Hey what's up Hi, everyone you need to go get her some of those treats again okay, I am recording this. So I hope that's okay with everyone. If it's not just let me know and I will unmute cord or turn off the recording when you talk. Oh, he's joining us this week. Doesn't make me nervous to have a co worker on here. What are you talking about? So, this week I think Julie Neumeister was gonna join us. chat a little bit but if not, we can always come up with more topics
I just saw some of you already today. Caitlin. Is it Caitlyn or Catlin?
It's Caitlyn. But it's spelled Catlin, and I keep saying I never had this issue before the pandemic. But now I think because people see my name is spelled. I get more Catlins than Caitlin's, but it's the Gaelic spelling of Caitlyn. Oh, I also feel like if you watch Game of Thrones, like Game of Thrones has a Catelyn Stark in it. And that also like sparked a bunch of Catlin's. Not Caitlin's.
Are you Gaelic?
Were Irish, but not like, my sisters have very normal names spelled normal ways. Like my parents just found this in a baby bucket and decided to name me, Caitlin, but with a strange spelling. So here we are.
When I named my son 18 years ago, we use baby books like baby name books to now you just search online, but yeah, back in the day. All right, let's
see if I have to do a product plug. But if you've heard of warmly what is it? Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's a free program because I use it because no one knows if it's Cara, or Cara. And so like when I send a zoom in by it says like the pronounciation of by Dave and it actually helps a lot.
Ooh, good to know. What is.
I'm pretty sure it's free, because I don't pay for it.
Please, so is it Cara or Cara? It's Kara. Sorry. I love hanging. I wanted to name my daughter that but I was like, I don't know, because nobody will know how to pronounce her name. And
yeah, it's like, I'm like 25 still happens all the time. Like, never got used to it. And then you just like get used to people not pronouncing your name right. And you're just like, don't even notice it.
My boss. Everybody will pronounce his it's gall G Al. And I just call him gal. And he's got the same first name as the other co founder. So I'm like, Oh, the gals. That's not how you say it, I guess. Are you corrected me?
I call my gal all the time.
I don't think he cares anymore.
It's always such an awkward thing. Like you never know when you should jump in and correct somebody or like, sometimes people say my name and then they just keep talking. And so then I feel weird going back but like then the next time they think My name is Catlin, and I never said anything. So now do I say something? It's a whole thing. So I would definitely pick up normally
is you get stuck in this vicious circle you can't get out of you're like well, I lost my app. So you just go like a couple of months and they're calling me RV. It's good scared.
My next door neighbors are like 80 years old and they have mispronounced my son's name since the first time we met them five years ago and I just don't have the heart to correct them
and especially now like what am I going to do?
And he's he's six and now he's like, why do they call me that like just
because we just love people and we just let them do what they need. Good morning. It's
just a nickname they have for you. It's special.
My dogs, I'm sorry, right before the call my husband message me, oh, we're gonna run to the post office. And I'm like, That doesn't seem like a great idea. I'm home with the dogs and a seven year old. So if you hear noise in the background, somebody should
give you a tip. Okay, go to stop video in the little arrow. And then go to Video Settings. Okay, then go to Audio, and then go to suppress background noise. Hi. Boom
Well, there it is. Yeah, there we go. Can you hear my dog now? Oh, no. Oh, you sound like Darth Vader now. You're just kidding. I am your father.
All right, is Julie here. I don't see Julie here. So
it's there.
Let's see if he was going to come late. And she wanted to ask a question. Does anybody have any questions that they'd like to talk about this week?
I have one thing I'm struggling with. That's more on the customer marketing side, less advocacy. But we have a lot of different options for emails that people can opt in or out of. So some of them are very product based, like your gift card balance is low in G two, or I don't know you've got a new, you've got a new alert, or you've got a new review that's been left. But then we also have our marketing campaigns that we're sending from a marketing perspective. And then we're in the process of rolling out a new CMS tool. So that will also be a set of emails that people can opt in and out of, and would just love to hear how people are managing that. Or if it does not roll up to you as a customer marketer, who does it roll up to so I can pass this to someone else.
Like that. So I can delegate? Does anybody have an answer? They want to throw?
I was like, in and out of that question, because I'm so tired and like you got home at two o'clock in the morning from LA but uh, so marketing ops, you're talking about, like, all the emails that go out to customers all the time.
Yeah. And like, everyone keeps point like pointing people to me saying like, well, your customer marketing. So you deal with all of the emails across the org, that are getting sent to customers. And I was like that, but not really. So I was just curious, like how other people deal with this,
I don't feel like it should be on you to figure out when those emails, I mean, it should be on maybe on you to figure out when those emails should be sent during the customer journey. But as far as like how many every all teams are sending is like should not be on you. So we put that over to marketing ops should really own that and feel that in their heart, right, that's their it should be their job is to like, make sure that anybody that we're emailing prospects, or customers or advisors aren't getting peppered with emails, so we set up that kind of parameter in Marketo that says like, it customers cannot receive two or more than two emails a week. And if Marketo tries to send it, it will be suppressed and they won't get it. So that's kind of how we manage that. And then we have a marketing calendar in Asana, were all teams, customer facing prospect facing, who are putting out the programs are putting in when their emails are gonna go out. And that just like forces us to be a little bit more forward thinking in our programs. So if we want to get something out the door, we know that we have to build it. Not at the last minute because we're not going to get a spot on that marketing calendar. And we just let see us do their things and their emails from their Gmail or from groove and then we're just kind of like, a little bit more strategic and processed on the marketing side of the house.
I was gonna say the same thing. We don't have an ops person so it all rolls up to me in customer marketing. And we've got like a marketing Google Calendar in our Google workspace that everyone can see. And I, I have like all of my webinar invitations and newsletters and things like that built out for like the full quarter. And then if anybody else approaches me and is like, hey, we need a one off send for like a product update, or like we just finished our NPS survey. So like sending out a thank you email for everyone that responded, they've just got to come through me. And I'll be like, Okay, well, you know, these are your options.
And that's it.
But it's just the easiest way to do it is put a calendar in front of everyone.
Yeah, we have in that's how we're managing, like marketing programs. But it's like these other more transactional emails that everyone's like, well, you should own how people opt in and out of those, like, I really don't think I should be in that sort of what I'm hearing,
I think that comes from the product. So my last company, we did this, so we had like the operational emails, which were like, you know, you just added new users to your account, or you just did this or whatever. And those were completely managed by the product, there became a point in time where we were like, hey, we'd love to see these emails, and maybe have some input into what they say what they look like, but that was owned by our product team. And then we also had the ability to opt into multiple categories of emails. We didn't start that way, we started with just do you want to receive marketing emails, and then we had 60% of our base was opted out of like, important emails. So then we transition to we have event emails, we have training and education emails, we have, like what we had like four or five categories. And then those were the marketing emails that I was responsible for. But it kind of helped to start by looking at like, what are the type of emails that we typically send to customers, and then categorizing them and deciding, like, who gets which type of emails, and then working backwards with marketing ops, and then our product team ultimately to kind of migrate to a different flow? Yeah, that's
the add to that, like, when you're getting to the point where you're sending too many emails and this is happening, then that's potentially when you have to start looking into a walk me. So you can do kind of inept messaging to kind of anything that you want to push out your customers in, like a different vehicle.
Yeah, that's, oh, that's exactly where I'm at, where I'm just like, trying to, I'm trying to collect all of these things. But then also, like, I don't want to own the product emails. But I'm worried if I don't, that they're gonna send too many. And so yeah, I think I need to really just like sync with the product owner, and talk about like, what is our ideal state? And then how do you own this with marketing influence if needed? But then how do we make sure that's reflected in the journey map? So that we're not getting out of control? Does that Caitlin, do you
have any other channels that you're using to share product updates, and like only relying on email? Or any other sort of like, yeah, we use reach customers where they are, we use App cues.
And then there's also like a notification center that's going to be rolled out within the product. So it'll be sort of like a not a Facebook feed. But like, it'll be a little thing in the corner that you can expand and it'll show you your notifications. Okay, so what
what we've seen work well, and something we started as of January, because we at the beginning, we're kind of bucketing our product updates into a customer newsletter, which goes to everyone who's subscribed to email. And the engagement rate was pretty low like it just because it was a lot of content. And like people, obviously, attention spans are limited. But what we did was we pulled out those product specific updates, and started sending a product like only email to our primary users, or admins and our big owner, so the people who care the most like the end user who cares most about what those feeds like those product updates are, and our product team has, they use Zendesk to build out our Help Center. And so each month we have like a landing page or a landing page, but we have a dedicated page for that month's release notes that we linked to in the email that goes to only our end users. We do in the emails we highlight like the top three like most important things that have been rolled out that month, and then we linked to the release notes that like essentially give more detail and like have like more like content that they can like look at to understand it a bit more. And with that we've seen like a huge increase in engagement overall, we have not had any subsidies we're sending to like a very specific, we're sending the right people the kind of content they care about. And then all the while, we also have Pendo pop ups that also go out like once a month when all the release notes are available to that same type of audience. So if someone's not subscribed to an email, for whatever reason, they unsubbed A while ago, or they're just not subscribed to receive emails, they're still getting the enact notifications in Pendo.
On the Job,
yeah. And I will say like, we then as we moved from our newsletters dropping, we've measured, we're hitting our customers something like over seven times a week. And I was like that you don't all see the problem in this. And so what had happened was we shift from the newsletters and all of the email outreach into inap. And then there was the same jockeying that started to happen over in app messaging. And so really, what you do have to do at some point, whether it's through your marketing ops, like Lindsay was mentioning is you have to have a workflow where people are submitting, and there's full visibility into the calendar. And there is that suppression limit of like, there's only so many we're going to do, because no matter what channel you do, you'll start to saturate. And once you hit that, that tipping point, you start to lose threat. Once you're over that threshold, you lose people minimum come back, right, they start to click out the axe on the messaging without even reading it. Right. So something to be cognizant of no matter what channel there is, you still have to have your almost like SLAs you have to have your limits and guardrails up.
Yeah, you make a good point, Ari. Both I and another person that worked out sales hacker, before we found the openings for sales hacker, we had been on the email list and unsubscribed. And then we ended up working for sales hacker. But it was because there were constant emails. So we had to work on that. But from my point of view, it seems more like a life. A lifecycle marketing, job responsibility, even though I think a lot of customer marketing people get those responsibilities. You're on video. Okay,
we are currently hiring for a customer lifecycle manager post sales. Have anyone
saw that?
Are you hiring in Canada potentially? Totally. Offered someone your way. Someone just came up to me. I'll send you on your way.
Yeah, so we're gonna have like the added element of sins throughout the journey too. So it's not just like in app and emails. It's like, also,
I want to be in your journey. Alright, we have lots of questions this week. So both Julie and Tiffany joined and hope and Kat both posted something. Let's let hope go next. If she's still here. And I don't see oh, yeah, there she is hope. Do you want to go next?
Sure. Hi, everyone. I'm HK mascot. I work for progress software. And I was asking about user conferences and calves. Are you doing them virtually? Are you doing them in person? I know at my company, we're probably going to do them in person. I mean, in virtually this year, and I'm kind of disappointed about that because I think people are ready to meet in person.
Andrea said hybrid that sounds I don't understand how you do a hybrid event. Do you want to share a little about that. So
for Cabot, it was always intended to be in person. And then when we launched it COVID hits. So we've only been doing them virtual, but we do have customers like so we're based in Chicago, we have customers in Chicago who are on our cab, and then we have customers who are in the UK who don't fly in for a cab. So we'll invite our local customers, whoever's in the area wants to come to the office, we'll host them there. And then we'll have everyone else who's either international or like, you know, another in other parts of the country who can't make it dial in. So that's that's what I mean when I say hybrid, like giving customers the option to come in and like actually meet them in person and like, you know, do a little bit more than just the virtual only. And then for our annual user conference, that's in September, it will be mostly in person. However, there will be hybrid elements like we're gonna livestream, the keynote, like our product showcase, like the big the big content sessions, not the breakouts. But something we're thinking about doing for the breakouts is instead of like having, like trying to livestream a breakout session because that's not great for the virtual like attendee doing like a news desk. And so like, let's say someone you know, gives a talk on whatever the topic is in person, then they would go or the news desk, which would be like kind of a live stream where they would recap, like their session information and like high level bullets, like the most important key takeaways, just so like there is an element there for anyone who can't make it in person. We did talk about like pre recording some things, but like, again, not the best kind of like experience overall. So we are definitely leaning towards having more of an in person experience but want to be want to make sure we cater as much as we can to those that virtual audience. So that's what we're working towards right now.
I have a quick question. So when you're doing both virtual and in person, like what is the budget? Like, does it when you add, you know, obviously in person is expensive, right? And then you do the live stream part? Does that increase your budget by 1020 30%? Or?
Yeah, so we are working with an AV team. per tablet, we haven't locked them down. Yeah, but we've got a few quotes. And if you are trying to do the live stream, in addition to the on site, because the onsite stuffs pretty simple, right? It's, it sounds like it's it's like not not as complex, but when you add that layer of like live stream, depending upon what type of platform you're trying to stream to, it gets a little complex and it does increase the price. So that is something to be aware of, like you're not gonna it's like a whole nother RFP, essentially. For having like a virtual experience as well.
Do you do gifts as well for cabs? And like virtual people?
Um, so our, our our I don't know, that question was directed to me, but our cab kind of asked that we don't send them gifts, mostly because a lot of them are like enterprise, enterprise organizations, they can't really accept gifts a lot of the time and like, to them, like, what they want to get out of it is really just understanding how other customers, especially ones that are in their, like, their market segment, are using our platform, like, that's really what they hope to get out of it. We do, like, you know, we want to take them to dinner, we want to like do little things. But as far as like gifting, they're not the type of group. Because they're all executives, I should mention that too, like gifting is not really necessary to get their buy in. Like they're really there to learn how others in the same boat as them are using our platform and like trying to think of new ways to like do things and like getting that firsthand from other users. But for our conference, yes, we probably will be sending virtual attendees like a gift box. And then we will have obviously like onsite swag for the in person.
Nice. No, we are. We wanted to, you know, cater to both audiences. But we didn't want to go but hybrid and do virtual. So we are also doing a roadshow series instead. So we've picked three locations to minimize the number of people that are in the room hoping to make people more comfortable. But we also have an executive audience. So just bringing them to three different locations. So they can be more intimate with their peers, as well as helping registration. And we made them to like half day event. So they'll come in on a Thursday for the afternoon. The theme that I put together as a league of a league of our own, so it's all like baseball themed, so we're taking them to a baseball game at night. So it's an event that's like out that outside. We don't have to worry about those fears there. And then they'll come back for the second half of the day where it's all like peer to peer networking conversations about using the product.
And do you like baseball? Because I have a feeling you do?
Yes, Michael.
When I picked that
you're having a great week. You're like yeah, baseball started. Yes, yes. Yes. I've liked the idea of roadshows. I don't think I'd actually want to go do them because I'm like, being on video is a lot for me. I'm like, I don't like people to see me. I have to get all ready and everything. I don't like to be live and stuff. But it does sound exciting to be there and going and meeting different people. So yeah. Oh, and somebody asked, Do you all pay travel costs for your live cab events, attendees?
We aren't paying travel for ours. The only people that we're paying for is we're going to have like one customer per location, like actually give like an hour long success story type spiel, and we are gonna pay all their TNT for that. Yeah,
Andre, that is a good point with the road shows. So what's working good for us, so I didn't do the cab. I do them every year in April, and I didn't do one and we changed it up to the CEO roadshow. So I am on the road with Chris and we just were in LA last night. Which is why I look so tired. Up and it's been so much fun, we present the roadmap at these happy hours. And then Chris will kind of like go off during the day and meet with all the companies in the major cities of our customers and late stage prospects, thank you. And then we have we party at night. And it's been, it's been really fun and a lot more, I think, powerful than the calves that I throw in just one area. So kind of going out to them is has been fun. I'm not going to the East Coast ones, but it's been a nice pivot.
Tiffany asked if anybody wants answers going back to the beginning, what is the strategy that you use to create or select the cap members? We talked a little bit about this maybe last couple of weeks ago, I think.
Because people said, there's so many different ways you can go by big brands, right? By logos, you can go by Arr, you can go by who really loves us, or who gives a lot of feedback. And everybody has an opinion, right? So taking all that data into that account from product teams and marketing teams and so forth CSM teams? What how did you guys all dummy it down and decide that you were going to invite 100 Select 10 or, you know, what were the requirements? All that
you do like a wedding wedding lists, you know, you have your like a team B team, or a group. Now I'm not a good person to answer this question. So already go ahead.
Well, I was just gonna say and this is not something that I came up with. It was something that was taught to me from one of my mentors who ran a lot of tabs and the way that she set it up was she had executive cabs, so II cabs, and then she had cab double A which was customer advocacy, advisory boards. And so it was your top of your top your top 10 to 15 advocates. And what they would do is run a two day event. And they would have both of their executives and advocates Gabs show up the same time. First night, all it was was a little cocktail hour meet and greet. And they would have the executives and the top advocates intermixing. And they would just welcome them, tell them about what the next day is the next day, they which was it was just a one day really a one day event. So one and a half, like the night and the next day, for the morning because executives tend to be morning people and I'm generalizing. But they tend to be there was breakfast and meet where they went through their executive crab programming, whatever you set that up with the CTO involved in product feedback and visionary stuff. And during that time, they would actually take we would take our cab numbers or double a cab and advocacy members do something like golf carting something fun is an activity together. And then at lunch, they would come back and they would have it and then after lunch, because executives always have to get back to stuff. So you'd let them get back through and have a little bit then at dinner, the way that we sat everyone was executive Next, your advocate next to executive next to advocate. And the reason for that was your advocates are contagious, right, your best of your best are contagious. And so when you have them next to the executives, it leaves them on these notes of like this is a brand that we're highly engaged with. And it leaves them on this very it's it's a contagious environment. And it rubs off. And so we notice, because originally, they were completely separate events, when we did that, we had much better follow up engagement in the second and third time we were doing those events.
Oh, that's great. It's also when you split them up like that it takes them out of their groups of people that they might already know and things like that and makes them go and kind of talk and be around other people. Just to say a couple of weeks ago when we talked about this, and I think both Lesley and maybe Ari to have done this where you ask people in bringing them into the advocacy program, what they might be interested in doing. I did that in my last position. And then I would just I would also look at people that had done other advocacy activities for us that seemed similar in some way to what you know, the cabs or whatever else we were trying to do and start inviting them if I didn't have enough people but the surveys
one last thing I'll say is for who should be in the cab like what types of executives write it because that look at what what the takeaway What is your outcome that you're trying to get and that will kind of drive who your personas are. But for like the way I always think about things like this and I tried to as often as the why out what right or why what out you know, we go back and forth on those but like, why and it's visionary and your executive level. What is the why that you're trying to get it roadmap and vision is it market placement, and then at that How old are the what level? Right? That's their strategic. So who's playing in the strategy and deployment of your product software program, whatever that is. And then down to the tactical, which is really where I love my habit gets in at the tactical level, how are they actually getting in there? The nitty gritty, right of it and using the product, right? So for those calves really think about what that one singular outcome is? What are you trying to get out of that, and that will kind of help you focus down.
Thank you, Ari. Cat had something she wanted to add. And I wanted to add something quick from Lesley from a couple of weeks ago mentioned that she had a, like a list of kind of the types of customers or most wanted list, something like that of people that she would want to get into her programs and things like that. And I just thought that was a really good way to think about that what, you know, setting aside what you have, and really looking at what you want out of the program and the people that will be there. Go ahead, cat. Yeah, I
think in regards to the question of who and how you select the people, I really leaned on our product leaders. So we worked directly with our chief development officer who was our executive sponsor for the cab and he said, Hey, I would love a cab, I need your assistance, I'm I want someone to help me with event logistics program management. And we agreed that his team would be in charge of our the the agenda, the content, and really the follow up when it comes to Hey, this is the feedback that you receive from our cast members, please pass along this feature feedback enhancement feedback, so that your product teams can either get in contact with these team members directly or start implementing it and where they think it best fit in our roadmap. When I started meeting with the, with our executive sponsor, I asked him, Who are we looking to select. And he said, since we're growing in cloud, and we're we just launched SAS six months ago, we need to look at some of the folks there that are in that area. Preferably people are already deployed with our platform for more than a year or so so that we can get their concrete feedback. And with that criteria from our product leader, I developed a list some of the top accounts and we focus on Enterprises for this instance. And in the future, we're going to launch a cab focused on our commercial. So digital natives. So I think for for your best. Next steps is really working with that executive sponsor, whoever you're working with on the cab to say, Hey, who are you looking to recruit, because I can pull something together. And when we do have that list, I encourage them to select no more than 10 to 12. Unfortunately, we ended up with 20. Because marketing sales, customer success, everyone wanted everyone on their mother on the cab. So if I could give you a suggestion, try not to have more than 1215, I think might be a good number still, but 20 on my end, I'm struggling with that right now. So that's my big feedback and advice. And really just work with maybe even the personal invite touches and invitations coming from your executive sponsor, if you do work with product directly, we hand selected and pick those individuals out rather than collecting a nomination form because then that's a lot of noise. And really the cap should be a small intimate group of whoever you want to have on there. So I hope that helps and happy to answer more questions offline,
too. So you've got thanks, cat. Yeah, I'll reach out to you. Go ahead, Lesley.
I love raising hands thing by the way, guys, that's down at the bottom under reactions, or if you're on a Mac. Option. Why? So?
Um, yeah, no, I was just going to add, since I didn't hear anybody talk about CSM. So if I have like five seats left, then I'll go to the CSM to and ask them, have you Do you have anybody that's super passionate about loving us. But it's kind of like we love Santos so much. But fuck, you gotta get it together in this one area. And like, that's what I'm looking for. I'm looking for those passionate people that love us, but they believe in our mission. And they want to help influence the platform. And it could be in going like a little bit past that. It could be someone who's about to churn. But still, you doesn't want to, but and that if we can save them with a cab, like that's a massive win. And another metric that you can add on to your CAP program.
How do you test that, like really get the feeling for can we save this person? Or are they going to turn and if they're going to turn? I don't want to invite them to a cab and influence the other people there.
It's more it's using kind of NPS so I'll run the you know the passive and then I'll run that list with the CSMs and just kind of chatted out with them like you know, are they are one foot out the door or can we like turn this around?
Gotcha. Okay, more questions then. Okay, and Julie I think Julie still has a question.
Oh, sorry. I think I accidentally raised my hand. But I don't have a question at this time.
Okay. All right. Um, let's see. All right. Do we want to talk more about cabs? Or does anybody have another topic that you want to jump into?
I'm hiring for a guess we're seeing your senior role senior customer marketing manager on my team. So if you and it's not the lifecycle role, it is going to be like with advocacy, reference program and all that stuff. So I'm, I'm very excited, Callie, my direct report is going to go into kind of like content for just providing exclusive content to our supercenter community. So it's going to be great. And so now I get to kind of like backfill slash level up that program, so I'm very excited at the roll. It's not even out it's not even on our website. I have the job wreck in a Google Doc. So I just wanted to like you heard it here first type of thing. Wow, we could you share,
like your whole org structure? Like what are the different roles? And what do each of them do?
As far as like, the marketing team or just
like cuz you said lifecycle, and then like content for your customers? And obviously, your advocacy program is huge.
Yeah. So no, I mean, I, we we just have a big marketing team. So we do have that content marketing team, we have demand gen side of the house, obviously, where that lifecycle marketer will report into and then, for me, it's just me and Callie right now. And then. Yeah, Kelly is gonna move over. So I did have a headcount for I don't know. You would know us and our headcount and how hard they are to get which is ridiculous. But I think I'll have a backfill her she was an associate at a later date. But right now, I just want to focus on getting that senior position.
I just chatted you, Lesley. Just an FYI.
Okay. Yes.
Oh, let me just I'll put the
Oh, I get that hint, hint, Tiffany?
No, I'll put the I'm just gonna put the Google doc in our chat. And if you guys know anyone.
Okay, so I threw something together this week that I wanted to share with you all. I'm going to put it in zoom chat once I find that screen again. And it's just a collection of some of the resources that from either the community and or what we've started to have in Miro. And I thought this might be a little bit easier for everyone to take a look. And obviously, if you have feedback, I would love it. So there's that. And who else has questions?
I'm really quick, Ashley. I met Robert, from lean data last night. And Rob Simmons. Yes. And we were talking about you and how we be friends. Because we live in the same area. We have one baby and we should be best friends.
Yeah, we should, you know, and I will. It's so funny with Rob, because I take 100% credit for him working at lean data because he was an advocate for us. And I introduced him to our CEO as a customer to talk with and then he went and poached him. So I'm just like, he wouldn't be such a fan of our company wouldn't have worked here if it wasn't for the programs that I'm running. So you're welcome. He's amazing. So I make sure to tell everybody that including our CEO.
Yeah, for sure. I'm not just in customer marketing, but I also brought someone awesome to the team. And you should remember that when it's time for my raise. All right, looks like Tim joined us this week. Hi, Tim. How are you? Hey, good. How
are you all? Sorry for that.
We were just talking about, oh, customer marketing responsibilities and getting people into cabs and having online and offline or hybrid events this year. Do you have anything? Oh, well, do you have anything that you want to bring up? And we can talk about and then Tiffany has a question too.
Yeah, so for me I think I've been mainly and this might be product driven and mainly on bias because I'm current They were working for a company that works asynchronously very much. So I'm looking at how can we use whiteboarding to empower customer advocacy throughout multiple types of programs? So for that, I mean, sort of an anatomy anatomy of what working with us looks like on different types of advocacy. What is the process of a, a testimonial or a reference activity? And maybe some loom videos included in that whiteboard of people who have participated previously to evangelize their experience?
Oh, yeah, I see. That's a good point. I I've joined I on mural now. And I've seen that a lot of these companies have like a customer journey lifecycle or something. I know that's a big ask, but then drilling down into that, I think would be really helpful for us to be able to see processes. I don't know if that's just me, though.
Yeah. And I just want to apologize, I'm out of breath, right? deliveries, I just lifted up a flight of stairs.
And so I put you on video. It's fine. All right. Well, if you have any specific questions, or, you know, if anybody has any feedback for Tim, then we can talk about it, or you can reach out to him or whatever works. Do you have any specific questions about that, Tim, any like pieces you want to drill down into?
I think right now I'm thinking through specifically, one thing that we've never had in the organization. So I'm new to the company, and I'm new to building out the function. It's been wild wild west, sort of for quite a while as it is the same story, a lot of organizations face, which is you don't know where your customers have been used, where their logos are features, etc. And so I'm trying to pull that together from a historical standpoint, but also put together a very usable primary database for customer evidence that then I can break out into multiple dashboards for different use cases or different teams throughout the company. So if you have any specific things that you have included in your evidence database, or any tools that you used for your evidence database, I'd be happy to hear it.
Awesome. And while we're on that topic, I am looking for templates, kind of from anyone in customer marketing, that might be okay with me sharing them on that kind of mini website I showed you, just so we can kind of build up a place of resources for everyone that wants to look into that type of thing. I know when I'm on YouTube and looking at videos, I'm constantly stopping and snapshotting screens of, you know, different slides and stuff. But that's not the easiest way to do it. All right, Tiffany, we're finally getting to you. Sorry.
That's okay. You're on mute. Oh, there you go.
So I have a quick question, because I use Influitive. But not all companies, right. And many firms don't use or have a platform to manage your advocates and ask for reviews and so forth. So how is everyone else driving reviews, because another way that I do it is I get happy like from Gainsight, I get a list of happy clients and we pull all their email addresses, we scrub it up against all the people that are opted out right suppression list, then we take like, I just manually create these small little lists like 1000 2000 names, I give it to do two, they run the campaign. In the past I we've also done in HubSpot, where we send it out as well. How are other people driving reviews. And then of course, I reached out in my community, but at some point, you're gonna like, tap out all the good people that have written reviews, right? And they can only update or renew it every 12 months. So how do people generate new reviews? What are some ideas? And how do you manage this? And then if anyone, how do you manage references? If you have your 20 references? Are they just on a spreadsheet? Is there a tool that you actually use? Because at the end of the day, it seems like everything is a spreadsheet, I export this out of Influitive? It's a spreadsheet. So when people ask me there's no real secret to to how to manage it. I mean, away yeah.
Having and, you know, take this with a grain of salt or whatever you want to say, because I do work at CR advocate now, having worked in Influitive, you know, I thought I was like, Oh, this is a great program because you can do all of these things. But the manual work, at least for me, I wasn't given access to set up Zapier and my marketing ops team was like, No, we can do it for you. And I'm like, No, you can't because I'd have to change it every time I change a challenge. So you can't do it for me. But it was the same with the spreadsheet and we only had so many people that actually joined Influitive the community and so many people that were like, I want to participate, but I'm not joining a community. So it was still spreadsheets like it automated some of it for us. But then all back to spreadsheets. I don't know, Ari, any thoughts there?
I've done it many, many ways. I think that the the groundwork of management, you know, to give advice, I'd want to know, you know, where your pain points are, and where your friction points are, and then can kind of work because there's many ways to do it, even probably with the tools that you already have. The biggest thing for me is how you gain trust to avoid that kind of black market of advocacy. That was Kara. I know, she's here somewhere in the black market of advocacy, right? And so you have to gain the trust, right of of your sales team and then of your account owners in that processing. So SLAs are to me, do you? Are you running? SLAs? Do you have SLAs for your reference program?
We do but SLAs are i So how I do it is basically our CEO, our old because we're going through a merger right now. So all everything our CEO is no longer our CEO, but he used to stay up and I'm up at night. That's what keeps me up at night reviews getting in, he's like, we got to beat we got to beat financials constantly. Like, okay, but you got to do this volume versus good quality reviews, right? What is it that we want to do, there's a balance that they keep trying to draw, I'm like, Okay, we're gonna do this volume, we're gonna get three, one somewhere, because out of the 1000 users, someone's going to be unhappy, that engineer guy, the guy who wants tons of features and insights, he's not getting it, he's not happy, he's going to write a ton. So three bad reviews is going to kill our 10, five reviews or 55 reviews that we got. So try to Kanzi tells like volume, but you have to look at big picture. And there's a balance, right. And there's this, of course secret sauce that they use methodology wise, and I drive a ton of reviews. And I'm the only driver reviews. RCS team does not really help with this reality. They never help if they can each 30 bodies drive one review a quarter, that would be another 120 reviews a year that I didn't have to do, but it's solely on me. And then he's always pushing volume. Okay, volume, here we go volume, watch our score go down. So it's like a trick. And I tried to explain this to them. But it's just, it's not registering?
Yeah, I mean, I was in a similar situation where I was being we were being compared to completely out not a competitor of ours, we're being competitive Dropbox on Salesforce AppExchange 5000 reviews, and like, we have 10% of those in customers right now that like there's no, you're gonna reach 5000 No matter what. But I actually did an internal research study on reviews. And because of a certain marketplace was run on our search engine, I could see exactly how the reviews were surfaced and how people were accessing volume is, is a is a mistaken game actually, in in the b2b business now, b2c, but in the b2b business, what it is, is time based, because what we end up doing is we run a split, and we run a campaign once a quarter. And so you have these batches of reviews, that all come in, within a couple of weeks of each other, and then you have nothing for three months, and then you have batches, and then you run into and when people are coming in, they want to see the newest thing, they're not going back because it's SAS, our platforms change so quickly, right? That our product a year ago is different than our product today. And so they're looking for the last couple. So what you really need to do is establish a program where you have a drip, right? You set a benchmark like for this, you take how many customers you have you say we want at least 35% of our customers to be leaving reviews. How many of that do we do? So we set a benchmark of five a month, right? So every month, we have five new customers coming in, and then you can set your target account by when they do it. So the next year, you can go back to them and say, Hey, this is your month. Do you mind if you go in and update that review? Take two minutes for you to do this. So you have a much more reliable Senate and kind of forget it method. But that is actually producing much higher value for people who are looking into your company. Right now. There is a no whole other game, right? You know, like Gartner peer Insights is trying to push like, get a minimum of 50 to be a Gartner customer. And with all of our reviews are based on an hour Gartner quadrant, or magic quadrant is being based on this? And I was like Oh really? Because let's look at the Magic Quadrant. We beat them out in every category and added to it and they didn't but they still made it. Oh, well. We're updating it. You know,
it's like a play type thing. Yeah. I go up head on with them all the time. It's like you don't there's no trust in your review sites. I'm not going to send people to go write reviews when you can't tell me when your email was sent out how they validate it. And most of my clients we have a lot of developers that are in India Yeah, it's 95% of the clients that are in India that write reviews that never gets posted, ever and all my clients are really good. I'm like, You can't do that. You can't assume because they're in India, they're not real. They have LinkedIn profiles. They work for Deloitte and Touche, like, they're real people. But it's so frustrating. Yeah. Gartner insights? All that is just, and okay, so and even, and being able to have access to ours to the CEO, I'm like, Okay, well, we have this many enterprise accounts, we have these many happy ones, then you do the math. And it's like, well, this is why we only have 1% of enterprise reviews, because our account base with enterprise clients is little. So it's like, you got to do the math, you can't just keep telling me to update every quarter 10%, when we're not growing at a 10% rate, I can't get 10% more enterprise reviews, because we don't have the clients. But it's just yeah, so really,
that's why I call it the well, right, because it's not an infinite pool of limited source, when you drop down, especially like even in references. When you're dropping down into the specific use cases, like it needs to be healthcare with choruses, its community, and it has to be a VP of product. And you're like, I've got like, three to choose from at this point. Right? So you have to be very specific at that level. But back to your references question, I would need to know what the process is to be able to. And we don't have to do that now. Because I know we're out of time. But I've done a ton with reference management.
That's nine minutes.
That's one of the things that I like started my focus on because I looked at reviews. And I was like, You know what, that's a fire that I'll get my hand slapped on all day, because of the value add that reviews are actually pushing to the company. But references, close deals, references shorten time to close, right? So there's an actual, measurable and attributable, you know, ROI to references in the now write reviews, there's a long term play. And there's lots of attribution is extremely tricky, no matter how great the inside engines are on the backside of them, right. But references are there. So that's a topic that's near and dear to my heart of how I like to go about solving that from a manual way to a scaled way. Right? So you know, we can we can talk about if you want to talk about now I can I just block. And I don't want to mansplain on this being very self conscious right now.
Well, I have to interrupt you, because we have a lot of people with questions and people raising their hands, and they've been really patient and I am awful at interrupting people. So that is my fault. Andrea said, lean on your customer facing teams for reviews, we see great results when our implementation team asks immediately following implementation go live. I thought that was really good. We also in my last position would send a review ask rate after people renewed so that was another thing. Tim says I don't see how happy customers each month I have a planned utilization database campaign, where I look at things like who's used features, who's used integrations, then build individual campaign messaging for those users based on the campaign and do some initial outreach prior to the Ask coming from trust radius. Catlin has a lot to share with us from G to on the 22nd. So everybody come and bite everyone, you know? Well, just in customer marketing anyways. Gartner also pulled one job because
he and
I just assume it's part of it. Okay. And then Julie had a thought on gain site. And go read that in the messages. And then both Kara and Ashley, Ashley, do you want to go ahead because you still have your hand raised? And Kara, I am so sorry. You've been super patient.
I was just going to add really quickly that what's worked really well for me on deciding like volume versus higher scores is every month I have a tracker where I track ourselves against our competitors, or at least our top competitors. And I track how many reviews have they driven? What is their current score, if there's anything specific that I want to dig into as far as the like implementation or support or whatever those are like, I can do that too. But my last company was all about volume. Our competitors were getting hundreds of reviews every week. And so that was my focus. And here where I'm at now, it's a lot less about that. And what we need to do is maintain our score. And so I've been able to make a case to our executive team that like hey, I'm probably going to drive less reviews than I did last year. But what we are focused on is only nines and 10s. So we are only going to get the best reviews. We're still going to maintain our top spot in our grid, but we're not going to have you know those lower scores bringing us down so I think just Tracking tracking the competitors. And just showing that you have a strategy behind it can help if you feel like you don't need as much volume as other people are putting, you know, pressure on you to get
Thank you, Andrea. And Kara, did you want to share something? Yeah,
mine was mostly about Tiffany. So I do work for Jane site. So I was having the same issue. Like I literally had a CSM. And he said, I have 10 references I use all the time. And I can't tell you what those are. And I was like, that frustrated me so much. Because one no one's tracking that no one's getting, like any type of recognition for doing these reference calls. So I added in my NPS survey, do you want to be a reference? It's like the last question yes or no, super easy. So now I can reach out and be like so and so at this company from your org wants to be a reference. And then I don't know how familiar you are with reporting. But I also do it if I need to find a reference for like, a super easy reference, like a small SMB or something like that. And I can totally show you how to do it super easy and saves a ton of time.
Yeah. Okay, well, now we are almost at time. But yeah, thank you, Kara, I used so I built the community at my last company. And then once I started building that it turned into like our base of where we would find people for advocacy, because I was already having conversations and building relationships with people and finding out how excited they were about software. But one of the great things about now working with Ari is he's on another side where he's never used community. And I've only ever used community. So it's fun to throw ideas back and forth. We're learning from each other and trying to put together more resources for everyone else to learn to. So one, if you have any suggestions, or you ever want to share or do something in one of these calls, we could have like three or four people share in one call. So anytime you want to just let let us know. And yeah, I'm here to really help educate and help everyone be successful. So whatever I can do as your community manager that you got thrown into, let me know.
All right, awesome. Thanks, Mary.
Thank you. I think that all kinda ended up for the week. An hour seems to be about a good amount of time for everyone. So maybe we'll just stick to that. And, you know, say hi to me anytime in chat because I'm always around in a little chatty in case you can't tell. Thanks, everyone, for coming. Thank you. You too. Thanks, Mary. Bye, you too. Bye.
