We attended the inaugural Customer Engagement Summit event from the Customer Strategy Group in Boston, MA last week. Unlike the annual Customer Reference Forum events, this event focused on how we, in the customer interaction realm, raise the level of relationships with key customers to be more mutually fruitful. 

Laura Ramos of Forrester was included in the speaker line-up, and posted her thoughts on the Summit. She offers a great synopsis of the Summit segments with her usual concise commentary. Worth a read. Laura also wrote a book, Groundswell, on the topic of customer engagement and posted the core objectives used to evaluate winners of the annual Forrester Groundswell Award.

 The theme for the entire 2-day event was well-established by Sean Geehan of the Geehan Group, and his customer, Tim Thorsteinson/Harris Broadcasting in the keynote.

There are massive vendor benefits to be realized by creating meaningful, purposeful and productive relationships between your top customer executives and your company’s executives. These include gaining critical strategic insights and cultivating powerful advocates that lead to significant, decision-maker-driven sales opportunities.

Executives are always the toughest targets for customer reference programs when recruiting references. And for good reason. Executives are busy and focused on a different set of objectives. Helping reference programs “just because” doesn’t move their needles enough to commit the time and effort.

However, if an executive is invited to be part of a strategic, ongoing vendor dialog with peers where the end product translates to the top or bottom line impact—-game on. There are a couple points in this statement worth elaborating on:

• Peers – Very literally, if the target audience is C-Level executives then that’s all that should be invited to the conversation. If the dialog is diluted with the areas of interest of a VP or director in attendance then the value is diminished and participation of the intended audience drops off.
• Strategic – We have spoken separately with Sean Geehan about how the right group of C-Level participants may never bring up a single product name or feature during an entire vendor-sponsored C-Level event. The conversations are all about business and long-range planning. If it digresses (and that’s Sean’s challenge as a facilitator) it loses participant interest and it’s perceived as a waste of time.
• Ongoing – These meetings (in person or virtual) must occur consistently. A true dialog isn’t possible if conversations happen so infrequently that no one remembers where it was left off. The forward progress isn’t there.

Here’s the challenge to customer reference managers at organizations that don’t yet have a program that brings client executives together on a regular basis:  Can you be part of establishing such a program? Call it an advisory board, a leadership council, or whatever resonates. It could be the most powerful customer advocacy you have the potential to harness.

Client executives who become part of this elite membership can help shape the vendor’s value proposition, it’s reason for being. In the process their companies are provided with answers to some of their most challenging questions, and they become an extension of your company’s executive team. They become such strong supporters that just a few words from them to an executive at a prospective client organization could qualify them for top sales honors at next year’s annual sales kick-off.

Selling “upstream” is nothing new. But for most customer reference teams, creating an element as strategic as this to extend the traditional customer reference program is a huge opportunity, further demonstrating the value of what might otherwise be viewed as a necessary, but tactical function.