Use industry events to connect with your customers

Event’s specific to your business vertical are great opportunities to not only meet new prospects for your Sales and Marketing teams, but also ideal scenarios for your Customer Success team to catch up with existing customers.

It is a strategy that I have used for a number of years in multiple sectors and works really well. The events are likely already on your customers radar’s, but if they are not, and would benefit them, it is certainly worth an advance conversation.

What type of events?

For Customer Success teams with a client base focused on Cloud or SaaS there are endless events every year, many of which are free. Ask your customers which ones they attend. Find one that is most tailored to your vertical and customer base. For many of my existing clients the AWS Summit (London) is the perfect event for this. It is annual, free and broad with the commonality across our base being workloads run on AWS.

This year at the AWS Summit 2023 whilst our sales team met new prospects, our engineers attended talks to learn about new services and concepts, us in CS spent time meeting as many existing clients as possible at the event. Catching up on existing projects, what’s top of mind and what they thought of what was on offer at the Summit.

In previous roles different events have been more relevant. While working in SportsTech, the SportsPro Summit was the optimum event for this. Held in central London and attracting audiences from both Sponsors and the sports industry. Similarly software specific conferences such as Snowflake Summit and Adobe Summit can also be highly useful, depending on your customer base.

Use industry events to connect with your customers — AWS Summit

Why a CS focus at industry events

It is always great to catch up with existing clients and doing so at these types of events means that you can meet many over a day or two in a relaxed and semi social setting. Grab a coffee, chat about the event, chat about work, projects, problems or anything else top of mind. Even the opportunity to catchup over lunch, dinner or maybe even a drink or two at the end of the event.

So, when your company is looking to attend events, make sure they include your CS team.