How AWS Used Social Learning for B2B Customer Engagement
Engage Customers and Partners
Before Tigerhall
Webinars are Boring
No exciting way to engage with customers virtually
Lack of Continuous Customer Engagement
One-off events and articles
Fragmented and One-way Thought Leadership
Lack of two-way communication with customers around cloud topics
After Tigerhall
51 mins spent on learning every week vs. an industry average of 10-15 mins
100% of participating founders rated the overall program good or excellent
9 interactions per week with AWS sales and customer teams through social Trail cohorts
100% agreed that mentors provided advice that helped them progress towards key objectives
AWS had 12 months of continued dialogue with customers
94% of users felt that their work performance improved
It’s been an amazing partnership with Tigerhall. It’s been great meeting founders, revalidating our assumptions about what’s the right thing to do for female founders, and collecting feedback to create customized programs.
Priya Lakshmi - Head - ASEAN Startup Business, Amazon Web Services (AWS)
AWS started their social learning journey with Tigerhall in June 2021, creating a leadership program for 124 start-up and scale-up founders across APAC including CoLearn, Fave, Funding Societies, Kargo Technologies and Love Bonito. The purpose of this leadership program was to help founders grow their organizations by learning from industry experts about leadership, technology and innovation through specially curated Learning Trails.
In October 2021, the program expanded to include 70 AWS female founders who were offered the opportunity to connect via the social learning platform and meet in-person for group mentorship sessions on growth mindset, leadership and scaling business. The results were outstanding. Two founders launched into new markets, including the Philippines. One founder added L’Oreal as a key brand and 10 start-up founders were connected to VC and CTO leaders.
Given the resounding success of this leadership program, the AWS Global team is now interested in scaling the Tigerhall experience globally. Key stakeholders within AWS include Laura Nguyen - Startup accounts and Priya Lakshmi, Head - Startup business ASEAN.
Key Areas of Social Learning
Start-up & Scale-up Founder Customers
Leadership
Technology & Innovation
Social Learning Approach:
After a careful evaluation of AWS customers' needs and aspirations, we found that 90% of the program participants were facing the same challenges when it came to recruitment, sales, scaling and growth, team engagement, fundraising, mental resilience, coping with the fear of failure, self awareness as a leader and balancing family and work life. This meant that content could be scaled for larger groups of founders through self-paced learning.
The Tigerhall team curated Learning Trails with their start-up founders' needs in mind. These included actionable insights from global industry experts gleaned through podcasts, livestreams, videos and power reads as well as AWS specific content relevant to the program.
Participants found the Thinkfluencer mentorship opportunities particularly engaging, citing the effectiveness of real world results being the key to unlocking growth for their companies. Mentors included:
- Alice Lopin, Former Retails Store Leader, Apple
- Anna Green, Head of ISV Segment APJ, AWS
- Divya Gokulnath, Co-founder of BYJU’s
- Nellie Wartoft, Founder & CEO, Tigerhall
- Priya Lakshmi - Head Startup Business ASEAN, AWS
- Sarita Singh, MD SAE, Stripe
- Yolanda Lee, Founder & CEO, Uncommon