Mark Organ

Mark Organ is the founder and CEO of Influitive, helping companies mobilize their advocates to produce massive increases in referral leads, reference calls, social media participation and more.

Mark first revolutionized B2B marketing as the founding CEO of Eloqua (ELOQ), the world leader in marketing automation software, which was acquired by Oracle for $871M. In between, he was a go-to-market consultant for SaaS companies in North America and Asia.

He has almost 5000 twitter followers, and the Influitive email database has 113,000 email subscribers. Influitive was ranked 57th fastest growing company in North America on Deloitte’s 2017 Technology Fast 500™ 

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Mark’s success

Building a community to create a referral machine.

Result if you follow the steps in Mark’s session

Bigger reach and rapport through the word of mouth by loyal customers and advocates of your business.

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

So our approach is different because we take, as I mentioned a community approach, right? Like you’ve probably seen a number of, you know, times, you know, you might be in a restaurant and they’ll ask you to leave a Yelp review, or, you know, they’ll ask for a referral, but there that’s really transactional, not really trying to build relationship with you.

And what I’ve learned, because I got really interested in this idea around advocacy when I was at Eloqua, and what I noticed was that advocacy was really important to generate more sales faster. But it was really hard to get in a systematic way.

And I like that word systematic that you use. So it’s a great word. As hard to scale that up as what is what we’ve learned and, and almost by accident, we learned that when you provide an amazing experience for these advocates, when you make them feel really special, when you make them feel good about themselves, you make them look good to other people, you give them social capital.

They respond by doing a lot more advocacy than they ordinarily would. So our approaches, as opposed to asking for a referral, it’s more hey, would you like to join our VIP club? And of course, we have some technology for that, we don’t have to use your technology for that.

You can, you know, just invite people into their, maybe an email file you have, WhatsApp or a Facebook group or whatnot. And you say we’d like we’d like you to join our club. And we’d like you to meet other people like yourself, give us feedback on how we can improve our business. And an advocate often starts a relationship with a company by wanting to get feedback, they want to participate.

So what will ask in return from you, Mr/Miss advocate is, we’d like you to help us build our business, not by buying more things from us, although that’s great. But we’d like for you to report for people that you think really do well with our product, we’d like for you to tell your story of how we’re changing your life. And we’d like to provide better service and product for you.

And so, that’s our approach. And we found that it really works. People love to join communities. Just part of being human right? Is that we love to meet other people that have the same interests that we have.

And the, you know, one thing that we may have in common is we may have a shared appreciation for product, for example, we both are zoom customers. And that’s something that we have in common, right, we may want to learn more from each other about how to leverage this platform that we’re on right now. Which by the way, does have an advocate community, quite a good one.

And so it brings people together and that idea of bringing people together in a group and making them feel like they’re part of something that’s bigger than themselves and giving them features feedback on how their advocacy is doing.
When you put all those together, you can get literally 10 times as much advocacy from the same person. And that’s what we’ve sort of figured out in this business.

And again, we have a technology platform for that. But we have, you know, we’re happy if anybody is using these ideas to build a business, even if it’s as simple as you know, once a quarter, get your customers together for dinner, and celebrate them and say, “Thank you for being a customer, for being a great customer. We’d love to get more feedback from you. And we’d like to help you in any way we can.”.

It’s a very inexpensive way to start leveraging these ideas to build your company.