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- 🗣 How to Build a Systematic B2B Word-of-Mouth Machine
🗣 How to Build a Systematic B2B Word-of-Mouth Machine
How Attention transformed customer advocacy from random wins into 35% of their inbound pipeline
Imagine if your best-performing sales reps weren’t even on your payroll.
Or if 1 in 3 of your inbound leads came from customers hyping you up in LinkedIn posts and private Slack groups.
Sound unrealistic? Not for Attention. They’re pulling in 35% of their pipeline from pure word-of-mouth alone (all without a referral program). We spoke to their CEO, Anis Bennaceur, to learn how they do it…
How to Build a Systematic B2B Word-of-Mouth Machine
"You should not try to grow if you don’t have customer love.”
Anis broke down Attention’s playbook for using customer love to amplify your voice and transform fans into a powerful growth engine.
A GTM strategy that optimizes for customer love
Most B2B companies treat customer advocacy like finding a $20 bill in an old pair of jeans… a happy accident.
But Attention doesn’t leave things to chance. Their GTM strategy isn’t about crossing fingers and hoping customers fall in love. Instead, it gives them every reason to.
“You first make it an art, and then over time, it turns into a science.”
Here’s how they pull it off:
Shipping features silently to trusted customers first: Attention listens to their customers, builds what they need, and ships it out quietly. Clients feel like VIPs and competitors can’t copy their every move.
“For the entire year of 2024, we’ve been shipping in silence and secretly, without announcing anything, right? So we were just announcing the stuff from 2023… In 2024, there were no major announcements, and now, in 2025, we’re gonna announce a lot of great, groundbreaking things that we built last year and the reason why we’re doing it that way is that we found out that a lot of competitors were trying to build one-off solutions - things that we built. And so now, we know that when we’re gonna release things publicly, competitors are gonna go out, copy those, but we’ll be a year ahead.”
Gathering real-world validation before public release: If their trusted users give a feature a thumbs-up, it goes live; if not, they refine it. This process helps them perfect their product and messaging before launching it publicly.
“The way we go about that is: we use it extensively, figure out all the kinks, the edge cases, and so on, and then roll it out to some clients. We get their feedback to keep improving things, and then fast forward to a year later… We have a plan of release for specific types of clients so that there’s more and more adoption around that. Then now, fast forward to 2025, a year later, we know exactly how we’re going to communicate about things and how we’re going to roll out pretty aggressively all the features that we’ve built in the past year.”
And that’s just the high-level strategy - time to get into the weeds of how Attention turns those loyal customers into powerful sales reps...
3 tactics to turn customers into sales reps
Nobody wakes up thinking, "I can’t wait to promote my favorite B2B software today!”
If you want customers to sell for you, you can’t just hope for the best. You need to engineer moments that make them want to share.
Attention figured this out and built tactics that turn happy users into loud advocates.
1. Encouraging organic LinkedIn shoutouts
Anis says if you’ve been super-serving your clients, don’t be shy about asking them to give you some love on LinkedIn. A simple, friendly nudge can go a long way.
“Kindly ask your biggest fans, your biggest champions, the ones that you’ve been selling stuff for over the past: ‘Hey, we just released this publicly. We would love to get some love on this post.’ They’ll actually do it, right? Especially if you’ve been catering to them and super-serving them… they’re gonna do it. And that gets other clients or other prospects to see how much your clients love you and how much proven and tested this is.”
Pro tip: Understand your clients deeply. Exactly how they talk and what drives them to share. Once you’ve got that nailed down, you can inspire them to champion your brand naturally, turning their shoutouts into real, organic marketing.
B2C brands have been running viral contests for years. Attention is testing the same concept in B2B, and it’s working.
They ran a contest… the more engagement a post gets, the bigger the reward:
The post with the highest amount of impressions gets $2,000.
Second, $1,000.
Third, $500.
And everyone who participated got $50.
“Only 5-10% of our customers participated… but eventually we ended up with so many impressions that it made absolute sense for us… That really worked out pretty well.”
Anis has a simple rule for referrals: make them smart, not random. He believes social graphs are the key.
Think of it like LinkedIn or Facebook suggesting "People You May Know"...
“So you need to make it really easy for your users to refer the best possible users. So if you’re building a really good social graph, a professional graph, and layering on top of it the right signals to really support this, and then say, ‘Hey, these are the best people that you should be referring, but also we believe that these are the people that you know very well that you should be referring.’”
By layering intent signals on top of these social connections (like hiring activity, job changes, or past interactions), Attention makes it easier for customers to introduce them to high-fit leads.
The power of (customer) love
Customer advocacy isn’t an accident. It’s the reward for building something people actually love. And when you turn that love into a repeatable system, you get what Attention has: a compounding advantage that’s difficult for competitors to copy.
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