Irwin Hipsman

Last Friday, we had an Executive Engagement follow-up to the Jan 23rd meet-up with CMA members on this topic. Here are the takeaways. I am working on a session for CMA community to learn more about Executive Engagement. What it is and what it is not. The meetup was pretty amazing. Based on registrations, we expected 10, and 20 attended. What blew us away was the candor and depth of the discussion. This is a small but serious group of people shaping something that will become more strategic over the next few years. We don't record as we want people to be open and most of the people on the call are running EE programs. We distributed a new report at the meetup (attached): The Rise of Executive Engagement. It's based on an analysis of the LinkedIn profiles of 200+ EE practitioners. Link to download will be available next week. Will post it when it is live. Key takeaways. 1- This role is still forming in real time. So many of you stepped into EE roles in the last couple of years. We’re not inheriting playbooks — we’re writing them. 2- Executive engagement is not about events. As Tamie framed it, it’s about building long-term, peer relationships that become strategic assets for the business. That distinction felt important. 3- Executive sponsor programs are hard. Scale, credibility, clarity of purpose — all recurring themes. The programs that work seem to have strong peer alignment, clear guardrails, and intentional orchestration. 4-Consistency > transactions. Several of you reinforced that this can’t be a “big meeting tied to a deal” motion. The strongest programs build sustained executive coverage and cadence across priority accounts. 5- Measurement is maturing. Beyond attendance or activity, we’re seeing focus on deal velocity (2-3x faster), close rates (60%), executive coverage, and real revenue influence. We'll reach out very soon with the next set of meetups....Irwin

By now, you know I love CMA data. Amy asked how many CMA staff at a company with 1-2K employees. Looks like the average was about 4. So, I asked ChatGPT, which CMA programs are the largest. Here are its estimates, based on a few sources it pulls from. This does not reflect recent layoffs, and I know of some companies with teams that were omitted. They also included the focus of the program Salesforce 40–60+ Community, Global customer storytelling, Customer references, Customer advisory boards, Executive engagement Microsoft 30–50+ Customer evidence, enterprise references, executive briefing, industry customer stories Cisco 30–40+ Global customer reference programs, executive engagement, customer advisory boards, storytelling Adobe 25–35+ Customer storytelling, executive programs, digital experience, customer community SAP 25–35+ Reference management, executive advisory councils, global customer marketing HubSpot 20–30+ Customer advocacy, community, customer storytelling, champion programs ServiceNow 20–30+ Executive advisory boards, enterprise customer references, thought leadership customers Zendesk 15–25+ Customer storytelling, advocacy community, product champions Atlassian 15–25+ Community advocacy, customer stories, champions Snowflake 15–20+ Enterprise references, field enablement, customer storytelling Okta 10–20+ Workday 10–20+ Procore Tech 10–15+ Asana 10–15+ Sprout Social 8–15

Just today I started. The big challenge is I'm on a PC and do not have IT support. So, it’s taken a while to download everything so that I am interacting with Claude as a terminal. now Claude thinks I am a bot. The problem i am trying to solve is pretty interesting. More info of if I can make it happen.

Aisling Martyn is a cash incentive possible. I can give you the details. Basically we paid out for a 5-star review for GPI. Plus a bonus for the top 2 performers. Can't say I lived it, but it did the job in a timely manner. It was open to all customer facing people.

Anyone going to Customer Marketing Alliance in NYC next week. Hope to see u there and connect in person.

I'm just starting to look into this for something else. Perhaps have Claude take a screen shot and then it can convert it into text. This way it is not scraping.