Episode 12: Building customer advisory boards that drive real growth

Host 0:00
Welcome to The Advocast, where we discuss all things customer advocacy. Discover the latest trends, best practices, and tangible advice as we talk to some of the brightest and sharpest professionals in the industry. Learn how to turn your customers into advocates to drive sales leads and make a positive impact on revenue.

Host 0:28
Hi everyone, this is Pablo from Wings4U. Today I'm thrilled to have Amanda Peacock on the show. Hi Amanda, how are you doing?

Amanda Peacock 0:36
Hey there, I'm so good. I'm coming off a week of PTO at the beach with my family, so I'm feeling very relaxed.

Host 0:47
That's so good to hear. Thank you very much for taking the time to be here with us today. We have a really nice show today about CABs, and Amanda is someone who has a lot of experience with them. She's running her own CAB, and she's going to share those experiences with us today.

Amanda Peacock 1:06
Awesome, sounds good. Yeah, so excited.

Host 1:07
All right, so cool. To start, the first question is about yourself, Amanda. How did you get into the customer marketing world, into the advocacy universe?

Amanda Peacock 1:20
Yeah, so basically my whole career I've been focused on events, specifically customer events. And you know, 15 years ago — not to date myself — customer marketing wasn't really a thing, right? So I was doing marketing for customers through events, but we weren't really calling it that. I've always just had a passion for working with our customers, and I really started from the event side first. As I grew in my career, I started to learn more about customer marketing, and I was really lucky to have a few mentors help me see, like, hey, we can do so much more than events for our customers. Let's take this to the next level and really focus on customer marketing. So it kind of evolved from events, to customer events, to customer marketing, and I love it. It's just a great way to — you know, we can't only spoil people while they're prospects, we've got to do that while they're also our customers. And I just love to do that, to make people feel great. I think that's what customer marketing is all about: just making sure your customers feel at home with your team, your product, and your software. So that's kind of how I got into this space, magically, it seems.

Host 2:37
Cool, cool. And I'd like to know a little bit about Zylo. Zylo is the company that you're working for right now, right? So what's Zylo, and what's Zylo's value proposition?

Amanda Peacock 2:48
Yeah, so Zylo — if you think of something like Truebill for your personal use, right, that helps you see everything that you're subscribed to, like Netflix and Hulu and all of those. Well, Zylo does that, but for your company. So it helps you see all these SaaS applications that you have, and it helps IT and finance leaders understand: hey, we have eight different subscriptions to Adobe, let's consolidate those so we can get a better deal and make sure we have less risk. So Zylo is really there for your IT and finance teams to get complete visibility, but also to understand, hey, maybe we don't need 800 Salesforce licenses if we're only using 400 of those. We really help our customers understand how they're utilizing SaaS apps and how to rein those in if they haven't been paying attention — especially, you know, in the pandemic everyone was kind of just getting their own apps because they could, and they were remote, and then all of a sudden you have a big problem. So Zylo helps our IT and finance leaders understand where we're spending that money, and how to better approach those SaaS apps.

Host 4:08
Great, that sounds good. So can we say that it's in the realm of security software? Or is it more analyzing the usage part?

Amanda Peacock 4:19
Yeah, security is part of it. It's overall SaaS management, so it's operations. It's making sure we're financially making the best decisions and not overspending on apps that we're not using, and making sure that we don't have people doing one-click agreements that kind of down the road put us in a bad spot from a risk perspective.

Host 4:41
That's a very good point, right? I mean, I guess that after the pandemic, as you said, since IT was a little bit far away, people were just finding the best apps that would increase their productivity, right? And I think that not only after the pandemic, but before that as well, because it's much easier sometimes for people just to show up on the internet and say, oh, I heard that this app's very cool. But not always are those apps secure.

Amanda Peacock 5:05
Yep.

Host 5:06
And not always are those approved by your company, right? It needs to be somehow controlled, and that's what Zylo is doing. That's one of the things. And what I'm hearing is that it also gives you another layer of information about the finance side, right?

Amanda Peacock 5:28
Yeah, exactly. Just avoiding redundancy, you know. Marketing could have two project management apps — marketing has two project management apps. Like, let's consolidate and do things, you know. We're just trying to make things easier for our customers and help them work smarter.

Host 5:45
Cool. And is this a global company? I mean, with customers in all countries, or more focused on the United States?

Amanda Peacock 5:51
Yeah, so we started in the US. We have some customers in EMEA, and one of our great customers is in Australia. They're actually — we have a big conference coming up in a couple of weeks, September 27th and 28th, and REA Group in Australia is going to be speaking about how they've used Zylo. So we have a global customer base.

Host 6:16
That's cool, and for you, of course, that means fun, because you have a multicultural environment with customers everywhere, right? Okay, so here's a tip for marketers: if you have apps — and we know we have layers and layers of martech technology that marketers have today — Zylo is a good thing. Check it out. Okay, so going back to you and your day. What does a day look like at Zylo for you?

Amanda Peacock 6:53
You know, it looks pretty good, I have to say. Typically I'm meeting with our CS team. They are so engaged with our customers, so it's really nice to work with a team that understands our customers so much. And really, it's nice to get that information not just from Salesforce, but from a person that works with them day in, day out. So most days I'm meeting with some members of our CS team, I'm helping fulfill reference requests for our sales team, and I am meeting with customers to work on case studies. Or, as I mentioned, we have our big conference coming up in a few weeks, so I'm working with our speakers and our marketing team to make sure that we're in a good spot for that upcoming conference. Really, every day is a little bit different. I would say we try to run one to two customer events per month, so on any given day I'm helping organize those. It really depends on the day, I guess I would say.

Host 8:01
Yeah, so what I'm hearing is that you're doing sometimes maybe 24 events a year that you're helping organize.

Amanda Peacock 8:10
Yeah.

Host 8:11
That's a lot.

Amanda Peacock 8:13
It is. You know, we have great support in CS that helps with a lot of the content and really helps us drive those registrations and helps us create events that people want to attend. So some of them are webinars that are really focused on, hey, here's how you can use Zylo better — because, you know, as customer marketers, we know the stickier a customer is, the less likely they are to churn, so it's our job to help with that, to help make sure that they're using the product well. We also host some upsell events, like bourbon tastings or cheese-making events, that are virtual and a little more fun. Those are the ones I prefer. But I have a lot of support, which makes it a lot easier to make those events happen. And then, of course, we're doing our CAB, so we basically try to do one virtual and one in person per year, and then stay in touch in between.

Host 9:19
Cool. Yeah, I have a friend from a previous job who said that she was also organizing road shows every year, and she used to say that it was like getting married once every month, you know, organizing those big events in a road show. Lots of preparation, like a wedding. And it's tough — it just tells you how tough it

Amanda Peacock 9:41
is. Yeah, it's cool to meet customers too. That's kind of the exciting part, right? It's a lot of work, but then you get to meet these customers that you're emailing with all the time, or you kind of see notes in Salesforce, and it's cool to put two and two together and see who they are as a person.

Host 10:02
That's cool. So, talking a little bit about the impact, just before we dive into CABs specifically — because between all those events we have CABs as one of them, right, and this is going to be one of the centerpieces of this episode — I would like to understand a little bit the kind of impact that you bring when you are doing your job, basically all these events that you organize and helping drive with customers. What's the impact that you're looking for, and the kind of impact that you're getting out of them?

Amanda Peacock 10:32
Yeah, I mean, we're always looking for upsell opportunities influenced. That's a huge part of us doing these upsell-focused events, so that's one part of it. The other part is really adoption. So are they using these new features that we're bringing, you know, on the monthly customer webinars when we call out, "Hey, these are five new features we've added in the last month"? Do we see an uptick in that feature usage? Are we seeing some questions that are coming out of that? So I think adoption and opportunities influenced are probably two of the larger things that we're looking for. We're also just always trying to expand the number of users within an account. Are they inviting their peers, their colleagues that maybe haven't been in the Zylo platform yet? That's something that we're always looking to expand as well.

Host 11:26
That sounds really like customer marketing, mainly the second one, right? Driving usage is one of the things where we can have a lot of impact. For all the customer marketing professionals around the globe, that's a place — I would say even that it's a good tip that I can hear from you, even for new professionals. That's an area where, even if you are in the IT industry, the usage is even bigger. Drive adoption of your products. You have the power to do that and to drive activities that will drive adoption.

Amanda Peacock 12:00
Yeah. And, you know, don't be afraid to get scrappy to understand that usage. I think sometimes it's like, oh my gosh, we don't have all these tools in our product to tell us if someone has clicked on this button. Work with your product team. I have a great partner in CS and CS enablement that really helps bring that to light, and you can find a way to get that information. It doesn't have to be perfect. Ideal state, yes, you'll eventually have every click ever done by every customer, but until you get there, it's okay to get a little scrappy with it to get the details that you need to be successful.

Host 12:42
It's a good enough journey, right? You're going to get better when you start doing that, but just start it. That's what you're saying, right? Start it the way you have, with the information you have, and just keep improving with time. And I guess that this is also, to close this section, another thing that I can hear: that it's important to have friends in other departments.

Amanda Peacock 13:08
100%.

Host 13:10
Managers from — I'm

Amanda Peacock 13:13
not above bribery. But you know, I'm only successful because of our CS team. Our Chief Customer Officer really sees the value in customer marketing, and so do our CS team, and really our sales and marketing teams. It makes such a huge difference when you have people that are helping and advocating instead of fighting you every step of the way. Making those friends, helping people understand what customer marketing is, what you're trying to achieve, and how it can also help them — it goes a long way. And if that doesn't work, like I said, do a happy hour or give them some swag.

Host 14:00
Yeah, sure. Excellent, cool. So now let's go into CABs — a CAB, by the way, is a customer advisory board, right? And there's a question that's not here, but I'm sure that you have no problem talking about it, which is that a CAB can mean different things for different companies, right? There's no book that you just follow the rules, and if you don't follow that, it's not a CAB. It's not like that. You can have so many different CABs, and that's correct. Usually it should fit the needs of your company. It's not one size fits all. So for you and for Zylo, what is a CAB? What is the opportunity, what does it look like, do you call it an event? All of those questions.

Amanda Peacock 14:52
Yeah, I mean, for us it's much easier to probably just start with what it isn't. It's not a "hey, here's our product roadmap, tell us everything that's right or wrong." It's not a sales pitch. It's not an hours-long event where no one is going to get anything out of it. What we really wanted was to create an environment with some of our top customers where, yes, we want their product feedback, but what we really want is to understand what's keeping you up at night. What are you thinking about in the next five to ten years? Because as a partner, we want to be there. We want to be there with you five to ten years from now, not just right now. We know that we're helping you solve what we can right now, but we want to be thinking together about the future. So I think we really try to focus at Zylo on how we can make sure that we're going to be the right partner for you and your team — not just today, not just next year, but five years, ten years.

And so what was really important when we were putting together the CAB is that this was really driven by our Chief Customer Officer and our Chief Marketing Officer, and having that buy-in and that teamwork is essential. It's so helpful for us to not only get some of that marketing feedback and some of that CS feedback, but to have a cohesive picture that says, this is what we want from our CAB. So we really decided that what we need and what we want from this is to understand our customer as best as possible and to make sure that we're going in the right direction with them. That's really what we were thinking of when we started the CAB, maybe six months ago. So I'd say that's kind of what it means to us. We've got a great group of customers. We actually ended up doing more than we were planning, which is always a great problem to have. And what was important to us is to make sure we have different voices represented. It wasn't just IT, it wasn't just finance, just procurement. We really wanted to make sure we had a well-rounded picture, because if not, then we're only going to cater to that one demographic, and we're going to leave a lot of people behind.

Host 17:07
Totally, totally. So usually, when I'm having conversations with customers about CABs, I usually say that that's the question, right? Who are you going to bring to the CAB? That's what you're just talking about. You wanted, for Zylo, it made sense to have different profiles, not only the IT guy, as you said, the IT person, but also procurement. So I usually answer that also by saying it depends on your value proposition. Your product was made with a value proposition for different groups, and if that's so, bring them all if you can. Of course, it could get very complex, but we'll get to that. We could talk about that later on in this podcast. Do you agree with this — that it depends on the value proposition? I mean, inviting HR, if you have no value proposition for them, doesn't make sense, but procurement makes total sense.

Amanda Peacock 18:02
Yeah, and I think, too, for us, what was important is, I think sometimes when people are doing a CAB, they kind of just default to, hey, we're going to invite our everyday user, and then maybe they're going to start to give everyday user product feedback, which is great in a certain forum, right? But this isn't "Amanda, I need you to change this button color, it has to be blue." We're focused on, hey, I need this to do XYZ things to make me successful over the next five years. And so I think we really took a step back and tried to make sure that we didn't confuse a product feedback session with a customer advisory board, which I think sometimes does happen. And so that was important to us. Of course, there are people in our CAB that are everyday users, and that's great, but we tried to find some sort of balance with that as well, and just to make sure that the expectations were clear from the beginning. You know, nothing is worse than someone thinking, like, yes, I get to have this session and I'm going to give all this feedback and everything is going to change about the product. But that's not what this is, right? And so making sure you have those expectations clear at the beginning also helps with that.

Host 19:21
Okay. Cool, cool. Well, okay. So let's go back to the set of questions that we had before, because now we're going to get into very exciting questions, like how do you keep your customers engaged. It's one of the things that everyone asks. Is it an event, is it a one-time thing, is it ongoing stuff? So we're going to cover that in the next questions, but let's start with where you start. If someone that's listening to this podcast — a lot of people are talking about CABs lately, it's incredible how many companies are starting their first experiences with a CAB. And so, Amanda, what's your tip for these marketers? How can they get started? What are the first things that they do when they are talking internally?

Amanda Peacock 20:03
Yeah, I think it goes back to what we said earlier: just start. It's not going to be perfect, you're going to mess something up, it'll be all right. You know, I think that's one thing, but the biggest thing is just get that internal support. I was very lucky to be welcomed into Zylo, like I said. Our Chief Customer Officer and Chief Marketing Officer saw this CAB as a very high priority, wanted to be a part of it, could see the value, so I was really starting ahead of the game, to be honest. But getting that internal buy-in and making sure everyone understands what we're trying to get out of the CAB at the beginning will really save you. Because sometimes — not that I've ever been in this situation — but sometimes people are like, we need a CAB, and they don't know what a CAB is, and they don't know what they want, and then it's just like, we've got to have a CAB. So I think getting that agreement first is the key to really getting started. And just have a conversation. Include product, include CS. Over-include, you know, to make sure we're getting everyone's point of view, and then go from there. But I think making sure everyone's aligned internally is the biggest thing first.

Host 21:21
Yeah, so that's a very good thing, what I'm hearing. I would like to also add a few things here. Unless you are a customer success unit, right — because sometimes it happens that customer marketing is very mixed and fused with customer success, and sometimes it's not. In the case that it is fused, then it could be a marketing program, like a peer marketing program, if you have customer success as part of you. But if not, you need friends. That's what I always say: you need people from other departments, because otherwise you are running and owning the program alone, but you need product, you need engineering, you need the support department, like customer experience. You need all those people to say, "Hey, together we need to listen more to customers, right? And let's design what our goals are, that every one of the departments here in this room have, so we design activities to accomplish those goals that you have." It's not something that's only for marketing.

So what I'm hearing you saying is: don't be alone, don't be a solo player in this case. Bring people from other departments — you even said over-include people, right, if necessary, at least in the beginning, so you see who is involved and who is not involved. And that comes to the next question, that's exactly about this. Any tips you have to recruit internal stakeholders? First of all, my first question about this is, who are the natural stakeholders, where you'd say, okay, this person should be on the table, at least in the beginning? Then they will say no if they're not interested. But who do you bring in as mandatory?

Amanda Peacock 23:00
Again, that comes back to what the CAB is going to be for you. For us, it's important to have, obviously, overall executive alignment, but really our CS leaders, our product team, marketing, and then our CEO is also very involved. And I think, you know, we're talking about our top-tier customers and really communicating a message with them. So take a step back and ask who needs to be involved in that at your organization. For us, it's of course product, engineering, marketing, and CS. I think there's a case for sales to definitely at least understand what the CAB is, and what we're getting out of it, and to understand what questions they have. Honestly, I am a fan of over-including instead of excluding. You would be surprised the things that people could bring to the table that you weren't thinking of. But at the minimum, you've got to have product, CS, and marketing. At the very minimum — but I'd say over-include.

Host 24:05
I agree with everything you just said. Cool. So then it leads me to the next question. You were mentioning customers, right? What kind of customers, and how do you select them at Zylo? What is a relevant customer, you know, to become a member of a CAB, and maybe what is not a good fitting customer, let's say, for a CAB? Maybe those two questions.

Amanda Peacock 24:35
Yeah, I mean, a lot of things went into determining that. Again, very lucky to have the partnership with CS that helped drive so much of this, because they know the customer so well. So really making sure we're including different use cases was important to us, and different personas. Like I said before, we didn't only have IT, we didn't only have finance. We really needed to make sure we were representing a good group of different personas. And then also we wanted different industries. We're not big enough to have an industry-specific CAB. Hopefully we'll be there one day, but right now we're not. So we really wanted to make sure we had a lot of different industries represented. We wanted different personas, and then also we really want to make sure that we're talking to people that are using Zylo differently. We don't need 20 people that are all doing the exact same thing with Zylo, right? We want to make sure that we see people that are really focused on our benchmarking tool, or someone that's really focused on our app catalog. We have a few different products, and we want to make sure that we have that all represented in this customer advisory board. So we really got a big-picture look at all of our different types of customers, so that way when we are doing future planning, we're really making sure we're representing all of our customers, even though they can't all be there. That's

Host 26:01
a very good thing to do. That was

Amanda Peacock 26:02
our criteria, I would say.

Host 26:05
Yeah, and that's one of the things that leads me also to think, and in my own experiences, of bigger companies with, you know, 50 products in business units that are all equally important. And it's usually not a good idea to put them all in one CAB, because you're not going to get enough engagement with them, right? They will be bored, because you're not going to take the best out of those customers. So in those cases, Amanda, what do you think? Should they just create several CABs?

Amanda Peacock 26:44
Yep.

Host 26:44
What do you think?

Amanda Peacock 26:45
Yeah, I think again you have to go to the end goal, and that's probably your customer's experience. And, like you said, if we have people that are nowhere near the same page or not working on the same products, they're probably not going to really want to learn that much from each other, and that's not going to be a great experience for them. So, something I should have said earlier: we really, when we were thinking of the CAB, wanted to make sure that we had a community that we were creating for our CAB members as well. That was really important when we were looking at what a CAB meant to us at Zylo. And so if you think about it from that kind of perspective, I would say having different product CABs is important as you grow larger and as you're building out CABs, and the same thing with industry. I think it's super important. But for us, for now, one is good.

Host 27:42
Yeah, that's for sure. I agree completely. The industry perspective is very important for some companies, right? It would make sense to have CABs specifically for those industries. And so, are people eager? Just saying, yeah, I'd love to become part of your CAB, Amanda? And do you have a set of, you know, gives and gets that they will receive to participate, and what do you do to make that attractive?

Amanda Peacock 28:11
Yeah, we basically had a charter. It's a maybe five- or six-page presentation PDF that we sent out. Our Chief Customer Officer made the ask to everyone — he knows almost all of them personally, so that was also another great step. And then this charter was something that our internal stakeholder team agreed on, so it said how long they would be on the CAB, what the commitments would look like from a travel perspective, what we expect of our CAB members, and then what they could get in return. And something that we did that I think has worked out pretty well is we included a line in there that said, you know, by agreeing to this, you will also complete one marketing activity throughout your term. And something that I really liked about that is these are our strongest customers that are already willing to be our champions, but sometimes we don't make that ask. We feel like, oh, maybe we shouldn't ask them, they've got a lot going on. So including that in the charter made it a little bit easier. We had a couple of people that pushed back, and they're notoriously private, and that's okay. So there are a couple of people that don't agree to that one term.

But really laying out those expectations from the beginning made it much easier for people to accept our invitation, because it was: this is the time requirement, this is the work requirement, this is the travel. Laying it all out there from the beginning gives them an opportunity to say, like, okay, can I handle this over the next 18 months, or am I going to be too busy? And some people said, hey, I'm so interested, but this next year I have XYZ things happening, and I can't do it. But I think that's better than having people commit when they don't know what they're getting into, and then six months later you haven't heard from them. So I think just laying out as much as you can from the beginning is what's really important.

Host 30:10
Cool. And to have that, of course, it means that you need to plan that upfront, and that leads me to my next question, which is about those activities that you are telling them about — this is going to be for the next six months or 12 months. How do you keep them engaged in terms of activities: online, offline, hybrid? Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Amanda Peacock 30:35
Yeah, so ours is an 18-month term, just a little bit longer than a year, and people can sign back up. I think basically at the 18-month mark we'll check in, and we'll know who's been engaged and who hasn't, and we'll say, hey, it's okay if you want to move on from this. And kind of in between sessions, we've created a Slack community. We've had some people that can't join the Slack community because of their IT restrictions, so that, of course, presents a challenge. And not everyone is really into LinkedIn groups, so sometimes we just resort to email, which isn't the most community-dynamic way, but you've just kind of got to do what you've got to do with where you're at. And so we just keep people up to date.

We just did a poll about our next meeting. I think polls are a great way to have some engagement but not have people feel pressure, so they can let you know, hey, Amanda, I can't travel in November, could we just do it virtually? Or these dates are better, or I would actually prefer to be in person. And I think if you go back to that beginning point of making sure our customers are happy and creating that experience for them, that's the way that you're going to keep people engaged: to ask them what they want. No one's going to be mad that Amanda from Zylo is asking, how can I make this experience better, right? So I think that's important.

At Zylo we don't have a community, and that is where I feel like you would typically engage your CAB members more frequently, because it's a place they already know. That's what I've done in previous roles. So I think setting up a private channel within your own community is a great way to keep your CAB members engaged. And just remember, it doesn't have to be just the customer marketer that's reaching out to them. You have other stakeholders on your team that care about your customers, that know about your customers, and that know about the CAB. Have your CMO, have your CCO reach out, put out a topic. I think they'd probably all be willing to do it too.

Host 32:53
Yeah, and that's actually one of the things that came up on one of the community calls between customer marketers. Someone gave us this wonderful tip that I'm definitely going to implement in a CAB that we are building right now, which is to have a kind of — how do you say that — a buddy system. Someone, you know, you bring your customer marketing manager, you bring someone from engineering. Everyone in your company, let's say at Zylo, should have at least one or two CAB members that they will always be connected to, to see how they are doing, how they are feeling. And mainly when you have physical events, right? You can feel a little bit alone or weird just being in a place where you don't know anyone yet, but then there's someone, a face that you know, a name that you know already — let's say one of these people from your company that comes and sits beside you during the events.

Amanda Peacock 33:50
And that's such a good point, because we do that for in-person events. So make sure you do that for virtual too. In person it's really easy to just say, hey, let's make sure we seat so-and-so next to so-and-so so they can chat, they have this in common. So let's do that for virtual too — have someone send a message on the side, check in with them. So I love that tip.

Host 34:14
Throughout the year, right? Following the customers in the CAB activities throughout the year. I think that is a good tip. All right. So, in terms of engagement, one of the things that we always talk to our customers about, and in the CABs and the programs that we are running for customers, is that the customers, the CAB members, or any advocate, they're looking for status, recognition, and influence inside your company. They want to be heard, they want to participate and influence, they want special opportunities for networking. And when you are doing a CAB, when you are designing those activities — what's going to happen throughout the year to keep them engaged — you have the opportunity to work on all those things. How can I give them some more status, recognition, awards, influence, all those things that we usually call the pyramid of advocates' needs? How do you climb that and have all those things in a CAB? I think it's a great opportunity. And in terms of how often — do you think that you should have one activity, be it a virtual event where you bring, let's say, a celebrity from the industry to give them an exclusive talk, or just a session for feedback, or a moment where they present between themselves? How often should those kinds of activities happen, in your opinion?

Amanda Peacock 35:38
Yeah, I think it really depends on your customers and also on your team. But for us, we try to meet virtually once a year, and then in person once a year, so just two CAB-specific meetings per year. But then we have a lot of our CAB members that are speaking at our upcoming event, and we're really celebrating and highlighting them. We also give them custom gifts throughout the year, just to say hello, thank you, that sort of thing. And then we're including them in all of our other customer events that we're hosting throughout the year. So I think it really depends on your budget, your time, and what you have bandwidth for. That's what we're doing right now. I think ideal state is to really get those going once a quarter. And once we can get back in person more, which we're hoping to start to do early next year — that's when it really changes. That's when you make those connections, I think, and that's when you really get to the heart of a CAB, where people are connecting with each other offline and outside of your CAB. And that's what we want. We want to create that community.

Host 36:52
Totally. And Amanda, do you use, like, the normal agenda of events? I mean, many companies have their event of the year. Do you use that structure, since someone else is already paying for hotels and travel for key customers, to do a kind of pre-event and enjoy the synergy of the budget spending?

Amanda Peacock 37:14
I typically try to do that if at all possible. Our event is virtual this year, so we're not able to. We're going to host an onsite early next year. But I kind of always like to do that half day before your big event. It gives you a chance to spoil them, it gets you people there that know the product and that feel passionate about it, so you always want those advocates at those events. And then it's honestly a chance for us to get to know them better when we're all in one room, and then you get to see them longer than just that CAB meeting, right? Like, you really get a chance to get to know them and chat, regardless of what's going on, because you have so many days together.

Host 38:07
Okay, cool. All right, so now going to the last portion of this call. This has been very interesting. Thank you so much again, Amanda, for sharing all this knowledge and experience. I'm sure that this is going to be a very successful episode, because so many people are planning CABs right now, and this is going to come in handy for sure for many people. And I would like to talk about your learnings. You make it sound easy, right? It's not that easy. We know that it takes a lot of effort. And even everything that you know now, you probably didn't get from a book about CABs where it was all there. It was really networking and trial and error. So, if you had to start over, what would you do differently?

Amanda Peacock 38:58
Oh gosh, I think that's a great question. I don't know what I would do differently at Zylo. I feel like I've really had a great team. But I've done it a bunch of times before, and something that I've changed since starting at Zylo is really having that partnership internally first. I think sometimes, as customer marketers, we just go, go, go, and I think it's really important to get your teams aligned first. I've worked on a product before where we got all this product feedback during a CAB, and then would have it over and over again, and none of that feedback was taken into consideration. But product didn't really necessarily know how important that feedback was, and so it really created this kind of confusion, right?

And so I think the biggest thing is just having alignment internally that says: if we're going to ask for feedback during this CAB, we are committed to not only making some of those changes, but making them before our next session, and then relaying that back to our CAB members, so they can see that not only are we listening, but we're listening and taking action. So, I haven't had that challenge here at Zylo, but I think it's just so important to understand internally what the expectations are and what we can really do with this customer feedback, because then we'll make sure we aren't asking certain questions if we know we can't make those changes. So I think that is a key learning for me that I've used here at Zylo, and it's been really helpful. But I'd say that's something to get right. It can be really hard if not.

Host 40:47
Totally, totally. That's a very good tip. I totally agree. And for people that are just starting, what do you have to say to them about the career, about the challenges, and about how they can have fun in the journey as well?

Amanda Peacock 41:04
Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, with these CABs you're just marketing to people. Your customers, they are people. They are not these massive logos. They are not Nike and Disney and Apple. They are Amanda at Disney, they're Pablo at Nike. They're people that want to succeed in their career, they want to be celebrated, they want to work hard. And that's a lot easier to work with than saying, like, hey, we have to get these eight logos. No, you don't need to focus on the logos, they will get there. Focus on the people that are working at these companies, and you'll really be able to enjoy it more. It's less stressful that way, when you think of your customers as humans and not as this big prize.

Host 41:53
Totally, cool. Now we usually ask this fun question just to end this episode: if you had to write a customer marketing phrase on a T-shirt, what would that phrase be?

Amanda Peacock 42:08
I think it's what I always say, which is, customers are humans, not logos. And I think that is 100% the best way to operate, because it's the truth.

Host 42:22
Excellent. So, Amanda, thank you very much for all of this. Can you tell a little bit about how people that want to connect with you can find you and send questions?

Amanda Peacock 42:35
Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn, Amanda Peacock. I think there's only a few of us Peacocks out there, so feel free to connect with me. I'm also on a bunch of the customer marketing Slacks. I try to join a lot of the customer marketing chats that we have every other week. I'm actually presenting at CustomerXCon in a few weeks as well, so I'm always happy to chat. So feel free to reach out.

Host 43:04
Excellent, Amanda. Thank you very much. Have a wonderful day, and we'll keep in touch.

Amanda Peacock 43:08
Thank you. See ya.