How to Run 350 Events a Year with Anna Tumanova

Hi, I'm Michael Hartman.

I'm Naomi Liu.

And I'm Mike Rizzo. And this is OpsCast, a podcast for marketing ops pros and RevOps pros, created by the MoPros, the number one community for marketing operations professionals.

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Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by marketingops.com, powered by all the MoPros out there. I'm your host Michael Hartman flying solo today. Mike and Naomi will be with us again soon, I'm sure. Joining me today to talk about running events at scale is Anna Tumanova. Anna is events marketing lead at Gorgias, spelled G-O-R-G-I-A-S if you're looking for that. Anna is an experienced events professional with a proven track record in the IT, entertainment, and services industries in over 10 countries. Over her 4 years at Gorgeous, she has spearheaded, organized, and executed 1,000+ events for e-commerce brands, tech solution providers, and D2C agencies, including D2CX community virtual and in-person events. Anna is passionate about driving customer engagement, partnerships, and lead generation through diverse experiences. Anna, thanks for joining me today.

Hi everyone, very excited about this chat. Thank you for having me.

Yeah, we should have some fun here because I think for our audience, mostly marketing ops folks, they probably have worked with events teams and often usually at the end trying to make sure things are communicated or followed up on and all that kind of stuff. But I don't know that anyone has done that at quite the scale. I know I haven't that you're doing. So why don't we start there? So I know we're going to cover a number of things about your approach and your process and some of the experience you have. But why don't we start with this? Like, how many events are you actually— we had 1,000+ during your time there. How many are you running each year? And I'm curious, what is the makeup of those, right? How many of them are, you know, maybe bespoke small events versus trade shows versus what other types of events you might be doing?

Yeah, yeah, of course. So, at Gorgeous, we do run a lot of events. We usually aim to run about 350 events a year, but realistically that number is usually varying between 320 and 370. But we do have 350 as our target, and that consists of numerous events. So obviously there is about 9 to 12 trade shows a year that we are participating in around the world.

We—

our markets include Canada, US, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. So we participate in all the major industry, commerce industry trade shows in those regions. Then another important thing that we do that we actually launched last year, we launched our very first own user conference, which is called Gorgias Connect. And last year we hosted it in June. This year we're going to host it in May. That takes place in LA, and that includes over 350 customers from LA and surrounding areas, and also some people fly in from other, from the East Coast as well. So that's our user conference where basically 70% of our attendees are existing Gorgeous customers and others are our partners, our prospects, and any other folk that is involved in our business, right? So that's like our biggest event, right, that we host ourselves. Then we also host a number of Gorgeous workshops. Those ones are happening around the world as well in major cities. In North America, it's usually LA, Miami, New York, Austin, Toronto, where I'm based, by the way. In Europe, it's mostly London, Paris, Berlin. We actually had one in Berlin yesterday for the first time. Yeah, expanding our markets. And also in Australia, we do Sydney, Melbourne, and yeah, I think that's it. Yeah, Sydney and Melbourne, pretty much. So yeah, so those ones are usually more hands-on. We invite 30 to 40 gorgeous customers, and we basically teach them how to use our product, how to make the most out of it, and also invite partners and prospects that also want to learn about the product.

Got it.

Then another type that we do is obviously dinners. So those are happening all the time, like, basically the whole year, and they're happening in major cities and in smaller cities. Also, when we want to expand to a new market, for example, if we've never done an event there, I probably wouldn't be committing to doing like a networking meetup or a workshop, but I would commit to do like a 20-people dinner to kind of get a sense of the market and see how easy or difficult it is to promote an event there. So, that's a good trick for anybody who wants to expand in a new market. Start small. Like, don't— like, if you've ever never hosted an event, like, let's say, I don't know, in Zurich, for example, you've never hosted an event there, you don't commit to like a 100-people workshop, right? You're only doing like a little happy hour or a dinner. And then, when you see the progress, when you see success, you keep expanding more and more and more.

That's really good. Question about those, just because I think it's an interesting thread here about using that as a way of entering a new market. Are you usually doing that as a way to try to size that market? Like maybe before you go all in on investing, say salespeople or whatever, or are you doing it like, we're already committed to this, we're just, we're going to try to kind of, it's part of our launch into that new market.

Yeah. So basically what happens here is that Gorgias is the number one Shopify help desk for Shopify stores. Our market penetration is pretty large for Shopify. It's over 50%. So we are trying to find new customers and we're also wanting to meet our existing customers in real life. So the main reason for expanding, when I say expand, it's actually not like start selling to people in those markets because we're already selling to them, but we want to meet them in person. And when we want to—

Oh.

Expand the events channel, we want to leverage the events channel for customer retention, for customer acquisition, for partnerships, for— so there is numerous reasons for that. And speaking of team members, our team, so our offices are, if I'm not mistaken, in 9 cities right now.

Right.

And we even have an office in Argentina and Portugal, you know, like we are like all around the world. And team members that are remote even live in completely different cities that where we don't have offices. So we are pretty international. And whenever we host an event where we don't have any team members, we just send someone and fly somebody in who is, The closest, right? So, yeah, so to answer your question is we want to make sure that we expand our events channel reach in those places.

Okay, so it's more about the events, starting to have events in those markets as opposed to growing business in the market?

Yep, pretty much. Yep. Yeah. And then, yeah.

Sorry, continue, and I may ask another follow-up on that.

Yeah, I just wanted to touch base on other event types. So yeah, we said trade shows, conferences, workshops, dinners, hosted, sponsored, and then we also do ABM experiences. So basically, we call that experiential events. For example, let's say, on May 7th, Beyoncé is coming to LA. So we rented like a suite, and we're going to do like a little activation there. We're going to have like a gorgeous person greeting everybody, we're going to have food and beverages, and we're going to have a few of our enterprise clients and prospects enjoy Beyoncé concert. And this is just like one of the examples that we do, right? But we do a lot of music festivals, sporting events. So that's the whole other program that we have and that we invest in and we see a lot of return from.

Oh, interesting. Okay.

Yeah. And then webinars, that's probably something I should have started with because that is our most ROI-generating channel. And the reason for that is because, well, a few reasons. Firstly, it's global reach. You can reach your target audience at any time around the world. I'm sure any of you who are watching this right now, you're all in different parts of the world. So that only proves that whenever you have a virtual event, your target audience can be reached from any place, right? And in any place. And it's usually free or Well, nothing is free, right? There are still resources that you use. There's nothing that's free, but like it's very cost-effective to organize webinars and virtual summits. You can involve as many speakers as you want. You can make them as long as you want. I run webinars that are 50 people, have 50 people registered, and I have webinars that have 5,000 people registered.

Gotcha.

So those ones differ. Like if we have like a virtual roundtable with 10 experts, we're probably gonna have like 8 to 10 people. But then if I have a virtual summit that is actually, I have one April coming up. It's, we expect 5,000 registrations with 40 speakers from the industry from all around the world. And that's something completely different, different scale. So it is a very good event format if you want to generate leads in a cost-effective way.

Got it. So that sounds like more, I would call that just sort of virtual events as opposed to webinars or webinars kind of fit into that, but I get it. Okay. So if my math is right, you're doing Almost one trade show a month and like something on every workday all year round. Is that, is my math right?

Yeah, on average you can say that. In real life, sometimes we would, so you would exclude weekends and you would usually exclude Mondays and Fridays too, weirdly enough, because people, Mondays are very like, Mondays are very hard to people, for people to commit to because, you know, you come after the weekend, you wanna clean your inbox, you have all your weekly meetings on Mondays. So Monday is never a good time to run an event. And Friday is also not a good time usually to run an event because people are already kind of done at like 1:00 PM, their local time, and they just wanna, you know, finish their, like clean up their inbox and just like get ready for the weekend. So the actual days when you can run a successful event are actually Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, unless it's a major trade show that takes over the whole week when people arrive on Sunday night.

Right.

Like for example, on Monday I'm going to ETL West, which is like a, one of our major trade shows happening in Palm Springs every year. So people arrive on Sunday and leave Thursday. So that's a little bit different, but like normally we usually schedule all events Tuesday to Thursday. Yeah.

Oh wow. That's now my mind is really blown like that. Very interesting. So, and all like all those are all very different kinds of events too, right? In terms of what it takes to get them done and the logistics. And I mean, I know that one of the challenges I've done, I've had working with field marketing teams where we're trying to do like the dinner thing. is just some markets are really hard to figure out what's a good location that will attract the most people, especially in certain metro areas. Like, well, Dallas, where I'm at, right? Dallas is a really hard one because there's a couple of different, I'll call 'em business districts, but it's also a very spread out metro area. So finding a way, a place at a time when enough people could be there, That, you know, people are dealing with traffic, getting their kids back from school or whatever. It's a real challenge. Have you, like, how do you deal with that, especially when you're going to a new market?

Yeah, yeah, for sure. That's a great question because there is a few things that you need to consider. So if your dinner is around a major trade show, for example, speaking of Dallas, there is an e-commerce trade show called SubSummit that is happening there every, that happens there every year. We're not sponsoring it this year, so we don't have like a booth, but we are sending team members to attend. and we are running 2 dinners around it. So basically what, how I approach that in that case, I just choose for the restaurant that is in that specific area near the trade show.

Sure.

Because you want, you're not gonna like send the people downtown if, you know, like if the trade show is happening in the suburb of the city, right? So you want to make sure it is convenient. And of course you always want the best. You always want Michelin star. You always want the best private room and best experiences. However, I personally always prioritize convenience. Like, if I have to choose between the two, I will always prioritize convenience because no matter how the— how good the restaurant is, if it is far away to get there, like, nobody will go. Um, another thing is to consider is to send people Uber vouchers. That's actually really interesting because, uh, that's actually really interesting because, um, You would think that like $15 Uber vouchers, like why would that even matter for people? However, you will be surprised that it does matter a lot because like I had situations when like I was hosting this event in Austin a couple years ago. It was like a networking meetup and, uh, people just, um, so on the morning of, I wake up and I'm like in my hotel and like getting ready for the event and then there's like a tornado warning, which, uh, oh yeah, you will understand.

Yeah, I get it.

Yeah. So there is a tornado warning and I'm like, okay, so what's gonna happen? So I was going to send Uber vouchers anyway, like regardless of that. So I send them and then when I come to the event, of course I have slightly lower show rate because of the weather, but I still had like over 80 people in there. And then people come to me and they're like, hey, Anna, if I didn't receive that Uber voucher in the morning, I wouldn't be here right now.

It's amazing.

Small detail.

Well, it's so funny because I, so I work for Freeman. I think we talked about this, right? The event company that, Behind the scenes. And one of the, one of the things that we talked about, uh, when we talked to exhibitors about how they could get more traffic in their booth was through things like what flooring you choose, right? So people are walking around a trade show for hours, their feet get tired. If you have, if you're willing to spend a little extra for thicker carpet that's softer on someone's feet, they actually come and they stay longer.

Mm-hmm.

whether it's conscious or not. It's funny how small things like that can make a difference, right?

Oh, 100%. Yeah. And to answer your previous question about the location, so if it is a trade show, everything is easier because you can just move something around. If it is just a completely like random city that you've never been to, and then you just like kind of, you know, you don't know anything, you don't know where to go, where people like to go, honestly, just a simple Google research. I would just like go and be like, hey, like, like, what is the top most wanted restaurants in the city? And then I will just like obviously look at my budget and see what matches my budget. And then I will just try to find something either very new and trendy where everybody kind of like that everybody's talking about. For example, like Miami, for example, is huge about that. They always have new restaurants popping up. So like, for example, there is like this big restaurant, um, that I really like, and I've hosted a few events there called Sexy Fish. And it's like a very beautiful, gorgeous place with like beautiful architecture from London. It's a gorgeous place. And 2 years ago, it was like a buzz. Like whenever we invited like that, it's gonna— our event is at Sexy Fish, they're like, okay, I'm coming. So that was like— Last year, just a year later, I decided to host a dinner there and people still showed up, but you could see they're always like, okay, yeah, I've been here like 6 times. So you always want to find something, something either very new and trendy, or obviously ask locals. If you have any friends, partners, coworkers, you can always ask that. And also, you could also find some staples. Like, for example, every city usually has like a staple that is maybe not new and trendy, but it's kind of like the beautiful and well, like, top-rated restaurant where everybody would go to. Right.

Interesting. Okay. Yeah, that's, that all makes sense. Okay. So you hinted at something I wanted to talk about, 'cause I think it's a challenge, which is especially with the variety of types of events that you do, how do you think about what is the purpose of the event? Is it to generate leads, to generate meetings? Is it just to enhance the brand? Like what are the kinds of goals that you that you try to have with these different events and does it vary based on the type?

Yeah, so it has changed a lot at Gorgeous in the last 4 years. So when I joined the team at the beginning of 2021, it's hard to believe it's been that long, but 2021 I joined the team. We had like our, actually I wouldn't say main purpose, it was actually the only purpose that we did events for was generating leads because we are still like, we're at about, I believe, 6,000 customers. Now we have 15,000. So when I joined, we had like 6,000 customers. So, and they were not huge brands, most of them. So we wanted to kind of like, you know, meet everybody and everywhere. So we were like generating leads and that was the main and only purpose that we were doing events.

Right.

Then as company grew and as we evolved and started and our market penetration increased, then we started expanding our goals. So we started to invite more customers to our events. We wanted to make sure that there is like, we do customer marketing, we do customer engagement. We launched our customer-focused user conference. We started doing customer appreciation dinners where we only invite our customers without generating leads. Of course, even at existing, like when you invite existing customers, there's still like ways to generate ROI because you do have add-ons, you do have some products that you can upsell to existing customers, but it's still not the primary goal. The primary goal there is mostly retention and marketing, right? Then we have lead generation events still. The only thing now, they are mostly moved towards enterprise. So, for example, those experiences like Beyoncé concert, for example, just from the top of my head, that's a pure lead generation event, right? When we would, where we would invite our top enterprise prospects and try to generate leads from them. And then—

Just a quick question because I Does— do you, do you carry the budget for all these events regardless of what the goal is? Or if it's something that's like a lead generation thing, does that come from, say, a sales budget to pay for, or is it mixed?

So actually, lead generation comes always from us. So we are, as an event channel, we are lead generating channel initially and still up to date, up to current date. So everything that is about lead generation, that comes from us. When it's when it comes to customer marketing, it depends. Gorgeous user conference does come from us. If we talk about customer appreciation dinners, we do have some budget and customer success that is sometimes allocated to those things, but it's kind of like a mix. And then we also the third goal of events that we do is also partnerships, right? We don't do solely partnerships-focused event as events as much. I do throw a Christmas party every year in December in Toronto that is like. For the partner community, but otherwise it's mostly like, it's always a mix. It's rarely just like, unless there is like a customer dinner or customer user focus conference or like a lead ABM generation event, but otherwise it's always like a little bit of everything. So there's some partners, there's some leads, there's some customers. So you kind of like do everything at the same, at the same event very often. So yeah, answering your question, it is coming from the events budget that is allocated to us.

How do you measure those results differently? I mean, lead ones, I think it's pretty obvious, right? You need to capture leads somehow, which we can get into more detail about. But what about some of these other ones, like the customer-focused ones, right? Do you see, do you measure, track like the fact that a customer came to your event, your customer events, and their retention, or is there— just curious.

Yeah, so for leads, yeah, it's definitely easier to track because there's pipeline, there is a number of deals created, deal value, there is ARR revenue target. However, for customer events, it's a little bit trickier to manage, to track. However, we have some goal of customer upsells. So if we want to generate revenue, we just invite some customers that don't have certain products. For example, Gorgias originally was just like a help desk for Shopify stores, but now we are a conversational AI platform, meaning that we have AI sales, AI support agent, and we're launching AI sales agent in the next couple months. So it's like we're going to be releasing that product to firstly, of course, our existing customers, right? So there is definitely revenue associated with that. So on that side, it's pretty easy to track because we do have our UTM links associated with every product for every event that my team is responsible for creating and tracking. And then there is also customer retention that is a little bit harder to measure. However, what we do, we usually like look at show rate. For example, like if we have a customer appreciation dinner, usually for, in general, for customer dinner, show rate is higher than for prospect events. Because when it's a customer, they're more loyal to you and they want to come have a meal with you. When it's a prospect, sometimes they just like, you know, wake up in the morning, you're like, no, I'm not coming there.

Right, right, right.

I'm going to a different event. So, yeah, so it's harder to measure, but there is no, like, unfortunately, magic potion for that. However, we do try to track the upsell revenue and we do track the show rate and the number percentage of registrations.

Okay. Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. Yeah, it would be, it would be interesting to see that tied to not just upsell like revenue, but also just retention, right? Which is sort of a revenue thing, but at least, you know, so, okay. So I, I've worked in the events industry in different parts and I've worked with events teams for a long time. And I, I, I continue to be surprised at just how bad the technology is, particularly for like lead capture. And I'm thinking like that's probably mostly trade shows. But just in general, it feels like the technology for events, maybe outside of virtual, which have gotten better since COVID I think. But what, I mean, am I off? Like, do you see the same thing, right? That there's just not great technology to support like lead capture and that kind of stuff? Or, and if so, like, how are you, like, how are you capturing that?

Yeah. Yeah. So I would say the biggest challenge for my team personally is that When you go to those trade shows like ShopTalk, for example, Retail West, they do have lead capture devices that you like scan and you can like input them in your system afterwards. However, I do lack a lot of filters in there. So for example, ShopTalk has a one-on-one hosted meetings program, which basically means that you pre-purchase, like purchase pre-event, like a certain number of hosted meetings with the leads. And then you go like, let's say for example, for ShopTalk this year, we purchased 20 meetings, right? So that basically means that I'm able to go through their attendee list and just like schedule 20 meetings with the merchants that are potential customers for Gorgias. However, knowing that Gorgias is only integrated with certain e-commerce platforms, for example, Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, but not integrated with Salesforce. So when I go into that portal, Mm-hmm. instead of just having a simple filter that says like what ecommerce platform this brand is using, checkmark, it would save so much time because imagine there's like 3,000 people in there.

Yeah.

So basically every time I need to schedule, and actually this is coming up next week for me, this is my little bonus in my work— working week. I basically need to go manually through 3,000 people because the filters that they have there, they are, I mean, no offense, like, there's like—

It's okay, you can offend. No, they're not—

Like, okay, what country it is located in, like, okay, country, cool. But like, we actually, we can sell to any country, even if we haven't had any customers from there, we still can sell to them, right? So it's not the filter that we're looking for. However, like, for example, we want to look at the GMV band, we want to look at what e-commerce platform we use, we want to even ideally You could filter by, like, if I was doing that kind of tracker, what I would do, who are the sponsors of this event? Gorgeous, and then, like, let's say 20 other tech companies. Customers of each of this company, how amazing would that be if I could just go into that platform, filter, remove Salesforce, remove custom cards, only leave Shopify, only leave the ones that are not Gorgeous customers, and only leave a certain GMV band? Boom, my job is done in An hour, maybe, maybe less instead of—

It sounds like, it sounds like a great problem for some sort of AI tool out there, right? Here's the list. And, but, but then you get into, you're probably not allowed to share the list, et cetera, et cetera, right?

There's not even a list there. You can't really download the list. You only go through the portal and you go through inside their portal. You have to manually go through every single company, copy paste, like You know, I just copy paste.

Like, this is such a great example of, to me, of like, I don't— events, even though we obviously had a real, you know, they dropped off the face of the earth basically for a year. Um, they still are a huge part of most marketing teams' budgets and still stuff like, this is why it blows my mind that the technology is so bad. And it's like, It feels like it should be pretty straightforward and I don't know what it is. Like, I don't know why. So any of you out there who are working with event technology, I'd love to talk to you. Like, I would, like, maybe we can have you on as a guest.

Yeah, for sure. The event, because the event, uh, the data is there. Like, for example, when I say like, how do you, um, filter by like gorgeous customers? We don't have to go into gorgeous CRM to see that there is this beautiful tool called Built With. That I use on a daily basis. I'm sure you've heard of it. So you go there.

I was using it just the other day.

Yeah, and you can see like, okay, what is this customer, what is this brand using, what like platforms does it use? So you could just integrate that into the portal of the conference and then you'd be able to filter e-commerce platform, tech solution providers, even agency maybe in their, you know, magic world. So Yeah, there is always ways, but unfortunately, like, it does take a lot of time and those portals are just, uh, I can tell you that whenever we need to do that with my team, we're not excited about it.

Yeah, no, I can only imagine. I mean, this, like, I wasn't kidding when I said this sounds like the kind of problem that an AI tool could, could do or, or, you know, to your point, right? Something that could connect in with, with GitWith or Clay or whatever. Okay. So given that there's a lot of this manual effort, right? Finding venues, finding prospects to have meetings with, things like that. How, like, I mean, that's a lot to do when you're doing the amount of events you're talking about with different sort of different scale and scope and timing and overlapping. How do you, you know, when we talked before, you said you used templates for that. I think you mentioned that's project management. I can't remember what, I think you said Asana, but I'm not 100% sure. Asana, yeah. I mean, how did, like, is that, how did you, yeah, what is it like, can you describe what you mean by template? Because I probably, like a lot of people, I have an idea in my head what that would look like, but I'm not 100% sure if that matches what you use. And then how much time did you spend upfront? Did you spend, like, have you been evolving that? Did you do it, take a little bit of time to develop them initially and then evolve them? What was that process like?

Oh, we keep evolving it every day. I literally made updates today in the morning. So we do keep evolving it every day. We add new event types, we remove event types. So just to give you, like, it's a very broad question, obviously, but I will try to give an overview. So how our process internally works, like with imagining, right, 30 to 35 events a month. So whenever anybody on the team at Gorgeous wants to do an event or suggest an event, either to organize or to sponsor, or suggest an idea for an event, they need to submit a request form to our team. So, they go to a certain Slack channel and they fill in the form. And then, that form has a number of questions that we're interested in when we review if this event is worth the investment or worth the effort from the team and worth the resources. So, that form has a lot of questions. What event type is it? Is it ABM? Is it an ABM experience? Is it beyond the concert? Is it a— trade show, is it a dinner, is it a webinar, virtual summit, then there is like obviously a cost associated with it. If it is a sponsored event, then how much it is to sponsor and what are the inclusions in the sponsorships. If it is a hosted event, then they would put like, okay, I'm expecting this number of people and I estimate this budget. And then we as an events team either say yes, this is how much it's going to cost. And we're like, oh no, that's not true. It's going to be way cheaper or way more expensive, right? So yeah, there's like a number of questions. So once the event gets submitted, We have our weekly event approval meetings happening every Friday, currently on Friday morning, our favorite meeting of the day. So we always like get together and we go through all these requests. Usually we have about— our team is very active and very motivated to submit those events because they do generate a lot of revenue for them, right?

Sure.

So it's a very good channel for them. So they submit these events and we usually have 10 to 20 requests a week. So we usually have like an hour-long meeting and usually—

20 a week?

Yeah, I would say so.

Wow.

And then, yeah.

Okay.

And that includes everything, dinners, webinars, anything. But yes, yes, that's a lot to choose from. And of course, we don't accept all of them. We usually, I would say, I don't have like an average number percentage, like on how many we approve, how many we pass on, but I would say sometimes it's 50/50, sometimes 60 to 30, 60 to 40, either way, or 70 to 30. So it depends, right? And then we like either reject, approve events, or we put them in the pending info section where there is like more, like we are lacking some information basically to make a decision. So we're like not ready to reject it or approve it. And also it's not just the events team that is participating in those meetings. We also have our partnerships team. team because we want their input. We have our influencer marketing manager, we have other team members also in that meeting. So it's like my team is leading the meeting, but other team members are giving their input, and we all make a decision together if it is worth, uh, the, the investment. Um, so yeah, once this gets approved, um, it gets assigned an events manager. We're 3 people on the team, including myself, and then I have 2 other amazing event managers. One of them is also based in Toronto, same as me. She's actually right here at the office And another girl is based in Paris, and she's covering most of our European and Australian events and also helping us in North America. So the event gets assigned to one of the 3 of us, and then once the event is assigned, there is an automated automation that creates a template in Asana, a template that we created beforehand, right?

Sure.

And that template is usually It's mostly just for internal guidance for an events manager because pretty much every event manager already knows what to do. You need to book a venue, you need to send invoices, find sponsors. Like there is already certain steps that we already know. Like you wake me up at 3 o'clock in the morning, I'll tell you all those steps, right? Like, Yeah. I don't need to look at the template at this point, but it is helpful sometimes just internally to look at it and kind of like, okay, did I send invoices? Did I submit certificate of insurance? Did I assign people from Gorges to attend? So there is like certain steps that are very helpful to check off.

Yeah.

Yeah. So we do have that and we rely on that, but not too much, I would say. And those templates are not really shared externally until the day of the event, the day before the event, when we have like an Excel spreadsheet with all the attendees, leads, lead capture. And that's the whole other thing that is something internal.

So I'm curious, there's a number of questions here. So as you get— because you're going through a pretty large volume already of events that are active and have already been approved and some that are probably approved previously but aren't really started yet. So when you get these new requests, are you sometimes having to go like, oh, we can do this one if we cancel this one that we already had approved? Like, are you going through that kind of process as well?

We rarely cancel the ones that have been approved unless there is a reason. So, or there is no budget loss. So there can be like, if you're asking me like what—

You had to do a deposit or something, right? Yeah.

So if you put a deposit, like, okay, example, we tried to do an ABM dinner last year in Indianapolis. We rescheduled it 4 times. And for some reason, just promotion just never performed. We like, we didn't, we couldn't hit the target. We couldn't invite the brands we wanted. And then we already put a deposit in the venue. I think it was like maybe $1,000 or something. We put like a deposit. And then like the girl, like the events manager who was running this event, she's like, Anna, like, this has been the 4th time we're trying to do this. The promotion is not going well. What should we do? On the one hand, I could say, yeah, it's $1,000. Let's, you know, like, let's proceed and let's still do it. But on another hand, we would have to send another person from another city to fly into the city, right? Because we don't have any team members in Indianapolis. So it would be the cost of people flying in. It would be their time, their frustration and disappointment upon arrival that there is no people in there.

Right.

And then we'll still have to pay on top of deposit. We would still have to pay. So the loss of actually hosting that event would be way higher than the loss of that deposit. So I made the decision to cancel it because sometimes you just do what you gotta do, right?

Yeah, no, I think that, that makes sense. Okay. So does it— now, because you have this whole process where that's all captured in Asana, in your case, could be another project management system, uh, does that also enable you to, um, publish or share the schedule, like upcoming schedule so people can see what's been approved or, or how do you communicate that out to the teams?

So for the schedule, we have another tool that's not Asana. It's called Airtable. I don't know if you heard about that.

Sure. Yep.

It's basically like a table, right? It's like a spreadsheet. So what happens every Friday after we run our approval meeting, anything that has been approved, we manually input it into Airtable with all the required fields. So because Asana can get a little bit messy and confusing for people because it doesn't really have like a list view, but in Airtable, can filter by city, filter by a person who is assigned, filter by event manager, filter by event type, filter by anything, literally anything. So it's very convenient. We used to have an Excel spreadsheet for that for the first 2 and a half years I was at Gorgeous, and that spreadsheet kept growing, and it worked. But I like Airtable way more because it's just way more manageable, it's way more digestible, So it's less possibility of a human error and typos because there's like dropdowns. Yeah. So we use Airtable. So anytime somebody comes to me, hey, Anna, where's the list of all our upcoming events? Please go to Airtable and see everything that has been approved. Nothing goes to Airtable if it is still unapproved or in the pending info or like only approved events go there.

Gotcha. Feels like there's some sort of automation that could happen so you don't have to do that manually. But we don't have to solve that problem.

Yeah, that's definitely, that would be a good improvement for that. But yeah, you do that manually for now.

Um, okay. So this is interesting. Okay. So we've kind of talked about what you, you know, the goals you set, but, um, I know like from my standpoint, another thing that's been a challenge is trying to come up with an ROI for lack of a better term. But what is, you talked about pipeline and revenue. But it's, from my experience, has been tough to do either because the technology is tough on capturing leads or because the people on site don't have the kind of discipline you want or whatever, right? So it's sometimes hard to tie that back to pipeline and revenue. So like, what are you doing for, I don't know if you call it ROI or attribution or something completely different, like the kind of the financial return on all these events?

Yeah, that's my favorite topic to discuss internally and externally.

Yes.

Yeah, attribution. So, if it is for something like, let's say we're at the trade show at the booth and the potential customer comes to us. So, there is a UTM link for gorgeous demo associated with that specific event. So, we create a property that is valid in our CRM. which is— we use HubSpot at Gorgias.

Mm-hmm.

And basically, we create a UTM associated with that specific event. And also, not only Gorgias demo, but also for each specific add-on product like AI agent or some other add-on tools that we have, we also create a separate UTM associated with that specific event. So, that's for onsite bookings, right? So, whenever the demo is booked, I look at the dashboard in SciSense and Periscope, And then I can see, okay, ShopTalk was last week and we had 5 demos booked. And I can see what demos, how much the deal amount is. So that's pretty convenient. For those ones that are not booked on site, that for example, our team member went to a dinner and they didn't book a demo while they were at the restaurant, but they had a nice conversation and the lead is potentially interested to learn more about Gorgias. So Then our partnerships or sales team after the event, usually we push within 48 hours after the event unless the event was on a Thursday or, which doesn't often happen, but on Friday, then of course we would wait the weekend and then we would send follow-ups to them. So that would be a manual follow-up that we all direct through a tool called Lemlist. So we don't send like direct email follow-ups just because it's impossible to track, but we do have like a tool for that. There is like direct enrollment tool, also has properties associated. So anybody who wants to send this manual follow-up and say, hey, I met you yesterday, here's the selfie with you, great times. By the way, this is the gorgeous demo link if you want to learn more about the product. That's something that every partner manager would send. And then the third option is automated follow-up. For example, we hosted a webinar and a partner manager or a salesperson didn't meet anybody in person, but they just spoke at a webinar and there is like 500 registrations. So we would send automated sequence for Yeah. Those leads through the same tool, but automated.

Got it. Okay. And then, so when, are you then, like, I am thinking of a very specific example, one place where the sales cycle was 18 months. This is the high-cost items, probably, I don't know if that's the same as yours, sounds like it's different. And Like, so there was no automated attribution to this. Somebody from that company attended an event 18 months ago, turned into an opportunity that we just sold for X amount of dollars. We could see it, right? It was a manual effort to connect the dots. Um, are you like, are you doing anything automated like that, or how are you tying the financial piece of it to it as well?

We have a, we have a window of 60 days. So if somebody attended an event event and booked a demo, they didn't have to be— so sales cycle basically starts from the moment they book a demo, right? So it doesn't matter if the event happened 2 years ago, but if they booked a demo within a certain period of time, which at Gorgias is 60 days, but it can be anything.

Sure.

It can be 30, it can be 12 months, right? Whatever you decide. But whatever the lead booked a demo after a certain— within a certain time after the event, it doesn't matter anymore how long the cycle, the sales cycle is, it will still get attributed to the events department. However, if the event happened and then 2 months passed and they didn't book a demo and they booked a demo within 3 months, but they use the event UTM, for example, they open their email 3 months later or they just like booked the— used the demo booking link for that event, we'll still count it towards events.

Yeah.

However, if it is like just they booked organically, it would not be attributed to events Okay.

So it's not that much different, but it's all connected. The dots are connected inside. It sounds like you use HubSpot. So, okay.

Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Makes sense. Okay. So our audience, mostly marketing ops folks, you know, as I mentioned, right, probably are working with their events teams or field marketers, depending on what they're called at their company. They may struggle sometimes with them and how they can help, right? What, how would you recommend marketing ops folks or martech folks help their events team? Like, what are some things they could be doing to help those teams to be more efficient, get better reporting, whatever it might be?

I would say automate communications where you can. And personalize communications where you can. Don't send the same sequence for every single marketing campaign. Adjust it based on the— if we talk about events, based on events type, based on the city, based on the— if a person registered or attended. For example, if somebody registered for a dinner but didn't come, we would send them an email like, oh, I'm sorry I didn't catch you last night at the XYZ restaurant. We wouldn't be like, hey, great dinner last night.

Right.

Right. So Yeah. So make sure that even if the follow-ups are automated, make sure that they make sense. Make sure they're sent to the right people. Like if it is an existing customer, don't sell your product to them because that is not a good look. If it is a partner, don't sell your product to them. If it is an exist— if it is a prospect, then it's an appropriate email to offer to look into your offering, right? Then Make sure that the follow-up is timely. If there is any bonus to add, like photos from the event or recording of the webinar or something that will bring value to the person receiving rather than you just like selling your product to them after the event, include that if you can. So for that, marketing teams and demand generation teams and growth marketing teams and events can work together. Try to share valuable resources as much as you can. For example, let's say we hosted a webinar about, about a certain topic about customer experience. Share some links to a blog or tell them, hey, you can subscribe to this newsletter to learn more about this on a weekly basis. Or, or you attended a webinar last night, but actually next day we have an event in LA. If you're in the LA area, please join us for the networking meetup. Or just provide some valuable resource. But in order for that to happen, events team needs to collaborate very closely to the marketing team. And I can tell you at Gorgeous, we can do a better job about that because sometimes everybody just does their own flows, but we don't sometimes know what each about each other, what everybody is doing. So yeah, that's—

I mean, it sounds like some opportunities for templates in a different sense, right? So say you're doing a webinar, you know that after every webinar, we want to send one email to people who attended, one to people who registered but didn't attend, one that maybe, maybe the ones who attended, you go like people who listened for, stayed on for half of it and those who didn't stay on for half of it or whatever. But that's a standard, right? You could say, I'm going to, we're going to spin up when an event comes to us. When you get your request, it gets approved, maybe it triggers something to the marketing ops team to go set up a template for the communications that go with it, right? Invitations, follow-up, et cetera, which is something I know I've done and probably many of our listeners, but it sounds like, I think what I'm hearing is like a big part of it is just like communicating.

Communicating and equally pre-event, post-event, and during the event. Equally, really important.

Yeah. Yeah. And then It feels like there's room to have templates there that could be loose too, right? I mean, I suspect for different audiences or different events, right, you want, even though you want to be on brand in quotes, right, you still want to leave room for matching, say, that event's ethos.

Mm-hmm.

So if the event is one that is Typically, it's a casual one. You don't necessarily need to have formal communications, right? You can have something that's playful or fun, right? So, you want to leave room for that kind of stuff, not just the personalization.

Oh, yeah, for sure. Like, and every single detail matters. Like, a quick example, last year I hosted a meetup in New York and I just decided to be creative. And sometimes it's a good thing and sometimes not. Instead of renting a regular kind of event space with like AV equipment and, you know, everything prepared for a networking workshop, I decided to rent a photo studio and it was beautiful. I was like in Manhattan and like really nice studio with like, you know, just a great venue with one little detail. When you come to the front door, there is like a buzzer that the building couldn't remove even during our event. So you couldn't really like enter the building without going through the buzzer. And I casually find out about this buzzer At like 7 PM the night before when I just come to the venue just to set everything up and just to walk through. I'm like, wait, how— like, is this going to be turned off? They're like, no, no, we can't turn it off. Like, so how do people get inside? Well, they need to know the buzzer. And I'm like, how will they know the buzzer code? Well, you need to send it to them. And it's like 7 PM, my event starts at 11 AM. You can imagine how— What it is like to rely on people actually reading my communication in time.

Yes.

So, of course, what I did, I sent 1,000 emails. I send notification reminders by phone if I had, like, for those who I have phone numbers for. And I hired a bodyguard that would be just like standing downstairs outside and opening the door for people.

Right. So, yeah. I love that because I'm fortunate my wife does a lot of events. In her world, uh, as well, nonprofit world and stuff. And I swear, like every, every time there's an event, I hear like very few of them go off without something that you just don't, don't expect. It seems like, I mean, that's a great example. The tornado one, you tornado warning.

Yeah.

Um, all those are great. Uh, so this has been, uh, really interesting. So, um, if we're gonna have to wrap up though, But I know that you're doing some webinars yourself too about how you do this. So I'd love for you to tell people about how they can keep up with you and learn, kind of learn what you're doing or maybe connect with you. And we can always share the webinar series too in our show notes. So what's the best way for folks to do that?

Yeah, for sure. I'm always open for a chat. So feel free to reach out. I'm on LinkedIn, obviously. You can find me by my first and last name. It's Anna Tomanova. You can also see it on the screen. You can just add me on LinkedIn, and I also have an email address at Gorgeous. It's anna@gorgeous.com. And also you can find a link to the webinar that will be shared with you after the— after this recording, after the session. And yeah, so my next webinar is happening on March 20th. And the webinar is called How I Run 350 Events a Year, and that's gonna be episode number 5. There I basically just talk about different, more narrow topics about events. So I've had episodes specifically about trade shows, how to maximize your presence at trade shows. I've had episodes about ABM experiences. There was an episode just about ROI generation and attribution. So there is, it's not only by event type, but it's also by event type or by topic.

Mm-hmm.

And yeah, so feel free to join the webinar. Be free to add me on LinkedIn or just shoot me an email. I'm always happy.

That's good. I'm glad you didn't bring up the how to get the most out of a trade show because I think we could have gone down a dark rabbit hole. I have a strong opinion about that.

Oh, for sure.

How you staff your booth makes all the difference, right?

Yeah. Oh, for sure. 100%.

Anyway, well, and it's just so fun. I really appreciate it. Thanks for sharing. And we'll make sure we share your webinar. And to our audience, thank you for your continued support. If you have suggestions for topics or guests or want to be a guest, feel free to reach out to Naomi, Mike, or me, and we'd be happy to talk to you about that. Till next time, bye everybody.

Thank you. Thank you for having me.