Situation For over three years SAVO hosted a Customer User Group in Chicago that focused on sharing best practices and gathering customer feedback. With SAVO’s 2011 Series B investment round the decision was made to increase its brand presence and develop a thought leadership platform from which it can be positioned as a sales enablement SaaS leader.
Leadership With the opportunity to reposition SAVO, I developed the strategy and execution plan that would reinvent the User Group by converting it into an Educational Forum. This event would have industry guest speakers, share insights and market research, and provide a forum for companies to learn about a new emerging discipline called “Sales Enablement.” While still serving as an opportunity to meet with customer and gain feedback, the thought leadership content would now be the focus and in-turn repurposed post-event to extend engagement utilizing demand generation and marketing automation techniques.
Result Between the event planning, content development, and demand generation activities my team and I were able to engage a record number of attendees, and through post-event metrics were able to demonstrate that the model worked. Customer satisfaction achieved the highest scores and sales teams were able to engage customers or prospects with a different talk track; one that created value around their challenges and pain points, not the new SAVO features.