Customer-Led Growth (CLG), Decoded
Kevin Zeisel is Vice President of Product at Extole.
Kevin Zeisel champions Customer-Led Growth (CLG) as a more efficient way to drive business growth by leveraging existing customers instead of relying on costly ad campaigns. At the summit, he will decode CLG, demonstrating how businesses can incentivize customers.
See the key chapters from Kevin's talk, and dive in where you'd like.
Beyond referral programs
What Exactly is Customer-Led Growth (CLG)?
Transcript
So talking about customer led growth. For me, customer led growth is just really focusing on using your existing customer base to drive growth that happens in a lot of ways. It’s not an amazingly new idea but really kind of focusing on incentivizing actions in your existing customer base to kind of do the things that you want them to do. And I see it more as a counter towards something like ad spending based growth. It’s like you can go pay Google and you can pay Facebook a bunch of money to kind of get new customers, or you can focus on these existing customers that you have that really kind of are the core of your business.
How CLG Offers an Alternative to Ad Spend
Transcript
The ad spending growth is really the opposite of customer led growth. I don’t think of it as necessarily the opposite. Most companies are going to do both but I think people tend to over focus a little bit on the ad spend side, just because they can press some easy buttons and make it happen. But really, if you want to drive brand awareness and brand loyalty, like focusing on your existing customer base is a much more interesting way, at least in my head, a more interesting way to kind of structure your thought process. I think referral kind of, for me, is that, is it, the core of it? I think it’s not the only part of customer led growth but referral is an interesting way to kind of use your existing customers to find new customers. It’s not just getting your existing customers to buy more. It’s also getting them to kind of network with the people that they know might also be interested in your product. Incentivize them to do it. Don’t, don’t pay that money to Google and Facebook. Get your customers to do it and give them some incentive to make that happen.
How CLG is Bigger than Refer-a-Friend
Transcript
So beyond kind of getting your super advocates to advocate more. There’s also kind of audience based stuff around like location based or programs targeting specific demographics of people. Let me give you some examples, like we have a client was opening a new branch of a credit union in Orlando Florida and it’s like they’ve got a Florida based program, an Evergreen program, that’s kind of everybody $50 something like that but they really want to focus on getting new customers in this new branch in Orlando Florida. So they offer kind of a burst reward for a very targeted audience in a very specific location to kind of drive growth there. Another example is a big telecom company that we work with and they basically want to have a program very specifically for building managers of apartment buildings where they’re like, these people drive lots and lots of new customers as renters are kind of coming in. They’re kind of promoting the program. So we want a program specifically for building managers of apartment buildings. Another big good example is a very large retailer that works a lot with different kinds of segments of a large industry, including government employees. So they have a very specific program for government employees and buying stuff on their retail website via the government, basically same, same deal with healthcare workers, where I’m going to target healthcare workers as a as an audience and kind of get referrals happening within that space and friends and family is another kind of one that’s kind of in the employee space, where it’s like, we had a interesting client who, once a year, would give out $50 50% off coupons to all their employees. And their employees would get 10 of them or five of them, I think. And it was a really big deal for that employee to be able to give those codes out to their friends and family to kind of incentivize purchases. It was not just a business, you know, driver for new purchases and new customers but it was also kind of, it was an incentive for employees to kind of feel good about their company and what they’re doing.
What is a Drop-a-Hint Program?
Transcript
Another program that’s kind of interesting, which is kind of a counter to product based sharing. Is what we call drop a hint, which is, instead of me saying, hey, you’ll like this product, it’s saying like, hey mom, hey grandpa. I want this for my birthday, or like, I just graduated from college, I want this mattress for my new apartment. So it’s kind of asking someone else that’s in your kind of social sphere to kind of buy you something, which is kind of a neat, interesting kind of switch. It also, you know, it encourages a purchase but it also encourages brand sharing. It’s now grandpa or or your Father knows that you like this kind of mattress and they might consider doing that or buying something like that themselves. Sweepstakes is another interesting one. It’s kind of a gamification of engaging your customers. It’s pretty easy to find kind of give away prize type stuff, like partners that you can do to kind of, work with and come up with some interesting kind of prizes around sweepstakes but it’s the same kind of thing where you’re just incentivizing certain behaviors via sweepstakes entries. And oftentimes we work with company referrals, part of that so encouraging sharing as part of the sweepstakes process, nominations, one that we kind of was big during kind of the pandemic era, when there were frontline employees and that kind of stuff. It’s a way to kind of show social positivity. And kind of it was nominating frontline employees to kind of get a new pair of shoes or something like that. That’s another one where you’re kind of leveraging your existing customer base to kind of encourage positive social behaviors and at the same time spreading brand awareness and maybe making some money out of it.
Beware Consumers Gaming the System!
Transcript
Anti gaming is an important part of the referral kind of play because once you start giving out incentives to people. People have a tendency to kind of mess with the system. So they’ll refer to themselves to try and get a discount or another thing that people will do is, they’ll kind of sign up with their wife’s email address and send it to themselves. That kind of things where they’re kind of using, not I wouldn’t say fraud but kind of doing things that are not the intended behavior. The gaming aspect is tricky and a lot of it’s around making sure your terms and conditions are right and making sure you’re enforcing them, like if you don’t want customers in from Nigeria, then you or if you don’t want customers from Congo then you have to make sure that your programs are set up in such a way that you’re kind of excluding those people and finding out that they’re in the group that you don’t want and kind of excluding them. The other aspects are things around again, getting back to rewarding a little bit is like, if I’m a super advocate and I’ve shared with 30 people, I don’t necessarily want 30 $10 off gift cards, you know it’s like, once you start kind of getting certain levels of social influence, the incentive structure needs to change.
What are Influencer Programs?
Transcript
One of the big programs that we run quite a bit of is influencer type programs, which are kind of a flavor of referral friend program. And when I say influencer, I don’t mean paying somebody on Tiktok to talk about your brand. I’m talking about the kind of someone that’s an existing customer that happens to have connections beyond what normal kind of a normal customer would. So one of our customers sells high end video equipment for taking videos of sporting events, mainly amateur sporting events. And basically what they found is like, Sure, there’s some referral happening but really, once one person in the sports league kind of gets this stuff, it tends to kind of quickly take off. And they, they basically find these people who are league managers or or coaches on these sporting teams and they kind of influence them to kind of to kind of share with the demographic that’s around them. And you see a big uptick in the numbers of people that they can influence. And again, like, once you become a super advocate or ambassador, the reward structure that you care about that’s going to incentivize you to kind of keep going is very, very different. You know, I don’t want 30 10% off coupons. I start one, you know, start taking commissions, or I start wanting to kind of get lump sum payments of value.
How is AI Influencing CLG?
Transcript
A lot of the AI side of things, at least of what we’re using is kind of to aid in the velocity of running these programs. It’s kind of double checking things, making sure the language is correct. Kind of auto writing a copy for you, so that you don’t have to worry about that stuff. Translations, the AI tools are amazing at translations. So that’s another thing that is kind of a driver for us but really, one of the things that we see is a key tenet of the future of CLG is around velocity, doing more things quickly and safely and just kind of getting ideas up and running with minimal, minimal effort and testing them just, taking them down when they’re not making any sense.
How to Reward Customers
Transcript
In general, we work with a lot of different kind of rewarding providers and I think having a wide variety of ways to kind of pay people and kind of incentivize people is always something that’s kind of an ever evolving kind of world. Whether it be direct monetary payments or charitable donations or the standard retail stuff like rewarding is a key aspect of what we do and is always evolving.
How Should Someone Get Started with CLG?
Transcript
For most people kind of new to the CLG world. We kind of recommend that you kind of start by getting a core Evergreen referral program running. That’s kind of step one. It’s like, start with the basics, I’m just going to let this thing run. I’m going to get some basic reward structures. And then we kind of encourage you to do some testing, do some bursting. Those are kind of easy, kind of next steps where you’re kind of playing with the incentive structure a little bit and then from there, start tackling new programs and audience based programs. Those are the key things that we see, when customers really start messing with that world where they’re doing audience based programs. The lights start turning on in their head about all the different things that they can do to kind of, to kind of encourage the behaviors that they want. When you’re thinking about kind of the incentive structure, you should also be thinking about how much you’re paying Google and Facebook to acquire these new customers. And are you kind of compensating your people who are referring in a way that is commensurate with the amount of money you’re having to spend when buying certain keywords?
How Treasury Wine Estates Uses Extole
The Value of Unearthing and Rewarding Brand Ambassadors
The Importance of Leveraging Happy customers
The Value of Rewarding Loyal Customers
How to Keep Customers Engaged with New Offers
How Extole Offers a Hands-On Partnership to Treasury Wine Estates
The Importance of Programs that are Truly Sustainable
There’s no better validation or salesperson than an existing happy customer. CLG is about using your existing customer base to drive growth. Get it right, and it’s far more efficient than blind ad spending.
Kevin Zeisel
