The Care and Feeding of Advocates

Today I want to talk about customer advocates. Those champions of your business that go out of their way to talk about what a great product you have, or what a great company you are and recommend you to other potential clients. Those people are few and far between, but they are arguably your most valuable asset. There’s no salesperson that’s as good as a happy customer. But you don’t just have to take what you get. You have the opportunity to nurture these advocates and create new ones. I want to share a couple tips for how you can do that.

It’s not about you

First of all, it’s easy to think that they’re doing this because of how great you are, and there might be some of that, but usually there’s another personal motivation for a really passionate advocate that they’re doing things that go beyond the norm to support you, and it’s probably cause of something in their lives. So, your opportunity is to do a little anthropology and research and get to know these few people, cause they’re not gonna be many, you can invest the time and understand what makes them tick, why are they interested in talking about you.

Add value

And once you know that, you can then lean into that. You can amplify that, you can, spark it, ignite it, by helping them achieve that personal goal they might have. It could be that they want to be a thought leader in their industry. It’s a career aspiration for them. You can help enable that by getting them to be a speaker at your industry conference, who’s always looking for customer speakers. You could have them be a guest on your podcast or a guest blogger on your blog. Those are just a few ideas, and what you wanna do is understand from that passion that they have, what can you do to support it. Involving your product or your business or not. And that is how you’ll, you’ll get them to accelerate.

There’s another group which are, I’ll call latent advocates. Ones that have the potential to act like an advocate for you, but for one reason or another, haven’t been activated. Same recipe. Get to know them. Understand how you can help them achieve their passionate desires, and that will help them promote you and your business. These are ways you can give your clients what they want. You can help your clients and in a way that actually helps your business by building more advocacy.

Advocate Funnel

The third thing that will help with this is to treat this group of advocates and potential advocates, like a funnel. So instead of looking for prospective clients, you’re starting with those that are early advocates, or not quite yet advocates and tracking their progress through a funnel of advocacy for your business. It helps you to manage the relationships and maximize the influence and identify those that you might have missed if you didn’t do this thoughtful look at them.

So, I hope you’re able to try these three things. Advocates, they’re not very common, but there’s usually a couple or a few, and just a few will make a huge difference in your business. It’s worth your time to invest intentionally in nurturing them.