Two stages, five capitals and awards on LinkedIn

The Customer Success Kick-off is a multi-day internal event for sales and marketing: SAP presents last year's results and next year's strategy, shares best practice and gives awards to its most successful people and teams. A month or two later comes the Partner Kick-off for business partners, who generate a substantial share of revenue by selling SAP software.

Because the content is similar, we carry the concept and content of the internal event over to the external one. The client gets two events with one look, without paying twice for the same work.

For the Customer Success Kick-off in Zagreb, attended by around 450 employees, we built the overarching concept on Einstein's theory of relativity. A month before the event, attendees received an invitation to a three-day mission: on expeditions to different places in space and time they gathered confidential business intelligence to help them master the challenges ahead.

We carried the concept through every format. Each part of the programme opened with animated titles that moved the story forward and introduced what was coming. Then came print and graphics, the host's linking script and the scripts for every video story, including the nominee and winner announcements at the awards ceremony.

At the 2023 Partner Kick-off in Bratislava we carried over the internal event's concept, which celebrated the cultural range of the market unit. That way the newly joined Asian countries could see themselves in the room too.

Here, too, we created the opening titles for each part, the animations for the awards to the top partners and the copy for the app, and led the technical team on site. After the event we produced a reportage video story that the client's team and attendees shared on LinkedIn.

At both events we take care of the whole delivery, from the idea and pre-event activities to running the hall. Transport, accommodation and food we leave to others.

Every year SAP honours the customers who implemented its solutions the fastest, most efficiently or most inventively. We first ran the awards during the COVID-19 pandemic, when an in-person ceremony was impossible. At the same time, the client wanted to move away from classic ceremonies with certificates that mean little to the winners.

We asked ourselves two questions: how to give the winners a first-class experience without a virtual event, and what award would actually be useful to them. The answer was two video series on LinkedIn. The first reveals the nominees in every category, the second tells the story of the winning project in each category. Each edition gets its own creative look, based on that year's theme.

A collaboration that began with video stories from annual reports is now end-to-end event delivery for one of the largest technology companies in the world: four consecutive Customer Success Kick-offs, events in five capitals and a new idea every year.

The Quality Awards reached far beyond the room. The posts were shared by the client, its partners and customers, even by nominees who did not win. The client kept the format after the pandemic and uses the video stories about the winning projects for internal best-practice sharing and for presenting its solutions.