#announcements
Important info for Customer Marketers & Community members
Thread
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??
I’m sure others will drop in on this. In past roles I’ve had to source speakers for events and it was a Sales product, so we had a lot of men to choose from. We ended up going with up to 50% could be white men, the rest had to be minorities. This wasn’t my decision, it came from our leadership team. We were able to find a lot of talented speakers who hadn’t done as much speaking and our audience loved new contributors. We followed up with a blog post of over 600 women in related spaces that volunteered to be speakers for events - it would have been smarter to do that BEFORE the event though, as it would have made our jobs a lot easier.
And I’m sure you’ve thought of this, but if you do ask customers about women on their teams, the language you use is really important. Ex: “Hi John, we are trying to showcase the brilliance of women in our space at our upcoming event. Are there any women you would recommend as speakers from your team?”
^^ Love that language, Mary.
Rebecca - do your CSMs know of maybe other people on the team (not senior level) who could speak? Sometimes I think executive speakers, while influential and inspirational, lack the kind of informational content people are looking for at conferences. I've found the "boots on the ground" people provide the content that people walk away thinking, "Wow. I can do something with that."