How to Grow Your Revenue With Dinners & Live Events

So I'm going to talk about how to grow your revenues by throwing dinners. Webinars, conferences, dinners, they go a long way, especially if you're in B2B. It crushes for closing because you're actually building relationships and relationships go a long way. People remember how you made them feel. That is the saying. And so I've been doing dinners for a very long time. Neil comes to a lot of these dinners and I think I've got it pretty down pat now.

Yeah.

I've been doing them probably start of 26 years old or so, and now I'm 39, so I've been doing it 13, 14 years or so. And I'll give you a couple of things that work for me when I throw these dinners to have a good one. One, the very first dinner that I threw was directors of marketing and CMOs, because I wasn't like an entrepreneur yet. I was still like 26 years old. And so my thing is, if you're going to throw a dinner, always make sure that the people are around the same level, because you can't invite like an intern and then invite like an entrepreneur and then invite like a director.

It just—

You're not going to talk about the same things and people are going to hate you for that. So you got to curate a really good group of people.

Okay.

Ideally you feed them. Ideally you're the one paying for it. The first time I was broke, so we only had a half-eaten bag of chips. And so we're just sharing my, my, I think it was like a, you know, Lay's potato chips.

That's cool though. Something's better than nothing.

But they loved it. They loved it. The key thing is the content. Going back to the content again, right? You talk about make sure the topics are good. So let's say, Neil, you came to the dinner, you had to bring the Who you are, what you do, and then one thing you're— what are you struggling with right now? And also like the best marketing hack that you have right now, right? Everyone likes hacks.

Wait, can we, can we go back a little bit? Yeah. You decide if you want to do a group, the group could be like CMOs or directors or VPs or even just entrepreneurs, because I'm assuming you've done entrepreneur ones too.

All the time. Yeah.

And some of them are related to a specific category like D2C or some of them are just broad.

Yeah.

How do you Okay, you got the list. Let's say you're going after VPs. How do you know who to invite? Because there's so many people in companies. And how do you get at those people if someone's not well networked like you are? Because when you first started off, you weren't well networked.

No offense. No network. Yeah.

And you got access to these people and you got them to come to dinner. So what's the process for that?

Yeah, great question. So I'll give you an example. This was maybe 1 or 2 years after I did the first one, right? But there's this one dinner where I remember I got 3 customers from it and I did this in SF, right? So we had, This always worked, especially if you're— you have agency clients or software clients. So you invite 3 or 4 or 5 customers. So half the group is your customers. The other half is people that you'd like to, that you're targeting, right? And then what you do is you say, hey, this is going to be a CMO dinner. It's going to be, it's a private dinner. Always say private. People, for whatever reason, private gets them, right? So it's a private dinner. It's going to be CMOs. It's invite only. It's amazing people. Here's who's coming so far. Are you in, right? I got one spot for you. Are you in? So it makes it seem super exclusive and they feel really special, right?

And you do this over email?

I do this over email. Yeah. And it always, I always, so I might overextend a little bit and invite like maybe 15 or 20 people, but I'm aiming for 10 really at the end of the day. I always end up filling it. Does that make sense?

I'm a little bit confused. Maybe I misunderstood you. You're saying these are the people who are attending or invited?

These are, so I will have like 5 guaranteed that are in already. Right. And I'll say these people are in.

So how'd you get the 5 in at the beginning?

Yeah. So I, in the beginning, I started doing the podcast, right?

And then, or let me rephrase, how does someone else go get the 5 people in when they don't have a podcast and an audience?

Well, I didn't have an audience yet. I was still starting out, right? So I got the first initial 5. I said, hey, it's going to be great food. It's going to be CMOs. I didn't name who was coming yet, right? I said, this is who's— I said, it's good. This is— we're going to be at this restaurant. It's going to be these types of people that will be there. I'm handling the bill. And are you in? And then once I I got 5 like bigger names to agree, then at the same time I was reaching out to other people, I would just start to include them. And then without fail, I would be able to get 10, even though I only reached out to 15, 20 people.

Oh, so it wasn't that hard?

No.

So you, you reach out to initial group, call it like 5, 10 people. Some of them are naturally going to say yes, because you're saying these are the type of people. Once you have enough key people that said yes, you then when you're sending the remaining emails, you're starting to list the people out instead of saying these are the type of people. Exactly.

And then I say, I say, look, it's easy for you. It's a great restaurant. great people just show up and then we'll, we're going to talk about marketing, right? Or I'm starting to do these AI founder dinners in LA, which, you know, obviously you're invited, but the criteria for this one is everyone has to be good at AI and everyone has to give me their tactics, right? And I have to approve. And so that's a little different, but let me rewind. So I started doing this bag of chips and the whole agenda was basically, hey, what's your biggest marketing challenge? What's your biggest marketing hack? Who are you? What do you do type of thing, right? And then we kind of went around the table, everyone shared for like 10, 15 minutes a pop, right? And we, we basically gave them advice or we like ripped them apart or we shared our experiences, right? And then sometimes I'll just have like general entrepreneur dinners where it's just entrepreneurs and what, who you are. You've seen these, who you are, what you do, one thing you need and one thing you can offer. And then, then I just connect everyone afterwards. But if you start doing enough of these, people start to see you as the connector. And I just, in the beginning I used to split the bill. I just found it way easier to just pay for it. But you also, if you're starting out, maybe you can't afford to pay for it and that's okay. Half-eaten bag of chips, right? So the second time we did it was I ordered Mediterranean food for everyone, right? Didn't break the bank, but at least it was a nice move from my end. But you gotta start somewhere is my main point.

How do you control the bill to make sure that it doesn't go crazy? Because people start ordering tons of drinks and all this kind of stuff.

It's— Great question, Adam. Yeah. So you say, what I do is usually it's like drinks are either ordered by you, you'll take care of it. All the food ordering is I take care of it too, right?

And then you're not saying, not only do you pay for it, but you're saying you order the food yourself for everyone. Like you do family style.

I do family style.

Yeah.

But you have to build experience to get there. Like we have a mutual friend who loves ordering for everyone. I think I've just gotten used to doing that.

We have a mutual friend that loves ordering for everyone?

Yeah. Oh, maybe you're not there. Longer hair.

Oh yeah.

Yeah, yeah. He loves ordering. He always over-orders too.

But I know that Always overorders.

Huh?

I've been to a restaurant with him in, was it Miami?

Yeah, maybe.

I think it was Miami. It was this place where it was exclusive. I could be wrong.

Zizi's.

Was it Zizi's?

No, I brought you there and I ordered.

Oh, that was you.

I ordered for everyone. Yeah. Yeah. So I've gotten good at ordering for everyone.

Oh yeah. The other person is how you got the membership or—

Oh yeah. Yeah. We signed up together. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We'll lead us through that. But my, my point, so even there we did a dinner too, right? But When you do these things eventually, like, because everyone asks me, oh, how do you build a network? That's how you build a network. And then going back to the SF dinner, just to wrap this up, and then we can move on to live events. I think we got 2 publicly traded companies and 1 analytics company that ended up selling to Google, I think. And that was because of that one dinner.

So that was probably Google Urchin?

No.

There's a different analytics company that sold.

Looker?

Looker sold to them as well, I believe.

Yeah.

So let's talk about you getting clients. You got 3 clients and how many people were roughly there?

10?

10.

Yeah.

I'm assuming this was a high conversion rate because you remember it.

Yeah.

Higher than your normal or average.

Yeah.

What did you do to transition them from, you know, if I recall correctly, who you are, what do you do are the questions you're asking, plus what is your biggest marketing challenge?

Biggest marketing challenge and also biggest marketing hack because it's information sharing.

Okay. Yeah. And then people are helping each other.

Yeah.

How did you transition that being at a dinner and it being casual, I'm assuming it would've been really awkward right there to be like, hey, we should work together. Let, let me get your phone number and let's pitch you. Like, I'm assuming you weren't that direct because that's not your personality.

No, no, you, you don't do that. It's, uh, so they hit you up afterwards because you remember that book Influence, the Robert Cialdini book, right? Yeah. So if I do you a favor, inherently you feel like you owe me something already, which is why Neil doesn't really let you buy him food often. And I don't like people buying me or doing me favors either, because then immediately I feel like I owe you, right? So the whole idea here is like, you, I just seek to give and you're the same way too. I seek to give without getting anything back and it keeps compounding because it's like, oh, what else do you need? Because I actually do follow up on the things that they're challenged with and I do try to help them. I make introductions. Eventually it's like, oh, by the way, we actually need marketing help. You know, are you the one, right? Or who can I talk to? And, you know, sometimes we can take it on, sometimes we refer it out, but it's fine. I don't have any expectations. I think you actually do a better job of this where it's like, When you did webinars, oh, scan for this one over here. If you need to talk to whatever, scan over here. I think we needed, we should in the future do a better job of just probably calling out, hey, this is Single Grain that actually sponsored this.

Yeah.

Yeah. Right.

Yeah, I agree.

Yeah.

All right.

So I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency called NP Digital, and they work with a whole host of global companies or a global organization. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more and we'll see you on the other side.

And then when you got those 3 businesses to pay you, did it take a long time to close them?

Those actually all happened in less than a year.

That's pretty quick because it's outbound, or I look at it as outbound. You're building relationships and networking.

Yeah. And then I will say one of those that closed, that person went to another publicly traded company and followed us and then went to another company that raised a bunch of money and followed us. So she followed us 2 more times after that.

A large chunk of our clients are from employees who change jobs and they were, we were working with them at the previous company. That is actually how we have gotten a lot of our clients. Another interesting point of view is we have a, we're a small company. I consider it small. You know, people consider 9 figures depending on what country you're in, a large corporation. I consider that small.

In America. Yeah.

Because you look at like Nvidia and just, it's like, okay, Even if I got to a billion in revenue, which I'm not at, I would start becoming a small large company in my eyes, right? Because you look at like Nvidia or Google, I was looking at Google's earnings. They do over $300 billion a year in revenue. If I got to a billion and I don't know if I'll get there.

That's 1%.

One, yeah, one 300th of a percent. It's just like, and by the time I get there, what are they going to do? $700 billion, you know, maybe even more. One of the ways we get it, because we have 1,000+ people, that's small in comparison to Google, Nvidia, you know, the list goes on and on.

Microsoft has 250K and they've cut some, but yeah, 250K.

Yeah. We're so tiny compared to them. And when you look at it, some of our employees leave to work at other clients and corporations, and then it actually solidifies our relationship with that company that is paying us. And then we make more money over time, or they hop around to another company or they They left and like, hey, I want to go corporate into the agency side, and then they hire us.

Yeah. All right, guys, so that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow.