#know13, or: 4 Things I Learned About Event Marketing

One of my college professors, Kees Fens (a famous Dutch literary critic, with a brilliant first name) once told me: “Jongeman, make sure you read as many books as you possibly can before the age of twenty five. After that, it’s work, and marriage, and children, and debt, and trouble – and you’ll be done reading!” How right he was. So let’s put the books down and get back to marketing.

Events. Events. Events.
The last months have been all about events. I am writing this on the plane to Las Vegas, to Knowledge13, our annual customer conference, which will be bigger than ever this year with over 4,000 registered delegates attending. End of April, we exhibited at the Service Desk & IT Support Show (London), and at the Best Management Practice Kongress (Bonn). In June, Gartner’s Infrastructure & Operations Summit (Berlin), Forrester’s Infrastructure & Operations Forum (London, again), and the CRIP Conference (Paris) will be added to the list. Additionally, we started running online events; live webinars in local language in the UK, Germany, and France. Eventful times, indeed.

4 general observations
Of course, each of the events mentioned above targets a specific audience, in a different location. Some events are owned by ServiceNow, others are sponsored. Some are broad IT events, others highly targeted to a specific niche within that industry. Nevertheless, here’s a couple of general observations on business-to-business event marketing in 2013. I would be grateful if you could add your own insights to help complete the picture.

1. Every event is an online event, too
Five years ago, in B2B marketing, social media where the playground of a handful of early adopters – hobbyists not to be taken too seriously by real businessmen. IT events were get-togethers of in-crowds, mostly – you’d be talking to the same people year after year, to a point where nobody even asked why an event would be invested in. Push-push-push messaging, attendees were generally talked into buying stuff they’d never deploy. This has changed materially.
Today, social media are an intricate part of most every aspect of marketing, and especially so around events. They bring new, highly engaged audiences to events. People who are well informed, who have already researched the exhibitors before hitting the show floor with questions prepared. It’s a different experience altogether, with the quality and relevance of conversations going up.

Nevertheless, we haven’t reached a standard by any means, and quality levels of social media integration vary hugely between industries and companies. Many exhibitors are still using social media to just broadcast their messages without facilitating engagement. Many audiences still just follow and read vendor’s content online without engaging and sharing out.

The beauty of social media: it is all in the hands of the buyers, the show attendees, the followers and their networks. They decide what spreads like wildfire, and what drops dead untouched. The million dollar question you have to keep asking yourself: What turns a follower of my company into an amplifier of my message and calls-to-action?

Our Knowledge13 event is a good example of how an offline event (Las Vegas, 4000+ attendees, keynotes, customer breakout sessions, hands-on lab sessions, training sessions, channel side events) is turned into an online social event with all possible channels geared up to deliver content through video, blogging, photography, live streamed TheCube video content, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, community forum discussions, and to spark conversations that will continue beyond the walls of the event venue.

We have reached a point where you can get a very good grasp of what is going on at the event without leaving the comfort of your home – just look for #know13, and check out our Social Hub site, where we pull together all social content in real-time over the next days.

O, and just to illustrate what happened to vendors pushing their messaging down the attendee’s throats: 90% of Knowledge13 content is delivered by ServiceNow customers, like CERN, Home Depot, Staples, Volkswagen, KPN, and many others.

2. Every event is a data drill
Yesterday, I came across this interesting infographic on LinkedIn, attempting to depict the current marketing technology landscape. True, it is an insane picture – I wrote about the subject before. But be it as it may, sales and marketing systems like Eloqua, Salesforce.com, Omniture and Radian6 allow us to understand exactly how our events are performing, not only in terms of lead generation and sales, but also when it comes to audience engagement, reach of messaging, and share of voice online.

Now, Marketing has always been reluctant in sharing objectives with the business, but that will have to change. Because with the ability of tracking performance of all aspects of (event) marketing comes the clear requirement of setting marketing and sales objectives to validate investment, to report against those objectives, and to optimize the marketing investment more rigorously than ever before.

And this conversation will have to transcend simple Marketing ROI and pipeline attribution type statements (we invested x, we got 20x back, and it was all marketing – YEAH!), to really hone in on data segments and characteristics, buyer behavior, tactical marketing and sales mix, and effective multi-channel follow-up. Did we reach the right accounts, the right job functions within those accounts, at the right point in their influencing and buying cycles, and did we follow-up in the most efficient and effective way – with our direct sales, our channel partners or our strategic pathways? It has to be a clean data conversation between marketing, sales and business partners.

3. Every event is part of a broader conversation
Attendees walk in well-prepared and ready to engage. The same doesn’t necessarily go for exhibitors – at the SITS13 event, I witnessed quite a few examples of competitor booth staff just hanging around browsing their iPhones, speakers delivering random corporate slides that I already saw up on SlideShare months earlier, stand messaging only pointing out the obligatory iPad raffle (“Leave your business card in this bowl, and WIN – WIN – WIN ! ! !”), but nothing else.

To build maximum engagement, be as prepared as your audience will be.

Before
Attendees spend time preparing online. Make it easy for them to include you in their research. Map the channels they will most likely use to gather their information, and give them compelling content and calls-to-action (research papers, websites, webinars, chat sessions – anything that will convince them meeting with you is a smart idea). Enable them to set a meeting with your crew, be available for questions, and respond without delay. Monitor the pre-show engagement data. Brief the stand team on customers and prospects likely to attend, and visit your booth. Have a plan, set targets.

During
Expect attendees to know your business and offerings in detail. Be ready to give them a very specific demonstration of your capabilities, and allow for ample Q&A time. Connect prospects with their peers in other customer accounts, analysts, business partners, and consultants, based on their business requirement, not based on the sales opportunity you think you spotted. Invest in ways to not just capture the bare contact data, but use the conversation to collect additional details that would enable a rich follow-up conversation. Set dates for follow-up sales meetings.

For marketing purposes, the audience not attending the event is more important than the folks who actually make it there. In social media, give the non-attendees a clear picture of what’s going on: the big announcements and messages, the demonstrations, the customer feedback, the overall impression and atmosphere, again augmented with premium content in various formats (writing, recorded sessions, video reports, photography, slides, audio).

After
Continue the conversation. Continue managing the event, but through other tactical means – as if it didn’t even end. This is where the real impact to bottom line is being delivered. Make your event content available on-demand, start promotions. Consolidate and qualify the contact data, follow-up through all marketing and sales channels, start nurturing the contacts that aren’t yet ready for sales engagement. Begin reporting against your objectives out of sales and marketing systems.

4. …and content is king, still
In content marketing terms, an event is just another vehicle designed to carry your message to its intended receiver – and it’s up to the event marketer to optimize the vehicle to do exactly that. But content marketing is too big a topic to be covered here. Check earlier posts (here and here) for more.

4 attributes unique to events
One thought I’ll leave you with while you’re here: In your marketing mix, every instrument (John, if you’re reading this – this one is for you, buddy!) has to play its particular function, making the most of its specific attributes and qualities. There are 4 attributes to physical events that cannot be covered anywhere else, at least not in combination:

• Serendipity, or the “stumble upon” factor (at events, attendees tend to discover vendors and solutions they didn’t even know they were looking for).
• The face-to-face contact between prospect and solution consultant or sales rep without any strings attached.
• The opportunity to address very specific, even unique customer questions and requirements.
• The opportunity to see a bunch of vendor representatives at work at once without being in their offices – and get a sense of their team dynamics and quality.

In your content marketing strategy for events, take full advantage of these unique attributes, and don’t focus on things other marketing tactics may deliver just as well (and probably cheaper).

Do drop me your feedback. I am heading down to the Knowledge13 show floor – from NOW to WOW!

@Gogol: Dead Souls Online

This week, both Google and Facebook shared their thoughts on dealing with social avatars after their real-life counterparts have passed away. Clearly, there is a business plan somewhere in here.

In Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol’s 1845 novel “Dead Souls” (Мёртвые души), the main character, Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov is on an intriguing business mission. In those days, Russian landowners were taxed per worker employed on their property, even after workers had died. At least until the next census determined the real number of live workers on the property, and the new tax rate to go with it.

Now, Chichikov’s scheme is straightforward: he goes around buying dead souls in order to mimic a mighty landowner on paper, and move up in the societal hierarchy of 19^th century urban Russia – like today, centered between St. Petersburg and Moscow. It’s a win-win situation, since the souls selling land owners offload taxable property, as Chichikov is attracting headcount and status.

So as the number of followers, friends, connections, likes, shares and recommendations is quite valuable in the online social hierarchy of the 21^st century, there will be a way of monetizing the dead souls idling away in twitterverse and blogosphere. I wonder who’ll be the first to start snatching them up in order to increase online influence.

To give you a good taste of the brilliant dialogues in Dead Souls, read how Chichikov is trying to get an old lady, Nastasia Petrovna Korobotchka, to sell him her 18 dead souls for a good 15 roubles each, “and roubles not in silver, but roubles in good paper currency” – she makes him work really hard for it!

Read Gogol’s complete “Dead Souls” here.

‘ […] However, the old lady still communed with herself. She could see that the transaction would be to her advantage, yet it was one of such a novel and unprecedented nature that she was beginning to fear lest this purchaser of souls intended to cheat her. Certainly he had come from God only knew where, and at the dead of night, too!

“But, sir, I have never in my life sold dead folk—only living ones. Three years ago I transferred two wenches to Protopopov for a hundred roubles apiece, and he thanked me kindly, for they turned out splendid workers—able to make napkins or anything else.

“Yes, but with the living we have nothing to do, damn it! I am asking you only about DEAD folk.”

“Yes, yes, of course. But at first sight I felt afraid lest I should be incurring a loss—lest you should be wishing to outwit me, good sir. You see, the dead souls are worth rather more than you have offered for them.”

“See here, madam. (What a woman it is!) HOW could they be worth more? Think for yourself. They are so much loss to you—so much loss, do you understand? Take any worthless, rubbishy article you like—a piece of old rag, for example. That rag will yet fetch its price, for it can be bought for paper-making. But these dead souls are good for NOTHING AT ALL. Can you name anything that they ARE good for?”

“True, true—they ARE good for nothing. But what troubles me is the fact that they are dead.”

“What a blockhead of a creature!” said Chichikov to himself, for he was beginning to lose patience. “Bless her heart, I may as well be going. She has thrown me into a perfect sweat, the cursed old shrew!”

He took a handkerchief from his pocket, and wiped the perspiration from his brow. Yet he need not have flown into such a passion. More than one respected statesman reveals himself, when confronted with a business matter, to be just such another as Madam Korobotchka, in that, once he has got an idea into his head, there is no getting it out of him—you may ply him with daylight-clear arguments, yet they will rebound from his brain as an india-rubber ball rebounds from a flagstone. Nevertheless, wiping away the perspiration, Chichikov resolved to try whether he could not bring her back to the road by another path.

“Madam,” he said, “either you are declining to understand what I say or you are talking for the mere sake of talking. If I hand you over some money—fifteen roubles for each soul, do you understand?—it is MONEY, not something which can be picked up haphazard on the street. For instance, tell me how much you sold your honey for?”

“For twelve roubles per pood.”

“Ah! Then by those words, madam, you have laid a trifling sin upon your soul; for you did NOT sell the honey for twelve roubles.”

“By the Lord God I did!”

“Well, well! Never mind. Honey is only honey. Now, you had collected that stuff, it may be, for a year, and with infinite care and labour. You had fussed after it, you had trotted to and fro, you had duly frozen out the bees, and you had fed them in the cellar throughout the winter. But these dead souls of which I speak are quite another matter, for in this case you have put forth no exertions—it was merely God’s will that they should leave the world, and thus decrease the personnel of your establishment. In the former case you received (so you allege) twelve roubles per pood for your labour; but in this case you will receive money for having done nothing at all. Nor will you receive twelve roubles per item, but FIFTEEN—and roubles not in silver, but roubles in good paper currency.”

That these powerful inducements would certainly cause the old woman to yield Chichikov had not a doubt.

“True,” his hostess replied. “But how strangely business comes to me as a widow! Perhaps I had better wait a little longer, seeing that other buyers might come along, and I might be able to compare prices.”

“For shame, madam! For shame! Think what you are saying. Who else, I would ask, would care to buy those souls? What use could they be to any one?”

“If that is so, they might come in useful to ME,” mused the old woman aloud; after which she sat staring at Chichikov with her mouth open and a face of nervous expectancy as to his possible rejoinder.

“Dead folk useful in a household!” he exclaimed. “Why, what could you do with them? Set them up on poles to frighten away the sparrows from your garden?”

“The Lord save us, but what things you say!” she ejaculated, crossing herself.

“Well, WHAT could you do with them? By this time they are so much bones and earth. That is all there is left of them. Their transfer to myself would be ON PAPER only. Come, come! At least give me an answer.” […]’

On business narrative (you know: storytelling)

Like all human communities, companies outline their identity by telling stories. One exciting aspect of coming into a new company – like I am doing right now – is to dig your way into the new narrative. What stories do they tell the market, the employees, prospects, and customers?

Like people, companies make up stories. They view the world through many filters, take on various personalities depending on circumstance, and have a very picky memory for facts. They simplify and magnify. They focus by shifting focus. They turn a random series of disparate events into a seemingly planned, meaningful, significant history. A story. They turn barren no-man’s land into markets and demand. They spin, they storify.

In a previous life, I earned a masters degree in European Literature. I studied some philosophy to the side, grew a beard, and smoked a pipe. Roamed the streets of Prague in search of Kafka. Quoted Søren Kierkegaard, analysed Sigmund Freud, and pondered Sergei Eisenstein. Didn’t have much of a clue in general.

Well, all that except the pipe, of course..! Goodness.

So during an extensive course on Semiotics, a Belgian teacher called doctor Emile Poppe introduced us to the work of Vladimir Propp and Tzvetan Todorow, besides cool heavy hitters like Louis Trolle Hjelmslev, Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, and even Alfred Hitchcock – what a teacher! Anyway, Todorow and Propp were two scholars who spent a good portion of their lives describing narrative schemes governing folk tales. Folk tales, yes sir! At the end of it, Propp delivered his famous morphology, containing 31 basic elements of narrative with which one can deconstruct every single folk tale. From all cultural origins and of all times. No exceptions.

The most basic story formula: A -> B. There is a situation A, which turns into situation B, that’s your simplest storyline.

And it turns out that most other stories can also be analyzed using Propp’s narrative system. Movies, novels, theater plays – humans apparently tell their stories according to a highly standardized structure.

At NetApp, I got the pleasure of working with Michael Clancy, who combines an engineering leadership background with a remarkable talent for business value selling and corporate storytelling – an explosive mix of qualities. Put him in front of a customer, a sales team, an industry analyst, and he’ll set the air on fire with his energy and stories.

Anyway, Mike taught me how every single customer success story (not just the NetApp ones – look at Oracle, SAP, most any business boasting customer success stories) adheres to the same basic schematic:

1. Customer status quo
2. Problem occurs
3. Solution provider is called in, resolves problem
4. New status quo is established, better than before

Quite close to the most basic A->B story, isn’t it?

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Update 20 February: I found this great new book, Life in Five Seconds, which “takes 200 world events, inventions, great lives, places, animals and cultural icons that you really need to know about, and then, hey presto!, cuts away all the useless details”, boiling stories down to strings of pictograms – basic elements of stories, check out the extract here. This is the story “Michael Jackson”:

 

 

 

===

So anyway, just to prove that reality is never A->B simple, I have a beautiful 1919 short story by Franz Kafka that defies narrative theory. Figure it out. I found this particular, splendid translation here.

A message from the emperor
The emperor—it is said—sent to you, the one apart, the wretched subject, the tiny shadow that fled far, far from the imperial sun, precisely to you he sent a message from his deathbed. He bade the messenger kneel by his bed, and whispered the message in his ear. So greatly did he cherish it that he had him repeat it into his ear. With a nod of his head he confirmed the accuracy of the messenger’s words. And before the entire spectatorship of his death—all obstructing walls have been torn down and the great figures of the empire stand in a ring upon the broad, soaring exterior stairways—before all these he dispatched the messenger. The messenger set out at once; a strong, an indefatigable man; thrusting forward now this arm, now the other, he cleared a path though the crowd; every time he meets resistance he points to his breast, which bears the sign of the sun; and he moves forward easily, like no other. But the crowds are so vast; their dwellings know no bounds. If open country stretched before him, how he would fly, and indeed you might soon hear the magnificent knocking of his fists on your door. But instead, how uselessly he toils; he is still forcing his way through the chambers of the innermost palace; never will he overcome them; and were he to succeed at this, nothing would be gained: he would have to fight his way down the steps; and were he to succeed at this, nothing would be gained: he would have to cross the courtyard and, after the courtyard, the second enclosing outer palace, and again stairways and courtyards, and again a palace, and so on through thousands of years; and if he were to burst out at last through the outermost gate—but it can never, never happen—before him still lies the royal capital, the middle of the world, piled high in its sediment. Nobody reaches through here, least of all with a message from one who is dead. –You, however, sit at your window and dream of the message when evening comes.

Hello ServiceNow!

So NetApp is well behind me now, and here I am at ServiceNow.

One of the many great things about a change like this, is that it forces you to readjust on various levels. It’s a great opportunity to get reacquainted with yourself, your profession, the things you thought you knew – and learn a heck of a lot new things while going through that process.

ServiceNow has been a very impressive experience so far. New market category, new product, new customers, prospects, and sales channels. New business model, sales and marketing strategies. Understanding the inner workings of a subscription-based service model. What it means to be part of the fastest growing software company in the world. Native cloud. State of the art data centers coming online across the globe. Professional services. A channel ecosystem expanding like wild fire.

Phenomenal customers, who entrust us with massive workloads of data critical to their day-to-day business operations. We can’t fail them. We return innovation to their IT departments by replacing IT Service Management legacy systems that have been around for decades without going anywhere. The IT guys hate them, the employees hate them, even the guys over at BMC and HP themselves probably hate them by now. With ServiceNow, on top of the readily available IT Service Management processes, IT departments are able to develop apps on the platform themselves, automating processes specific to their company, bringing instant value to the business. And with those custom apps sitting on top of the ServiceNow platform, they automatically benefit from all available platform technology and enhancements over time.

We are revolutionising IT Service Management, and allow our customers to take our technology to unseen levels of deployment within their organizations. Way beyond IT. We turn your IT into the department of “yes”. All new. It’s a lot to take in.

I listened to a customer who got just a titbit emotional when he described the impact of ServiceNow to his IT department. We actually were able to make their lives a little easier, more fun. They get to spend more time on creating business value through IT innovation, instead of running from incident to incident and just barely keeping the lights on. Bingo.

I listened to the CEO, the CTO, VP’s of product development, sales, professional services and so on. Huge vision and determination. All these great stories – if you are interested, I can really recommend this keynote speech taped at our annual user conference Knowledge back in May of last year. Our CEO Frank Slootman packed it with stories essential to ServiceNow. Have a look, and let me know how you liked it.

And then the people on the ground! All these new excellent people that have been working since 2004 building this company you didn’t even knew existed – and here it is, and they’re happy you joined to help out in Europe. This last week I got to visit our offices in San Diego and San Jose, met many of my new colleagues and was able to start building new working relationships. Awesome.

Had a couple of beers with Tim, who after college graduation worked for EMC for 13 years before joining ServiceNow. Former adversary. Great guy. We had a good laugh about our backgrounds, and then a couple more cold ones.

I will stop here. Come back for more, later. I am writing a pretty good piece on narrative in business.

O and by the way: If you like these stories, why not join ServiceNow yourself? We have so many job openings. Get in now.

Goodbye NetApp

I resigned from my position at NetApp to join ServiceNow as per December 1^st.

It’s a jump from a rather big to a fairly small IT company. From storage software and hardware to Platform and Software as a Service. From a crowd of dear colleagues and friends to just a handful of strangers. From “Go further, faster” to “Transform IT”. From consolidation and organizational maturity to fast growth and sheer opportunity. At ServiceNow, I will focus on Enterprise Customer Acquisition, in order to fuel the company’s growth in EMEA.

When I joined NetApp in 2007, the company held the number 5 position in EMEA, behind EMC, HP, Dell and IBM. Today, we’re the clear runner up, with EMC in sight. Revenues more than doubled since. Markets understand that in storage and data management, true innovation will come from NetApp, and NetApp only. Our brand and positioning never was more differentiated than it is right now. I am proud to have been part the team going beyond to get that done. I will miss this category of IT business.

But more so the people in the EMEA Marketing team. I want to thank a few of you here. Ton, for getting things organized, for your sincerity and straightforwardness. Lorrayne, for your great stories, self-mockery and channel insight. Robert, for your blunt boldness, ideas and lightning-fast humor. Udo, for turning event and sponsorship management into a higher art form. Heike, your wisdom. Stéphanie, your endless energy. Sandrine, your courage, commitment and hard work. Heather, your curiosity, care and friendly pitbullness. Antonio, your focus, patience and long-term scope. Silvia, your professional style, marcoms expertise and constant flow of solid ideas. Ingrid, for helping me get things done despite everything. Marvin, your talent, wit and sharp eye for quality. Kerstin, your open mind, know-how and relationship management. Dani, will I ever find a more marketing savvy and committed colleague? Claudia, Michal, Irina, Shiri: I admire how you guys create great marketing out of thin air. Rakan, for picking up the pieces sitting next to me. Kate, for running the show – it will go on!

And the leaders. Ashley, I am walking out of our second term together; I am sure it would’ve been lots of fun. John, thanks; we delivered some solid programs together along the way. Hamish – you just rock, mate. Ali, Jac, Pascale – I have thoroughly enjoyed working with you and your teams. Thank you for leading the way. Lastly David: It is all about beer and skittles in the end, isn’t it?

I thank you all for now, and know we will stay in touch.

My talk at Forrester’s CX Forum tomorrow

For any business, at any time, delivering an outstanding customer experience is imperative. Whether you sold swords to gladiators 2000 years ago, or FlexPods to CERN just yesterday – people still buy from people. And the consequences of doing a bad job will be (almost) as killing in 2013 as they were back then.

Forrester Research will host a Customer Experience Forum tomorrow in London, and they asked me to talk about customer experience in a business-to-business environment. Most of the other presentations will be delivered by brands on the B2C side, so for mere balance they needed some hard core B2B content. Just call Kees, I say. Yeah!

Anyway, I don’t expect any of you forward thinkers to believe in the dichotomy between B and C. I surely don’t. Whether people buy professionally or privately, just two variables matter (provided there is a budget to spend): Level of involvement (do people care about the purchase, is it important to them, do they need it to achieve their goals?) and level of perceived risk (what if it turns out to be a bad investment, what is the potential implicit and explicit damage?). The higher the involvement, and the higher the perceived risk, the more people will be involved. Privately, the whole inner circle of friends and family is consulted. Professionally, the decision maker will seek council with more and more stakeholders and influencers. There is no real difference, there’s usually just a bit more money involved. Where and from whom they buy depends on brand preference and customer experience.

You can argue that it’s easier to sell a €2 bag of licorice produced by Unilever, than a €200,000 FlexPod produced by NetApp and Cisco. Unless that FlexPod will help the buyer save considerably on operational and capital expenses annually, whilst you’re trying to sell licorice to a bunch of chewing gum addicts. Or health freaks. You get the point.

You can argue that NetApp is selling the FlexPods through an indirect two-tiered channel model, which makes it impossible to control the customer experience. Surely, but Unilever doesn’t own any of the licorice outlets either, do they?

You can argue that Unilever knows the end customer far better than a company like NetApp, because they can spend millions on market research. Sure, but their target market consists of millions and millions of consumers, whom they have to convince into 100,000 deals just to equal a single FlexPod booking. Relative to Unilever, NetApp is selling to just a handful of customers – whose decision making units by the way are fully profiled, and all their contact data can be bought on every street corner. It just takes some budget.

You can argue that consumers don’t take 2 seconds to ponder spending their €2 on licorice. They’ll be addicted and stay true to their preferred brands for ages to come. True, but then business buyers spend a lot more time researching their purchases – and their behavior can be meticulously monitored, tracked and acted upon with sophisticated marketing systems for real-time spend analyses, customer listening and behavioral research, like Eloqua, Marketo, Radian6, Zuberance, Salesforce.com et cetera. And you know what? That’s actually true! Ha!

O, and business buyers will be equally hooked to their FlexPods once they’ve had a good taste of its qualities, savings and user benefits, don’t you worry about it for a second. They will be back for more.

So, whenever someone tries to talk you into believing that B2C is an easier sell than B2B – just tell them “Call Kees”. They’re wrong, and I will show them why – just in time to prevent their heads from coming off.

All said, this doesn’t imply that delivering an impeccable customer experience to business customers is easy. By no means. But, step by step, it can be done and reported on – and that’s what I will talk about tomorrow in London. Join me there and come prepared by downloading my tomorrow’s presentation.

Savor these slides with a bag of Venco licorice – try their Drop Toppers Salmiak & Mint, for a world-class experience. Guaranteed.

ABC of EBC

We’ll open an Executive Briefing Center tomorrow – another clear sign of NetApp’s coming of age.

The goal of an EBC is to establish a controlled environment for sales conversations at the highest level of engagement. “Controlled” means: Superior interior design, state-of-the-art technology, and the ultimate storytelling content. It’s where brand management meets account strategy.

C-level buyer journey
From a buyer journey point-of-view, an EBC visit is positioned in the purchasing phase of Enterprise C-level audiences. All content – delivered in the briefing rooms, in the telepresence room connected to corporate headquarters, or through large interactive touch screen panels in the break spaces – is geared towards turning consideration into signed deals. The EBC planning system is tightly integrated with salesforce.com.

Benefit
Until now, prospect and customer executives from our area would fly to Sunnyvale for briefing sessions like these – which can be a challenge (time, cost, travel visa). Now, we can host briefing sessions in our Amsterdam EBC, which is also available for American or Asian customers who are looking to venture into Europe.

It’s a considerable investment. It will propel our EMEA business.

Competition
Check out competing EBC programs here:

• EMC
• HP
• Dell
• IBM