 All right, we'll kick it off this morning. I would like to welcome everyone to today's sales enablement training I'm excited today. We're going to be talking about our customer reference program Some recent updates and a lot of information there As a reminder we are recording this session and we will be posting it live on YouTube So we would love this to be a two-way conversation Where we get lots of questions in chat and we'll do some Q&A at the end, but please Keep in mind that it's a it will be a public training and so we want to keep things that are confidential confidential With that I will Share my screen and I do have some slides that are linked in the In the meeting invite So just to kick us off I wanted to talk about some some customer anecdotes and we've recently been capturing these And in fact even as I'm sharing this slide and even better view of this would be this merge request I just made right here To the handbook so I've just added a bunch of customer anecdotes So think of a customer anecdote is a short customer story You could use these on a customer call recently Vivian and I had a had one of our partners they wanted to know, you know What are some of our case studies, but they didn't want to read the whole case today. They wanted a synopsis This is a this is a great opportunity when you need anything like that. You could use a customer anecdote And so and you can use them in different ways. So one anecdote that we have it's a great little story is One of our customers and I think some of you have heard the story before this is a non-referensible customer So if you share the story keep in mind to keep the customer anonymous Until we of course get permission Which we're seeking but today we don't have that skip them on us. Yeah, the idea is, you know, we had a large Large customer large enterprise in the software space They're a GitLab premium customer and they are we're looking to replace Perforce And they predicted that it would take them three years to hit 6,000 active users But because the developer experience on GitLab is so superior They actually ended up hitting 6,000 users in only eight months So this is a great customer story you can share in a few different instances So for example, if you're talking with someone and they happen to be a Perforce user And you could say, you know, how does Perforce compare to GitLab? Well, you know, what anecdote we know is that we had this one customer and they wanted to bring 6,000 users on the GitLab. They thought it would take them three years to make that migration But they achieved it in only eight months Because they were able to move to GitLab so quickly and GitLab was so superior So that's one way to use the anecdote Another way might be when you're talking to any customer and often especially IT IT folks that a concern for them might be Hey, it's it's very difficult for me to drive tool adoption and I'm hesitant to adopt new tools Because then I have to get everybody in the org to go and adopt it You can say, oh well, you know customers tend to adopt GitLab very very quickly In fact, we have one customer. They want to take three years to get on 6,000 users But they actually ended up hitting it after only eight months. So From that perspective, that's a few anecdotes that I just wanted to share and What I'd really like to do is pass it over to Kim who is running our customer reference program and have her tell you a bit more about it Hi guys, so Customers don't want to hear from us. They want to hear from their others from other people in the world How often when you are looking for a new restaurant to try you're in a new town. Do you look at Yelp? What about when you're looking at a hotel? You look at TripAdvisor or Yelp if you're looking for a new job Gifts a glass door. The power of customer references is Immeasurable it is everybody is so powerful when they're listening to others and GitLab can utilize the same crowd-source feedback With our customer reference program the whole goal being to show them that other customers of the hero And we help enable them next slide So we have a multiple type or we have multiple types of references that we can use some are formal some are informal The formal include the case studies like what we have on our current website Presentations and events at conferences speaking with analysts for reports We need to make sure we're tracking this and that we're presenting the best customers to speak with analysts Speak with other customers on our behalf. We need to make sure we're tracking that as well as videos Now what William just shared where we've got the informal That's a little different. Those are more of the snackable stories that you can reach into I don't need we don't need to necessarily track that but we want to make sure that we're building a repository So that you can use that information as needed Like I mentioned, it's snackable stories like what William just mentioned along with unattributed customer quotes So even if we have customers that aren't Referenceable we can anonymize their story. We can anonymize their quotes and make it so that we can share that story publicly Next slide. Yeah, and Kim. I'll just chime in for a moment I know you and I had this conversation About how there's a lot of tribal knowledge. You're telling me like our sales team has all this tribal knowledge And so I think internally we share these stories all the time Or we might even talk to one of our new customers about one of our other customers But we're the only one that knows that story or the person you share with is only one that knows it So if you share it with Kim You know or we add it to the handbook that way more folks can get those snackable stories Right, and that's that's what we want to make sure we're capturing are those the the stories that everybody knows But it's not written down and so that's part of what I want to make sure that we're accomplishing with the customer reference program Is that we have a point where we can point people to where is that tribal knowledge? Where are those stories so that everybody can use them because it's not just the sales team that needs this information Think about how we can use that with partners and resailers as well So here are some of the examples outside of what you would typically think for a customer reference So here we have the oblong quote that's currently used on one of our product pages It's a simple three sentence quote, but the power that it brings to that page is Amazing it helps boost and it helps give credibility to our page And so we need to make sure that we're capturing this that we it doesn't just stay as tribal knowledge that we've got it Documented that we've got it written down and so that we can share it widely among the company next slide Another reference Here's pulled from a case study as we know We're building up our case store our case study repository. We need the information. We need those stories So as we hear amazing customers that are doing amazing work with get lab that get lab is enabling them We want to make sure we're capturing that and sharing it with more widely with the world Next slide This is actually I saw this in a magazine just the other day And I thought you know what this is great for something that we're trying to do here It's just simply this man saying they said I'd never walk again I said want to bet and it's saying how after an accident He he was paralyzed from the eyeballs down and then he fought back with the help of this health institution We can do the same thing. This is the power of a quote This is the power of not just simply a case study, but something more Next slide Yeah, that is the Empire Lounge. Good job mark. This is a Colorado magazine. It's also important to track references That's why this this program is so vital We want to make sure that we are reaching out to a wide variety getting a lot of stories We don't want to hit and share the same five stories We want to make sure that we are building credibility in the market by instead of sharing the same five stories We're sharing 15 20 25 the list grows It also makes sure that we're not overusing a reference that we're not potentially Making somebody upset by how often they're having to talk with a customer or an analyst We have an example right now with a customer who? We want to make sure we're not overusing that connection And so we want to make sure we're tracking that and that we have it in market of okay They said they would speak to somebody once or twice a quarter. They've already hit their quota for this quarter What's the next step? Who else can we look to where else can we go? for somebody to make this this need that we have And I'll chime in for just a sec is welcome just to affirm that I know today a lot of folks will Use a customer that they know well as a reference for one of their other customers And so you're possibly doing this day Somebody's like oh can I can I get a reference and you just send them to one of your own customers? But what we're asking here is that you loop Kim into that process Even if they're both your customers and you have that relationship and the reason why is A so that she can track it and make sure that that same customer doesn't get pinged a thousand times and then B So that she's aware that that customer may be willing to do this sort of thing And we can we can have that in a centralized place right? We want to make sure that We were open and that we understand where people are who people are talking to what people are talking and It helps with that story Make sure it's being shared properly Yeah, just to reinforce this is a sheesh You always always want to make sure that the sales representative or the sales account manager is Always in the loop because they own the primary relationship exactly though if you need a reference for anything You know you want to make sure both the two people in touch always one is Kim and One is you know the appropriate sales executive or sales representative associated with that account. It's really important Exactly Well, I believe this is where either your JJ or sharing Yeah, so One of the things so we're talking a lot about what we want this to look like long term So another element to this program would be ideally we'd be able to go into Salesforce and Run a report to ask the question who is referenceable Which we're building towards that process So what I'm gonna do is a JJ. Did you make it on to our call this morning? Yep, I'm here. Awesome. Then what I'll do is I'll stop sharing and I will I'll pass it over to you to talk about our new updates in Salesforce For folks that are using Salesforce Sure Okay, so in Salesforce There's a couple different fields that are now new both on the account object and the opportunity object So on the opportunity object Way too many controls So on the opportunity objects there is now a pick list that is yes, no or unknown Starting on Monday that field is actually going to be required if you're going to be moving somebody from stage five to stage six So it I mean it will stop you it is you'll get an error message saying You haven't answered this question. The field is right here on the right side. It just says yes Yes, no or unknown when you check this box You also need to go to the account object and then update the fields that are both on the slide and then I can jump into an account here And so the referenceable customer stuff is right here about to scroll down So again when you're editing an account record You're going to answer the same question the yes, no or unknown right now. They're not hooked together the two questions Because we couldn't have that field dependency without one being required And so internet super slow Maybe it'll see So anyway, the the fields that you're going to be seeing is Like a customer reference note section like that's where you can put your customer anecdote Or if there is something that you want to remember to talk to came about you can put those in the customer note section Scrolled right by it. Yeah, so here's the same question. Yes, no or unknown. So just answer it the same way Customer reference notes. These are customer story like notes that you want to take to remember to talk to Kim about Future plans like if you know what their future plans are Kim or William will cover these specifically, but these are like special interest groups or an advisory board So membership into those if there are different Criteria for those but then over here on the right side is the ones that you're actually wanting to do logo means that We can use their logo on their website or the deck if they give us like we can ask them for a quote Do a case study be an event webcast speaker Those are sort of self-explanatory and then a sales and analysts reference and then also if they're willing to do a testimonial for us Like the testimonial could be like a blog post or it could be a video testimonial or just a written testimonial So these are just checkboxes You can just go through and check them and then you save the record the account record and so then these fields Will actually be mapped into a report. There is an existing customer reference report that uses this section It's going to be updated to include these fields And so then we can have one central location for all this information to live And so yeah, like I said the process is on the off you check the box Like you pick do the pick list and then you make sure that you update the account as well And then Kim if you need help she'll be your resource And that is about it and it is documented in the handbook We have updated it. It's in the business opportunity section under stage five It'll explain the same thing that's written here on the slide and then I guess I will hand it back to William yeah, I can share again and We have a few more slides gave the demo So what's coming up next? Kim can you kind of share with us? What what we have going forward sure so this week We are starting the process of nominations for our customer advisory board and if you go to the next slide This is in the handbook, but it describes what the customer advisory board is it's More of our we're looking for our enterprise level customers at this point for the cab We are trying to meet virtually every six to eight weeks We're anticipating our first virtual meeting to be in August mid August Hopefully before the summit and we're also hoping to have an in-person meeting October wait more details on that The customer advisory board is the opportunity for customers to speak with each other To share their insights to share what they're learning and then we can learn from them They can talk with each other. We're there. It's it's an amazing opportunity for them to to share And to hear from us We also we intend to livestream the meetings and so we'll make sure that everything is anonymized in the meeting We also have the nomination letter can be found here In this issue down below Next slide and then I see that there are a couple of questions in the chat Yeah, it looks like we're to questions one thing that I thought would be good to clarify it. I know JJ and Kim and I had a lot of discussion around that around this Erica was in this discussion as well So the sales force report will be a formal record of When we have permission for something so the customers given us permission for a quote or given us permission for a case study That doesn't necessarily mean we have a case study That this is a report that like Kim or product marketing would run to say Out of all of our customers who's willing to do a case study so then we can look and say okay We need a case study for IT Or we need a case study for This specific vertical this is a way for us to run the report so that we can figure out who's willing to do that Of course, there will be another report that everybody will use that will be What's the list of all the logos I can use where's that or what's the list of all the case studies? So that's in the works and coming down the pipe One of them is about get lab Com slash customers So this is the formal repository of all of our case studies and as we ship new case studies This gets updated live. So I saw that Elsha asked this question, but I wanted to you know, bring it to the whole group into YouTube that Yes, as we case studies Are our formal and polished, but of course they take a lot of time to To get through but we do have several case studies in the hopper And I don't know if Kim or Erica is on and wants to talk about maybe some of the well I guess we can't talk about the ones publicly that are not yet formally approved but Rest assured, we do have more case studies coming down the pipe and as soon as they're approved They will be published here on our customers page and in addition to the the product marketing handbook where There's information about everything we're chatting about today, but also the You know the anecdotes So those are some places you can go today to get resources today and then there is more coming down the pipe With our innovation came out if you want to talk a little bit just about our innovation It is a software tool that will help plug into our sales force to help make everything easier a more Referenceable library for all of this information So once we have that in points. Yeah, yeah once we have that plug-in then we'll be able to pull a sales force report such as List for me all of the customer quotes we have on file Related to CICD like I need a I need a customer quote about CICD We that's that's coming down the road. Let's see. There's a there's a lot of questions I don't know if Kim or JJ you want to jump in and What is a sample agenda look like for the virtual meetings for the cab I will link that in the agenda here, but essentially it's Have a customer to share their story. We might have a thought leader join Just so that they can start the conversation be speaking with each other. I believe a she-she also wants to add Yeah, so typically when we have a virtual meeting for the customer advisory board We will publish the agenda well in advance because it's not possible for that person You know, let's say they're from a bank an executive from a bank Who's on our cab to attend every single meeting right if we do that for example every month So we'll have a process in place where they know the agenda They kind of know what discussion points are coming and be able to send in the appropriate person or bring in an appropriate person from their team If they're very specific things that they want to talk about this agenda will be defined jointly by GitLab and the customer advisory board attendees So, you know part of the ongoing Discussion will be what topics are more more interesting to you what what problems are you trying to solve and You know, it's a peer-to-peer interaction between themselves as well So these agenda items will vary but an example could be you know, how do I bring my? Development and security teams together. I'm really struggling right or I'm having a real cultural problem with bringing the dev and ops teams together Yes, they all agree in theory, but they're practical Challenges because the teams are distributed and so we might have another cab member kind of speak to how they're doing this today and share those best practices with the rest of the Attendees and and then I have them then lead the discussion on what's the best practice in their area? And and so these sessions tend to build on themselves once the topics are identified by the cab members themselves There's a agenda will vary we have some placeholders, but we'll see you know, how it evolves. Hopefully that answers the question I Seed another question in here from from David just about will there be a way to quickly search For what are all the customer quotes say for banking stories? and just to reiterate historically our tracking of this has been tribal knowledge and Sharing one-to-one and not captured in one place. So the start to get to that repository of being able to search is Noting all of his data in Salesforce that as as a JJ showed so if everybody Starts doing that that that will allow us to get to this to get to this place. So that's the next step in the journey At one to add on that if people are putting like the customer knowledge in their referenceable notes section The report that is in Salesforce can have an industry Column on it and so then you can search that way but right now since there's nothing in the customer notes section It's not going to be helpful. So yeah, we start putting everything in Salesforce. You could have that information Yeah, and then as we implement our innovation, etc We'll keep progressing down that path That's that's the vision David It looks like We also have a question here from John. Do we want customer nominations for the cab in that issue? And the answer is yes, please do go to that issue for nominations Looks like are there any prerequisites For the nomination Paul'd like to know for example, do they need to be a senior leader on the account or can it be a senior developer? I don't know if Kim or a she she want to talk about prerequisites for for being nominated for the cab Yeah, I really might have answered here I think we need the nominations the way this process will work is we're expecting not more nominations Then we will have seats on there and we'll have a selected select selection criteria The idea here is we didn't talk about it in this meeting But we will have a customer advisory board, which is the cab we're talking about as well as a special in a number of special interest groups It's six. So the idea of the special interest groups is to actually have those Along the lines of the different areas, which our solution provides help to our customers. So it could be around, you know portfolio Planning and PPM right portfolio and product planning It could be a long, you know security. It could be a long testing. So we're going to have specific areas that kind of map to the different You know problems we solve for our customers using our solution the cab is supposed to be More horizontal if I might use that word and the idea there being you know If you're driving an initiative in inside of your company and you're looking to solve problems across How can we kind of help you get connected to your peers? You know, what is the decision-driving criteria? How are you, you know kind of coping with that? What are the best practices? How can you share that with your peers? How can we help you and and part of that? You know the six and the cab the intention is for us to partner and understand, you know How can we help them better by designing our product to solve their problems? So it's a two-way interaction right between the peers But also between GitLab and the members of the six of the cabs So the decision criteria, you know short answer to who will Be what who will want to be in the cabs versus who will want to be in the six? We'll get decided on, you know the persona itself. So that's a decision that you know will help drive within the customer reference Hey, I'm here in your description of this cab as being much more around Collaboration and best practices and process rather than having a serious product focus And I think that's a missed opportunity Can you help help me understand why you want to focus on things other than product in the cab? So the product will definitely be a focus in the cab in the six I think when it gets down to specific elements and you know Areas six will drive more of the capabilities of the product. What's working. What's not working, you know What would they like to see or how are they using our product innovatively? So that's why we are designing the special interest groups along the product areas in the cab We'll also be discussing the product really well But if you really look at you know all the DevOps transformations out there in large in large enterprises Just taking it from the perspective of using a tool on how to do a DevOps transformation It's usually not how you know enterprises are looking to solve their problems It's a combination of best practices the tools that they're using the processes that they're using So this cab will automatically You know civil towards that and pivot towards a combination of you know, what I call people process and tools tools definitely will be an integral part of these discussions in the cab and You know, we will discuss how get lab is helping. What is missing in get lab? How do we you know make the product better? But it will not be a hundred percent focus of the cab as you can understand, right? Because these leaders are struggling not just across two sets But how to combine the processes with the tools with the teams that are often diverse and you know very siloed So don't get me wrong. I mean, there will be a lot of tool discussion There'll be a lot of you know, how do we make get lab better for them or what's missing and it'll help drive us our direction But it's not a tool capabilities focus group It needs to hold value for the for the customers who join us to write Yeah, I think just to summarize I think we will be capturing like a traditional cab product feedback But we'll do be doing much more than that to drive value for the customers With about we've got one more question Which is will we be inviting cab members to our get lab summits? And so the the and of course I'm reading the questions I know they already have answers in the chat, but I want to get them on the YouTube video for everybody and the short answer here is that We want to make the summits today the summit experience is very much get lab centric And then when we bring customers into that or especially other folks like core contributors Etc. They can feel like outsiders So we the vision is that eventually yes We do have when we do our summit the ability to bring in customers the ability to bring in open-source contributors that that becomes a broader experience and we when we do that We want to make sure that that it's inclusive and that those people feel welcomed So that is part of the vision for the very next summit I think there may be a Few customers we bring in but that process that hasn't been formalized yet So with that want to thank everyone for joining the call today And if you have more questions feel free to drop into the product marketing slack channel or to log an issue Thanks a lot everyone