Not too long ago I was preparing a talk about the importance of community in enterprise software and I found myself trying to explain why Salesforce.com’s Trailhead training and community platform is so successful. Then I came across a picture that explained it all. In it a bunch of Trailblazers were gathered around the main Trailhead mascot, Astro, many of them wearing Trailhead hoodies and other paraphernalia, looking for all intents and purposes like a bunch of college kids partying after their team just won the Big Game.
That realization – Trailhead’s concept of community is a reenactment of the American four-year college experience, which, for better or worse, places experience well ahead of education – crystallized something that’s been lurking in the back of my mind for a while: When it comes to enterprise software, experience is more important than content, more important than feature/functionality, more important than price. In fact, it’s really the only thing that matters, especially in a renewal-dependent SaaS world.
The primacy of experience in turn has led me to conclude that the question about online vs. in-person events misjudges the importance of experience. Indeed, as much as we complain about schlepping off to Orlando and Las Vegas for in-person events, the enterprise customer experience – something that translates directly into upsell opportunities and renewal rates, not to mention genuine customer success – is incalculably enhanced by the experiences that can only take place at in-person events.
This has led me to coin a new aphorism, which goes like this:
Content is the Printer, Experience is the Ink
In other words, customers buy software and services from vendors for their functionality, but they come back again and again because of the experiences they associate with that vendor, and maybe, just maybe, its products too. Which in turn led to a second aphorism:
Experience is the Fuel that Powers Community
Those experiences run a wide gamut from the direct user experience (the usability of the software) to the more indirect experience of being part of that particular vendor’s user community. In fact, I would argue, the tech world is full of examples where the indirect customer experience was perceived as so excellent that it didn’t matter if the direct user experience was so-so, or worse.
There’s a lot about iOS that fits that characterization neatly: Anyone think using Settings provides an optimal experience? Remember when Tim Cook told users to switch to Google Maps because the iOS map sucked? Ever wonder when Apple will fix the messy way in which apps are rearranged on the screen?
There are definitely problems with the UX over in iOS land. But does any of this matter in terms of Apples mass appeal or market share? Hell no. That’s because Apple won the experience battle long ago. To a certain extent one could argue they’ve squandered some of that experiential advantage over the years, but the numbers of customers and the profitability of the company tell the real story.
If Apple holds the experience crown in consumer tech, Trailhead stands as the best example of the overall impact of experience in enterprise tech. Regardless of how Salesforce is doing in any particular quarter, Trailhead continues to attract a fervent, dedicated crowd. Interestingly, Trailhead won its experience laurels independent of any real competitive threat. That’s perhaps the other singularly brilliant aspect of what Sarah Franklin, the current CMO at Salesforce, did as she guided Trailhead from conception into the potent force behind Salesforce’s success that it quickly became: Sarah knew how to make it fun and inclusive and even a little too cute while providing great skills-based learning, all without being dumb. By the time she gave the first standalone Trailhead keynote at the 2017 Dreamforce she got a well-deserved standing ovation when she walked on stage. I’ve described that experience as more of a tent-revival than anything, and it’s not that far-fetched. That early fervor around Trailhead is definitely not something you see every day at software conferences. (For those of you not familiar with tent-revivals, here’s a tent maker’s pitch on why you should buy a tent for your revival from them. Max Weber is probably rolling in his grave at this one.)
Trailhead is an excellent example of how experiences (of the positive kind) bind us to each other; they populate our memories and dreams, and provide the reference point for our expectations of the future. We don’t remember our classes or professors as much as we remember the Big Game, the fun and drama of dorm life, the quiet elegance of the library we got to study in, and the camaraderie that, for many of us, defined college life so much more than a great seminar or those term papers we wrote.
Trailhead provides a solid experience for its community in two ways: it provides quality online content and a gamified experience for learning on the Trailhead platform that can upskill a Trailblazer and prepare her for a new job; and it provides excellent in-person community experiences at both Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference as well as at Trailhead’s standalone community conferences – which this year take place in eight countries (including Albania!) in addition to the dozen or so taking place this year in the US.
Credit where credit is due: It’s no surprise Trailhead is a Salesforce.com platform. The concept of enterprise software as an experience was embraced by Marc End-of-Software Benioff like no one else, and that embrace led to the circus-like atmosphere of Salesforce.com’s annual Dreamforce conference (aka Dreadforce for its unwieldy size, or Woodstock for CRMbecause of its entertainment to content ratio.) Behind the curtain may be a man pulling levers and speaking into a mic, but the overall effect works: Salesforce leads the market in large part because of the experience it provides its customers – they’re part of a winning team – independent of the actual functionality of its software. Or cost.
And while I mock Dreamforce because it is unabashedly a three-ring circus, the conference experience matters – and judging by the tens of thousands of attendees that eagerly roll into town each year, the vox populi agrees.
Other vendors have had some limited success replicating the model. Back when SAP was starting out in the US, people who attended its annual user conference loved watching founder Hasso Plattner get up on stage with his guitar and rip out some chords and a passable solo. It was part of the SAP experience, one that attendees universally loved. SAP also had until recently a robust user community, and a special corps of influencers called the SAP Mentors, among others. SAP also worked with a collection of what are the only independent enterprise software user groups in the industry – ASUG in the US and DSAG in Germany, along with many other country-based user groups –and together they were able to create a rather unique ethos around the company. It wasn’t always a picnic for SAP: that sense of community and experience resulting in SAP being held to a uniquely high standard relating to a variety of issues (such as indirect licensing) that its peers got a pass on. Along the way it also became the market leader in enterprise software and the second or third largest software company in the world. So – maybe it was worth it.
Salesforce and SAP aren’t the only ones that have built out experience-based communities. Microsoft’s developer and partner community have historically been very strong. Microsoft conferences in the old days were somewhat wild nerdfests, and customers used to go to Microsoft conferences in part to see Steve Balmer himself get wild on stage. Oracle had an independent user community once too, the Oracle Application User Group, and its conferences were impressive from both the experiences and information they imparted. As the grilling the Oracle apps execs used to get on main stage by its customers. Along the way Oracle Applications did pretty well too.
Of course, the problem with active communities – particularly those that deign to be independent – is that they’re hard to control. Microsoft saw that, realized it meant their desperate need to control the message (and shoot the messenger when things didn’t go their way) was threatened, and basically pulled back from the concept of community, especially the influencers who aided and abetted those dangerous independent vibes. Oracle long-ago abandoned the concept of an independent user group and lurched in to control the message/shoot the messenger mode as well. It’s been the dominant model for enterprise software ever since.
Instead of building real community by providing genuinely compelling experiences, most companies today try (and fail) to create a fun vibe and experience at their conferences, defaulting to playing loud live music as the keynote gets started and then subjecting the audience to 90 minutes of death by PowerPoint. Then comes the obligatory concert, usually by a has-been rocker, to close out the “big gala celebration.” There’s usually also some silly swag.
So don’t get me wrong: I don’t want in-person just for the sake of it – the model generally sucks, and desperately needs improvement. But defaulting to an all online model instead of fixing in-person events – and presenting a true hybrid combination – is definitely the wrong way to go.
The focus on experience-based community is essential. Communities gravitate towards shared experiences, and can only grow if fed a steady stream of shared experiences. In other words: A powerful, well-designed set of experiences, when done right, create and nurture a community of individuals who share in their enjoyment of those shared experiences. That’s what Trailhead and its swag, cute mascots, and nerdy hipster vibe have created. And Trailhead has clearly, since its inception, become a self-perpetuating community. Self-perpetuating as long as Trailhead continues to support this most virtuous of virtuous circles by continually creating new experiences to keep the community engaged. Which it does particularly well.
As the great Maya Angelou put it (though I confess a small degree of shame in bringing her into this discussion):
I‘ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
Meanwhile, here we are in 2023 asking ourselves whether we still need to have any in-person events at all. I mean (snark alert) moving the world of in-person experiences to the online meeting world did so well for us and our children, why not just perpetuate those wonderful experiences? It certainly is cheaper to run a conference online, and takes much less creativity. As my colleague Jon Reed has pointed out time and time again, it turns out most of the people running online conferences still apparently believe that a few cameras, a little Zoom, and a URL is all it takes to create a great experience. With five minutes at the end for Q&A, and no sidebar chat windows, please, they distract from the mind-numbing slide deck we have to get through.
Snark aside, it’s clear that online events, as they are generally practiced, are experience killers. Running events that are only online – no hybrid option for people who want to gather in person – guarantees there will be nothing really memorable, no feeling, about a conference that people will remember a month, a year, or even many years later. What are our best memories from the conferences we’ve attended? They’re all related to the physical connections we made with people and ideas, not what was in a PowerPoint on main-stage. Those great conversations in the halls and over coffee, the renewing of old friendships and the making of new ones, the hand-on demos and chances to learn just by walking around instead trying to learn while sitting through hour three of the third Zoom conference this week. (A good example: I don’t remember a single thing from Dreamforce 2017 exhibit other than Sarah Franklin’s ovation, obviously because it was such a remarkable experience.)
I was told recently by a marketing exec that online makes sense because in-person events can only serve a small number of customers at a time, and that online is more in line with a “quantitative” approach to marketing. That of course completely discounts the influence that is wielded by conference goers – those customers, partners, pundits who report, informally or in blog posts, videos, and social media on what transpired at the conference. How much would like to bet that “reporting”, particularly the informal kinds, skews very heavily towards ideas, concepts, and conversations that didn’t take place from the keynote stage?
As those kinds of conversations are extremely hard to control, despite (or because of?) their high value, eliminating them by insisting on a purely online experience is seen as acceptable collateral damage in the effort to force-feed a canned message to an audience.
Unequivocally, online meetings, like online school, genuinely work for a relatively small percent of the intended audience, and that hybrid models are probably the best way to go – not everyone can afford the time and monetary commitment to traveling to Vegas or Orlando or wherever. I also grant that people with disabilities and some neuro-divergent people truly benefit from online events. So let me be clear that I think every worthwhile event needs to be hybrid as well.
But online only? No thanks. Humans are by nature social beings, and we interact using a complex mix of verbal and visual cues that simply can’t be rendered in the online world. We learn best in social settings because we’re programmed to learn either by doing or watching how others do things. That social setting is our community, and the more solid the community, the more solid the experience. And what nurtures community? The interaction of its content and the experiences that content can enable within the community it supports.
One more important reason to support in-person events for the enterprise software market. Each of the main software vendors has an ecosystem of partners trailing behind it, the very vast majority of which are dedicated to helping make those vendors’ customers successful. I’m mostly talking about the smaller boutique partners, not the giant software vendor/partners and global systems integrators that tend to suck up all the oxygen on both the virtual and online main stage. For smaller partners, online is worse than a slow-motion train wreck, it’s a death knell. They don’t have the budgets or reach of the larger vendors to replace the contacts and lead-generation activities – much of which is ad hoc, in the hallways or at an overpriced booth – that would have naturally flowed from in-person events. The more large vendors eschew in-person events for online events, the more they limit their ecosystems to the biggest partners and the more they limit customer choice and the chance for real customer success.
I promised some tips about what can be done to solve this problem. It’s pretty simple: next time you’re in a meeting and someone says that online events are the way to go for your company, particularly to the detriment of in-person events, ask them whether anyone has bothered to ask customers and partners about how “good” endless online events are for their success. If someone can show you that online works just fine for lead gen and renewals, then IMO you’re probably in a commoditizing part of the market, whether you know it or not, that has lost its strategic importance to your customers. Think TurboTax or even Zoom or Teams – who needs in-person to sell those products?
Successful lead-gen operations do not correlate with customer success, by the way. They only correlate with sales success.
If you’re selling something that can really transform a company and change how people work – opening up new markets and opportunities, fending off new threats, creating new levels of productivity—then it takes a proverbial village for the customer to actually be successful. A village full of people, lots of people, because transformation is complex, and deploying the software that transforms companies takes a lot more than self-service tech and a coin-operated, online marketing and sales function. The best enterprise software needs to be part of a community effort inside the organizations that are deploying it– IT, line of business users, formerly siloed domains. That effort needs an ecosystem of peers and partners that can help a company transform complex enterprise software systems into competitive business advantage. That ecosystem can’t thrive only as an online community any more than we as individuals can live the entirety of our lives in front of our laptops or phones.
When it comes to real enterprise software success, it takes a community built from shared experiences, dedicated to building even more. If you systematically and deliberately leave out in-person experience and community, you may have some short-term gains that Wall Street will invariably love. But for those customers and partners relegated to an online-only experience, you’re just wasting everyone’s time on content that will be irrelevant or outdated in a manner of months. Product, content, collateral, webinars, even leaders, are all ephemeral: Only experiences truly endure.
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