Relationship One and Influitive: Advocates for Life

Roughly 6 years ago I brought Eloqua into my previous company to begin catapulting our marketing efforts to the next level. I knew the product was better than the competition and I was confident we made the right choice for our needs. It wasn’t until post implementation that I began to fall in love.

I never thought I would become an “EloKing” by any means. I mean, it’s just software you use for your job. It’s not something most people brag about. But here I was, talking to everyone who would listen about how great Eloqua was. I was hooked and I wanted everyone to know.

Before long I was posting on social media, I was connecting with the company leaders on LinkedIn, I was doing reference calls for the sales team, I was speaking at industry events about the power of using the platform, and I was probably super obnoxious to my friends and family who weren’t marketers and had no idea what I was talking about.

Why did I do all these things? There was no tangible benefit for me. Why would I spend all this time and energy singing the praises of a product that I had to pay to use? It’s probably because Eloqua had designed a product that was so integral to my professional success that I wanted others to experience the benefits I had.

I mention this story because I think every company would love to have a legion of raging fans that use their products and tell their story to anyone who will listen. I didn’t have a name for it at the time, but I was an Eloqua Advocate. And as an advocate, I made Eloqua’s job of marketing and selling their software a little bit easier.

Finding ways to discover, develop, equip and reward advocates should be one of the goals of every organization. No perfectly designed marketing campaign can even come close to influence a few raging fans can generate. Don’t believe me? Just ask Apple!

But, figuring out a way to keep track of, organize and encourage your raging fans can be a bit tricky. “How many times did I call Jeff over at Acme Corp last month? Was that too many or do you think he would do another reference for us?” How are you keeping track of this sort of thing?

For most organizations it’s a kludgy mixture of spreadsheets, Post-It Notes, sketchy CRM updates, and anecdotally in the back of 6 people’s minds. Needless to say, that’s not a great “system.”

Our friends over at Influitive have recognized how important it is to build out an organized, robust advocate marketing strategy. They’ve built a first rate platform that’s helping organizations create fantastic success in building raging fans. In fact, it’s the system I interact with as an Oracle Eloqua Advocate every time I login to see what I can do to spread the word of Oracle Eloqua to the masses.

So, given the importance of everyone developing a robust advocate marketing strategy, coupled with the best in breed technology to do this, I am excited to announce that Relationship One and Influitive are partnering to advance the cause of advocate marketing.

Relationship One is the newest, certified Influitive services partner organization. It’s no small feat to become a certified partner. You have to have multiple team members go through an extensive training process, participate in actual client work and then pass a certification exam before you’re allowed to called a certified services partner. It’s a lot of work but we’re so happy we went through the process.

We’re excited to be working alongside the leader in advocate marketing software and are looking forward to helping organizations transform their advocate marketing efforts.

If you’re wondering if your organization could benefit from Advocate Marketing or need help getting the most out of Influitive, we would love to chat.