Possible New JMP Customer Care Event Offering- Brainstorming Notes from 28MAR19Here are the notes from today. Please feel free to add any new suggestions that you have.
Also, I have an action item to reach out to Peter, but I don't seem to have his email. If someone has it, do you mind forwarding to me? Thank you!
Possible New JMP Customer Care Event Offering
Brainstorming Notes from 28MAR19
In Attendance: Chuck Boiler, Mary Loveless, Julian Parris and Stan Koprowski
Issues We Are Trying to Solve:
- JMP Hands-on Workshops for existing users remain popular for users and are also in demand by JMP Sales Teams.
- Since 2010, the number of JMP Sales teams in N. America has doubled while the number of trainers from JMP Education who are available to teach at the workshops has drastically decreased.
- We would like to come up with solutions to make sure that we are still able to meet some/all of the original goals for when the hands-on workshop series was created:
- Reach JMP users at small to medium-sized accounts who are not large enough to warrant a JMP Day.
- Take some of the burden from JMP SE’s (i.e. instead of traveling and presenting at a dozen small accounts, do one day in a central location and reach lots of small accounts at once).
- Shine a spotlight on JMP Education and allow users to see first-hand the value that JMP Education brings and possibly help sell training.
- Provide an additional free resource to JMP users that can help them be more engaged, become more skilled in their use of JMP and learn more about the resources available to users.
- Provide opportunities for JMP Sales teams to get in front of customers, interact with them personally and build those relationships.
- Present JMP SE’s as a valued resource to local customers and provide opportunity for them to present.
- Notes from our brainstorming session:
- Scenario 1- Find a new resource to replace JMP trainer
- Would JMP Education/Dan O. be willing to let/certify someone like Peter Bartell to present the hands-on portion of the agenda as a contractor?
- If Peter Bartell is not interested, Chuck and Mary both might know of other people we could contact.
- Scenario 2- Develop a new live customer event offering
- In-person event:
- Have a lightning talk session where customers share a brief presentation. SE’s could help find customers willing to speak. Possible topics- something cool in JMP all new users should know about. Only talk for 10-15 minutes so it’s low commitment of time. It’s very credible having a JMP user present. Note: It could be a challenge for some territories to find willing volunteers to speak. AE’s could also help find someone.
- If user speaker for lightning talk unavailable, backfill with someone from JMP via WebEx.
- Have JMP SE’s present from standard list of topics (like the JMP Day list of topic choices). Don’t ask them to create anything brand new. Possibly have users review list and submit their top choices. That could be what SE presents.
- Possibly partner with the JMP Academic team? (Julian says they’re already stretched pretty thin but maybe if they were already going to be in a particular city?)
- Virtual event:
- Possibly hold hands-on workshops as-is, but allow JMP trainer to present hands-on portion virtually.
- Pros:
- Much of the instructor-led training at SAS is already moving in this direction.
- Would require less of the trainer’s time due to eliminating travel days so it may free up availability of trainers for us.
- Could reach more users and cover more territories. Only limited by time zones and limit set by trainer.
- Planning timeline would shrink a bit. However, we don’t want to completely lose the time for Sales to promote the event, do the one-to-one personal invites to targeted customers, etc.
- JMP Education still has opportunity to showcase training.
- Cons:
- Would lose the face-to-face interaction which is especially valuable to Sales.
- Hybrid event- either do a full day with A.M. for novice users and P.M. for advanced, or do a full day split over two days with a 12:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. session on day 1 with a possible overnight homework assignment and day 2 from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. Possibly add a dinner event for customers and sales team between the two sessions. Depending on the geographic location, one day’s session could be the virtual component and the other could be the in-person session.
- Pros:
- Could purchase the right kind of lavalier microphone (that plugs into a USB drive) for every SE and provide a bit of training on how to make sure audio is working right.
- JMP Education still has opportunity to showcase training.
- Allows for flexibility in how we schedule the events and how users participate.
- Stretching the event over 2 days options gives more opportunities for customers to engage with us.
- SE still gets to present in front of customers and Sales doesn’t lose the face-to-face relationship building.
- Could possibly have all customers bring laptops to event and participate with the portion of the event being held via WebEx, while also being on-site with the JMP sales team.
- Cons:
- A/V and technical issues related to audio and WebEx could be a challenge when on-site.
- SAS has fewer regional offices so finding a location with proper technology and support will be essential for the virtual/WebEx portion.
- Scenario 3- No hands-on training included- just call it a mini-JMP day, where we invite local users from small to medium-sized accounts to meet with us at a central location and we use some of the above suggestions (e.g. customers present short talks, etc.) and standard SE presentations
- Recommendations and Action Items;
- Robin to contact Peter Bartell. If he is open to presenting, reach out to Dan Obermiller to see if JMP Education would agree to use him (or another 3rd party if Peter’s not available.)
- Robin to schedule a follow-up meeting with the team to flesh out what the structure and agenda might look like for a new or modified live event. We could do a couple of test cases in various sales territories this year and then review how they went before formally making this a new event program. Note: Timing for this dependent on whether or not using a 3rd party in place of a trainer turns out to be a go AND how long it will take to get started.
Re: Possible New JMP Customer Care Event Offering- Brainstorming Notes from 28MAR19@Jeff_Perkinson @julian @maria_astals @stankoprowski0 @MaryLoveless @chuck_boiler
Hi All,
I spoke with Dan Obermiller and I have an update.
It sounds like costs (paying the fee for the contractor) will be the primary barrier to proceeding with the plan to hire contract instructors to present at JMP hands-on workshops (when a JMP trainer is unavailable). If the cost can come out of the Customer Care budget, that would eliminate the barrier. Dan says it will be difficult to get Education Management's buy-in for them to pay. It would probably need to be us.
Peter Bartell is interested in helping. The process for certifying someone to teach the workshops is straightforward, especially for known candidates. There would also be a process that we would need to ask HR to start in order to get anyone outside of SAS set up as a contractor.
There are other potential JMP Education contractors, who are already certified and set up with HR as contractors. They are- Heath Rushing, Jim W. (Heath's business partner), Wayne Levin, Laura Ryan, Lori Rothenberg and Gerry Hobbs*. Dan's suggestion is if we go this route, to submit our requests for a trainer to be booked, without specifying a name. Then JMP Education would work to find who is available. If we let Dan know our decision, he can let Billie Parrish know to automatically consider contractors when trying to schedule these hands-on workshops.
Dan let me know that it is certainly possible that we will be down one more JMP trainer once they fill his old job. They have been told that if that happens, they won't be able to hire a replacement trainer. So we may all be relying more heavily on contractors going forward.
*These are US-based. I know there are additional contract instructors used in Europe.
Re: Possible New JMP Customer Care Event Offering- Brainstorming Notes from 28MAR19Hi Robin,
Thanks for sharing.
We will do a similar event in Germany in October together with SAS Edu and we have taken an approach similar to what SAS already does (SAS Practice days):
https://www.sas.com/de_de/events/19/sas-praxistage-ap2019.html#anmeldung
We will follow the agenda from JMP Starts with JMP and JMP Accelerate but all in one day (two parallel sessions), we want to have the breaks at the same time and after the event we will offer a get together.
The registration is not for free (around 250 Euros) because SAS believes that having a small payment provides more value/ decreases the number of no-shows/ helps paying education partners...
SAS will create the registration page (Landing page and GEC) and I´ll create a landing page in jmp.com, we should have a good visibility of the event.
JMP Sales, JMP Marketing and SAS Marketing will help promoting the event.
We are still on the planning, so I cannot tell you how sucesseful the event will be, but SAS had good registration numbers in the past.
I´ll keep you posted!
Maria
