How do you prove that a customer "thank you" is actually worth a million dollars? 

At Workiva, we’ve spent the last decade figuring out how to turn warm feelings into hard revenue data. As we march toward the billion-dollar mark, we’ve realized that while startup tactics work in emerging markets, a mature organization needs a programmatic, data-driven approach to advocacy. 

In this article, discover how we’ve scaled our core programs – references, advisory boards, and customer stories – to influence over 30% of our revenue growth year-over-year.

You'll learn:

  • How to fix a "broken" reference process before buying expensive tech.
  • The power of "many-to-one" group reference calls for global scaling.
  • Strategies for building high-impact Customer Advisory Boards (CABs).
  • Why we abandoned PDFs for Q&A-style customer stories and video testimonials.

The shift to revenue-driven advocacy

For a long time, leadership didn't quite "get" advocacy because we weren't speaking their language. That changed when we started tying our efforts to a dollar amount. We’re currently tracking a 30% year-over-year increase in advocacy-influenced revenue.

We measure this primarily through influenced Sales-and-Success (SNS) metrics. If a deal closes after a reference call or a customer story engagement, it’s tracked. 

It’s a journey, though – it took us at least a year just to unpack what was wrong with our data. We’d look at line items and realize they didn't match reality. You’ve got to fix the data problems first before you can get accurate measurements that leadership actually trusts.

Turning reference chaos into a revenue engine

When we first looked at our reference process, it was complete chaos. We were managing everything out of an inbox. It was ad-hoc, high-touch, and incredibly inefficient. 

We identified three major challenges: 

  1. Limited visibility, which led to overusing the same five "star" customers 
  2. A lack of granular use-case data.
  3. A process that required 15 to 20 emails just to fulfill a single request.