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CustomerXCon 2020

CustomerX Con 2020

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2020's Theme: Elevate Your Game

October 26 - November 2, 2020

This is a free, virtual conference, with three sessions a day, along with paid workshops

THE digital gathering designed by CustomerX Pros, for CustomerX pros in:

> Customer Marketing

> Customer Experience

> Customer Advocacy

> Customer References

> Customer Engagement

> Customer Relationships

Meet the team of CustomerX pros who are determining the topics, designing the formats, and delivering the sessions:

Check out these great session topics and leaders

Monday, October 26
12 noon - 1pm EST

Session Leaders:
Jeff Ernst
Howard Fields

Watch Replay

Elevating our Game and our Profession: Why and How

We can get so bogged down responding to tactical requests for customer stories, reviews, and references that we lose sight of the opportunities to have REAL impact on our companies, by mobilizing customers to help drive strategic growth initiatives. That’s where our work will be noticed. And that’s what we need to do to elevate our profession and put ourselves on a career path to the C-Suite. In this interactive session we’ll talk about:

  • How do we connect ourselves and our customer programs to the strategic growth initiatives of our company?
  • What kinds of strategic growth initiatives can we impact by mobilizing customers and their voice?
  • How do I not get buried in tactical requests which keep me from being more strategic?

Monday, October 26
1:00 - 2:00pm EST

Session Leaders:
David Meerman Scott

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Fanocracy - Turn Your Fans into Customers and Your Customers into Fans

David will share key lessons from his newest book, “Fanocracy”, that we as customer marketers can apply right away. What is a Fanocracy? It is an organization that inspires extreme passion for a product, brand, or idea by putting customers’ needs and wishes at the center of everything it does; a force critical for massive success. David will share a ton of inspiring examples of companies that have built a Fanocracy, and tips that Customer Marketers can use right away to create the fandom we all crave.

We will be providing attendees with the book ahead of time so you can share your own takeaways and ideas. If you don’t already have a copy, send us your mailing address in the Contact Us form.

Monday, October 26
2:20 - 3:20pm EST

Session Leaders:
Lisa Nakano
Jeff Ernst

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Welcome to The Year of The Customer Marketer - Fireside Chat with Lisa Nakano About Her Bold Prediction for 2021

Lisa Nakano recently published a Planning Assumption for 2021 that boldly states that this is “The Year of The Customer Marketer.” (Read her blog post about it here.) That’s music to the ears of all of us at this conference. But what does that really mean?

Lisa is VP/Research Director for Customer Engagement and Jeff is former VP/Principal Analyst for Customer Engagement at Forrester Research. Join Lisa and Jeff for a fireside chat where we’ll dig into:

  • What are senior executives saying about post-sale customer engagement and retention (and why?) that led Forrester to predict that this is The Year of The Customer Marketer?
  • Lisa says that marketing leaders must begin to see Customer Marketers and Demand Marketers as peers. What do these marketing leaders need to do differently as it relates to budgets, staffing, and org structures?
  • What does this mean for Customer Marketers – what will they be expected to do to accelerate value delivery to customers and contribute to retention, and how will they need to adapt their programs?

Tuesday, October 27
12 noon - 1:00pm EST

Session Leaders:
Evan Jacobs
Kalina Bryant
Nick Venturella

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Career Trajectories in Customer Marketing: The Path is Never Linear

When done well, Customer Marketing is one of the most important roles in any organization. It can offer career advancement within the function, and to executive positions. You can come into Customer Marketing roles in a lot of ways and progress into it a lot of ways. Learn how these three Customer Marketing leaders have advanced in their careers and continue to make a name for themselves within their organization. Key Takeaways:

  • Learn how to write your own job description and understand where Customer Marketing should report into within the organization and why.
  • You do not go to college to get a degree in this, why should I choose Customer Marketing, and or how do you make your way into this role and succeed?
  • How do I show there is a demand for this role when hiring or recruiting for a position on my team?
  • How to get your C suite to not only support you but value your work, and how recommendations on how to standout as a Customer Marketer.

Tuesday, October 27
1:00 - 2:00pm EST

Session Leaders:
Gordana Stok

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Igniting Your Content Marketing Strategy with the Voice of Your Customers and Experts

Capture and create content that B2B buyers crave. In this session, you’ll learn how customer marketing and content marketing can work together to develop a content strategy that aligns with the B2B buying journey and answers buyers’ key questions using three powerful and persuasive voices. Topics We’ll Cover:

  • What stages of the B2B buying journey provide the greatest opportunities for customer marketing and content marketing to influence?
  • What questions do B2B buyers have as they acknowledge their problem, identify their business and solution requirements, and evaluate vendors?
  • How to create a content strategy based on buyer questions and repurpose topics so that we never run out of ideas.
  • How to build authority and trust by answering buyer questions using the voice of your customers, internal experts and external subject matter experts.

Wednesday, October 28
12:00 noon - 1:00pm EST

Session Leaders:
Heather Pritchett
Sarah Schreiner
Victoria LaPlante
Amanda Salem

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Customer Marketing is a Team Sport – Winning Strategies to Get Your Key Players in the Game

Join this interactive workshop and panel discussion to learn a framework to take on your biggest challenges in getting your key players bought in and committed to customer programs. Leave the session feeling empowered to identify and engage your stakeholders, and to demonstrate the business value of the programs you run. Topics to be covered include:

  • Identifying your stakeholders and understanding how to get them on your side.
  • Design of a winning “pitch”” to capture buy-in.
  • Creative channels for effective internal communication.
  • Showing impact and success – gaining and leveraging internal evangelists.

Wednesday, October 28
1:00 - 2:00pm EST

Session Leaders:
Alison Bukowski

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Managing the Marketing Gap: Getting Creative to Have the Customer Voice Heard

In this dynamic session, we will showcase the role that your Customer Marketing and Customer Advocacy programs can play in pushing marketing to get creative, explore new ideas and creatively infuse customer voices into marketing activities. We’ll talk about:

  • How do you establish a strong relationship with your marketing department, including those that have multiple divisions?
  • What do you do with a marketing department that is stalled in reactionary vs. proactive mode?
  • Can a marketing department really not see the value of the customer voice? How do you bring them up to speed?
  • How do you push boundaries with marketing to go beyond the case study or testimonial?
  • Ultimately, how do you drive the value of your advocacy program to make it an essential element of marketing?

Wednesday, October 28
2:20 - 3:20pm EST

Session Leaders:
Scott Wilder
Bill Johnson
Barbara Thomas
Rebecca Salem

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Customer Community Success & Growth in 2020 & Beyond

We all know that communities can be powerful, but when it comes to the intersection of Customer Marketing, Customer Support, and online and offline communities, there is still a lot of fog in many organizations. As Customer Marketers or CS professionals, we have an opportunity to clear that fog and leverage both online and offline communities to drive real value for our customers and our business. But how do we get there? Join us for a discussion group that will touch on these questions and more:

  • What does “community” really mean and what types of community engagement are beneficial to customers and to the company?
  • How do you decide between creating communities on social platforms like Facebook vs. a private “walled-garden” community?
  • What are some strategies to tie both online and offline communities like user groups, CABs, etc. together?
  • How do you (or do you?) incentivize community participation?
  • Is it important to name and brand your community and all of the programs that go with it – advocate programs, champion programs, user groups, etc.? If so, how do you go about that?
  • What are good community benchmarks to focus on? For example, % of solutions authored by non-employees? % of active users vs. passive?

Thursday, October 29
12:00 noon - 1:00pm EST

Session Leaders:
Irwin Hipsman
Howard Fields

Watch Replay

A Maturity Model for Your Customer Marketing Program

We will present a pragmatic framework that will help you determine how mature your Customer Marketing program is today and the actions you should consider to get where you want to be in the next year. We will also share an aspirational vision of how Customer Marketing might evolve as organizations become increasingly customer-led and embed customer voice in all facets of the business. Key Takeaways:

  • How does the management of people, processes, and technology advance at each stage?
  • What are the Customer Marketing Program guideposts for moving from one stage to the next?
  • How might Customer Marketing leaders leverage their deep customer knowledge and experience as customer fluency evolves, matures and gains a broader influence across the organization?

Thursday, October 29
1:00 - 2:00pm EST

Session Leaders:
David Coates
Yvette Tardiff
Heather Pritchett
Jeanne Talbot

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Small, but Mighty: How CABs Can Have an Outsized Impact on Your Company's Success

Customer Advisory Boards are a team sport – Executive leadership, Product, Sales and Marketing all have to be aligned and committed to the goals and long term success – how can you do this successfully? Topics we’ll cover in this session:

  • CABs can really have a significant strategic impact on the business, but it has to be of mutual value to vendor and members – we’ll share some best practices on how to make this happen.
  • Having clear metrics are absolutely key – it can’t be simply a two-day meeting in a beautiful location. We’ll share some examples of how the panelists have been able to capture and measure impact.
  • CAB seats are a powerful tool – how do you manage the demands of leadership and sales to keep the CAB dynamic and engaged?

Thursday, October 29
2:20 - 3:20pm EST

Session Leaders:
Rob Leavitt

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Executive Engagement: Why Does it Matter and What Works for C-Suite Connections?

Your customer engagement programs work well with end users and managers, but your own leadership team wants you to bring in C-suite executives, too.

You know you need to treat execs with kid gloves. But where do you start? Why should C-suite executives engage with your programs? We’ve gone to ITSMA’s Rob Leavitt, the leading authority on Executive Engagement, to bring you a session where we will cover:

  • What C-suite executives care about today and why they want to engage with companies like yours?
  • Why should you care? What benefits can executive engagement bring to your organization?
  • What types of executive engagement programs work best and what’s required to develop and sustain them?
  • How can you avoid “random acts of executive engagement” and create an integrated strategy and program that supports every part of the business?

Friday, October 30
12:00 noon - 1:00pm EST

Session Leaders:
Liz Richardson
Deena Zenyk

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The Advocacy-Loyalty Fusion: New Strategies for Building More Scalable, Sticky and Measurable Customer Engagement Programs

Ongoing customer engagement is hard.  We’ve seen many B2B customer engagement and advocacy programs launch to great acclaim, only to lose steam and struggle to engage their once enthusiastic members down the road. It’s time to evolve our B2B engagement strategies based on how people engage today. In this session, Deena and Liz introduce tried and true tactics from the world of B2C Loyalty programs and fuse them with the unique structure of B2B business to present a next gen approach to customer engagement practice. In this session, you’ll learn:

  • The key differentiators between loyalty and advocacy

  • Opportunities for combining loyalty techniques with B2B customer engagement

  • How to begin evolving your B2B customer engagement program for higher member retention

Friday, October 30
1:00 - 2:00pm EST

Session Leaders:
Barbara Thomas
Dana Alvarenga
Kim Plank
Nick Venturella
Meredith Franks
Crystal Anderson
Meaghan Sullivan

Watch Replay

It's You! Why Your Customers are NOT Engaging with Your Program! (And how to fix it)

Too many customers programs sound like this: “We beg our customers to do favors for us and we give them points/rewards in exchange.” Really, you thought you could do that forever? It’s like saying to someone you care about, “I got you this Amazon gift card for each time I need to give you something – birthday, anniversary, Christmas, etc. And I never need to personalize it any way cause I know you like it, you said so a couple years ago when we first started dating.” Customer advocacy is a relationship with your best and favorite customers. Stop putting the relationship on autopilot. Keep date night in the relationship with your customers. Add the spice back into the relationship. In this session you’ll discover:

  • Secret & successful techniques to keep your customers interested and motivated.
  • How to amplify your program.
  • Presenting the valuable opportunities for their benefit.
  • Engagement during the different stages of the customer program maturity.
  • Redefining Customer Marketing: New rules of engagement during an unpredictable environment.

Friday, October 30
2:20 - 3:20pm EST

Session Leaders:
Steve Rankel
Kaily Baskett

Watch Replay

How to Gain Influence and Authority: When You Know the Customer Well, You Have Credibility and Power

Want to offer “bullet proof“ customer insights that will boost your career and impact your company‘s revenue?

When you know why customers buy, why they stay, and why they leave – and you know how to infuse these insights into every fiber of your company – you gain the ultimate authority in discussions and decisions around product roadmaps, customer experience, business processes, and growth strategies. But how do you do that in a way that gains trust, demonstrates valuable perspective, and still keeps everyone “on board?” Join us for a session to uncover this and more:

  • Customer Interview Basics and the #1 mistake NO ONE tells interviewers that hinders the depth and power of customer insights.
  • How “Value Hallucination” might be holding your business back, and how to avoid it.
  • 3 keys for uncovering “deep customer truth” as opposed to settling for generic insights.
  • 2 ways to frame and present customer truths so your executive team and “VP of NO” will listen and follow your lead.

Monday, November 2
12:00 noon - 1:00pm EST

Session Leaders:
Meredith Franks
Evan Jacobs
Jeanne Talbot

Watch Replay

What Does the Customer Story of the Future Look Like?

The customer story isn’t a new invention – for decades companies have been relying on customer proof to help them turn prospects into customers. Advocacy programs have long been established and relayed. But given the current world state and demands we now have for our all too few advocates, how do we evolve to tell the customer story better? Key Takeaways:

  • How to create compelling customer proof even when you can’t be in person.
  • What do prospects really want? How are they consuming content?
  • How to leverage customer proof to effectively cross-sell/up-sell into existing accounts.
  • Moving beyond the written case study/video – what other avenues should we be utilizing?

Monday, November 2
1:00 - 2:00pm EST

Session Leaders:
Jeff Ernst
Howard Fields
Surprise Guests

Watch Replay

CustomerXCon Closing Session: Introducing CustomerX Labs and Birds-of-a-Feather Cohorts

As CustomerXCon 2020 comes to a close, we’ll talk about what comes next.

We’ll introduce CustomerX Labs, an opportunity for those of you who like to shape the future, to participate in a couple of exciting initiatives to define the future of customer voice and insights. And for those of you who want to continue to network and support each other, we’ll be forming birds-of-a-feather cohorts of 4-8 people who will meet and tackle a big topic or issue.

Contact Us with Questions