As you explore the increasingly vast selection of platforms in the customer marketing world, you’ll find many focused on customer references, advocacy, community, and customer engagement.
When evaluating advocacy platforms, teams often compare the SlapFive platform with alternatives such as Orca and ReferenceEdge, which take different approaches to reference management and advocacy workflows.
In this article, we review the SlapFive platform and examine product overview, key features, integrations and APIs, and customer service offerings.
This article is part of our series evaluating customer advocacy platforms and the tools organizations use to manage customer stories, references, and advocacy programs.
Table of Contents
1. Product Overview
The SlapFive platform brands itself as Advocacy 2.0. In this article, we’ll seek to gain an understanding of what SlapFive offers customer and advocate marketers to warrant such an upgrade in nomenclature.
We’ll do so by exploring its key features — meaning those it promotes as key as well as those you’ll likely be looking for in a tool that occupies this space. We will also explore the important topics of integrations, customer service offerings, and attempt to get an understanding of customer sentiment as gathered from online reviews and other forums.
The SlapFive platform is a well-thought-out advocacy management platform co-founded by Advocacy veteran Jeff Ernst. The platform is more akin to traditional reference request platforms (such as ReferenceEdge) than community and gamification platforms like Influitive or Base. We’ll soon see why that comparison doesn’t exactly do it justice, but it’s important to understand that SlapFive mostly functions as a backend workflow tool that relies on email or account rep outreach to generate activity.
Through its upcoming partnership with Gradual — a community, content, and event hosting platform — the SlapFive platform hopes to close the gap soon. This could be the dealbreaker when it goes up against Base, Influitive, or community platforms, but SlapFive welcomes the use of other community platforms as the frontend, collecting relevant data on member profiles and in their Google Data Studio-powered reporting system.
We said SlapFive is mostly a backend tool because, while it doesn’t have a centralized homepage for advocates to visit, it does offer a suite of tools for collecting and displaying customer stories and other referenceable content.
We’ll delve deeper into that functionality further on in this article.
2. Key Features
This section reviews the core functionality of the SlapFive platform, including advocacy workflows, content collection, referrals, reviews, and reporting.
You won’t find much about gamification and motivation here besides rewards (discussed later in this article), because that’s not the focus of SlapFive. While customers can attach an Engagement Score (the closest analog to points) to each advocacy activity type, these are optional and there is no talk at all of levels or badges.
2.1 Requests
Requests drive most core advocacy activities in SlapFive. This is where you’ll find the product differs from portal-based advocacy platforms, but it’s also where it excels.
Within the SlapFive platform, sales reps aren’t limited to requesting referenceable advocates from Salesforce. They can choose from any of the advocacy types defined during onboarding. From the Opportunity Record, you could in theory request:
➤ References
➤ Testimonials/Recorded References
➤ Case Studies
➤ User-Generated Content
➤ Webinar/Event Speakers
➤ Referenceable Advocates
➤ The Moon
The requester can also specify which advocate(s) should fulfill the request. Using the request tool in Salesforce, they specify criteria such as industry, products used, seniority, etc. The actual criteria available depends on which fields were set up on advocate profiles.
To avoid burning out your advocates, each member can specify (on sign up or through periodic surveys) how many of each activity they are willing to do per quarter. This information lives on their profile and can also be viewed in Salesforce.
Once a request is made, it lands on a Kanban style board, where it makes progress from the new column all the way through to fulfilled. This is a simple concept but provides an intuitive way for a program manager to track requests.
2.2 Prompts and Stories
If the request is for user-generated content such as a video or text testimonial, the platform will generate a page for advocates to easily submit or produce their content. In SlapFive’s nomenclature, this is called a Prompt.
This prompt system is something they tout quite highly, and we believe it’s another differentiator in the industry. It has an easy-to-use interface for submitting video, audio, text, or other assets. There is also no need for an advocate to login to complete the request.
Fulfilling a request involves some sort of outreach such as an automated email containing the prompt or a message from the Account Manager or CSM.
Responses to these prompts are called Stories and can be shared on what SlapFive calls a Board — it’s jargon for a landing page. A board can contain one or more pieces of content that have been curated by the advocacy program manager.
2.3 Embeddables
The boards produced from the collection of stories can be shared publicly via URL as a standalone page or embedded into a website using some JavaScript or iFrame code. SlapFive provides templates for boards and embeds that take the design work out of creating showcases.
To get a good understanding of the concept, take a look at SlapFive’s marketing page on the subject.
Below is an example of an embedded showcase. In this case, clicking on any of the individuals reveals a video testimonial.
In addition to the examples above, SlapFive embeds can take the following form:
➤ Showcase of reviews with attribution from third-party sites
➤ Customer stories and use cases
➤ Thought leadership pieces
➤ Member directories
2.4 Referrals
In keeping with SlapFive’s backend advocacy management concept, you won’t find a referral form within their platform. Referral forms can be promoted via SlapFive Boards, but they will still have you link to a form hosted by your Marketing Automation System.
Using their native integration with the following platforms, all lead activity and progress is recorded in SlapFive:
➤ Marketo
➤ Eloqua
➤ HubSpot
➤ Referenceable customer matching based on criteria
➤ Recorded references (basically pre-recorded structured testimonials)
2.5 Reviews
SlapFive doesn’t have direct integrations with Review sites, instead it takes the approach of trying to make things easier for advocates to share their reviews across multiple websites.
Advocates will be offered a series of questions that have been pulled from popular review sites (see image below).
Once the advocates have saved their responses, a board containing their responses will be created from which they can copy-and-paste the same review to multiple review sites.
2.6 Reporting
The SlapFive platform offers fairly basic reporting dashboards within the product, but this does mean they are snappy and reliable. You will find metrics on the following:
Content: Number of members by industry, company size, industry, etc.
Requests: Types and status of requests
Engagement: Advocacy activities by type, engagement score, rate, and number of activities
While the offerings are limited, SlapFive operates on Google Data Studio and works with customers to create custom dashboards outside of their platform.
The SlapFive platform does not currently allow customers to create their own custom reports or dashboards directly within the product.
3. Integrations and APIs
This section reviews the integrations and API capabilities of the SlapFive platform, including its connections with Salesforce, advocacy platforms, marketing automation tools, and external systems.
3.1 Integration with Salesforce
Since stakeholder and rep access to SlapFive is likely limited, the Salesforce integration features collectively aim to streamline customer engagement and leverage customer content to drive sales and marketing efforts within the Salesforce.
Data Synchronization: Bi-directional synchronization between SlapFive and Salesforce objects, ensuring data consistency across platforms
Custom Components: Custom UI components and fields that integrate SlapFive content with Salesforce, enabling Salesforce users to access and share customer stories and references directly from Salesforce records
Influence Reporting: SlapFive’s integration comes with out-of-the-box reporting capabilities that track customer influence on revenue, utilizing custom objects and dashboard analytics to measure the impact of customer activities on sales outcomes
3.2 Integration with Influitive
SlapFive offers a native integration that logs advocacy activities that happen in your AdvocateHub. It does so by hooking into the Influitive API and pulling in all events.
While this may sound convenient, we’d recommend using this migration as an opportunity to step back and review the data you want to import. It’s a good way to start fresh with the data that is important to your business and metrics.
According to SlapFive, it is more common to import data via CSV instead of using the integration method.
3.3 Additional Integrations
In addition to Salesforce and Influitive, SlapFive has integrations with the following platforms.
➤ Marketo, Eloqua, HubSpot (discussed in the Referrals section)
➤ Gainsight
➤ Higher Logic Vanilla
Beyond its native integrations, SlapFive promotes integrations via Zapier or Workato with Typeform (integrate surveys into SlapFive, notably member sign-up forms) and Highspot (post new content from SlapFive to Highspot).
3.4 APIs and Webhooks
The SlapFive API, in conjunction with webhooks, enables the creation of bi-directional integrations with your platform of choice, given you have the right tools, expertise, and time.
If you have a community or other customer portal serving as the frontend of your advocacy efforts, the API can serve as a great way to access SlapFive’s full potential as an advocacy repository and orchestration tool.
SlapFive has webhooks for a host of events such as member updates, page views, activity log updates, and more. These webhooks send information about the specified event to URLs that you enter into their configuration page. This would enable outbound integration (typically via a third party such as Zapier or Workato) with just about any app.
The SlapFive REST API provides endpoints for most retrieval and creation operations you might want to perform.
➤ Board Creation and Management
➤ Story Handling
➤ Access Company and Advocate Details
➤ Access Activity Logs
4. Customer Service Offerings
In this section, we’ll review what SlapFive offers in terms of account management, strategic guidance, support, and professional services.
4.1 Onboarding
The onboarding process, included in each customer’s subscription fee, is said to take just under one month. This includes everything you might expect like training, strategy, and planning.
During onboarding, every new customer participates in a Customer-Led Growth Strategy Workshop, which is part discovery, part strategy session. Reps dig into the company’s strategic growth initiatives, determine top use cases for SlapFive, define metrics, and design programs and campaigns to drive all the above.
4.2 Account and Customer Success Management
Each customer has a dedicated CSM for no additional cost. You can expect them to perform typical functions such as providing ongoing guidance, feature updates, product best practices education, and support in customizing your dashboard.
4.3 Support Channels
In addition to their ticketing system, SlapFive offers every customer a private Slack channel with their CSM and the technical support team.
Customers also have the mobile phone numbers of all CSMs and the technical support team for any urgent issues. Additionally, the CEO makes his mobile phone number available for customers wishing to report concerns.
4.4 Support Hours
Regular support hours are 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM United States Eastern Time, but emergency support is offered 24/7.
4.5 Professional Service Offerings
Voice Advice: SlapFive offers a professional content creation service called Voice Advice. This service provides seasoned business leaders that will interview a company’s customers to produce written and video assets as well as custom SlapFive boards.
Minute Booth: This service similarly offloads the story-gathering efforts from companies by sending SlapFive reps to their conferences or industry events. They gather content by asking event attendees up to five questions, all of which can be answered within one minute.
Other Customer Advocacy Platform Reviews
If you are evaluating customer advocacy platforms, you may also find these reviews helpful:
➤ Orca Platform Review
➤ ReferenceEdge Platform Review
➤ Influitive vs Base Comparison and Migration
Final Assessment: The SlapFive Platform
The SlapFive platform takes a distinctive approach to customer advocacy by focusing on backend workflow management rather than a traditional advocate portal. Through its request-prompt-story framework, the platform enables organizations to capture customer stories, manage advocacy requests, and showcase referenceable content efficiently. While it lacks some gamification and community-driven engagement features found in other advocacy platforms, SlapFive offers strong flexibility in managing customer advocacy activities and integrating advocacy content into sales and marketing processes.
FAQ 1: What is the SlapFive platform used for?
The SlapFive platform is a customer advocacy management solution designed to collect customer stories, manage advocacy requests, and showcase referenceable content such as testimonials, case studies, and customer reviews.
FAQ 2: Does the SlapFive platform include a customer advocacy portal?
Unlike many advocacy platforms, the SlapFive platform does not focus on a centralized advocate portal. Instead, it operates primarily as a backend workflow tool that enables teams to collect and distribute customer advocacy content through requests, prompts, and boards.
FAQ 3: What integrations does the SlapFive platform support?
The SlapFive platform integrates with several major systems including Salesforce, Influitive, Marketo, Eloqua, HubSpot, Gainsight, and Higher Logic Vanilla. It also supports integrations through APIs, webhooks, Zapier, and Workato.
