The B2B Event Playbook: Building Revenue-Driving Events in 2025

If you have a leader who's skeptical about your events and your strategy, get them out in the field, send them to events, let them interact with your attendees and see, you know, how much they're enjoying it, how much value they're getting in the field. Time with you. I've seen a lot of success recently in doing that.

I love that. I think it's so important for them to feel it like to actually experience it in order to see that. I would add too to that that I think understanding how your execs process information is super important. So I've had executives I work with, like One of my CEOs was a visual guy. So I've had to put mood boards together and then the CR obviously is analytical and I had to put data points together. But I think as you as marketing leaders are all trying to secure budget and buy in because it does take all hands on deck for events, as most of us know. But I would just say that understanding how they process information in addition to having some experience, it is super important.

All right, we're back. Hey, we're back. It's been a while. Has it been a while? Has it been a month, a week? I don't even know. I'm excited. These are these live. We do these live sessions once a month here at Exit 5, if you're joining us. And we like to bring in some subject matter experts and talk about a specific play and a strategy or an area that you need to go focus on this year. And I'm excited to do this one because I think we found a really good lane for this. We've been doing a bunch of different variations of them, but for this one, with our partners at zttle, they help us do these events, they run the software. We're gonna do an awesome chat about event marketing today and I think we have a cool playbook. Danielle and I have been talking a lot about this. I know you all come every, every month for these, but we wanna do more specific sessions about, you know, hey, here's a product marketing session, here's an email marketing session. And so today the focus is events. We get an awesome crew here. I got Stephanie and Christina here with me and events are back, baby. That's, that's, that's all I can say. This is like the most. I think there's like over 1200 people that registered for this, which is so funny because events are so back. As we've been saying here at Exit 5, we did our first event drive this year in September and we didn't know how it was going to go for those of you who don't know the story. And literally that first night, Dan texted me at 11 o' clock at night. He said, did we just become an events business? And we did. And so it's awesome. We're doing 30 events this year, 26 virtual events, four in person events. And they're a huge part of our strategy. And I'm excited to get to hang out with Stephanie and Christina and hear about all you. I think the goal of this session is to do a deep dive on events, event marketing, what does, what this looks like for B2B brands today. And we're going to have a great discussion. So quick housekeeping for me saying hello. Everybody knows the drill. They're in chat right now. People from all over the world. Jamie's in Atlanta, Henry Johnson's in the mix. Good to see you, Henry, My old friend who actually convinced me to start this whole damn thing. Funny story, we got people from New York, Salem, Mass. Oh, that's Danielle London, dc, Canada. We got a global audience here. So we're going to talk for. We got 40 minutes. 40, 50 minutes. We're going to take all your questions live. We got a bunch of discussion we're going to get into. The chat is the best part of this because you. There's a million people in here. Holy cow, Danielle. It's got to be a new record. The chat is great because it's all marketing, our marketing peers helping out each other. So we're going to have a great discussion and I guess we can bring up our guests right now. So let's bring in Stephanie and Christina. What's up, y'?

All?

How you doing?

Hi.

Happy.

Do you see the turnout for this session or what? Holy smokes.

Awesome.

It's amazing. Hell yeah. So super excited. I'm gonna, I'm gonna formally. We'll, we'll, we'll bring you both on in a second, but we're gonna, we record this for everyone listening. Right. This will be a future episode of our podcast. You'll hear this in the future. But we're also going to set out the recording after this. But to make it easy for us and producer Danielle behind the scenes, put your questions in the Q and A, obviously riff on things in chat. We'll keep building on in there, but if you have specific questions you want us to stop and answer and we will put them in the Q and A. I got a bunch of questions that we have prepped that we're going to use to guide this discussion. But if you put them in the Q and A, we can sort by upvotes and get to the most popular questions. So. All right, before we get into our discussion, quick background. Stephanie, why don't you kick us off then over to Christina. Who, who are you? What do you do? What's your relationship with events in this context?

Sure, yeah. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. So I'm Steph. You can call me Steph. I've been in the event space for about 15 years now. It sounds so old saying that. I can't believe it. All sorts of, all sorts of events, mostly in B2B. My primary background was at Qualtrics. I was there like, gosh, I mean, no, seven, eight years. We did their event programs, 300 plus events while I was there. And then we pivoted. Had had a, had a kid, as a lot of us have, and then went from all over the world events to just our user conference locally here in Salt Lake City, Utah. And so I did that event about five times. Yeah.

Hey, did you work out it. Did you work out of the Qualtrics office in.

Oh yeah.

Okay. I went, I went there one time. I did, I went there, I went there in maybe 2016. And I remember seeing Ryan, CEO, like riding around the office on one of those like one wheel skateboards. And you walk in the office that was like legit. The coolest office I've ever been to because you're, you're in the mountains, like the view is insane. And then like you walk in, I have a video of like, you know, shooting a three pointer in like the lobby. There's a basketball court. So like, you know, startups, the, the tech, the tech world, we get a lot of flack for like our like, you know, ping pong tables. But that office truly lived up to like the.

Well, good. I'm glad you had a good experience. I love Utah. We do all events here. So I was fortunate to do their user conference. We started around 500 and grew that program to 15,000. So I was lucky to just kind of jump on it at a good time and just got exposed to things probably. Frankly I had no business being a part of, but learned as I went and was able to get a lot of experience. Then after Covid went on my own, a lot of my colleagues started going to other companies and B2B and, and I just started kind of going on as 1099 for some of them and doing their conferences, doing some of their C level events and Kind of been all over the place, so it's been great. I love events, I love connection, bringing people together, it's like my passion, especially in real life, in this world, social media. So really happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

All right, cool. Good energy. Christina, what about you? What's your background?

Hi, Dave.

I'm Christina De Brito. I'm the director of strategic events and partner marketing at Iterable. If you're not familiar with Iterable, Iterable is an AI powered customer communication platform. So brands like Priceline, Redfin, they use Iterable to send hyper personalized messages to their customers. So at Iterable, I manage our user conference, our roadshow series. I do webinars, I do smaller VIP dinners, kind of wear a jack of all trades. And my history, my work history is mostly in B2B marketing, focused primarily on events in the tech space and then also I spent a number of years on Wall Street.

Cool. Okay. All right. Shout out Wall Street. What does Iterable do?

What does Iterable do?

Yeah, yeah, I know. Just give the context for the company so people can have that lens.

Yeah, absolutely. So Interval, like I mentioned, is a customer communication platform. So emails that you receive from like some of your favorite brands, they are powered by intervals, same with some SMS messages. And it's, it's a really incredible tool and actually newly integrates with subtle as well. So you can be sending some really targeted communications to your customers based on, you know, real time activities on site, at events.

All right, cool, got you. I got it. All right, so check out the chat. By the way, I asked people why they're here and there's like Dave GPT, which is my robot brain AI. I've analyzed the data and it seems that most people are here because events are important and I think people are realizing they're back and they want to come get smarter about events as a strategy and as a part of the marketing playbook. So let's dive in and let's see if we can give some helpful knowledge. And we're going to riff on this based on what you say in chat and answer your questions too. But maybe let's kick it off here. What's, what's the biggest mistake that you see with marketers today planning events? And let's try to be with all of our answers. Let's be like hyper relevant and specific to like your top. The people are here who, they're here because they want help. Now they're doing an event in June and they want to get smarter. They're thinking about it. So let's be as tactical and specific as we can today. But what's the biggest mistake that you see B2B marketers making with events right now?

Do you want to go first?

Yes. Steph, kick us off.

Yeah, yeah, I can. I can kick us off. And yes, you should hire a DJ for your event if you are asking in the chat.

All right, we'll get there, we'll get there, we'll get there.

I'm going to tell you a couple things. I think number one thing that comes to mind is kind of moving too quickly or packing your program too full. I think I made a mistake early on, especially in early stage startup. Like we just went to everything and every, like everywhere. Right. And a lot of the times we were not. I think sometimes you can get so focused on just executing the event that you're not thinking end to end the way that you should. Right. So really pumping the brakes, really being strategic about what you're trying to do and accomplish. But then also the other end of it, and we'll get into this more in our discussion, is really making sure that you see that all the way through the event's not over after the event's over. The event starts after the event's over in terms of follow up and the things that you want.

Cool. All right. I have some things I want to build on too, but I want to get Christina in and then we can, we can kind of discuss as a group or.

I think for me it's not fully tapping into their strategic partners. I think there's. When you look at like partner joint field events, there's a lot of opportunity there. And I think some organizations, they get a little intimidated by that kind of joint marketing motion because, you know, there's a lot of pre work that comes that's involved with partner events.

Right.

So really taking a look at like who are your shared customers, your shared prospects, making a plan for them on site, you know, meeting with them and then also what does the follow up look like? So really, you know, it's twofold. It's really accessing their target, you know, their customers that are potentially your target prospect, also potentially splitting the bill with them and then leveraging their customer aware or their brand awareness as well as your own brand awareness. So I think there's a lot of opportunity around partner events. I'm not seeing enough of that in B2B marketing right now.

Oh, okay. So people could be. So you're, you're people could be Doing more partner events. Like, like, like co marketing, right? Like, we used to. We do webinars together, but we could do events together. Okay, let's. Let's like zoom way out and let's think about why. What are the first principles questions? I guess, like, if I'm a marketer, I'm here most likely because I'm not like a. I might not be an event marketer, but I'm a marketing leader. I'm someone who's responsible for a team of marketing. I want to help us grow revenue. Typically, we look to things in marketing because we want to grow, right? If we're, if we're not growing, then, hey, we don't need to do more stuff. We don't have a goal. So if we back it all the way out, like, what would be the reason that you'd want to put events in your marketing strategy? And should you only be doing events where the direct events are expensive? Should the direct measurement be like, can we get three deals from this? How do you all bet? Like, what's the first principles thinking for, like, why. Why do events as a B2B marketer?

You want to start, Christina? I'll follow.

You can go first. I'll follow up.

Yeah, I mean, I think why do events? Because they're continuing to prove to be the. One of the top channels performing for marketing. I think in this age of AI and digital everything, I think trust is more important than ever. It's more impactful and it's moving the needle. So when you think about your strategy, I mean, yeah, we're going to measure three things. We're going to look at our revenue. That's our bottom line. But also getting the right names and our total target accounts, looking at getting the right people there and our retention, expansion. And so I think those three things are the. There's a lot of different things when we get into events measurement that we can look at. Those are kind of our top three. And so why do we do that? Because that's help us to get into that space.

And there's like. Christina, go ahead. Before I. I was just going to.

Say plus one to that. I think events are definitely a relationship builder. Right? It's getting that, like, personal time outside of the boardroom when you're making a buying decision. Right. A lot of products today, they have similar features, they do similar things. Right. So it really comes down to, like, a lot of times, you know, the relationships that you've built with the Aegis, with the csm, with the enablement team that You've gotten early access to during the deal cycle. And that's how you're doing that, you know, in person, live. You're reaching the target audience. It could be, you know, traditionally hard to get, like, the executive audience. An event is a great way to reach those hard to get audiences as well.

Yeah. And we're talking about. Sorry, Dave. I'm just saying one more thing. We're talking about, you know, new revenue, but we're also talking about, like, NRR and Internet. Like, that's a huge initiative space, like retention.

But that would be. You would. You would have that goal first, right? You wouldn't. You wouldn't. You would do it. You would say, we want to improve NRR or something, or we want to do X. I've made the mistake of in the past. It's like, we're doing an event. We start doing the event and they're like, well, it's kind of for sales and it's kind of for this. And I found, like. And the reason that I asked this question about, like, why do events in the first place, it's because it's kind of this. It's this weird thing, like, without the goal in mind, the event needs to be tailored to what the goal is. Right. Like, if you just go and shoot the shit with 10 potential customers at a dinner, that not necessarily, that's not necessarily going to magically turn into revenue. But if you have the strategy first of, like, hey, we want to get these 10 people in the room. We want to build these relationships so we can follow up after. I think it changes how you look and measure at all these things. And then there's also this, like, fundamentally competing objective, which is like, the key to a great event is to put. Is to have an enjoyable. To create an enjoyable experience for the attendee. Right. But oftentimes what we get is like, I have to sit through a demo or it's overly venting too many. If you're sponsoring somebody else's event, it's a trade show booth and you're scanning badges. You're doing things people don't want to do. This is weird. This is the. There's a creativity in this at the same time that you have to be able to figure out to deliver on these things, right?

Yeah, a hundred percent. I think if you do it right, you got to do three things right. You got to educate them. What is it that you do? You got to entertain them, let them go home with a story that they're going to tell their families about. And you got to inspire him. You got to make them feel something, right? And that's the, that's the constant challenge. And balance is like, how do you, how do you do all three things? And I think it all just goes back to knowing your audience and getting the right people in the room. Which is why I said my big mistake is not pumping the brakes, not thinking strategically, just trying to fill an event or execute an event to go do it and cross it off our list. You know, that's one of the reason I use zttle, not to, you know, jump into, settle too much. But I think one of the things I love about that, that platform that we're all on now is you can approve and decline who goes to these things or who's, who's at these things. And that's huge, right? Because if you're, if you're really thinking about this end to end, you're going to get the right people in chair and you're going to, you're going to customize your, your content so they feel all three things. Educate, inspire, entertain.

Have you found people that you want to sell something to? Like, are you, you run marketing at a company that sells HR software, right? You want to do an event for HR pros. Do you feel like getting butts in seats is hard or is someone. More likely, is someone just going to show up because you, you invited them? Like, how do we. Or maybe a lot of people have, have not traveled. Like, maybe people, like, there's a post Covid era where people are like, yeah, I'm leaving my family. I'm coming to your HR convention in Vegas.

You know, it's funny that you brought up, I used to work in HR tech, so I fit in this exact scenario. To me, it always comes down to, like, that decision of, like, do I, you know, as an attendee, am I attending this event or am I attending that event? Value prop, right?

Well, I'm just like, I'm thinking about, like, you know, I get a DM from someone and it's like, hey, you know, leave a review for our product on G2 and I'll give you a $20, you know, Starbucks gift card. And I'm like, I don't want 20. I'm not. That's not worth $20 to me to leave review for your thing, right? And now we're asking the bigger ask, which is like, spend a night away. Go. Go travel somewhere. I thought about this. I had immense stress before doing our first event at Drive. You know, drive with Exit 5. Because I'm like, oh, my God. People are like, leaving their house for two nights. They're flying here, they're spending money on a ticket, they're leaving their family. Like, how do. How do you get them to go to that? And I think that's, like, what I. That's what's fascinating about events. And just this is the stuff in marketing that I love. We can talk all day about MQLs and ABM and metrics. It's like, no, this is the craft of marketing. It's like, how do we. How do we get someone to want to come hang out with us? That's the offer. Like, we argue about, like, oh, people, you know, webinars are boring. Blah, blah. No, webinar's not boring. How is a webinar different than a YouTube video? Really? @ the end of the day, it's, it's the content. And I think about that a lot. For events, we see questions in the community, but, like, how do I do better events? It's like, you got to make better content. It's got to be like, why do people want to go to that? Right?

I love that. I, I think that that's, that's the challenge is balancing our, you know, looking at our analytics, but, like, being truly creative. And in order to do that, you have to. We hear empathy all the time in marketing, but you really have to know your audience. You have to know, what are these people against? What's going to. What's going to really bring them away from dinner time with their family? Probably they're not going to. So maybe let's do a lunch or a breakfast, right? Like, really being able to pivot your strategy. And then on top of that, I wouldn't say you, you don't always have to think about getting all these people to come out. You need to go where they're going to go, right? So that's where you're seeing more piggyback events is I know that ton of my ICP is all going to be at Money 20 20. So instead of blowing all this money on a third party, like a booth or on a trade show floor, let's just run out a restaurant close by, because they're all going to be in the area and do something really cool, right? So I think the challenge is this creativity aspect and really, really putting ourselves in those shoes to, to make it.

Worth their while, trying to be a good host. And pause, because that's when I have to give my guests time to add their thoughts if they, if they have them. But I Also think like Mark. It's about, it's about time spent with somebody. So we did an event and I have more questions on my list. I'm going to ask you, but I'm telling a story. We did a dinner with a bunch of CMOs in Austin when we were down there for an event and it was amazing night. And I got the bill, maybe 1300 bucks for two and a half hours of FaceTime with these incredibly important people to our business. That is the most insane. You know, you can't even get an E. Capture an email address with an ad on LinkedIn from. From. With that amount of spend. Right. And it's like to get to hang out with people and hear the nuance and look each other in the eye and get the tone, you know, tone of voice. There's so much value in, in person, you know, person to person connection. Especially in B2B when we're selling things that are, you know, multiple thousands of dollars, we can, we can hang out.

I think the key there, though, that dinner that you just described is really like, then what's the next step? And I think, you know, back to where people kind of missing is like, okay, the dinner's over. Now what? So, like something that we've tried recently is like creating a shared Slack channel and like keeping those conversations going, keeping them engaged, coming to that event with like, okay, if you had fun tonight, here's the next move. We're doing this.

Oh, interesting. And is it a Slack channel with you or with like the people? Because I would, I'd want to, I would want to be like, oh, I met these four people last night. I want to know who they are and stay connected to that.

Exactly. So it's all like, you join the Slack channel and you keep these, you know, relationships going through there, the communications going, leveraging the Slack channel.

Okay, that's actually a good segue to, to event followup. So what, what is the playbook for event followup? Right. Because ideally it's. You have an amazing time at this event. We're not selling. We're not selling. Maybe we're selling a little bit. And then it's. No, it's, you know, we got.

After it's over.

I was. I think it depends on the types of events that you're doing too. Right. Like a lot of times you do really top of funnel events, like a trade show sponsorship, and you get this huge lead list and what are you doing with it? A lot of times I'm seeing that people are throwing it into a Generic nurture about your company. Right. But you know more about the people on this list. You know what their job functions are. You from there know what they care about and be putting them into targeted, you know, nurture campaigns. Right. And be thinking through strategically like, okay, this person is exactly our icp. I have these other campaigns coming up. Let me start marketing these activities to these leads. And I think being really smart and intentional I think is really important with the follow ups.

Yeah, 100%. And I would, I would also add, I think timing's key. Providing value is key. So wrapping up, you know, all the, all the content is key. You'll see it from Zettle after this event. Every single person on this, on this webinar is going to get a step by step playbook of how they follow up from events. And you can just forward that to your event teams and use it. But essentially I think number one is just kind of integrating your attendee engagement data to what your CRM platform is and then cheering that out. And I imagine most of you have tiers. We have like strategic accounts tier 1 tier, tier 2, 3 based off their ICP and their deal average deal size. And then we're going to do a, you know, really create a unique offer and then we're going to just monitor. I would just add babysitting and bold.

Letters when you said the most important thing there, which is we're, we're going to, I don't see enough of this. We're going to create a unique offer. We, we're going to create a unique offer. Right. It's not, it's not just about personalizing, you know, sending personalized emails, following up. It's like I, I had Steph at our event. She's a key prospect for us last night. Right. I'm not gonna immediately email her and send her to like some, you know, non relevant offer or send her a completely an email. That just doesn't make sense. I think thinking about those next steps and maybe the next step is like, hey, we talked about that thing. Do you want to have a call about this? Like, I, I think it's thinking about the, thinking about the customer journey and the offer is where a lot of the like marketing goes sideways. It's, we spend all the money to get them there. Whether it's a webinar, whether it's ads, it's the, it's the classic conversion problem. This is just now like, hey, we just spent a bunch of hours in person. What is the best next step gonna be here 100%.

And I think going back to your question on mistakes, it was not babysitting was one of my mistakes. And I love salespeople. They are fantastic. They're great. They're good at their job.

You're safe. You're safe here. I bet you the ch thinking like.

Yeah, okay, they don't care so much.

About the event people or about, like, the event necessarily. Right. They. They've got their eyes on their deal in front of them. And so think having a dedicated person that is in the weeds saying, what is the next follow? Follow up. Who have you called? Who have you called? Looking at those analytics daily even to make sure that those things are actually happening. Assuming. Assuming someone else is going to own that. Your content team, your sales team. That is a big mistake I've made in the past. And I would just say keep all eyes on it all the way through for months.

Right? You just went shot. You just went shopping. You brought home this, like, haul of fresh groceries, and you keep walking in the kitchen and they just been sitting on the shelf for days, like, rotting, and now nobody can use them. That's. That's what happens.

That's a great analogy. I love that.

We actually, we have a. We have a bazillion. That's a. That's a very big word. We have a bazillion questions in the. In the Q and A. So I'm going to just, like, abandon my list. And I think we can just give people, like, we can riff on these and I'll be helpful. So the first question is from Diana. What are ways to stand out at a booth in a sea of companies at a conference? Maybe. Christina, have you done this recently?

That's a really good question. I think it's bringing. So, yes, I have done this recently. And one thing that we tried recently at a big conference was doing tarot card reading. And so it's not really like a super expected activity to see, hey, it's.

Better than the branded Frisbee. It's pretty good.

Exactly. It was real tattoos that I mix. You want to stand out. Holy. I mean, I've seen some crazy stuff.

Yeah. Yeah. So it's like, it's experience activities. Sometimes it's the swag. People do crazy things for a pretty solid hoodie. So I think it's that. And then I think also, like, don't forget about some booth design. Right? Like, we really have to be kind of thinking about how can you make it stand out from a design perspective as well. It doesn't. They don't all have to look the same.

That's a good one. Tarot card readings.

It's fun. I like that idea and it is shocking what people will do for swag. It is mind blowing to me. But the other thing I would add is I think standing out, pre event outreach is everything, right? Like, there's going to be a million booths on the show floor, and you can only do so much to like, brand that or build that out. But what you do beforehand is everything, right? And so I think tying an offer or say you did like a Plinko thing, send them a Plinko chip ahead of it and bring them something physically to their home that they can take to the. To the event and look for you. The booth, right? So thinking outside of the box, it doesn't necessarily have to be spendy. It just needs to be creative and awesome.

Check this out. We did a. We did an event. When we did this event in Austin, our sponsor was this company, Customer IO, and we did a. We did networking and we decided we were going to give prizes to the audience, and they came up with this idea. They. They basically weren't. I feel like other brands I've worked with, they would be like, we're going to give people hoodies with our logos on them and stickers and hats. And I'm like, nobody, with all due respect, no one's going to wear that, especially if they don't know who you are and haven't bought your product yet, right? And so what they did is they gave away a pair of, like $400 cowboy boots, yeti cooler, a paddle board, and a set of AirPods, right? All in to them, that probably costs, I don't know, two grand, 2500 bucks. The people who won those prizes were like, holy crap. This is a real actual. This is a real, actual prize, right? And so I think, like, at least for me, I have just a corniness. This is just personal opinion. Corniness in marketing, like, makes my skin crawl. And so, like, I would want to have a booth that, like, attracts people and it has awareness. But there's also a line between, like, I don't want to have something ridiculous that makes me uncomfortable at the booth or. Or it's just, like, so corny. I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna use this. I'm not gonna ever take this home again. And like, I like the stuff that you can deliver on that promise, but do it in a way that's, like, real and legit and feels authentic for sure.

And I think to, like, especially More than ever, people are just more environmentally conscious. It's just not cool to buy junk anymore. It's a huge turn off, you know, so give them a eco postcard that they can send home to their families that they can plant that turns into a tree. Like do something different like think, you know, think outside the box and just stop buying, you know, it's fun.

My brother in law loves, my brother in law loves startup swag. He's a, he's an engineer and for my whole life I have for basically a decade, everything that someone has sent to me I give to him and swag. So he'll be like, he'll be walking around his neighborhood somewhere and he's got like some like super niche like you know, B2B SaaS marketing tool like hoodie on. It's the best.

I love it. The other thing I would add to Dave is you don't have to just give him stuff, give him an experience, right. One time I did an event where we, we hired a pancake artist to come and he was making live pancakes and turned them into logos. He, I showed him a picture of my kid and he put my kids face on a pancake. That's the stuff that is cool that you're going to go home and tell your family about, right? Like, sorry, I'm talking about my kids so much. I've been gone in India for 11 days and I miss them. But those are the things that are going to make them feel something, that are going to tie them to your brand, that are going to give them a unique experience. They don't have to carry home junk, they can eat it, you know. So think of activations that are experiences, not just stuff at your booth.

Draw on your own experiences. I mean we've all been to trade shows, right? What are you looking for? You're looking for a good cup of coffee. I've done cold brew at my booth before. Attracted a bunch of people.

I'm just giggling. I was like, oh, what, what's your husband do? Oh, he's a pancake artist at conferences.

It is mind blowing. You got. If you haven't hired one, I'll send, I'll send the, the vendor in the chat.

No, it's a great, it's a great idea. And then like you, there's a, there's a thing like you're at the conference and there's a crowd all the way in the corner at that booth and you're always like damn, I wonder what they have over there. And you're like oh, there's some guy making pancakes like this. Genius. This is. See, this is the market. Like, can we bring. Let's. Let's make. Let's bring B2B. Let's bring marketing back to this. This is what's fun, right? This is the fun marketing stuff. Yeah, this is where like this is.

Put things in the chat too, while we're talking. It's so fun.

Any advice for. Must have comms channels for events marketing. For event marketing. I'm assuming that means like, what, what channels are you. Like email. I don't know. What do you. How do you interpret that?

I would interpret that internal and external channels. Right. So internal channels again, going back to Zelle, they'll like tie their event reg data to like a Slack channel so you can see every single person that's registering and then tie that to any, basically any metric you want in Salesforce, whether it's a target account or a deal size of over 100k or however you want to do that. So internal comms are huge to make sure that people know who's coming and they're staying on top of those, making sure they actually show up once they're here, they have a great experience, et cetera. So internal comms are huge and getting talked about.

Pause now for a sec and go. Go a level deeper in there. And what do you do for internal comms? Any. Any plays you've run specifically that have worked. I hear from a lot of marketers that like I do ad here in Slack Channel and no one, no one responds. How do you, how do you incorporate your babysitting advice into it?

Yeah, so like I was saying that Slack Channel through Zo, so they'll, they'll basically integrate the, the Slack with the event registration data. So I can see everyone's getting pinged as soon as anyone signs up. Or I can set it to like only deal size over, you know, 6, 100K or whatever. I can ping the rep to let them know. Same thing with on site. Once they check in, I'm going to notify my rep. They can take them to the VIP hall and whatever, right?

Oh yeah, that's a good one. We, we use that like for, for drive. For example, when people started buying tickets, Dan had set up the Slack channel so all the ticket purchases or registrations posted in that channel. And we had everybody's, we got everybody's LinkedIn with the submission. And so we would be going through and be like, we go see someone bought a ticket, we go click on their LinkedIn, we'd connect with them on LinkedIn and then we'd see this person's like a director of marketing at a B2B SaaS company. And we would write in the chat like ICP and I would tag Dan. And it just, it built this like, you know, knowledge of who was coming to our event before Event. That's a good, that's a good one.

I've even taken a step further, Dave. I have pre programmed it. So before they check in, we know what their favorite song is because we send them a feedback survey. As they check in, we play their music, like walk on music. We've gotten to that level of detail where we know who they are, what their favorite song is and what snacks they want during the break. And we're customizing the event toward that. Right. So that's, that's what I mean by like internal comms is really paying attention.

Christina, what about you? What about you?

Yeah, I mean, I think Steph touched on it earlier about just getting sales folks in particular to pay attention and care about an event. And so what we've done is we've started creating friendly competitions. And so we have leaderboards where we show like, oh, the enterprise team is ahead of, you know, the growth team or out of emerging. And it's just fun. It becomes like, you know, an internal competition. Other things with like SDR specifically, we run Spiffs. We get a lot of, you know, really good engagement from Spiffs. And then, you know, we have tried the like at here and Slack channels and what happens is it's just noise. Right. So what we started doing is we started going to like larger kind of team meetings and just marketing our marketing internally.

And what do you do? What do you do at that meeting?

Yeah, you know, it's kind of like an ama. Like we come with whatever event updates we have. Like, we just released a new speaker, we have a new session added to the agenda. You know, what questions do you have? And then, you know, help them kind of think through other strategies. Like I have this target prospect account that I can't figure out how to get them to the event. What can I do? And then we'll, you know, kind of brainstorm with them. Is it a direct mail, you know, something we can send them like that? Is it more lean into this experience they can have on site, you know, and so it's kind of like that, like one, one to one approach. But by going to the team meetings, we can do that at scale. Like obviously it's not scalable for a Large organization to go one on one to each ae. But, you know, that's how we do it.

That's great. Someone just asked what spiffs are, but I would just. Yeah, they're, they're like incentivate ways to incentivize your team to get registrants in the door. You can do that with bonuses and actually like money. Or you can just, if you're trying to be a little scrappy or you can say, hey, we're having a concert anyways, I've got 10 backstage meet and greets. Top two reps to get their accounts there. Can go to a meet and greet or something you're already doing. You can do it that way. It's ridiculous. We have to incentivize sales to do their jobs. But that is the bottom line that it's required sometimes because like I said, they have their quotas. But that's, that's I think what you mean by Spitz, right, Christina? Yeah, exactly.

They're like we do for the SCRs on our team, we do a trip to the actual event, right? Like, we know we're going to send sales folks anyway to the event, but still, you know, they're competing to be folks to get to come.

I'm at the point, I'm at the point in my life now where I'm like, let me, let me be on the list who doesn't have to go. Can I be on the list who does have to go to the event? I'm going to stay home and go to bed. 8.

Well, Dave, we actually have data on some of the larger user conferences that I've done. If you are able to get five accounts there, you're going to hit your quarter for the year, right? So they're really incentivized to, to get their people there. But in order to come, you got to get 10 registrants there or whatever. So we'll set rules around who actually gets to go in order to incentivize that way too.

Or really, really leaning into metrics like deal length, time and the impact that, you know, attending an event has on that. Right. Or like the different contacts that you'll meet that help close the deal.

Like, what have you learned about, what have you learned about that at your company, Christina? About if you can get someone to attend an event, what does it do for their propensity to buy?

Oh, it's much higher. All of the metrics that we pull, they're all much higher as compared to like, you know, accounts that don't attend Our events and we look at, like I said, billing size, their billing time, renewal rates, you know, all of those kind of metrics.

Let's talk about measurement. There's a question in here about measuring brand awareness, but I kind of want to spin that into a. What are the types of, what are the ways that you each have measured an event? How can you think about measuring an event? Because probably just like good marketing, you shouldn't, you shouldn't only do things that are going to be direct correlation to sales. Like that's not what good marketing is. So if you're going to do an event, can you do an event for brand awareness? Can you do an event for just customer love? Can you do an event for sales? Have each of you done? Kind of, obviously you do an event where the goal is pipeline. Can you do other events and measure them? Is there a purpose?

Yeah, totally. When you think about like customer events, right. It's like product adoption, health score impact integration, partners that were added, all of these things kind of like pre event, post event, customer nps. Yeah, I think those are all like pretty good metrics that we report on.

Yeah, that's good. That's good.

I would say on the brand side, yeah, there's lots of ways you can measure and there's going to be events.

The.

Maybe some marketing leaders might not want to hear this, but the reality is there's going to be events that are not necessarily going to be these revenue driven events. You just can't not, can't afford to not go to them. You got to be there. Right. And so in order to measure those, I think like she said, you know, you can look at the customer impact, but you can also measure site traffic, you can look at social names, you can look at press mentions, app usage, NPS score return, attendees feedback. I mean, there's a lot of other things I think it's the challenge though is keeping your primary and secondary metrics, I would say your primary or your growth metrics like we talked about with revenue pipeline and then also measuring those secondary metrics but staying focused on, on growth. So that's always the challenge. Right. Sometimes we measure so much we don't measure anything. So the kind of like differentiating between the two is huge.

Like pairing what you said about having primary understanding that it doesn't just have to be one. So having primary and secondary metrics and then like I like a bunch of the metrics Christina kind of pointed to is like, okay, we could, we might decide to sponsor, we might decide to sponsor Saster or some Gartner event. Right. And there might be a new revenue play there. There might be an expansion play there. There might be some key accounts and people we want to meet with. And so we're going to build maybe, like, a scorecard for that event that's beyond just direct sales. Speaking of that, there was a question about this earlier. And do either of you think about how do you articulate the strategy between, like, doing and. Danielle's going to try to find this question and pull up, but I'm kind of making it up based on what we've seen. How do you articulate, like, doing? When should you do your own event, and when should you go sponsor someone else's event? Do you. Do either of you have strong opinions or a philosophy to help somebody think through that? Christina? You do.

That's a tough question. I mean, my go to is like, looking at your budget, right? Because, I mean, if you're going to blow, like, a big portion of your budget, going to a big trade show where you're like, one of a hundred and you don't even have that much to do, like a big splash at the trade show, that's a waste, in my opinion. I'd rather take that budget and do, like, a more impactful ancillary event around that big tent bowl.

I know that. You know, but that's the catch, though, right? Which is, like, you got to pay. They might have the audience. What if you don't feel like you can bring in? Can you get people to show up? Like, the reason to go to someone else's event is because, like, okay, then we don't have to worry so much about, like, getting butts and seats. I saw a question about that. Steph, what's your answer to that?

I was just gonna say, I think it depends on where you're at as a company, too. Like in our early days, like Quadrics, for example, our early days, we were going all the third parties. We didn't have a big enough database. We didn't have enough people to recruit to these things quite yet. They didn't know who we were. We had to get our name out there, right? So we did third parties and a lot of shows in the beginning. And then as we evolved and as we grew that database, people started knowing us. Then that's when you start doing your own hosted stuff, because you're gonna put customers and prospects together and let them sell each other, right? And that takes time. And so I think I would just. I would just say, like, there's no like, clear answer. It kind of depends on where you're coming from.

Yeah. Kelly's in the chat said micro events during conferences are trending, which is a great, which is a great play. Right? Like, we, we know this event is happening. We know people are going to be there. Let's, let's go do dinners.

100. I call it a piggyback event and it's going to save you money. You can kill two birds with one stone. You can do a smaller investment on a show floor and then a bigger after party or, or something like that. Where, where they're already going to be. Same with your staffing. They're all going to be there. You know, get to.

Either of you ever worked at a company? Do you have like friends or maybe your company does this now? Where does your company do a kind of flagship customer conference every year? Yeah. Christina, you do.

Yes, we do.

Steph, you've done that.

Yep. Multiple. Most, most of the tech companies I've worked with are, are doing a flagship event these days.

How do you, how do you know, how do you know when the right time to pull that card is? Because it's a great play. But there's kind of like this, like, when are you at the right.

Do it customer size. Unless you're confident that you can get at least 500 people there, you're not ready. That's my opinion. I think in order to do flagship, I mean, that's what I say. Like, yeah, it can't be lame. If you're going to do a flagship, it needs to be full and it needs to be, it needs to be you. You get a smaller venue and you pack that thing. Right. And so in order to do that, you've got to have a certain amount of customers and be confident in your prospect pool that you can pull into that if you're not there yet. Do roadshows, go to their cities, do smaller things. Until you've built that up to do.

A flagship, you wouldn't, you wouldn't do a 200 person event, say in Burlington, Vermont in September?

Yeah, I would, but I wouldn't call it a flagship conference. I call it something else.

Damn, Dan, you hear that? That's, that's me deflate being like, it's.

All about, I mean, it's all about how you're perceived too. Like if you're going to. What we're all trying to do is become leaders in the spaces we're in. Right. And so you, you put on an event and it's like awkwardly half full. It's going to be a flop. You gotta be confident.

And one of the best marketing lessons I work with, I work for David Cancel as the CEO of Drift, and he's a master marketer. And he was the first one to teach me about the lesson called no empty seats, which is either that event better be packed or you better not do the event. Because if you do an event and you got a room for 40 and six people show up or 13 people show up, that's. That's worse for your brand perception than not doing an event at all.

100 Dave. We're talking about like ROI and customers, but there's even a bigger play to this for a lot of these companies, which is an acquisition or an IPO and, or, you know, like our, our partners kind of, kind of buying different areas. Right. Like, there's so much more. Especially when flagship context. That is important to think about. Which is why I always do a smaller venue and pack it full. It's so important that that first impression and that, that feeling and that energy in that room is packed. So until you even think about it.

Yeah. Less seats for the number of attendees. You want people standing in the back for your keynote?

Absolutely. Do either of you have. So I, I just want to ask this in case I'm hogging the direction of this. It's my job. But do you either have something that. That was on our list of questions or in the Q and A that you feel like you have a strong opinion on that I want to make sure we can. We can talk about. The answer can be no. That's.

Sorry.

This is going great.

All these, I'm reading all these questions and I know I want to.

I want to keep going through the questions, but I don't want to, like, get off this session without you being like, oh, no, I had this hot. I really wanted to say something about, like, AI in the future of events or something like that. So basically, while I took a drink of water, giving you the opportunity to be like, is there a hot. Is there a hot topic that's like a burning thing or really relevant to you that we should hit on? Otherwise, I'm gonna keep going.

There is one thing I think we should talk about that's important and it's the, the question you had about securing buy in, especially with executives and stakeholders, that is a common challenge I see in this space.

For budget. For budgeting.

Budget. Just buy in on the program itself. Just the best way to, to work to advocate for your programs, prove your value. All of that is A challenge. I think, Christina, you're, you're nodding your head. I think that we've seen that that's, that's tricky. So maybe we could touch on that one and get into more Q and A. Yeah, totally.

I mean to me it's always comes down to the data. But then I think like my biggest tip for the group is, you know, if you have a leader who's skeptical about your events and your strategy, get them out in the field, send them to events, let them interact with your attendees and see, you know, how much they're enjoying it, how much value they're getting from that, you know, in the field time with you. I've seen a lot of success recently in doing that.

I love that. I think it's so important for them to feel it like to actually experience it in order to see that. I would add too to that that I think understanding how your execs process information is super important. So I've had executives I work with, like One of my CEOs was a visual guy. So I've had to put mood boards together and then the CRO obviously is analytical and I had to put data points together. But I think as you as marketing leaders are all trying to secure, budget and buy in and get everybody because it does take all hands on deck for events, as most of us know. But I would just say that understanding how they process information in addition to having some experience, it is super important.

Chelsea said, did he shout out to you, Chelsea, how are you doing? Good to see you girl. She said, do these amazingly smart women have any takeaway resources they can share with us after this is over? So yes. All right, I'm going to go back into the Q and A. Our leadership wants to understand revenue impact specifically from in person events and trade shows. What are the best KPIs you've seen to track impact and or attributed revenue?

Do you want to start us off? Steph and I can jump in.

Yeah. I mean for me it's pipeline in the room. How much is actually in, in attendance, but then also pipeline after the event that's generated total reg number. They want to see that we're building our program year over year and that's expanding. I have actually found execs care more about how many people are there than anything else for at least for flagship events, which is fascinating to me because Even at a 5,000 person event, I've had 100 VIPs that make up 80% of our pipeline and they care more about the giant number which is Shocking. But those. Those are probably like, the two pipeline and Total Red and then reg. And then we talked about those secondary metrics on the brand side that are super important. We can send that over afterwards as well.

Yeah, I think it's worth noting that it's important to kind of look at the event that you're. That you're executing on and, like, where in the funnel is it? So I'm looking at kind of like a trade show, right? That's very tofu. I'm generating new leads, impacting pipeline. You know, those are kind of like my key metrics there. If I'm looking at something like a roadshow, that's more probably mofu, you know, somebody who's not really. Who's already familiar with you. I'm probably looking at, like, bookings after. I'm looking at renewal rates. I'm also looking at impact on pipe. Right. And then, you know, from kind of a macro levels, I'm looking at, like, as a cmo, right. Like, I want to see, like, how much are my events of my total Pipe portfolio, how much are those affecting Pipe, Right. And also affecting bookings. So I would just be thoughtful, you know, about where in the funnel and then kind of match your goals based on that too.

Yeah. And we're talking about, again, we're talking about all new, like, new business, but I don't want to glaze over the fact that, like, NRR is so important. Right. And so I think just being able to look at deal acceleration, look at renewals, look at help scores, like you mentioned, Christina, all of those things are. I think you mentioned as well.

Yeah.

I saw that Hassan posted in here, sourced or influenced Pipe, and, like, which one is better? I think, again, like, that's really looking at the activity specifically, right? Because, like, source, like, that's going to be something like tofu, right? Like from your conference, right? Like big industry tent show.

That's.

You're gonna mostly be talking about that, right? Because that's probably, like, your first touch. That's where they met you. So influence to be, like, more middle of the spot.

Christina, give me your knuckles through the camera. Let me tell you why you just did this. This is the ultimate dream as a host. When you're. When your panelists are actively participating in the discussion, reading the chat, bringing in a question from the chat, weaving it on. Oh, my God. Chef's kiss.

Me. I'm having to focus both ways. That's tricky.

No, this is great. This is great. All right. This is from Rachel. Tips for getting execs to attend an event, dinner, slash happy hour as a startup for getting them to come. Is that getting them to come or getting them getting the people who work at your company to go? Let's say it's getting them to come. Let's say it's helping her get butts and seeds. Let's read it as that.

Yeah, tips. I think it's funny. I think I keep hearing that everyone's saying short attention spans are shorter than ever. Right? That's what I keep hearing. And then Liz Latham, who she does club ET a whole event marketers club, she mentioned, you know what? I just binge watched Grey's Anatomy for eight hours. So I'm going to challenge the notion that our attention spans are down. Same thing with events. Like, I think that in order to get people to come, you gotta, you gotta make it interesting enough for them there. It's not that their attention spans are down. It's not that they're so busy. It's that it's not cool or interesting. Right. And so going back to that empathy, like what's in it for them? What are they, are they gonna meet people? Are they gonna learn something? Like, that's how you do it. And then going back to knowing who they are and timing that appropriately. I'm probably not gonna go to dinner, but I'll go to a lunch because I work remotely, my kids are at school. Right. So like, thinking through it on that level, I think is key to getting.

Those right people there and then tailoring the content about what they care about.

Right.

Like, if you're trying to get an executive there, you better know, like, what is it that's top of mind for them?

I'm going to bring this up because we're, we're talking about this at, as a team right now. And I'm, I'm seeing Danielle on our side talk about this in our chat. But we're, we're planning our events and we're evaluating options for like event space in, in Boston we're going to, in March. And you know, it's like this weird. You want to, you want to be conscious of the budget, you don't want to do it in a certain place. We're realizing that the, the space that we select, like the esthetic of the venue matters so much on like how people are going to feel from this. And like, if it's a truly cool event space, like, I don't know if any of you know, Pep from Winter. They're like a user testing company, right. They started Putting on these events. And his event formula was really simple. It was a pretty standard, like you know, a couple speakers and hang out. But they did it, you know, outside at like a partial brewery in Austin. It was a little bit less formal. Like those little things matter and they count for your brand so so much. Right before this I did a podcast with The CMO of 1Password and 1Password is like going up market and they're trying to sell to the enterprise and so they're doing like, they started advertising on like PGA Tour golf events. I was like, whoa, that's a crazy strategy. He's like, well, we have the budget to do it, but if you think about it, the reason we're doing it is because people will now see the 1Password brand with brands like Accenture, BMW, these high end brands. The same is true with your events, right? If you, if you, no disrespect to any company who's done this, but if you're hosting your event in like a cold air, overly air conditioned little corner of like a Marriott somewhere, that is going to feel different than like an amazing venue. And I think I'm totally, I totally see that now as like running, you know, being a part of this company and like that matters. And you can basically get the marketing points for that just by picking a great venue. So there's a whole, there's a whole taste making element to events that I think matters. It's not just about like, did we send the right emails and follow up after. It's like, this is the art of this, right?

Yeah. And Kelly said it right. Like gone are the days where steak dinners are cool. Right? Like you gotta be way beyond that. And I think especially more than ever execs, they have fomo. So if you're two things I would say if you're able to, number one, tell them who else is going to be there. Make it seem like something they're going to miss out on if they're not there. Hey, just so you know, BMW and Porsche, all these other companies are going to be here. Wanted to make sure we save you a seat. And then number two, I would say in order to get them to show up, try to give them a responsibility. And this has worked really well at some of the events I've done where we do like a roundtable discussion, for example, we give them a table topic that they're in charge of facilitating. When they feel tied to your event with a responsibility or a job, they're going to show up, they're going to be Engaged, they're going to be excited. And people love hearing themselves talk, especially executives. So let them do that at your events and that. And that's a great way to kind of boost engagement and attendance, I think for execs at least.

Plus one.

We need another hour. Do you all want to stay around? I got like a thousand.

That's fun. It's fun to see all the time.

Danielle producer in my ear. She knows what she's doing. She told me I got to pick one more. This about outreach and filling seats. Somebody said no. No mention of technology about cvent. No, this is put on by Zettle. That's the technology. What do you think about trying to align an in person event with a trade show? Targeting your audience in the same area? We, we love that. Obviously go to where the attention is. All right, here's a good one. This is from Henry. What unique thing. I, I guess we talked about this, but what unique things do you do to make an event worth coming to? Ve watching the recordings, Anything that stands out to you?

The FOMO 100%. Like you can watch the content, you can, you can get all the, the basic talking points but you're not going to be able to see who was in the room and yeah, anything.

Oh, here's a. Okay. What, what about the role of. What about. So we talked a lot about in person events. Is the role of the event person inside of a company changing kind of post Covid where a lot of companies during hybrid where like a webinar might be an event, more companies are doing virtual events. High production, high end virtual events. Where do you all see virtual events? Living in the event.

Go ahead, Christina.

Yeah, I mean for me personally, I still think there's a line. I still think that webinar in my opinion is a demand gen function and not necessarily an events person's role. So yeah, that's kind of where I'm standing. But I do also want to say just for the record that I think virtual events are not dead. I think the way we think about virtual events just needs to change. Right. So like I think what is dead is probably like those cocktail making, beer and cheese tasting. Like I think we just need to get more creative with the experience that we're offering virtually so that it is a unique experience. You kind of can't get on your own because gone are the days of like just needing that social interaction online like that we needed during COVID We don't really need that anymore. So we have to get creative.

Right. I would add to that I think that I kind of joke that I think your event portfolio should kind of be like your financial portfolio. Like the more diversified you can be, like, you're gonna better your chances and like, you know, hopefully, hopefully drive. Drive new business across the board. And so I would just say, like, where possible and where resources allow, you should be doing all the above. Right. You should be having a healthy mix of in person of trade shows, virtual web, quick webinars, and, you know, a one or two day virtual if you're able to. Like if I'm running an event program, I'm trying to think across all those things off my list to have a really healthy balance so that it all kind of works out in terms of numbers.

Well said. Okay. Brittany just says put cheese. Cheese at every event. That will. That's interesting.

All you need to do.

Okay. All right, thank you so much. Steph, Christina, we're gonna have to do a part two. I feel like Matt, Danielle, if you're listening, like, do we need to do like, do we need to do like a follow up AMA in the community or something where like Christina and Steph could just answer kind of. We could all answer questions over the course of a week or something. I know we haven't done as many AMAs in the community, but I wonder. Everyone's saying they need a part two. Darcy says, wow, we sat there an hour and all we needed was cheese. Okay, Danielle's gonna throw up a poll right now before we wrap up. Shout out to you. Shout out to Zuttle for helping put this on. We use it. It's awesome. Daniel's gonna put up a poll for this. You know, one, you hated the session. Five, you loved it. There's a billion questions that I really want to get to because this is such a good topic. Clearly what's so cool about doing this business is we have this kind of. We have this content feedback machine which is like, this is a signal. There was almost 400 people live for this today, which is a signal that, like, this is a topic people want to hear more about. How can we help people with their event strategy? There's so much we could cover in person, virtual, doing your own event, sponsoring somebody else's event. We could talk about all this. I'd love to be able to help out more. So awesome. Really good, really positive review. Steph, Christina, thank you so much. Events are back, baby. We'll see you all in the follow ups. Thanks everybody for coming.

Thank you.

Appreciate it. Okay, Rebecca says, I don't think a webinar had me like this in years. Thank you so great. Great job to you, too. And thank you, everybody for the feedback and ideas. We want to do more stuff like this. Maybe. Maybe less slides, less presentations. I'm speaking this out to the universe, which the team is going to hate, because that means we're now putting the pressure on making it happen. But this was awesome, and I'd love to do more like this. So we'll see you all later. Okay? Thanks, you two. Awesome job. Great job. See you later.