Mark Behar Builds Red Carpet Customer Marketing and Advocacy Project With Prophix Software — Mark Behar

After I moved from Marketing to Customer Success at Prophix Software, the Marketing and Sales teams ignored the advocacy data we had collected for years. We had customers who'd taken reference calls, spoken at events, completed surveys, and worked with our CAB, but we had no system to engage them.

Meanwhile, Sales needed references, Marketing needed content, Product needed feedback, and CS needed to monitor vulnerable customers in their early stages after implementation. We had willing advocates but no infrastructure to activate them. That represented untapped business value.

As a founding member of the Prophix CSM team and then as Prophix's first Customer Advocacy Manager, I created and ran a community called Red Carpet. We built this on Influitive’s AdvocateHub platform.

We launched Red Carpet with a comical cartoon video of company CEO Paul Barber welcoming customers into the community. Two years later, Paul would sell the company for $500 million USD.

Red Carpet was a bustling, interactive, self-contained world for customers, partners, and employees. It featured a thriving discussion forum, ‘challenges’ that excited community members and fed valuable intel to client teams, Ask Me Anything sessions with CFOs and other Finance leaders, and an attribution model to track the dollar value of all these advocacy activities.

In 2020, the platform generated 10,675 acts of advocacy and $409,804 in ROI—as well as a related referral program with $650K in additional revenue.

In 2019, our first year, we received a nomination as finalists for Influitive’s top award. In 2020, Prophix won that distinction, the Influitive BAMMIE award for Advocate Marketing Program of the Year.

On the back-end, we had a well-oiled customer reference program interfacing with Salesforce via nightly uploads—a collaboration between our Customer Success team and Marketing Operations. I spoke about these innovations to an audience of Influitive prospects and customers in 2020.

By the time I departed Prophix in 2021, nearly two and a half years after launching Red Carpet, we had built the user base to 1,400 active customers and partners.

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