How to Engage with Marquee-Brand CustomersBy Pascale Roumain Royal,Senior Program Manager, Strategic Customers,Citrix

State of the Profession SeriesCase studies from the world’s top customer advocacy and engagement programs, showing how to grow the business in today’s buyer-empowered world.

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Pascale R. Royal is Senior Program Manager, Strategic Customers, at Citrix, a $2 billion global leader dedicated to powering mobile work styles and cloud services. Citrix makes complex enterprise IT simpler and more accessible for 260,000 organizations around the world, providing solutions that touch 75 percent of Internet users each day. Citrix partners with more than 10,000 companies in 100 countries.

Royal is currently responsible for creating marketing programs that increase strategic customer engagement, build brands and influence sales revenue. She also drives initiatives that leverage the power of social media, amplifying the Citrix vision through the voice of the customer. Royal delivers results back to the organization in the form of hundreds of case studies, videos, customer quotes, on-demand webinars and other content that showcase Citrix customer success and provide positive proof-points to prospects.

Royal joined Citrix in 2006, overseeing the planning, communication and execution of the company’s customer advisory program, the Citrix Customer Council. Additionally, Royal developed high-touch target account marketing programs, created customer-centric sales tools and assets, moderated and facilitated research activities in the Citrix Customer Advisory Community and wrote executive reports following advisory council meetings.

Royal resides in south Florida with her husband, Jason, and precocious 2 year old son, Jonah.

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How to Engage with Marquee-Brand Customers

As effective and persuasive as all of your advocates are, your marquee-brand customers represent the most influential loyalists among them. Moreover, by “co-branding” your company’s products/services with a premier brand—through their stories and in their own words—you will be enhancing the status of your company’s brand. These are reasons enough to tackle the challenging task of engaging your marquee customers.

Here's how to do that.

Three key strategies to recruit marquee-brand customers

At the end of the day, it’s important to remember that you don’t “engage” with a brand. You engage with a person, specifically, executives. With that in mind, we use three strategies to get IT executives at brand-name companies to be a reference for us.

Strategy #1: Solicit marquee customers’ feedback and opinions on meaningful business topics

Engagement is a two-way street. That means that our relationship goal is to promote meaningful, two-way conversations with marquee executives. And to drive that forward, we provide them with opportunities to share their insights, opinions and feedback. The topics vary, but examples include asking for their take on our strategic vision, products and solutions and our R&D road map.

One way that we do this is through the invitation and participation of marquee executives on our Customer Council. We first established the Citrix Customer Council, our global customer advisory board, 15 years ago. Our goal is to drive a business-level discussion that facilitates customer feedback. Along with that we’ve established mechanisms to report that information to our executives.

But to make that work, you have to be genuinely open to feedback, including constructive criticism. So we make sure that our representatives sitting on the Council really listen to what they have to say. And where appropriate, we act upon what they share with us. That’s what’s in it for Citrix.

What’s in it for our customers is the chance to network with their peers. In fact, our participants tell us that this is one of the most valuable aspects of being on the Council. They also value the opportunity to interact with our executive team, and to develop a close business relationship with them.

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Over time, participating on the Customer Council builds trust. And that trust forms the basis for getting marquee executives to be advocates for us.

Many times we’ll invite an executive to join the Council, and they will flat out tell us that their corporate policies prevent them from endorsing us. That’s fine. We still value their contributions. And we bide our time. We earn their trust.

This happens so frequently, that after six to 12 months of proving our genuine commitment to our industry and their success, many of them have a change of heart. They take the time to convince their own executive and legal teams that they can speak publicly about Citrix and about the work we are doing.

Strategy #2: Recognize and celebrate marquee customers’ accomplishments

Everyone needs to feel valued. Everyone has an ego. And for those of us who work with IT executives, we know that they have a healthy ego. So at a psychological level, it’s important that we honor and satisfy that need.

At Citrix, we do this by recognizing their achievements with awards. It’s a way to not only share their success story, but also to provide a broadcast platform that showcases it.

Citrix Innovation Award

We present this trophy at our annual user conference to customers who have shown great innovation using our solutions. This year we received 36 nominations from our worldwide field teams. Then we narrowed those down to five finalists.

Now in order for the finalists to be considered, they had to work with us to complete a video, press release and do public-facing activities. There is a give and take to be sure. But we structure it so that our customers feel that it’s a win-win situation. In fact, our Innovation award has worked so well for us that recently we expanded the program to recognize partners.

Industry awards

Another way we get our marquee executive customers recognition is through industry awards.

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The conversation with them goes something like this. “I’ve been working with you for a year now. I know your story, I understand your vision. I know the hard work that you have put into changing the way your organization is run. And you’ve done an exceptional job with that. I would love to nominate you for an industry award and recognize you for the work that you have done with Citrix.” We’ve found that marquee executives are very appreciative of that. It's a great way to get more of them invested in what you’re doing.

Strategy #3: Share marquee customers’ stories of success

The common theme of all the content we create is that it’s all the customer. Not us. This thread permeates all of our content tactics:

Videos White PaPersCase studies PoWerPoint slides

We deliberate our process carefully. We think through every customer touch point and every engagement opportunity to understand what’s important to an executive and when. Then we tailor our content accordingly. And of course, we showcase our high-value, marquee, assets. This does a couple of things for us.

For one, the experience of a brand-name company executive carries more weight with customers and prospects. So we judiciously use them with our best possible opportunities. Secondly, showing that marquee customers are using our products boosts the image of our own brand.

It’s all about the customer Case study: Miami Children’s Hospital

A great example of how we focus on the customer is the reference video that we created of Miami Children’s Hospital. The approach we took is to NOT showcase the IT team. You don’t even see the CIO in the film.

Instead, we asked our customer, “Who is the best person to exemplify the work that you do at the hospital, as well as the technology that helps them do better work?” The answer was pediatric heart surgeon, Dr. Redmond Burke.

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So the story features him, the work he’s doing and his use of Citrix solutions to enable mobile technologies and a mobile work style.

Dr. Burke is a great choice because he is recognized in his industry as a leading surgeon. He teaches doctors all over the world and even has his own YouTube channel.

He’s doing really great work with children. And that connects with viewers. So does the fact that he works hard to balance work and family. Our solutions help him do that because he can quickly respond to patient needs wherever he is, even at his daughter’s soccer game. His work is to save the lives of babies, but at home, he’s a husband and father. Those two things really resonated with our audience.

This customer-centric approach led to a truly successful campaign for us. The Work Better campaign, which features three compelling customer stories, delivered:

3,000,000

50,000 neW

20,000 Visitors to CitriX.CoM

VIEWS ON YOU TUBE & CITRIX.COM

TWITTER FOLLOWERS & FACEBOOK FANS

WHO ON AVERAGE:SPEND

1:37 MINUTESON THE SITE

VIEWED

3.4 PAGES

75% OF VISITORS'NET NEW'

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Provide marquee customers a broadcast platform to tell their story

As we generate customer reference content, we constantly ask ourselves, “How can we make it more valuable?” Not just for us, but for our marquee executives as well. One thing we came up with was the idea of providing them with a platform to broadcast their story.

Most people make a video or case study or whatever and just put it up on their Website. We have a number of media channels that we distribute that content across. So we make sure that our marquee customers know that their story will have a lot of reach with industry peers. That’s not just talk. We’re a worldwide company with over 9,000 employees and we have connections in the media as well as systems that can effectively broadcast our content.

Sharing metrics with your executives

One of the reasons that we have, and maintain, a healthy budget is because we can show the impact of our activities on revenues, (see Figure 1 below.)

Pipeline Total Closed/Won revenue

Total for 2013112 Deal & 201 in Pipeline

Q4 201357 Deal & 34 in Pipeline

Q3 201332 Deals & 37 in Pipeline

Q2 201322 Deals & 113 in Pipeline

Q1 20131 Deal & 17 in Pipeline

$70,693,731

$11,402,113

$11,918,633

$44,800,000

$2,572,985

$15,056,957

$8,009,021

$3,444,989

$3,577,873

$25,074

Figure 1: The influence of content and activities on sales pipeline and closed deals.

Showing the impact that we have on the business makes us more credible and gives our program greater prestige. That’s because we can prove that we’re not just getting people to say nice things about us. They’re speaking on our behalf, and we’re able to tie the influence their advocacy has on sales.

Parting thoughts

If you can implement the three strategies I’ve detailed above, I believe you can significantly increase the success you have engaging with your marquee-customer executives.

You’ll get crucial business intelligence in the form of feedback about your products, services and roadmap. When you engage with marquee customers via councils and boards, and recognize them with awards, you’ll earn their trust and make them want to take reciprocal actions with you. And by embracing story themes that put the customer first, you’ll develop content that performs with your customers and prospects significantly better than the status quo.

All these things combine to help you contribute to your company’s bottom line.

CENTER FOR CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENTBill Lee, Founder

bill@c4ce.comwww.c4ce.com+1.214.907.5600

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