I spent some time this week with two colleagues to reflect on their success with executive level customer engagement. One of them was  Ben Kiker, the CMO from Interwoven prior to their acquisition by Autonomy.  He had some interesting perspectives to share about how he was able to transform and drive success of Interwoven through his approach to engaging strategic customers and prospects.   After implementing a two-tier approach to engaging executives, he was able to improve customer retention, accelerate sales and account expansion, and develop an impeccable list of customer references and loyal advocates as the catalyst for these changes.  Ben is now with Jive Software, and is looking to repeat his feat and take Jive from an up-and-coming start-up to an enterprise leader in the social business software space.

Lisa Campbell, a VP and GM at Autodesk provided her perspectives about how she was able to leverage executive customers from Autodesk’s Geospatial Business unit as a strong voice of the customer to develop the strategies that led to success.   Lisa was able to engage with leaders from the market, creating executive relationships in unique settings and align her team to drive to market needs, accelerating Autodesk’s product portfolio and go-to-market approaches.

Luckily enough, Lisa, Ben and I will be speaking at the BMA’s September 15th evening mixer in the Silicon Valley at the San Jose TechMart.  Here is the URL - come join us to hear the rest of the story.  http://norcalbma.org/programs/Mixer