Episode Transcript
Will: Welcome, Sarah. Welcome, Angela. I am so excited to have you on the show here today.
Angela: We are just as excited, Will.
Sarah: Oh my gosh, this is probably the highlight of my day. We're excited to share all of our expertise with your audience. Thanks for having us.
Will: Not a problem. We're really excited to have you here. I think we've got a lot to cover - it's going to be a really action-packed episode. Before we go into the meat of the show, could we take a minute to understand a little bit about yourselves, your careers, your backgrounds? Angela, maybe we can start with you.
Angela: I am Angela Wells, head of customer advocacy and executive programs at Splunk. I've been in marketing and market research for the last 25 years, with the last 10 concentrated on customer advocacy and customer relationships. That led me to what we're talking about today - working for about the last year and a half in executive programs and executive events, really helping companies connect with the senior executives at their most important customers.
Sarah: I'm Sarah Moody. I live here in San Francisco, and I have been in the customer marketing world for about 27 years. I started off in product marketing and then quickly fell in love with Voice of the Customer programs. Since about 2007, I've really focused on building executive customer programs for Fortune 500 tech companies, typically 500 million and above. I have my own company and I've had the incredible opportunity for the last couple of years to work with Angela and her CMO Claire, building out their entire executive customer program strategy with my team.
Will: For our audience members who may not really understand this idea of executive customer advocacy, maybe you could help us understand what that means and why it should be important?
Angela: This is really about building connections at the highest level of your company with the highest levels at your customers. It's really making that C-suite connection because we know those customers are incredibly important to the future of your business, and they need to feel as valued and important as they are.
Sarah: We think of it in three buckets. One is growth - we're all about durable growth. When we build these relationships with executives in the top accounts, we're building relationships with the decision makers, budget owners, and power holders. Number two is advocacy - building a set of ambassadors for our brand so we can have the right reputation in the market. And the third is that these executives are really smart and in the know about what's going on in the industry and how we can stay competitive in our space.
Will: You know, it's interesting because I think we've all heard a lot more about the B2B advocate program that focuses on that typical team member. And here we are looking at those buying powers, those buying centers. Are there any hard numbers or concrete data we can bring to the effectiveness of these approaches?
Sarah: One of our favorite papers is from Boston Consulting Group that came out this year. There are three metrics we tout all the time. First, brands investing in executive customer experience have a 70% higher customer loyalty rate than their peers who don't. Second, companies that invest in this space grow 190% faster than their peers over a three-year timeframe. Third, companies who do this have a 55% higher total shareholder return in terms of profitability.
Angela: Yes, and we really look at a cohort of high-priority customers to understand their behavior and what they need. We track metrics about these targeted companies: Do they renew earlier? Do they upsell and buy more? Do they serve as sales references for similar companies considering Splunk? As we've built this program, we can see the stronger relationships absolutely helping the top line.
Will: That's some amazingly powerful information. I'm really glad you have that available because I feel like we're still learning in advocacy around that efficacy.
Sarah: Well, these are the customers, the large accounts - those elite accounts that are such a large portion of your revenue. As they go, so much of your company goes, so they have to feel valued.
Angela: I love analogies - these accounts in our program are the first at the buffet. They are the first to get access to the best of what we have to offer through experiences, events, research, and experts. They deserve to be at the front of the line.
Will: I think that's interesting because I think often we're trying to influence people far down the decision tree and far down that buyer's journey through those who are inside of our applications or services, consuming the most of it. So it's really exciting to get a chance to get access to those elite accounts and not just the elite accounts, but the decision makers in those elite accounts, and making sure that we take care of them the best we can. Now, I think in concept, in theory, this all sounds great, but I know you recently did a talk at the Customer Marketing Alliance summit and had some key tactical things that can really help people understand how to succeed in this space. Maybe you can help us walk through some of those points?
Sarah: Yeah, we'd be happy to. The first one is content is king. That's a simplified expression you've heard, but what it means in 2024 is not "Oh, we need another white paper or ebook." No executive ever told me, "Oh, I wish I just had a white paper on that." What we mean by content is king is you have to design that experience and that interaction with the customer so that you earn the customer's time.
Angela: I fully believe, and I came from a very large tech company before coming to Splunk, we used to be able to plan executive events at our CEO's exclusive venues - a place outside Palm Desert, a place on a Hawaiian Island, where just the venue was enough and it was cool and it got the C-level customer there. But now they really want to understand what's the program, who else is going to be in the room, what are they going to be talking about, what experts are going to be participating. It's got to be a program that is worth their time, where they are going to learn something or make a connection or get early access to something that makes them say, "Wow, I really am going to participate in that."
Sarah: One of our favorite things that we love to hear from these executives when they leave our advisory board meeting is "that was such a good use of my time and I had no idea about X." We want to make sure every one of our executive customers leaves our programming smarter than when they arrived. And we also have curated such a high-end group of executives that they are building out their Rolodex and their networking and learning from the smartest minds in the industry.
Key number two is enabling influential connections. So really thinking through all the personas that all come back to our corporate priorities and who we are as a company and who we're going after. For us, it's the CISO and the CIO and the CTO, and it's for our top accounts. So making sure that we have peers and only peers at our executive advisory board, for example, at the Formula One event - it's only peers and it's diverse peers from all backgrounds.
Angela: One of our favorite account executives would love to put forward someone who's less than a C-level title that's equivalent at another company. You know, I've got this great analogy: if we bring in the wrong titles into our programming, it's like adding a little too much tonic to our cocktail. You're just going to dilute the meeting, dilute the program, and dilute the cocktail.
Sarah: So just stay in that belief that quality is really important - quality of content, quality of the executives. That is a huge part of the success.
Angela: If I could give a tip to listeners who are interested in this topic, there's a wonderful book that helped me immensely as I was thinking about customer events. It's called "The Art of the Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters" by Priya Parker. Any of you listeners that want to know more about how you design a program to get the right people talking about the right content so that they always want to come back - that's the book to read. It includes executive events, but it's also useful if you're planning a dinner party at your own house on a Saturday night.
Will: You're talking about that quality of the attendee and that quality of the content, and I know we're using title as a filter here, but do we look beyond that title? Is anyone with the right title in the industry going to get an invite, or how do we go deeper than that in this process?
Sarah: For an executive advisory board program, we're going to have an internal set of criteria that we all agree on internally, including our CEO, who's the executive sponsor of the advisory board, our CRO, who's going to help us with all the nominations. Examples of criteria we look at are: Number one, what's their role of responsibility? Number two, are they a thought leader, publishing papers and getting on committees and being out there as a forward thinker, especially if they're a CISO out in the industry? Number three, and I did this at Palo Alto Networks, is we built a board of advocates, people that weren't hugely fans, and then even some people that weren't definitely fans but were still invested in our company. So it's important to have a mixture of folks that are not fully invested fans to kind of push us and help us grow.
Angela: Answering your question, Will, it's not exactly the title. Certainly, we've talked a lot about C-level as those titles, but it's really about their responsibility. Those titles, if that's across a government organization or in some of our customers abroad, they may not have C-level in their title, but they have a lot of responsibility. And at some of these very large brands we work with, they may have multiple C-levels of that same job working on different business units. We want to welcome all of them into our program because those are all relationships that, if we can get those senior people at our customer connected with our senior executives, will pay off for a very long time coming.
Sarah: We really try to approach those conversations our executives have with our customer executives as if we are hopefully and ideally going to stay connected for years. Jeffrey Moore, who wrote Crossing the Chasm as well as many other books, has a saying that I've literally had in my mind every day for probably the last 13 years: us tech vendors need to think of ourselves as skilled courtiers, build these relationships, nurture these relationships, and only then can we leverage these relationships. It's a journey that happens over time. Just like think about your best friend or your partner - that relationship took time to build.
Will: So maybe jumping on that - I know in the beginning here, we mentioned a stat around growth rates over three years. What kind of timeframe should I be looking at? Let's say I've gone to my CEO and I've pitched this idea of executive advocacy and he's like, "Great, we need to hit sales targets next quarter. Let's get after it." What's a realistic timeline that I need to be talking to that leadership about?
Angela: This is not a one-hit wonder investment. This should not be done for "what are we going to deliver this pipeline this quarter?" There are programs for that kind of stimulation, close the deal - a lot of that involves discounts or incentives. This is really about longer-term relationships. These are usually multi-year licenses, multi-year deals in the tech industry. You're trying to keep that relationship healthy and thriving and ready for upsell of other things or early renewals. If you just focus on that short term, hit the gas on the revenue, it's just going to be a short-term solution. It won't be that sustained relationship, and it's going to be more like the bat phone when there's trouble than an ongoing relationship.
Sarah: Yeah, and I would say too, Will, what Angela and I have seen is that we have seen the accounts that we put into these programs - say we measure the ARR one year out compared to the accounts that are not in these programs - we have seen double-digit increases in ARR. In the accounts that are in these programs, 10, 20, 30 percent more ARR in 12 months than accounts that are not in these programs.
Will: Interesting. I mean, 12 months is still a pretty short term. I mean, realistically, if you're early days, maybe that's too long, but for many companies, 12 months is still within like this annual planning cycle and still something that we hopefully can get that support for and start to produce that kind of results that quickly.
Sarah: Totally. In combination with what Angela is saying, there's some short, quicker fixes like a CISO dinner roundtable, for example, that can really impact pipeline in a much shorter time frame. So you build out a menu of different growth programs that are like levers over time to drive durable growth for the business.
Will: What's the next big key takeaway? Now, if we've talked about content and enabling those good connections, what do you think is the next big piece people need?
Angela: Our next bit of advice is to be where these senior executives are. So really looking at what are the watering holes that they use now, what are the Slack channels they're in, or the recommended customer events they go to - those kind of C-level exclusive invite-only roundtables or those big third-party conferences where executives may bring a number of their team members. We know that it's increasingly expensive each year, so this isn't a bargain way to do it, but pairing with those top industry events to plan exclusive programming has really been a way to get a kind of captive audience for your message and program.
One of the things Sarah and I worked on together was at the RSA conference, a large security conference that's really important to Splunk and our customers. We held an exclusive CXO dinner with some recommended, really well-respected industry leaders at a very exclusive members-only club. It's not just a place that they could have booked on Open Table or Yelp by themselves. We really thought about that content and who was in the room, and we had a set exclusive room - we could have filled that two or three times over, there was so much interest.
Will: We're talking about some premium and exclusive activities here, and we're mentioning that they're not necessarily the cheapest of activities. While I think we're talking about business-to-business tech companies here, is there a scale of business where this starts to make sense? Is there an average contract value where this starts to make sense, or do you think this works across a bigger spectrum?
Sarah: What I've seen over time is companies that are at about a hundred million dollars and above, and say they've got between 500 and a thousand customers - that is enough scale where they can start putting in a program like this. Maybe the first step of the executive program is like an executive advisory board, because that's going to be a program that's really going to help the leadership team drive corporate strategy. Then phase two could be when the company gets to 250 or 500 million dollars - that could be rolling out like an executive sponsor program, where we take our executives at Splunk and map them with executives in our top 35 accounts. So you can slowly over time, as you get bigger, start rolling out different programs to complete your overall executive customer engagement strategy.
At Splunk, we call it our platinum program and we've got about 12 different programs as a part of it that we've pulled together.
Angela: And I just would think, Will, that for any B2B company, this kind of approach is going to be relevant because you're going to have a small number, a single-digit percentage of your customers that are a whopping double-digit percent of your revenue. So really understanding who your most important customers are and making sure they know who to call as the bat phone when there's trouble, but also who to call when they're just beginning sorting through something and they're planning a strategy or they've got work early in the new year.
I really think it works at many businesses. I used to work at a market research firm at 50 million and we knew exactly who our top five customers were and we were connecting with them every opportunity we got to make them feel as important as they were. That's what it's really about - that whole notion of how are you making your customers feel? Are you making them feel like you only want their call when they're in trouble? Or are you making them feel like you really want to get to know them?
Will: Right. Like, "Oh, there's that tech vendor calling me, must be the end of the quarter."
Sarah: Exactly. They must be having trouble meeting their pipeline goals, so they're calling me.
Will: We all know you get more speeding tickets at the end of the month, right?
Sarah: Exactly.
Will: I do totally appreciate the point here of being where they are. I mean, it's kind of like when you want to catch fish, fish where the fish are. It makes a lot of sense, but it can be a little bit - maybe we don't make it easy on people always enough. We can end up trying to build our own things and thinking we're super special instead of just trying to figure out where they are already and making it easy for them.
Sarah: So key number three is being present where these executives are at these industry events. And one of the next things to think about, key number four, is how are you going to start building all of these relationships? For example, at Splunk, we had so many amazing relationships with all these practitioners, and then we very strategically thought about, okay, now we're gonna start building these executive relationships. The key is actually you have to leverage everyone's Rolodex. So everyone in your C-suite, CEO, everybody, all your CTOs in the field, all the folks who know all the humans, your CSO - your job is to leverage those Rolodexes, including your board's Rolodexes, including your initial venture capital funder's Rolodexes.
I even remember when I was working with Greylock, this venture capital firm, we hired Heidrick & Struggles and they helped us start building out these relationships in our top accounts because they had the relationships. So how do you leverage Rolodexes? You go to LinkedIn and start stalking your CEO's connections on LinkedIn. You do the same with your board members. It's like a sales play, but it's a build out your C-level connection play.
Angela: Yeah, that's a solution we use regularly, but in 2024, this is really about just like you do right now in a one-to-one basis. When there's someone you want to get to know, you look to who do you know in common? And so we really look at that elite group of accounts, who are the key people, the individuals that we want to get to know at those accounts and how do we have any way into them through someone at Splunk or through another one of our customers so that we're really making that connection in a person-to-person way, not a heaven help us automated email that looks like it comes from someone when we all are kind of on to all of those tricks.
Boardroom Insiders is good because it gives you a bio on that person. So you find out where have they spoken recently? What are topics they like? What are their hobbies? When you really are trying to get to know an executive as a person, you want to know more than just that LinkedIn "where did they go to school and what's their title now?" But where are they speaking? What topics are they speaking about? What are their hobbies? What are their interests? So that you can really get to know them and find a way in.
We use that extensively when we're planning our executive sponsor program, where we're serving as like a matchmaker to connect a senior executive at Splunk with a senior executive at that customer to really understand where did they go to school? What are their hobbies? Where are they based? All these different criteria where we can find that connection of someone on the Splunk side who can stay connected with that customer over a long period of time.
Sarah: And a big part of our job on Angela's team is also looking at our company culture and really helping our field as well as our executives understand this is a mindset shift. This is about building relationships. This is about thinking really creatively. This is about a long-term play.
Will: This all makes a ton of sense to me. I guess the question that I come to is, I often struggle to get anyone with a C title or an executive title to get the thing done that I want, let alone open up their Rolodex and introduce me to all their contacts. Especially the board and the VCs - how have you found making that happen? Is there a compelling argument that you find works the best when you're trying to get that to happen?
Angela: It's not at scale 50 at a time, it's not turn over to me all of your connections or spend the next four days sending these 100 emails out to your connections. This is really much more targeted than that. We've got a list of those accounts where we really want to get to know the C-levels and we want to find out what's a way in to those individuals, those humans, as Sarah calls them. What's the human-to-human route into those people?
So, we're not going to our CISO saying, please connect us with every CISO you've ever met. We're going to our CISO saying, "Hey, these are three accounts where we don't yet know the CISO, but you seem to have worked with them in the past. Can you help us with this?" Or, our CEO spoke at the Aspen Institute and was in a room with a whole host of these executives that we wish we could know better. And he's right in the room with them. So he's making those connections and now they are not fresh leads because a number of them are a customer of ours in some way, but they are fresh connections. They are people he can reach out to in just these coming weeks to stay connected.
Sarah: No, you've asked a great question. It's always going to come back to, we build programs that tie back to our corporate priorities. So when we keep saying we're doing this to drive durable growth, we're doing this to drive customer innovation, we're doing this to improve the customer experience, which are all typical corporate priorities most tech companies have - when you keep tying it back to how we're impacting the business, that's when it's like, "Oh, of course, of course we're going to do this."
Will: So we've got four key points here. They all seem like really good information to me, but let's finish it off here. What is the last of the five key points that you think are really required to make these programs effective?
Angela: The fifth one is about bringing these separate pieces that could all be pieces of executive customer experience program together into one puzzle. So for us at Splunk that means I oversee our executive briefing center, our executive in-person and virtual meetings, our executive sponsor program, our executive councils, our executive program at our main annual conference, and then our whole series of CXO dinners and roundtables across the globe, working with our field marketing counterparts.
This is really about bringing all of those pieces together in one strategy so that we're making sure we are engaging all year long with those most important executives at those key accounts. It's really about making them the first at the buffet, but knowing what are the upcoming key industry dates for our events team, what are the upcoming research reports and papers that our content team is putting out, what are the webinars that we can host and exclusively invite people to - connecting with the same individuals over time, not a one-hit wonder, but a constant symphony of music, a symphony of ways we can interact with them.
Will: That sounds easier said than done. That sounds quite challenging.
Angela: That's why I've tried to bring all of that together in my executive programs team. We've created an executive customer experience team specifically to manage these programs, to always keep an eye on those top accounts. We track as a quarterly metric in that quarter and year to date what percent of those target accounts have we engaged with through one of these programs. We average that we connect with about 70 percent of those accounts on a quarterly basis and cumulatively we're up to about 94%.
Sarah: Which is fantastic. And here's where most tech companies are - like where we were 15 months ago. Claire was like, "Hey, Angela and Sarah, there is executive programming in every one of the functional teams across this company. There are like six different teams doing the exact same thing." Just think about that, what that means to the executive at our top accounts in terms of the experience as well as efficiencies across the company.
Angela: Exactly. What we've done is everything is now rolled up under me. So everyone's got a really clear role of responsibility, really clear KPIs that tie back to our corporate priorities.
Sarah: A few other KPIs or metrics that we track are - we've got these top accounts, and as we said, in some of them, we might have had like one executive that we knew, or we had some white space. So we're tracking over time how many relationships we're building. Ideally, we want to know the CIO, the CTO, the CISO, and a few other folks in each of these top accounts. So we're also tracking how deep we're building out relationships in these top accounts, and also in sister accounts. For example, Comcast could be a client, but you also then want to build out relationships with their sister company NBCUniversal. So you want to get a network of C-level relationships, both inside of your top accounts, as well as in the sister companies in these top accounts.
And then the other one that we track is what Angela was talking about - having them show up to events, having them be our advocates or brand ambassadors, get up on stage and speak, be with Gary at the Aspen Institute and share the stage. Whatever that looks like is be another voice in the market, talking about the value of what we do.
Will: We've covered a lot of different points here. If you could only give one piece of advice, if each of you could only give one piece of advice to someone who's yet to start an executive advocacy program, what would that piece of advice be?
Sarah: Here it is: Get your CEO as your executive champion and have the mindset every single day of "I work for my customers, I work for my C-suite" and this is a journey of building relationships over time. That's it.
Angela: And all of that I agree with. I am nodding along. I would just add that it's really fundamentally designing your program so that it's worth your customer's time. Realize how many vendors are just like you that want their time, want them to do something for you. But how do you make it worth where they think that what you have planned is going to impart value to them? They're going to come away learning something or making a connection they didn't have. So that not only did they come that first time, but they come back and they come back again and they come back again so that you stay really connected.
Will: Well, thank you both very much. I think those are both great summary pieces of advice here. Before we say goodbye, though, I do want to just get a chance - where can people find you? How can they best connect if they want to keep this conversation going with you?
Sarah: For me, I can be reached at Sarah L. Moody on LinkedIn.
Angela: And I'm Angela Wells on LinkedIn or @AngeW_Wells on Twitter.
Will: Perfect. Once again, thank you both very much. Thank you very much, Angela. Thank you very much, Sarah. Thank you so much for your time and your insights and your thoughts here. I'm sure we'll be talking again soon and I just look forward to kind of checking in and learning more about this space.
Sarah: Well, thank you so much.
Angela: Thank you so much for having us. It's been an absolute pleasure.
