CRM's Essential Role in Your Customer Activation Program

While customer activation and engagement are predominantly CS functions, they shouldn't operate independently of your sales and marketing processes.

Customer advocacy software handles the logistics of your program, like onboarding, creating and publishing content, incentives, rewards, and metrics.

Integrating it (and the overarching processes tied to advocacy initiatives) with your CRM keeps your sales, marketing, and CS team in the loop on customer sentiments, activities, and interactions. And it maximizes your opportunities for leveraging customer advocates in both pre-sales and post-sales efforts.

Let's look at five reasons to integrate your customer advocacy program into your CRM.

1. Aligns your sales and marketing efforts with customer advocacy.

There are dozens of ways to use your existing customers to flourish. It's all about how you utilize their power, the trust they place in your brand and how you can leverage that for higher conversions, cross-sell/upsell opportunities, and retention.

For your sales team, that could be customer reference calls, testimonials, and case studies. For your marketing team, that could mean user-generated content, reviews, and social media advocacy.

Using CRM allows you to seamlessly incorporate these initiatives into your sales and marketing processes. Since both teams will have access to the same customer data and interactions, it's easy to identify specific content and potential advocates for a campaign.

For instance, your marketing team can use Deeto's dynamic social proof website widget to source specific UGC (reviews, testimonials) from within their content pool. They can dynamically display it on your website, based on the products/services a potential customer is viewing. 

2. Allows for day-to-day integration of your customers’ voice within the sales cycle.

When you integrate customer advocacy with your CRM, the system can easily pull a prospect's firmographic data and current sales pipeline stage.

From there, you'll get a list of customers with similar attributes, use cases, and experiences, plus the stories and testimonials they've left in the system.

• For prospecting and outreach, reps can personalize their messaging and calls by connecting voice-of-customer data to specific, relatable outcomes of using your product.
• With smart-matching, the system can suggest which customers would be the best fit for a specific reference call or use case scenario.
• For sales enablement, reps can use customer stories/quotes/video testimonials to backup product claims and objections handling, based on where they are in the funnel and what type of buyer they're working with.

Without integration, sellers would have to spend significant time pulling data from multiple systems and prepping content for calls, without certainty they're using the most relevant information for their buyer.

3. Helps CS teams address high-value and at-risk customers.

Advocacy is one of the best ways to activate your customers. Meaningful advocacy increases their engagement with your brand and product.

With engagement data within your advocacy software, you'll know:

• Who contributes the most and how it impacts your bottom line.
• Which customers have disengaged from your program or left negative feedback.

Your CRM will give you broader context into their behavior and potential issues with your product. Using that information, you can...

• Engage with high-value advocates through personalized communication and rewards.
• Reach out to at-risk customers to resolve issues and prevent churn.

4. Improves tracking capabilities.

In B2B sales, attribution is remarkably complicated. You can't just rely on top-of-the-funnel metrics like 'leads generated' or 'deals closed.'

This is particularly important when it comes to your referral program, and when you're assessing the overall impact of advocates and their content. With access to pipeline data in CRM, you'll know which customers and content touchpoints played a role in each deal, and how.

You can compare this with insights into who did what activity how many times to determine the impact an advocate has on the journey, and the overall ROI of your program.

5. Creates a more integrated advocate experience.

By integrating your CRM and customer advocacy program, you'll maximize customer engagement by delivering a more cohesive and satisfying experience.

• Customers receive timely and relevant communications, rewards, and recognition for their advocacy efforts, which increases their loyalty and likelihood of promoting your brand further.
• You'll collect more accurate, consistent and actionable data, since it will be based on all interaction points with your customers, not just a few.
• It ties into other customer engagement efforts, like product/feature testing, newsletters, and loyalty programs, which you'll manage from CRM.

You don't have to shoehorn advocacy into your CRM.

Deeto integrates with your CRM to create a seamless workflow between sales, marketing, and the customers that help them sell. And you can set it up in minutes, not months.

For your customers, leaving a review or testimonial is as easy as posting a story on Instagram. For your team, end-to-end content, reference call, and referral management makes it easy to integrate social proof into every stage of the sales cycle.

Request a demo to see how it works.