I have to cancel today's call, I have a new computer and it is saying I need to download and make adjustments and updates. I'm so sorry. I will reschedule Overcoming Challenges with Other Teams, I even did a presentation for it.

⭐ New issue of the CMAweekly newsletter is out and it’s got a lot of new content <!everyone>

Access the beta version of the Advocacy Tech Portal to get your Vendor Scorecard
Check out the blog for new posts/recordings and top quotes from calls with @Katlin Hess and @Patrick Kalie
and visit the updated Resource directory

⛔ Finally, NO CALL TODAY - but we will return next week with winners from the CAP Awards with Captivate Collective, @Liz Richardson and @Deena Zenyk

Please share your feedback on the new content below.

https://cmaweekly.beehiiv.com/p/sooo-much-new-cma-content

On with Joel to talk about community https://us06web.zoom.us/j/81311333405?pwd=2kjtbM4wKPOKYIt1JnUV2aTNngbZ6N.1

I’m excited to brainstorm and share insights on Adoption and Onboarding with Taylor Page - if you have experience, can you join us? <!here>
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/87451399074?pwd=OaXGuTrf7q8qDrBnT9X8BHFNIAVjUc.1

Bring your roadblocks and let’s brainstorm about them - https://us06web.zoom.us/j/4029861639 for this Friday’s meetup <!everyone>

Hi all, we are on with Emily Amos to discuss Customer Stories https://us06web.zoom.us/j/81355216779?pwd=QHFp02rbZZLqiDbkwJ0MAO6a4WcAkS.1 <!here>

Hi <!everyone>, this week’s newsletter is out and it is PACKED full of content.

The biggest piece of news: We have Sponsors!! ⭐
Welcome UserEvidence, Champion, Orca, and Advocacy Maven as supporters of your professional development in Customer Marketing & Advocacy 😁

Thank you @Evan Huck @Mark Huber @Jeff Reekers @Gianna Scorsone @Scott Grimes @Andru Creighton, and @Diana Gabroveanu for helping our community.

Check out the issue here and subscribe. Next week I’ll release our new Tech Portal on the website and subscribers will hear about it first.

Here’s the newsletter https://www.linkedin.com/posts/marygreencny_your-new-sponsors-fun-tech-job-market-act[…]463812616192-9w_O

Don’t miss today’s chat with @Carey Jordan about Customer Communications for Large Product Lines (this topic matches a call with Taylor Page from this week where she talked about Onboarding for complicated product lines - recording is being uploaded to Youtube now). https://us06web.zoom.us/j/4029861639 at 2PM EDT <!everyone>

Join us <!everyone> https://us06web.zoom.us/j/4029861639

I’ll hop on at 2PM EDT to discuss whatever topics you’d like. See you soon https://us06web.zoom.us/j/4029861639

On for open discussion https://us06web.zoom.us/j/4029861639

Hi all, getting on to discuss Adoption & Onboarding with Taylor Page https://us06web.zoom.us/j/87451399074?pwd=OaXGuTrf7q8qDrBnT9X8BHFNIAVjUc.1 <!everyone>

Lauren Stefano’s group call on Virtual events from yesterday is on Youtube https://youtu.be/3gxj5qc3d_o

Hopping on with Shetal to discuss Expansion https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84329368081?pwd=Ns4fP79BbJHA0iWS27fObFGmF1HuJR.1

Tomorrow you get a 2 part show:
1 - Shetal Shah will host a mastermind (group discussion) on Expansion - RSVP here - https://lu.ma/yw4vk31a
2 - Friday meetup with Jeni Asaba - Intersection of Community & Advocacy - RSVP here - https://lu.ma/9jhiljis

Finally check out all of the new uploads on Youtube today https://www.youtube.com/@CMAweekly/videos

We’re on with Lauren Stefano talking about Virtual Customer Events https://us06web.zoom.us/j/83136835667?pwd=iREVn2nPFbiWVJYcSPz5XXtNQL3iSx.1 <!channel>

The guest for this week’s call isn’t able to keep the time open. I’m going to cancel as I have a service repair company coming to deal with my washing machine. Next week, @Callie Rojewski will join us to talk about developing your advocacy program strategy and delivering it to leadership.

Have a great weekend <!everyone>!

Hey all, I’m taking the next few days off. Please message @Shannon Howard if you need anything! 🙂

Hopping on today’s call with Daniel Palay on Showing Our Program Value https://us06web.zoom.us/j/4029861639

Thank you for all that you've done for our community, keeping us connected, helping us grow and learn from one another, and doing it all because you wanted to help.

We appreciate you so much, Mary!

Thank @Mary Green (Owner CMAweekly) for BUILDING such a great community of CMAs. You are truly inspiration

We are live <!channel> https://us06web.zoom.us/j/4029861639

What he said!!! I understand the why, but certainly wish there was another way.

You handled that perfectly

<!everyone> in case you didn’t see it in #general

All Good Things Must Come To An End…

TL;DR I’m exhausted from running the community, and financially need a break, I’m looking for a buyer, then taking the summer off. Please help me find the right buyer.

Two years ago I started CMAweekly with weekly zoom meetups.

In the two years I’ve learned a lot of things about myself, the tech space, relationships and people.

Like many others in the space, it’s been hard to monetize the community and hard times and emotions make it even harder. Simply put, I’m awful at selling myself, my services and my knowledge.

I’m awesome at giving it away for free. And, I had hoped that would eventually lead to offers for work, sponsorships, etc. Unfortunately, those offers haven’t panned out, save for a 6 month successful sponsorship pilot with Champion, who they didn’t have the time to benefit as much as they could from the engagement, but assured me they had wanted to continue.

That’s business. It’s exciting, often rewarding and other times harsh, painful and exhausting.

What’s Happening?

So while it’s been wonderful to build the CMAweekly community, it’s time for a break. I’m looking for a buyer, one who will continue to grow the community and support CMAs.

What’s included: newsletter, YouTube channel, recordings, website, Slack workspace, CMAweekly name, list of members/subscribers, accounts on Grain, Zoom, Luma, Beehiiv, and anything else I dig up. Be sure I’ll be looking out for the community’s best interests while evaluating offers.

I want to thank everyone who has been supportive, especially those who saw the value and supported the community financially. THANK YOU. It’s been a pleasure to meet, help, and learn from you all. But, I need a break!! :)

Please share this message, tag people who might be interested, and send companies my way.

Such a great report Mary! Thanks for putting in all the time and effort!

Due to repeated complaints about using the community to push for sales, I’m banning Deeto employees from the community. <!everyone>

I apologize but I can’t host the call today. The Summer Series starts next week with a new guest!

My condolences. Sorry for your loss, Mary. 🙏

Who has program or customer advocacy success they want to share? Comment here or message me, I’m scheduling a CMAweekly Summer Series and YOU are showcased! 🥳

TY all, you are the most awesome people 🙂 ❤️

So sorry Mary 💔 for your loss. Sending hugs and prayers 🙏 your way. Let us know if you need anything.

Sorry for your loss, Mary. Sending you lots of love

Hi all, I won’t be able to host the call today, we had a passing in the family yesterday and I wasn’t able to plan the call. I’m sorry, we will be back next Friday. I will send the newsletter Tuesday. Everyone have a safe Memorial Day weekend <!everyone>

<!everyone> No call today. The Google invites ended and I didn’t realize it. We will be on for next week with Evan Jacobs discussing turning colleagues into champions: the art of creating internal advocates. 😄 Have a great weekend.

amazing thank you!

our survey varies depending on the content. we always ask:
1. How valuable was this CAB event to you?
2. How likely are you to recommend Ada's CAB to your peers?
then we ask 1 quantitative and 1 qualitative question about each session we did in that CAB meeting. for example:
1. how would you rate the product demo?
2. how could we have made the demo more compelling for your business?

@Perri Chaikof @Tiffany P. Nguyen could you also share the post CAB survey with me?

Sad I missed the live call but thank you for posting the YT video, @Mary Green (Owner CMAweekly)!!

Hey @Lauren Turner! I know this was 4 months ago, but would you please share what you have with me as well? And congrats on your new biz!

Great session, @Patrick Kalie! I remember you were talking positioning repurposed event content as "behind the scenes" - do you have an example of that?

Today (in about 20 minutes) @Patrick Kalie is joining CMAweekly Fridays to share on Event ROI, Finding Expansion Opportunities at Events, and more. Don’t miss it. [bit.ly/cmanps](https://us06web.zoom.us/j/4029861639>

ALSO - we need negative reviews on the software in our space. Pop into the Advocacy vendor survey and quickly answer a few questions, it will take 90 seconds Max

Today’s update on the Customer Advocacy Rankings Survey:
Base submissions: 6
Ranking: 27/60

Champion submissions: 1
Ranking: 10/10

Deeto submissions: 14
Ranking: 136/140

Influitive submissions: 12
Ranking: 53/120

Orca submissions: 1
Ranking: 9/10

Reference Edge submissions: 8
Ranking: 65/80

SlapFive submissions: 4
Ranking: 35/40

UserEvidence submissions: 16
Ranking: 154/160

I don’t think I ever saw this @melanie gomez ty for sharing.

It’s time to share your opinion on Customer Advocacy platforms. <!everyone>

I NEED your answers to help others making decisions on their next software purchase so please share a few seconds with us.

https://tally.so/r/n9dGdQ

No Friday call today <!here> - Have a great weekend.

@Vikki Lira ☝️

@Vikki Lira

We’re on with Champion & Gainsight https://us06web.zoom.us/j/4029861639

Hi there - question about these release documents...

Is this a best practice? Does it help get approvals quicker? We do not have them, just keep email chains with approvals. But I was curious if they are help in getting a yes/approval quicker. Also - does it help avoid last minute drop outs?

And do you use for any story share, or just case studies/videos? What about webinars or event speaking opportunities

I've had some situations recently where the customer contact said yes to a story share/webinar, said it was all good, had a few meetings but last minute get a no because they mentioned it to someone... or did have an approver that wasn't mentioned at beginning (even when asked or after a few content meetings!)

Thanks in advance for any input 🙂

Please forgive me but I can’t host the Friday call today, distant family emergency. Please join us next week for the call with Gainsight lu.ma/gainsight it’s going to be hot 🔥 <!here>

So far, I’ve heard really great things about the new platforms in the space. But I love seeing reviews as well ty @Danielle Stewart

Not surprised!

All I've heard is high praise for Deeto across the board 👀

Thank you so much!

@Emily Gover I’ve been using Deeto for over 8 months now and cannot be happier! Let me know if there are any questions I can help answer on how our team is using it and the results we’ve had 😀

Someone was just talking about Deeto yesterday. I will check it out.

Thank you @Stephanie Murphy! Sending you a DM 🙂 This kicked my butt in gear to just set up time for my own demo with them

@Emily Gover I’ve used their product and would be happy to share my experience.

Great job, Mary 👏.

Hey <!everyone> we are on with Emily Amos right now! https://us06web.zoom.us/j/4029861639

We will record @Amy

@Emily Amos can you record and post a link after the call? thanks

@Amy Thanks for the kind words! I'd be happy to chat further about this on the Friday call. 😀

Wow. VERY impressive @Emily Amos 🌟 I would like to find out more about "activities that impact revenue most" and how companies are collecting this data.

Adding in @Emily Gover who's leading this for Dropbox 🙂

Congrats @Kevin Lau ✨

Happy to help! Another fun angle could be having @Emily Gover's perspective as a candidate - met through CMA weekly (thank you Mary! 🙏 ) and nailed the whole process. Forgive my delay from extended travel!

No call today. 3 kids with awful stomach bug. <!here>

Mary what time are the Friday calls and where do we go to join in? Thanks!

<!everyone> Hopping onto the Friday call with Jane Menyo to discuss advanced advocacy. https://us06web.zoom.us/j/4029861639

Beautiful! Congrats 😄

Wip at the moment. Essentially it’s an aggregate score that we’ll use to incorporate several datapoints to get a better pulse on the customers overall satisfaction - NPS, csat, ces, health etc. At the same time we’re building out use cases to incorporate this into a customer data platform or CDP like sfdc data cloud or Adobe experience platform. This is definitely a multi year journey

@Kevin Lau - Curious if you've expanded on the customer engagement index yet. I heard you mention it on a podcast. I'd love to learn more!

Thanks for clarifying @Marie Elliott!

HEY - Some news for you all 🙂

Last week I finished a Review Management Guide on the CMAweekly Blog:

Katlin Hess from G2 did an AMAZING call with us on Feb 9th on how she did a complete makeover on Customer Onboarding at Scale

🎉 Jane Menyo from Gong is discussing Advanced Advocacy with us THIS Friday- she’s going to share and ask for your input. RSVP here.

I’ve made updates to the Influitive Alternatives guide

And there are more events on the CMAweekly website for the Influitive Success Series, Revenue Planning, a Deeto Demo and more.

🔥 Finally!!! My course is open again 😄

Please support me by checking it out, giving me feedback, sharing it with others, and joining the cohort!
In the course you will learn several systems and frameworks to make your job much easier and more productive, while still having fun.

The best part? No more Advocacy Island, you’ll get all of the support you need to build the best program of your career!

GO HERE ---> https://maven.com/cmaweekly/community-advocacy

genius! just what I was looking for, thank you both

@Emily Amos the latter. I typically will do an intro/discover type call to dig into what goals they had and how they are achieving them, any metrics they may have, how their use case is growing but sometimes the measurement and impact is more... Fluffy. Either due to the level of the happy user being too junior or the generic use case.

I usually pivot those to a customer quote and or ask for a review but I'd love ideas and advice on how else to approach these cases.

@Marie Elliott Do you mean that you know that you need a story about use case A for geographic area B for X size company, and it's challenging finding that exact story?

Or do you mean that you know you have a happy, successful customer who'd be happy to participate, but the challenge is determining whether there's anything unique about their story (and therefore whether it's worth telling)?

Great points @Randy Ksar - appreciate it!

@Shannon Howard Love the avocado analogy - thanks!

Great tip @Maria Colusi, thanks!

PS I didn’t mean to “downgrade” anyone - that sucks. Please know I had no idea it would say that. No one has been downgraded.

Hi All, I’m making a few changes so it’s easier to find announcements (like Friday calls, Events, new resources, sponsor info, courses, etc). This channel is now #announcements and the new #general is where you can post. You should still be able to comment on posts in this channel 🙂

Please give me feedback or thoughts on this.

In product 100% is low hanging fruit for NPS and CES. We did a comparison of in product via walk me vs Marketo email and it was 4x engagement from walkme

We increased our NPS responses by improving the appearance of our in-product request (mostly adding avatar w/ a person which generally gets us more responses, but also making slightly more prominent) and removing any delay for the pop up when the users hits the page where they are asked. Our theory was they are more likely to respond when they haven’t started doing things in-product yet.

Hi friends! I started at a company last week that has absolutely ZERO advocacy functionality built up yet, so I'm starting from scratch. Had a call with Legal today about ensuring we're using customer IP (names, logos, etc) responsibly and by the books. Anyone willing to share what their release forms look like for publishing customer content so we don't have to build that from scratch as well? At the moment, we're not going to be adding a publicity clause to the SLA, so more focused on a stand-alone type doc.

Anyone have recommendations for free scheduling software to use when coordinating several busy customer's schedules for a joint presentation? I've looked into Calendly but that requires them to create an account and connect their calendar, would rather use something with a bit less friction if possible... 😅

Hi Poojasri - OES sounds interesting - this is how we approach VoC across 3 spectrums of listening to get both real time and delayed feedback. We will be introducing a customer engagement index in the future

Hi everyone! I'm creating a new resource for the community and would love your input. What are your 3 biggest challenges when it comes to identifying customers to particpate in customer stories?

Thank you so much for all your tips and examples, friends! Appreciate you all.

This is the video release form we modified from Testimonial Hero: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1J1I8FdXoQ-39n62CM3ljuatg_-B8PIg_y77d5r0Mm1o/edit?usp=sharing

And this is what's built into our agreements (I honestly think whether they get a discount or not. We just let them redline anything they don't want so it's built in upfront): In consideration of the pricing discounts provided in this Service Order, Client permits Intellum to identify Client as a customer by using Client's logo within sales/marketing materials and on its website. Further, Client shall upon advance request by Intellum participate in some or all of the following at Intellum's discretion
• Case Study (used for various purposes including being available on Intellum’s website)
• Speaking Engagement
• Video Testimonial (used for various purposes including being available on Intellum’s website)
• Conduct Reference calls as reasonably requested
And any time I'm talking with a customer, I'll say something to this effect: Once the video is filmed/case study is written, we'll send over cuts for your approval. Your team has ultimate veto rights, so if there's anything you don't want us to share, that's OK! You reserve those rights. << I say this to put them at ease about the ask in general

And then I include this: Usually someone from the marketing team (like a VP of Communications or PR) likes to be involved for final review. For the last few stories we've done, I've found edits are typically around very specific wording the company prefers to use, but no edits to the actual story content. << this is to give them confidence that other people have done this and we've done such a good job, there are no edits. Also to put them at ease.

Hi folks! For those who use Influitive/ a platform where they award advocates badges, do you have examples of cool badges you've created? I'm looking for inspo because we're starting to do custom badges

Hi everyone, I would love to hear your recommendations and best practices on building up a referral program as a B2B Saas company.
Would love to hear:
• how people promote the program
• how you track referrals
• what kind of incentives work best
Would love to hear your thoughts 🙂

Here's our agenda from our full day in person industry CAB meeting last week. It is C-level customers in the Construction industry. Happy to provide details. The two breakout sessions are always very popular...especially the Table Topics session where CAB members work on different top-of-mind topics (not necessarily related to our product) that they voted on in advance.

AEC CAB Agenda - sharing.docx
Password: XF46ESUe
https://egnyte.egnyte.com/dl/KoEXF7L9Tw

Hi all! Is anyone using G2 Buyer Intent data with great success? We have it in our package, but aren't seeing value. I suspect that we don't have the right people involved in the org, and a lack of knowledge about how to leverage the data. Would love to hear any success stories. 🙏

I'm late to the game on this but would love to join a call if you haven't met yet! @Emily Gover @Ornella Mariño

@Kira Kletti

Hi! I came across this post on LI and it's the first time I've heard about Digital Services Act. Interested in hearing if anyone has made changes to their community to align with DSA regulations. https://community.sap.com/t5/what-s-new/the-impact-of-the-digital-services-act-dsa-on-sap-community/ba-p/13602832

Some more photos from our customer conference, AppWorld - really thankful we were able to get such a large booth presence

We did a light walk through of our roadmap and discussions around it with a networking event after.

What do you consider a ‘mini’ CAB?

Happy Lunar New Year friends!!! 新年快乐

@Marie Elliott This is really helpful, thanks!

@Hena Varma — Love these program types!

Were either or both paid opps or simply a swap (content for exposure/maybe a discount for advocates on contracts)?

love to return the favor by offering any LinkedIn profile advice, content strategy, and marathon advice.

Hi friends. Happy Thursday. Curious if anyone has any experience running an awards campaign for customers? Getting nominations, voting, etc..Love to see any links to any award sites and even talk to a few of you.

Hey everyone! Our org is considering hosting an in-person CAB session in late April/early May and would love to hear about your past experiences or any advice you can share. Our NA based CAB is spread out all over the country, and we don’t have a user conference that would make sense to align it with.

Disclaimer: We’ve held virtual CAB sessions twice a year for the last three years, so this is new territory for us.

1. Any tips on gauging CAB members interest in attending in person and handling scheduling challenges? Would you recommend sending out a survey to gather preferences and availability?
2. Any recommendations on choosing a neutral location? Thank you in advance!!

congrats on the launch!

Bit of a niche question — has anyone here had experience leveraging corporate/sports sponsorships for customer marketing activities and/or lead/demand gen? We may have one in the works, and this is a new realm for me...

Hi everyone! Is there anyone currently running a reference program and would like to share some insights on it?

money!

ok random but if anyone has any brain power they want to share .... had a fun plan for international women's day with a custom chocolate bar and messaging was going to be punny around an 'Empower-Mint Chocolate Bar' but they don't have the mint choc chip flavor ... any chocolate puns you can think of? chocolate bar flavor is milk chocolate or sea salt caramel - thanks!!!

That was my original plan for 2024. CMO overrode my plan.

We should ALLLLLL LEAVE G2 and peer reviews in the dust. #overrated. #hottake :)

@ Its in concord, ma on a pond. We have a separate entrance but no full kitchen. It’s great for a long weekend and enjoy sharing and meeting our guests. My wife manages it and she is a super host. If I managed it…..

Eh, it's not surprising Some people will think it's great, and others will think it's exploitative-it depends on each person's individual circumstances, I guess. What's your place, @Irwin Hipsman? I've got an AirBnB in Madeira (Portugal, not Ohio). :)

at Salesforce "customer marketing" is purely a support function to PMM, events, and content. responsible for infusing customer content/stories/VoC into marketing efforts, not exactly for nurturing Advocates... that happens on the Trailblazer teams who run the Trailblazer Communities

@Shannon Howard I've had a few friends say that they got an error message when trying to vote. Anyone else have this?

let's gooooo!! good luck @Kevin Lau gonna be great!

Launching our new F5Insider program at our customer conference tomorrowww 🥳

We have a few members that want to have a call on Expansion strategy; I’d like to include some campaigns and maybe results others have had in their expansion efforts. Who’s In? PS: I’d like to plan it out more than open discussion. If you want to join, I’ll reach out to see if you have campaigns or insights to share. 🙂

We have some older case studies on our website & we're trying to decide whether to deprecate or keep them. If a POC that was quoted a few years ago is no longer at the company, do you still keep it on your webpage? Do you update the old case studies or deprecate them? Trying to get some best practices!

Any recommendations for industry awards to nominate customers for (director level, developers, etc...not CISO/C level). Perhaps "project of the year" awards and awards that are focused on success with AI, success with technology? thanks

Hey all, wondering if this happened to anyone else or if it’s just us --

We pay G2, have a shared Slack channel, dedicated CSM, etc. A couple weeks ago our AE left and wasn’t replaced. Now our CSM is suddenly gone and there is no one from G2 in our shared Slack channel and no one has reached out to us. Emailing our CSM got an auto response that they left G2, contacting the higher-up listed in the auto response resulted in a kinda terse response telling us to contact support. We’re baffled. Not sure if it’s just our bad luck or if this is wider spread?

Hi all! It's been a couple of weeks since @Jeff Reekers and I were on @Mary Green (Owner CMAweekly) weekly webinar. Would love to re-offer any support or office hours - happy to converse on the sales/ cs perspective, getting buy-in as I know this is a hot topic! Likewise I can share models and frameworks I've used to motivate teams in tough times!

Hello everyone! I'm working on our customer advocacy plan (never was one) and I wanted to ask which benefits or rewards you offer to your advocates? what do you find motivate customers the most? swag ideas? gift cards? something else? my main goal in launching the program is to increase our customer generated content (success stories)

@Julie Neumeister I’d be interested in whatever you’ve got to share for the release webinars!

Hi all- I've been quiet for a while - heads down on our upcoming customer conference and my teams is in charge of the entire event!

We are hosting an awards ceremony during dinner. Does anyone have a template/event run of show for an in person awards presentation at dinner? Or anytime of day? Or any tips? We are running a bit behind and I need to get this figured out ASAP. Thank you!!

Love all of this, working on this as well - @Madeline Coke if you would be so kind to share yours I would love to see it!

Oh, very interesting, @Mariah Lenahan! I honestly haven’t heard of that set up but makes sense the expansion and lifecycle folks are under one leader. My experience is more on the brand advocacy side of things. In my experience, typically that function is separate from LCM and expansion in my experience (unless the company has merged them). I’ve definitely worked with those teams especially to advise on leveraging customer advocacy content like case studies and quotes for campaigns or nurtures.

@Sarah McCoy I'm curious how other folks have their teams structured since I do see a lot of advocacy related activity in the channels (by that I would mean customer references, etc). We have separate LCM, CM, and CA teams here. We work together closely but my focus for example (managing the Customer Marketing team) is on customer adoption & retention which also includes some degree of customer education. We have a separate team that is focused more on brand advocacy, specific customer programs like running a CAB, etc. And we recently combined the expansion & lifecycle marketing teams under one leader.

I've only worked with small and medium sized organizations regarding customer marketing, but they have been all one team (of one).

@Jane Menyo asked: Are you hosting 🖥️ *virtual Customer Advisory events?*
Yes 👍
No 👎

100% agree. At smaller companies, the hiring team may not have had any previous experience with reference programs so they need someone to come in to confirm best practices, what works, what doesn't work. When you see a long (unrealistic) list on the JD, that's a sign!

are you sending monthly/quarterly release notes? if so, any template you're willing to share. we're starting to do this monthly.

Hey there, do you mean “customer marketing” as in retention or lifecycle marketing? It’s one of my biggest pet peeves that these terms became intertwined over the years…. But in larger companies advocacy and the folks responsible for upselling etc to the existing customer base are typically not on the same team in my experience. I’m not sure what other folks might say.

Hello everyone 🙂 I'm sreaching for the best webinar platform to run pre recored webinars that allows us to launch polls and survey to capture demo requests, currently we are using GOTOwebinar platform and we are using the survey feature to collect demo request but because the survey launch only in the end of the webinar the number of demo request are low, and I'm trying to find better soultion - Any recomendations? Thanks!

Hiring CMA leaders - who wants to be a guest on a call to help others win new positions? @Kevin Lau @Ari Hoffman @Jeff Reekers @Diana Gabroveanu @Daniel Palay @Bree Bunzel @Asha May @Megan Donaldson at Zoom @Shetal Shah These could be group calls, panel calls, presentations, anything you’d like to offer.

If you know someone else who recently hired in our space, or does consistent hiring in our space, tag them in. TY!

Does anyone use Charity Choice to gift charity donations for advocacy activities? Trying to get a better understanding of the cost and user experience.

Greetings! Any leads on cool industry awards to nominate customers for (developers, AI/object storage/multi cloud)? thanks

I've seen several things over the years:
• pins (for their lanyards) that allow community members to recognize one another
• community names on their conference badges
• special seating for community super users
• recognition for those super users at the conference (plaque, certificate)
• special dinner
• having community members speak at the conference
• giving the speakers a badge on the community afterward
• giving all attendees a community badge afterward
• having special participation badges they can earn during the conference for submitting their photos, favorite quotes, etc.

@Emily Gover ☝️ both of these threads might be helpful!

@Emily Gover ☝️

Hello friends 👋 Does your company have a referral program? I am doing some early stage research on how other brands are implementing referral programs to reward their customers and increase their sales pipeline, and would love to take a look at yours if so.

I'm especially interested in how SaaS businesses (B2B or B2C) are structuring their referral programs (e.g. Airtable).

Please share any recs (either your own, or ones that inspire you) in 🧵 — thank you!

Anyone have any really great email templates they use for inviting customers to be a panelist and/or keynote speaker at events?

Yes, would love to @Amy Ng! You can DM so we can coordinate a time. I’m available this week from Tuesday onwards. Meetings from 12pm PT and after works best for me, thank you!

For Design Partners, what’s a good number you aim to have in the program?
• Currently, I’m thinking 10-20 max.
It’s for a new side project and it’s closer to a product than I’ve ever ventured before on my outside of a company and want to ensure my friend and I are staying close to it through a design partner program. Equally, I’ve never owned one before 😅

Curious what other community managers do to promote and engage their communities at your company's annual conference?

@Hayley Handler this thread may be helpful. 👆

Hi folks! Curious if anyone here every planned or executed an AB(C)M referral strategy? Specifically with a focus on selling into groups of related brands. Thanks in advance!

Hi everyone! I wanted to see if anyone had any CRM/Retention/Enagement/Loyalty platforms they could suggest similar to yotpo with SMS and Email capabilities?

@Mary Green (Owner CMAweekly) Essentially issues with community being prioritized over advocacy and now some overlapping projects. @Valeria Gomez That's great! I might try to do create a customer journey and see if that helps

@Asha May - thank you! This panel interview is on Thursday! I am prepping.

Catching up here. @Sharon Rosa-Bohrer - I hope your interview went well.

glad it was helpful! Happy to answer any Q's or provide more advice anytime

Happy to brainstorm more with you.

I used Zapier with Influitive to automate sending testimonials on to the marketing team and the customer’s customer success manager.

Thank you all!

thats a really good cheatsheet!

@Mariah Lenahan Here is an interview guide that has some questions geared towards preferences for an advocacy program, but can also be used for community https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZaFkPDreQgMUXYcOk3gN6cAZY7U_YSD5/edit

Hi does anyone have any ABM campaign examples/planning resources they can share. I’m hopeful going to be running more ABM programs in the near future and would to learn how other orgs are approaching this. Thanks

Mirroring Laura’s comment. Many of our clients ask for sales slides and maybe an additional quote or two.

However, I think the best approach here is the simplest…ask the sales team what they want or need instead of guessing.

If you can’t get a straight answer from the sales lead (and it’s likely you can’t/won’t), the What, Why, How messaging framework could be helpful in guiding you toward the types of information a prospect may want to see during the purchase cycle.

What: is the product/does it do? Or what do your current customers love about your solution/team?

Why: is what you do different, better than other options on the market? Or why did your current customer choose your company over other options?

How: is your company or product uniquely qualified to solve the prospect’s biggest business and job challenges? How do your current customers use your services/products (in detail) to do their jobs better, smarter, faster, etc.?

The result is that you may end up with some audio and video buyer’s guide-style assets, or a how-to guide driven by your existing customer use cases, etc. Complements well the sales slides and other more prototypical sales enablement assets.

Hi all - looking for some ideas for additional resources to arm our sales teams with. What types of content/assets are you creating for them to use in pitches. As an example, you have a new case study or customer spotlight, how are you helping the sales team leverage that asset? If you're willing to share the asset that'd be awesome!
Thanks in advance!

Hi! Hope everyone's week is off to a good start. We're exploring the use of Zapier to automate different actions in our community. For those who are using Zapier, what are some of the zaps you've set up to help deliver a better community/customer experience?

Hi all! We are planning on launching a community this year and I'm conducting some customer interviews to help us guide our roadmap and planning (and validate the impact to customers). I have an initial list of questions, but was curious if anyone else had favorite questions they like to ask customers when doing this kind of research?

Hi everyone. I am preparing for a panel interview on Thursday for a customer marketing role where I know 2 of the people will be demand gen folks. I also know their focus is on top and middle of funnel. I anticipate I will get questions about my experience in generating relevant content that engages customers and moves them down the funnel, segmenting our audience, metrics around demand gen activities of which I know they told me is mostly emails at this point. I also know this role needs to work closely with Customer Success which I have also done in the past. What questions do you think I should be prepared to answer and what examples to have ready to speak to for the demand gen perspective? Also, what questions do you think I should ask? I plan to ask how they see a successful collaboration with this Customer Marketing role? Thanks everyone!

@Maria Braune thank you so much for this. The interview went really well and based on answers I got they are in the infancy stage of lifecycle marketing- it’s more where they want and know they need to go, but from the sound of it they haven’t even mapped the customer journey yet. So I don’t have a problem working on that but I will ask some clarifying questions. These 30 minute interviews are not long enough!

For those of you who have started/have Slack customer communities - any resources to share on how you got started? Specifically curious about boundaries you have in place on who you let in/invite, how you police so it doesn't turn into all "support-type" questions, how you keep engagement up, do customers without Slack in their workplaces see benefit in joining? THANK YOU!!

What an excellent call we had on 2024 Planning. Here are some quick notes:

Takeaways from the call:
• Mary: Predictions; Revenue/Expansion, Revenue, References
• Katlin Hess from G2 Joins us next Friday to discuss Reviews & Onboarding Comms
• Rebecca: Get focused and in your lane. Make it clear what is your responsibility and what is not.
• Daniel: Make sure Sales sees your contributions and support.
• Ajay: Make sure we are sharing our program value.
• Evan: C-suite has a decreasing patience for results from our programs.
• Lauren: Drive monetization with your program now.
• Multiple people: But how do we best show that value?
• Daniel: Capture and share the touchpoints on closed deals to show the real influence and keep sales from taking all the credit.
I’ll have the recording on the website soon.

Next week:
• New guide on influitive alternatives for those looking at other options.
• Wednesday (new biweekly series) Influitive Success Series - get influitive support from the community
• Friday Katlin Hess shares on Review programs for 2024 and Onboarding Communications
RSVP for calls on lu.ma/cmaweekly and if you subscribe to the calendar you will get notifications of new calls as they are scheduled.

TY for attending @Evan Huck @Daniel Palay @Rebecca Grossman @Ajay Nawathe @Amanda Schulte @ @Maria Sturgeon @Jennifer Lyons @Alison Bukowski @Cristina Levenetz @Jenine Laviola @Allison Hughes @Ornella Mariño @April Chu

Hey @Justine Winkler I'm not 100% sure of what the needs are for an Exec Sponsorship program to be able to speak about whether or not BriefingSource would be a great fit and I also wasn't an admin of the tool. If you have the time, maybe check them out? https://briefingsource.com/solutions#executive-meetings

We are live https://us06web.zoom.us/j/4029861639

Thank you and yes, please @Sarah McCoy

We’ll be discussing 2024 Planning again today at 2PM EST

Could you share a little bit more about what that looked like @Sarah McCoy

I haven’t run an Exec Sponsorship program, but I have used BriefingSource alongside the EBC and Comms teams. I wonder if it’d be worth checking out.

Sorry All, I have been removing some posts that are more promotional to the #open-share channel (everyone in general is also in open-share). The general chat only allows promotional posts from CMAweekly or our sponsors and I like to try to keep it clean. TY, you are all awesome, kick a** CMAs 😄

Incentivized learning helps a lot. We have an onboarding channel in our customer advocacy hub where customers can earn badges and certification for completing training--and sometimes we send a surprise and delight gift as a congratulations, as well!

Do you use a product analytics tool, like Heap or Amplitude?

Hey all! Has anyone run successful feature adoption programs for customers? We do the usual stuff - running feature led webinars, 1 page guides and helping the CSM team with in-person product training. However, we need to get better with tracking all efforts to see the effect of the above. Any thoughts on tracking + anything else that you'd do to push feature adoption?

Does anyone have experience running an executive sponsor program? If so, what type of tooling have y'all been using to make it more programmatic and easier for executives to participate? Thank you!

<!everyone> we are on with Champion - come check out the platform and team!

Thanks @ - this is helpful!

I had a temporary one last night but it looks like it's fixed now.

Got feedback back from bp with only 2 more small edits they want done. We are SO FREAKING CLOSE to getting this amazing case study published, I can't wait. (And it's only 1 month late from original timeline). 🤞 Here's hoping it crosses the finish line this week.

@Sharon Rosa-Bohrer - first - GOOD LUCK!!
I would ask questions around how they are set currently for segmentation and personalization. This might help to determine if there are any gaps that you might face when it comes to sending the right lifecycle messages to the right person.
I would also ask what their expectations are - this will help you understand what they are expecting from this program.
I would also ask who the biggest champions are within the organization when it comes to this role. Meaning - will you have support from the Client Success team?

Hi all! Hope everyone is having a great start to the year. We’re preparing for an integrated campaign with our demand gen team, and the topic of gated content has surfaced. I’d love to hear how others approach gated content for the customer audience.

A few initial questions come to mind:
• Do you have any standard rules in place for when you would or would not gate content for a customer?
• If you’re not using a form, how are you measuring the effectiveness of content?
◦ Our DG team relies heavily on downloads/engagement as a success metric for content. When we promote content without a form, we run into the appearance of “not contributing” to success metrics for the content piece.
Recognize this could be a larger conversation about content strategy, but interested to hear how others approach this topic!

Hi everyone, I am sure this question has been asked before but I would love to hear what this community thinks are the best customer marketing/customer advocacy conferences to go to this year?

This is a great question, @Sharon Rosa-Bohrer ty for sharing with us. I’m posting in general so that more of our members see it. 🙂

Hey all - Starting next wednesday at 12PM EST I’ll be hosting a bi-weekly Influitive Community Support call with @Diana Gabroveanu from Advocacy Maven.
The first call is with @Dean Shaw and we will discuss Proving Program Value.

Be sure to bring your questions for anything Influitive Platform specific - we’ll cover as many as we can.
P.S. Yes I do have experience using Influitive 😄

RSVP here: lu.ma/influitive

Also, there’s a new issue of the newsletter - https://cmaweekly.beehiiv.com/p/influitive-support-meet-champion

There is now an #influitive channel as well, for questions and thoughts between calls.

^^^ definitely agree here. Review count only shows one piece of the puzzle. I think there's a ways to go in terms of reporting/insights from our customers on which sites they look at etc. But one of the big things we're focusing on for this year is implementing Birdeye to take the manual reporting off our plates and allow us to run campaigns/report on which campaigns are successful etc. I think that will then change how we report out to our stakeholders since we will have easily accessible data that we don't have to pull ourselves

I ask because $559 seems high for a room block rate.

Out of curiosity, which city is your conference hotel located at in?

I’m sorry <!everyone> I have to reschedule today’s call 😞

@Mary Green (Owner CMAweekly) i never got back to you!

Um, it's a manual job for us all right now. 3 or 4 of us have to manage the different brands/sites. As you can see, some of the brands have more than others. For our leadership, they can quickly see how things are progressing. We update it weekly, which I think is too often. (reviews don't always come that quickly). AND, if you have a specific campaign running, like we did in November and december, your numbers can get deceptive.

For example, we had something like 50+ reviews come in over 2 weeks time. So, our delta number was like +47 and +16...but then the cut-off date for a promotion hit and the reviews slowed down, so the delta became -37 or something.

that doesn't tell a good story. We just got 50+ reviews! And then we got 4. Everything is ok!

For planning, @Emily Smith is our powerhouse strategist for this. I steal her ideas honestly. She comes up with monthly/quarterly ideas, where to focus, which sites to focus on, etc. in addition to our "always on" efforts.

@Crystal Anderson could you share this CAB doc w me also? Christine08chen@gmail.com|Christine08chen@gmail.com
Thank you!!

(Currently use and admin an influitive community and my org has been a customer for many yrs for background)

Thoughts?

Looking to just prepare ourselves as we had already been assessing zendesk and have purchased for a support perspective - but want to understand if there's anything else in the market that actually compares to influitives advocacy hub capabilities.

Speaking of the above ^^

What are the serious alternatives to Influitive from a functionality perspective?

@Margo Schneider We did ours slightly different, and covered the amount of nights instead of a tiered cost. So we said book your room, and then we will pick up 1 to 3 nights of your stay depending on who it was.
I will say I am avoiding it this year, it was messy. Remember to account for the tax and fees and be clear on who has to cover those per night.

Forrester’s take on the Influitive acquisition by Principal Analyst, Amy Bills.
"Late December’s news that Jigsaw Interactive would acquire advocate marketing platform Influitive came as a shock, but not a surprise. Even Influitive’s most loyal supporters recognized its weak spots , but public communication from either company since the announcement has been lacking. Jigsaw owner ESW Capital must invest in the offering after the planned initial cost-cutting. Otherwise, competitors — which have already begun capitalizing on the disruption — will seize the moment. This increased focus will drive development across the market, but we don’t recommend changing solutions until the disruption subsides".

I saw a great one on tiktok the other day. Will find it after I do bedtime with the littles

Not CM/Advocacy related BUT does anyone have a 1:1 meeting template that they love? I was looking through free ones online before I build one but I thought I'd see what you all are using if you don't have a software solution.

Events/Hosting a conference Question:
Does anyone have experience with wanting to cover a portion of the hotel cost for customers attending your conference or creating different tiers of hotel room rates. We have been given a room block rate link from the hotel of $559 and want to offer:
• A $199 rate to customers
• A $299 rate to Prospects
• A $399 rate to Consultants that are attending.

The hotel wont give us the 3 lower rate links so trying to get creative to give all attendees the best booking experience and how to have clear communication if all attendees have to book at the $559 rate and then the hotel will bill to us the portion we are covering on the backend .... a mess right?! 🙂

Hi everyone! Does anyone have a good template for planning out their CMA initiatives at a high level by quarter or by year?

Go for it!

@ can I add that to the resources on the website (all free to access) in a doc?

Here's a short one I wrote as a response to an NPS detractor:

Subject: Oof–that hit right in the feels. How can we help?

Hi [customer name],

Thanks so much for completing our quick survey–your feedback on how we’re doing is critical to our improvement. From the looks of things, there are some issues where we fell short of expectations.

We really appreciate your candid feedback! It’s how we learn and get better. I would greatly appreciate the opportunity to see how we can make things right. Can you let me know specifically what we can work on with this one question survey so that the appropriate person can get in touch?

Thanks in advance!

Best,
[name]

Thanks, @Mary Green (Owner CMAweekly)

Shout out to @Mary Green (Owner CMAweekly) and @Taylor Bogar for setting up and leading the discussion today! And thanks to everyone else who shared ideas and inspiration! Customer Marketing is going to shine in 2024 and today added some extra gas in my tank to on my quest to land my next CMM role! Rock on Advocates, rock on!

Group Call: 2024 Planning
2:30 PM EST TODAY
No presentation, this is a group discussion on how we are planning for 2024.
Join us https://lu.ma/on4fc7q2

Hey team!

Customer Conference planning is probably upon most of us at this time. Was wondering if anyone had any super unique swag/gifts that they've given away in the past that were a hit?

1

Hi @ - I'd love to see as well. Thanks

I’m awful at reading and I have both Blinkist and Headway to make it short and easy

Wow that is a lot of great books, ty @Mariah Lenahan

Would you mind sharing with me too @ ?

@Becca Snee did you find what you needed?

@Michael Sciano I like how you made the conscious decision to focus on one site at first. We often give ourselves far too much to do, having that focus is a much better idea.

That’s a great write up @Axel Lavergne - if you’d be open to it I can reshare that in the newsletter this week.

Aww miss you too @!! ❤️ We should catch up for a coffee chat if you're free!

What habits or goals are you working on this year (doesn’t have to be for work)? @Shannon Howard (a resident favorite here) shared with me that she focuses on habits to build, not necessarily goals. What a great idea. Can you share some habits you’ll work on in 2024?

Here are mine:
• More 1 on 1 conversations with all of you: November and December got away from me, so I need to focus on having more conversations and making connections between all of you and the resources we have.
• Weekly Community Column: I want to find 1 person every week to write a short column on a CMA topic for the community.
• Providing more value in my content: Again, I feel like I got off track.
Personally I have a few as well:
• Spend more time as a family - with 2 older teens, it can be hard to pull us all together and make quality family time work, but I’m up to the challenge (any other parents of teens want to chat sometime?).
• Develop better Sleep and Morning routines - I’m not the best at going to sleep at night and that makes mornings really tough. Right now I’m working on wearing my blue light glasses in the evening and not eating after 8PM. For the morning, it’s Coffee and watching a helpful video, then work. I keep thinking about Huberman’s morning routine, I’d never do the cold wash but the rest sounds enticing.
How about you?

Hi @Yoselyn Rea, we offered gift cards, swag such as mugs, t-shirts, hoodies, water bottles. etc. and donations to charities as incentives for rewards. Before Covid we also offered ice cream and pizza parties as incentives. I was an Influitive user for a few companies I worked for. Amy Ng, above is also an excellent resource to talk to as well. Miss you @Amy Ng! ❤️

Hey Yoselyn! I work at Influitive and I know a lot of our clients offer gift card rewards with exceptions for public sector customers and some have a spending cap per member based on corporate gifting policies. (I believe anything over USD $600 in a calendar year cumulatively needs to be reported on your taxes.)

There are lots of opportunities for non-monetary rewards as well though so happy to chat through this further if you'd like!

update, we’re on the financial sector call now if you want to join https://influitive.zoom.us/j/95723168508

Not customer marketing-related, but anyone have a great field marketing manager they've worked with who might be open to a short contract March/April?

Sure thing @Maria Colusi. Feel free to reach out and we can set up some time to chat

My question feels basic but I would like to execute it well. When scheduling a virtual CAB meeting with ~15 members from various companies have people seen success w a date/time voting or calendar tool or just emailing 2-3 dates/time and gathering responses?

Hey All! I've joined a new company (iPaaS/CIO focused) and am looking for ideas for swag items to include in an advocate welcome box. Anything your advocates rave about?

<!everyone> zoom for our Open Discussion is opening now 🙂 HOP in!! https://us06web.zoom.us/j/4029861639

Curious about the Influitive call - did anyone hear “business as usual?” were concerns addressed? TY 🙂

Could be interesting for you to explore a hotel drop too! That way if you decide to do gifts, people aren't lugging them around the venue and can start enjoying the gift upon arrival

Hi All! I am managing an advocacy program that offers rewards for activities, has a point structure, etc. The program has been around for a long time (going on 20 years) and the points have never expired...until now. Leadership wants to overhaul the point structure and institute a point expiration (among other changes) going forward. Has anyone conquered this before? All the programs i've ever run always had an point expiration dates. So I'm curious how this was managed on the back end and ultimately communicated to customers, if anyone has any experience here!

Happy to chime in! A few learnings from running Influitive's BAMMIE awards:
• Plan for a soft and hard deadline for applications – give yourself the flexibility early as you'll often have many applicants ask for a little extra time.
• Include word count limits – not all applications will be created equally so asking for brevity ensures a more level playing field.
• Find a way to bring in a surprise and delight element – this could be getting congrats videos from your winners' executive team, teammates or even their friends/family. It adds so much more to their winning moment
• Create a content piece out of your winning entries – this is a great asset that not only highlights your customer as an industry thought-leader, but allows other customers/future customers to learn from their success

Of course, my pleasure! I'd love to connect with you @Maria Colusi

Thanks @Lauren McCutcheon ❤️ !!! @Maria Colusi I'd love to connect with you! We host three rounds of Awards each year, all around product usage.

This is all SO amazing! Thank you for the examples @Ornella Mariño these are great. I can connect with you privately and I'd love to share specifics on what we have planned and get your insights. @Srishty Khullar

Love these @Rebecca Grossman! We typically will have all of those categories, along with a booth for our user community for our customers and prospects to learn more about that and join on the spot. We had branded swag with the community name on it (keeping the size of the item top of mind) — packing cubes, tote bags to carry around their other swag from the event/water bottles/notebooks, pencil pouch, and then a charger organizer! So the swag we gave out here was more like a “perk”, people could choose to join the community and not take swag, or join and take something home

Tagging in our Award EXPERT here @Cassie Sneed 🏆 to share any of her thoughts and best practices with the different awards and strategies we use!

Hi @Maria Colusi! Recently I joined a Webinar about Customer Awards. I saved two examples that i loved! I hope this help to inspire you.
2024 Adobe Experience Maker Award | Discover the movers and shakers of 2023.

Golden Grot Awards | Grafana Lab

Also, I think the following question could help you to design the awards:
1. What do you want to highlight? For example, those customers whose actions are aligned with your company´s values? Or the ones that bring more profitability?
2. Who will choose the winners? I like the idea of a transparent votation. Sharing their success stories so the rest of the customers can vote.

@Amy Ng LOVE that idea! It gives people a choice. The coop where I used to live did this when you brought reusable bags to the store. They gave you wooden tokens worth 5 cents apiece (1 for each reusable bag) and you could "vote" between 5 different charities. They'd then count up the tokens and gift to the charities.

@Rebecca Grossman My 2 cents (not saying I'm right): For the advocacy activities and speakers, a gift might be more appropriate. For attendees and award winners, swag might be more appropriate. Here's why I'm saying that: Attendees and award winners are going to take a photo, post it, and tag your company. That has marketing value. But for your speakers, CAB, and testimonial, those people have taken time to provide a service for your company. They may also take a photo and post, but what they've done has gone beyond generic swag gift criteria.

hi everyone. love this community. so many lessons / best practices shared. Hope everyone is having a great start of the new year!

Hi all - Happy New Year! I was wondering if anyone has experience with Customer Awards? If yes, I would love to hear about any best practices or results you have seen 🙂 Thanks thanks

Thank you!

Here’s the preso - unfortunately they wont let me share the recording externally but you can get the jist from the slides- if you have questions LMK

@Kevin Lau hi! do you have a recording of this? i am currently working on building a community page

Hi all - is anyone leveraging any paid services with TrustRadius? I would like to know what the spend looks like if you're willing to share. Currently, we are working with G2, and I see that staying the same, I am just checking out additional options. Please let me know your thoughts on review sites as well.
Thanks in advance!

Hey @Shannon Howard I wrote down what we usually recommend to our clients in this post. Here's the TL;DR

1. If you rely on search ads extensively, make sure you get at least 100 reviews per geo on one google-certified platform. Just the one. The usual suspect is Trustpilot, but there are plenty. It'll get you stars on Google, and on avg a 20% bump in CTRs. This is where the big ROI is short term.
2. Pick 2 - 3 platforms. Not more.
3. Capterra, Getapp, and Software advice use the exact same reviews (some people aren't aware) and you can pay to play. It's a PPC model and your position is directly defined by your bid. They claim reviews help with a "quality score" of some sort, but really it doesn't account for much. If more than 3 people are bidding on your main category, there's no point playing the organic game (getting reviews), it's a lot cheaper and faster to pay to play.
4. If integrations are a big deal to your business, be sure to get every single integration user to review you there. For example if you have a Salesforce integration that's driving real ROI, make sure you don't ask Salesforce users for a G2 review. Ask for an AppExchange review instead. Also massive ROI there. These platforms are usually tons less competitive, and they're where the money is.
5. For lack of anything better, google your brand + reviews and pick the top 3 websites. Send all the reviews you can to the platform with the highest ranking potential (lowest # of reviews you need to get top 3 and lowest review velocity) and get 10 - 20 5-stars per quarter on the others just to get the ball rolling and maintain fresh 5-stars. Change your focus to the next best once you hit top 3, maintaining the avg review velocity of the top 5. Meaning if the top 5 gets 45 reviews / quarter on average, you'll need 45 reviews / quarter on that platform. Not 50. Not 100. Not 15. Just 45.
6. Do not settle for the quarterly G2 & Gartner campaigns that drive 15-20% collection rates. Happy customers are hard enough to come by that you shouldn't settle for anything under 35% collection rate. Also, make sure you know who's reviewing you. Do not get locked into a single platform. They're your customers, and they're reviewing you. You should own the relationship.
7. Always-on is tons more effective as blast campaigns. Review recency is grossly over-rated on the main software review platforms because they're in all-out war for SEO positions and need fresh content. This means a 3 months old review is worth a lot less than a 1 week old review. Getting 2 reviews / week gets you ranking higher than getting 9 / month.
8. An efficient way to increase collection rates is to escalate requests: Ask for a review on one platform. Once they've submitted it, ask them if they'd be willing to repeat the exercise on another platform. Make sure they don't copy paste. They usually can't because the fields aren't the same anyway, but a good way to ensure they don't is to know they reviewed you before the review is made public. Have them let you know or fill in a 2 question form or something after they submitted their review.
9. Use rewards. Either reward the customer directly, or mention explicitly that you're rewarding the staff asking for a review
10. Use a personal touch. The most effective way to collect reviews, by very very far, is to ask for one right after a positive human interaction. Support ticket solved quickly is the most widely used, but there are plenty of times when humans speak to customers. This is when you need to ask for a review. Also, do not write "we" when asking for a review. "I" & "You" only.

@Ari Hoffman add me pls!

Hey Shannon - we utilize a range of sites across our 3 brands at ServiceTitan. We (the we being @Emily Smith, me, and a few others) really try to focus on where our customers are participating. For example, ServiceTitan has to focus on G2, Trustpilot, Google, and Capterra. FieldRoutes manages 5 or 6. And, at Aspire, I manage 1 - Capterra.

The Aspire team made an intentional decision to focus on Gartner/Capterra since all of our reviews were there. We had ZERO on G2 and other platforms two years ago. So, instead of spreading ourselves across a bunch, we decided to invest in capterra - for SEO, for reviews and content, etc. Our customers seem to go to Capterra/Get Software for whatever reason, but now it has really worked.

If someone googles for Aspire Software reviews, they are going to end up where we want them because we don't have profiles on any of the other sites.

Separately, yes, we worked with the Gartner team to consolidate two previous software products (Go iLawn and Land1) into a newly launched product a year ago (PropertyIntel). The Gartner team was really helpful to use and associate the reviews of the other two products into the new product and profile. We just had to show screenshots and marketing material proving the new product was replacing these two with similar functionality.

@Shannon Howard, more than happy to provide insight on what we do. We currently utilize G2, Capterra and TrustRadius to drive reviews and have moved to the leader board on all three over the last year.

@Ari Hoffman i can make either time

Let me know if you can join either time, we will make that work

Gah. Sorry for all the questions, fam! I am clearly taking on some new programs this year. 😅

We're having a local customer join us at our RKO. Anyone have resources/suggestions of how to structure their session? Planning on it being a "fireside chat"-type deal. This customer recently signed a HUGE expansion deal, so excited to celebrate that, share their thought leadership, and also get people hype about this incredible customer advocate.

NP, I think it’d be a different group anyhow. Whatever works for you all. Good luck on the calls Friday.

This is one of my areas of expertise, happy to share best practices and templates that help crack through difficult personalities and sensitive industries. I'm free at that time!

Who can do Friday at 3pm ET (12pm PT)?

oh, I can do later if that’s better @Mary Green (Owner CMAweekly). We just have our customer webinar for the Influitive transition right before that

Hi <!everyone> Happy New Year - Happy News…letter 😁 😆
New edition (sent from beehiiv platform) is out today.
Influitive Acquisition - Job Seeker Resources - 2024 Predictions on SaaS & CMA
https://cmaweekly.beehiiv.com/p/influtives-acquisition-job-resources-2024-predictions

Works for me also!

Thanks for cross-posting!

But it looks like it works for you all, Have fun.

DUDE - Friday at 2 is our weekly call 😛

me too!

I’m in!

Happy to discuss!

Can you invite Cache @Emily Amos as I don't see him on here?

Happy New Year, everyone! I am the first person in a customer advocacy/community management role at my company. I created and launched our advocacy program, among other initiatives. For a while, I’ve been wanting to create a document that goes into the ins and outs of managing the program, and all the random tasks I do associated with it, so if I’m ever able to build my team or just need to share the processes with someone, it’s there. Has anyone done something similar or had someone give them something similar in their role? Maybe something you were handed down? What was most helpful for you?

I'd love to listen in as well @Ari Hoffman. Cache Walker might be good to have on the call. He's in cybersecurity.

Happy new year all! Huge favor to ask - can anyone share a screenshot of how they've set up their roll up field in hubspot or sfdc for customer marketing activities? In other words, how are you all setting up how you capture reviews, references, referrals, case studies, Speaker engagements, UGC, etc?

Absolutely, @Jenna Feldman

@Ari Hoffman not sure I'll have a ton of best practices to share but would love to join this group to listen in if that's ok!

Hey all. I’m looking to upgrade my Customer Marketing dashboard, with less of an emphasis on Influenced Revenue, but looking to layer in some additional items and options. What are you folks out there doing? Thanks for letting me know and happy new year!! 🎆

Hope everyone had the most amazing holiday and were able to enjoy some time with friends/ family and lots of time to relax!
Question for you all as I look to increase exposure into our advocacy program internally - what tools are you all using to ensure that your program is fully transparent and folks are able to see what you are working on? We are working on a global calendar and creating a committee of Product/ Marketing/ CS/ Events folks that will play “gatekeeper” of their own teams. I am hoping that this will help to increase transparency but wanted to see what else everyone is doing!

Hey everyone! Happy new year! How many of you have goals for totals of G2 reviews you need to reach each month? And what are your feelings about goals for this?

@Shannon Howard honestly a lot of different times! Like if a customer approached us about wanting to do something, or if we knew they were a target for a story and we wanted to approach them. I also feel like the AMs/CSMs used it often in 1:1 conversations with customers.

Let's Talk Community & LMS Integration
Happy new year! As we kick off 2024, I'm curious about how you're weaving communities and LMS platforms together to create engaging experiences for your customers. If you're running both, I'd love to hear about your integration strategy.
• Do you guide customers to the community first for connection and then the LMS for deeper product learning?
• Do your searches fetch both posts and training content?
• Do you use single sign on (SSO) to get from one to the other?
My previous org used an LMS for community and learning. My new org uses SFDC Sites for community and Docebo for learning, so I'm trying to figure out the best way to make it a seamless experience for customers. TY!

For those who have a "menu" of advocacy activities:
• Do you include criteria for recommending a customer?
• Do you include the incentive?

@Katlin Hess When/how was that shared with customers? Interested in doing something similar.

New report on Communities from my colleague at Forrester, Amy Bills.

If your company is a Forrester client, the seat holder can share it with you. Here are the highlights.

Forrester’s Marketing Survey, 2023, 21% of B2B marketing decision-makers indicated that their organization’s CMO dashboard includes metrics for community involvement — up from 13% in 2021. With greater attention comes greater opportunity and responsibility. Too often, community teams rely on measurements such as volume of members to prove how the community contributes to their business. But online community platforms have evolved substantially from siloed discussions and self-serve support resources to hubs for digital interaction, heightening the potential to show community impact in areas such retention, growth, and reputation. Advanced community managers point to the impact of their communities on:

• Account engagement
• Expansion opportunities. One-quarter of surveyed demand and ABM decision-makers indicated that they use community access as a demand marketing tactic, placing the lure of community engagement above static assets such as white papers and price quotes.
• Loyalty that correlates with renewals
• Efficiency through scale

FWIW, I’d be firm about this and collect feedback/info/data and challenge folks to ideate on this vs be too much of sales/marketing channel and break the trust of members.

Totally agree with both sentiments. I like the community to be a safe space and trying to balance the aggressive cross/upsell goals. Happy Holidays!

To me, that’s too sales-y/marketing-y, and I’d encourage y’all to explore options for it. Something that’ll drive actual value for customers and not lead to potential negative feelings about the company/product(s).

It's more the soft approach through education, where there's an overview/teaser of the other feature/product and “lmk if you'd like to speak with an AM” as a CTA. Community needs to be a safe space for customers. They’ll be less likely to engage and give honest feedback if they feel like anything they say will result in a sales pitch.

@ I like your strategy about driving adoption on things they own, vs trying to promote new purchases. You all must have good data ;)

@Joel Primack - Thanks! Regarding the second bullet, they want to add data sheets and/or other product info to drive awareness of available products that the customer can purchase, in addition to what they already own.

I haven’t ran into this yet, but would love to be included in the discussion, thanks.

Yes I'm facing this issue, most of our customers are from the finanical sectoer and it's very hard for us to get case studis from them

The reindeer pancakes are the cutest!! LOVE IT

Does anyone deal with highly regulated customers within the financial sector that have both SEC regulations and compliance protocol that make it very hard to get them to want to share their stories? Not just those who can't, but personality traits that make them personally less motivated to engage in advocacy?

If so, would love to get a group together to discuss programs that have worked to get costumers interested.

Let me know who you are

Has anyone hosted a "virtual launch party" before? I threw out the idea to our VP of CS to celebrate customers who are launching their platform, to host a little get-together virtually to celebrate.

My questions:
1. What did the agenda/flow look like?
2. Anything you learned from doing this? Anything you'd do differently or suggest?
3. Did you send them anything? Any favorite gifts? (Was thinking DoorDash gift card, coffee, something like that).

Hello everyone, happy holidays! 🎉 As we ease into the new year, let's chat about Customer Community.
For those overseeing the community, could you share how, or if, you incorporate cross-selling or upselling strategies? With the growing emphasis on retention and renewal, this has become a significant consideration. In the past, many communities steered clear of any cross-selling or upselling. Have your perspectives on this evolved? It could be something as straightforward as making product documentation accessible for exploration, or perhaps it's not on the table at all. Excited to hear your thoughts! 😊

Merry Christmas everyone!!

Thank you all - I think I'm going to have everyone wear their own cloths and have lanyards make it obvious who are employees so every is comfortable and feels good about how they look without being forced to wear something that does not feel or fit well.

The fit and the fabric. Feel like tshirts tend to fit better and feel more comfortable.

Hi - for those who have a CAB - do you have a deck for sales/csms to explain what the cab is, why they should care, how they can leverage it, etc that you could share? I have the basic overview slides done, but I need to train sales/csms to think about the cab as something that benefits them, not something that they are doing "for marketing". Thank you!

Thank you all! @Shannon Howard why do you not like polos?

We do a branded staff t-shirt in a different color each day of the conference (in our company colors: blue on day 1, black on day 2, etc.) with whatever pants they want (usually jeans). We leave up to staff to decide if they want to wear a jacket/blazer/hoodie/sweater. We also have a lanyard that is different for staff to make them easier to identify. Our conference is a wear whatever is comfortable environment so we try to make it comfortable for our team too.

A friend forwarded this to me about the acquisition of Influitive by Jigsaw today. Anyone familiar with Jigsaw for customer success? How does it compare to Gainsight and others globally?

https://jigsawinteractive.com/jigsaw-interactive-acquires-influtive/?utm_campaign=Jigsaw-Influitive&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=287469356&utm_content=287469356&utm_source=hs_email

Oh how fun!

@Megan Donaldson at Zoom not sure if this is exactly what you're looking for, but this was the "advocacy menu" I used at my last company!

Super fun tool I found: https://emojidb.org/ once you type in a topic/search you can hold down a click on each emoji to make a string of emojis to paste.
✝️🎄⛪🎅🎁🎉
☃︎🎅🎄❄️⛄🎁🦌
❅❆❄️🎁🎄🎅⛄🦌🌟❆❅
°❆⋆.ೃ࿔🦌*:･❄️

Hi friends, this holiday season I'm hoping for the gift of a slide, or slides I can repurpose.

I need something to help communicate:
1. when in the customer journey it's appropriate to ask a customer for a case study / success story. Like 1. Contract signed. 2. Product Implemented. 3. Success. 4. Then consider case study.
2. Communicate that a case study is not the only medium for customer content. There are name/logo approvals, quotes, new wins mentioned in earnings, speaking engagements (webinars, thought leadership, owned and 3rd party events), leaving reviews, interviews with analysts or media, etc.
Anyone willing to share?

so fun!

This is a nice post, thanks for sharing here 🙂 Great work!

Gartner Peer Insights just rolled out AI-generated company profile descriptions. Ours was.... bad haha. So heads up to go in and update/ completely replace what they've come up with!

I’m very keen to share it with recruiters LOL
Had a recruiter yesterday tell me that their target salary for a mid-level customer marketer is $81-92 based on their research. I sent them the 2022 report from CMA. I’m curious to see if the numbers have dropped significantly for 2023.

Was midway interviewing with one company and they chopped $30K off their salary range for the role.

Very soon

Does anyone know when the Customer Marketing Alliance’s salary survey for 2023 will be published?

Posted a new role under #jobs for anyone looking or if you have referrals.

Happy Holidays @Kristine Kukich! - BUT, who’s still working this week?

Happy holidays everyone!

Hi everyone, does anyone have a nice section (on your website) with CAB members? I googled a bit, there are pros and cons, I don´t wanna overcomplicate, ideally only headshots, name, job title and company (logo).

Interesting -

But, I also feel that this data is self selection - I see this as correlation, not causation - show me people who look identical to those who engage in community, other than the engagement, and compare those people to these ones in terms of GRR and Expansion.

At past companies we had a list and then would print them and have a signing party and however many people could come to the office could sign them and then send it out. We used a vendor that was used for business cards and was done the beginning or first week of December to make sure it would arrive before Christmas. It’s a little late now so not sure it will get there in time depending on where the customers are. Good luck

We’re on to talk about expansion https://us06web.zoom.us/j/4029861639

@Alexie Glover sounds like you're trying to forge a partnership with your partnership team... 😅
Try putting it into WIIFM terms-- what's in it for them to do these things that will help you? How does it help them? You can also just straight out ask them how you can help them achieve their goals. If you're not reporting up to the same exec, then you can also try talking to your exec about how your two teams can align on some KPIs/ goals so you can all row together. That's not just good for you, it's good for the company!

Happy, happy!

ForeverGrot

Hi! I'm trying to figure out the easiest way to get our holiday cards printed for our different team members to write in and send to customers? They live in a different cities around the US - was brainstorming getting them printed at each of their local staples but was wondering if anyone has found a good solution for this?

@Kevin Lau hook us up 😄

Thank you everyone for the feedback and great ideas! I really appreciate your replies.

Monday works for me as well.

I could do Monday - @Jeanne Talbot @Liz Richardson @Ciana Abdollahian @Brooke Wilson @Melissa DiBernardo

Monday at 12 is good for me!

I'm booked until 12:15, and then again from 2-3 on Tuesday. As of now, I could do 12 EST on any other day next week

I'm booked 12-1245 and 3-4 but free rest of the day tuesday

Hi @Kristen Howard I would normally start with the baseline of how many join the community and revisit at launch, expect that to drop after the first month, then at 5-10% each month of active members.

Would next Tuesday work at 12PM EST?

Send away!

Hello!
Looking for feedback into all of the review platforms.
We've saturated G2 and getting great results, but looking into which review site to build out next. Would you all go with Capterra or Trustpilot? Would love your insights. Thank you!

I'd love to listen!

anyone have g2 review request email copy ideas? looking to do something different and tired of my same ol same ol -- thanks!!

Hey there! We are relaunching our community with the goal of getting more engagement (very little engagement today). What would a good goal be for recurring community users with a 4,000 customer base?

Hey @Rebecca Grossman - Just had our annual conference in early November. We had a few specific upsells to position. We did a variety of things:
• incorporated the top 2 in the main stage opening
• incorporated both in the product roadmap session
• each upsell had its own specific "deep dive" breakout session (scanned name badges of those who came)
• had a specific kiosk in the exhibit hall dedicated to upsells - it was 2-sided with an additional demo desk next to it (3 screens total for demos and looping videos)
• Announced a sales promotion via mobile app (push notification) available at the kiosk - prior to the event, we used this teaser to promote app downloads (stay up to date, networking opportunities, and, oh yeah, deals to save money on products).
• There was a huge video display screen in the lobby area of our event space and part of the looping video highlighted 2 upsell products and had QR codes to landing page with the sales promotion.
Hope that gives you a few ideas!

Happy happy Hanukkah!

We are going to survey our customers to find out how customers would like to participate in our community (user groups, online communities, events, etc.) Any suggestions of questions we should be asking them?

I know i'm late to the party, but well done @Mary Green (Owner CMAweekly)!

@Mary Green (Owner CMAweekly) Congrats!!

We've landed our biggest customer (ever) and now we need to create a whole marketing-driven onboarding program. I've, candidly, never done this type of work before and will take any and all guidance from this circle of brilliant and experienced minds. Playbooks, examples, templates, advice, partners who do this well, etc. Thank you friends!

THANK YOU, MARY!

DANG BEAUTIFUL! @Mary Green (Owner CMAweekly)

you are awesome

I was traveling so missed seeing this yesterday. What awesome news to come back to today! Congrats @Mary Green (Owner CMAweekly)!

Fantastic work @Mary Green (Owner CMAweekly)!
Thank you for all that you do. 👏 👏 👏

I feel like this was asked a while ago but anyone have a post-CAB survey they're willing to share? trying to get inspired and my brain is not there lol

Does anyone have a description of the differentiators between Capterra, GetApp and SoftwareAdvice? Looking for differentiation in buyer persona as well as use cases. Thanks!!

@Kevin Swecker bit of a convo about Tremendous here

Hi all - what external programs do you use to run referral programs? Researching a few now, but really looking to implement a referral program for our self-service portion of the business. Any experience folks have had with software like Tremendous, Referral Rock, Nicejob, Referral Factory, or InviteReferrals?

quick win that we're hosting our CAB today (virtually) and 50% of our members are women! the coolest to see so many women on my screen ❤️

We're planning to offer a spiff for sales and other groups that work directly with customers, to incentivize them to refer customers for case studies. Has anyone done this successfully? What were the keys to setting up the program properly?

There was another post in the CMA community from a member who this also happened to last week. She was posting to warn others to check their renewals ... but the post has been deleted.

Does anyone have any recommendations for vendors who you have used to create your customer awards with? I am looking to design something slightly custom that I can start a project now, then in March provide names and have them shipped out by early Apri.

My annual PMA membership renewed when I was on vacation. They send one reminder email and then 3 days later charge you. My former company paid for the membership but I was laid off from that role back in March and I have no need for the PMA any more. PMA refuses to refund me (sent a 7 paragraph email about why). Instead of being out $700 for nothing, I'd like to see if anyone here wants it. It's the executive level and you can access CMA content from there, I believe. I'm not even positive they'll let me transfer it but if someone wants it I can certainly try.

It’s so complex 🫠 I’ve been working with “the actions we know successful customers take” as @Katlin Hess mentioned … but it requires a deep partnership with partner marketing/CSM org which I haven’t found to be particularly easy (really depends on company culture). I’m basically asking a different team to report “milestones” that are adding to their to-do list. With what you’ve shared above, I’d probably begin my testing with email campaigns tied to customer age vs maturity (knowing that most customers take X days/months to reach X stage), review engagement and then actually touch base with a number of customers/CSMs who have received the emails and engaged to check your work. Starting small and then building when you have a foundation to rely on. Not perfect … but a starting point

I wish we had something even close to this 😭 that's super cool though!

@Ciana Abdollahian it's a crazy algorithm that our product team built and tracks and then pushes into Salesforce. But basically it's a 0-5 score comprised of "have they taken the actions we know successful customers take" and "how many monthly active users do they have at their account" (and there are different thresholds for each segment)

These are awesome tips.

Agree with Jan and Katlin, there's an opportunity for a nurture highlighting benefits and tracking engagement there.

I'd also consider the difference between account onboarding and individual/admin onboarding. Most products have different types of users. You might need some activities to be done by only one person on the account, which is where you might want to track account level metrics and not just individual metrics.

I always laugh when I see "product utilization does not equal adoption" because please tell me what other metric you're measuring to track adoption. 😂 The only way I can make sense of that is that some customers may use your product for ONE main thing and be happy, even if they don't use all the other features. Or only one person on the account might use a feature, and that's considered success.

@Katlin Hess how do you determine adoption score for your second bullet point?

We have an onboarding channel in our Influitive hub, which enables us to both incentivize customers to complete onboarding as well as allows us to track where people are in the journey based on the challenges they've completed.

@Ciana Abdollahian we measure it on both a program level and a cohort level plus we share the top-line MAU number with Product and Product Marketing. It's far from perfect and fairly manual, but as we're building out the program the metrics I am looking at are:
• Onboarding nurture stream engagement (% open, CTR)
• Avg adoption score of nurture stream participants (and compare that to the overall average)
• % of nurture stream participants that have "successfully completed onboarding activities" (for us this means profile completeness, have run a review campaign and have at least 10 reviews)

Hi friends, for those who are responsible for Onboarding & Adoption marketing? How do you measure Marketing's influence? My biggest concern is the lack of customer data or accuracy of that data. Also, our customer journey is pretty complex (our CS team identified 15 steps for a customer to be onboarded 🤯). I recommended we start with a few milestones but that will still rely on product and ops being able to get product data into our CRM. My team is afraid that we're not going to be able to show impact so it's hard to get them motivated so hoping I can think of some quick wins to help build momentum that are realistic & measurable.

Has anyone started with simple metrics to show the value of onboarding & adoption that isn't reliant on other teams/data? If so, what have you done?

Has anyone here participated in Reforge or Pavilion? Curious to hear your experiences on each. What did you like? What was it worth it?

👋 Hi All! G2 Reviews: does anyone have a good process or strategy for G2 Reviews? I have not used them in years, but in my new gig, we are focusing on getting more reviews. Would love to hear tips, best practices etc! Thank you :)

Hi all - I'm looking for inspiration - does anyone have an image of how you organize your advocacy program across all customers - similar to the Marketo mountain one? Thank you!

Congrats @Joel Klettke for the invite to MozCon!!!!!!!!! make us proud

Thank you, @Mary Green (Owner CMAweekly) for providing valuable insights into the four types of customer advocates. I find this information extremely useful. My follow up question is how a brand can categorize advocates into these four buckets? What specific cues should brands be attentive to in order to understand customers better across various social platforms?

Hi All! Would love some group input-- I am planning a Christmas campaign with a series of 6 emails throughout December with product tips and tricks. I want to tie in some sort of gamification to it to get people to engage with the emails more.. first I thought of adding a secret word to each email to make up a sentence that they would fill out in a form at the end in order to receive a gift - but they're going to have to opt in to the full series so some people won't get all the emails/won't be able to complete secret puzzle... Anyone have other ideas I could incorporate to make this more "Fun"? 😄 TIA!! ⛄

Hi all! I’m hoping to chat with others using Influitive to leverage reviews. I’m looking to identify some benchmarks for a new program and having a hard time finding metrics to compare with. Thanks in advance!

I’m writing a description of the different review companies, does anyone have any thoughts to share on Capterra, GPI, Trust Radius or PeerSpot? I’ll credit you if you’d like.

I do remember someone mentioning this, maybe last year, but I haven’t seen it come up often. If I find it, I’ll let you know.

Too funny and also too relateable

Our exec team is asking for a strategy brief/document for Customer Gifting in 2024. Does anyone have an example of something like this? I'm having a hard time getting started and would love to see what others have done. 🙂

anyone from this group at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas this week? Would love to meet up with other customer marketers if anyone else is here!

Hi all! At my company we have a ton of customers who do speaking engagements, participate in our user groups, customer stories, webinars, etc. BUT we don’t have a formal “advocacy program.” We just have a ton of advocates and it’s great! Our leadership wants to see more of a brand behind our advocates and community (think Trailblazers) and I’m not sure how to introduce one without introducing a formal advocacy program. Has anyone here been able to do something similar and have examples/anything they are willing to share?

Hi there! Jumping on this thread to see if anyone has any best practices to share.. we are moving towards more Enterprise size deals and working with stakeholders across the company to plan out the onboarding experience for an Enterprise account. Can anyone share the type(s) of onboarding nurtures you've built, as well as any playbooks you've shared with your Customer Success teams? We are looking at building an "Onboarding Kit" that would encompass key resources to get started: guides, tutorial videos, email templates, recorded training sessions, timeline of implementation/onboarding, etc. that the internal buyer/champion can use if they choose to roll-out our technology to their team. If anyone has any ideas or recommendations on what you've seen work, I'd appreciate your help!

@Ashley Ward do any of your customer facing teams like CS or Account Owners use a tool like Fathom or Gong? Or record calls? We use fathom internally and some of our best customer stories come during casual calls with the CSM. You could feed a variation of these questions to the CSM’s managing accounts who have expanded, “Why was just using product A not cutting it for your team? What was your Ah-hah moment when you realized that product B would help you with X use case? What advice would you give to another customer thinking of going down the path of bringing in product B that isn't sure yet?” With Fathom/gong, the AE/CSM can highlight the response (video or audio) and send it over to you for cleanup and usage on social or in expansion campaigns or assets.

This would be my approach, and make sure to identify what the CSMs favorite “donuts” are (an expression from a VP of CMA at CustomerXCon) and lay out the “what's in it for me” of them adding this question to their next check-in call. If they're overprotective of clients, explain that this will actually save the client time in the end because they won't need to do a whole new customer story about this! I would imagine if CSMs care about renewals, that should be enough intrinsic motivation, but just a few ideas for if not!

@Vera Flores I have a whole DRIVE advocacy model that has evolved over the years, but it’s aimed much more at the practitioner/champion level than the C-Suite

I love that approach @Irwin Hipsman thank you for sharing. Maybe it’s time to get you on another call to share your thoughts on customer marketing and demand gen.

Let me know if you need any help @Amanda Peacock 🧡

in my mind i responded to this thread thanks so much all! appreciate your inputs -- i think i'll build out my vision in asana for people to react to and have a mini governance team.

Hi Contact! As lives get busier through the end of the year, I wanted to catch up with you on the case study. We had such positive discussions earlier on this, so we've finalized the timeline for publication as follows: Your final review date, publication date, follow up date. If you can't fit it in, we'll proceed with anonomizing it until you and your teams can get through the necessary reviews.

Thanks @Marie Elliott & @Joel Klettke, appreciate the suggestions. The client renewed with limited friction earlier this Fall which is why I’ve been at a bit of a loss about where we’re getting stuck and how to keep it moving.

Unconventional idea:
Send a gift basket to the POC. It may be enough to jostle an approval loose and remind them.

Or, if there's a time-sensitive feature you could get them in (your newsletter, customer of the month, etc.) send a request w/a deadline.

Be careful about the anonymous route because it can make a bad situation worse at times if they feel like you went around them and recognize themselves in the piece -- a remote risk, but one nonetheless.

Candidly, it sounds like the relationship may be going downhill. I'd opt for one of two things 1)Get executive weight behind it. Can you have a CEO to CEO outreach buttering them up on how important they are as a client and how you want to shout their success? Or 2) Publish anonymously and revisit updating to a named when things get back to healthy. When is renewal on the account? That may be a good indicator of timelines for them and you.

I also like to think about multi-threading - different contacts for different types of advocacy activities from the same customer bringing different perspectives.

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours, team! 🦃

Thanks for sharing @Kevin Lau . I love the visualization of mapping of what a new customer vs. an experienced customer is more likely to do.

Thank you all so much!! So many great examples, I appreciate it!

@Ashley Ward - my favorite is the "case study lite" - three questions in video format (1) who are you (what does your organization do, how do you fit into your organization); (2) why us? (what made you buy our product or service?); (3) what does your program look like in 18 - 24 months? This gave us enough info to leverage. And it only takes about an hour - although you could certainly automate it even more than I did the last time around.

@Ashley Ward I think I've seen @Kristine Kukich talk about a customer spotlight series that she runs that sounds similar in format/delivery to the Salesforce example you provided. Maybe she could help?

Have done this so many ways.

We have had a shared calendar with a stakeholder planning meeting each quarter. This was at a smaller company.

At another company we had an in-app guide playbook with style guide designed by product and UX teams. We could only launch one center guide a month and one corner guide (on the main dashboard, notifications on other pages were exceptions). And customer marketing worked with product team Pendo owner to determine which guides were set for which months. These guides were used for marketing. Product launched tool tips throughout the month and managed the resource center, which we could share information to be included. I met bi-weekly with my Product counterpart who owned Pendo, so we communicated often regarding this channel as we used it heavily for upsell and even used it to score interactions in-app.

At my current company we use WalkMe and CS owns it and everyone goes through them (I do not recommend this method).
WalkMe has a lot of issues and we haven't gotten them fixed, but someone right before they left signed a 3 year contract 🙃 so we're trying to make it work. I do believe we'll be looking at Pendo (woo hoo) when able. And product will own it.

@Irwin Hipsman would love to learn more about your governance team — what functions were represented?

anyone managing in app comms? any recommendations of how you're doing this/keeping a schedule/ record of everything? ideally something that people can reference even if they aren't actively using the tool (AppCues/Pendo)

Hi everyone! Looking for some inspiration! Does anyone have different types/levels of customer stories? Like stories that are focused on one specific use case rather than your standard overall story? Any examples to share?

Background: This week we ran some workshops w/sellers around customer expansion and the primary feedback was that they need more customer examples/stories around specific use cases that could lead to growth.

I'm thinking about something like a series of templatized micro-stories, but would love to hear how others are approaching this. Thanks! 🙂

Yes - Shannon, we are doing that too. Thank you!

Hi @Lexie Sirak, I just DM’d you directly. I sent it to Laurie by accident.

Hi everyone - I'm leading our customer conference in March. Our agenda is 80% done, but we are still sourcing customer speakers. My concern is that 80% of my speakers are currently men. I really want it to be 50/50. I have told everyone internally that we need more women, but unfortunately many of our biggest brands/most senior level folks are men. Any suggestions how to find more women? Can I ask our men customer contacts if there are women on their team would could speak instead of them??

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/4029861639 we’re on

NP 🙂

Unfortunately a meeting I can't miss got moved to your call time today. Apologies! It's with my CMO so I can't skip it.

NP!

Hi @Laurie Timms I pinged you directly with my feedback for your question above.

@Mary Green (Owner CMAweekly) I'm going to try to make the call today but most likely will be late. Dealing with some time sensitive stuff at work!

@Bree Bunzel - Just a few comments as we are knee deep in our upcoming CAB.
• We hold 2 in person meetings a year - 2 virtual meetings with more of a specific theme around something we discussed in the in person meeting.
• On zoom we only meet for about 60 minutes and provide pre - reads of the meeting
• We started recruiting (if needed) about 3 months prior to the meeting. This allows time in case someone drops and we need to fill that seat
• We have our members sign a media release - this way anything that we capture in the meeting could possible be used for video references and such
• We don’t have any type of membership criteria - at least that we share with the member 🙂.

We have a very similar approach to Zylo (probably because Amanda super generously shared her CAB stuff as I was getting mine started )

We paid for lodging, transportation (although a lot of our attendees were within driving distance) and we provided a welcome reception and dinner, all meals on meeting day and breakfast on the last day.

Hi @Crystal Anderson - Could you please share with me as well. Thank you. yrea@auditboard.com|yrea@auditboard.com

Does anyone have a customer facing one pager that explains your CAB that you could share? I need to get one to my execs tomorrow so they can send to potential CAB members to get them excited about joining and would love to see what others have done. TY!!

Hi Friends! We've been heads down on a few projects (including our conference that kicked off today in London), so I've been MIA for a while. But since there is a moment to breathe right now, I just wanted to say HI again to all of you wonderful people. So HELLO and Happy Tuesday all around!

💯 but there will eventually be big consolidations as the bigger fish start acquiring more and more ancillary solutions. Such is life in the Saas market! Well… any market in capitalism 🤪

I think I prefer the integrate with many and excel in one thing (best-in-class) specifically!

Community is mimicking where the intranet space was 5-7 years ago! And these integrations are super smart and will be powerful for adoption

In communities for customers, do y’all segment it/create dedicated spaces by company size (SMB/startup, MM, Enterprise)?

Happy Monday All! 👋

We are working to re-introduce CABs to Dropbox, ​​do any of you have industry stats (or your own stats) on how CABs increase customer retention, upsell/cross-sell, revenue?

• We had an inconsistent program pre-COVID so there wasn't enough momentum to show this with enough data over time, looking for guidance 🙏

Does anyone have a slide that highlights the badges you've earned on G2? I got an ask for a customer for some examples and I know I've seen some before, but of course I can't find them now!

Hi all! I’m new to this community/customer marketing in general -- thank you @Kyle Tansley, for the intro 🙂

Reaching out as my team and I are building a cohesive customer marketing/comms calendar that includes touchpoints from our CS, DG, comms, and PM teams for a bird's eye view on how much we are currently communicating with customers for future alignment.

Does anyone have experience pulling this kind of calendar together? If so, what platform worked best for you ( Asana, Google Sheets, etc.) to ensure the list has complete insights to all customer comms and is customizable to each internal team?

Looking forward to hearing some thoughts from you all, and thank you again for letting me be a part of the community!!

Hi all! Wondering what everyone is doing for holiday gifts this year. Last year I sent out gifts to around 200 of our top VIP customer contacts (Selected by the CS team). This year I am on the fence since its so difficult to tie the spend directly to ROI and budgets are tight. Considering maybe top 50 instead of top 200. Anyone have any other ideas for low spend/free alternatives (besides standard holiday greetings, emails etc)?

I really like Asana's!

Hi! Wondering if anyone markets to web developers who are allergic to Sales and Marketing? 😳

<!here> today @ is hosting our weekly call, I hope to see you all on https://us06web.zoom.us/j/4029861639 at 2PM EST

Happy Friday All! I have a question about multithreading in customer accounts- has anyone done a program(s) to help support their CS team’s efforts to connect with more people at an account?

Love the partnership route as an alternative to the buy vs build one’s too, Rachel!

We just announced a partnership with ChurnZero. Instead of buying they're integrating with us (LMS). And, they're partnering with Higher Logic as well, seems to be the new way!

Exciting stuff.

Congrats and congrats! Such a sweet boy!

Any community platform without an LMS or a tight LMS integration is a poor choice at this point. It's the future.

Hi all! 👋 I'd love to use this 🧠 brain trust to understand how your CEO is engaging with customers?
• Is this intentional and mapped out for the year (ie. CAB, roundtables, lunch with customers as they travel to different cities, EBRs)
• What engagements are most impactful for customers & the CEO/leadership team?
One of our key company priorities next year is a customer focus, starting from the top 🙏 - and I'm keen to get some inspiration!

Thanks for sharing here, Mary!

Thank you @Ornella Mariño and @Meg O'Hearn for your feedback and input

For those of you overseeing case studies, particularly Enterprise case studies - a few questions.
• How many case studies per quarter do you typically commit to?
• How long does it typically take you from identifying a customer to publishing the actual case study?
(Playing around with changing some Q4 targets and would love to hear what others are doing 😊)

Hi! CSAT question(s) for you all!
1. How often are you sending? Do you send quarterly or after a specific event?
2. If sending in bulk via your ESP - what do your open rates/ click rates look like?
Appreciate hearing what you all have to say!

Thanks @Amanda Peacock

I have two things im been thinking through.

1. Something(s) to welcome/thank someone from handraising for advocacy
2. Items that would be great for new years Also agree that a well items message + giftcard sometimes could be the best 😛

@Aadhi this entirely depends on the culture of your org! If you are a majority Slack org, I recommend working where the people already are. If most things happen via email, send them there.

Hello! Looking for some information here. Has anyone actively tracked lead generation/done lead attribution back to your customer assets? (case studies, pdfs, etc) If yes, what is the good standard to aim for? Is there any benchmarking done on this? We're starting from scratch and want to know what is a good goal to set for lead attribution against customer stories and related assets. Looking for data for B2B SaaS space.

hi @Julie Neumeister 👋, I just came across this thread. Would you be open to sharing what you discussed with Kevin? I'm in new role taking something like this on and was hoping to get inspiration. Thank you!

I’ve included partners, I’d suggest making guidelines specifically for them. They usually have a lot to add to the conversations.

We are creeping up on holiday gift giving time 🎁 - curious what your teams have done to make custom individual gifts for customers. We would like to print a sentence with a metric unique to each customer that they are proud of but not sure how to scale this for our top 100 customers and would like the item to be functional and not just a frame for a desk. For example a notebook that says on the cover "Your team made a difference in 100 people's lives this year." but that '100' changes for each customer.

hey @Preston! so it kind of depends on budget/vibes -- for every reference call we facilitate I send a simple gift card through tremendous, for surprise and delight gifting we do themed items based on the campaign, etc so I think it depends on use case/budget but if you throw some scenarios out there I can give you some ideas!

hi all -- does anyone work at Lattice or have connections there? A friend of mine is applying for the open Customer Marketing role and would love a leg up. Thanks a bunch!

hi everyone! Looking to get peoples take on when to send NPS/CSAT surveys. I've always worked with CS teams that would send them out after touchpoints like after onboarding is done, after a support ticket is closed, post QBR at at specific time intervals (every 3 months). What has been your org's experience?

Hi everyone! Does anyone here invite partners to participate in your customer communities? If so, what kinds of things do you invite them to participate in and what kinds of guidelines do you have in place? My hesitation is that the space becomes too sales-y and that it takes away from our customers sharing.

@Kati Jacobson figured as much. Hope you get the answers you’re looking for!

@Scott Stransky Yeah, I spoke with a few people there already and wanted to know what others experience is with their community.

Hey y'all looking for some ideas to delight advocates!

Currently it's been more mental math and sticky notes keeping tabs of which folks love us, in the past i've relied more on CRM and tagging - looking to get back to this to enable / educate our team (and track growth)

👉 MY QUESTION IS: What are some well received things you've done for hand raisers willing to be advocates for your company?

Thank you 🙂

Hi all! Got a quick question. Once an advocate talks to a prospect, how can we measure how well it went? Should we think about sending surveys to prospects so they can tell us how helpful their chat with the advocate was?

Very comprehensive - thanks @Shannon Howard

Happy Halloween from your favorite Dino bot!

I am sure this thread already exists, but I can't find anything today.

What are some of your favorite customer stories? I am looking for inspiration (have a few) but would love to see what everyone else has shared they think are killer stories/formats/etc.?

Thanks!

Just catching up on this thread and was going to tag @Katlin Hess but see she already chimed in 😄

Id love to see as well!

I think champions would love that. So far I haven’t seen a stellar platform that has made this uber successful. I think it’s more about the strategy and approach used with something like Zoom or Hopin.

Hi all! Does anyone have a platform recommendation for casual coffee chat/networking virtually? ☕

We are exploring this as an activity for our Champions and curious what others have done! 🙂

For folks running award programs: are you using a platform to power your awards program? In the process of evaluating the vendors in the space and would love to hear your input!

I've personally used AwardForce and have been in conversation with OpenWater.

Hi everyone! Would love to hear about your tried and true ways to drive peer to peer engagement in your communities?

Our community has been live for about a year now and our membership is growing steadily as is the number of questions that customers are posting. Today, we're mainly working with internal teams to get answers but we'd like to shift this to have more customers answering each others questions. What are some of the things you do to drive this behaviour?

@Katlin Hess yes! I think saw screenshots of this in your CustomerXCon deck! That would be awesome 😀

Hi Everyone
I’m creating a pitch deck to try and convince our Exec level team that we need to invest in the services of a certain peer review site.
The big question that will be asked is as follows: ‘How do you drive retention and growth through positive Customer Reviews?’
I feel like the answers I am coming up with are very fluffy (e.g. Share on social media to drive awareness and confidence).
Does anyone have ideas for more hard hitting answers?

Hey All! My company’s NPS data, while valuable, isn’t getting surfaced in ways that let us take action easily, and I’m trying to fix that.

If you’re using NPS, are you using one single tool to gather responses or multiple, and where are you surfacing that data? How are you ensuring that the people who need NPS data are able to use it in a way that fits into their workflows?

Thank you in advance for helping me gather insights to put an end to our current messy situation

Has anyone created Sales Playbooks for Onboarding/Adoption that complements/reinforces what you're doing from a customer marketing perspective?

e.g. Here are the resources you should send to your customer in the first 30 days or adoption is low here are programs/resources you should suggest?

Morning! Has anyone been able to get into the Customer Marketing Allience’s event today?

does anyone own appcues at their org? or at least help build things out from the marketing side?

<!here> We are on now with Deeto https://us06web.zoom.us/j/82348900767

Such a timely topic. I’ve recently joined a customer marketing role that reports to the demand gen lead. It’s been a challenge to set goals for my projects that align with the KPI’s of the team ( MQLs, sales qualified opportunities, pipeline) even when it comes to up sell/cross sell plays. 😅

@Rebecca Grossman I would too. Please share if you run across any.

@Michael Sciano Completely agree!

This distinction is the best and worst part of this industry. So much we still have to frame up but so much potential once we do!

I need mentors for Expansion, Community, Partners and advanced Advocacy. If you have not signed up yet, please consider signing up today clubcx.pro/mentorship <!here>

My team’s growing at F5 and we have a few new roles now open under #jobs

@Kevin Lau what date works for you? Can you add it here? https://cmaweekly.slack.com/canvas/C04B57HN9D3

You should check out the call with Ciana Abdollahian from CMAweekly - it was in March and it was all about the executive program at Snyk.

Love this - it's my goal to transform how we execute customer stories going forward with a bigger focus on "how to guides" - I would love to see more examples.

I am too - let's talk!

Is anyone running executive-level advocacy groups/outreach? Curious to see what the most successful program elements have been for anyone who has done them before. Working on building out an executive program now!

Canvas to choose a date to host Open Discussion: https://cmaweekly.slack.com/canvas/C04B57HN9D3

If there’s interest, happy to do one in the future on how to secure $$$ and HC for your team or even fy24 planning

I'm happy to host one

<!everyone> Updates - No Call Today & Hosts for Fridays Needed!!

I’ve canceled today’s Open Discussion where I was going to talk about Community & Advocacy - I am running the course starting Nov 1, please share it with others: [marygreencny@gmail.com](https://maven.com/cmaweekly/community-advocacy>

Host a Friday call! - I need volunteers that want to host Open Discussion calls on Fridays. You can choose a topic or leave it open ended. Email me <mailto:marygreencny@gmail.com) and we can chat about it.

Are any of you creating customer stories that go beyond the traditional challenge/solution/results? For example, are any of you doing implementation stories? Or adoption stories? Or stories where your customers share their best practices? Or any other type of stories?

oh for sure! I am used to writing short item surveys from doing undergraduate research but that was based in pyshcology and not marketing lol - I think with our customers the shorter and more direct question the better

Happy to dive into feedback form design/Qs, Emily, since I love them (especially building them on Typeform), but I’d ask a clear, direct question on your main attendee goal of it to report on and benchmark against future ones 😊

thank you @Joel Primack

Happy Thursday!
Does anyone have a Customer Marketing career track template the can share? Of all the content I “travel” with from company to company, that’s the one I continually fail to bring with me when I jump. I’ve done these so many times with HR. I just don’t want to start over again. If anyone has template for the progression from Customer Marketing Associate, Manager, Sr Manager, Director, Sr Director, that would be great. Thanks!

Hey Everyone -

Looking for folks who've created an "elite community group" within your communities, The best of the best. Customers who stand out amongst the crowd and have earned elite status.

Looking for best practices on creating a group like that.

Hi there, does anyone here run a weekly customer advocacy/stories meeting with stakeholders and have a meeting template they use. What I’d imagine would be useful to cover is case studies pipeline, field marketers share wishlist or updates on interesting deals closed, etc. anything else I’m missing?

Someone is looking for warehouse and logistics, not direct mail - Ideas on where to send them?

I would love to be added!

There is a CustomerX Con channel let me know if you need an invite #customerxcon - I won’t be there, between 1 of my son’s having a birthday and another 1 having stomach issues still, it just wasn’t going to pan out 😞 Please take pics and videos and share EVERYTHING with me. 😄

Who is ready to Accelerate in Boston? I'm inbound and looking for all friendlies :)

For those going to customerx con have fun - Melanie Gomez and Pascale Royal will be there representing team F5, if you want to say hi

<!everyone> Masterclass with Liz Oseguera on Sales Alignment starts in 5 minutes - FREE for everyone this week 🙂 https://us06web.zoom.us/j/82348900767

I'm working on ideas to get more plugged in to our customers so I can build better relationships. One idea I have is that I get introduced as part of the onboarding/implementation process for our top customers. Has anyone done this? If so, when do you get introduced? How is it positioned? Any learnings?

Just started a new gig and picking up their virtual user conference.

I have done these before but it's been a minute since virtual and I know those tend to lag in attendance.

Those here who do these virtual events, do you vote 2 half days back to back or one full day (starting later morning)?

Thanks in advance!

Hello all, We are working closely with G2 and their CSM and having great success with reviews, but would love to hear from you how you are leveraging badges, grid reports, overall content you are getting from G2?

@Amanda Peacock I love the idea of customer content around special days like International Women's Day!

Thanks for this folks! Really helpful. And thanks @Sarah Koval and @Gareth Wilson for sharing those examples!

Last call for the mentorship program: clubcx.pro/mentorship

You may be amazed how just changing the wording changes the participation!

thanks everyone!!

If price isn't a huge concern, the Faena in Miami Beach is awesome--it has White Lotus vibes and very cool decor.

Happy birthday @Emily Amos! 🎉

Video testimonial
Podcasts
Customer webinars
Video reviews from customers on sites like G2

I love all these ideas, @Joel Klettke! Thanks for taking the time to respond back to me.

I haven't been focussed on the wording and just realised there are so many ways of making this ask. I think I've always gone head on saying we needed to document a case study and never went this direction. Thanks for the perspective! 🙂

Curious! Besides customer stories, what other types of customer content are you creating?

Named Case Studies vs Masked Case Studies

I work with some customers who are super secretive in having their name associated with the case studies that we create. I want to focus more on creating more named case studies, but increasingly, I've been getting approval to document only masked case studies. Although they are great stories, I can't help but feel like this is not as impactful as a named case study. It's a challenge currently as my pool of customer collaterals is steadily increasing, but with the majority of them being masked stories.

Have any of you experienced this? I'd love to hear your insights on obtaining approvals for more named case studies.

Hello everyone, does anyone have an event list for the next 6 months? I know there's the big CustomerX conference next week, but unfortunately I can't be there. Maybe with a focus on content - I already googled it, but many events start from May/June 2024.

If you were going to join the Deeto call on Scaling Advocacy today, it has been rescheduled to Oct 23rd due to the conflict in Israel.

Does anyone have experience with customer stories that feature polarizing brands? Interested to hear your creative solutions! I'm currently working through the mental gymnastics of a brand that sells weapons but is very interested in telling their story and has a particularly interesting use case. I'm hesitant to suggest that we anonymize the story, as I know the customer is excited about their use case.

Hello everyone! Does anyone have experience with the Customer Marketing Alliance, specifically one of the paid membership tiers? Would love any feedback on experiences anyone has had with it and pros/cons. Thanks!! (https://www.customermarketingalliance.com/signup/)

Hey all, we had a really helpful call for anyone job seeking on Friday. Here’s the link: https://cmaweekly.slack.com/canvas/C04B57HN9D3

Does anyone have a document or a list of customer marketing/advocacy metrics that you track that you can share? I track the obvious: # of case study, reviews, videos, testimonials, references, engagement in email, # of advocates, and recruitment. What are some other good metrics that you have used such as attribution (I have an ROI calculation) or calculated to get buy in from executives and to get budget? Thank you in advance.

Happy Friday everyone! Who has used Orca and can give me the pro's and con's of the platform and use cases? All or any information would be greatly appreciated.

@Jake Sotir 🙂

Live with Claudia (career coach) https://us06web.zoom.us/j/4029861639

Hi everyone - do you have a separate communication about product updates? Or is that included in your newsletter? And assuming you have a monthly newsletter, what percent of it (roughly) is typically focused on product updates? Thank you.

Hello all! My name is Laura and I’ve just joined the group and the conversations look amazing. I’m wondering if anyone has experience with testimonial.to or any other video testimonial collection software. Would love to hear your experiences! Thanks in advance.

“Increased levels of collective intelligence occur when you have diverse groups within a setting.” - just read this on Headway 😄 from Rebel Ideas

Hey all, question for you! I have a customer who did a case study with us and we were in the final phases of getting approval and then today learned that they have a new head of marketing who doesn't want to do the case study because they don't want their competitors to know their trade secrets. Any ideas for objection handling here? I know I can always anonymize the story, but looking for a way to potentially convince them it's a good idea to share their story!

@Emily Stanze Also worth popping in on these calls (Fridays at 2pm Eastern)

Hi everyone! My name is Emily and I am pretty new to the Customer Marketing realm. I work as a Customer Marketing Manager for a technology company. I had been following Leslie Barrett on linkedin and subscribed to her. I am hoping to grow in my career and personal development with marketing and customer success. Does anyone have recommendations on certificates or courses? I have a bachelors with a double major in psychology and art, and pursing my masters in HR

Hi - my PMM team is rethinking how they announce new product releases to customers - does anyone have a document outlining roles/responsibilities between PMM and Customer Marketing (for the lifecycle, engagement part of the role) - eg who does what, and how are you informing customers of feature launches, enhancements, etc. Thank you!

Super excited about this!!

id be happy to chat about how that might interface with reference edge (im very salesforce API literate but haven't ever used that part of their api)

it can do whatever you want it to (because whatever you use for the middle automation layer can pull data from anything you have access to via an api IE product usage data, your crm, etc

@Rachel Ward It's all in our speakers, I think. We usually build two tracks of speakers in the afternoon and make the keynotes memorable. With that - we'll see most of the keynotes up at the 70 - 75% marker. The other sessions may come in lower.

chiming in from the cheap seats @Jake Sotir and @Mary Green (Owner CMAweekly) - we wanted to come up with a unique brand mascot so we let our creative agency run wild a bit. they came back with a few different options and we liked Dali for a few reasons: it's very different for a B2B startup, plus Dali's mustache and facial expressions play nicely with the bottom U part of the UserEvidence logo (happy or sad).

i loved it from the jump but was very nervous to see how buyers and B2B marketers would react to it. the response has been amazing so far. we're going to keep pushing it forward

Scaling Advocacy & Content Creation - next Tuesday join me and @ from Deeto to discuss how to overcome some of the issues in scaling your customer story and testimonials efforts. 🙂

RSVP: lu.ma/scalingadv

Why I’m looking forward to it: I’ve been focused on scaling advocacy as I’m creating a course around it, right now. This presentation will cover a few topics I hadn’t considered so I’m excited to help others learn more, too. <!everyone>

That looks very polished! I just used a much more basic doc to share my contact info and the panel questions.

Hi! Has anyone automated a flow to monitor online communities that look for customers who consistently provide helpful advice or promote your brand and ask them to be advocates??

Happy CX day y’all!

Oh, whoops, just seeing the contractual requirements. Oof, I don't have that, it's always just been "customer will participate in... within X timeframe"

Thanks @Alana Merdzan!

Wow congrats on this @Evan Huck, this is a huge accomplishment! 🥳

Hi all, thank you for replying. @Austin does your bot only capture form responses? Or does it also churn out case studies and other recommended assets upon request as well?

Here's a pretty basic one--I hope it helps!

Customer Marketing Specialist:

Skills and Abilities:

Strong communication skills (both written and verbal).
Basic understanding of marketing principles.
Ability to analyze customer data and draw insights.
Proficiency with marketing software and tools (e.g., CRM, email marketing platforms).
Willingness to learn and adapt to changing customer needs.
Attention to detail and organizational skills.
Collaborative mindset and the ability to work in a team.

Customer Marketing Manager:

Skills and Abilities:

Proficient in customer segmentation and targeting strategies.
Strong project management skills to coordinate marketing campaigns.
Data analysis expertise for optimizing customer journeys.
Experience in creating and executing customer engagement programs.
Proficiency in customer advocacy and referral marketing.
Ability to collaborate cross-functionally.
Strategic thinking and ability to develop customer-centric marketing strategies.

Senior Customer Marketing Manager:

Skills and Abilities:

Advanced knowledge of customer lifecycle management.
Mastery of marketing automation and personalization techniques.
Exceptional data analytics skills for deep customer insights.
Expertise in customer retention and loyalty programs.
Strong leadership and strategic planning capabilities.
Ability to develop and manage a customer marketing budget.

Director of Customer Marketing:

Skills and Abilities:

Comprehensive understanding of customer journey mapping and optimization.
Proficiency in customer advocacy and ambassador programs.
Exceptional data-driven decision-making skills.
Ability to drive customer-centric culture throughout the organization.
Strong leadership, team management, and mentoring abilities.
Extensive experience in defining and achieving customer marketing KPIs.
Strategic thinking for long-term customer engagement and growth.

Senior Director/VP of Customer Marketing:

Skills and Abilities:

Visionary leadership with a deep understanding of customer marketing trends.
Proficiency in creating and executing customer-centric strategies at scale.
Ability to influence and align the organization around customer-focused goals.
Exceptional data analytics skills for predicting customer behavior.
Expertise in customer experience design and optimization.
Strong collaboration with C-level executives and cross-functional leadership.
Accountability for overall customer satisfaction, retention, and advocacy.

Kristine, what do you do for such stellar attendance?

I’m looking for a customer advocacy/engagement career matrix. Anyone willing to share? Job skills and role from specialist to people manager.

Absolutely obsessed with this kind of publicity, as long as it's @Andru Creighton's face and not mine 😂

We have about 500 people registered for our sessions next week via cVent, so recordings will also be available, but we usually see about 75% attendance from registrations.

How do y'all showcase your metrics to leadership? Do you have a BI tool? Slide deck?

Hi! Is anyone running a sales reference call program? If yes, are you/how are you vetting your current customers who are jumping on calls with prospects? For context, I have a bunch of people who volunteered () but I don’t know very many of them personally.

Events people. It's been a hot minute since I've hosted a virtual conference (moved back to in person last couple years).

Is there anything new or just something that's working for your to get "butts in virtual seats" and have people attend? I feel like virtual is hard these days as we're all burnt out on it.

Thanks in advance!

Revinate

Anyone ever seen a B2B company do "Customer of the Month" effectively? Any examples that come to mind?

Hello friends! At CustomerXCon next month, @Daniel Palay and @Cara Peterson are hosting a panel on customer communications.

Myself, @Jeanne Talbot, and Alison Zak will be on the panel.

My question for y'all is: What customer communications questions would you like to see the panel address?

We have a member wondering about anyone using RocketLane - do you use it?

What are you working on this week? What wins or roadblocks are you seeing? I’d love to know 😄

Anyone have a checklist or customer comms & marketing plan for a product launch? I'm starting to pull the pieces together but want to make sure I'm not missing anything.

Hi all has anyone set up a programatic customer reference submission/nomination process and a customer reference finding/search tool for their company? Anything done via slack (ie bots) or you might have a better solution? Plus points if it works with reference edge, saleseforce’s app.

@Emily Smith this is interesting! Did your business ops team build this for you? curious how you created the open reference request aspect

Open discussion https://us06web.zoom.us/j/4029861639 NOW

I am the only customer marketer in the company and it's a new position. I report to the Head of Product Marketing but spend my days with the Customer Success team.

Hi All - I've noticed there is a trend towards cutting back on gifting efforts to save money and focus on sustainability. What is this group's sentiment around holiday client appreciation gifts? Seems like people expect to receive something during this time but it's often more work to stand up than it's worth, not to mention the costs 🎁

hey everyone 👋 i am wondering if there’s anyone here who oversees owning Reddit as a channel, and how you balance said channel with your own community platform/efforts. we are gearing up for a community launch soon, and leadership wants us to have a “plan” in place for our brand’s subreddit, which is a bit of a ghost town, save the occasional support question or frustrated vent. i have some concerns/thoughts that i would like to hash out with someone who has had experience striking a balance between these two community channels.

if this is something you have experience, with, i’d love to chat over a (virtual) coffee on me ☕ — please send me a DM, thank you!

Nope, that’s also me!

@Leah Miller This is great, thank you. I love that you sit side by side with Ed and Lifecycle. The comms piece is such an important part of those efforts. Is there another comms person that manages release or newsletters (more broad comms?).

@Melissa DiBernardo I wanted to come back and give more context, as I realize I left many of your questions unanswered in my excitement to hear what everyone else would add to the thread.

Like I said, I serve as the customer comms manager for my org. I sit within the Marketing team, under Customer Marketing reporting to the Director of CMK. Within our larger CMK team, we also have a Community team, a Customer Lifecycle team, and Product Ed team. My role sits alongside these more niche teams and supports them through strategy & execution of the comms portions of their campaigns. The role is new to the org this year, so we’re still working through exactly how this works most effectively.

Does anyone have a rough guideline on conversion rates for customer referrals? For context, we’re a B2B company exploring referral programs, but our Product Marketing team points out that referrals typically work much better in B2C where you have a high proportion of end users who are willing to be advocates, and in general you’d need 10,000 customers to generate 1 referral. Does anyone have any reactions to this or data that would help us answer the question of whether that ratio is accurate?

@Katlin Hess do you have a guide for this? I didn't see anything on the website. Thank you!

Hi - does anyone have an internal guide for employees to ask customers for reviews? I'd like to encourage all customer facing teams to be comfortable asking for reviews when a customer has positive feedback. Wondering if anyone has done this - and what has gone well/what are the things to avoid. And, if you have a doc or an outline to share, let me know! Thank you.

Thanks for raising this, Rebecca. I'm also interested in knowing if you (all) have any tips on how we can keep the review pipeline going strong with customers?

My suggestion would be to dig deeper into the "why", what benefits will customers get out of attending this virtual session vs any other activities they have on their plate for that date? Right now it reads more about your company vs the customer. I know you want to demo your new product for me, but how will the product address my problems and save me time/money/efficiency?

For example, you mentioned a brand-new operating model for marketing teams...but why do I need a new operating model? Does Uptempo make it easier to collaborate with my team members? Is it going to save me 27 hours a month in meeting hours? Reduce costs by $X? I can't tell you what to insert here because you know your audience and their pain points better than any of us.

I don't think it's a bad email, it's just missing the deeper connection to your audience and speaking their language.

i think so... we use it for a bit of both. mostly to send thanks and swag to folks in the community.

no they dont have like 'self service' for your sales team but they do build out 'stores' that you can send out to customers/prospects but not like .. individual motions by AE/BDR if that makes sense/

@Amanda Peacock do they work like Reachdesk (or sendoso)? curious for future. we went to reachdesk in the last year so not looking to switch right now, but doesn't hurt to have some ideas just in case.

For this user group it’s mainly a presentation with Q&A and no networking or best practice sharing is planned.

Can you lead with the engagement aspect or networking with their peers? I have found that folks register more often when they know they will meet with peers sharing similar business challenges/business outcomes, etc.

I lead all Customer Marketing - including advocacy and lifecycle marketing (all customer comms). I report to VP of Demand Gen, in Marketing, although I was in Product Marketing for a bit. In my past role (smaller org) I reported to the VP of Marketing, we did not have a CMO

Subject line 1: [first name], you’re invited
Subject line 2: Can I buy you a coffee?

I’d love to buy you a coffee, [First Name]. You can enjoy it while attending one of our virtual user groups on October 17 or 19. We are launching the new Uptempo platform this October, and here’s why I think you should join our user group:

• Learn more about Uptempo’s new platform and roadmap.
• Get an exclusive live demo before the official launch.
• Engage with our product leaders in a live Q&A.
• Explore a brand-new operating model system for marketing teams.

I think you’re going to learn a lot from the sessions, and I look forward to having you there.

Sure I can post the original draft I received, but it’s so blah that you can swap out the company name and it wouldn’t make a difference. Un momento.

As the only customer marketer at my org I sit within Marketing but work much more closely with CS and Product/ Product Marketing than I do with the rest of Marketing

Hi all! Does anyone have a template for a Customer Reference Call request please? i.e what I would send to the customer for them to participate in the call. The template will of course have some gaps for specific use cases to be filled in to personalise the request but curious if anyone has something that works well? TIA!

hey customer marketing friends. Anybody have any customer marketing / advocacy events to attend in October - December?

speaking of swag -- had to share this here -- coolest swag i've gotten in a while!!

Uptick In Layoffs

I’ve had multiple people reach out this week about being laid off. I had really hoped we we past the peak but it’s still happening. Please share & respond if you can offer any help to others looking.

Suggestions on how to help:
• Directly message someone and ask what roles they are interested in.
• Look at your network to see who is hiring (I go to jobs and scroll through to see what posts show my connections)
• Share this info on #jobs, LinkedIn, or directly to them.
• Reach out and ask your network if they are hiring.
On October 6th, @Claudia Miller will join us to discuss “Crafting the Perfect Resume for Women on the Rise” along with a Q&A. I had a call with her today and she was beyond helpful, I have a lot of homework to do.

I hope you can join us on this free call for the whole ClubCX community 🙂 sign up here: lu.ma/cmafridays you will not see specific information.

Hi folks! Spam me with your favorite swag bundle providers? We are looking for branded swag, in pretty branded containers/boxes, that we can have on site and have mailed. TIA!

Curious - Would anyone be interested in participating in a repository with a list of companies that you and others have partnered on for case studies? I feel like it could be helpful when reaching out to customers to know ahead of time that they are allowed to do case studies for vendors. Of course, the research can be done, but I thought a list would be helpful! Maybe there is something like this already also?

Yes. The people who build the workflows, compliance, guardrails and see the dollars and hours being saved are much happier than the people who have to deal with it.

@Marie Elliott Higher for buyers/exec sponsors and lower for users/admins?

We run it to both and I see a VERY clear correlation with score and role.

Have you run a successful re-opt in campaign for email? We have a large set of customers who we suspect were unintentionally opted-out due to an issue on our end, but since we can't be 100% sure, we need to find a way to get them to opt back in. I am kicking around a few ideas, but would love to hear if you have any tried and tested tactics that worked

How do you set your quarterly G2 reviews goal? How do you know what the "right" amount of reviews are each quarter to maintain/grow your rating?

Friends who run NPS: Do you survey users/admins of your product? Buyers? Both?

Hey Ladies (sorry Gentleman) we have a fun opportunity to talk to Claudia Miller - a Women in Tech, Career Coach on October 6th (normal Friday Open Discussion).
This is for the entire ClubCX community, not just paid members.

She will be presenting us a MasterClass on “Crafting the Perfect Resume for Women on the Rise”
AND, she’s open to a Q&A on our job search.

I would encourage you all to come, we never know when there will be layoffs and I’ve always gotten great information from Claudia about how to better position myself for new opportunities. Bring your questions and resumes (a lot of what she says applies to your LinkedIn profile, too).

Learn more about her here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/claudiatmiller/

You can register here: https://lu.ma/cmafridays (you won’t see specific details).

New tools 🙂
I’m normally sharing all of my favorite docs, videos, and tools with the ClubCX exclusive members, BUT, I wanted to share a tool I found called BreakCold.com

You can tracks ‘leads’ from LinkedIn, what I like is the ability to add up to 10 free leads to easily scan through their new posts on LinkedIn making it easy to find new conversations to join. So, if you have some people (favorites) you follow and want to easily check on their new content, give it a shot.

Maybe share who you are following with it?