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Your New Sponsors, Fun Tech, Job Market & Many Resources

Learn about your new sponsors, my thoughts on the job market, and more

Author

Mary Green
September 06, 2024

Sponsored By: 

We have new sponsors!! 😁

Having new sponsors is HUGE news for CMAweekly as all 4 of these companies wanted to ensure the community stays alive, active, and accessible for professional growth in the CMA space. Thank you, Evan Huck, Jeff Reekers & Gianna Scorsone, Scott Grimes & Andru Creighton, and Diana Gabroveanu.

  • UserEvidence is our Preferred Customer Evidence platform.

  • Champion is our Preferred Advocacy platform.

  • Orca is our Preferred Reference Management platform.

  • and, Advocacy Maven will manage your advocacy programs.

These sponsors didn’t just pick us, they had to meet our standards for high levels of customer success, reputation, community reviews, ratings, and commitment to helping and educating our industry.

I’ll be mentioning these vendors whenever their related topics are discussed. You’ll see events, emails, new programs, and more soon.

Community Member News

Welcome to the 51 new people joining this past month. Welcome!!

New wins: Michael Sciano and his team wrapped up their customer event IGNITE in Orlando. He did a call on planning events several months ago with CMAweekly - check it out.

Jeni Asaba wrapped up a trip to the Uganda school she and her husband are building in Uganda (she’s such an inspiration). I love to watch what she’s doing. A couple weeks ago she posted how the school has helped to bring more people to the area and build a nicer town.

Rachel Taft has come back from maternity leave with her beautiful baby boy.

CMAweekly Housekeeping:

As you can see, we’ve got sponsors, so I’m getting ready to make a big update. I’m working on a Tech Portal where you can log in to learn about the tech platforms in our space. Right now the focus is Advocacy/References but you’ll see more added soon. (Announcement coming!)

Volunteer to check out the Tech Portal when it’s ready! (DM on LinkedIn)

Poll Of the Week:

Help fellow CMA’s by sharing your experience.

Graphic of the Week from Gartner & B2B SaaS Reviews Joe Kevens

While CMA’s work in post-sales, it’s important to understand how our work affects the sales process. We play a big part when we work on references, customer stories, and reviews.

Merlin for AI - I love these AI platforms that allow you to improve your experience with ChatGPT. I really like the option to save prompts and use popular prompts from others.

Clay for free enriched data: Our new sponsor UserEvidence & Mark Huber shared Clay with me and it’s so easy to use. For someone who only occasionally needs these enhancements, it’s great to have a free account without astronomical upgrade fees.

Tech Fail: Quickbooks - I was asked to join to complete a transaction. Every other payment site I’ve used has been fairly simple; join, add bank info, initiate transfer, it’s done in 2-3 days.

This was not the case with Quickbooks, the website wouldn’t load, I couldn’t use my existing account because I had to add a new business entity from the invite, I had to use the same email address, I couldn’t subscribe to Quickbooks without help from support (so I could add my entity), support never answered, the trial transactions to my account took several days, there were 8+ product options to choose from when logging in, I was asked to add my license, it couldn’t verify my face as a photo, and therefore I couldn’t fully set up my account to get paid.

Yes, I sound like a senior playing on the internet for the first time, but the UX was very disappointing and I’m sad for less tech-savvy customers who would have to jump through similar hoops.

Top Discussions

What part of the customer lifecycle are you working on right now? Poll for possibly creating community-sourced playbooks. by Shannon Howard

Exclusive Thoughts

How is the Customer Marketing & Advocacy job market doing?

I’m asked this every week. Here’s what I’m seeing in our job market:

  • I’ve seen more openings and people starting new roles in the last few months.

  • Salaries are down compared to two years ago and remits seem to pack in a lot more responsibility. On average I think I’m seeing salaries at least 25% less.

  • There are still a lot of applicants 400-1000 per opening. Expect ghosting, lost responses, and some opportunities never to materialize, even from the most well-intended recruiters. They are overwhelmed, too.

  • Disappointment is still common. 4 years ago I could apply for 10 jobs and see at least 8 of them hire. 2 years ago this was approx. 3-5, and today I’d say it’s around 6-7 that hire.

  • We are still seeing layoffs, I don’t believe it has much to do with our inability to prove value, these companies have to make big changes to get profitable. Often this means cutting a lot and rebuilding slowly.

  • Hiring managers can be very specific about what they want and they will get it. This often means they can find someone with 5 years of experience, who is willing to take a low salary, and has the exact experience the HM wants.

  • Unfortunately, hiring less experienced people means there are wide knowledge gaps and the hired individual has to find resources to get answers to their questions.

In summary, hiring is up, job ads seem to be up, and I’ve heard of a lot more contract positions in the last 2 months.

Free Resource

ReviewMining by Senja - I used this to analyze the reviews from our sponsor UserEvidence and got this summarization. You could also use this to learn about your competitors 😉 

Thanks for checking in this week. The following is a list of all of your CMAweekly resources.