Exploring Advocacy Activities for Strategic Accounts

HI - For your # 2 - I do! I work with sellers to help with discounts for customer stories/case studies at renewals as well as new customers if they agree to do partnership announcements via press releases as they come onboard. It's great to start those conversations early and cash in on the excitement of the new relationship. It's not for everyone, but it does convert for me and has helped establish strong relationships with Sales.

This is good to hear. My hunch was that it might be useful if for nothing else than to give me another channel to identify opportunities.

Yes! It works well for that as well.

I've also worked on incorporating this into contracts. It can be helpful, but to make it work, you need to make sure that the output is as specific as possible and that everyone on the customer side is on board (for example, I've seen a champion says yes, but then their legal won't approve when the time comes). Even though it's in the contract, there usually isn't much recourse realistically available if they don't come through. For renewals, I would go down to the level of agreeing on what story you are going to tell and the timing/channels so you can make sure that it aligns to what they want to talk about and your goals.

We've built reference/advocacy in with a 5 or 10% decrease in contract cost, but it doesn't usually make it through the contract redlining.

And, for stories — thinking about the “Who” — partnership between Finance/Legal or Persona (assuming it’s outside of those teams).

and , these are great points. Specificity upfront makes it more likely that we'd be able to follow through with it.

we would probably have a similar experience, but even a small number of successes would help us diversify our sourcing for advocacy activities.

I've also seen in included as part of the base price (so the standard contract language includes advocacy), so that if the customer asks to remove it during redlines, the price goes up. Functionally the same as offering a discount, but can be very different psychologically

Love the psychology/thought process of this motion, !!

We've built advocacy into our contracts (mostly around logo rights/ability to share their "academy") and allow them to redline.

When we've offered discounts for case studies, they usually don't pan out or there's not a great story. That's just my experience. 🤷

, oooh, that's a really interesting application of loss aversion. I might see if we can test whether prospects would rather avoid a price increase or losing a discount.

, I 100% agree that focusing on discounts for a case study doesn't produce a good result. That would probably be at the bottom of list on how we would think about executing it.

We try for name/logo referencability in the contract although more often than not it gets redlined and we just do our job to earn their advocacy.

We don't give discounts for case studies. Like others mentioned it usually isn't a great story or they're just not as excited about advocating because it's tied to a contract. We also can't give discounts because we'd have to disclose that they "received compensation in exchange for the testimonial" ... not a great look.

Yea agree w/ - rarely does it help that you had a contract from a while ago where they said they'd be a reference.

One tactic that does help is trying to de-coupling the individual from the larger corporate entity. One way to accomplish this is by changing the framing of the ask. If you ask for a "case study" - that's going to imply a bunch of legal/pr approvals and you'll get mired up w/the corporate entity.

If you focus more on the individual user/champion and frame it more in the context of a best-practices showcase, award, etc (eg "we're doing a best practices series for other customers and we've selected you as one of our top users!" - you might get that person to tell their story in a way you can capture it w/o going through all the normal hoops.

Of course you're going to want the normal, federated official endorsement as well but having a few asks of varying levels of friction can help generally get more from that F500 segment.

, I agree and would never want to narrow the scope to a case study only. IMO, it's just too big of an ask for many organizations to start with a case study before they know and trust us or have even found value in the product.

- Interesting thread here based on our current challenges. 🙂

Thanks for sharing your experience, everyone. You are not alone. ❤

☝ this thread might be helpful!

Very - thank you! Much of it reflects our experience with "contract" marketing language. But it's helpful to read others' insights.