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Most B2B companies overlook their biggest growth opportunity: investing in the customers they already have. Yet, customer marketing leaders struggle to secure budget, prove ROI, and drive growth.
In a world obsessed with more (more leads, more deals, more revenue), how do you make customer advocacy a non-negotiable growth strategy?
This show is for marketers who want to turn customer advocacy into a strategic growth engine. Each episode features customer marketing pioneers, revenue leaders, and industry experts sharing actionable strategies to engage, retain, and expand your client base. And not just through content, but through meaningful connection.
Because customers become champions when you make them feel valued first.
[00:00:00] Lauren Turner: Community done right can really be advocacy at scale because you’re not only helping to surface champions among your customer base, but you’re having customers helping each other, customers sharing best practices. And it’s definitely going to be perceived differently when that advice is coming from a peer.
[00:00:19] Jeff Reekers: Welcome to Customer Champions where we explore how the best marketers turn customers into their biggest growth engine.
[00:00:28] Jeff Reekers: Hello everybody and welcome back to the Customer Champions podcast. Today’s guest is Lauren Turner. Lauren is CEO and founder of CustomerCentrx and one of the leading customer marketing advocacy strategists. Just out there, Lauren has spent years building customer advocacy community marketing programs at companies like Qlik, Alice, user testing, Nuance, many others before founding CustomerCentrx to help startups and scale ups foster cultures of customer led growth. What sets Lauren apart is really her ability to transform customer centricity from a buzzword into measurable business impacts and so many examples of that for her clients and through the companies that she’s worked with as well. And we dive into all this and more in the upcoming questions here, but Lauren, thanks so much for joining us today.
[00:01:13] Lauren Turner: Oh, thanks so much for having me, Jeff. Great to be here.
[00:01:16] Jeff Reekers: Amazing. Well, maybe first just kick us off with a little bit of insights on CustomerCentrx. Tell us a little bit about it. You get started, what are some of the motivations behind it, and then we can kind of dive into it further from there.
[00:01:26] Lauren Turner: Yeah, absolutely. So CustomerCentrx is pretty much the culmination of my career prior to business school. That’s kind of how I divide things. I was the one-person marketing department at a series of tiny startups where I learned to do pretty much everything, went to get my MBA because I was in very engineering driven organizations that looked at marketing as you make pretty pictures for sales, and I wanted to be able to bring more analytics and more math and to be more credible with the numbers people in the companies. And so after that, I went into product management where I was really bringing both those product definitions and customer research to the forefront. Went from there to product marketing and then from product marketing to customer marketing. So where CustomerCentrx comes in is that I’ve been in all of these different customer facing roles and seen the unique relationship that each of these functions have with the customer and they’re all different.
[00:02:22] Lauren Turner: And when you take a look at how an entire company may have that customer relationship, it’s almost like that adage of the blind man and the elephant where they grab the trunk and they feel like they’re holding onto a rope and they touch the legs and they think, oh, this is a tree trunk, but no one’s actually getting the full view of what the elephant is. And I’ve seen this happen in many organizations that you have these really great functions, but they’re all working in silos and because the information isn’t being shared and you don’t have really great communication between those different functions with the same KPIs that everyone is working toward, you end up with this very disjointed brand experience on behalf of the customer and a lot of internal friction between these different roles when there doesn’t need to be.
[00:03:07] Jeff Reekers: Yeah. Amazing. And there’s so many great insights I want to dive into here and one of them we were just chatting about before, which is on the relationship of demand and customer marketing and customer advocacy, and you’ve written very recently that customer advocacy is more like brand than it is demand gen, but yet so many leaders, SaaS leaders approach it more from a demand gen standpoint. Would you mind unpacking that a little bit and sharing your methodology and thought pattern behind it?
[00:03:32] Lauren Turner: Sure. So I mean customer marketing into advocacy is kind of the new kid on the block in terms of marketing, whereas demand generation has been there since there’s been marketing. So it’s not surprising that the majority of marketing leadership had their career come through usually either demand generation or product marketing. That’s the mental model they know, and it’s a conversion funnel, so very transactional. You spend a certain amount of money on ads, which leads to a certain number of clicks, which lead to a certain number of conversations, which leads to a contract and then you end up with revenue because that’s the model that they’ve learned. And especially since a lot of executives really want to see everything that can be easily wrapped up in a nice dashboard, that’s what they’re applying to these relationship-based disciplines like customer advocacy, customer marketing, customer success, and it’s really trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.
[00:04:28] Lauren Turner: And what I mean by that is customer marketing, customer advocacy, customer success, these are all long-term plays. This is a long strategy. It’s very similar to brand in that way that you’re not going to have a campaign that’s going to lead to instant brand recognition, instant ROI, but you’re really trying to create this mindset among prospects and customers that in the back of your head, almost on a subconscious level, you are aware of this company so that way when the time is right and they’re looking to buy, it’s the first thing that pops up. And customer marketing and advocacy works in a similar way that it’s not, here’s a really great webinar, hand me a contract. I mean it would be great if we could do that, but it doesn’t work that way. But you’re talking about hundreds of touchpoints over a long period of time with multiple people involved.
[00:05:18] Lauren Turner: When you think of all the different ways that a company reaches out to a customer, you might get things like newsletters from marketing, you’ll have demos from your product team or sometimes sales on that earlier side. You have your customer success manager doing the quarterly QBR and the weekly meetings. You might have a customer advocacy function where they’re doing their own programs for referrals and references and case studies and all of those other things. All of these different people and all these different functions are touching your customer and that’s what you need to look at it not as a linear funnel, but really as a multifaceted ecosystem. And that’s the kind of stuff that takes a fair amount of time to build. Now you can absolutely measure that ROI you’re talking about influenced revenue. You’re talking about easier closes because you’ve brought in a credible customer to help tell your story to prospects.
[00:06:11] Lauren Turner: You’re talking about customers helping each other as part of an advocacy program, which helps upskill all of your customers. You’re talking about customer recognition so that the customers not only feel like they’re getting value from your product, but they feel personally valued as human beings. All of these things are vitally important toward leading toward that upsell, that cross-sell, that renewal, and all of those things are measurable, but to be able to say that definitively this one specific action by one specific person within a program drove X dollars, you’re just making numbers up at that point. So acknowledge it for what it is as a lagging indicator long-term relationship play and recognize that and build toward the metrics that make sense within that structure.
[00:07:00] Jeff Reekers: Well, I absolutely love that. It feels like it can be so easy for teams to, in the day-to-day, they fall behind target and there’s a meeting that happens and we’ve got to get to X, Y, Z target, and the CFO comes in, where do we put our money in? Then it’s like, well, these AdWords, they were clicked on. They led to revenue, so more money there. And it’s kind of like short-term mentality versus building a company. Everything you’re saying, it’s like building a company the right way through your customers and through the success and happiness and diving into that. And so much of it is building a company the right way, and that is in the end, if you’re going to do that, that is a long-term initiative, not like a short-term. We need deals coming through the line over the next three months or something like this. You also recently wrote something that really resonated with me and that is that unhappy customers, if they’re listened to and they’re included in the process, can really become your fiercest allies. Now, hope I’m taking that directly from you not making that up.
[00:07:57] Lauren Turner: I’m making sure more about that and I wrote about that last week. Yeah, actually one of the examples that I gave is the Better Business Bureau. If you’re looking for a vendor, you will typically look ‘em up in the BBB to see how well they rank. Well, it’s actually known that you can’t get an A plus rating from the Better Business Bureau unless you’ve had issues that have been resolved. So what that translates to is the company that has never made a mistake is ultimately going to have a lower rating than the company that has had some issues but fixed them. And that makes sense psychologically because when you think about it from the perspective of the aggrieved customer, the only thing that really matters to them at that time is that their problem is fixed and that they feel heard. So when the company does that, and especially if they’re going out of their way to really try to make things right, it builds trust and it helps build trust because there was proof of intent.
[00:08:53] Lauren Turner: The company wanted to help, they did something and it had a positive outcome, and so it’s actually putting the pressure test to that vendor in a way that a vendor that’s never had an issue might not have. And it’s true personally as well. I mean, when I’ve had issues with consumer things that have gone wrong and I bring it back to the store and I’m thinking, oh my God, how many layers of people am I going to have to go through? I don’t want to sound like a Karen. I don’t want to speak to the manager. You go in, that person handles the issue first time and it’s one and done. You’re my favorite company now. I’m going to keep buying that thing.
[00:09:30] Jeff Reekers: Yep, a hundred percent. There’s such an amazing opportunity for B2B brands who really lean into the same philosophy as well, but maybe segueing when you walk into a company that you’re starting to work with or driving an engagement with, or maybe just for anybody out there who’s particularly that first topic on how to really be thinking about investing in customer marketing advocacy. It’s a long-term play and all these things, and they’re looking to get started to build out that motion. What’s the sort of a first step that you either take with a client or that you would advise for those out there who are really starting to look at investing more in customer marketing?
[00:10:06] Lauren Turner: Yeah, it’s really talking to the executive leadership team of the company to really understand what are the short-term and long-term goals of the company. If you’re talking about a company that is running out of runway and they have three months to turn a profit or they’re toast, it’s going to be a very different conversation than a company that just got round of funding. They’re looking to grow, they’re building toward an IPO and they’re trying to do customer advocacy right. A lot really depends on where is the company, what do they need? If the only thing in the horizon is short-term revenue, okay, let’s focus on that. What is the lowest hanging fruit that we can find? Where can we find existing champions that we can get to speak our praises, to do a webinar, to do those reference calls, to write a review, to help those customer proof points that will bring in those new accounts as quickly as possible?
[00:11:02] Lauren Turner: How do you leverage those if the company has time to really build and build properly? This is where you’re interviewing the leadership across the organization, understanding what each function’s key goals are, finding where the common threads are across all of them, and making sure that the KPIs for each of those teams are aligned so that way you have everyone marching in the same direction, the customer has a uniform brand experience and you’re not duplicating work or fighting for credit. As just an example, if you have your customer marketing team and your customer success team and their big hairy goal is let’s say 95% renewals, they’re not going to bother nitpicking on who did what. They just need to see that the end result happened. When you’re not constantly under that pressure of having to validate your existence, the company, it makes it a lot easier to share data across those functions so that way everyone knows what’s going on with a customer.
[00:12:01] Lauren Turner: Just a really quick example, you can have marketing. If marketing is working completely independent from customer success or customer marketing, they may send an email teaser out to the entire database talking about a new feature that’s about to be rolled out. Now, if they haven’t had a conversation with customer success or support, they’re not going to know that one of these key accounts may have just had a really painful call with support yesterday and they’re really mad, and the last thing that they’re going to want to see right now is an upsell message because you haven’t fixed the problem that they have now. But something as simple as a conversation of, Hey, we’re going to be sending this campaign out on this day and this time, let me know if there’s anyone who should be suppressed from that mailing list. Okay, now you’ve proactively helped solve a problem so that the right message is getting to the right people at the right time.
[00:13:11] Jeff Reekers: Yeah, amazing. I’d actually love to dive into that part a little bit more because I had on here to make sure to talk about alignment and cross-functional alignment. You mentioned some great examples there. Horrible support ticket came in, not the right time to be reaching out to somebody, and teams really need to be connecting on these upsell cross-sell opportunities, but what have you seen work best when advocacy is at its best and customer marketing is at its best? What do you see present in an organization on that cross-functional alignment and sort of any tactical insights on how to really bring together success, marketing, sales, exec leadership, maybe even product around this?
[00:13:49] Lauren Turner: A couple of things. So communication is key, and so one of the easiest ways that customer marketing can get that seat at the table is frankly inserting themselves into all of the other functions’ departmental meetings. It’s as simple as saying, Hey product, we know that you’re meeting every second Tuesday. I need 10 minutes of your time so that I can brief the department on what’s going on in my programs and how we are helping deliver value to your team, and here’s what we need from you in order to help keeping things running. And it’s basically piggybacking on everyone else’s meeting, so everyone is in the loop.
[00:14:40] Lauren Turner: Before you have that, even before you make that first hire, have all of these departments work together so that they can understand how they can support each other and how everything is going to tie together. So one major issue that customer marketers and community managers have is recruitment. You’re always trying to identify new champions. You’re always trying to get more people involved in your programs. If the customer success team doesn’t have it as part of their mandate that they need to nominate a certain percentage of their book of business to these programs, it’s going to basically end up being that customer marketing person or that community person constantly nagging, Hey, do you have anyone for me? I’m running low on people. I’m behind my quota. I’m going to get yelled at if I don’t bring in 20 more people by the end of the week, who you got?
[00:15:50] Lauren Turner: And it’s not that the CSMs don’t want to help. I mean, I’m taking everyone at face value that best intentions are assumed until proven otherwise, but the reality is they have their own job to do. They have to have their meetings. They need to make sure that all of their customers are tracking toward their goals. They have to prepare decks. They might have to go through new product training because there’s a new thing that they need to teach their accounts that has rolled out. If it’s not already part of their job description, even if they want to help you, it’s going to end up at the bottom of the priority list because the things that they are being measured against have to come first.
[00:15:50] Jeff Reekers: I love that mentality of just injecting yourself in your colleagues or counterparts’ meetings and just ingraining in it there to really be able to drive that empathy and understanding and to start to build that motion out. I think that’s an incredibly easy thing for anybody to start doing. And I think one thing that’s so easy to learn through that process is just, again, to your point, everybody’s job is hard and everyone has a hard job to do, and so it’s almost hard to have these asks where you have to continuously knock on their door, but if you’re just in there and you’re showing them the willingness to learn and be part of the same team, that can really go a long way. So anyways, that just resonates very, very deeply with me.
[00:16:29] Lauren Turner: Thank you. I mean, another part of it is, again, this is a give and take. This is not customer marketing demanding accountability without giving anything back. Marketing, what they’re giving to customer success is helping to free up time. If you’re doing it right, your customer marketers are talking to your support people. They’re finding out what are the most common issues. They’re taking those common issues and turning that into a tip of the week or something that’s going to help your customers fix those low-level issues so that way your customer support and your CSMs have more bandwidth to really tackle the big strategic stuff. That is really what that renewal is going to be dependent on. They’re helping CSMs do their job better.
[00:17:32] Lauren Turner: When you’re putting it in that type of a context, if you’re positioning to CSMs, when you’re talking about having a customer be part of a speaker’s program or to give a testimonial or to be part of a case study, this isn’t, oh my God, I have to ask my customer for favors. No, no, no. We’re giving your customer an opportunity to have a platform that is going to boost their career. We are giving them an audience to show off the really cool things that they’re doing using your company’s tool. Who wouldn’t want that? But you go into it with that mentality of like, oh, I know you’re really busy. Can you please find someone? Of course it’s going to be viewed as we don’t want to get our customers upset. Well, yeah. When you frame it that way, a salesperson would never come in and make it sound like your product is a burden, so why are you doing that to departments?
[00:18:07] Jeff Reekers: Yeah. Yeah, love that. I want to make sure we cover a little bit on metrics and impact tying back from a little bit earlier, kind of that pressure we were talking a little bit about, that short-term impact versus the long-term impact and how incredible it is if you don’t have to continuously justify your existence every week on some nuanced and not helpful ROI metric that someone just makes up and throws out there to do it, but at some point you’ve got to really tie in the programs and the initiative back into revenue and growth. How do you think about that? How would you advise it and what have you seen to be the strongest impact of companies who are doing this really well?
[00:18:47] Lauren Turner: There are a couple of different ways. I think of it in terms of revenue influence rather than revenue impact, because you are making numbers up at a certain point if you’re saying that this one particular action or this one particular program led to X dollars because there are just too many different touch points and too many people at play here. And so what happens if you’re trying to actually say, okay, well 20% of this deal went to customer marketing and 30% went to CSMs and the rest of it went to sales? Who made up those percentages? It’s really just based on whatever the pet project is of the leader and what they personally think is the most important, and there isn’t really science behind it.
[00:19:44] Lauren Turner: So what we do is we can triangulate and we can make comparisons. Now, I’m going to get into how you can track some of these in your CRM in a minute, but what you can do is you can look at your upsell, cross-sell and renewals with accounts that have members within a community or an advocacy program compared to those that don’t. So at UserTesting, the accounts that had active members in the community, their renewal rate was 99%. For the ones that were outside of the community, it was 83%. You can also look at time to deal closed when a reference is brought in at the end of that conversation versus when they’re not. And so if you say that the deal is closing faster, if that deal is a larger deal, then there was clearly something involved in the value of that conversation between your prospect and your customer.
[00:20:54] Lauren Turner: You can look at referrals. I mean, that’s probably the closest that you can get to a straight line. If you have your customer have a friend and they’re bringing their friend in and they say, Hey, Jim brought me, it’s very clear to see where that’s coming from, and that’s something that you can actually pretty easily do in your CRM. You create a category called customer generated lead or advocacy generated lead, so that way when that comes in the door, it’s properly categorized. Because what can often happen if you end up with a siloed customer marketing function, you can end up with one of your champion accounts, your contact finds a new job at another company, they love your product. Now they’re coming in under their new brand label, and that deal closes almost immediately because they’re already bought in. But if that communication and that tracking isn’t there, it just looks like sales got the deal of a lifetime with no effort. Aren’t they amazing? And you had this poor customer marketer who started the entire process getting nothing.
[00:21:13] Jeff Reekers: Yeah, that’s that last example also is just such an easy way for the impact that customer marketers are making to get absolutely lost because now it’s this net new deal that comes in and everybody forgets about all the work — or not even forgets, it’s just not even aware — of all the work that went into making that great experience for that person who was a customer and wanting them to just buy at their new company. And it just gets lost along the way.
[00:21:37] Lauren Turner: Exactly, and a lot of customer marketers, because they care about their customers in an odd way, even though they are representing the company and they’re doing all of these very relationship-y things, they don’t often like being the center of attention. And so what happens is if you’ve got a Slack channel and sales is like, Hey, everyone ring the gong because we just closed this deal with Acme Co. And the customer marketer knows that, well, Acme Co is really just the same person from your advocacy program who changed jobs. They’re not likely, unless they really want to be the center of attention, to go into that Slack channel and say, and a big kudos to John Smith from Acme Co who brought this in from the new job from our advocacy program. But if there isn’t an internal mechanism within your CRM that’s going to make that already clear, the only other way that people are going to know is if that person toots their own horn.
[00:22:30] Jeff Reekers: Yeah, a hundred percent. Also something, I can’t get it out of my mind right now. The 99% versus 83% from a retention rate for customers that were a part of a community is a phenomenal stat. It makes me want to start investing in community much more immediately. So that’s a great takeaway and tip, and that is such a great way to just tie it back to results, the impact on retention. I’ve got to put my mind over here for a moment because going on a different path of all these things that I could be doing right now and we could be doing at Champions, so we’ve got to bucket that for a separate conversation internally and get later.
[00:23:05] Lauren Turner: I think that community done right can really be advocacy at scale because you’re not only helping to surface champions among your customer base, but you’re having customers helping each other, customers sharing best practices, and it’s definitely going to be perceived differently when that advice is coming from a peer than when your vendor is saying something that’s the party line.
[00:23:27] Lauren Turner: It’s just so much more impactful, it’s so much more authentic. And when you consider that your CSM relationships are usually with at most a handful of people per account because they’re working with lots of accounts, well, suppose that account has 10,000 users. There is absolutely no way that CSM or even the customer marketer on their own is going to be able to know what’s going on all the way down here with all those users. But if they’re part of a community and they’re doing really interesting things that are being tracked, then suddenly all of that activity bubbles up, and not only does that give you opportunities that you can capitalize on to help with that upsell, cross-sell, working with those advocates to help your brand, it also helps being a little bit like the canary in the coal mine where on the opposite side of things, you can identify where there may be issues before they bubble up and before they need to be triaged and before it becomes an emergency so that you can handle it on its own.
[00:24:24] Jeff Reekers: Yeah, love it. Let’s talk for a second on this thing that I’ve been hearing about just around, I think it’s called AI. I dunno if you’ve heard of this thing yet.
[00:24:32] Lauren Turner: Oh, yeah.
[00:24:33] Jeff Reekers: Yeah. It’s gotten to the point that early in my career I really looked at a lot of spreadsheets and so at one point would go to sleep at night and I would just see numbers and spreadsheets in my sleep and before I would fall asleep just when I close my eyes, and it’s kind of becoming the same with AI. I’m just seeing the word, the letters AI around at this point, but what is your take here? How is AI impacting customer marketing, advocacy, and community? Where is it playing the future role? Is it really disrupting the role? Are there customer marketers out there that are really leveraging it the right way? Curious where you think AI is best applied and where that’s going?
[00:25:12] Lauren Turner: Yeah. Well, I am an early adopter of AI. I am now up to probably 30 custom GPTs that I’ve built. I’m starting to get into agentic. There are people who are far more advanced than me, but I’d say that as far as being on the trend, I have a general idea of what’s going on. I think there are different questions. It’s the latest silver bullet that everyone wants to throw at everything, and in some cases we know we need it, so let’s use it. But they haven’t really done the strategic thinking to figure out why and how and what it’s supposed to do. They just know that it’s the thing they need.
[00:25:48] Lauren Turner: That’s when you’re going to end up in trouble because when you throw AI at everything, you’re taking out the human element that is necessary to drive a lot of these customer relationships. So for example, it’s an awful example, but I have a friend whose mom passed and she’d posted about this on LinkedIn and a few weeks after this, she ended up with a solicitation email in her LinkedIn inbox that was along the lines of “Improve your Google Ads conversion rate while you grieve.” And she’s like, what now? Now what clearly happened was that there was an AI that had been scraping her posts and configured this into something that was personalized email, but clearly there was not a person who was overseeing this process to be able to determine — yes, it was personalized, but in a really way that should have been not stand out like that.
[00:26:33] Lauren Turner: AI can be really great at automating the boring repetitive stuff, and that’s where it really saves time. It can help with your analysis. It can help take a transcript of a customer interview and put it in the format of a case study so that way you’re 80% of the way there and you still have to edit, you still have to read it, you still have to make sure everything is legit, but it saves at least the time of having to get from that blank page panic to a draft. It can help identify patterns. If you are uploading a customer database and you want to see if there are correlations and behaviors between customers who have the product and do some other thing, or they attended a program or they went to a webinar and how does that potentially affect their usage or those kind of things, it can find those correlations a lot faster than a person can, and that can be really useful and really save time, and that’s where it really helps.
[00:27:48] Lauren Turner: You still have to know how to prompt it properly because you’re going to get garbage in, garbage out, and you have to fact check. If it’s going to pull up quotes or if it’s going to pull up links, you need to click on them and make sure that they’re real. I mean, it will and can hallucinate things, and so you have to have it within guardrails. I would think that it’s very usable when you’re talking about your very low-level repetitive customer support issues like your top 10 FAQ. Train it on that. If that’s what’s going to be clogging up 80% of your inbox, then let AI handle that, and if it can’t answer the question properly, then punt it over to a real person who you can talk to and fix it.
[00:28:37] Lauren Turner: But when you get rid of the repetitive stuff, then it frees up more of that time. Okay, now you’ve got an extra hour in your day. How many customers can you have a real conversation with during that time? Now that you have that breathing room, what kind of long-term planning can you do? How can you plan a better event? How can you better connect to customers who you’ve been wanting to reach out to but just haven’t had the time? That’s where you’re amplifying the effectiveness of AI. It’s not replacing the humanity, it’s augmenting the humanity. And I can give you another example. One of the bots that I built is called Tify, and I trained it on business communication, etiquette, manners. I pulled from a bunch of different sources and trained it on that, and it’s really, really great when you are not in the right mindset to be saying the right thing, and you basically give it your unfiltered brain dump and it converts that into HR friendly, productive writing. Really, really useful when you’re writing reviews or you’re trying to communicate about a problem that you have. In that case, it really does help because it’s going to save you from saying something that you’re going to deeply regret.
[00:29:41] Jeff Reekers: Yeah, love that. And I love the vantage point of AI to help empower better human connectivity and augment human centricity as well. That is the ultimate path and the ultimate goal, I think, if we do it right. Absolutely. Well, wrap up with a couple of final questions here, Lauren. So first I want to say I have such incredible admiration for all those who go out on their own and are building a company and the entrepreneurship behind it and behind that. I also understand how much goes into that as well. How do you kind of find your peace or balance or what are some of the things that you do outside of customer marketing and building this company kind of help you give a little bit of balance to life as a whole?
[00:30:24] Lauren Turner: Yeah. I do improv comedy. I play with Sick Puppies Comedy in Delray Beach. We play at the Doghouse Theater in Delray. I’ve been doing improv comedy regularly, probably for the last 10 years, and then on and off for closer to 20 before that. And I found it to be almost meditative in a way, not just as an entrepreneur, but I think just as a person in this environment, your brain is always, it’s like the little hamster on the wheel just going all the time. You’re making lists in your head, what do I need to do today? Who do I need to respond to? What am I doing? When you’re on stage doing improv, all that stuff needs to shut up because you are focusing on what is going on stage and who is saying what and what’s going on, what’s the character, what’s the situation? Who are you? Because all of this is being decided in real time.
[00:31:15] Lauren Turner: So if you’re listening to the mixtape in your head, you’re not paying attention to what’s going on on stage and then you’re kind of useless to your teammates. It’s a really nice opportunity to kind of put the chatter away for a while and really be focused on what is happening in the moment. And not only is that what they teach in meditation, although I would say obviously meditation and improv are very different things, but it’s the same kind of thing where you’re focusing on what is happening in the moment and then reacting in that kind of way. Another thing that improv has really, really helped with anything customer facing is iterating and getting used to failure. Not every scene is going to be hilarious. Things are going to fall flat, and the nice thing about improv is it’s never going to be repeated ever again.
[00:32:06] Lauren Turner: So when you have these very, very low stakes failures, you learn to build up that resilience where, okay, we failed. Here’s what we learned, let’s move on. And that can be so useful in the business world because we are so likely to beat ourselves up over mistakes and to constantly ruminate of what we did wrong and what we should have done better and what we should have said. The more you do that with practice in things that don’t matter, the calmer you can stay when you have the things that do. And some of what I do in some of my improv trainings for customer facing roles — the active listening, the teamwork, the iteration, the not censoring your ideas before you get it down. And if you are brainstorming for part of a program or trying to do some kind of long-term planning, it allows you the freedom to be able to get all the ideas out before you tell yourself, oh, no, that’s dumb. It makes it so much more accepting and so much more welcoming to yourself and not just as part of your team. What would you be able to do if that inner critic was silenced for a little bit? And that’s part of what improv does.
[00:33:15] Jeff Reekers: Love that, and I love how you substantially bring that back into the customers you work with and the process as well, and make that intersection something that comes together in a really unique way. It’s fascinating to bring that all together. Last question, Lauren, if anyone else out there, if you were listening to the next podcast episode that airs directly after yours and you wanted to listen to somebody else in the world of customer marketing, customer advocacy, or just customer-centric marketing or SaaS leaders as a whole, anyone you’d recommend that we chat with next here?
[00:33:47] Lauren Turner: Oh my gosh, I have a feeling that everyone I name is someone you’ve probably already spoken with. Dave Hanson.
[00:33:54] Jeff Reekers: Dave’s the best.
[00:33:54] Lauren Turner: What’s the one? Jenny Asaba. Jen Socinski.
[00:33:59] Jeff Reekers: You’re naming a lot of my Minneapolis peeps here. Dave and Jenny, you both have your Minneapolis. We’ll have to do a full Minneapolis episode.
[00:34:06] Lauren Turner: Heather Fa.
[00:34:09] Jeff Reekers: That’s a great start nonetheless, and will give us some good fuel. All those people will probably be getting an outreach as well, and hopefully we’ll get ’em on the podcast here. Sometimes I think some of these folks are already lined up for one. But Lauren, thanks so much for joining today. It was a pleasure having you and really appreciate you taking the time out to walk through all things customer-centric, customer marketing, customer advocacy, and all your insights and philosophy on this.
[00:34:31] Lauren Turner: Thanks so much for having me. This was great. I really appreciate it, Jeff.
[00:34:34] Jeff Reekers: All right, thanks, everybody. Cheers.
[00:34:38] Speaker 2: If you’re ready to turn customer advocacy into your biggest growth engine, make sure to subscribe to Customer Champions wherever you listen to podcasts, and for even more insights, go to championhq.com because the best way to grow isn’t just by winning customers, it’s by championing them.