Recruiting customers to speak on your behalf at industry events can be challenging. It’s a huge commitment for a customer even if you are agreeing to pay their expenses. In addition to the time commitment, they may have to secure approval from their management, ensure compliance with company guidelines, spend time on content development and manage inquires that their appearance generates.
For loyal customers for whom your company has delivered value, they often have no trouble jumping through these hoops to support you. These customers are gold as they lend credibility to your claims and can deliver powerful narratives for audience members. They are also the types of speakers that conference organizers love to book.
But how can you make it easier for them to say “yes” to your request? Make it simple for them and demonstrate the value they will get out of attending. Often times, attending an event can serve the customers need as much as it serves yours. They get to network, gain insight and ID new trends/technology.
Here’s a quick step-by-step guide of how you can increase the number of customers you get to speak on your behalf this year.
- Build a list of client contacts. If you don’t have one already, you need to ID customers who may speak on your behalf. This can be a bit time consuming but a good list can last several years. Start with an appeal to your customer care team for names of their most satisfied customers. Also talk to executives in the sales, customer delivery, professional services and any other organization that touches customers to aggregate a list. Make sure you understand the customer’s role, a bit about their business and how they are using your solution. If you haven’t already, check out my four-part series on building a great customer evidence program.
- Make the request with lots of lead time. Don’t wait until you start planning for an event to make a request. There is no reason you can’t work 6-12 months ahead on securing these commitments. Customers will be better able to plan around your event if you recruit them ahead of time. And knowing a customer will be participating can even help shape your comms strategy at the event including booth design, key announcements you will make, email campaigns, etc.
- Curate a list for of opportunities for them. Instead of presenting a single opportunity which the customer may not be able to accommodate, you can present them with a couple strategic options. Work with your events manager and partner marketing team to understand what events they will be sponsoring. Add in any non-sponsored events you want to attend. Segment the list by customer persona and region. This will allow you to present them a slate of events you know will appeal to them professionally while leaving room for them to select into events that will work for them.
- Build a great invite. Express your appreciation for their continued patronage, highlight how their unique use case would be valuable to others in the industry, outline the monetary and other support you can provide to offset the burden of presenting and offer to work with other internal stakeholders at their company to get through approval hoops.
- Create an escalation path. If customer doesn’t respond or is hesitant, you’ll need a strategy to (hopefully) get their attention. Working with sales, customer service and your executive team to determine the right way to get a commitment. Can you offer something in exchange? Can an executive ask for a favor or reach out to the executive sponsor in the customer org? Can you ask someone else in the organization? Plan to be persistent and not take “no” for an answer.
- Track responses and the specific events they have committed to attend. Not only will this help keep you organized, it will help reduce the chances that you overburden your customers with multiple requests in too short a timeframe.
- Thank them for their participation. In a follow-up communication, find ways to illustrate specific ways their participation has helped your company. Share any media coverage that resulted, recognize them on your social media channels, share video of their presentation with them, and/or prepare a report on the value they delivered for their company (visibility, service benefits you provided for their participation, journalists they met, etc.). This not only demonstrates to them your appreciation but also extends the value of their participation to other mediums.
- Upsell. Now that you have spent time building a relationship with the customer and collected valuable information for their presentation, you can upsell them on additional marketing assets. Build a case study and send it to them for approval, ask them for permission to submit their use case for an industry award, prepare short video clips or slideshows from their presentation that they can share via their social channels or request 30 minutes of their time to chat with a journalist or industry analyst.
Getting customers to participate in your corporate communications initiatives can be difficult but is critical to developing the credibility of your company and its offerings. Taking the time to cultivate these stories will payback many times over.
