Just back from CMA in NYC. Lots of takeaways. About 120 people with a nice mix of B2B advocacy and some B2C brands. Nice to learn from each other. 1- Workiva hit a grand slam with their presentation. They are pioneering group reference calls. Get 1-2 great customers to present to their prospects with an open opportunity. Does not completely replace reference calls but helps scale them and reduce advocate burnout. 2- the workiva team of 3 have a mission statement, have done some great defining of who they are, their values and internal branding. 3- I presented for the first time publicly the preliminary results from the state of B2B Customer contact database research I’ve been working on. Not a pretty picture with an overall score of 47%. Report coming in April. Talked about ways to improve that customer marketers can do in their own. 4-Not a lot of lifecycle marketers came, but lots of talk about what people are doing via a vis lifecycle. Alyse Chiariello from Varicent is doing great work in this area.
Very cool. Any of these sessions available OnDemand? Thanks Irwin!
I imagine that CMA will make some of the content available in other formats over time and I think Pro members get access to the recordings.
Irwin Hipsman can you turn off the sending to channel when responding please? Also, tysm for sharing this, do you know if there are videos to share?
Great summary! And your presentation was awesome!!
Curious Irwin Hipsman on the group reference calls. Did they open lines for this or was it more of a webinar presentation. I ask b/c we did something similar and it was a hit but we did a webinar style so that a question wasn’t asked and another prospect thought “oh man, never thought of that” and it could turn them off.
Maria Braune I can answer, since I was at Workiva until last year! We'd either conduct the group reference call on Zoom or On24. A Customer or Product Marketer would host and do a brief introduction of the customer, talk about their role/scope and a bit of before/after their life with our product. Then for the remaining 20-40 minutes, we'd encourage live questions through the chat or even have folks to come off of mute and ask questions live. We've done it both ways where the Q&A is visible to the whole group, and times when it's only visible to the marketing team. If it ever started to get quiet, we'd have a few planted questions. The whole vibe is very organic and authentic- no slides, no pitches. It doesn't feel like a produced webinar. Just a real customer speaking to their experience and answering questions honestly in a one to many format.
