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I wanted to give everyone an update on our upcoming Sage CRM conference as food for thought for 90 Minds or individual practices. This is not a pitch - we have sold out of space - so hopefully the powers that be won't delete this so others can learn from our experiences.
This was our first pass at putting together a technical conference. We are still working out kinks on putting everything together and it's been a HUGE investment. I want to make that clear before I go on to the next bit. Sorting out everything took much longer than anticipated and we are still finalizing presentations.
Our goal going into this was to solve a common problem that we see with CRM over and over: customers don't know what they don't know so most of them end up skimming the surface of using the product which puts them at greater risk of ceasing usage. Unlike ERP / accounting, our CRM clients can fall back into the safe comfort of using email and spreadsheets to do their jobs if they feel like CRM is a waste of time.
We are putting a few things out there to help give customers multiple paths to learning what CRM can do for them and how it can help them reach their goal. This is being done as part of our mission: help small and medium-sized businesses succeed through the use of CRM. Of course, there is a selfish component of helping customers succeed and we hope that success will breed longer-term customers who tap us on the shoulder to help them with additional needs as they grow and evolve.
We agonized over the sessions. We still are frankly. We wanted a blend of ""Why"" and ""How"" to help paint the picture of WHY customers should use certain parts of CRM and some specifics on HOW they will accomplish it.
We have tried to create sessions around use cases - common scenarios and ""day in the life"" stories that act as a wrapper for us to talk about best practices, tips, and tricks. I'm mostly happy with our sessions titles - the meat of the sessions is still being refined. The final test will be if customers find the value.
It's tough though as we have a good smattering of attendees with different usage patterns and at different spots in their journey - some are seasoned pros, some are just starting out, some are technical folks, some are management folks. In the end, we have put together the best agenda we could in the pursuit of delivering strong valuable content and we hope that - even if customers don't see value in EVERY session - customers should get value from the overall conference.
As this was our first year, we weren't sure what to expect or how to draw people to the conference so we were conservative and got a room for 28 people. We filled five spots in the first two weeks without any big push. I simply mentioned it to a customer or two and they said ""sign us up"" before I even had all the details.
Thanks to @WayneSchulz - I worked to add more details around hotel and sessions as quickly as we could so the conference had more substance and value was more apparent. We added a video and a web page to send to people and I sent it out to a few more customers - some of those signed up as well.
I reached out to several partners - some through a group message in here but many more via direct emails and calls. My thinking was we were putting on a lot of effort and it would be nice to spread the end result - help other partners inform their clients about the power of CRM. I figured most ERP partners don't dive deep on CRM so this would be a great opportunity to help them re-engage with their customers.
A few partners connected and dove in. Huge thanks to the team of Eide Bailly - they stepped up and did several out reaches and they have four attendees coming plus @SamanthaKnigge will be there too!
I think if we do this again, I will try to spread the message further and hopefully fellow partners will feel comfortable sending their customers.
Of course, the true test will be what happens with the customers that attend this year. Will they be happier with their investment? Will they be stronger in their adoption? Will they reach their goals? Will they purchase more consulting services and products?
I hope so. We'll see.
One thing that I am convinced of is that my sheer laziness stopped us from filling a room twice the size. I am sorry to say I didn't push hard on the conference. I would say only 60% of our customers even got a single message about it and most of those were notified in the last two weeks with only six weeks to go with the conference.
I'm only being half-deprecating when I speak of my laziness - I'm juggling a lot over here these days and it's hard to always being doing the right things at the right time. The big reason my calls were pushed off to current clients is that I haven't always done the best job staying in touch with some customers so there was a (found to be valid) concern of what I would hear.
My primary account manager who was responsible for managing customers post-implementation recently left / was asked to leave so the conference acted as a great coalescing reason to reach out and reconnect. The conversations were a mixture of awesome (customers who are hungry to do more with CRM and us) to horrific (your guy sucked, you guys suck, I hate you). Luckily more of them were positive and in the middle so I took my lumps, listened, and absorbed so we can improve for the future.
As part of the 90 Minds Admin Group, I advocated for a 90 Minds Customer Conference. A lot of the member firms are too small or too busy or too whatever to do what I've done here and put on their own conference. I always felt we could easily have a customer conference and get 100 - 200 customer attendees easily to the inaugural event and grow from there. This would be with purchased tickets to ensure commitment and say something of the value expectation. There was a lot of negative pushback around this idea - mostly fears and uncertainty - but I hope that my modest push here opens up the discussion around this.
Customers are hungry for roll up the sleeves training on add-ons, core product, advanced features, etc. Sage isn't doing it. In my opinion, there is opportunity here for 90 Minds to step up for the benefit of the customers and the member firms.
One of my goals in putting this together was to hit the number of attendees that we had in the first 90 Minds meetings. I half-assed the marketing and hit our goals. I have full faith the 90 Minds member firms could quarter-ass it and get great results as a collective.
Here are the benefits to me - and I think they would be similar to 90 Minds as a whole and individual firms - of doing the conference:
1. Excuse to call on all customers - even lapsed.
2. Pushed us to thinking of customer outcomes for sessions.
3. Helped us create additional packaged services around the sessions for customers who want to go deeper.
4. Helped us clean up our database (kind of attached to #1).
5. Helped us create content that we will trickle out on our website and youtube channel.
LMK if there are any questions.
The process has been ugly so I'm happy to share what I've learned with full transparency so others can learn and improve upon what I did. I'm also taking suggestions for next year.
Thanks for reading. @SageCRM