Best Keynote Ever Via Your Enterprise Tribe

What was the best keynote you ever saw as a customer, partner, or prospect?

A keynote that energizes me the most is one that shares a vendor’s’ vision for the future as well as its latest developments.

Ideally, a passionate customer is on stage eagerly showing off the solution and raving about the benefit their company is getting from it. Even better if it’s not all rosy: “Had to work out some kinks, which is understandable, as it is a brand new product. We shared our journey on our blog ….”

If partners also get ample opportunity to showcase their solutions built on the vendor’s platform, I am even more impressed, as it gives me confidence that the ecosystem is alive and well.

As a vendor, how do you make sure you know about all the cool things that your worldwide customers and partners are doing with your technology?

Your enterprise tribe or as some call it your advocacy group to the rescue. It is the fertile ground to bring your keynote to the next level.

Back at SAP, long before SAP TechEd we would ask the SAP Mentors, via a questionnaire, what they would like to hear in the next keynote. What cool uses of SAP technology have they seen or done lately?

We shared these results with the teams organizing the keynotes. SAP’s SVP & GM for Platform as a Service, Prakash Darji, in preparation (I think it was for a Vishal keynote) even did a webinar with the SAP Mentors and discussed every single point that the Mentors brought up. It was an amazing pulse check and clarification exercise for everyone involved.

Your Enterprise Tribe members are often the ones that are on the forefront of your ecosystem offerings. As it was with SAP Mentor Chris Paine who, with Enterprise Jungle, was one of the first to share a solution on the HANA Cloud Platform. Here he is presenting his Enterprise Jungle App during Steve Lucas’ SAP TechEd keynote.

Chris is an Australian partner of SAP, and I am convinced, that without the SAP Mentor Initiative he would not have been on the radar of Steve Lucas and his team.

If you include your enterprise tribe in the development of your keynotes, the expectations on both sides have to be set right. Of course, not all suggestions will make it into the keynotes.

Your top community advisors are often sharing their learnings with the rest of the community, are comfortable to present in front of crowds, and therefore ideal candidates to bring on the big stage of a keynote.

Their deep expertise also makes them excellent candidates to be the hosts to interview executives or the product specialists. Like above where SAP Mentor James Wood is interviewing the HANA Cloud Platform gurus Rui Noriega and fellow SAP Mentor Matthias Steiner [Recording].

A secondary effect is that the executives engage more with their enterprise tribe, which builds trust and enables ideas and concerns to flow more freely from the marketplace to the decision makers.

A keynote is also the ideal moment to introduce your enterprise tribe to your community. Like Lothar Schubert Director Developer Relations at GE Digital recently presented the Predix Builders at Predix Transform (video 1,2). I will share details on how best to announce your newly formed enterprise tribe to your community in another post. Stay tuned!

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