GoDaddy - Sales Meeting of the Year

Company: GoDaddy, Scottsdale, AZ
Company Description: GoDaddy powers the world's largest cloud platform dedicated to small, independent ventures. With over 18 million customers worldwide and more than 77 million domain names under management, GoDaddy is the place people come to name their idea, build a professional website, attract customers and manage their work.
Nomination Category: Sales Awards Achievement Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Sales Meeting of the Year

Nomination Title: GoDaddy Annual Leadership Summit

Which will you submit for your nomination in this category, a video of up to five (5) minutes in length, explaining the nominated achievement since July 1, 2018, OR a written essay of up to 650 words describing the same? (Choose one): An essay/case study of up to 650 words

In August 2019, we hosted our annual Care Leadership Summit at Mountain Shadows Resort in Scottsdale, AZ, for GoDaddy customer care (Care) teams. The event was held over a two-day period and gathered more than 250 Care employees, supervisor-level and above, across our 56 markets to learn, connect, and grow.

Who attended

GoDaddy has grown significantly in recent years, expanding its operations from the US and Canada to more than 56 markets. With rapid growth like this, it’s easy for an organization to become disconnected. The event brought together key players from our global Care organization to ensure everyone left with a baseline understanding of our Care strategy and roadmap, and to pave the way for a more interconnected and interdependent organization.

Agenda

Throughout the event, attendees participated in keynotes from top Care leadership. Messages from the keynotes were captured and transformed into https: //secureservernet-my.sharepoint.com/: f: /g/personal/lphillips_godaddy_com/EpK8uC6y64RKnk1b5tW_E5MB_pFRAo7pLvQj08dtmIBNaA?e=ylizTv">illustrated artwork which is now on display in our Care facilities.

To further amplify GoDaddy’s dedication to small, independent ventures and their success, we invited a GoDaddy customer to present their journey as a small business owner to our leadership team.

Our Leadership Summit was not just for the people, but by the people. Prior to the event, an employee survey was distributed requesting topics for presentations dubbed Learning Labs. After topics were selected, supervisors and subject matter experts rehearsed their presentations for months in advance. During the RSVP process, attendees selected six Learning Labs they wanted to participate in, therefore building their own, unique learning track. Learning Labs consisted of the following topics:

-Building your Brand
-Building your Professional Reputation
-Care Hackathon
-Channel Manager Q&A panel
-Conversational Marketing
-Customer Q&A panel – featuring four GoDaddy customers!
-Deep Dive Into eComm
-Driving Rewards and Recognition
-Emotional Intelligence
-How to Coach and Give Feedback Like A Pro
-How to Mentor Effectively
-Interviewing Skills
-Enhancing Your Influencing Skills to Have More Impact on Others
-Managing Performance
-Poetry of Presentation
-Protecting the Internet
-Reading the Care PnL
-The Power of Storytelling and Humor in your Presentations and Meetings
-Wow 3.0

Attendees also took part in a Product Walk where product managers – our internal experts on each product – presented their product(s) to Care leadership. This ensured a clear understanding of the products our customers use at all levels of the organization and provided our supervisors with clear sales talking points to take back to their employees.

Our support teams, including HR, Employee Resource Groups, and Learning, hosted a happy hour where each team shared information about their departments.

Scattered throughout the event, we made plenty of time for teambuilding and fun. These activities included: morning golf, hiking, dinner and awards show, swim party, craft cocktail making, glow golf, and a GoDaddy Story Slam. This GoDaddy tradition includes a small group of GoDaddy employees sharing personal stories (including serious challenges, funny anecdotes, and inspirational tales) in five minutes. This exercise fostered employees’ connections with colleagues, enabling them to get to know each other outside the office.

Finally, everyone came together with GoDaddy for Good - which uses corporate donations, partnerships, advocacy and volunteerism to enrich the communities in which we work, live and play - to participate in activities for charity. The leadership team divided into three groups and built skateboards for children, pack school supplies for local teachers, and design super hero capes for terminally ill kids.

Over the two days, senior leadership presented short- and long-term strategies. Recordings and other materials from the event are now housed on our intranet for future reference.

Moving forward

A sense of camaraderie has always been a core characteristic of our organization, and we realize that as our organization grows, opportunities for organic connection can shrink. At GoDaddy, we realize the need for effort to keep our bonds strong. As a result, our Summit has become an annual event and our teams will reconvene in Scottsdale again this coming September.