How purple cork helps Alloy connect with customers

Last week, we sat down with Chi-Chi Liang, the Chief Marketing Officer at Alloy to learn more about her formula for event success. We talked about how the pandemic kept marketers on their toes and fundamentally changed how prospects engaged with vendors. And, we learned an awesome secret for driving better attendee engagement.

Here are the highlights of the conversation:

You are mostly using purple cork events to engage your customers. How did that come about?

“I learned about purple cork at a prospecting event where I was a guest, so my original intent was to develop a series of wine tasting events to drive our prospects deeper into the funnel. I wanted to bring prospects and customers together for fun events where they could ask questions of us and their peers and network. But, what I found was that the folks that knew us best - - our customers - - were much easier to drive to the events and they were so thankful to have the opportunity to participate. Following the events I would receive such great feedback about the experience. They loved having the opportunity to engage with each other and our team. Since my team also has a strategic objective around investing in our customers, we decided to re-focus these events to drive meaningful engagement with them.” 

You always ask a customer to co-host the event with you. How does that help?

“My customer co-hosts are so important to the success of these events. I work with them before the event to ensure they are prepared with questions to ask attendees. Customers prefer to learn and engage with their peers versus their vendors. While they love that we are on the call and available for questions, they’re really there to learn from each other. Having a customer co-host changes the dynamic, drives engagement and makes it feel like a community event versus a vendor event.”

How do you leverage the content that comes out of the discussion during the event?

”I’ve been very successful getting quotes from the events approved for marketing purposes. Since the quotes come up organically in conversation, it’s easy for me to jot them down and email the customers afterwards with the snippet and ask if I can use it publicly. Since the work has already been done in formulating the quote, it’s much easier to get it approved.”

Do you have a special approach to how you structure your purple cork events?

“No, I tend to follow the tested and proven approach of two wine tastings and two conversation blocks in a 60 minute event. I like to keep the group together, versus breaking out into smaller groups. I find people tend to loosen up in the second conversation block so I usually leave the Zoom on for an extra 15 minutes when the hour is up so people can continue the conversation if they would like.”

Who joins the events from Alloy?

“Alloy attendees can be sales, CS or marketing. I am a huge wine lover (and extrovert) so I love to attend. Since our sales team is responsible for upsells and cross-sells, they maintain great relationships with their customers after the original deal is sold. We like to have the folks with the best customer relationships join the events.”

Which wines have you enjoyed as part of your partnership with purple cork?

”Our first event was an Aperture tasting, which was awesome. I have been a longtime follower of Jesse Katz so it was a fun event for me. I also really enjoyed our Blue Rock tasting.”

About Chi-Chi Liang:

Chi-Chi is currently the CMO at Alloy. Prior to Alloy, Chi-Chi was the VP of Marketing at Periscope Data during the period it was acquired by Sisense. She was previously VP of Marketing at Grovo during a phase of rebuilding and repositioning Grovo as the leader in modern workplace learning, resulting in the company’s acquisition by Cornerstone OnDemand. 

Earlier, Chi-Chi was VP Product Marketing at Lookout and was responsible for introducing their flagship Mobile Endpoint Security solution to the enterprise market. She has also held senior roles in marketing, strategy & business operations roles at Symantec after it acquired Vontu, where she led practice development and operations functions. She started her career as an Accenture consultant, primarily advising client companies on operational and process improvements.

About Alloy:

At Alloy, we work with consumer goods companies that make the products we eat, wear, and use every day, as well as the ones we occasionally splurge on. We’re tackling a real and complex problem for them—managing supply and demand in the face of constantly changing customer behavior, highly complex supply chain networks, 40-year-old data standards and labor-intensive manual processes.

Our team is passionate about aligning supply and increasingly unpredictable demand by freeing manufacturers from functional silos, backwards-looking reporting and rigid supply chain processes, so we've built the first Connected Planning & Execution platform purpose-built for consumer goods brands. Alloy is connecting brands' sell-through data from retail and ecommerce with their internal inventory and supply chain data, so they can plan better and execute those plans faster.