When we sell to enterprise customers, driving adoption and long-term user engagement is always a major focus. However, we found it was really hard to drive that adoption via webinars, email marketing, or phone calls alone. In this session, we'll walk through how we've built our our Ambassador Program: an effort to equip power users to help nurture and grow our biggest accounts. By identifying and training a handful of Ambassadors in each enterprise, we increased adoption and revenue growth by over 10% in the first 60 days. If you're looking for specific tactics on how to grow your top accounts in the next few months, this is the session for you! (Originally presented at the Totango Customer Success Summit in March 2016)

1. The Ambassador Program
How we increased post-­‐sales adop8on & expansion among
our biggest customers

2. A li<le bit about me
• I’ve been to over 50 breweries and 100
wineries.
• My first job in high school was stocking
shelves and sawing off deer legs.
• My favorite spot on earth is Yosemite
National Park.

4. We help people build strong,
authen8c rela8onships
• Contactually = CRM to help you
get referrals from your network
• Major verticals: Real Estate,
Finance, Law, Consulting
• We have thousands of
individuals customers, and
have moved up-market to large
firms

5. Selling to large services firms
presents a huge problem
• These firms are composed of contractors who run their own
small businesses
• Individuals can largely buy whichever software they want
• When a firm does buy software for their team, they can’t
mandate usage and adoption is generally poor
Our enterprise customers wouldn’t buy Contactually unless
we could figure out a way to get their teams to adopt it

7. ENTER THE AMBASSADOR
PROGRAM

8. What is the Ambassador Program?
An exclusive and elite
program where the best
users at our enterprise
customers get 1-1
training & coaching from
our Customer Success
reps in exchange for their
help in training the rest
of their colleagues Ambassador Program =
his brain child
Brandon Carroll

9. How does it work?
• Enterprise CSMs find Power Users, broken down by office
• Reach out to their managers and ask them to choose the
the Ambassador for their office
• Once chosen, the Ambassador gets regular 1-hour
coaching/consulting calls valued at $500/month
• In return, Ambassadors are the SME for their office and
conduct an in-person training once per month

10. FINDING SUPER USERS

11. Finding Super Users
• Enterprise CSMs work with large companies, comprised
of offices of users that are regionally managed
• In our CRM, we can break down groups of users by Office
• Look at success metrics and recency of use in the
application
• We call these highly active, successful users “Super Users”

12. How we define our Super Users
! Activated User = A
User who has signed
in, connected an
email, tracked 25+
relationships, and
sent a follow up
! Super User = An
Activated User who
has sent a follow up
within the past 7
days

13. Narrow to 3.
Ask the Regional Manager to choose.

14. Allowing the regional manager to
choose creates ownership and buy-­‐in.
It also makes the Super User feel
special and elite.

15. GETTING OUR
AMBASSADORS RAMPED UP

16. We first need to ensure our
Ambassadors get a huge amount of value
• Our Ambassadors are business owners, and their #1 objective is to grow their
business. We coach them specifically on topics that will help grow their business, like:
• How to implement a system to nurture your leads
• How to get more referrals from your past clients
• How to stay top of mind with your professional colleagues
• We also provide 1-1 consulting on how to best implement these best practices in
Contactually.
We provide a high-value experience and put
a $ value on our coaching.

17. Training cadence
1 or 2 calls in the
first 30 days to
ramp up the
Ambassador
1 consulting call
every 90 days
after that
Each call is about an hour. Yes, it takes a
lot of time. (More on that in a bit!)

18. We equip the Ambassadors with
training materials
• Each month, a 90% complete training presentation is
sent to the Ambassador. Ambassadors simply need to add
or edit text in a few slides.
• We keep our Ambassadors in the loop. They’re notified of
product updates before the general population
• Ambassadors are expected to be the Office “Subject Matter
Expert” and to help their fellow office colleagues with
Contactually

19. The training should make the Ambassador
look good — both with their colleagues and
their manager.
It looks like it’s created by them. We don’t
take any of the credit.

20. Here’s what our first Ambassador
training template looks like

21. OUR RESULTS SO FAR

22. We ini8ally piloted with 3 customers
across 13 offices
• Worked with the
manager to hand-pick
our 13 Ambassadors
• Created the training
template decks
• Held 1-1s with each
Ambassador

23. We saw promising results right away
• Within first 60 days:
• New people started using Contactually (initial activation increased
7%)
• Existing users became much more engaged (Super Users grew by
9%)
• We expanded the size of the account by $2,100 ARR!
• Moreover, we got a ton of great qualitative feedback, both from
Ambassadors and users

24. Some Contactually love
“The presentation was very well received! I’d say there
were 15-20 folks there. And I have a ton of feedback
for you.”
“Our ambassadors are telling me that they are learning
a lot from their coaching calls with you. Great work!”
“Thanks so much for your time today. I’m really happy
with how you listened to my questions, gave me some
training and background into the application, and have
given me simple concrete tasks to complete in order to
reach my goals. Awesome!”
Ambassador:
Executive:
Training
attendee:

25. We’ve since expanded the
Ambassador program
• Currently in place at 30% of our enterprise customers
• None of our these customers have churned, and the
accounts have expanded by 12% on average in the past
3 months
• We’re iterating on a lot of the Ambassador training and
trying to scale the 1-1 training with less direct CSM
involvement

26. KEY LESSONS LEARNED
(FROM MISTAKES WE MADE)

27. Your best users in an account are far be<er
at driving adop8on than you are

29. It’s totally fine to do things that
don’t scale (as least at first)
• This was one of many things we tried to increase user
adoption. We iterated until we found something that
worked.
• 1-1 coaching calls & customized training takes a ton of
effort. It wasn’t scalable at first. But over time, we
streamlined it. Now we do Ambassador webinars &
provide a Tier 1 support line for them vs 1-1 calls.

30. There’s a reason why TFA is an elite
program
• TFA has a 15% acceptance rate
• Why? Because it’s an elite, selective program
• Ensure you’re also selective with your Ambassadors, and
stress their elite status

31. Set clear success criteria & track
your results
• We selected our #1 goal —
driving greater activation —
from the start
• We tracked office-specific stats
to see how we were progressing
• It’s OK doing this manually (it
doesn’t need to scale!)
• Brandon gained exec buy-in with
clear goals & success metrics

32. Have fun!
http://contactual.ly/1MillionEmails

33. QUESTIONS?
tony@contactually.com
@cappaert