Fergus Gregory Director at Collingwood Advisory- Various cases using a digital pivot framework

Sure. Thanks Ricardo. Great to be here. And how to follow those case studies. It's always amazing to hear from entrepreneurs who are actually making this work. So Collingwood Advisory, we advise media and events entrepreneurs on strategy, value creation, science, scale up exit strategies, corporate finance, and we believe that the opportunity, there is an opportunity that's been created by this for events businesses, for digital publishers to focus on creating long term value in their business as well as overcoming some of the short term challenges that have been presented as a result of COVID And it's great to hear the stories today of organizations changing rapidly. My background is in B2B media and events. I joined Collingwood at the start of the year and I was on my way out of a well known media and events business called the Drum. So I actually got an opportunity not only to advise other organizations on this process, but was also actually living this process for the rest of my life at the coalface with the Drum. And the Drum was one of the first organizations to move in that area and we learned a lot along the way and continued to learn daily, which is what makes this necessary and enjoyable in some respects. So yes, whether Raoul or Joe knew this or not, there is a, there is a process that they've been following and that process started with, if I were to distill it down, it started with a question that a lot of folks ask. And whatever the digital transformation process is, whether it be one where you have a gun to your head like many of us have at the moment, is one based around how are we going to help the most important people in our community? It's a really important question.

Right. And by the way, Fabios, I have this slide about if you, whenever you want me to bring it up, I will bring it up if it's necessary. So you guys have the context of various organizations. What would you say is obviously you've mentioned about, understand about the customer. Is there any other success stories or not so successful stories, obviously keeping the confidentiality that you can kind of for the benefit of the audience here kind of are able to come to share on that, on that part as to how anyone that is probably has not done the pivot yet or that's still thinking about it, how they, what they should be thinking about. And I'm sure that that's going to lead into that framework. But are you able to share something along those lines? Any context in any other cases?

Yes. Yeah. And the success stories are the ones that people are talking about. And we've got two on the, on the call here. There are plenty of less successful attempts at this, and we're beginning to hear feedback from clients. And, you know, having sold sort of digital events, webinars and digital media for years and sold it as a hybrid with offline events and built very successful marketing solutions businesses around that, the market has always been awash with failed attempts at digital marketing and failed attempts at digital events. There are more of them at the moment and we are all noticing them a lot more because it's the only way we've got to engage because we're not at other events or running other events. And so there are a couple of areas where I've seen those fail in the past and I think it's just amplified at the moment. The first one is that they're not thinking about the most important people in the room. They might be assuming, particularly for events businesses and digital media businesses, they might be assuming the most important people in the room are their paying clients, when really the most important people in the room are the client's customers. And whilst you at an event can program in a way that attracts that audience in and then they're stuck with you for two days or three days or a week or wherever they are, they're there. So they're much more likely to engage in things that they might not normally engage in. You can't get away with that online because your audience, A, they might not even register for it in the first place if it's not a grade in terms of content, and B, they're soon going to switch off if it's not a grade in terms of content, which puts a lot of pressure on us as those speaking on webinars, of course, and I'm glad the other two went first.

And so, like Fergus, what's. Are you able to expand a little bit more on the framework that probably Joe, Raul and many, many people that run events should or are following knowingly or unknowingly, and ideally just to help them kind of put some structure into it. And I know that we only have like 10 minutes, but that's kind of. Are you able to share with us a little bit more about that framework or about that process?

Yeah, happy to. So this is a process that we continue to iterate on, but it's one founded in a very successful process. It's one that's worked for digital product development for four years, and it starts with the audience and it then brings in your customers and then ends with execution of the process. And we'll talk about that in a second. I think the interesting difference For a lot of organizations at the moment, there are two interesting differences. Number one, we have to do this with haste, we have to do this fast, and we're doing this fast, which means you don't normally have the three six twelve, five year development cycles that you might get in another digital product development process. The second part is often you're carrying a whole heap of customer liabilities and so what you need to do is this with that in mind. And so we've developed this out with that in mind and nuance. And it broadly revolves around these three core tenets. We habituate the market and indeed your existing customers to your ability to deliver results digitally. We then mitigate the existing liabilities that you carry and we focus on those two things first and then you go and accelerate and sell new things. I think there's a slide coming up which will help keep me honest. So it's about focusing on your existing customers first. And really there are five steps to discharge liabilities and then you can go and do the fun bit which is about winning market share. So there are five steps to that. The first thing is you focus on the most important people in the room, which is the audience, their pain points. You define the most important Personas, particularly the most important Personas to your sponsors, but the most important Personas in your community and and you really get to grips with what their pain points are. And the more the peeling back the layers of the onion is really important on this. The more you can get down into not just their needs but their real business challenges. And the more you can obviously play on the fact that there are some business challenges that have been amplified by Covid. But the more you can play on actual like what is a CEO? What keeps the CEO up at night and what will always keep a CEO up at night for the next period and really start to build off the back of that. You can then build a really strong content proposition by focusing on some core Personas and their pain points. So going back to the how are we going to help the most important people in our community? You can then think about how you can best help them by mapping the inventory to them. So expecting the CEO of a large organization to attend a two day virtual event is somewhat wishful thinking. I would suggest they might fly into an event, but I tell you what, they're still working at that event and they will not give 100% of their time for 48 hours at that event, necessarily for most industry events. And so expecting them to do that online is just not going to happen. So really thinking about how you're delivering that content in the best possible way, at the best possible times, in a way that is going to be most useful to your audience is absolutely vital at this point. And you start with that, then you start to think about how you value and price that inventory. And one of my key takeaways and one of the mistakes that I see happening time and time again is people undervalue digital inventory. We did it as publishers back in the turn of the century where we basically said you can have digital for free or for pennies if you keep your print advertising going. Don't make the same mistake as event organizers going digital. There is huge value in digital engagement. Digital engagement is different, but there is huge value at the end of it, particularly if one of your vendors, your sponsors, gets a sale off the back of it. And so really, when you're valuing and price in that inventory, it's about looking for what are the outcomes of a digital campaign and how much is that worth to our customers. And then looking at pricing your inventory. You then go by a customer by customer approach, starting with the people that you've already got the cash for and that are worth the most for you. And you then map, you have a defined sales story by that point for each and every one of those customers, because you know exactly who it is that they want to target. You know exactly what the output that they will now need from the event or from whatever it is you're doing digitally. And so therefore you have a really credible sales story which maps back to why they need to be doing it now and why their audience and why your audience needs their help. And then once you've done that, you go live and you launch and you deliver. So you tell people what you're going to do and you advise them on what you're going to do. You then go and execute it. And then the crucial part is afterwards you're going to keep telling them how good it was. And that's when your upsell conversations start to come in. Once you've delivered and you've mitigated some of that liability, you can then start those upsell conversations. What that gives you is a load of really wonderful market leading case studies that you can then take out to the market and start driving new business. So there's a real process in this. And when Joe and Raoul talk through what it is that they've done in slightly nuanced ways, they broadly followed this process, whether they've known it or not. So Kudos guys. Well done. Top of the class.

I've been kind of looking at this process for a while, and I think, yes, kudos to Joe and Raoul. And the thing that. Fergus, how long. You just talked about agility, right? You have to do it fast. Joe did it in three weeks. Raoul probably has done this in two, three weeks, or, you know, probably even less. How long? When I know how long is this piece of string? How long can someone that's at the moment thinking about, okay, I better. It's may, I better do something about this. I want to follow this process. How long can this process take, generally, normally, or.

Yeah, it depends on your organization, the resources you've got to hand, and it depends how close you are to your market. Crucial to all of this is your ability to speak to not only your customers, but also your audience about this. And so you go as fast as your customers and your audience will let you. You can do this pretty fast. We've got customers who are doing it and have done it in a month. We broadly followed this process. Again, whether we kind of knew it or not, at the drum. We did that in two weeks. We called it pretty early and had to convert a bunch of events in March into digital events into a digital festival. And we did all that in two weeks. So you can do this pretty fast. I would urge you to not rush, though. It's vital to get an MVP out. So what you don't want is that old kind of, we've got to get everything perfect before we go to market, because you'll never get to market. But also, there are important parts of this that you don't shortcut. But, yeah, you can do it in weeks, you can do it in months. It depends on the urgency in the business and the resources at hand.