Hi all - let's discuss customer advocacy programs, as in "hey customer, become a (named champion) or join our (named) advocacy program." If you have a named program, do you also have Influitive or Base or some other place for customers to log in to? Or do you just maintain a list of everyone opted in? If not Influitive/Base, what tech do you use to help you manage your advocates and keep track of what types of activities they want to participate in? I'm working on some ideas for 2025 and want to see how others are thinking about planning their programs for next year. My goal is to have a group of customers I can easily invite to participate in advocacy activities. Thank you!!

Looking for an impactful way to say "thank you" to customers who traveled across the country to join us on stage for a huge event. Other than sending swag or some other gift, how have you said thank you? Thank you for your ideas :)

Hi all - I've been asked to organize an in person CAB meeting this fall - like in less than 2 months 🙂. It will be a stand alone meeting. The only other time we all met in person was in Q1 at our annual user conference. I am putting together a budget and wondering if I need to cover flights and getting people to the venue - or only costs once they arrive at the venue. We will likely be in Scottsdale, AZ as very nice resort - but not the Phoenician, they were so hard to work with and had no availability.
Please use emoji ✈ if I should pay for flights, and 🚗 if it's ok to ask the customer to pay for transportation. Thank you!

Hi all - looking for ways to encourage prospects and customers to join our VIP events at Dreamforce. These are VP and C suite Finance and Product execs. Curious how you have driven attendance at intimate meals with your execs as bigger events. Or what you have seen others do at these large events. Thank you!

Does anyone have a doc you are willing to share that outlines all the steps (and who is responsible for them) for customers speaking at events? We need to document the process and roles as we have had some confusion recently - I'd love to see how you all are handling it and if you have any good template examples I can share with my org. I'm talking soup to nuts, from identifying the requirements for the customer down to sending a thank you gift afterwards. TY!

Hi - one more from me on a Friday night 🙂

How do you manage reimbursing customers when they attend your events and they do not want you to book travel for them? We are having a really hard time with finance on this. We had a top customer who spoke at an event book his own hotel/flights and finance is asking for a W9! Yikes.

Has anyone held a super high end CAB meeting - like the Phoenician in Scottsdale?

If so, what did your cost per person look like? Where was the event? Also, do you think the high end venue got more customers there?

My President recommended this - and I think it may be out of budget and a ton of work - wondering if the engagement is worthwhile. TY

Hi everyone - happy end of 1H! Can you believe Q2 is over (for most of us)

I'd love to hear from you:

1. What program did you work on that you are most proud of in 1H?
2. What are you working on in 2H that you are most excited about?

Hi all - looking for ideas to leverage a relationship with a mid-level champion (manager or director) to build an exec to exec relationship (VP or CXO).

One idea we are working on is a surprise and delight gift box. We were thinking of sending very nice gifts to our top champions. I cannot figure out a way to tie in the exec to exec invitation - unless we just send the gift and call afterwards to follow up and ask for the intro. Thoughts? What has worked for you to intro your execs to customer execs? Thank you!

Hi - I need a video card to go in a mailer that I want to send on July 15 and I have not even scripted the video yet 🙂 - does anyone have a vendor who can turn these around super fast? My usual go to says he needs 30 business days after we deliver everything and I do not have enough time for that.

Dreamforce!

Who has been? How have you engaged with customers before/during/after the event? I'd love to brainstorm with you all. This is our first time attending. At a high level, here is what I've been thinking about:

• Tell all customers we will be there - tell them to stop by to get special, customer only swag
• Find a customer with a cool product to give away to any prospect who will take a demo with us
• Invite VIP customers to exec meetings, meals, etc
• Invite customers with open expansion opportunities to talk to someone on site
• Invite all customers to large events, eg happy hour
• Identify strong customers as speakers
• Showcase big brands in our marketing onsite
• Ensure onsite team is equipped to talk about customers who use our integration

How do your companies think about product adoption? Who is involved and do you have a process you can share?

I lead customer marketing, and lifecycle marketing is part of my team. I would like to see us play a bigger role, but we do not have bandwidth to do it all - right now we announce new features in our newsletter, but that's about it for 1:many. To be more specific, when you roll out a new feature, who determines the TAM, how do you drive adoption with those customers? How do you determine what is 1:1 and what is 1:many? What role does product and product marketing play? Who is accountable for driving adoption? Who determines the go to market strategy, and then organizes all the teams to execute? If anyone has this mapped out and could share, that would be a huge help!! Thank you!

Hi - how do you tell an advocate who agreed to a reference call that they are no longer needed - bc the prospect keeps changing their mind who they want to talk to!!!

Wondering if there is a good "relationship building" way to approach this

Thank you

Hi everyone - we are just starting our lifecycle efforts and are first focused on expansion.
Does anyone have any examples they can share of an integrated campaign that worked well, including in product messages, emails, webinars, paid ads, 1:1, etc? I'd like to paint a vision of where we could be in 6-12 months across teams. One of my challenges is that people are working in silos and I want to get everyone inspired to work together. Thank you!

How do you manage getting a customer to speak at an event without getting too many to say yes and needing to then tell them you don't need them? To be more specific - I have a few events I need to find customer speakers for - I don't have enough time to ask one then wait for their answer before asking another- so I need to ask a few customers, and since this is for a specific event and date and they need to travel, I need to share the details in the ask. But, if one says yes, then I don't need the others. Wondering how others manage this. Thank you!

Hi all - does anyone have a list of links to public facing customer advocacy programs? I feel like this may exist?

I'm looking to make a landing page/one pager to share with customers about the benefits to them of participating in advocacy programs and would love some inspiration - I had chat GPT write the copy and it was pretty good - but I would like to see what others do as well. TY!

Hi - I'm doing a deep dive on reviews sites. Does anyone focus on Capterra? We spend no time there, but are getting a decent influx of positive reviews - we've had 4 in April.

Wondering if others focus on that site - the other sites we don't focus on tend to have negative reviews as people are complaining - so wondering why this one has so many positive reviews. Thank you.