Act-On Software is a cloud-based marketing automation software company that, like many others, relies heavily on sales leads referred by existing customers. To continue their rapid growth, they needed to develop a way to generate many more of those leads on an ongoing basis without coming back to the same customers too often.

Act-On launched an advocate marketing program, called ALUV, and worked toward establishing a successful referral program by:

• Finding their advocates - Act-On rewarded their sales and customer success team members for inviting customers to join ALUV.
• Starting with small "asks"-before jumping into the referral campaign - For example, they promoted a survey campaign in the program and received more than 100 responses in just 48 hours.
• Making it easy - The advocate marketing platform that ALUV is hosted on integrates with LinkedIn, allowing advocates to find referrals in their network, and has built-in referral technology.

After warming up their advocates with those smaller "asks", Act-On launched a referral campaign, asking advocates for a warm email or phone introduction to someone they thought could use the software.

In just a few months, Act-On's referral campaign resulted in:

• 209 high-quality referral leads, which close at a rate 500% higher than the industry standard
• $180,000 in pipeline
• $80,000 in closed business
• A better relationship between sales and marketing