Last week, Referential sponsored and sent both myself and consultant Emily Feber to the Obsession CLG Tour in SF. It was such a pleasure attending and I want to take a moment to thank our partner Base for hosting such a worthwhile day of knowledge sharing and networking.

We boarded the 6:00am CalTrain from Morgan Hill to SF with warm coffees and granola bars in hand excited for the day ahead. Two hours later we arrived at the conference early enough to add Referential giveaways to the swag bags and rub elbows with the Base team before other attendees arrived.

As the conference began, we enjoyed chats with individuals and teams about everything customer advocacy, sharing exciting projects, innovative ideas, pain points, and more.

Some highlights for me were learning:

• some of the creative ways Robert Solby is combining metrics from different platforms to holistically measure the success of Adobe’s advocacy program

• how AJ Cartas is engineering and managing advocate communities at ActiveCampaign

• how Genefa Murphy’s team at Five9 has remastered their customer testimonials to be customer and use case focused rather than vendor focused

Obsession offers huge value in networking, but Emily and I were also impressed with the content. As Referential principal Jen Doyon says: “ABL, always be learning.”

At 20 minutes per session, each speaker delivered capsule concepts and answered the audience’s questions. We learned about the heart of CLG (Customer Led Growth) initiatives through sessions that highlighted new, unique approaches in which companies adopt this strategy.

TrustRadius shared growing statistics behind why buyers shift away from solely relying on curated reviews, and incorporate personal experience and holistic review platforms. In essence, as the economy is tightening, those making a purchase decision want to hear from real customers about the good, the bad, and the ugly.

I was invited to co-present with Andreas Silva from Alteryx on creating win-win co-marketing plans with your tier-one advocates and what they coined as “AABM”, oradvocate account-based marketing. We each shared anecdotes and best practices for how Referential and Alteryx identify the best advocate companies to partner with on co-marketing plans, steps to build the relationship, execute a co-marketing calendar, and measure the ROI. With this approach, advocacy programs can get a lot of mileage out of a few advocates and their scheduled activities while the advocate is engaging in opportunities that promote themselves and their company.

We wrapped the day with champagne and Base customer awards, a Referential dinner and debrief, and a train ride back home. Thank you to the Base team for putting on such a great event. We look forward to seeing you all again next year!

To those we had a chance to connect with at Obsession, we are so excited to keep the conversation going and continuing to share and connect. Especially in what some consider to be turbulent times, it will be the connections and customer-led growth that carry us forward.