Hero image for recap blog on Cisco Insider Advocates' Lead Scoring Model

Cisco started its customer advocacy program (Cisco Insider Advocates) six years ago and, since then, it has evolved into a vibrant community of customers and partners

In fact, Cisco’s advocates aren’t just customers who are in it for rewards. Rather, they’re genuine brand champions who share ideas and discuss insights at the highest levels. 

Cisco Wanted to Find its Strongest Advocates

In a recent webinar, Cisco’s Rashik Rahman told us that his internal stakeholders wanted to identify the company’s most valuable and impactful customer advocates. 

It wasn’t just a matter of checking who was sharing and/or commenting the most, but finding out what advocates – and acts of advocacy – were truly moving the needle for Cisco’s key goals.

To uncover these critical insights, Cisco got together with Influitive to build a new lead scoring model. Cisco designed its lead scoring model to measure the value of each act of advocacy – e.g., coming in for a reference call, helping with a case study, helping with a blog, and so on.

With this new model, Cisco identified its most impactful advocates and began engaging them more strategically. Not only that, but Cisco also began deepening its relationship with its new customer advocates so that they could engage in more ways.

Overall, Rashik explained that the goal wasn’t just to elevate the customer’s voice for Cisco’s benefit, but to make sure the advocates could benefit from the program (e.g., by elevating their careers, professional networks, thought leadership, etc). 

You can learn more about the new scoring model from Rashik’s blog and catch the full recording of his webinar by clicking here. To get you started, here are a few high-level points.

Why a New Scoring Model?



 

Rashik discussed how the need for a new scoring model was driven by the following areas:

Weighing Activity vs. Value

Cisco’s previous scoring model helped with measuring engagement. While this was a valuable metric for gauging frequency and finding active advocates, it didn’t give a complete picture.

Rashik’s stakeholders wanted deeper insights. 

They wanted to know which specific advocates and acts of advocacy were driving the most value. Frequency doesn’t always equate to higher impact outcomes. 

Frequency also doesn’t tell you the full story about your advocates. It only shines a light on a very specific group of personas as opposed to your full advocacy landscape. 

Finding Advocacy Rockstars Early

Rashik also highlighted how the old model was missing some potentially stellar advocates because it didn’t account for certain types of engagement. While the most active customer advocates kept surfacing, Rashik was missing those who engaged in other ways. 

With the new lead scoring model, Rashik was able to start honing on how different personas were impacting the business. Furthermore, Rashik used the new model to also understand his new advocates and start deepening the relationship with each of them. 

Optimizing Advocacy Campaigns

By using the new model, Rashik discussed how Cisco’s community managers were now able to help specific advocates. 

Instead of taking a carte-blanche or one-size-fits-all approach, they can now give advocates the right content and assets. In turn, each advocate is getting content they can personally speak to and resonate with. This is important because it fuels the advocacy’s authenticity with their own audiences and, as a result, drives more reach and impact.

Increasing Visibility for Stakeholders

Finally, Rashik emphasized the need to directly tie back Cisco’s advocacy efforts to its ROI and other critical KPIs. This way, stakeholders can gauge how specific customer advocates and acts of advocacy were driving profitability and growth for the business. 

With the new lead scoring model, Rashik started identifying strong advocates from a range of buyer personas and backgrounds. He started directing them to different types of advocacy that could give value to both them and Cisco. 

Top Questions

“There’s a difference between frequency of engagement versus impact. One isn’t necessarily better than the other. Iis it okay for some folks to only do a lot of low-impact activities, and for others to do only some high-impact activities?”



 

“Is this lead scoring model known to your members?”



 

“Given that you’ve defined your activities from low-to-high. Is there now a temptation to now create more high-value activities? How do you find a healthy balance between low, medium and high-value activities?”



 

“Does the model provide some executive visibility that wasn’t there before? Has this helped grow the profile of Cisco’s advocacy program internally?”