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

This episode is brought to you by Zttle. We're halfway through 2025 and one thing's clear. We've been feeling this firsthand for sure. Events continue to be one of the highest performing marketing channels. Niche meetups, conferences, curated dinners, networking, breakfasts, everyone's all in. Everyone's leaning into in person. Events have become a core part of our playbook here at Exit 5. So far, we've hosted two virtual sessions. We do them twice a month. We do one large virtual event, sometimes two a year. One in person meetup. And we're deep in the trenches right now planning drive our annual conference coming back to Vermont in September. We use Zuttle to help us run a smarter event strategy. They help us with driving, registrations, managing invites, automating, communications, reminders, analytics, tracking. They do it all. They have a salesforce integration that also makes it easy and simple to report on pipeline and revenue from events without having to pull an op. So you'd know exactly how your events performed. On top of that, the differentiator with ZTTL is how their team is insanely good at supporting us. They always go above and beyond for us and that's how we've been able to keep the momentum going with 12 events this year already and just a small little team here at exit 5. So if events are a part of your marketing strategy like they are ours, you should check out Zuttle to see how Companies like Zillow, CrowdStrike and Iterable are using the top event platform for business events in 2025. Head over to zuttle.com exit5. That's z-u- dash dash l.com exit5 to learn more. You're listening to B2B Marketing with me, Dave Gerhardt.

All right, we're back. 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. 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 and focus on this year. 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 going to 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 month for these, but we want to 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 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 text me at 11 o' clock at night. He said, do we just become an events business? And we did. And so it's awesome. We got. 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 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. I guess it's. We can bring up our guests right now. So while we do that, 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 gonna send 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 gonna 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 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 events, mostly in B2B. My primary background was at Qualtrics. I was there like, gosh, I don't even know, seven, eight years. We did their event programs, 300 plus events while I was there. And then we pivoted, 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. Shout out to Dave.

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 the, 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 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 events here. So I was fortunate to do that 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 Dobrito. 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. 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?

Yeah, absolutely. So Iterable, like I mentioned, is a customer communication platform. So emails that you receive from like some of your favorite brands, they are powered by Interable, same with some SMS messages. And 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. Customers based on 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 analyzed the data and it seems that most people are here because events are important and they're, you know, 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 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 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?

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 everywhere. 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 kind of discuss as a group or.

I think for me it's not fully tapping into their strategic partners. 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'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, meeting with them and then also what does the follow up look like? It's twofold. It's really accessing their target, their customers that are potentially your target prospect, also potentially splitting the bill with them and then leveraging their customer or their Brand awareness 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 doing more partner events, like co marketing. Right. Like, we used to. We do webinars together, but we could do events together. Okay, 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, we want to grow. Right? 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 people marker?

Yeah, I mean, I think 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 in our total target accounts, looking at getting the right people there, and our retention expansion. And so I think those three things are. There's a lot of different things when we get into event measurement that we can look at, but those are kind of our top three. And so why do we do that? Because that's going to help us get into that space.

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 the relationships that you've built with the ae, 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 in person, live. You're reaching the target audience. It could be 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 going to have one more thing. We're talking about new revenue, but we're also talking about NRR and Internet. That's a huge initiative space. Like retention.

That would be. You would have that goal first, right? 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, 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'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 have an enjoyable. To create an enjoyable experience for the attendee. Right. But oftentimes what we get is 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. This weird. This is. 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. 100. 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 them. You got to make them feel something. Right? And that's the constant challenge and balance is like, 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 reasons I use ztle, not to jump into ZTLE 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 at these things. And that's huge, right? Because 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 content so they fill all three things. Educate, inspire, entertain.

Have you found people that you want to sell something to? Like, all right, 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 just going to show up because you invited them? Like, how do we. Or maybe a lot of people have. Have not traveled. 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've been in this exact scenario.

Me.

It always comes down to, like, that decision of 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, leave a review for our product on G2 and I'll give you a $20 Starbucks gift card. And I'm like, I don't want 20. I'm not. That's not worth $20 to me to leave a review for your thing. Right? And now we're asking the bigger ask, which is like, spend a night away. Go travel somewhere. I thought about this. I had immense stress before doing our first event at 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 you get them to go to that? And I think 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 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 is not boring. Well, how is a webinar different than a YouTube video, really? @ the end of the day, 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 the challenge is, 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 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 why you're seeing more piggyback events is I know that a ton of my ICP is all going to be in money 2020. 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 make it worth their while.

But I also think, like, 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. It was amazing night and I got the bill, maybe 1300 bucks for two and a half hours of FaceTime with, like, these incredibly important people to our business. Like, that is the most insane. You can't even capture an email address with an ad on LinkedIn 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 of voice. There's so much value in the person to person connection. Especially in B2B when we're selling things that are, you know, multiple thousands of dollars, 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 like where we're 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 event.

Oh, interesting. And is a Slack channel with you or with like the people? Because I would, 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.

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

Okay, that's actually a good segue to event follow up. So what is the playbook for event follow up? 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 it after it's over.

I was just gonna say 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 should 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 all the content is key. You'll see it from Zettle after this event. Every single person 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 turing that out. And I imagine most of you have tiers. We have like strategic accounts tier 1, tier 2, 3 based off their ICP and their average deal size. And then we're going to do a really created unique offer and then we're going to just monitor. I would just add babysitting and bold letters.

But you said the most important thing there, which is we're going to. I don't see enough of this. We're going to create a unique offer. Going to create a unique offer. Right. It's not just about sending personalized emails following up. It's like I had Steph at our event. She's a key prospect for us last night. Right. I'm not going to immediately email her and send her to like some 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 that? Like I think it's 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 classic conversion problem. This is just now like, hey, we just spent a bunch of hours in person. What is the best next step going.

To 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 sales people. They are fantastic. They're great, they're good at their jobs, but they're safe.

They're safe here. I bet you the chat is thinking.

Like, yeah, okay, they don't care so much about the event necessarily. Necessarily. Right. They've got their eyes on their deal in front of them. And so I think having a dedicated person that is in the weeds saying what is the next faults 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 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 from months after.

Right. 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 what happens.

That's a great analogy.

I love that we have a bazillion. That's a. That's a very big word. We have a bazillion questions 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. 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.

Real tattoos that I mix. You want to stand out. Holy. I mean, I've seen some. 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 to watch a 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. The other thing I would add is I think standing out pre event outreach is everything. 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 event and look for you the booth. Right. So thinking outside of the box, it doesn't necessarily have to be. It just needs to be creative and awesome.

Check this out. We did an event. When we did this event in Austin, our sponsor was this company, Customer IO, and we did networking and we decided we were going to give prizes to the audience and they came up with this idea. They, 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, a yeti cooler, a paddle board, and a set of AirPods, right? All in to them. That probably cost, I don't know, two grand, 2,500 bucks. The people who won those prizes were like, holy crap, this is a real, actual prize, right? And so I think like, at least for me, I have just a, 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 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.

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And I think especially more than ever, people are just more environmentally conscious. It's just not cool to buy junk anymore. It's a huge turnoff, 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, you know, think outside the box and just stop buying.

You know, it's fun. My brother in law loves startup swag. He's an engineer. And for my whole life, for basically a decade, everything that someone has sent to me, I give to him. And so he'll be like, he'll be walking around his neighborhood somewhere and he's got like some like super niche 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 them 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, and turned them into logos. I showed him a picture of my kid and he put my kid's 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 that 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.

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

It's a great idea. And then like 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, it's genius. This is, See, this is the marketing. Like, 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 to see what people are.

All right. Yeah, it is. Any advice for must have comms channels for event marketing? I'm assuming that means like what channels? 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 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. Etc. So internal comms are huge. And getting talked.

Pause that for sec. Go a level Deeper in there. And, and what do you do for in internal comm, Any plays you've run specifically that, that have worked. I hear from a lot of marketers that like I do ad here in Slack Channel and no one responds. 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 this 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 a hundred K 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 use that like 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 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 write in the chat like ICP and I would tag Dan and it just, it built this like knowledge of who was coming to our event before event. 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. Right. We've got into 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 what I mean by like internal calms 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 the growth team or ahead of emerging and it's just fun. It becomes an internal competition. Other things with like SDR specifically we run Spiffs. We get a lot of really good engagement from Spiffs and then 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.

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 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. And so it's kind of like that like 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 that's how we do it.

That's great. Someone just asked what Spiffs are, but they're like 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 were 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 do 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 think what you mean by spiffs, right Christina? Yeah, exactly.

Item either like we do for the SDRs 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 beat folks to get.

I'm at the point in my life now where I'm like, 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 quota for the year, right? So they're really incentivized 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 incentivize that way too.

Are we really leaning into metrics like deal length, time and the impact that attending an event has on that, or like the different contacts that you'll meet that help close the deal?

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 feeling time, renewal rates, 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 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 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?

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. 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 that 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 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 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. The kind of like differentiating between the two is huge.

I 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, okay, we could, we might decide to sponsor Saster or some Gartner event, right? 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 a scorecard for that event that's beyond just direct sales. Speaking of that, there was a question about this earlier. And when should you do your own event and when should you go sponsor someone else's event? Do either of you have strong opinions or a philosophy to help somebody think through that? Christina? You do.

That's a tough question. My go to is like looking at your budget, right? Because I mean, if you're gonna 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 stuff 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 pole.

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 and 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 going to say I think it depends on where you're at as a company too. Like Quadrics, for example. Our early days, we were going all the third party stuff. 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 going to put customers and prospects together and let them sell each other. Right. And that takes time. And so I think I would just say, like, there's no, like, clear answer. It kind of depends on where your company. Yeah.

Kelly's in the chat said micro events during conferences are trending, which is a great play. Right. 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 something like that where. Where they're already going to be. Same with your staffing. They're all going to be there. Get two for the price.

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 of the tech companies I've worked with are doing a flagship event these days.

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. When are you at the right size to 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 a flagship, I mean, that's what I say.

Yeah.

It can't be lame. If you're going to do a flagship, it needs to be full in it. 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 road shows, go to their cities, do smaller things until you've built that up to do a flagship.

So 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 would 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 gonna. What we're all trying to do is become leaders in the spaces we're in. Right. And so you put on an event and it's like awkwardly half full. It's gonna be a flop. You gotta be confident and pack.

One of the best marketing lessons I work for David Cancel is 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 worse for your brand perception than not doing an event at all.

100. Indeed. 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 our partners 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 package. It's so important that that first impression and that feeling and that energy in that room is packed. So until you're even think about it.

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

Yeah, absolutely. 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 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 talk about.

There is one thing I think we should talk about that's important, and it's 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 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 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 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 how much they're enjoying it, how much value they're getting from that 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 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.

Shout out to you, Chelsea. How 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.

Yeah.

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?

For me it's pipeline in the room, how much is actually 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 a hundred VIPs that make up 80% of our pipeline and they care more about the giant number which is shocking. But 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.

I think it's worth noting that it's important to kind of look at the event that you're executing, executing on and like where in the funnel is it. So I'm looking at kind of a trade show, right? That's very tofu. Generating new leads, impacting pipeline. 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 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 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 will be 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, that's going to be something like tofu, right, from your conference, right? Like a big industry tent show. That's. You're going to mostly be talking about that, right? Because that's probably like, your first touch. That's where they met you. Influenced to be, like, more middle of the.

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 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. It'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 start. I wonder if that is. 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 in seats. Let's read it as that.

It's funny, I think I keep hearing that everyone's saying 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 got to make it interesting enough for them. 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? Are they going to meet people, are they going to 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 going to go to dinner, but I'll go to a lunch because I work remotely. My kids aren't to supposed 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 gonna bring this up because we're talking about this out as a team right now. And I'm, I'm seeing Danielle on our side talk about this in, in our chat. But we're planning our events and we're evaluating options for like a event space in, in Boston we're going to in March. And you know, it's like this weird. You want to be conscious of the budget, you don't want to do it in a certain place. We're realizing that the space that we select like the aesthetic 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. 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 couple speakers and hang out. But they did it 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 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 do 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 no disrespect to any company who's done this. But if you're hosting your event in like a 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, 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 as 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 wanting 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'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 amount outreach and filling seats. Somebody said no mention of technology about cvent. No, this is put on by ztle. 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 love that. Obviously go to where the attention is. All right, here's a good one. This is from Henry. What unique thing. I guess we talked about this but what unique Things do you do to make an event worth coming to versus just watching the recordings? Anything that stands out to you, the FOMO 100%.

Like you can watch the content, you can get all the basic talking points, but you're not going to be able to see who was in the room. And so I think anything.

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 are doing 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 ecosystem.

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 can be, like you're going to better your chances and like hopefully drive new business across the board. And so I would just say like where possible and where resources allow, you should be doing all of the above. Right. You should be having a healthy mix of in person of trade shows, virtual 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.

And in terms of numbers, well said. Okay. Britney just says put cheese at every event. That will.

That's problem solved. All you need to do just.

Okay. All right, thank you so much. All right, 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 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 one. You hated the Session five. You loved it. There's a billion questions that I really wanna get to because this is such a good topic. Clearly what's so cool about doing this business is 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 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 job to you too. And thank you for everybody for the feedback and ideas. We want to do more stuff like this. 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.

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