How to Prove ROI with a Virtual Event | With Expert Jim Sharpe

In terms of, you know, because a lot of our listeners are SaaS founders or marketers, right? They're looking to maybe, or they're considering events, that was part of their marketing budget, going to events, maybe hosting an event. Would you say hosting a virtual or hybrid event is for every business? Because I know you work with a lot of enterprise clients, or how can you say a SaaS company start hosting a virtual event? Why should they consider organizing one?

Yes, so I do think it depends on what your goals are. I think we all agree that nothing beats the value of a face-to-face event, so we would say that the greatest way to get your constituents together is that way. But increasingly, we're gonna be leveraging virtual. I do think there are a number of reasons why your listeners would wanna consider getting an event or events on the calendar. I think the benefit of virtual is that you can reach a large part of your audience at once. You can do so on a budget that you couldn't before. And now with the capabilities that we've been describing, you can make it a far more enriching experience. So I think that the ability to monetize the event is important depending on what the goals of the organization are. We've talked about that. I think the way to make these events successful if you're an organization is first you need to have a platform that can handle what you're looking to do. So you need to have an understanding of how many people, how many event days, how many speakers, the type of interactivity you're going to have, and the features you need. So that's the first goal. The second is making sure you put together an agenda that makes sense for whatever your goals are. So you have to have the right interactivity of speakers, keynotes, gamification. You know, at our global kickoff, Akeel, a month ago, we had celebrity cameos. So every once in a while we would break in with a celebrity that was talking to us for a couple of minutes, and that was a great way to keep people engaged. Um, you have contests, you have polls, so you just need to have an interactive type of, um, way of connecting all of your attendees. And then, you know, the other part is the networking side too, which we described, is that when your attendees come to the show, they want to meet other people, and you need to make sure that you have networking tools that will benefit them overall. So we do recommend it, of course. We think that based on the fact that 1 out of every 5 marketing dollars goes toward events, which means it's a big business. It's, you know, it's a— some say it's a trillion-dollar market overall if you include all the different ways people are getting together, but We think it makes a lot of sense to engage in virtual and live event formats and just have it be a part of your marketing stack, especially given how noisy and crowded a lot of these marketing channels are these days. I mean, online marketing, pay-per-click, and all of that. For you to really engage leads that you want to engage with, we feel like the event is a great way to capture that.

Okay. So if I'm thinking of it from a marketer's perspective or founder, I've got a budget for leading events. And obviously at the end of the day, I'm gonna invest all this money into it. I have to think about ROI, just like you as a CEO, you think about all your investments. What, you know, tickets are being one way of kind of monetizing events, and you mentioned some other ways. Can you talk about what are some other ways to monetize or prove that ROI, or what are some clever ways that you've seen ROI has been proven at these virtual events so far?

Yes, so there's what's been done, there's sort of what's underway, and then there's a bit of a futuristic view of that as well. So you mentioned tickets, and obviously registrations is the old way to make money. But envision a world now where you could have 5,000 people at your live event and 500,000 people at your virtual event. That creates whole new opportunities for revenue from attendees. So that's the first side is just global reach. And we've seen benefits of getting more attendees to an event because it's virtual. So there's that. The second way to monetize is through sponsorships. So that there are a few ways to do that. One is by setting up virtual booths. So You can have sponsors that are paying real money in a virtual format at the show, and attendees are finding ways to video chat and engage with content from that virtual sponsor the way that they would at a live trade show or event. That's one way. The other is just pure sponsorship opportunities to monetize is that you're now providing access to banners, sponsored activities, this poll is sponsored by so-and-so, surveys that are running throughout the show. These are all things you can monetize for, uh, the large part of the market that is sponsorship revenue. Um, and then with that also, I think if you're engaging an all-in-one platform like an Eventree, you have access to very rich data that you can leverage in the future. So you know who went to that event, You know what they paid attention to, you know how much time they spent in that particular session. That data is stuff that you can leverage as a marketer in the future toward generating greater outcomes for your attendees. So we think that that's another, that's another big area of it. Now, the last frontier is content libraries, and this is where we're starting to look to the future a bit. You know, we envision a world of Netflix-type engagement with the content of events. So what you have today is kind of static content libraries, which is a virtual event allows you to access the content of that event during the event. You go back to your hotel room, for example, you can log into an event that took place that day. Great. What we're also seeing now, and something that we have in place, is we have a sort of instant and rich content library that is accessible for years after the event takes place. So now you have all this content at the touch of a button, What we're also envisioning in the future is that we start to aggregate all that content, turn it into a marketplace, or at least an area where people can consume that content, and then that may bring all sorts of new monetization capabilities in the future if you think about just the value of all these video platforms. The great thing about events is that the attendees are focusing generally on a very specific set of topics that therefore will have a very specific and interested set of users in the future that would like to consume it. So we're thinking about how we create that last area of the monetization, which is making the most of the content going forward.

Super cool. I kind of want to shift gears and talking about kind of how you approach the business model and your framework of how you make product development decisions, because I think there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of risk and a lot of uncertainty as we've seen in the last year. But you got your solution, you know, work with Many different kind of industries, different types of events, different size and stages of businesses, and different event job kind of roles, what I've seen. What's kind of your framework and how you make those decisions and roadmap with so many of these variables? Because I know you mentioned you had those front row seats with some of the big guys, and, you know, they're leading those conversations. Are you just focusing on the 80/20 of those few guys helping you make those decisions, or do you have some other way of looking at that and approaching it? This is more for CEOs and— and helping them as well?

Yeah, so it's one of the greatest challenges and then also most exciting opportunities is the product roadmap, especially in a fast and rapidly changing industry like we're in. The first thing we always do is we listen to the market. So this morning we had our Client Innovation Council, which is a quarterly event that we host with a number of our customers where we share advanced views into updates on our business and then get their feedback, right? So that is an important way develop your product roadmap is to talk to your customers, and we're lucky to have 1,400 of the largest enterprises in the world. In fact, we signed our largest enterprise deal of all time just yesterday, which was fantastic. There's that listening to the customer, and then you have to set up the right framework. This is something that I overhauled when I got here is that we built a committee structure that allowed us to stay formal, but also stay agile, which meant that We drive content strategy with client influence, but the strategy itself is top-down, but the accountability for executing that is bottoms-up. What that means is that we have a 3-layered committee structure that is underway that is always evaluating our product roadmap and pivoting and adjusting the swim lanes based on what we think needs priority. I'll tell you, it's changing every week right now because of all the innovation in our space, and I can talk about that in a minute. But the, the third layer of that committee structure, everybody is welcome to attend that, which means that you have somebody from sales or customer success listening in on the product roadmap and can express some concerns or support of what's going on. And that has really helped us in this world of innovation in virtual where, for example, our team is working 7 days a week right now to innovate around our next generation of features. You need to be agile. And it's something very new for us. So I think now we have sort of week-to-week agility on our product roadmap. And as we build things, we circle back and make sure it's the right stuff. And then you obviously have to align the rest of your team, your sales materials, your training, all this other stuff around the product roadmap as it's developing. So it needs to be a very immersive process for the entire company, but you need to maintain that formality to make sure that you're sticking to it and that you're communicating well across the company. And I think that if there's one thing we've done well in our ability to roll out not one but two virtual technologies and also innovate our on-site safety technology, it's been the fact that we have a very tight product development effort underway now.

I love that idea of kind of building a committee to kind of, you know, run those ideas and have us as kind of as mentors but also as a sound like a board, right? Can you speak a little bit more? How big is the size of this committee that you work with and How did you decide who would be the right fit there to be part of this?

You have 3 layers of committee. The first one at the top is the strategic direction. They take and recommend direction from the executive committee, which then allows them to chart out a hypothetical roadmap for the quarter. That group of people is probably a half dozen that are setting that direction. Strategy. Then from there, you get into the next group, which is actually dividing up the responsibilities among various teams. So say we have X number of developers, so we can handle 6 different development streams at one time. They then allocate the resources across those development teams, and then report that back to the executive team on the timing. The third area, which is more than a dozen attendees, and that's the one that tends to include more representatives from around The company, that one is the actual tactical execution. So where are we this week? Did we get it done? How is this feature working out? And that is one where a lot of the actual ingenuity occurs because we learn on the fly what the challenges are or where we can innovate. And so those committees are chatting with each other. The invitations are pretty much open access. The minutes of those meetings are posted publicly so that you can log in and see what was discussed at those meetings. Because I think that one challenge that many of your listeners probably experience is that there's always this finger-pointing between the go-to-market organization and the product or technology organization, where, you know, one side says, you know, we created something, but you didn't sell it. The other side says, you didn't listen to us when we told you what we needed to sell. So you have to have that interactivity, and that's one gap that I've really worked hard to bridge. And I'll tell you that a lot of our discussions, they're real. I mean, people are very adamant about what we need, especially in this day and age of change, and it's led to a tremendous amount of Positive development, uh, at rapid speed.