“We wound up using many of the ideas and tools we learned at the CAB Exchange Summit at our own Board of Advisors meeting. They were quite helpful.”
Rhett Livengood. Director of Enterprise Customer Programs
Intel Corporation
“Last year’s CAB Exchange Summit took place the week before our EBOA (Enterprise Board of Advisors). So we sent three people (including myself) to the CAB Summit and wound up using many of the ideas and tools we learned there the following week at our own Board of Advisors meeting. They were quite helpful!
“Lessons learned came under two categories: confirmation of what we thought might work, and disasters avoided! For example, we eliminated presentations by Intel people after hearing that customers aren’t there to be presented to, they want to engage each other. So we converted our Intel speakers into moderators of group discussion. People loved it!
“Also, we got a great idea from Joe Heinen at Genesys (Vice President, Corporate Marketing) who forgoes having people introduce themselves at the start of the first day. It’s a huge time waster. Instead, they develop a fun way for people to introduce and get to know each other during the reception the night before. We tried that, and it worked great.
“Another thing we learned was to score individual Intel moderators at the event, in the evaluations filled out by our board member attendees. Most of them did very well, but a few scored poorly (often because they didn’t follow our guidance). These folks won’t be invited back next year. Btw we used a few tricks of our own. For example, we allowed 20 minutes or so at the end for attendees to fill out our evaluations on the spot. If you let them get away, it’s very hard to get that important feedback. And to insure 100% participation, we “traded” them a memory stick containing all presentations for their completed forms! This worked very well.”