Customer Advocacy

Aaron Woods

We, like all companies, want to be able to leverage existing customer relationships to accelerate our ability to grow at other current customers and bring new logos in the door. As with many younger startups, we were hesitant to push back on customers who would redline the logo rights clause and are thus trying to dig out from underneath. I have a couple of thoughts we're discussing internally right now:

• How do you best structure, setup, and track a customer referral program?
• How do you strategically and successfully (without doing damage to the relationship) go back to existing customers and get them on board with logo rights?
• How have you incentivized this behavior within a CS organization whose current KPIs are Net Growth in ARR and Logo Retention?

Would love to hear people's insights!

Thanks in advance y'all!

gurd3v

Hi Aaron. Could you elaborate "As with many younger startups, we were hesitant to push back on customers who would redline the logo rights clause and are thus trying to dig out from underneath." Not sure I understand. 

Thanks in advance!

Aaron Woods

Hey Gurdev, thanks for the response. Happy to elaborate. Put simply, our boilerplate MSA gives us rights as a vendor to use the client logo publicly. In our early days, when clients would pretty much automatically redline that out during the legal negotiations (you can't get what you don't ask for) the sales team would never push back to maintain logo rights for fear of derailing a deal. Now that the sales team and the company are more mature, we more frequently open up the conversation on what it would take to gain logo rights, rather than just accepting the first pass from the client's legal team.

Given so many early clients of ours removed those logo rights, we're now trying to find the best approaches to reopen that conversation. One way we've had success is to highlight something really interesting or advanced they are doing with our solution and provide them the platform to talk about their success, as an example.

I hope that help add the proper context! Let me know your thoughts or any other follow up questions.

Benedict Fritz

"One way we've had success is to highlight something really interesting or advanced they are doing with our solution and provide them the platform to talk about their success, as an example."

I think this approach has the right flavor. What are some others approaches that you can take that are mutually beneficial for both you and the customer? Maybe they're recruiting and highlighting the work they're doing could drive potential recruits to their site? Maybe you can link to job postings from the case study page?

Looking at LaunchDarkly's website, it seems like you have some fantastic logos on your site already. Perhaps highlighting that fact will make the logo rights seem more of a safe bet. "You'll be among the ranks of Atlassian, CircleCI, Intuit, and IBM!" has a certain reassuring ring to it. That could make it feel less like a risky legal gamble and more like an obvious chance to list their name amongst some great companies.

Aaron Woods

@Benedict Fritz, I love that point of getting into the ring with names we've [very fortunately] been able to secure. I didn't even think about that. What other mutually beneficial angles have you been able to leverage? I do love the idea of playing into the stack and presenting it as a benefit to working for those companies, where we're a little bit earlier in the market I feel like it may not hold as much weight depending on the client.

Aaron Woods

Has anyone out there gone through the process of not just getting more logo rights but also built out a customer referral program? Whether incentivizing folks to refer others or having a database that makes it easier to keep track of/request a reference from a current customer. I find that we keep asking the same customers over and over again to help us evangelize our product and want to make sure we're not burning them out/harming the relationship.

What are people's thoughts?

Kevin Mitchell Leonor

Try an alternative.or backdoor agreement like a cross-marketing promotion. We see it all the time in this industry where a company is invited to present how your company helped them reach their goals. It may not allow us to directly put them in on our logo reel, but we could always feature the presentation or article on the landing page.