Here’s the next post in a series on team-led growth - a strategy to build teams across vendors and customers for the purpose of understanding each other and unlocking an ecosystem of potential knowledge and action.

One of the key methods of building team cohesion is to learn from each other and make connections within a customer team that you don’t know very well.

When there is a customer issue or question, one of the biggest barriers to resolve is finding the right people to talk to on the customer side (and sometimes within your own team as a vendor). By involving multiple people, you increase the chances for timely and accurate collaboration, and build a sense of community in the temporary team.

But who’s the right person to talk to on the customer side? It turns out that a small number of people send most of the messages to the vendor.

The 90-9-1 rule for communities (Nielsen, 2006) suggests that 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute. 9% of users participate to a lesser extent, and 1% of users account for almost all communication.

We reviewed 1.1 million messages in Slack and found that team environments make it possible for a broader set of people to connect compared to the standard you would expect from social networks and broad business communities. These are the contacts you need to engage to improve customer relationships when you are handling sales, service, or success questions.

In a team-led growth scenario, more people are involved in the conversation so that your 10% of active users becomes 35% who are aware of the issue and actively participate and engage.

There are a small number of key players in your customer’s organization that influence the success of your engagement. The more of these people you can get to participate, the better your chances of doing well.

Engaging these influencers is likely to bring other customer players into the mix. By talking to the people who post the most, you can find the hidden resources. By interacting with the other passive participants you gain influence in the organization.

Three Types of Participants and Their Roles

1. People that initiate a request - they behave similarly to those in 1:1 business communication
2. People who participate and help others get to engage in a team-led environment where they would not have been able to participate in a 1:1 message. This extends the influencer pool and gives those participants a stage to influence.
3. The bystanders who are reading this conversation also are participating, though passively.
   

Creating a shared space for collaboration drives

• Higher engagement to solve problems
• Community across vendor and customer
• Multi-threading of touchpoints enabling the right people on both sides learn and communicate about issues
• Knowledge sharing that builds learning, competency, and loyalty

Strategic Takeaways for Effective Engagement

1. Use the statistics of message sending and reactions to find hidden influencers in the organization
2. With the help of these people, drive engagement and adoption

Join the Team-Led Growth Revolution! Discover Why Teams are 3.5x More Likely to Cultivate Influencers. Elevate Your Customer Success Today! Book a Demo