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Austin’s Bulldog Solutions Galvanizes Team to Create One-Day Conference in 3 Months

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Galvanize Bulldog Solutions conference
Checking in for a day of brilliant marketing and sales discussions at Bulldog Solutions one-day galvanizing conference in Austin.

Could you pull off a one-day conference for your clients in less than 90 days? B2B marketing agency Bulldog Solutions did it by galvanizing its team.

The definition of galvanize is to shock or incite someone to take action. So, it’s apropos that the theme for the event was “Galvanize: A Post-Modern Marketing Symposium.”

It all started in late July 2015 when Vice President of Marketing Erin Riggs had the spark of an idea for a client-focused event. Her next thought was that it should coincide with the company’s annual Halloween party. With the decision made, the clock started ticking.

After securing a venue (Omni hotel), theme (Galvanize), and speakers (11 marketing and sales leaders), Erin and her team (which eventually included almost everyone in the company) had about one month to promote the event.

The result was one of the most enjoyable and information-rich conferences I’ve ever attended. While the content was stellar, I was also impressed by Bulldog’s incredible feat — pulling off the event in less than 90 days. So I asked a few questions to understand how and why the company galvanized for the event.

Q. What was your inspiration for the conference?

Erin: In today’s world we’re dealing with an overwhelming rate of change. It takes courage to make a move when everything feels so uncertain. But maintaining the status quo or doing nothing is often the riskiest option in the bigger picture.

I love conferences with inspiring speakers and great ideas that energize you. If you can ride that energy, you return to work with a new perspective and renewed momentum. It helps you make change happen.

Q. How did you pull it off in such a short timeframe?

Erin: Of course, the rush aspect was self-inflicted. But we were on the tail end of spinning off our software business, which had consumed most of the first half of 2015. So, the timing was a product of that transformative event for Bulldog. We were re-launching our brand, so the timeframe made sense at the time. I’m not going to lie, if I did it all over, I’m not sure I would have been so aggressive with the date!

Q. You had a whole day of great speakers. How did you select them?

Erin: It started with a wish list. We were looking for speakers who embraced the spirit of “Galvanize.” When you geek out over something with people who are like-minded, things happen more organically.

Booking our first speaker, Scott Brinker, was the day the whole thing became real. Beyond that it was about crafting the Galvanize story and making sure each new speaker we approached was true to that vision. We were looking for speakers who challenge thinking and take risks, and encourage others to do the same.

Q. What were the results?

Erin: The feedback from attendees, sponsors, clients, employees, and speakers was all so positive. I worried leading up to and the day of the event. But by the cocktail hour, we were all just ecstatic.

Q. Will you do it again?

Erin: Definitely. Galvanize 2.0 is already in early-stage planning.

Q. What galvanizing event-planning tips can you share with other companies?

Erin: My four main lessons learned were:

  • Have a theme and stick to it. Every message is amplified when it’s a part of your overarching theme.
  • When it comes to speakers, choose quality over quantity. It’s okay to offer a one-track experience.
  • Constantly question the value you are delivering to your attendees, because it all comes down to their experience.
  • Give yourself at least six months to plan — maybe even 12!

Galvanizing Insights from the Speakers

Probably the most amazing part of Bulldog’s three-month feat was the slate of speakers and depth of the content delivered. Here are highlights from the speakers’ galvanizing sessions.

Brent Adamson, CEB — Introduction to the Challenger Customer

“Today’s sales and marketing organizations are getting better at things that no longer matter,” stated Brent Adamson. In today’s congested marketing world, sales and marketing organization need to switch things up. He recommends the Challenger Customer theory, outlined in his book. First, find the right person in the company to target among seven mental models. This is usually the Skeptic. Next, deliver the right message by showing them where their company is failing (without your solution).

Tyler Lessard, Vidyard — Personalize Your Videos

Everyone knows video is the best-performing medium today for click-throughs and engagement. But Vidyard discovered a way to boost performance by 15 times the norm — personalization. Vidyard is adding personalization everywhere from email subject lives to inside the videos themselves. Tyler Lessard predicts that personalizing videos will be a key strategy in the new era of engagement marketing.

Brett Hurt, Bazaarvoice — Get Customers Talking

There’s no escaping the power of word of mouth advertising, said Brent Hurt. Today it’s most powerfully executed in customer reviews. That’s amazing to consider when you realize that in 2005 only three retailers accepted customer reviews. Of course, Amazon paved the way as the first and largest online retailer to embrace reviews — and we all never looked back.

Jill Rowley, Social Media Evangelist — Socially Surround Your Prospects

Buyers have changed more in the past 10 years than in the last 1,000! Yet, sales and marketing teams are still using decades-old systems, said Jill Rowley. To be effective, sales organizations have to get involved in the discussion earlier and know more about the customers than ever before. To that end, they should leverage social media to become both more visible and relevant.

Scott Brinker, Chiefmartech.com — Focus on Creating Customer Experiences

Scott Brinker created the famous graphic of over 2,000 sales and marketing technologies. “It’s a proxy for the level of change in this industry,” he said. Yet, with all of this technology, 67 percent of marketers say they don’t have all the tools they need. That’s likely because “marketing as we know it is being fundamentally transformed. And it’s hard to grapple with so much change.” Scott advises, rather than focus on the lack of an ideal slate of technologies, focus on creating valuable customer experiences.

Laura Ramos, Forrester — Customer Obsession is Winning

Laura Ramos presented the results of a Forrester study on the impact of “customer obsessed” companies conducted to find out: Does it pay off? “Yes, it does. We found that marketing-led companies will thrive in the age of the customer.” In fact, the research showed they outperform in three key metrics (with a strong correlation):

  1. Faster revenue growth by 48 percent
  2. Hitting or exceeding goals by 51 percent
  3. Increased customer recommendations by 91 percent

Note: The Forrester report on customer-obsessed companies will be publicly available soon! I’ll post on Twitter when it’s ready @KarenWritesATX.

Photo Credit: (c) Bulldog Solutions

What I Learned from Kenneth Berger’s Talk on “What I Learned at Slack — 3 Strategies for Growth”

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Slack's Kenneth Berger
Kenneth Berger shares Slack’s success strategies at a packed house at ProductAustin Meetup in September at Capital Factory.

What do a cartoon rooster, a PR story about diversity, and measuring both sides of a business tradeoff have to do with the phenomenal success of Slack?

That’s what Kenneth Berger came to Austin to tell us at the ProductAustin Meetup at Capital Factory on September 8th.

Kenneth, who was the original Product Manager at Slack, presented three strategies that helped Slack take over the enterprise — launching cliché-free PR stories, aiming for peaks in user experience, and measuring both sides in business tradeoffs.

Slack Strategy 1 — Create Cliché-free PR Stories

As a marketer, you’ve got to love a guy who understands the value of original, cliché-free stories that can capture the attention of the jaded media.

Slack became a master at PR early — developing a knack for sussing out clever, unusual, and interesting stories to tell in the media.

“We invested in PR early and began building relationships and trust with journalists. In fact, we didn’t do any marketing in the beginning,” said Kenneth.

He cited six examples of big stories Slack leveraged for PR:

  1. An Email Killer: “Flickr Co-Founders Launch Slack as an Email Killer”
  2. An Underdog Success Story: “Third Life Flicker Co-Founder Pulls Unlikely Success from Gaming Failure. Again.”
  3. Catalyst of Organizational Transformation: “We’re selling better organization better teams.”
  4. Massive Growth. No Marketing Required: “Slack has grown entirely (and phenomenally) by word of mouth.”
  5. The Next Microsoft: “But — the Microsoft you want to use!”
  6. Diversity as a Core Value: “That ‘useless’ liberal arts degree has become tech’s hottest ticket.”

Kenneth shared several insights on how to find your company’s big cliche-free stories:

  • You’ve got big ideas. Go tell big stories.
  • Avoid normal stories. You’ve got to go beyond the clichés.
  • What are your underlying truths? What do you believe that other companies don’t?
  • Look for ideas about what your company is doing at a higher level — it’s bigger mission.
  • Look for stories that are genuinely disruptive.

Slack Strategy 2 — Aim for Peaks in Customer Experience

You can build a flat product with everything in your vision moderately function — OR you can build out a few features to great heights. “Giving your customers peak thrills is the way to engender passion,” said Kenneth.

“At Slack, we always tried to add little joyful details where it made sense.”

This doesn’t mean you have to go big or go home. “The ethos is simply to do more than the bare minimum — not everywhere, but a sprinkling of places where it counts.”

He shared three of Slack’s joyful peaks:

1. A Rooster. Broadcasting alerts to an entire @channel on Slack, especially large channels, created a moment of panic in the senders. After all, send too many alerts to the team and people start to ignore them. Slack eased the tension by adding a cartoon of a crowing rooster to the alert — effectively telling people: “If it’s important, go ahead and hit the @channel send button.” Slack received a lot of positive feedback on the graphic.

2. A Reduction. One of Slack’s benefits is reduced email. But when people used Slack’s push feature, it would trigger a push notification and an email notification. “It’s annoying. There’s no reason we should be getting two notifications,” said Kenneth.

“We simply sent one more email to tell them, you’re no longer going to get push email notifications now. Push is a better way to get notifications.”

“It was a tiny, simple detail, but we made visible the thought we put into it. A lot of design details are visible. You never get credit for them. But it made sense for us to let users know. As a result, we got tons of positive feedback for the change. It showed that we cared about their experience.”

3. A Refund. In subscription services, companies have come to expect lost revenue when they don’t use all of the seats they paid for every month. This creates tension to use the seats they paid for.

“We decided that we were just going to refund our customers for any seats that weren’t in use during a billing period,” said Kenneth.

“We thought that creating a peak in the billing process was a huge opportunity, because no one expects it. Naturally we get a lot of positive feedback on this peak experience.”

Slack Strategy 3 — Measure Both Sides in Tradeoffs

“Every decision you make in product development is a tradeoff. While it’s seductive to rally around one goal, one metric is not enough to determine your success,” explained Kenneth.

“Making software is hard. Your vision is a series of bets you make on the future. What happens if those bets don’t pay off? It’s rare that one metric will go up during every stage of product development.”

His advice? Measure both the sides of every decision — otherwise you won’t see the whole story — for example:

  • When you send an email, some users will click and some will unsubscribe.
  • When you decide to focus on your existing clients, you’ll increase customer satisfaction and lower the rate of growth into new areas.

“Big growth does not coming from doing the same thing, no matter how great the growth rate is for that one thing,” Kenneth concluded.

Watch Kenneth Berger’s talk.

Learn more about the peaks and valleys of customer experience.

Learn more about the rooster.

The Most Creative Mornings in Austin — and You Might Not Get In

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I had only 90 seconds to gain a seat at my first CreativeMornings/Austin event.

The email arrived at 10:01 a.m. on a Monday morning. I opened the event’s web page, and set my phone alarm for 10:59 a.m.

At 10:59, the alarm blared. I started refreshing the event page non-stop. Every time the large oval register button was grayed out.

My heart was racing. Would I get in this time?

At exactly 11 a.m., the button went live — trumpeting a single word: “Register.”

I clicked it. A new page opened asking if I was a guest or returning member.

Darn. I mentally kicked myself as I realized I could have registered ahead, and then signed up faster as a member.

I typed my email, first name, and last name in the appointed three boxes as fast as possible. Was I really shaking?

Finally, I clicked the big orange register button. A new web page appeared. “Success,” it announced. I was in! Yes!

It was 11:02 a.m. Out of curiosity, I refreshed the page again. All of the available seats were already gone.

Finally, I had a confirmed seat to the exclusive CreativeMornings meeting on Friday. I didn’t even care what the topic was.

Yes, I realize the group was using Cialdini’s scarcity principle on me. It worked like a charm.

When CreativeMornings Came to Town

CreativeMorningsI still don’t know how I missed the launch of CreativeMornings/Austin in early 2013. After all, I’m an information junkie — especially for anything marketing or creativity oriented.

I’m always scouring every available resource, searching for interesting, inspiring, and informative events. Yet, this one had slipped through my radar for its first several months of existence in Austin.

Once I learned about the monthly events, which are held in different venues from Oak Hill to Round Rock, I tried to sign up for the next event. But I was informed it was full.

I clicked the button to be added to the wait list. But I never heard another word.

So, I joined the email list and waited for the following month’s announcement.

CreativeMornings’ Origin Story

According to its website, CreativeMornings is a “breakfast lecture series for the creative community.”

Its About page says:

In 2008, Tina Roth Eisenberg (Swissmiss) started CreativeMornings out of a desire for an ongoing, accessible event for New York’s creative community. The concept was simple: breakfast and a short talk one Friday morning a month. Every event would be free of charge and open to anyone.

Today, attendees gather in cities around the world to enjoy fresh coffee, friendly people, and an international array of breakfast foods. Volunteer hosts and their team members organize local chapters that not only celebrate a city’s creative talent, but also promote an open space to connect with like-minded individuals.

Today there are CreativeMornings meetings in 117 cities, from Dublin to Denver.

In Austin, the coordinator is Ben Thoma. He describes himself as a “Creative Catalyst for brands, communities & humanity.” His website says:

I helped to start CreativeMornings/Austin and now serve as Lead Organizer & Host. In a past life, I made big ad campaigns for big brands. I also have won a collegiate national championship as a mascot, earned my Eagle Scout and now have two smaller humans calling me “Dad.” I enjoy off-centered beers, editing Waze, and being a jack-of-all-trades.

Inside CreativeMornings/Austin

CreativeMornings/Austin meetings are held at different venues every month. Some sites have included TOMS on South Congress, the Lady Bird Wild Flower Center, the Austin American-Statesman, and St. Philip.

Events last about an hour and a half, and follow a set pattern:

  • Arrive. Get some free coffee and breakfast tacos (all free thanks to sponsors!).
  • Chitchat and network with the other attendees.
  • Ben makes some announcements. Then he introduces the live music. The singer or band plays about three songs.
  • Ben introduces the speaker, and we sit back and learn.
  • Q&A, which usually includes some chachkies for those who ask questions (so far I’ve scored a t-shirt with kittens and a MailChimp monkey hat!).

In the past year, I’ve heard a wide range of Austinites tell their interesting, creative stories including:

  • David Ansel tell funny stories about starting his Soup Peddler enterprise
  • Josh Hare discuss how he founded the Hop & Grain Brewery
  • Elizabeth Mack share why she created the Freestyle Language Center
  • Jen Spencer tell us how she coaches entrepreneurs to find their next thing
  • Chris McCray share the serendipitous launch of his industrial design business

CreativeMornings/Austin celebrated its two-year anniversary in March 2015 at the Treehouse home improvement store. Ben’s website features a photo taken to commemorate the event. I’m in it!

This month’s meeting is tomorrow. The theme is “collaborate.” The speaker is singer/songwriter Darden Smith. The venue is the Vuka co-working site off of South First.

The event is already full. But you can get on the wait list — and cross your fingers.

Or get on the mailing list and get ready to register next month — at 11:00 a.m. Sharp!

I’ll be tweeting @KarenWritesATX!

UPDATE — Friday July 10 — This morning’s CreativeMornings/Austin was one for the record books. I cried! Darden Smith’s story of collaborating with soldiers to write songs and singing one of the songs for us was a heartbreaker. He is doing great things with SongwritingWith: Soliders.

Here is the video from the talk. Darden Smith at Creative Morning Austin.