know, there's that part where you go like you can start without the software, you can start with a pilot program that's going to be managed by some people. You're going to do some reach out, you're going to see how it works. And when you get to a point that you've proven you're ready, you know, let's take a look at the automation. And I think that kind of leads me to a question which is, you know, you start the pilot program and we're starting to get some engagement. But if I'm a company and I've got a B2B company, is there a number of customers I need to have before I start this advocate program? What is the right size that I should go after this?
Pablo: That's a good question. There's a trap. This question also can be a trap because I've seen with the companies that we've been talking and discussing the market, I've seen a Magic Number of 30%, 35% of your customer base should be your advocate. And I always think, why is that? That's a number that is, you know, if you think of those big programs and do maybe an average, I've seen those big companies and I would maybe reach that 35%, I would get to that number and probably understand why we hear these numbers as a standard for advocacy. But that's not true in my opinion.
You don't need that to start. It's all based on ROI. As soon as you are reaching your ROI, it doesn't matter if you have 10 customers. With 10 customers you can start a program. Maybe you cannot start a community with 10 customers. That's not possible. But you can definitely have a pilot with managed advocates and that kind of approach that's more proactive instead of transactional. The one that you will act as a success manager and much less as a back office kind of program.
And we will go ahead and put together in a plan those recognition activities and those advocacy activities and say okay, with this customer, we agree and shake hands that we'll do three calls throughout the year. We don't do copy are in September this, you are purchasing a new product that we're launching and we're going to do event with you. Are you okay? Advocate? Okay, so you shake hands and then the other side you have the recognition activities. A hand letter, a handwritten letter from the CEO you're going to send more or less in May, that bottle of wine, if it applies, trainings.
And we should never forget that an advocate is formed. You need to forge, form, whatever is the word you prefer and advocate, they will not. Sometimes you do that just naturally and unintentionally. And it happens because maybe you have a great product. That guy, that customer had a great experience with you and they are willing to spread. They are doing that just like us as consumers. We do all the time. You purchase great products, doesn't matter what, and you are recommending it to your family and friends, they want to do the same. They want to talk about your product. But unfortunately the reality is that the best is to plan for that and do it systematically and intentionally. And then you are talking about a program. But you can do that with 10 customers and manage that. So that's what I call the managed advocates.
Pablo: And that you can start small. And there is a reason for that. I wanted to say, just say that before I change the question, which is it's very important in the beginning why you have a pilot. Why not to just, okay, spend $200 million and have a full communities and managed advocates and let's bring 40 people to why not to do that? Because it's not an easy task. First of all, it's not easy. Sometimes it's an interdisciplinary by nature. You need to go beyond your silos. You need to go to sales, marketing, customer success, sometimes customer experience.
Then you are realizing the full value. If you're spending that money without doing that, that's probably money spent badly. But then when you start small, you can build that value and get your stakeholders buying. You start with one product. Maybe you have that VP of that product that you be your advocate of the program. You can start changing big process inside that company for that VP. You get your basically your partners inside and then you spread slowly across the organization what makes sense. So as long as you have an ROI, the number of advocates really doesn't matter.
Will: Yeah, I like that. I like that a lot.
Pablo: Okay. And the one last thing about this 35%, there is one thing that you could get that's very good. It's one of the promises of customer advocacy. You have many promises. One of them is for sure, customer retention. You have pipeline, better conversion rates.
But you have integrated ROI. That bottle of wine that you'd send to a customer giveaway. How can you see the ROI of that outside of a program? It's impossible. But at the moment that you say, no, no, this is a bottle of wine in May for this customer that will do all these activities related to all these pipeline, then that bottle of wine has an ROI that's clear. So that's second promise of customer advocacy.
And the third main promise as I'm talking about is customer retention. The moment that you have only promoters, those promoters could be stolen by the competitors. I mean, okay, I'm happy with this, but I'm only happy if someone is offering something better. Maybe I will go, but if I'm happy, but I'm also learning how to position the product, how to step on stage to talk about that problem. I'm starting to be a professional branded with that product, then man, that's going to be very difficult to jump ship, to be stolen. Because the moment that the competitor comes to me and I ask all the questions that I value already - the company taught me. That's the reason I'm saying advocates are formed.
Will: And I like the way you're talking about that. This idea about forming that advocate, recognizing the ROI, because I think a lot of times the ROI can be tricky for some people to understand. And I do totally appreciate the idea that we start the pilot. That pilot's going to let us prove out some of these activities. But then when we track that programmatically through a program, we are able to attribute that to many different outcomes. That may come from the many different sales calls and things, which I think is really the goal of advocacy.
I think there's this kind of interesting question, though, that comes, which is where we say, happy customer versus advocate. And this idea of an advocate, I think to some is, oh, yeah, we'll turn everyone into advocates. And to others is - we don't have any advocates. How do I even create an advocate? But I think the question I kind of look at is like, is there a bar that you say, like, well, this person's an advocate and this person's just a happy customer?
Pablo: Yeah, sure. So that's maybe a continuation to our speaking just recently about this third promise of marketing, and that's the reason the 35% is good. It's not bad because you are shielding a third of your customers against the competitors. So you choose wisely. If you are in an industry that's very hot, I mean lots of competitors doing great things. And so maybe that's a great way to shield your customers because if they're just acquiring and then you forget about them, you're not forging them as advocates, and they could jump ship easily. And you don't want that in that industry. So that depends a lot.
If your industry is like that, maybe that 35% is going to be financially very interesting for your company. But now about who is an advocate, because that's completely related to this that I'm saying - an advocate to me is not only a happy customer. It's someone that also uses their time, their own time to promote your product. Some programs and frameworks for advocacy program, they call it high touch and low touch kind of activities.
Pablo: The low touch activities are those that are not using the advocates time, like a list of customer stories that maybe your sales team needs. And you as a program, you're providing the assets basically, produce the assets. But when they were requesting RFPs - like they want a customer that accepts to be in RFP and answer questions if it comes to the moment that they progress in that RFP or a C2C call, customer to customer call. We are using the advocate's time.
So to me, I always split in the programs that we are dealing with - okay, those are the population of customers that we have, a certain amount of customers that accepted to be part of your program. And some companies are calling those advocates directly. Okay, last year we recruited that customer, they are advocates. For me it's not true, you cannot know. Maybe just after a month later, after you recruited them, they became mad at your company. They're not satisfied anymore with your product. And how do you know?
The only way you can really know, because the net promoter scores will not tell you that. Maybe they will say, okay, right now just to give an example, as a consumer right now, I'm okay with my bank. I will not say the name, but I'm okay. I don't have any complaints. I don't have any cases open with customer experience. But ask me if I'm going to recommend that publicly. No, no way. Because I'm probably a promoter for the net promoter score for them. But I'm not an advocate.
So knowing that is when you actually do an activity with them. And that's also the reason it's important to have this balance between the managed and the communities or the automations. Because that way you can also prove, okay, I'm offering an activity to this advocate, and I offered already three or four times in a row and they keep saying no, there is a problem here. And that's the kind of problem you go and check, okay, customer experience, do they have any problems here?
Pablo: What about the product? Are they consuming less or more? Maybe not. Maybe it's just the same. But you, as a customer advocacy program, you have information that's very important. They are okay, but they don't want to be public and say something on behalf. Maybe it's just about internal policies of the company. And that's important for a program to of course recognize that and mark that. But if it's not, it's a problem that you have in your hands and what you do next. That's one of the reasons that - that's not the subject, we have so many things to talk, we need to talk again maybe in the future.
Will: Absolutely.
Pablo: But one of the things is the feedback loop of course. So you connect with different departments and you can have a plan. It's just like an advocacy plan but to recover a customer. You have activities that are a little bit different.
And yes, I think that to go to the point - an advocate is that customer that said yes in a recent time. And how recent? That depends on the company. That really depends on the company. I've been working with companies that would select the six months and say, okay, if the last six, the past six months, there is no activity, this guy is churning. So you start develop a churn kind of model of your advocates and you start downgrading them to promoters and just say, okay, those are a happy customer for sure, but not advocates.
And then you have a question, should I invest more? The reason I'm not increasing my number of advocates, it's because sales teams, the sales and marketing teams are not coming to this program and asking me for advocates or is it because really they are saying no systematically to us. Maybe you have a problem. And that was one of the cases at some point with one of the customers that we had that they were having a problem like a global problem with performance issues with one specific product and it was very hard. The other one was very localized in the US healthcare industry.
Pablo: It was impossible to find advocates to say yes, I'm talking about advocates that were recruited already, but also customers that were using the product. Apparently they were happy. And we would try to recruit and offer advocacy activity at the same time. And no way. So you as customer advocacy have to fix that.
Will: You know, I like the way you kind of breaking that up. We've got our promoters, we've kind of got our low touch advocates, we've got our kind of high touch advocates. And then we got to recognize that people can come and go from those stages, right. That maybe someone was willing to do a talk last week and this week something's happened and they're not willing to have a talk. And I think something we're kind of talking around here a lot, which is I think really important is really the importance of these programs to be interconnected with many departments inside of the company. Right. Like a standalone advocacy program just doesn't really make sense. You know, like you were mentioning, obviously the advocacy activities or the advocacy outcomes, you know, those willing to speak at events and things like that are going to be valuable to the marketing and sales team. And then we're going to have, when we need to develop advocates or discover advocates, we're going to interact with the success team. We might even interact with success team as using advocate information as a signal on their churn predictors, things like that. But I think that interconnectedness really sounds like it's an essential part of these programs in your experience.
Pablo: Yeah, for sure, for sure. As we were saying, there is unique kind of information that customer experience right now doesn't know about me and my bank relationship. But if they had a customer advocacy program, let's say they would know because I would say no.
Pablo: So that's saying, and this is coming because it's an interdisciplinary area of knowledge. Customer advocacy by nature. And for the executives and managers, it's very hard to go beyond silos and just see what else exists there. No, it's someone else's problem.
But in customer advocacy, as you said, it's cross department. So to start a pilot again because of these, this can get tricky, let's say, and hard to execute in a company mainly, especially if it's a big enterprise. But when you're starting a pilot, that's the reason it's important to start small. So you are building those relationships internally and integrating. And I would say that you need a phased like maturity model roadmap that will include different services that you give to your internal customers and to your advocates in terms of experience.
And then you can work on that slowly over time. Always chasing an ROI, always showing how things are improving. And I would say that at the end of the day you should have at least conversations with customer experience, marketing, sales and customer success units. If you have success managers. If you are talking with all those guys - of course, when I'm talking about sales, I'm talking about pre sales as well. Depending on your product, maybe it's based on post sales and drive consumption of something. So they purchase now something and you are getting value if they are using that. So you include those teams as well. And then if you're touching all these, you're probably doing in the right direction.
Will: Yeah. And you know, I think one of the things you said in there that was just kind of maybe a passing comment, but I think is really important as well is, you know, the value of a no. You know, by offering people advocacy activities and encouraging them to join the programs and having them say no, it's actually a really important piece of data for the business to recognize how many people aren't willing to advocate on their behalf.
Will: Now obviously it's just kind of the inverse of those who are willing to advocate on their behalf. It's just the opposite. But I think that's a really interesting signal. You know, if someone's unwilling to advocate for you, that's a signal that those other departments can use. And you said you got to mark, like, hey, it's just a company policy. Like anytime they say anything, it takes 400 lawyers to approve it. So it's not really going to happen. But you know, that information is really, really valuable. I think, you know, when we're looking at these kind of advocacy interactions, you know, we're talking the lower touch and the higher touch actions. And you're talking kind of building out this plan, right? This, maybe this longer term advocacy plan. You know, are there specific models or specific types of advocacy actions that you think are better or worse than others or what's kind of your view on that?
Pablo: Yeah, I think that first of all, having these kind of plans is important. I would say that most of the programs out there, they don't have that yet. When I was talking to Zoe the other day, we were talking about proactive model versus a transactional model. The transactional model is usually when you are acting as this back office. You have people that are just waiting to receive requests and as soon as they get, okay, I have sales team. Sales Peter requesting Monica advocates or advocate with specific characteristics. And that's it. Look for it please and give me or someone similar. That's the transactional.
There is a huge problem when you have just that model. Which is the main problem I see is that talking about that 35%. So let's say that you are aiming for this 30, 35% of penetration in your customer base for advocates in your customer base and forward to leave them unused. Maybe with the transactional mode, what happens? I would say 90% of the programs out there, they have this problem. Almost 100% of the programs out there is, okay, I recruit a lot of customers, but they are unused. I mean recruiting and then they spend like a year without using them.
Pablo: You know, maybe they will never hear from us again. And I'm talking also about the publicity agreements. Sometimes you get into advocacy program through a publicity agreement and then nothing happens when you have a plan. So my first answer to that is having a plan is good enough. You know, if you're thinking that way, you are already in my opinion, in a good direction at least.
So a plan you cannot do, it's much more expensive. Of course, it's much cheaper to just say, hey, please come request, sales and marketing, request more. And I just add people to a back office and then we receive the requests. The problem is that doesn't work that well, unfortunately. Those two tabs that you need to open - the number of requests in the ad book that you have, they are never going to be synchronized. And one of the things that you have to do to have it adjust a little bit. Two things in my opinion you can do in this first one is have a plan, a customer success plan for those advocates.
Meaning that it's really, of course, this is a database. But just to give you a picture of that, it's a piece of paper that says customer name, it's in the dates and the advocacy activities that you run with that. And then the recognition activities. That sounds easy. But to have the recognition activities and that upfront, it means that you needed to shake hands with that owner of the bottle of wine. You need to go there to that PR person and say, hey, we will need - when is the moment, okay? There is a product launching in September and I would need PR, so can you give me someone? So you have to plan that upfront and that's a lot of work.
Pablo: And the kind of advocacy manager that you need is also different from a back office person. To do this kind of agreement, go and plan something. But having that is a very good idea mainly if you're talking about your best customers, basically your rock stars.
But then the second thing to also give a little bit of proactivity and solve this problem, that 100% of the problems out there, they have of unused advocates in the database untouched advocates is to do interactive outreaches. That's what we call at Wings4U. It's when you are scanning the pipeline of your CRM and you see those opportunities between let's say 40% and 60%. Of course that will differ - different sales process will make sense, different things. But on the beginning you go and offer those assets and then when it's 50%, you go back to those guys. And that can be automated easily. You don't need even a software for that. Some software will do that automatically for you. That's great. But you don't need that for your pilot.
And I think that all of the pilots should be doing that as well. You can just go export that from the CRM. You're going to see, you're going to get an Excel with a bunch of opportunity owners with the mail address of those sellers and the customers industry product they are trying to sell. And what you do, you try to match that and send them an email, a mail merge, Outlook, my Excel word saying "hey, this is Pablo, I'm advocacy manager and I have advocates that could accelerate your deal. Are you interested in promoting a C2C call with your prospect?" And about in my experience from 15 to 20% they will reply to you saying yes, I didn't even know that you existed. Great. So you start working and you have someone that you probably request again organically later.
Pablo: So those two things, I think it's very important. You offer your advocates proactively, don't wait for someone. So you see what you have in your supply and you try to sell it. Who is your customer? Your seller is your internal customer. And you try to offer them those great advocates that you have and put them to work. That way you are using your advocates, your promoters and you are transforming them into advocates and the plan, advocacy plan. When you have the recognition activities, that's the moment that you are really in the game. If you do that, you're talking about customer advocacy, if you're not doing that, you're talking about probably a reference program. Because advocates are forged again. And you forge that way.
Will: You know, that's a really, really important delineation you're touching on there. I think that the majority of programs that I have seen, I would argue are much more in this transactional model, like you said, that they're waiting for people to be requested. You know, they may occasionally ask for a testimonial or a reference, but it does feel much more like they're building a reference program.
And this idea that you're talking about, I don't hear a lot of people talking about how they're proactively reaching out to their PR team or their sales team, their marketing team, whatever it might be, even their success team, potentially to say, hey, I have an advocate that I think could help you. That I think is a very next level deployment of an advocacy program where you're literally, as you said, you've got an asset, you've got a resource, an advocate, and you think that they could help in this sales process and you volunteer them to that process. That to me sounds like kind of a very strong bar that people should be striving for, but also really effective program.
Pablo: Yeah, totally. I completely agree. And at some point, what I envision that will happen - customer advocacy is something that is incipient right now. People are starting to talk about that. We see an increase in interest, but it's not easy to deploy. That's again, you need to go beyond your silos. And so when they see that barrier, it's already maybe sometimes it's hard just to move forward and they don't have this also experience.
And a lot of people in the market that we just talk about phased ways of implementation. But in the future, I see that most companies will drive their businesses and all the marketing budget and budgets that are invested to customer are going to be centralized through a customer advocacy program. So again, you have budgets for customer trainings, what's the department? It could be any department, sometimes it's operations, sometimes it's specific training department. They have budget for customer. Hey, let's try to do that through an advocacy program because otherwise you just give away random things. But when you have a plan for each customer, you know how much you're investing and how much you're getting back to that.
And there's another thing that's very important as well that we didn't talk. I'd like just to finish about the types of advocates - you also have one thing that's called a quasi advocate. A quasi advocate is someone that you invested in, they are doing promoting your product publicly for you and recently. So an advocate. And they left the company. They were working, let's say, for Volkswagen, whatever is the company. Now they go to Ford. That's not a good example anyways. You know, you leave the company and go to a different company, you don't have that product anymore. So how come you can be an advocate without using the product you're not using anymore?
Pablo: You know, even though we could try to use that guy because it's a former user of your product, that's not the same. When people with the company name behind saying we are using, I am using and the company behind me is using your product. So identifying those guys, those quasi advocates, you invest a lot in those customers, but you don't lose them. You need to identify those guys and give to the sales team again, scanning the pipeline again, same automated. You can do that. If you don't have a software platform to do that, you can do that anyway. It's easy, it's not difficult. You check those guys and see if there's any deal with that company that your quasi advocate is working right now. And you just go to the sales team and say, hey, we have a great guy. Bring that guy to the sales table. That's going to be at least influencer. That will help you sell to that customer. So it's almost for, it's one of the goals that we should have in mind as managers of customer advocacy. Be sure that we are identifying those quasi advocates and converting them back into advocates. That way you are also selling more again, you're helping the sales team. Some softwares are doing that already for you. But integration with Sales Navigator, LinkedIn. So you see form advocates change. But you can do that manually, easily. I would say mainly again if you are doing the managed, but if your whole structure is all set up for back office transactional, you are going to lose all of that. You're not even talking about those great things that you could realize as a program.
Will: Yeah. I've got one more question on my side here that you mentioned early on, but I want to come back to this, which we are talking about companies that have a global footprint. They're trying to develop advocates around the world. And to me, a lot of the companies I talk to are struggling to do this in one country, let alone in a diverse range of countries with diverse languages and cultural norms and things like that. Any anything you're seeing that's really successful there or any advice for someone who wants to expand their maybe their obviously program for a core market to multiple other markets?
Pablo: Yeah, I think that's - there is no magic in here. I would love to just tell you, okay, just do this. You get five new regions. Now, unfortunately, you need to plan that and have people that can speak those languages. If you are, let's say talking about EMEA markets, they are really nice, very open to those kind of activities. They really like to be invited. But you need people that will not speak only English maybe in a few markets.
And that's one of the reasons I think it's very important to think on the managed kind of advocates. And so you can plan those things. But it's definitely possible. We have a number of customers that are not only the customer advocacy, but Wings4U. We have also APAC, EMEA. Actually in all continents. We have in regions evidence problems. That gets even trickier. How can you shoot a video right now in Kazakhstan? Those are important markets, oil and gas and you have them as customers and you want to shoot a video there, local. Maybe you don't have offices, so that's possible. But again, that needs good partners. That requires in the plan.
The other thing is important to do that is by outsourcing, outsourcing part of that team, if not the entire team. You can do that. And of course you need to create email addresses of the company. If you are whatever is the company, you need to give all those outsourced teams also the email address. So the experience they have when they are talking to your customers are same experience that you'd give them with your FTE's employees, own employees. But that way you can expand quicker. You can do some projects. You can say, I will explore a market and see if I can drive more sales through advocacy for the next six months. So again, planning and expanding and with good partners, that's the only way I would see.
Will: And you said six months. Is six months long enough for a pilot for someone to test this out and see in your experience?
Pablo: If you have already a pilot that's in the US and extension of a pilot, that's possible. But six months, depending - that all depends on how engaged you are as an executive, as the owner of the program. If you are that kind of owner, that is working with an agency to implement that, not answering emails actively or not seeking those kind of agreements, or you're trying to do that without a process, something to guide - it's just going to be a little bit not well organized, let's say, and you can consume the six months and have nothing at the end.
But with a good process, I think six months, you can definitely, if again, you need to hire people. One of the things that you are doing, a pilot, maybe you don't have these people inside. Maybe your success managers are completely full already, cannot deliver the current things that they are doing and there is no one. So you need to hire someone and let's say that you go with an agency so it's quicker to hire someone and okay, that's done. Then you need to train this person. If this person is not trained, depending on some agencies will give you trained people and certified people, some will not.
And then you need to start, of course, recruiting those customers, selecting and promoting the program internally. You need to translate all of the assets you have - brochure, the internal, maybe website for the sellers in that area. You need to do a lot of things. So that depends a little bit. But in my experience, six months, you can do a lot of things. And depending on your engagement, you can definitely, it's possible to have a pilot and show the ROI, go to your stakeholder and say, hey, I have a great thing in my hands and that's the way we scale this. That's why you do a pilot.
Will: No, and I think that that makes a lot of sense. We have a pilot, we have a plan, we have some skilled people, and we can get a lot done in a rather short period of time. I like it. Thank you very much for all this wonderful insight here today, Pablo. I've really enjoyed this conversation. We'll definitely be having a few more conversations, I think, on some of the topics we just able to touch on slightly here today. But before we go, I just want to ask, where can people connect with you? Where can they learn more about Wings4U? What's the best way to get ahold of you?
Pablo: Sure. First of all, of course, our website and wingsforyou.com that's one of the source. Contact us definitely. The team will get in touch with you in very short time. And if you want to connect with me, I'm open to connections. Just go to LinkedIn.com in Pablo Fernandez BR Fernandez with S. And I just accept that and you start engagement, just ping me. And we are happy if you have a program, of course, if you have a pilot, if you want to start your own experience, we are happy to discuss that with you and see how we can help you succeed.
Will: Wonderful. And we'll put that link into the show description as well. For people who are listening to this show, love it. Pablo, I just want to say thank you. This has been a really wonderful conversation. Really appreciate your time here and I know our listeners did as well. So thank you very much.
Pablo: Thank you, Will. My pleasure. And looking forward for the next episode.
Will: Absolutely. Thank you.
Pablo: Talk to you. Bye.
