That's What She (Or He) Said: Driving Reviews That Work for You
with Davin Wilfrid, Customer Marketing Manager at Intuit
Visit www.advocamp.com for everything you need to know about Advocamp - the biggest customer experience, engagement and advocacy event of the year.
Hi everyone, I’m Davin Wilfrid and run the advocate marketing program at Intuit QuickBase in Cambridge, MA.
Thank you to Truman, Stephanie, and the rest of the Influitive team for inviting me here.
I’m really excited to share the story of our advocate program and how we were able to drive the right reviews, but really I just want to talk about fajitas.
In the early 1980s, several restaurant chains started serving fajitas, which had been served at some small Texas restaurants for decades. But one restaurant outdid all the others.
That was Chilis.
Because while other restaurants were innovating on the ingredients, Chilis focused on the sound. They made their fajita skillets produce more noise and more smoke than anyone else’s.
Fast forward to the present, and fajitas are the ULTIMATE in social proof.
To this day, the kitchen staff at any Chilis will immediately start prepping fajita skillets once the first order comes in. They know the sights and sounds of sizzling smoky fajitas will prompt a deluge of new orders. This is called the fajita effect.
This has everything to do with social proof, which basically describes a psychological phenomenon in which people who don’t know what to do next will just do what everyone else is doing.
At Chili’s people who don’t know what to order will see that first order of Fajitas and get triggered into ordering it also.
For your prospects, you need to find that sizzle.
Last year we began charting a new course for QuickBase.
Our product is an application building platform that lets people like me build business applications without any coding.
Our customer base is also very different from the rest of Intuit’s. Our best customers are companies like FedEx Office, Tesla, Pepsi, etc.
We did a ton of customer research and discovered that our most successful customers – those with highest retention and growth rates – were centralized technology buyers in mid-to-large organizations who used our product as a platform for building lots of apps. Forrester calls this emerging category Rapid Application Development.
This resulted in a new go-to-market strategy in which we try to sell directly to this type of buyer.
But we had a problem. To reach central buyers in IT or Operations, we would need a lot of things we didn’t have. AR & PR, a real reference program, updated messaging, and better training & onboarding, for example.
We also knew we would need to invest time in our social proof strategy. We knew 93% of B2B buyers start their search online, and 60% of those searches are for peer reviews.* And that 63% of technology buyers use review sites to create shortlists.**
*“The B2B Tech Customer’s Path to Purchasing,” Google, 2012
** “Online Software Reviews and the Power of the Crowd,” Software Advice, 2014
And yet this was us in January of 2015.
We had 5,800 customers and 3 million end users
Our NPS was in the high 40s
But virtually no presence on any review site.
In fact, we had fewer than 20 reviews total across all of the review sites.
And our listings were outdated.
So it was time to get to work. But we didn’t just want reviews. WE WANTED THE RIGHT REVIEWS. Reviews that would matter to our target buyers, and were easy to find when they were shopping in our category.
We got started by identifying the top 3 sites we wanted to focus on. For IT buyers, we think G2 Crowd, TrustRadius, and IT Central Station were the best options. Out strategy was to start by updating our listings and, when necessary, our categories, across each site to match our new Rapid Application Development messaging. Then we would mobilize our advocates through our AdvocateHub.
On G2 Crowd, we were placed in a category that didn’t align with our strategy, and had only a handful of reviews
Before we started driving reviews with our Advocate Hub, we first worked with G2 Crowd to create a new category that made sense.
We sent them analyst reports, customer stories and videos, and information on our competitors
Took a few weeks of back and forth, but eventually this was successful
Next we surrounded our advocates with our updated messaging, through blog posts, surveys, and our EMPOWER 2015 user conference. We spent about a month doing this.
Finally, just after the EMPOWER conference ended, we created our G2 Crowd challenge and drove more than 40 reviews in just over a week.
What’s even better is that those reviews reverberated with the language our advocates heard in the weeks prior. They referred to our product as a RAD platform and themselves as “citizen developers” – which is a core component of our RAD messaging strategy. With 0 prompting, they were speaking in the language we knew our new target buyer would understand.
We’re now the #1 ranked solution on G2 Crowd and IT Central Station, and are working with TrustRadius to drive our ranking there, too.
This has given us opportunities we never had to reach prospects in the discovery and evaluation stage
We’ve armed our demand and product marketing teams with content assets, embeddable web widgets, and new lead sources
We’ve armed our sales team with the right tools to validate us as a player in this category
We’ve contributed real, public customer feedback to the product team and
Used review sites as a another way to publicly engage our advocates and customers
Overall we’ve driven over 220 leads in the past 12 months and we’re just getting started.
Not all review sites are the same – focus on the ones who are most likely to catch your target audience’s attention.
Think about what you want your advocates to say about you, then come up with a plan.
Reviews aren't open letters — they're part of an ongoing conversation you have with your customers.
All of these things together – right reviews in the right place, used the right way – is your sizzle. It’s your way of driving people to make the decision you want them to make. It’s your fajita effect.