How we built a community of customer advocates - Interview with Joan Babinski of Brainshark

Today’s interview is with Joan Babinski, founder and vice president of marketing at Brainshark, which helps thousands of companies around the world improve productivity with cloud-based business presentation solutions for sales, marketing and training. Joan joins me today to talk about Brainshark and how they built a community of customer advocates that helped them grow their business. Background: Brainshark has more than 400 champions in its customer champion programme and, since starting it in 2012, has more than quadrupled the number of companies willing to serve as references and more than doubled Twitter activity around the brand. Brainshark also won a Forrester Groundswell Award for it’s programme, which has resulted in amplification of its content, acceleration of the sales cycle and deeper levels of engagement with customers (for example, more customers are enthusiastic about joining beta programs, etc.). This interview follows on from my recent interview: Great service, great coffee and great people creates loyalty – Interview with Nick Barlow of Small Batch Coffee – and is number one-hundred and eight in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, helping businesses innovate, become more social and deliver better service.