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  • #15 Do More w Less article, ABM in CMA & Our most popular solutions

#15 Do More w Less article, ABM in CMA & Our most popular solutions

March 21, 2023

Hi All, I just finished my new website on www.mary-green.com with an update to services and new blog posts. Please check it out and share with anyone hoping to build their advocacy community.

Updates from Vendor Satisfaction Poll - this continues through March 31st.

  • 88 responses (keep sharing please bit.ly/cmasatsurvey)

  • 29 Influitive users, 17 Refedge, 6 Slapfive, 4 Orca, 3 Base, 2 UserEvidence

  • 35 use Spreadsheets, 14 use a Project Manager, 21 use a CRM (there is overlap)

  • Satisfaction results will be released April 1st (ish)

Upcoming Events

🗓️ Thursday 3/23 12PM EST Rachel Ward invites Eran Livneh to discuss ABM & Expansion bit.ly/cmaexpan

🗓️ Thursday 3/23 12PM EST Alison Bukowski hosts Customer X files with guests: Ana Kutcher, Valeria Gomez, and Kyle Yantis to talk about all things customer advocacy.

🗓️ Friday 3/24 Marie Elliott joins us to discuss ABM & Customer Marketing; she’s had some great success with being very specific and data-driven to get results. lu.ma/cmafridays

🗓️ Friday 3/31 Ciana Abdollahian joins us to discuss C-suite Advocacy - do NOT miss this!! lu.ma/cmafridays

🗓️ Friday 4/14 Anita Toth Retention & Expansion - lu.ma/cmafridays

🗓️ Tues 4/18 Influitive & Airmeet host Better Together: The Power of Event-led and Customer-led Growth

Update

Canceled for March 23rd - Joel Klettke - lu.ma/cmastories

Great Content

Slack Community Update

CMAweekly has a No-Vendors channel, Join the community here: bit.ly/cmaweeklyslack and DM me to get an invite to the channel

I also want to thank Ciana Abdollahian for joining the CMAweekly community and breathing a lot of life into the No-Vendors channel.

Definitely follow her on LinkedIn as she’s on a roll sharing lots of ideas, strategies, and insights.

Here are our engagement stats from last week.

Make sure you join bit.ly/cmaweeklyslack

Job/Career World

Kevin Lau is Hiring for a Senior Manager, Customer Programs at F5

Survey

I’ve recently been meeting with multiple new software programs in our space. One of them is John Fennessy the Head of Sales at IPinfo.

John was tasked with figuring out which of their more than 10k customers would be ideal for customer advocacy activities and he started to realise the extent of the challenge we face and was keen to investigate more!

Please share your view on your challenges organising customer advocacy. If you have 5 mins, here it is: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/3KCCL26

Why is this important? The more we share our experiences, the more we can get the tools we need!! Please share your thoughts.

Do More with Less in Customer Marketing & Advocacy

I forgot to include this last week:

Being left on a team after layoffs is tough in a lot of ways. It usually means your workload is about to increase. This is happening for a lot of customer marketing & advocacy teams.

Even those without layoffs are experiencing smaller budgets, loss of new headcount, and canceled of software contracts.

It’s time to do more with less.

No one likes the idea, but when you are overwhelmed, you can run (to another job) or juggle what you can.

Start by Prioritizing What Needs to be Done

I like to talk to my superiors ask the following:

  • What priorities do you see from an organizational standpoint?

  • What do you believe will make the biggest impact?

  • Why hasn’t this been achieved before?

Then move on to other teams:

  • How does my role support your goals?

  • How does your department support my goals?

  • How can we best work together?

Among the answers I’ll create a strategy based on my priorities, their expectations, and my expertise. Now it’s time to set expectations with my seniority and approach teams to let them know how we can work together and what my plan and processes are.

Several professionals in the customer marketing space are focusing on Retention & Expansion right now.

For Retention you’ll want to look at Customer Success at scale.

  • Where are customers failing? How can you plug that hole immediately and then fix it in the future?

  • What customers are not failing? Why aren’t they failing? Maybe host some customer-led workshops.

  • Record, label, and organize all of this, then make it available to your customers.

Doing more with less (tactical tips)

  1. Always look for a way to use existing materials and processes to get things done. This means record everything (super easy to get videos and transcripts for $25 a month with grain.com)

  2. Make the greatest impact with your time. Need several people to learn the same thing? Invite them onto a call. That includes Sales, Support, and Customers. Frame this as helping them connect.

  3. Share your recordings, transcripts, templates, resources, etc. Make it easy to find all of these things.

  4. Automate your technology; keyboard shortcuts for starting a new zoom (I always use the same link), bit.ly for sharing links (customize each one so that it’s easy to remember).

  5. Look at what creates value but requires very little prep. For community building AMAs and live interviews are super easy to pull off with little prep. It’s easier to ask customers to write content for your Top Contributors program than to write it yourself.

  6. Ask for help. Find the people that WANT to do more, that want to take on a pet project, and give it to them. Help them make progress in what matters to them.

  7. Share the heck out of your successes. Tell everyone when you succeed at doing things, and make sure they know how often you succeed.

Please respond and share how you are doing more with less.

Additionally, I’ve recently written How to Get Customer Success & Sales to Work with You.