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Welcome to The Outpost, where customer marketers trade what works.
This is where your peers are sharing their best customer marketing and advocacy plays –– the ones that get their CEO's attention.
Join us every other week for new episodes. And to join one of our sessions live and unlock the content that will define your next best play, mosey on over to userevidence.com/outpost
Jillian Hoefer (00:08):
Howdy everyone welcome to The Outpost. I am Jillian Hoefer. I run content here at User Evidence. I am thrilled to have you here. I don't know if you were involved in last Outpost webinar, but it didn't happen because the technology was not working for some reason. I'm going to get you acclimated with today's guest and today's topic. So today Kevin Lau is presenting on a customer rewards program that he built at Freshworks that gave him access to their most elusive customers. So if you don't know Kevin Lau, I don't think that's possible because if you're in the customer marketing space, you know Kevin. Kevin is truly when I think of voices in this space that are really taking the role and elevating it into an incredibly strategic realm and getting a seat at the leadership table in the realm of customer marketing that I think of Kevin.
(00:57):
Kevin is absolutely the one leading the charge here and has been for years in this space. So we're thrilled to have him presenting today on the customer rewards program that he built most recently here at Freshworks. The thing that's really cool about this program in all the conversations Kevin and I have had about this is that it's been more about kind of like the long tail effect of this program than it was just like we did the awards and we moved on and it was a nice moment. It went so far beyond the moment. So when they set this customer awards program, it wasn't a one-off campaign. It gave them a year's worth of customer stories from that single kind of campaign effort. It gave them a bunch of new brain advocates from top customers that he could not pin down previously, which I think is the big hook today that I'm excited for you guys to all hear from Kevin is that these are huge accounts that kind of weren't giving a time of day otherwise, but creating this really cool moment, creating this really cool long tail effort gave them these new advocates.
(01:51):
And then also the thing that our bosses care the most about expanded pipeline because of these strengthened relationships and he was able to kind of track and advocate for that as well. So we are going to dive into all of this today. Kevin has an awesome presentation for you all. But first of all, if it's your first time here, if it's been a minute since you've been here, welcome. We are so thrilled. I'm going to bring Kevin up on the stage with us now. Hey, Kevin.
Kevin Lau (02:14):
Hey, Julian. Thanks so much for having me.
Jillian Hoefer (02:15):
No problem. So excited to have you. Could you just start off by telling us a little bit about why a customer awards program? What's the importance and what's the impact and why is that something you wanted to pursue at Freshworks recently for you?
Kevin Lau (02:29):
Yeah, we started this whole program, I want to say it was eight months, a little bit over eight months ago. And the team pitched me on the idea of being able to run this. And one of the main reasons, and we'll get into more of the details, is an awards program is sort of a major unlock, especially as you think about engaging the different types of customers or personas, whether it's the executive audience, practitioners, influencers. We had a very built out ecosystem when it came to all the other types of programs like references, champions, community engagement, et cetera. But the awards program was a slightly different engagement opportunity that helps unlock a different level of relationship with your customers because let's face it, they like titles, they like awards, they like their ego striped a litle bit. And so that's part of the strategy with all the program itself.
Jillian Hoefer (03:19):
I love it. Well, with that, Kevin, you go for it.
Kevin Lau (03:22):
Okay. Well, thanks so much again. I've been leading the custom marketing team at Freshworks for a little bit over two years at this point. I mentioned when we started this whole journey, the team had basically pitched me back in November and we had a very built out portfolio, everything from which we call the Freshworks Collective. It's an ecosystem of eight to nine different programs. And the awards piece was what's the last, I would say, element that we wanted to build out fully as a program that we launched and then successfully ran over the past eight or so months and still going on at this point. And the problem that we're trying to solve for, as you can see on the slide is that we wanted to be able to unlock larger logos well-known brands, organizations Freshworks Play is largely in the S&B and commercial space, so we want to be able to show enterprise great capabilities.
(04:15):
We want to be able to build recognition and brand recognition with what some of these larger accounts. And we had a subset of our top 200 accounts we call Thrive 200, which are these are essentially the big spenders in our ecosystem. And most of those customers never really wanted to go on the record. We might've had really good references that were kind of one-off, but we want to be able to showcase some of these customers in particular in a much more elevated experience and motion. And so the whole goal of this was really how do we start to build that executive mind share, not just executives, but also the influencer folks, the people that had influence on a deal that were able to influence the decision-making in terms of the technology, specifically both from a customer experience and an employee experience standpoint, because that's essentially what we sold.
(05:06):
And this whole presentations go into some of the details exactly on how to build something like this. So I go through some of the pitfalls, some of the opportunities I've also just as a side run awards programs at pretty much every company I've worked at. One in particular was when I was at Marketo going through the Adobe acquisition. We launched what's now called the Adobe Experience Maker Awards. That program alone is driven over 250, 300 million in revenue just from the number of applications and expansion opportunities that came from that. And so if you're thinking about how do I start an awards program, hopefully this presentation will give you some guidance. This is just one example of one way you can run it. It's not the only one. So one thing I do want to make sure that is clear, when you think about starting an awards program, most people think of it just as the recognition amplification, but if you really treat it as sort of a 12-month cycle, this is something that can be paying you massive dividends year over year.
(06:06):
As you start to launch it, you drive momentum and then you get nominations from your field, from your customers. There's a whole judging process, of course, and then you announce winners and then you do this recognition publicly. But oftentimes I think teams tend to just do that and then they kind of move on to the next thing. The main thing I want to call out is that an awards program takes a significant amount of time. There were so many individuals, even though it says I created this, 100% it was my team's effort, full stop. So there were some amazing individuals on my team that helped develop this from start to finish and they get all the accolades and the recognition for building this. And to be able to create it for a year's time, it means that it gives you continued resources into being able to tap into these customers for references, for speaking engagements, for thought leadership.
(06:57):
The assets that you develop from a lot of these stories awards programs are meant to be a showcase of some of the best of the best use cases and stories that help amplify what your value proposition is from your company. And so why wouldn't you want to be able to continue to drive the momentum for the next year's awards program beyond that? So think of it that way as sort of a 12-month cycle. This slide shows you a litle bit more of how you can think of it in chunks. One is identifying the strategic references that you want to be able to deploy and build the relationships for within your ecosystem over those 12-month cycles of those four quarters. But I think also equally most important is access into that executive audience and that executive relationship. That's typically, I would say, where most programs they somewhat falters because we don't have the right level of participation.
(07:47):
Whether it's a RFP that you need to have with another CIO or how do you get access to some of these customers going to your customer advisory board or speaking at your main stage keynote, all those kind of things factor in terms of what's going to propel an executive to want to participate in something that is recognition based. One, of course, it's pride. It's they want to be able to move into their next role, their next opportunity, especially as leaders tend to move around every 18 to 24 months on average. And so that's another thing when you start to cultivate the relationships over the two quarters that you start to launch this thing. And then I mentioned a little bit of how the story travels. It's not just the number of assets, but it's using that use case in almost every single go- to-market campaign that you can imagine.
(08:33):
So it's not just the email drips, it's the webinars you're producing, it's the in- person events. Our in- person events was called Refresh. We did a whole showcase with some of those customers on mainstage and then during some of the panel discussions. And then of course other types of strategic initiatives like a customer advisory board. So think of it as how do you create a lighthouse program from your awards initiative and then select these winners and really think about how the ways that you want to showcase them throughout the year, both through peer opportunities, speakerships, et cetera. And that's when it starts to drive some of the momentum. But before we get into all that, the first phase of this is really building that strategic alignment. That is the thing that really will prevent an awards program from taking off is making sure that you have the leadership buy-in to help you sustain and support the awards program as it starts to pick up ground and you need the nominations across the field.
(09:28):
So I like to think about it as a cross-functional alignment across a couple different teams. Usually you're going to have to tap to your sales leadership. So that ultimately lines up to your CRO, your product, your CPO, customer success is your chief customer officer. Customer marketing, of course, is like your CMO and then comms and PR. So these are sort of the areas of where you want to start. It may not be the only groups that you drive that participation with, but you can create some of these shared goals or outcomes. So if you think about what's most important for a sales rep or a sales team, they want to be able to have use cases at the ready. They want to be able to know exactly what are the major customers and brands and logos that are being able to compete as they have direct outbounding if they have opportunities that they're engaging to be able to close them for an expansion opportunity or a new business deal.
(10:21):
Your customer success team, they want to be able to build strategic executive relationships, practitioner relationships so there's more stickiness. So naturally, as they think about expansion motions, they think about retention, having an awards program helps solidify the really deep relationships within that organization and that account. And then of course your product team, they care about all the use cases. They're building things, they're shipping things. They want to be able to showcase that anytime there is a product review, they want to be able to showcase that in product launches of some kind. And then PR and comms, I think that's pretty straightforward. But anytime you can get a customer to go on the record to share their story with the press, the media, that's all gold. And so this is sort of the ecosystem that we first want to think about when we're starting to build that recognition and how do we get them on our side?
(11:09):
But the other thing is, as most of you guys know that our practitioners, customer marketing, customer advocacy, there is sort of a premium aspect around customers feeling like they're part of something special. No surprise, also customer obsessed organizations, they actually grow faster and there's better retention overall. So these are elements of what you want to think about a recognition program as really something that can drive revenue and it's not just a moment or a spotlight like I was talking about at the very beginning. And so when you think about the awards program from that lens, think about how do you translate that language or that noise to the CFO, the CRO, the CMO. I mean, you could essentially say it's all the C-suite essentially, but I think that's where we often as customer marketers have the biggest disconnect is how do you translate that language to the leadership team so they understand it's not just, "Hey, we're giving you out trophies.
(12:04):
We're giving out a spotlight or we're doing something to celebrate." There is some intrinsic value of being able to do this. And your CFO cares about both retention expansion by directly being able to identify the top customers that are using your core solutions, whether it's AI forward or not. These are great examples that every executive should want to be able to tap into. Your CROs, I kind of mentioned pipeline deal velocity. Your CMO cares about customer proof at scale, brand awareness, driving all the go- to-market campaigns, et cetera. And so you can use some of this language as you start to think about how to position it. An ideal stace is like if you're able to present to all of them in a leadership presentation, that's kind of how we did it, but also engage them separately to find out specifically what are the things that their hot buttons that they care about the most and build the program based on that criteria so that you have that executive air cover and that support.
(13:01):
So as I mentioned, so your CRO, think about it from a reference pipeline, what's actually going to help his sales team close business faster? Ask them to also participate in the judging process because if they're closer to the recognition, they can understand what are these use cases at the ready that are going to drive the most meaningful impact for the business? And then how do you think about enabling that team and partnering with your, whether it's a sales enablement or some other teams or product marketing, these are folks that you can start to partner with closely. And then your CMO, they care about the assets, but they also care about the customer connections. So how do you think about engaging them so that there's an exec sponsor within some of these top accounts? I mentioned Thrive 200 as sort of an example. Each of those Thrive 200 accounts has an exec sponsor.
(13:47):
So each of our C-suite leaders will take on maybe eight to 10 different accounts that they want to continue to strengthen the relationship with. And so this is a good example. So they understand the customer use cases, they understand the ecosystem of that account. This is where all that kind of sums comes into play. And then again, the CFO relationship, it's all about the renewal and expansion math. I would argue it's probably the same thing for your CEO and how do you drive more stickiness with these accounts that are essentially too big to fail?
(14:20):
So now I'll go into a litle bit of the mechanics of actually how to start to build the program at scale.
Jillian Hoefer (14:25):
What would you recommend is the size or level of maturity or the size of customer, your customer cohort that you would recommend for running an awards campaign? Is there a threshold that you would recommend hitting before you create a program like this?
Kevin Lau (14:39):
Yeah, there has to be critical mass, I would say. So if you think about any type of program you build, whether it's a reference program, a champion program, building a community for that standpoint, you have to have clearly a number of customers that are starting to use your products. We had about 150 or so submissions that came in from this program alone. It doesn't necessarily have to be that volume, but I would say the biggest thing that's going to probably drive the most anxiety for you as someone that's going to run the program is making sure that you get enough applicants coming in the door and not just the applicants, but the strong use cases. Because if you have, let's say, eight to 10 award categories and you only have five submissions, the math isn't going to quite work out. So you need to at least have some type of multiplier to showcase that whether you have 50 customers, 100, 200, 500, I think you can build something from that.
(15:39):
And I'm just giving you one slice of awards program for more of a mid-market enterprise organization, but I've also worked at startups where you don't have to go through as many of the formal aspects around an awards program. I'm going to this conference this week where they actually didn't do a application process. They basically just, their team selected people for an award and that's how they're doing the recognition. So that's a little bit more, it's a different process, but that's also something you could start with if you don't have that ecosystem and you want to be able to control the narrative a little bit better.
Jillian Hoefer (16:10):
Is this solely customer-driven entries or did you allow for internal nominations of customers
Kevin Lau (16:14):
From
Jillian Hoefer (16:15):
Your own staff?
Kevin Lau (16:16):
And we'll totally get into some of those details as we talk about it.
Jillian Hoefer (16:20):
Yep, awesome. And then clearly this award program specifically was obviously a customer awards program. Have you ever done in the past, Kevin, an awards program that was, did you include other prospects or industry leaders in the mix for it or have you only run programs that were solely like, "Hey, we're just doing customers and use cases of the product?"
Kevin Lau (16:42):
We always kept it customer first and then we've also had partners as part of the awards program, there might be a partner award category, but we made it very clear that this is not a prospect event, this is not a prospect program. It'll help with prospects as you have matching the right customer to speak to a prospect that is considering your technology or solution, but it's a completely different thing. So as I mentioned, we'll get into some of the mechanics of actually had to start to build it. So there are five design principles when you think about building something like this. I mentioned at the very beginning, think of it as a 12-month cycle where it's not just the recognition itself, that's really just the starting point of how you start to build the relationship at scale from there. The other thing is you're starting to think about award categories, establish the award categories based on what's the most press and need.
(17:39):
So this is where you'd want to partner with your product marketing team, your solution engineers, perhaps your PM organization. What are the use cases that constantly come up from your organization where they're like, "I need more customer proof for something." And I would argue that in this case, probably every organization that you work for, it's all about AI. So make a category specifically around AI adoption or readiness. We actually ended up with eight different award categories. We have two different product portfolios and so essentially it was four categories across each product line. So we kept it fairly simple. But when I was at Marketo and Adobe, we had to go from three different awards programs down to one and taking 35 different award categories down to about 15 or 16. And the things that were important to us was making sure that we did both individual recognition.
(18:35):
We did executive recognition and then we also did team recognition. So there's ways you can slice and dice the awards category so it fits the needs of what you need, but that's a way that you can start to celebrate and identify more champions within that account. It's a ways that you can start to unlock relationships at different scale and build sort of that cross-functional alignment partnership with the rest of your teams. And then I mentioned the judging process. The reason why an awards program is successful is one, because you're judging your submissions based on qualified criteria. So you're not just basically picking them because it's the best logo in the mix. I might have some consideration on why a winner was selected, but it shouldn't be the only thing. It should be based on merit and we'll get into some of the details as far as what is the judging rubric, but we actually ended up having a judging panel of RC-suite leaders.
(19:32):
Then we also brought external judges. So we had Forrester and some other third-party influencers that were able to judge the applicants. So it gave us a very well-rounded mix. And then the other thing that I think is most important is having some type of major recognition moment. We ended up doing something with McLaren because we had a major sponsorship with them that we signed a year ago and we want to do something with one of the races that happened more recently. So think of it as how do you engineer a moment with their peers so you could focus on the networking, could focus on the facilitation of how do you build that relationship with their peers as well as with your executive team and then start to build your playbook of the content you want to develop over the next 12 months.
(20:18):
And we'll get into some of more of the finer details on how that all breaks out. But when you think about the pipeline of where you're getting your submissions, 50% of them will largely come from your existing advocate base. So whether you have an existing reference program, a community, some type of ecosystem, a customer advisory board, these are all people that you want to encourage to apply for the awards program. And the other aspect of why you want to launch this thing is you want to be able to tap into the net new advocates that you don't have a relationship with today. And as part of this, this is where you can start to get submissions directly from your customers. You can get nominations from your CSMs, your account teams. You could also get them from your partner ecosystem. We had probably, I don't know, 40% of the submissions that came in from partners.
(21:04):
So there's a lot of different ways you can slice and dice it, but the nice thing is it doesn't have to be just limited to the customer themselves submitting, because sometimes a customer is a litle bit too shy. They don't want to think about the recognition in their own way, but a CSM might know their account really well and so they could be able to submit the submission on their behalf. So those are kind of things for consideration. And this kind of covers some of those details again. So you have your internal teams, which would be your account managers, your CSMs. Oftentimes that ends up being one of the biggest drivers of submissions. You could also do a lot of reports, whether you look at NPS data, you look at customers that had a high satisfaction rating, whether they've done a user evidence campaign. I mean, we actually ran the whole campaign, the actual award submissions through user evidence.
(21:57):
And so that's a way that you can also start to mine them for other advocacy initiatives. And then self-nominations, sales product, et cetera, are all kind of different sources for it.
(22:12):
So when I mentioned the award categories, these were our four award categories that we looked at. So Advocate of the Year, of course, that is organizing the top advocate that has been doing incredible stuff for us. So whether it's someone that's been speaking at our events, sharing product feedback, been part of beta programs, the whole nine yards, this was really an opportunity to showcase and bring them closer into our orbit. Innovation, I think everyone at this point's pretty exhausted with AI and all the things you could do, but that's clearly an award category you can have. And then the transformation leader. So this is sort of the digital transformation aspect, how you recognize a leader that is driving that innovation within the organization and then the dream team, which is really the team that is helping to drive this orchestration at scale usually at that practitioner level.
(23:03):
So these are all folks that can help bring your technology and become those internal champions for your product.
(23:11):
In terms of the composition of the message, when you think about the judging mix, it's important to have a role for each individual. I mentioned your CMO or your chief customer officer. We were fortunate because both my boss, who was both our CMO and chief customer officer, she was kind our exec sponsor. So she saw it from both lens, but she was the one that was helping us to push a lot of the messaging, the narrative, announcing the program on social, doing all the outbounding on our behalf. And then we partnered very close with our CRO to make sure that his sales team was bought into the program too. Because when we think about the activation of the in- person event, we need to make sure that we get those people to attend. We have the right relationship, the room, they knew exactly the right use cases, they knew about the stories, everything else.
(24:02):
Our CPO was very involved from a product roadmap perspective. We want our customer success leader to think about it from a retention and adoption lens. And then again, I mentioned the analysts and third party teams that are also involved in it. When we talk about the judging and scorecard, this is where this will kind make or break your program at the end of the day because you want to be able to score each of your applications based on a rubric of sorts. And we did it based on sort of like five categories. I would say the business impact one is the most imperative because if you have a story that doesn't have any measurable impact or growth, it's kind of a waste of time. If you're only doing it for the vanity metrics or because it's a sexy logo or brand, that only goes so far and there needs to be more depth to it, especially as teams want to be able to access the store and the use case in a more meaningful way.
(24:58):
And so that's the first step, making sure that you have the right business impact. Then there's the innovation, of course, what is the customer actually doing that is going and breaking the mold in terms of how innovative they're using their solution? How does it make a difference to the customer experience, the partnership death? That's where you can get so much unlock. And then the advocacy readiness, their willingness to participate in other types of speaking engagements, thought leadership, et cetera. What we actually found, I think in the awards program, is that as much as I would say every company has their own set of problems when it comes to customer data and everything being documented properly, we actually found that the awards program gave us more factual information on a customer account than was actually getting plugged into our CRM. Unfortunately, that has been sort of a ongoing challenge.
(25:47):
I think even when I was at a much larger company where some of that data was just not updated from the account records or from CSMs. And so getting this direct feedback from your customer on how they use your product or solution, that is sort of a massive unlock that I don't think we always think about too as a nice benefit of why you run something like this.
(26:09):
And then when I mentioned it's a build over time, think of giving yourself enough leadway. I've been in situations where leadership said, "Hey, let's run an awards program. Let's launch in the next 90 days." I would realistically push back on what you could realistically do because it is a very strong and time intensive program that does require a certain level of lift and cross-functional partnership in order to be successful within. So when we thought about this again, we launched the spec in November right before Thanksgiving. We let the application run for about two months to give so that we have enough volume that came in. You're always going to find that whenever you run an award submission, you might have a high input. A lot of people apply at the very beginning, there might be a drop-off in the middle and then because people procrastinate, you might get a bunch at the end.
(27:01):
So just know that there is going to be a flow with the submission process. Then your team would essentially go through a screening process, identifying the top 10 submissions in each category. You make it easier for the judges to actually understand what are some of the best use cases to work with. Then you go through the whole winner's announcements and the notification publicly. So that's how I like to think about it from an end-to-end process when you're thinking about that soup to nuts process. And then again, the six months after that is really how do you think about that amplification of the stories and the use cases more externally.
(27:36):
And then I'll talk a little bit more about the recognition experience. We were very deliberate. The team wanted to spend some serious dollars to invest in a McLaren race. So we did this at the Miami Grand Prix, which ramped up a couple weeks ago. For those that are like McLaren fans, it is a different experience when you could see a race live. And so we wanted to be able to create that experience in person for ... We had about 20 tickets that we invested in for what we call ... It was a suite experience. And so there was a box seats where there was food, there's beverage, they could network and we were very intentional and strategic with how we made sure that these customers were invited. So we had both finalists and winners. We did this whole recognition. I have some photos at the end that will show what the experience looked like, but it was cool because we had the customers go.
(28:34):
Our account teams are actually kind of worried we would get enough people to show up. And I kid you not, every person that we asked, immediately they said yes. To go to McLaren, we had people fly from Europe to attend this thing.
(28:47):
We didn't have to sell it. They probably sold themselves on wanting to go and convincing their boss to pay for the flights and everything, but it really was an exceptional experience. And then we also made sure that we had the right account teams to be present. So our Sierra was there, our partnership team was there, our head of customer success, et cetera. And we pretty much did complete white glove service. It was a two-day racing experience. So people flew in on a Friday. They also had to give up their weekend, but I think they really enjoyed the experience overall. And then we also did what we call a refresh, which is our customer conference. We did it last week and we did a recognition or a nod to those people. So we had two formats and we basically celebrated them on their mainstage keynote and there was a panel with some of the winners that were present at that event in New York.
(29:37):
So that's kind of what we thought about is for the recognition. But I've also done award programs where you do the traditional Oscar-style dinner, and that's why I want to include this slide because that historically was what we did at Adobe. Again, it was a different level on experience, but most people recognize if you do a dinner reception gala, you You have to build the programming for that night. So it's like how do you make sure that you cover all eight, 10 award categories? How do you make sure that you see people strategically throughout each table so there's the right type of networking and the right type of conversations happening? How do you make sure you capture the moment so you capture both photos as well as video sizzle reels and all the kind of good stuff when it comes to getting customers to get their trophies and then do all the fault there.
(30:29):
So that was the experience and how you think about it. And then I'm going to talk a litle bit more about how you engineer the runway.
Jillian Hoefer (30:37):
With an application, what's a good way for capturing measurable results or making sure that the customer when they're submitting their use case is giving good measurable results, like you said, that you're adding to the CRM, to the file and having those use case metrics around.
Kevin Lau (30:50):
So there's a couple ways we could do it. One is I think be clear with the question, what you're asking. For example, whatever your product is, ask them just point blank, what measurable impact have you seen by using ... For us, it was Fred AI when it came to their Copilot use case or deploying agents of some kind. So be very specific with the impact measurements and be upfront in terms of the actual application process too. Before they actually fill it out, you'll send out a brief or you'll enable your account teams to be able to communicate what's actually needed to be submitted in order for a recognition. We also have a public website so people can read the actual nomination. If you guys do a search, just type in Freshworks, global customer awards and the page will pop up and that has all the criteria and the details there.
(31:46):
So it shouldn't be a surprise as far as what people are submitting. The other thing that helps too is I've done this at other companies where you create a sample submission and it could be a completely generic submission, just fabricate the details. But to give a customer an example of what a potential award-winning submission could look like, that gives them a depth of what they should submit in their own submission. So it just gives them some additional context. So how they think about their use case, time savings, everything is about efficiency and growth. So I think most people will kind of understand, they'll probably have to consult their leadership team at the same time to get into those finer details.
Jillian Hoefer (32:30):
Yeah, that's brilliant. I love the sharing the example because that's a surefire way. I'd be like, "This is what great looks like. Now try to copy it for us." Kate was asking, do you tell the winners ahead of time or do you let that public moment be the first time they have that feel good moment?
Kevin Lau (32:47):
It really depends on ... I mean one aspect is you deal with potentially some of the information leaking. I think it's okay to tell them ahead of time unless there's ... If you're doing a celebration dinner and you want to keep that surprise delight moment because you want to see the winner reaction.
Jillian Hoefer (33:07):
Totally.
Kevin Lau (33:07):
I've done it on both sides. In one aspect I would say we let people know that they were a ... We'll let them know that they're a finalist out of time, obviously, but if they're a winner and we need them to be physically present to accept their award and for whatever reason we just didn't hear back from them in a timely manner, then I would use that as a carrot to essentially get them to commit to attend. And we've done this both on live streams when we had to do it during COVID. So it would be kind of awkward if they didn't show up for the live stream. So you do what you can, but again, it's always going to be slightly different based on your particular situation.
Jillian Hoefer (33:46):
What's measurement look like for a program like this? How are you making sure that you are measuring all these different pieces and having the KPIs that you can report on upward?
Kevin Lau (33:55):
Yeah. So the McLaren Race in particular, it was both a customer marketing and a field marketing activation. And that made it a litle bit easier because we already knew how much we invested in the race. It actually wasn't that expensive. It's probably about 85, $90,000 to do the race. All in, I would say the awards program was not ... I want to say we spent maybe 100, 150,000 total, which is not bad, consider the ROI that you get back. But when we did the ... As far as attribution, you can look at the attendee mix and you could look at active deals and opportunities that those customers are in. I wouldn't try and make it so complicated because I think sometimes we get a little bit lost in the attribution model and it gets way too complicated. I think just think of it this way.
(34:46):
Do a cohort analysis of those people that applied for your program, those that are selected as a finalist and those that are selected as a winner and look at over a period of time, how those accounts have either grown or shrunk with you. So think about it from a share of wallet perspective. That's very basic math that doesn't require a lot of backend analysis and engineering, but you can see how those accounts have expanded over time. And you'll have an idea based on some of those accounts and the CSM teams that are already engaging with those organizations and that's how you can start to build your attribution model for it. So for us, out of 150 submissions, we already knew that it was driving close to 50 million in expansion revenue and then the award submissions is a subset of that. So start with that.
(35:34):
As much as I say, do all this advanced math, I got into marketing because I'm not a math major and I'm not good at it. So just make it easy for yourself.
Jillian Hoefer (35:44):
Love it. We love the easy button on the attribution. Awesome. Let's get to engineering the runway here.
Kevin Lau (35:49):
Yeah. So we'll talk a little bit more about as you think about how do you want to engage these customers over the 12-month cycle? I mentioned think of it as sort of a lighthouse opportunity. So when you're engaging your top accounts, there's the recognition moment. There's the asset capture where you're capturing both their use case, their story. You're getting the intake of what they actually, from their words, what they actually told you, but you also have the submission themselves and start to proactively work with that customer in a more strategic manner and build a relationship. Talk about it from almost like you have a buffet that you're opening up to them or a menu and say, I like to think about five to six different engagement opportunities over the next 12 months that we could start to slot you into. So whether it's a podcast, a speaking engagement, speaking at your major customer conference, it's a case study, of course, it's a video testimonial.
(36:47):
We ended up doing, I think they have planned road shows later in this year. So think of it as how do you chunk it out over the 12-month duration? And that actually helps you as you start to line up what are the key moments that you want to be able to leverage the customer for. So whether it's a product launch, it's like I said, a customer conference promotion, it's something that you guys are doing from an advocacy or customer marketing perspective that you want to drive more buzz around. This is your opportunity to do all that and more and start to really slot in each of those winners. So imagine if you have eight to 10 winners, you're not going to use that same customer for 12 months out of the year. You're going to use each one of them kind of strategically placed over the next 12 months back and forth.
(37:30):
So it doesn't feel like you're overexhausting the same story, but you're using it strategically to help drive that engagement. So that's really the takeaway I want to showcase from this slide. And then this really talks a litle bit more about how you space it out. This is just kind of a rough example of how you can follow it as you start to think about the asset capture within that first quarter, how do you start to get that customer looped into the idea that you would love to leverage them for references, strategic opportunities there, speaking engagements, co-marketing, customer advisory board, all that kind of stuff down the road. The one thing I would say that's the most critical, and it's really about striking while iron is hot, is making sure that you're capturing both the assets that you need within that first 30 days, whether you have the full approval of the story itself or just the main ingredients so that you have something that you can showcase.
(38:25):
At Adobe and Marqeta, we used to make sure that we had a finalist and a winner blog. And then we also did these ... Then this actually took a couple months, but we actually created these portfolio books of each award submission and we did this whole spotlight story on them. So it was kind of like a five to 10 page in- depth expose about that customer, both not just them as what they drove from the organization, but also them as a person. And so you can develop whatever you want from that, but that's one example of where they had an asset that they could also socialize on their own channels, they could share with their leadership team, et cetera. So you want to be able to hit the iron when it's hot and be able to capture some of those details upfront, especially when the recognition and everyone's super excited.
(39:13):
And then I probably don't really need to talk about this too much, but I would say when you think about it from a reference engine perspective, you want to make sure that your teams are also aware in terms of how to best leverage them. You don't want to treat them as just an average everyday reference that can help with some deal. Think about a reference enablement toolkit that you want to be able to provide to both your sales team, your account teams in general on how to best leverage this customer and think about it for the most strategic deals. Maybe it's an opportunity that is six figures or seven figures in an opportunity value on how you start to leverage that particular customer for a one-to-one reference call or a webinar of some kind, but make sure that you provide that enablement and that sales training to make sure that they understand the use case and this customer, we want to protect them.
(40:02):
So making sure that accounts teams just don't go rogue and start to hit them up every time they get when they have a deal that comes up. And so make sure you protect that loop. And then also make sure that you recognize and you thank them in the process. Making sure that there's a connection that you're building with that executive team and they thank them anytime they do some type of active advocacy, in this case, a reference call. And then I talked a little bit about the four metric categories. Again, pipeline and reference impact, that's fairly clear. The brand visibility and placement, that's where you can work directly with your brand team. I guarantee you as you start to collect these award submissions, you get the whole video testimonies developed, et cetera, your brand team is going to have metrics. Go back to those teams and ask them for the campaign performance because oftentimes we as customer marketers, we create all this great content, but these teams that would tell us exactly how they performed and they should go back to how you think about the revenue attribution for that initiative when it comes to QBR time or any opportunity down the road.
(41:05):
And then the retention expansion, that's more of a longer play, but how much revenue did you drive from this expansion motion? And then the executive engagement unlock. You'll find that probably as you start to build that mindshare with your CIOs or your C-suite customers, those are customers that are going to start to unlock major doors within larger accounts and deals just because of the network that they provide. And so that's a accelerated reference opportunity. That's a referral that comes in. We had some of those use cases from some companies like CYA that helped us introduce us to larger accounts like Honeywell, et cetera. And so these are all examples of you start to think about how it's going to drive referral pipeline for you down the road. And I think I just have a couple more slides. It's mostly just about the moment. So I'll give an example.
(41:54):
This is kind of what the Turn 18 suite looked like. I mean, Lily is the person on the top left. She was on our team that helped orchestrate this whole event and she was super thrilled to be there. And a lot of the people, it was a really fun weekend. So they had these bleacher seats and they also had this, like I said, they had cocktails and other things that they could celebrate. And then we did these social cards that the customers could use and a lot of them started posting this on social and then a few of them also got their trophies and they started to do little promotion videos of that kind as well. And just recap, I would say things to avoid or lessons learned in year one. Again, training the recognition program as a whole 12-month cycle. Don't think of it as just nominating big accounts.
(42:45):
There's going to be always like diamonds in the rough where you never really thought about the relationship. Don't prejudge. Just focus on getting as many submissions as you can during that process and then start to nurture and identify those wins. The communication internally as you think about both the stakeholder relationships that you need to build, the follow-up, the follow-through is super important and just know that the workload of building awards program is going to take a significant amount of effort. So give yourself at least six months to plan it from end to end so that you really have the time to be able to build it successfully. I think that's kind of it. I won't go through I think we kind of covered this ad nauseum. So I also have a newsletter that you guys have getting access to. I post every Thursday and most weeks, just playbooks and other things that help customer marketers.
(43:37):
I also have this diagnostic tool that you can play around with, which talks about how to basically build a customer-led growth flywheel within your own organizations. And there's a maturity scorecard there. And I think I'm actually connected to a lot of you guys are also on LinkedIn, but just some other resources at the end of the day.
Jillian Hoefer (43:54):
I mean, I have an avid reader of your newsletter, Kevin, so we'll make sure we include that link in the follow-up email from us so that if you are not subscribed already, you can subscribe to it. When you did an award ceremony more like that Oscar style, like you were telling, so not this use case, but that other one, how much detail do you go into when announcing those winners on the main stage? Sometimes it feels like a delicate balance of you want the customer to have that feel good moment, but you don't want everyone to be bored just hearing these kind of drone on about people they don't know.
Kevin Lau (44:26):
It is sort of like a fine balance in read the room. So when we did it, we did it both virtually the first year on a live stream and we wanted to make sure that the whole ceremony was essentially kind of like 45 minutes. Obviously when you do dinner, there's time for networking, there's meals, and so you extend that to maybe, I don't know, hour and a half, two hours. I would say summarize it in terms of what the category is and the use case so you could speak it within 20 to 30 seconds. I think any more than that, you're going to start to lose people. People need to know about all the quantifiable metrics. They could read the submissions after the fact. They really just care about who's going to win and who's going to get that trophy. So the in- person experience, just try and move it at a fast enough pace so that it doesn't start to feel repetitive, especially as we had to get through 15, 16 award categories like that.
(45:23):
Once you start hitting number eight or 10, they all kind of sound the same. So just trying to go through that fairly systematically and quickly.
Jillian Hoefer (45:31):
Kevin, I know people can subscribe to your newsletter and then find you on LinkedIn as well. Is that a good place to connect with you?
Kevin Lau (45:37):
Yeah. And if you guys have questions, by all means, I always try to make myself available, so feel free to ping me separately.
Jillian Hoefer (45:44):
Awesome. And then just a couple little things about where you can find us next. Our next session up at The Outpost is actually next week. Turnaround quick here for our next one. We are going to be hosting a conversation between Alex, our VP of Marketing and Casey Hill, the CMO over at DoWhatWorks. DoWhatWorks does very cool enterprise level A/B testing and they have done some A/B testing to find out what kind of social proof actually drives conversion. So we're going to have some data from our evidence gap research. Casey's going to bring some of their data. It's going to be a good one. And then secondarily, I have some great news. We have a few slots left for Highline, which is our annual event out in Jackson, Wyoming, which is where we're headquartered. If you've not been out, man, this is the time to do it.
(46:26):
Kevin, you're coming, right?
Kevin Lau (46:29):
I will try and be there.
Jillian Hoefer (46:31):
If you are free August 3rd through 5th, we would love to see you in Jackson. So go ahead and apply. Like I said, we have a couple slots that are still available there and we would love to see you there. So please apply to join us. It's a really, really fun time. So Kevin, thank you again so much for joining us today. This was absolutely jam-packed. This was awesome. We really appreciated you presenting at Outpost today.
Kevin Lau (46:52):
Yeah. Thanks again for having me.
Jillian Hoefer (46:54):
All right. Bye everyone. Have a good rest of your day.