Cohort Course, Influitive Updates, Revenue Planning and more

This edition of CMAweekly news is sponsored by Champion!
And this week, they have a new feature release:

Job Change Tracking for Advocates: With the new release, you can turn your customer advocate's job changes into opportunities: expansion revenue with CS, warm introductions for sales, and personalized and human experiences for customers to drive even deeper relationships. Visit championhq.com to learn more or schedule a demo.

Customer Marketing & Advocacy News

Sendoso acquired Alyce, leaving many community members wondering what acquisition is next.

Help CMAs get new positions - mention them on this LinkedIn post. 🙂 

Orca also has an update on features in Salesforce, keep an eye out.

Events & Recordings

Katlin Hess of G2 joins us this Friday to talk about Onboarding & CMA

Join our upcoming discussion on Planning Revenue for 2024 on Feb 21st.

Biweekly Influitive Success Series with Diana at Advocacy Maven Feb 21st 12PM EST

Listen to the previous NRR (Net Recurring Revenue) call on planning revenue for 2024.

Multiple new recordings of our Friday calls have been added to the website.

The Acquisition of Influitive Updates

Influitive has changed a great deal since the acquisition news hit right before Christmas. Wide-spread layoffs hit almost all CSMs and others with institutional knowledge of the product and strategy used to drive advocacy.

• Customers will have to pay additionally for a CSM. A new service level plan, called Platinum, is required to get CSM support. The plan does not indicate where these CSMs work, as the Account Managers managing customers seem to be part of the portfolio of Jigsaw rather than working at Influitive. They support several products.
  

• Communication is improving as more customers get a call with an account manager to discuss renewals, concerns around price increases rumored to be 25% or more and issues with support.
  

• Support is through only Zendesk and a chatbot.
  

• Leaving Influitive will be changing from a required 30-day notice to a 90-day notice.

These changes make it difficult to get support for Influitive, while Jigsaw says they are focused on providing 100% Customer Success. It remains to be seen how they will do this.

Top Ideas from January

Rebecca G: Make sure you know your lanes, and stay in those lanes, make it clear to others where your work starts and stops.

Daniel Palay: When Sales tries to take credit for all sales, go back and check the touches involved in that sales and share it with your org. It’s rare that Sales alone should be credited with most sales.

Evan Huck shared on the 2024 Planning Friday call: Leadership and the C-suite are not patient; they want results quickly

In applying this, Think about the short-term and long-term plans for your programs, both community and advocacy. We have to show some results quickly. (I’m now offering an audit and roadmap consult to make sure this is covered in your programs).

Dean Shaw shared on the idea that we need to push our teams to help us show the real value of our programs. Multiple teams cannot take ownership of revenue created. Sales can’t take credit for all revenue generated anymore.

Alison Bukowski: On the Roadshow Approach in Customer Advocacy: "It's not just onboarding. It's like you have to consistently do it."

The Importance of Collaboration in Business: "Ultimately, we can't do this stuff in a vacuum, and that's what I'm hearing, just a resounding I do my part. And, like, to the customer references, and they love me. They love working with this program, and then it just completely falls apart in another area of the business, and that's something that definitely has to be discussed." — Alison Bukowski

Monetizing Community Programs: "There's now this additional pressure to not only bring in all of the inherent goodness that we see with customer advocacy in terms of those traditional KPIs. But now we're also being asked to monetize the community as well and be able to put, you know, put a stick in the ground and say, 'yep. You know, this is how many more dollars came in from upsell and cross sell as a direct result of community'." — Lauren Turner

Free Resource

Kaily at SlapFive shared an attribution model you can copy. TY Kaily. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1aRJRIQCv1b1-0LVTXsnaWx6okoWWHWW_MYkNJspgmiI/edit#gid=0

And…

Be sure to check out my cohort course, available at https://marygreencny.freshlearn.com/community-advocacy