How Networking is Evolving at Enterprise Events with Grip and Money 2020

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Amazing, thank you so much. It's great to be here. I'm Tim, founder CEO of Grip, and thank you so much for, yeah, for, for being part of this great session about how networking is evolving at enterprise events. We've got a short— and so, Monique, thank you so much for joining me here. It's so exciting to have you with us.

Thank you for having me, really appreciate being here.

Amazing, amazing. So people, what we're going to do today is really go through kind of 3 key parts. First, we're going to learn a little bit more about Money2020 and what makes it an ecosystem event, which is kind of like how we look at the future of events, to be honest. And then we're going to go a little bit more detail on why that is so important and how you can become an ecosystem event as an enterprise, and then the role of networking in this whole process. So to start things off with, Monique, I listened to a recent podcast in which you said that Money2020 is an ecosystem event. I'd love to understand a little bit more, what is Money2020 and what makes it an ecosystem event?

Yeah, so Money2020 is— this is our 10-year anniversary. So it's a 10-year event that literally brings the global money ecosystem together. So if you borrow, save, manage, innovate money, you are coming to Money 2020. We like to call ourselves one of the leading platforms for content, for sales, and for networking. We're all about connecting people at our show, finding the right partners, um, and finding the right clients. So when we call ourselves an ecosystem show, that means we bring together everyone. So that includes startups, um, other entrepreneurs, government regulators, financial institutions, Tech within finance. So FinTech, um, the financial customer, we're bringing everyone together that touches money. So that's why we call ourselves the global ecosystem. And just those few have other tentacles with that. So you definitely have, um, digital coin, you have cybersecurity, you have, um, so many other elements that, um, support what happens with money. They come to our shows as well.

It's such a dynamic field, right? Like the fintech space itself, and it's constantly evolving. So I'm really curious, how do you kind of keep up with all those new trends that have been coming up? Like blockchain didn't exist when you first— when this event first started. So how do you keep up with all those new things coming up?

Yeah, it's a lot. Like, I think, you know, right now we touch about 27 different industries that have something to do with money. And how do you keep up with it is you have to have your pulse on the industry, you have to have really good people that you call your friendlies. So you're having constant conversations with those people in the industry. We have people in-house who are from the industry as well, who are very well connected. So they're always traveling around, participating in programs, participating in projects where they get to learn kind of what is coming down the pike from an innovation standpoint. Definitely having connections to venture capitalists. They always know what's about to happen, what's about to be big within the space. And also just really kind of making sure that you treat your— the delegates as your community. We always look at them as in, how do we feed our community? What does our community need? What do we need to learn from our community? So who are those influencers? Who do we need to be chatting with? We're constantly doing research, not only just when we have our planning for the event, but we're constantly talking and having those conversations and engaging and having surveys and having telemarketers call, having our research department call and really kind of get under the hood about what are the needs of the global money ecosystem. And we are a global show, right? We're just not based in the USA. We're based in Asia, we're based in Europe. And then we have the biggest one, which I like to call the Daddy, which is what we run in Las Vegas every October.

That's so cool. You mentioned those 27 topics, and I read somewhere that, you know, I'm sure that many of the people are on the call, they run their own enterprise events, user conferences, and so forth. And it can be quite daunting to distill all those different topics that you wanna discuss into something that is really bite-sized and can be well understood by everyone. I heard something about like, I read somewhere like about 5 pillars of how you've kind of distilled that down to. So I'd love to learn a little bit more about that.

So we think of ourselves in the— in these 5 ways. How do we connect you? How do we inform you? How do we amplify you? How do we bring the fun back for you so that you have these experiences? And what are the key innovations to make sure that those right thought leaders are at our show? So we're— when we're thinking about anything that we're doing at the show, we're looking at it from that particular standpoint. And you have to think about when you're building a large event, what is the unmissable moments that you're going to create within your program? What is the one thing that you know that you're going to be known for that no matter what other event is out there, whatever other competition is doing, what is the one thing that they know that they're going to get out of you consistently, constantly, and that you're always thinking about them in this way? And that's being a connector. We definitely are all about figuring out how to make a big show feel small. How do we make sure that we connect the honeypot, as we like to call it, to the right people, the tentacles for the rest of the industries within the money ecosystem. And so we're always thinking about the experience. We don't call ourselves a conference, we call ourselves a show. And so, Ed, when you think about yourself as a show, you're thinking about how do you create an unmissable moment with every experience, how can every experience be a, "Ah, this is great," or, "Wow, they thought about that," or, "Look how they're treating me," and things like that. So we're always, always constantly making sure that we understand what our community needs and that we provide that for them.

This is a perfect segue into kind of the second part, which is more about like we've got so many great C-level people that are on the call and I'm sure are listening in that is really about how do I become like the Dreamforce of my industry, how do I become the Inbound by HubSpot, like how do you kind of become those different really kind of ecosystem events that actually started out by enterprises. And you refer to the honeypot, and, and that's such a kind of concept that you, that you always touch upon.

What, what do you mean with that?

And I'd love to learn a little bit more about it.

So when we're thinking about the honeypot, you know, there's going to be people that service key people or who want to connect, do business with, partner with key people at our event. So we're always thinking about how do we make our number one, our core, the core attendees that will attract everyone else to the event. What do we need to do to make sure that the majority of them or the, the ones that stand out the most within their industry are at our show? So of course, when you, of course, when you're talking about money, You're talking about legacy financial institutions. You're talking about legacy credit card companies. You're talking about technology, big tech companies. So the Googles and the Facebooks and the Amazons of the world, and either one that has anything to do with e-commerce. You're talking about the startups. Like we're always nurturing and figuring out, there have been a few unicorns that came out and found their partners or got the information that they needed starting at our event. And then 5 years later, they're a billion-dollar company, and they contribute finding the right partner at our event. So like I said, one of what we like to say is our foundation is that we're a connector. So we're one of the places where people are going to attend to be efficient when it comes to doing business. Because when you have all of those, those 5 key industries, really, and you got the best of the best, we got all of the major banking institutions. All of the wealth management institutions, the startup community, we got the VCs, you got everyone that's coming there, it attracts everyone else. And I think that's what you have to think about. How do you attract, how do you service that core so that it's attracting everyone else? And so when we're thinking about the core, we're thinking about how do we make the show have a unique experience for each of those 5 things, because that'll attract everyone else to the show. And so we're really thinking about how do you make the big show feel small? What do we need to do from a thought leader standpoint? And how do you make them have fun so that they have that FOMO effect and they don't wanna miss it for the next year?

It's definitely like, it's so noticeable for anybody that's been there. It's like, you know, you really notice them where you're at, at Money 2020, that's like really what is happening. Currently, of course, during the pandemic, the world has kind of been set upside down for in-person events. And we've seen a lot of enterprises are really being focused on like a lot of webinars and virtual events. And so how would you recommend that an in-person event should you kind of like play a role in kind of creating this ecosystem? Can you be an ecosystem event completely virtual or do you need to have an in-person component to that?

In my personal opinion, you definitely need live. It is nothing like having that face-to-face meeting, that focus, people confined in that one area to really engage with your program and your product. And so there's too many distractions. Look, I definitely— we've done virtual events, we've done webinars. There's just a lot of that going on. And believe me, Zoom fatigue is real. I mean, yes, there's some convenience to kind of being part of a virtual experience, but nothing to me or to— from the sentiment that we're getting from our attendees, because we've been asking them for months are you going to come back to live? Are you interested in coming back to live? And out of everyone, we have about 80% out of everyone that we surveyed were like, yes, if you have it and I could get approval, I'm coming. So the live experience has to be a big part of creating an ecosystem. How we look at virtual and webinars is how are we going to feed— how we're going to use them, use that tool as a funnel into our live event. So if you never engage with us, how we make sure that virtually you have some— this wonderful experience that you create in your mind, like, I have to see what happens live. Also, we're talking about— we're talking to people who maybe haven't engaged with us in a while. We're making sure that we get them back into the funnel to get to know our brand again, to see our growth, to see that we're still that number one place for them to visit, and how do we get them to live. Live is the destination for us. Um, in everything that we do, we want to bring them there because the live experience is going to be like something they've never seen before, especially within a financial conference. And we're going to make sure that they have a good time. You know, we always think about our first timers as we need to create first timer experiences. We need to create opportunities and tools for them to understand what's about to happen to them on site. So we actually have a first-timers program that we put people through weeks before they show up. Then we make sure we connect with them on site. And then we have something called a first-timers extend program. So we are really all about bringing our community together, servicing our community. And I don't feel like you can fully do that without having a live component.

Yep.

No, I completely agree with you. I think that virtual is a great way to, provide content and to kind of get the brand out there. And it's a great way for people to get to know a brand, but really to really become part of that community and to engage further, you need in-person and you need more than a conference. And that's really the second part that I wanna talk about is how networking plays a role in creating industry-defining events. So I wrote down a couple of points here already. And one of the first, the first one here actually is really from from you, you are saying like Money2020 is 4 months of meetings in 4 days. So how do you create 4 months of meetings in 4 days?

Well, because we are such an ecosystem event and basically everyone is there. So I've had partners and sponsors who 100% just sit in the meeting room that they have with us and just bang out meetings all day long. I had one sponsor who said I had 127 meetings in 4 days because his clients were there, his targets were there, the people that he just wanted to connect with connect to build relationships were there. Everyone was there. And so it's because we are that ecosystem event that people find our event in a very, very efficient— even though we're a premium-priced event, they feel like they get a lot out of it. I've had people who still are talking to us about the leads that they had from 2019, from the 2019 show, that they are still in contact nurturing and have either gotten over the line or are close to for big deals. That's amazing. And they talked to us about that. They let us know kind of how our show helped to impact them within their business dealings. And they're back again. Look, a lot of people cut their budgets because of COVID for 2021 when it came to live events. They didn't know what was going to happen. But when we're talking to our partners, they're saying, we cut out a lot of your— the other events that we go to, but we kept yours. And so that means that we are very impactful for them to know that they're willing to take that chance. They know that they're going to get something out of coming to our show. So we have to continue to put connecting at the forefront of everything that we do, and how do we help them engage with each other. And your platform has been very helpful in us doing that with them.

That's very kind of you, thanks. So I think that like as part of something that you said, and like the previous time that we spoke, is, you know, events are such a moment in time experience. So, you know, you build up to it and then, you know, it happens. And this kind of 4-day period can often be as like, okay, we capture all the feedback after it. And something that you do very proactively is kind of capturing feedback during the event. It'd be interesting to talk a little bit more about that.

Yeah, so we actually do daily surveys during our event. Every night we send out a survey to say, how was your experience for the day? What did we get wrong? What can we improve? And so we've actually used those daily surveys and that daily feedback to improve something the next day or to change something or to make sure that something else stands out a little bit more. If someone couldn't find something, it has been extremely helpful for us to do our surveys that way. And then at the end, we do our NPS survey. So they're kind of used to us contacting them, checking in. That's what we call it. We're just checking in with you. How was everything? Here were some of the highlights of the day. How did it work for you? Like I said, was there anything that we could have done better? What did you like? What didn't you like? What can we do better for the next day? And then at the end, they appreciate that because then they see the changes instantly on site whenever we can change. And they talk about that in the NPS survey that we have at the end that, you know, I filled out your survey on Sunday about something. I saw it changed on Monday or Tuesday. I really appreciated that you were very thoughtful about doing something about that so quickly. So when we're thinking about the customer experience, we are literally thinking about every touchpoint of the customer. And I don't think a lot of shows do think about surveys. They just wanna think at the end, what is it that you liked and didn't like? But you can make instant changes if you're in constant communication with your community while you're at the event.

Definitely, I completely agree with you. And one of the great examples of that is the kind of live networking at Money2020 and, And I think that a lot of people here on the call that do their own user conferences will have maybe like a lounge or something, or there'll be like something along the main stage and the session stages. But at Money2020, we've got this incredible networking space with 150 tables. Like in 2019, I think we had like literally tens of thousands of meetings happening there. Would be interesting to just hear your perspective on why such a central networking area like the PayPal Lounge is so important.

Well, if you think about it, like I've said several times here, what's our foundation? We're a connector. So we're always thinking about how do we make it easy for people to connect? And so one of the, the simple transformations that we did was give them the space to connect where there's tables there. They can go on the app, they can pick out a time where they want to meet with the person that they want to meet. They can reserve a table and the table's sitting there waiting for them. That was a simple change for us, but it made such a huge impact. Because that place stayed packed throughout the entire 3 days that we had that Connections Lounge, um, live. We even had to have overflow area. And with 150 tables in one place, and then to still have to have overflow area was just insane because we made it so easy for people to connect with each other. I mean, one year we had— maybe when we first introduced the whole networking app, find the person that you want to meet, get the time, get the table. We had about 700, and then the next year we went to about 4,000. It was like insane how you just jump from those numbers, um, because we just made it simple. And I think when you're always thinking about— you understand what your foundation is, connecting, and you're always thinking about that from everything that you do, and how do you make life easier for your community. These small things, these small changes can make such a huge impact on your event and really give people a great experience. 'Cause they didn't have to figure out and find a place to sit and network.

Yeah, definitely, definitely. I'm conscious of time actually. So I'm gonna skip 2 slides around kind of that short 3-minute virtual networking that we've been doing. Actually quickly, let's touch on Global Connect. And you know, I think it's happening next week. Give us the short 30-second pitch of Global Connect. What is it? Why it's cool? Why is it different?

Global Connect is all about us connecting our community virtually. And so they absolutely have an opportunity where we do some matchmaking, as well as we give them the opportunity to find people within our community. We have hundreds, 100,000+ people who have engaged with Money 2020. We have a huge robust signup for people who are like, yay, you're helping our business again, connect again, who are joining this platform. And it's basically just another way for them to schedule and have really impactful meetings. And it's going so well for us.

That's amazing. Cool. While the top takeaways are here on the slide, I think that we're perfectly on time, I think. So we'll open it up to questions. I've got many more questions for Monique if others don't have any, but like, I'm really curious if anybody on the call has any other questions that have come up.

Actually, Tim, if I may, we are at time. And I would ask if we might be able to take those questions right over into your lounge. Um, which would be a great little takeaway to come over and allow individuals to go and engage with you, if that's okay. Um, so everyone, thank you, thank you for joining this session. Uh, and Tim and Monique, thank you for your time and putting it together. We have a lot more great content ahead for SaaS to Enterprise, so