#announcements

1. Wrapping up an April GPI campaign with a client
2. Discovery call with a potential new client
3. Creating a campaign to engage top advocates for a client who has availability for both testimonials and recorded reference calls
4. Finish up reviewing investor material for a startup CPG company I've been supporting
5. Losing my mind ???? 🤪

finishing up a CAB cycle where everyone decided to have an opinion 🙃 , building a new process for driving logo approval and case studies for top accounts (while reformatting and rebuilding our case studies archive) and, similarly, losing my mind!

Ahh yes, I think losing my mind is on the agenda every week. Though I never know where it’s coming from.

I’ve been juggling sponsorship calls this week and ideas to bring more value to the community. I get knocked off course very quickly so I’ve been writing everything down - now I’m surrounded in notes.

Also admiring all the cute CMA-ers dogs? Add yours so I can continue to be distracted today!

@Taylor Page - the logo approval process is on my list in the near term!

DON’T DO MORE WITH LESS

nobody, not even the company, wins like that

@Cecilia Wainio i would LOVE to chat with others about strategies, esp in terms of getting buy in from sales leadership. i have lots of tactics and strategies, but always want to learn more!

100% recommend investigating adding logo and name drop approvals into your services agreements if it isn't there already!

AND, I’m also on the struggle bus right now. This Awards campaign has me up at 4am and not shutting down until after 11pm. I’m literally spent right now

@Taylor Page happy to chat on that front 🙂

oh, adding it to the MSA was my first recommendation, but apparently the company has tried that in the past and it got redlined 99.99% of the time so they're not open to trying it again

happens a lot

but, you can work with sales to create discount programs to add it into the MSA

1. Writing proposals for our advocate and referral programs that can go through ALL the internal approvals incl. compliance (!)
2. Budget
3. Logistics around a strategic event at our annual conference
4. Following up with individual advocates on specific activities they're signed up for
5. Building out a new advocate portal while manually approving customers who sign up via the old (which is honestly just slack and google forms)

so it starts off, but gets added on

1. New product webinar with a reluctant PMM
2. Series of new cross-sell webinars with mini-case studies and Q&A
3. Year 2 adoption nurtures with CX
4. Setting up MQC/customer stages in SFDC
5. Trying to show value to VP of AM
6. Fighting off a week+ cold 🥲

Sounds like it's time for some enablement training for sales. Every single global enterprise company that I support includes it in their MSA and drives adoption when customers sign because Sales have the right things to highlight/share with customers.

@Ari Hoffman that was my first proposal but ELT is not aligned.... if anyone wants to chat more about logo approval, would super appreciate if you grabbed time on my calendar! i feel like i've offered all the standard strategies and have been told 'no' and am a little (ok a lot) frustrated

@Alexie Glover it’s a very complicated discussion, there’s NO silver bullet when it comes to this. It can vary dramatically and depends on the current size of your company, the size of your customers, the maturity of your product, etc

@Ari Hoffman completely agree!

1. Finishing a proposal for sales management re: aligning customer proof to the buyers journey to drive AEs to 1) use all the available customer proof we throughout the buyers journey 2) reduce reference calls 3) get them to use reference calls more strategically
2. It's finally time for our customer advocacy program vision deck (I finally feel I can get the buy-in I need). If anyone has done this - I'll take inspo. I have ideas on how i want to structure it but seeing what others has done is really helpful.
3. We took buyers pains that AEs have entered in SFDC and analyzed those to understand the most common challenges our prospective customers are facing. The whole marketing team was pumped that we did this exercise so just doing more analysis e.g. top pains by competitor (incumbent)
4. Driving GPI reviews
5. Getting customer proof into every demand gen campaign possible. We just had a digital campaign go-live on Linked where all the ads are customer proof ❤️
6. Trying not to freak out that my hair is going gray at a rapid pace....

@Ciana Abdollahian would love to see an example from your LI campaign!

@Taylor Page Not a silver bullet, but one strategy that I've seen be more successful than just including in the MSA is making it a line item with a discount in the initial estimate the customer sees. So for example, their estimate would be:
$X - platform fee
$X - services

-X% - advocacy discount

$X total

That way, you've anchored them at the lower price and if they want to redline the advocacy clause, it feels like an increase. Won't work every time, but can be more successful with customers who are on the fence about participating. Also helps because that estimate is typically what travels to CFO/procurement etc so they are also directly seeing the cost impact

May not help with your ELT alignment issues, but could be another angle to try

@Alexie Glover here are a few examples!

@Ciana Abdollahian these are rad! Great work!!

1. Getting as many GPI reviews before our April 30th Deadline
2. Building our first customer awards
3. Building and creating structure around our customer journey to hopefully create some automation instead of having everything be manual

Sounds like we should have had an April GPI call 😂

@Alexie Glover even better looks like Wells Fargo accessed one of the assets since campaign went live yesterday so already seeing attribution!

Congratulations!!!

GPI is not my friend right now. They decided to create new two categories and add us to them (without telling us) so for one of the new categories they added we only have 2 reviews (because they've been driving reviews there) and I had an AE ask why we only have 2 reviews.... AND the reviews going to that category takes away from the category we need the reviews in to qualify for customers' choice because the new category is just a subset of the category we are already in 😤

They've been driving customers to a report where my client's product is named incorrectly ... and haven't engaged when we've requested an update ...

Gonna be honest, GPI is basically never my friend

Agreed @Taylor Page

Ya i'm fully expecting it to take 2 weeks for them to respond to me. Must be nice to work for Gartner lol....

Goodness I stepped away for a few minutes, this thread just ran wild LOL. @Ari Hoffman I know you think I shouldnt say Do more with less, but it’s the common saying right now that people understand, so we can talk about it and better approaches 🙂
GPI - should we discuss that again?
Logo process; #1 do I even want their logo? (it was an open challenge in our Influitive), if yes #2) Legal

I spent three hours last week with our Gartner rep going over why so many reviews are getting rejected and they still could not tell me 😞 but did learn if your customers review gets rejected they only have a 72 hour window (including weekends) to update/edit their review

Reading these msgs, I’m so glad our company is not doing GPI yet

Budget and plan.

Welcome to my world Re: running awards program, @Ari Hoffman! Now pile sponsorship for an in-person conf on top and you'll have a flavor of (a portion) of my day-to-day

@Mary Green (Owner CMAweekly), of course we can talk about it, we should talk about it, I said don’t DO it. BIG BIG BIG difference, hahahaha =). Looking forward to the chat