Boost Your Dreamforce ROI with Product Reviews from Your Users and Advocates

Editor's Notes

• #3: Slides will be on slideshare
• #4: Meagen bio – amazing marketer, leadership experience at companies including ArcSight and HP, and earlier at IBM and Cisco. She has a great perspective on how to maximize the Dreamforce opportunity that she will share in just a bitMatt bio? – co-founder of G2 Crowd and previously co-founder of Big Machines, recently acquired by Oracle
• #7: As buyers in the consumer world have become accustomed to ratings on Yelp and Amazon and everywhere else, people have become conditioned to look beyond company generated information. If you are anything like me, you won’t even buy a simple HDMI cable without checking reviews to see if real people think it’s well made. This thinking has spilled over into the business world. Ratings are out there. Comments on LinkedIn Groups and Twitter matter. More are added every day whether you like it or not and whether you want to participate or not. We see statistics all the time that validate this trend. Most of the buying process now happens before a prospect contacts your company. Reviews and references are top sources of new leads.
• #8: And here’s a chart from Nielsen that shows just how buyers perceive these peer to peer recommendations relative to other types of marketing. You don’t have to read all the fine print to see that their opinions can dwarf the impact of your ad dollars in the minds of your prospects. Just the other day, we saw a blog post titled something like: “Our best marketing was the marketing we didn’t do,” and it described how their happy customers had made a huge impact in the growth of their business.
• #9: So what does all of this have to do with Dreamforce?Retailers are dealing with customers that come inside their stores, then go online to check prices and product reviews. This happens so often that it has a name: “show-rooming.” The Dreamforce Expo hall really isn’t that different. There are so many new solutions that you are sure to find yourself in a situation where you’d like to know more. I’ve done it myself. What do you think this guy is doing? Maybe he’s checking email or the weather forecast, but he could be looking up some company that he just met for the first time. The sales pitch and demo was great, but he’s wondering, “What do actual users say? Hey, I can just find out on my phone right now!”Whether you have your own booth or will just be meeting other attendees on-site, you want to be ready for this guy.
• #10: The first place he might look is on SalesForce’s own AppExchange. User ratings have become one of the most important elements of each solution listing, and clearly drive attention to the most popular solutions. This is a simple screenshot of apps featured in the sales category exactly as they were shown. No cherry-picking, Photoshop, or rearranging involved. Notice that they have solid support from hundreds, or in Docusign’s case, thousands of reviewers. Two of them highlight these great reviews on the ad banner. It’s important to point out that a good review doesn't’tnecesarilymean 5 stars. It meanshelpful and credible. 5 stars with no colorcommentaryisneither.
• #11: AppExchange is a natural place to look for reviews at a Salesforce show, but Google will quickly lead you to other destinations. Do your own search and draw conclusions about where to focus. Here, I’ve searched on “influtiive reviews,” and I quickly find a place to find them, and Google takes it a step further to even display the star rating right here within the search results. I’ve noticed that G2 Crowd is often very highly placed in organic search results for companies like mine. I think their focus on software helps, but the type of rich and constantly evolving content provided by real users seems to be just the type of material that Google’s algorithm adores.
• #13: Let’s face it, we all want good, helpful reviews. But writing one takes some thought and a bit of time that can lead even our happiest customers to procrastinate and put off what you want them to do today. So to improve your odds, use some basic human psychology and ask them right after they’ve experienced a win. Look for those moments when the value you provide is crystal clear, and your chance of success goes way up.
• #14: It can be easier than you think to find advocates and users willing to submit a review. Besides just trolling social media and noting who may already talking about you, these types of moments can be natural starting points for building an advocacy relationship. High Net Promoter Scores are an obvious example, but it’s truly shocking how few companies actually run these surveys, let alone follow through to drive some value from that relationship. Sure these people are likely to share positive reviews, but they are also motivated enough to think through what they write and put some great detail into the commentary that offers new insights and credibility for prospects that may be reading their words in the coming months (and years).
• #15: Even the happiest users are busy, so think about how you can make their task easier. And always think hard about the experience from their perspective. I couldn’t help myself and included some screenshots here from the influitive application. To be clear, a solution like this isn’t required to provide a great advocate experience. But from my personal experience launching and running an Influitive based advocacy program at Xactly, it sure helps. And it helps me make the point about making things easy for the advocates.First, give them a personal outreach, with clear directions. We provide embedded links and integrations to review sites that make it simple to get your user to the right place to write the review. For example, our AppExchange integration not only send the user to the right spot, but it also automatically handles validation that the review has been published. We also provide a mobile app, so a user can engage that way if it’s the experience that works best for them.
• #16: So here’s the secret to an ongoing advocacy program. If you get the advocate experience right, you can get more than a couple of reviews. Advocates are seeking:StatusRecognitionCareer valueConnectionsPart of the teamReputationPerksFeedbackYou can provide these things. Gamification elements such as points, badges, levels, and leaderboards go a surprisingly long way. Personal feedback is huge. And rewards can come in many flavors. Creativity is the only barrier to what you can do here to move beyond the abuse and negelect that are too often the norm.
• #17: You want to mobilize your advocates to directly influence revenue and reduce customer acquisition and retention costs. That means that they can get involved throughout the lifecycle.Xactly more than tripled the number of product reviews to land on top of the AppExchange category, driving massive sales increases. They are now well on their way to an IPOEktron has an army of advocates on blog comments, Quora and LinkedIn passionately defending their brand and attacking others.Act-On generated over $500K of revenue from referral leads in December alone sourced through advocates.We have several of our customers who plan their product roadmap and marketing calendar based on input from advocates.There is no limit to what advocates can do if you provide them the experience that they want.
• #19: AppExchange gets you in front of potential buyers – it’s a listing for the Salesforce ecosystem and users go there to find apps. But the reviews are not in-depth, don’t include info on the reviewers, and don’t really allow you to differentiate.
• #21: Review sites are creating a much richer overall experience from review sites that are doing more than just reviews – taking on Gartner and providing comparisons and rankings based on user reviews. These offerings are opportunities to differentiate yourself from competitors – companies are using these comparisons and rankings to help them make purchase decisions.
• #22: Example of how a vendor promotes their third-party reviews on their site
• #23: Example of how a vendor promotes their third-party reviews on their site
• #26: Example of how a vendor promotes their third-party reviews on their site
• #28: In terms of a quick introduction to DocuSign, DocuSign is the global leader for eSignature.Our vision is to “keep business digital.” We are 100% focused on delivering on this vision. We have a large and growing customer base. We have over 50 million unique users who have signed more than 300 million documents to date. We are adding more than 60,000 unique users on average per day (that’s almost one a second).We also lead the market in terms of market share, transaction volume and number of partners. Two thirds of documents signed in the cloud are DocuSigned – more than all others combined.We operate globally, with people signing in 189 different countries using 43 different languages.We are a SaaS business, operating in the cloud, which enables rapid and cost effective deployment51% of DocuSigned documents are completed within 1 hour46% of all DocuSigned documents are sent using the DocuSign APIMore than 1.35 million copies of DocuSign Ink have been downloaded to date
• #29: Goal – dominate dreamforce
• #30: We have over 3200 reviewsWe update and make our billboard relevant
• #34: Looking forward to seeing updated ratings at the show
• #36: You’ve made a big investment to be at Dreamforce (booth, personnel) and look your best; when the event is over, online reviews are a great “leave behind” for your prospects
• #38: - this is when they have more time to look at your product and if they are getting deeper into evaluation, they’ll want to check out reviews