Back in September, Gartner came out with their rather controversial CIO Advisory:  Four Recession and Growth Strategies That Make Sense for 2012.  Though forecasts for growth in 2012 are modest, Gartner recommended that clients plan ahead and “avoid consuming time preparing for growth should growth opportunities suddenly arise” and that “however long a distressed economic climate may last, growth will remain a top priority of CEOs and boards of directors.”

Many organizations may prefer to wait and see what the economy does, but that would be a big mistake. I agree with Gartner that organizations must be prepared to take action when the opportunity arises.

Plan ahead. Get started by attending Geehan Group’s upcoming B2B Executive Summit: Navigating Growth & Transformation. Designed exclusively for VP & higher executives, the B2B Summit provides an intimate setting (attendance is limited to 50 attendees) for learning from a prestigious roster of speakers, including Paul Gottsegen, CMO at Infosys, Joe Austin, SVP Customer Experience at Juniper, and Brent Ahrens, General Partner at Canaan, as well as author Jim Hauden.

• Learn how Bill Fathers, President of Savvis, helped shape the company’s international presence, increased its market share, and developed leading-edge products for the financial services, media and telecom industries.
• Discover how John Schwarz, former CEO at Business Objects, doubled the company’s revenue to more than $1.5 billion, improved profitability, and oversaw seven strategic acquisitions.
• Hear how Joe Morgan, CEO at Standard Register, is transforming his organization from a document printing company into a provider of communications technology.

So get started. Plan ahead by attending Geehan Group’s B2B Executive Summit and begin preparing for growth in 2012. You’ll be glad you did!  

Click here to learn more and to receive your personal invitation.


“Rarely do you find an approachable business environment that invigorates your social senses with intriguing conversations, collaborative exchange of inventive ideas, fascinating speakers with applicable war stories, and the urge to network well beyond the two days that the Geehan Group brought us all together. What I gained out of this B2B gathering of like minds expanded my strategic thinking, opened new opportunities about how marketing can make an impact, plus enlightened me on similar management challenges with realistic solutions and results.”

Greg Jorgenson, SVP Marketing, VeriSign

Navigating Growth & Transformation

The B2B Executive Summit is designed and reserved exclusively for executives (VP & higher) who are plotting a course to future success. Whether you are contemplating the journey or already immersed in it, the B2B Executive Summit will provide you with fresh insights and guidance to help you along the way. 

Join other B2B leaders from companies like VMWare, Wells Fargo, Canaan, HCL, Oracle, Savvis, NCR, VeriSign, Xerox and Standard Register.  Learn from their experience how customers are helping them transform and re-design their organizations to achieve sustainable, predictable and profitable growth.

This year’s event will be held at the Grove Isle Hotel & Spa in Coconut Grove, Florida. Spaces are filling up quickly as there are a limited number of registrants available for this exclusive event. To receive registration information and your personal invitation, please send detailed contact information including; name, title, company name, and email address to: Misty Strawser: mstrawser@geehangroup.com.

Here are a few quotes from last year’s attendees:

Neal Polachek, CEO, Kelsey Group
“Few conferences – large or small – offer attendees both the opportunity to engage and interact and the provocation to stretch and explore. Geehan’s event in Phoenix provided this unique mix and forced the attendee to ponder all aspects of their enterprise – from how they work with their best customers, to the pace of innovation, to the business partners they ally to the role of the board. I look forward to attending another Geehan Group event!”

Joe Morgan, CEO, Standard Register
"When you can get executives of the quality you had from such a variety of industries who are working on really big and important things for their own companies to be that attentive for two days, talking about issues facing their business, you must have really, really rich content. For them to sit and actively participate, adding value to one another, and then have tremendous follow-up afterward where people want to continue the dialogue and actually impact each other’s businesses relationships and development, that for me is a real benefit. I’ve already heard from four people and it’s only been 3 days since the Summit. That’s rare. You created a dynamic environment where people expect they’re going to stay in touch."

As a project manager one of my responsibilities is developing timelines and project plans for my customer’s executive programs.  It is amazing to me as I put each project plan together, the number of individuals it takes to pull off a successful executive summit.  It truly takes the all hands on deck approach to coordinate all of the details and execute on each line of a project plan.   Key resources must be identified up front for overall program management, marketing creative, print production and communications.  Each of these areas is reliant upon the other to complete assigned tasks.


The list of areas necessary to execute each summit may vary by organization, but the areas I listed above are the ones I recommend be top priority.  Before you begin any summit planning activities make sure that you have identified the key resources you will need to have a successful summit for your organization.  I have a few other things that you may want to check out on our Execuitve Summit Checklist.

I recently spoke to a group of Banking Chief Marketing Officers at the CFG summit in San Francisco.  My compliments to Pat Scanlon who organizes the group to bring such a high quality program together.

I asked the group of B2B Marketing leaders to pair up and identify the biggest issues that they see in their respective organizations to build out customer engagement at the decision maker level.  The main challenge:  “Gaining executive buy-in”.

This issue is not new, and similar to other company initiatives and transformational programs whether you are implementing a new CRM system, putting your strategic plan in place or implementing a customer advisory board.  Gaining executive support is critical to success of any transformational program.  Here are three quick ways to gain executive buy in.

Show me the money
Customer advisory boards (or councils) and executive level customer programs will yield an increase in revenue from the accounts participating in the program.  Imagine if every customer on your advisory board would buy all the products that you offer and/or fit their business.  Experience tells us that revenues from advisory board members can increase anywhere from 10 -100% - a phenomenal ROI.

Make it easy for executives to engage with customers
Most executives are so busy that they don’t get a chance to engage with top customers.  A typical customer advisory board meeting allows them to engage with a dozen or so customers in a meaningful manner – all at once.  The customer advisory board can eliminate a dozen separate customer visit trips, making great use of executive time.

Make better decisions
All executives want to make better decisions, more quickly and more confidently.  Engaging customers to help validate key decisions will either provide executives with confidence in the decisions – or alter the course and set a clearer path for success. 

In my experience, when executives are presented the key benefits and ROI for a program – they will support the initiative.  The onus then moves to the implementer of the program to deliver the results. 

Are you a B2B company looking to achieve sustainable, predictable, profitable growth (SPPG)?  Referencing The B2B Executive Playbook by Sean Geehan, SPPG is the holy grail of goals for any B2B organization.  Throughout my career, I’ve observed three fundamental elements that will enable the realization of SPPG for B2B organizations:  Market Driven Strategy, Customer Engagement and Internal Alignment.  

Customer Engagement is the key to transforming the organization to drive sustainable, predictable, profitable growth. In the B2B world, customer engagement is the fundamental leverage point that allows an organization to foster two-way communication and connect the organization to the heart of its success - customers and sales.  During the sales process, and subsequent working relationship with customers, there are countless opportunities to engage with decision makers for dialogue - both outbound (ie. awareness and selling) and inbound (voice of the customer and market insight).  With the right environment and process, customer engagement is the cornerstone to gather insight that drives a market driven strategy and internally aligns the organization for success.

For the B2B Company, the magical moments that lead to company transformation are found within the engagements where decisions can be vetted and committed.  These successful customer enagagements primarily begin with a customer advisory board. Additional B2B customer engagement programs are needed to deliver other successful components: Breadth, Depth and Engagement Type.

Breadth:  The breadth of customer engagement in the B2B space is all about how broad your reach is to touch and engage your customers.  A domestic based company would need to reach all corners of the US to drive success of customer engagement.  Likewise, an international or global company would need to cover the corners of the earth.  Key decisions need to be made in those markets where you must invest to be successful.  Do you open an office in Dubai because it’s a hot market?  Do you focus on specific verticals to target and align to your regional or global breadth?  The breadth of the markets you focus on should align to the company strategy and growth opportunities. 

Depth:  The depth of your customer engagement programs includes the levels of engagement you have within your accounts.  We typically see that B2B companies engage with their customers at three distinct levels: the user level, the operational (influencer) level, and the executive (decision maker) level.  Customer Engagement at each of these levels requires different approaches.  For instance, a User Group meeting in Las Vegas won’t be a place to invite executive decision makers however, an industry trade show focused on an operational process would be a great place to meet and engage influencers.   Executive/decision maker programs in turn must be well thought-out, planned and executed to perfection to engage the right audience in the right manner…and ensure that they will return in the future.

Type:  The type of program refers to the engagement being on a 1-1 basis; a 1-few basis; or a 1-many basis.  Examples include:

• One to One:  Executive Sponsor Programs; Account Based Marketing; Account Based Innovation; Major Account Programs, etc.
• One to Few: Roundtables, customer advisory boards; CEO dinners; small summits
• One to Many:  Conferences, trade shows; summits; industry or partner events
  

In determining the type of customer engagement, careful consideration should be taken to determine the most effective method to reach your targeted buyer, advance the positioning of the company, gain both insight as well as get your message delivered. Each of these programs require levels of structure as the complexities of the programs can vary.  Our research has found that the top programs for advancing sales are executive summits while the top programs for driving retention and loyalty are executive customer advisory boards.

If you and your company are on the path to drive sustainable, predictable, profitable growth, an advisory board is a great place to start your journey and customer engagement approach.  If you’re a company that already has these programs or elements of these programs in place, often clearly defining and rationalizing the value of each program is important.  Making the most of every initiative is what separates good companies, and good marketers, from the average.