executive programs to help with customer relationships

Im building this as a 7th pillar of our Customer Engagement team - components include CAB, Exec Sponsor Program, Exec Forum, etc.

I'm pretty sure a few of these sessions might be relevant......https://www.base.ai/obsession-2024-recap?utm_campaign=Obsession2024&utm_medium=ema[…]-yMHw&_hsmi=328565966&utm_content=328565966&utm_source=hs_email

Following — we have had similar interest from leadership at our company, too

We built a CAB this year of primarily managerial and executive leadership roles (Directors, VPs, and one C-Suite) and are re-thinking what content we discuss with them at our meetings. To date we have done a mix of messaging and product feedback, but I think we need to zoom out a bit to bring more value to them

It's an interesting situation for us, because most of our advocates are (obviously) day to day users, who are usually ICs or lower on the totem pole. But we <i>need</i> the attention and buy-in from execs if we want to sustain growth in our new business areas — and I'm sure we're competing for their time and attention with every other vendor they work with 😅

You’re totally speaking to the biggest challenge in most orgs - how do you drive stickiness across all levels of a customer account from practitioner to exec so it influences adoption, retention, expansion

This is how I’ve structured it within my team to drive buyin and stakeholder alignment tied to the customer journey.

Practitioner includes things like community, lifecycle and adoption programs, education and training

Influencer is developing brand evangelists and customer evidence

Exec: thought leadership / exclusive tailored communities etc

I believe I’m doing a session with in a few weeks where I can explain this further

Thank you and that would be amazing! This is so closely aligned to how I'm building this out. I would especially love to hear more about the influencer programs - I was thinking about having Influencer + Exec together, hoping we could tap into the Execs to build out the influencer program.

Currently we've been trying to build out an influencer program but it lives in DG and it's just not aligned to our teams priorities but I think there's huge opportunity to move this into CM and build both out together.

Depending on how you're resourced it could start as a shared program across several teams or departments that have similar goals - essentially an MVP and as it matures, you'll prob find that naturally it will move in the direction where the program best aligns to supporting the customer and you can make the case of a COE. It helps remove the territorial bickering to get started and just solve a customer problem

Love this visual — thank you for always sharing your insights with us 💙

This may be helpful as well.

I'm in the same boat and would love any and all ideas around exec/decision maker engagement. We've found CAB and events work well, but the struggle is how to engage them in between. Giving our CS teams a "reason to reach out" in between EBRs, events, etc. I'm thinking offering advocacy opportunities can be one way, but for those that maybe aren't seeing measured success (thus accounts more at risk), it's a struggle.

you mentioned 7th pillar of your team. Can you share how you structure your whole strategy (all of the pillars?)

I posted a visual of my team charter somewhere in here a few weeks back but this is how it's structured - it's purposely designed to be a CoE engaging customers across their entire journey to drive stickiness and create raving fans

• VoC
• Community
• Customer Edu
• Advocacy
• Lifecycle and Retention
• Customer Comms
• Exec Engagement

Thank you! I'm a recent-ish member of the community but I'll poke around and see if I can find it! What does your VoC team own?

Pretty much everything qualitative and quantitative feedback - 1:many surveys (NPS etc.), customer interviews, advisory councils, CAB, closed loop feedback, insights aggregation etc.

I have a 25 page brief that goes into the details that I could walk you through at some point

I'm late to jumping in here - but if execs are disengaged and unfamiliar with your product, one of the things you might consider is how your passionate users can be enabled to influence executives.

Our customers typically have a team (developers, business analysts, etc.) that uses our product and the team's leader is responsible for getting buy-in from others -- especially executives -- in order to get the resources they need. This ultimately means marketing themselves and sharing how they are driving business impact. But typically, these folks don't know how to do this (because they are technical folks, not marketers)

Giving them support, templates, resources, advice has helped so many of them improve their internal evangelism and gaining more exec buy-in.

So... I'm not answering your question directly, but hopefully this helps you think about one of the barriers to greater exec engagement and advocacy for your team.

Thank you, this is great! So similar to our current users and exactly something we've been talking about. Do you have any specific examples of support, templates or resources you've used successfully?

I think in our situation it's not necessarily that the champions want to show the value to protect budgets or anything like that - it's us wanting to expand the relationships to above and around them, so how do you approach them with resources if they aren't really asking for them? Hope that makes sense!

I turned this thread into a post (with the help of AI) tell me what you think please https://cmaweekly.com/blog/executive-engagement-programs

In our case, we start out with a maturity assessment to help them understand how effective their program is. Almost everyone wants to see where they stack up, right? This opens the door to us sharing resources to help them grow and mature... and one of those signs of maturity is getting more execs engaged.

Happy to talk live sometime if you want to hear more!