Emily Coleman

#general - October 18, 2024 at 04:44 PM

I'll be there! Really excited about this one.

#general - October 17, 2024 at 05:58 PM

Great question. I like that.

#general - October 17, 2024 at 03:58 PM

I did a demo with ShoutOut at SolarWinds, and wanted to do a trial, but we couldn't make it happen. Definitely looking forward to continuing the conversation in this new role. I'll send you a message!

#general - October 17, 2024 at 03:45 PM

Oh, that's a great idea!

#general - October 17, 2024 at 03:41 PM

I started a new job this week 🥳! My first priority is meeting with a LOT of people across product, marketing, sales, customer success, etc. I'd like to have a standard 3-5 questions I ask everyone, and I was curious what you all would ask your cross-functional stakeholders during your first 30 days. Here's what I have so far: • What role should customer advocacy play in the organization? Does it serve that function today? Why not? • What are the biggest pain points on your team related or unrelated to customer advocacy? What questions or problems come up most frequently? • How do you normally interact with customer marketing and advocacy? What worked well and what needs improvement?

#general - October 09, 2024 at 06:25 PM

I'll be there this year as well. Really looking forward to it!

#general - September 20, 2024 at 08:39 PM

Here is a slide I created with a hierarchy as an example. We are breaking out the reviews based on a few different criteria, including where we're sourcing the customer, their account size, and the account or contact persona, since we have a diverse product set, and certain review platforms perform better with specific personas.

#general - September 12, 2024 at 08:50 PM

Well, they are ... creative with how they modify it. So, I think there's some work to do there to get the content aligned with what they need. I have a handful of slides from our most recent pitch contest, and I'm going through them now to identify some patterns or commonalities in what they're putting together to implement in our phase 2 design.

#general - September 12, 2024 at 08:35 PM

I'm so glad you asked this. I'm definitely hoping to see other examples. This is ours, but I'm actually working on revamping it now. I think ours is too text heavy.

#general - September 12, 2024 at 07:42 PM

This is a little bit of a shot in the dark, but does anyone have a videographer they've worked with in India who they would recommend? This would be for the photography/video only, not production.

#general - August 15, 2024 at 09:40 PM

We have a gazillion products at SolarWinds, and somewhere in the neighborhood of 300K accounts. Can you tell me what you mean by customer comms and I can either give you details on what I've done, or I can point you in the right direction at SolarWinds.

#discussions - August 02, 2024 at 05:23 PM

Right now, we're using a pretty simple form in a survey tool (Alchemer). At some point, I'd like to move that to a Salesforce lead form so it can be properly routed, but it's a project that's on the backburner.

#general - July 17, 2024 at 10:07 PM

The short answer is weak executive sponsorship. The longer answer is that we really aren't in a place right now where we can offer customers the value that a CAB demands. This was one of the key initiatives that executives wanted when we started our advocacy program, but when it came time to recruit, plan meetings, and action on feedback, we couldn't get the support we needed from the teams that needed to be involved. It became a very high-energy project with only marginal benefits.

#general - July 17, 2024 at 06:07 PM

@Mason Sokana if you'll email me at <mailto:emily.coleman@solarwinds.com|emily.coleman@solarwinds.com>, I'll send it to you.

#general - July 17, 2024 at 06:05 PM

We just had our _*last*_ CAB meeting this morning. We're going to turn the lights off on ours. So, that's a bittersweet win for me.

#general - July 15, 2024 at 06:00 PM

Generally, when I'm putting together a pitch for more resources (platform or hiring), I include the following information: • Job description already drafted • How the KPIs we have set have impacted the business. For example, if you're looking for someone to run a reference program, I would say something like, our reference customers have influenced $X in pipeline and bookings, accelerated deal cycles by X days, and increased average deal size by X%. • Do some math to put together what the impact will be with an additional resource. For example, by bringing on additional headcount, we expect to support X% increase in matching reference calls, which should yield X% increase in the metrics above. If you can get really specific about your pain point and how a new hire will drive business or tie directly to a strategic OKR, it will be much easier for leadership to see how increasing headcount brings them value. It will also set your new hire up for success because it makes the job description clearer and tied to your department's objectives.

#general - July 12, 2024 at 06:59 PM

@Karilla Dyer it was happening much more frequently back in December. I know they have a tool that is supposed to catch AI-generated reviews. I asked what platform they used or how they were developing their LLM to screen for these, and the product team didn't want to go into further detail. I put them into Co-Pilot and asked the AI to tell me if they were likely fake or real, and it pretty readily identified the reviews I had flagged as fake.

#general - July 12, 2024 at 06:57 PM

@Erin Koerpel we weren't sourcing the reviews at all. They're part of G2's review sourcing function. My understanding from conversations with the product team is that they search LinkedIn and other 3rd party data sources to find contacts with similar job titles and invite them to leave reviews. This isn't based on any list or data we provide; it's just their own outreach. And yes, they're incentivized.

#discussions - July 12, 2024 at 05:24 PM

I did a demo with ShoutOut and their platform does this quite well!

#general - July 11, 2024 at 09:14 PM

@Katlin Hess totally not your fault, but I appreciate the follow through! I have escalated this before with our account team and it unfortunately keeps popping up, particularly with the G2 sourced reviews.

#general - July 11, 2024 at 08:10 PM

Have any of you dealt with fake reviews from G2 and their invite program? I'm kind of at my wit's end with monitoring a couple of our listings that contain pretty obviously fake or chatGPT generated reviews from customers and accounts that don't exist in our CRM.

#general - July 11, 2024 at 07:47 PM

Honestly, I'd see if you can do this with a very basic survey tool using logic. Collect the person's info first, ask them what they'd be interested in doing right now, and based on each response, send them to another page to complete activities. You can validate responses with screenshots, links, etc. and then have whomever is awarding swag look at the responses on the backend. That way you can do some testing and experimentation with the choices without a big commitment.

#discussions - June 28, 2024 at 09:22 PM

@Evan Huck, I agree and would never want to narrow the scope to a case study only. IMO, it's just too big of an ask for many organizations to start with a case study before they know and trust us or have even found value in the product.

#discussions - June 28, 2024 at 07:08 PM

@Shannon Howard, I 100% agree that focusing on discounts for a case study doesn't produce a good result. That would probably be at the bottom of list on how we would think about executing it.

#discussions - June 28, 2024 at 07:06 PM

@Lauren Stefano, oooh, that's a really interesting application of loss aversion. I might see if we can test whether prospects would rather avoid a price increase or losing a discount.

#discussions - June 28, 2024 at 06:23 PM

@Kristine Kukich we would probably have a similar experience, but even a small number of successes would help us diversify our sourcing for advocacy activities.

#discussions - June 28, 2024 at 06:21 PM

@Lauren Stefano and @Joel Primack, these are great points. Specificity upfront makes it more likely that we'd be able to follow through with it.

#discussions - June 28, 2024 at 05:44 PM

This is good to hear. My hunch was that it might be useful if for nothing else than to give me another channel to identify opportunities.

#discussions - June 28, 2024 at 05:33 PM

Happy Friday! I'm looking for some knowledge on a couple of ideas I'm working through with our team. 1. We have some blue-chip logos that I'd like to start moving toward doing advocacy activities. My initial idea is working with our CSM, Sales, Renewals, PR, and Corp Comms teams to identify a dozen or more strategic accounts and develop a 12-month advocacy plan for them that we could present and get approval for. Has anyone done something similar to this that they could share? 2. Do any of your organizations build advocacy activities into your sales or renewal contracts? If so, is this something that has converted into actual, successful content or engagement?

#discussions - June 28, 2024 at 05:15 PM

I'm happy to share our charter as well. Send me an email at <mailto:Emily.Coleman@solarwinds.com|Emily.Coleman@solarwinds.com> and I can send the file and our strategy deck.