#random

Hey Petra! I'm right there with you right now. One of my clients has launched a new top-priority product and all the implementation has been rocky ... meaning we have very few happy customers. We've used a few early adopter techniques to get some stories created and have also anonymized stories about use cases where the customer wasn't yet comfortable being publicly associated. From there, we've been leveraging the CEO's relationship with customers + speaking opportunities to build the pipeline.

If it were my dream scenario, we'd be using the rocky implementations as an opportunity to repair the relationship, going above and beyond to delight the customer after our shaky start, and then build advocacy around that naturally.

We're also relying heavily on information from Product Marketing and Partner Marketing - they're sharing where implementations were successful and we're targeting those accounts as low-hanging fruit. We've also worked with our implementation partners to do some co-branded webinars/assets to create more content.

And, finally, where we had customers upgrade/expand into the new product, we're using existing name drop/logo use to create assets that show breadth of adoption without telling the full story.

BUT this situation is far from the ideal. I wouldn't suggest taking everything we're doing as a suggestion for what should be done. Right now it's pretty scrappy.

I know @Scott Stransky has been working on some pre-go-to-market customer marketing/storytelling ideas. He might have some good suggestions for how best to tackle this situation.

I'm revamping our early access program right now and this is a main outcome for me -- making sure we get customers who are agreeing to early access for product feedback but also for marketing quotes. setting clear expectations that they are getting early access/help to shape the product and we are hoping to get timely feedback and potential marketing quotes/stats pending approval

@Amanda Peacock can you share more about the e early access program? Is it an always-on, automated, or one-off campaign? What types of channels do you use to communicate to customers?

Pre go-to-market customer marketing sounds amazing, hope @Scott Stransky can weight in here! It often feels like a scramble post launch 😓

Same as Amanda: Our Product Marketing team works on betas for upcoming releases, and we've worked feedback and quotes into the beta agreements. This helps to feed product launches and put at least some social proof behind it.

sorry for delayed response @Petra William!! so for our early access customers we are communicating mainly by email as the customers are pre-selected based on recommendations from CS -- the program is always on technically but they are individual campaigns if that makes sense .. so depending on the size of the launch we determine if EA is happening. if its happening then CM/PM and product work together to build out the program. everyone opts in to the program and part of that is setting expectations (one of those expectations is a marketing quote)

Can you made guides? How to documents? And include quotes in that? In other words, make the content a useful tips document and talk about your offering and include quotes from your customer - so it's not your customer endorsing the product, but rather a guide how to do something that the product helps with - hope that makes sense. I have not done this yet, but it's on my list!