Gathering and leveraging customer feedback is frustrating for everybody… but especially so for customer marketers. When you’re stuck begging for stories, running interviews, and caught in endless follow up loops, content creation can easily become a massive time suck.
We built UserEvidence to automate content creation around customer stories, but we also know that content is only powerful when you use it.
That’s why we’ve teamed up with SlapFive and created an integration that helps customer marketers find customer stories faster and use them more effectively.
Need some inspiration? Check out this latest webinar with our customer, Netskope.
Cache Walker, formerly the Senior Customer Advocacy Manager at Netskope, explains how he used both products to scale his customer advocacy program as a team of one.
Cache’s struggle as a small customer marketing team is familiar to anybody who works in B2B and who wants to use customer stories to grow: there was never enough of anything.
Marketing and sales teams require lots of collateral, but getting case studies and testimonials out of customers is generally as easy as lassoing the moon.
Cache was ambitious though: he wanted to have a story for every single one of Netskope’s customers. To hit his goal, he needed to find tools and processes that helped him work smarter, not harder.
He needed help from tools that would grow with the project — as opposed to something that met his immediate needs, but which would limit him in the long run.
Impressed by UserEvidence’s and SlapFive’s integration capabilities, flexibility, and focus on data, Cache settled on working with us as partners. Instead of working in isolation as two separate apps, Cache saw that we combined to be a “multiplier” for his customer story efforts.
“We created a flywheel that really maximized our advocacy efforts”
Any customer marketer can tell you that creating content isn’t the most exhausting part of the process — finding the right customers and getting your team on-board with creating collateral is.
While Cache originally planned to use UserEvidence just to fill the content gap, he found that the integration with SlapFive made it way easier to find advocates in the first place.
“When you have the data, it’s so much easier to get that customer on record,” he says. “You can go to the CSM or the sales rep, and they’re automatically more engaged and more plugged in when they’ve seen the goodness, and they want to go get more.”
Thanks to the SlapFive and UserEvidence integration, Cache had all that data and goodness — and it was ultra-transparent. The program he built let him find advocates (with 58% of those surveyed opting into an advocacy program), and it showed him gaps on how the business could improve. Having all the data in a single spot then helped him get more buy-in from stakeholders, which helped him push the program even further.
“We ultimately created this kind of flywheel that really maximized all of our efforts. It wasn’t just about the gap between polished case studies and testimonials on review sites,” he said. “The program we built had an impact on the front end, driving us to make more case studies, because we had more data in the middle and because everything was integrated.”
Instead of scrambling to get content, Cache had time for bigger, time-intensive strategic tasks like:
- Developing and executing new advocacy initiatives and programs
- Championing the customer advocacy program at a executive level
- Identifying opportunities to showcase customer success stories across different business units
- Analyzing advocacy metrics and reporting to guide the program’s direction
- Managing and expanding the partnerships with UserEvidence and SlapFive
- Providing strategic guidance to the customer success/CSM teams on leveraging advocates
- Overseeing the cultural change efforts to make advocacy a shared responsibility
Once everything was configured and plugged in, everything clicked into place. Wings4U, a customer marketing agency that Cache used, took over the reference program as a whole so Cache could focus on other internal efforts.
“We had a cultural change, thanks to the transparency”
Within a few months, Cache was able to show the rest of the business the project’s impact on revenue.
The bigger win though was the cultural change that came as a result of the program. Instead of sending out monthly reports, Cache’s program let him constantly demonstrate the value of what he was doing, and became a central source of information for everyone on the team.
Part of the data visibility also helped Cache create a bridge of trust between the sales team and the customer success team.
Reps and CSMs could see when their work was making a difference, which made them feel good about what they were doing, and the constant feedback meant there were more customer wins to celebrate.
Check out the full webinar to see the whole story
Cache’s work at Netskope is proof that customer feedback isn’t just a box to tick: it’s a powerhouse strategy to fuel your marketing engine and drive your revenue up the wall (in a good way).
The collaboration between Netskope, UserEvidence, and SlapFive isn’t just a success story; it’s a beacon for all of us trying to make our customers’ voices the cornerstone of our growth strategies. So, let’s not let their insights and hard-earned wisdom go to waste.
Hungry for more details or itching to see how you can make your customer feedback loop a slam dunk? Dive into the full webinar to get all the details (and get inspiration for how you can build your own advocacy program).
And if you’re feeling a tad overwhelmed — don’t hesitate to reach out. We’re always here to answer any questions.