Goldcast

With over a decade’s experience to pull from, Laura Wille knows a thing or two about marketing. As Director of Customer Marketing at Clari, Laura is responsible not only for product adoption, but also the cross-sell, upsell, renewals and customer advocacy angles of the brand’s marketing operation.

Put simply: “Anything that involves the customer, my team touches.”

Laura spends most of her time innovating new ways to fortify relationships with Clari’s customers — and her digital event strategy is a big part of making that happen.

Covering every part of the post-sale customer funnel, Clari’s customer marketing team is looking to double down on events and level up on pipeline generated.

We caught up with Laura to find out how she uses her digital customer marketing events to strengthen key relationships and increase pipeline.

With each part of the marketing team owning a specific segment, every stakeholder has the freedom to add their own flavor into the event marketing mix.

For Laura and the customer marketing team, that means educating customers on how to get the most value out of Clari.

“We’re always thinking about how we can leverage events to educate customers on how to use the product by showcasing key features and functionality that deliver high value. We also use events to share new use cases and to introduce Clari to new personas to help generate net new expansion pipeline.”

Last but in no way least, Laura is always looking for ways to use events to position Clari’s customers as thought leaders. “For top-of-funnel events where we’re trying to showcase Clari as a revenue thought leader, we’re always looking for customers that can pair with us and speak to the key themes and challenges in the revenue space.”

Clari’s customer marketing event strategy currently breaks down into four key event types:

1. Demo-based event series

Goal: Pipeline and product adoption

Audience: Customers and prospects

Description: A bi-weekly live demo series for customers and prospects to drop by to learn about and see the platform.

2. Virtual roundtables

Goal: Thought leadership and relationship building

Audience: VPs and executives

Description: These events feature Clari and customer executives who discuss relevant, hot industry topics.

3. Customer Advisory Board events

Goal: Product feedback and customer advocacy

Audience: Invite-only for small group of pre-selected customers

Description: A tight-knit group of customer executives who provide feedback and input into Clari’s product roadmap. Highly interactive with plenty of breakout sessions and one-to-one engagement.

4. Monthly marketing webinars

Goal: Top-of-funnel pipeline generation

Audience: Broader marketing audience

Description: Monthly webinar in partnership with the pre-sales side of the business on a particular topic or use case Clari solves for — these can be product-specific or geared toward a certain persona.

“We look at last-touch but we also look at multi-touch attribution. If we look at our entire pipeline, every single opportunity is touched by some sort of virtual event or webinar. Not only are we able to directly convert leads to qualified pipeline from our event program, we're also able to influence opportunities that are already open and help them progress through the funnel and influence closed-won revenue at the end.”‍

With clear goals for pipeline generation, velocity, influence and engagement, Laura knew she needed a robust digital event platform to execute these event formats in style, while hitting all the right metrics.

When it came to finding her new platform, she was looking for three specific factors:

• How easy is it for speakers to use the platform?
• How easy is it for our audience to attend and engage?
• How robust is the integration between our event platform, Salesforce, and Marketo?

“With our previous platform, we just didn’t feel it was a home run. We had some difficulties with our speakers using the platform and the interactivity was also lacking from the attendee side. The integration with Salesforce and Marketo also wasn’t as robust as it is with Goldcast, which contributed to slower follow up, and in turn, lower conversion rates..”

When Laura and the team happened upon Goldcast, the choice was, well…Clari-fied. 😉

When we asked Laura what she loves about running customer marketing events on Goldcast, there wasn’t just one functionality on the list.

Here are some of the core features Clari’s team uses to generate more pipeline through their customer marketing events.

A virtual area where speakers and organizers can get together, prep, and ask questions.

“I like the backstage functionality to ensure speakers are comfortable and prepped ahead of time to go on stage. Our previous platform didn’t have that or if it did, it wasn't as intuitive.”

Templates that save your event branding for easy access next time.

“For the pre-event setup, I love the fact that we have a template for the branding of our events. We can easily just duplicate the event template and have all the appropriate colors, fonts, and backgrounds. It's just so much easier than building from scratch. We already know that the look and feel is going to be consistent with the Clari brand.”‍

Intuitive interface

A user-friendly platform for smooth cross-functional event setup.

“The time to create an event is a lot lower than it was previously because of the templates and the general ease of use. The backend workflows we’ve been able to create inside Goldcast have helped us build a strong system with our marketing operations team.”

Easy admin announcements

Allowing admins to communicate to attendees across your event in real-time.

“There are so many different ways to ensure the audience knows what to do via the chat or scrolling screen message. Goldcast makes it easy to share information with attendees.”

Leveling up the fun-factor to create a memorable event experience.

“For our demo-based series, we leveraged the chat and Q&A within the chat. The ability to ‘like’ and use emojis was so much fun and another thing that not all event platforms have.”

Feature-rich engagement options

From bringing attendees on stage to interactive games and beyond.

“One thing that we did for our customer advisory board event was enable them to raise their hand and come on stage — I really like that idea of having someone come on stage and have a conversation with a speaker.”

Different formats for different event types

Multiple setups to facilitate all use cases.

“Within the platform there are different formats for different types of events. For instance, if you're doing a webinar, that's a presentation style with us speaking to an audience. But there's also a way for us to have a more interactive discussion with attendees in the form of breakout sessions.”

Seamless Marketo integration

World-class integrations with Salesforce, Marketo and more.

“The Marketo integration helps with our lead flow process. If our customers or prospects attend events, the integration makes sure all that information is pushed back to Marketo which in turn pushes it back into our CRM, Salesforce. It’s really efficient.”

Easy data-driven follow-ups

Account-level data to fuel personalized follow-ups.

“One of the biggest things about leads from events is that in order to successfully convert them, you need prompt follow-up. So having that integration allows us to easily push the account-level information about attendees to our RDR team to follow up almost immediately and that helps us with conversion rates.”

Laura and her team are all about putting the customer first. And they’re thrilled to see this ethos reflected in their choice of event partner.

“Goldcast’s customer success team is amazing. If I have a question about how I set up an event or about functionality, our CSM is always on top of it. From a customer service and support perspective, the team goes above and beyond to make sure we feel comfortable with the platform. Beyond the technology itself, it's the people in the team that help us succeed, which is a true differentiator.”

From endless engagement options and an intuitive interface to ease of execution and superior customer support, Goldcast has helped Clari raise the bar for what attendees can expect from their customer events.

And with an event experience this robust, increased pipeline always follows.