Webinar: A Month into the Digital Pivot for B2B Events

We have. Our New York event was due to be held on the 7th and 8th of April. It was going to be about 800 people. We sold out eight weeks before the event and six weeks out, we just hit our sponsorship target. So we were really happy, feeling super confident about the event. And then about five or six weeks out, the full extent of the coronavirus pandemic kind of started to really hit us. And after some pretty intense meetings with the senior leadership team and the board, it became really apparent that we weren't going to be able to run the event. And so we made the really difficult decision to postpone both the New York event in April and also our London event, which was due to be held in June with, we were hoping for 1800 delegates to that one. So I'm sure, as you can imagine, we're a really small company, there's just 12 of us. And to make a decision like that was very challenging, to say the least. And before we'd made those decisions, we'd had calls with all of our sponsors, our speakers, and a lot of key stakeholders in the conferences to really understand where they were at, what was happening in their world. It was the time when it was the week that this was happening, was the week that everybody was suddenly having to go and work remotely in the UK and the US and increasingly that was happening. So we, from those calls, we knew that we, that putting something on in the. During the April event time was going to be really important to all of our stakeholders. We thought it would keep us front of mind and it would also help support some of their challenges. So, particularly for the sponsors who still had lead targets to hit during April and that period, and we were hoping that would help them move with us to the, the postponed event dates later in the year. So, yeah, so that was kind of a bit of background behind the decision.

Okay.

And so three weeks out, we launched our first virtual event.

Wow.

Not a lot of time.

So three weeks to put the event together. And I think most of the people in the audience have got themselves into this kind of thinking mode of, okay, what technology should we use? So, although I don't want you to expand a lot about, on that process, but for the benefit of the audience, what tech do you use, what platform do you use and how do you go? How do you go about picking that tech?

Well, I mean, yeah, as you said, with three weeks to go, it's not a lot of time to choose the tech. So we, we had to make that decision really quickly and we chose to go with hey, Summit as the platform and then we live streamed to YouTube as well. And then we alongside that we used Slack and we used Slack for all of our interactive discussions. We ran speaker office hours after each session and so people could move to Slack after each live session to continue the discussion. I think sort of learnings from that we just had to make a decision pretty quickly. There's pros and cons from every platform, but I think it was actually quite useful for us with that time frame to put some constraints and boundaries around it. So quite early on we knew some things we couldn't do, which was frustrating, but it also really helped with that limited time frame. And I think now we have a much clearer moving forward we have a kind of clearer list of what we, what we want from a tech platform. And so we have, we're in a much better place now. We've used one to know what, where our kind of what our must haves are and where we can make compromises. And so it's much easier now. We've used one to go and pick one for a more permanent solution.

That's pretty interesting. And I just kind of wanted to understand also a little bit more on the aspect of you say Joe, about. Okay, you probably were expecting. What were your expectations before the event? Okay, so we're going to run this virtual event. How did you go about it? Did you do any marketing differently to the way you would have normally marketed your event or what was the result of that as you started seeing everything kind of happening the way that it developed?

Yeah, well, I suppose we'd never run an event like this before. We've done a few webinars for some of our other more technical conferences. We've never done anything like this for lead dev. So it's really new territory. So we put together some targets with marketing team. Our targets were a thousand registrations, 300 views on the day and 750 new Slack members in our Slack group. And I suppose our marketing plan, we wanted to again we had three weeks. We really didn't have a long, you know, a lot of time. So we were concentrating on emailing our full mailing list across all kind of global mailing list and then ads, some ads out using Twitter and LinkedIn and that was kind of it really. So we were a bit blown away with the results to be honest.

That's very good. But I think what is important and I think what I would like the audience to also gain the perspective is that the interesting part is that you've seen through doing this digital process that your audience really values and the audience has your back. Right. So that's a really, really kind of sweet story. Now, Joe, obviously, great, great story. Are you able to share with us a little bit what the good and the bad probably at this point in time on that front?

Yeah, I mean, I think you just touched on it just then. One of the amazing things was how our community kind of got behind us. And I think we've known how important our community is for a while. We've recently appointed a community manager. We've been planning a bit of a strategy around it, but we've been moving quite slowly on it and really carefully planning things out. And then obviously this situation has forced our hands. But of the 12,000 registrants, 9,000 were new to us, which is a bit mind blowing. And the reason for that is that our really loyal community amplified our message for us. And so the social sharing was kind of off the charts. The forwarding of our emails just massively pushed our message out to a bigger network than we could have dreamed of. And so we've suddenly, I don't know, I don't think that we could have planned or anticipated the speed and the scale at which we just grew the community. So it's both very exciting. We've now got this amazing engaged community, but also we now need to look after them and keep them engaged and keep them, keep them coming back for more. So exciting times. But.

Of course, we were speaking earlier. The team is obviously at this point in time running up full speed. One thing to clarify to the audience out there is that Joe and their community are lead developers. So they're techie, highly tech individuals. They are highly engaged in Twitter. And the reason why they use Slack is because Slack, Slack is the tool for developers. So I just wanted to kind of to clarify that.

So, yeah, absolutely. Our community is really happy and confident using these tools and so they're very comfortable using Slack to communicate. That's why it was really successful.

I think one aspect that I wanted to touch on, Joe, is you've gained a lot of new stats, a lot of new kind of KPIs, new metrics, so to speak. Do you, have you got any metrics or like in which you will assess this event or have you got any statistics that you are able to share with the audience so that they can get that perspective of what this now means or potentially means?

Yeah, I think that's been a really interesting learning curve that the things that we're measuring as successful for this event has had to shift quite wildly from what we would normally use as an in person event. One thing we were really interested to see was looking at the engagement of our attendees. So I think throughout the two. So our event was run over two days. We had two and a half thousand people actively participating on Slack in discussions with 20,000 messages sent over the two days. 5,000 people viewed the videos during the two days and many more afterwards. We've left it on YouTube and are promoting the videos now and they're getting many more views. And our sponsors collected 5,000 leads through a digital swag bag that we had on the site. So that level of engagement again just. We just didn't know what to expect. But that's far and above what we could have dreamt of really. So that side of it's really exciting. But yeah, the, the new metrics that we're trying to work out, how we measure success with this kind of quite fluid and transient new audience. It's definitely interesting and something we're trying out lots of different things and I think it will be something we iterate on as we move forward.

That's pretty cool. I think. Joe, I wanted to touch on one thing and I think there's a really interesting, fantastic idea that I saw on your event, which was the swag bag and linking this in particular. I have not seen this being done in any of the virtual events that I've attended that I've seen. So the swag bag, how does that work? How does that link with sponsorship? Because obviously whatever is top of mind and everyone attending here is how can we make money? How can we drive this? You know, the revenue for these events. It's clear that yes, one element is lead generation, building your database and everything. So clearly case study there for absolutely not charging. Just to bear in mind, you didn't charge for this for this session.

No, it was a free event.

So it was then more like your sponsors were the ones that were kind of backing you up on this. Tell us a little bit more about the swag bag and what does that mean and how did you engage that sponsor leads and all that sort of stuff? Because that's very interesting for the audience.

Yeah, so I suppose we decided when we launched the event that we were going to use this as an opportunity to kind of support our sponsors who were supporting us in moving to the. All of our sponsors moved with us to the postponed event. They were extremely understanding but we wanted to kind of give something back to them. So we offered this as a kind of free add on to their packages. Firstly, we definitely could have upsold. We in fact did upsell a few things because our sponsors were asking for it, which really shows the demand. I think there's huge opportunity to sell digital sponsorship packages for these events. They're incredibly valuable. And the number of leads, the 5,000 leads that downloaded that were collected by our sponsors is kind of testament to that. The SWAG bag, we actually did this one in a very light touch way. So the sponsors would have either a link to a free trial or something that they wanted to promote that we linked out to and then they collected their own leads. But we also encouraged them to do something a bit more creative. So a lot of them did things like if you engaged with their swag bag item, they'd donate an amount to either a coronavirus charity or a of tech charity. And those items in particular, people were shouting about them on Twitter and we've never had people shouting out about amazing swag before. And so the ideas the sponsors came up with, our sales team were really lovely and so people really loved the swag bag. And I suppose it's not quite the same as having a booth conversation. I think there's still a bit of work to figure out how you can replicate that one on one conversation, but it did go a really long way in getting towards that.

Amazing, Amazing. I have to say I loved it and I was kind of pretty impressed when that happened. Joe, I know that we can speak for hours and the audience would love to have it. I'm starting to see lots of questions coming in. By the way, questions are going to come through towards the end, if that's okay. The final question to you, Joe, is which I think is ultimately the key important part of this session that I want the audience to take, which is how is your business outlook looks or how does the business outlook look now with this history or this kind of big event that you've got on your back now and then, how does it look like moving forward? What is the outlook positive? What does that mean now moving forward?

We're always positive, Ricardo.

I know, I know.

I think, I mean, the immediate future future is virtual. We're still planning in person events, but we don't know when the next one's going to be held, in all honesty. So I think for us it's about focusing on a digital product offering that can match and align the needs of our audience and our sponsors. And for us, we're thinking that that is going to be a permanent new revenue stream for us and it will sit alongside the in person events when they come back. So we're planning for our in person events to return as soon as possible. But we're hoping that this is giving us an opportunity to create this second revenue stream that's actually going to push us further forward and leave us in a really strong position when we come out of the back of this. So when you're looking 6, 8, 12, 18 months further forward, we're actually a much, much stronger company.

Of course. That's amazing, Joe. And we'll kind of bring you back when we start asking the questions. Now let's just bring Raoul Monks from Flum sales training. Raoul, welcome.

Hey Ricardo, how are you doing?

I'm very well, thanks. Raul, do you want to give us a bit of an introduction about your organization, what you did, and to be honest, the context that kind of led you to be sharing your story with us today? Have to say to the audience that whenever I looked at individuals being socially, you know, being socially active, event organizations or anyone that is promoting any event or digital event, I am always keeping a very close eye to how they developed and how they promote themselves. And it is, it is Raoul and Flume has been one of these organizations that I was kind of really blown away from the very beginning of all these kind of process because the way in which they have started running their marketing campaign, positioning their events, marketing, all this new digital offering is to my standards, outstanding. And it's basically the way in which we generally advocate and evangelize that organization should run social media campaigns and then digital, digital event. So thank you, Raoul, for being here with us today. And I'll shout myself and I'll let you kind of take the limelight.

Wow, thank you so much and thank you for everyone for taking time to listen to us. I find it quite bizarre that we're here because up until three months ago, this really was not our forte whatsoever. Background is to our business. I started Flume sales training in 2010. My background is at United Business Media and previous versions of that company. And I started the business Flume Sales Training out of the belief that sales training should make a difference in terms of results. Couple of Years after that, 2012 realized the way clients were making decisions since 2009 had quite dramatically changed. So we started with a belief that we needed to help salespeople get into the shoes of clients. So we kind of had those two leading beliefs which was that sales training needs to stick and it's all about embedding stuff and helping people actually drive roi. And the second one Was all around getting sales into clients shoes to understand what would and wouldn't work and design approaches actually stick. So that's what we were up until eight weeks ago. We had had the most magnificent year we've ever, ever had. 40% year on year and we were getting amazing client results, couldn't have been happier. And then overnight fell off a cliff and we realized that training was no longer a priority. Ultimately training is an event. Right, because we were going into clients, businesses and we had the same impact a lot of you guys have probably had. Our core audience was media and events companies and we were running an event and that was quite tough. So we panicked for a few days. What on earth are we going to do? And then we came back to our core belief. One of our core, core biggest questions we always ask ourselves, which is why do we exist? Why do we need to exist right now? And it was that question that allowed us to do everything after. And what we've got now, coming from being a sales training business who ran modular programs, could prove the impact, getting amazing results. We had zero community apart from our clients. That was it. We didn't have any community, we had clients. So zero. We now have an engaged community of over 2,600 people who are interacting with us in various different ways. And that all came from one question, which is why do we need to exist right now? And that's how we got to where we got. And I can go into more depth on that in a minute.

But yeah, and I think what I really wanted to highlight, and I find it very interesting, Raoul, that in your webinar sessions, when you are doing, you know, the selling in a crisis, one of the things that you highlighted the most, I think it was on the first webinar was like, think about your audience, question your audience, understand it to a very good, great level of detail. Some people call it buy Personas, customer Personas, whatever name you want to have that you actually have gone through that process. I know that from the conversations with JoJo as well. Kind of actually went back when she went back and spoke to the audience. So that was an amazing story. So can you expand a little bit more? So what was the. How did this, after that customer understanding why do we exist? How did you come to build this digital portfolio?

First point is we didn't know we were going to. Like we genuinely did not know what the end was we were working towards at first, but we knew we had to do something and we knew that we had to do something. That sounds cheesy. But was right for the clientele and potential clientele that we needed to be working with. So that one question, I deeply remember the hour long conversation myself, Richard, Paul and Nicky had. And we were like, why do we need to exist? And that was to help the media and events industry sales professionals come out of this in the strongest position possible. We knew that if they didn't come through this, then we would struggle to come through it. And we, when we kind of polarized laser focus on that, we were so excited about it. We're like, we've got to just put this out to market. How can we do this? How can we do this? And we realized that by working out the purpose, we could work out different approaches, content that we could start delivering. So it kind of went, what does the audience need first? And then what's the messaging they need? And that gave us two core streams, pretty simple, which is help people sell in the crisis, help sales leaders, help to manage and lead remote sales teams. Two core ways we could massively help. We also did a little bit on the pivot to digital as well. So we went out to market almost immediately saying this is our cause. We stated it, put out LinkedIn, absolute matter of fact, this is why we now exist. We then said, these are the three ways we're going to help you first. And then we said, please let us know other ideas. My LinkedIn prowess was very, very limited before then. I'd had a maximum amount of views ever of 2000. That was when I was doing a long run last year, so wasn't even a business one. My average views was about 50 to 60. And off the back of that post I got 7,500 views. I'm like, whoa, what's happened here? Wasn't expecting anything, but because we put our calls out there, our purpose, and it resonated at the right time and answered the question they wanted answer people, just like Joe said, they shared it, they talked about it. And we went to our first, first webinar and we were not expecting very many people, not knowing what's going to happen, maybe 50, 60 people. And the Crowdcast system broke down and I was 15 minutes late because I couldn't log in because we had 1,600 people who were waiting to listen to it out of nothing. And that all came from the purpose side of things. And what we then did after the webinar, we kept people engaged and thought, what other content can we deliver it? How else can we deliver it? So we started looking more at platforms and that's Interesting, because we didn't look at platforms first. We thought, why do we exist? What's the message? And then we started looking at different delivery platforms. So we've started doing. We've got a YouTube channel. We've had an extra 1,500 views of that particular webinar. And in total, of all of our webinars, we've done four now. I think we've had about 5,000, 4,000 views, something like that. And we created flume sales chats, which are chats with people in the industry around what's working, what's not working. We did vlogs, we started doing all of this different content built out of that one purpose, and we're now looking at different stuff moving forward. So that's kind of where we've got to. But we've completely kind of repositioned what we are as a business. And people are getting very bored of seeing me and hearing me and beforehand. People. Well, people always say, I didn't even know a flume beforehand. But we've always been there. We've just never been vocal.

I think you got, you have highlighted something so understanding the audience, 3, 2, 3 core pain points, goals, etc. Which materialized into three webinar sessions. But then you ended up with a lot of content. You're doing the sales, the chats, the videos, which are amazing. You do your own videos on LinkedIn, you are doing blogs, you're doing YouTube and everything. By the way, I have never seen, with the exception of White October, an events business that gets kind of more than 10,000, 15,000 views on their YouTube channel. So you say you've got around 4,000 views onto your videos and everything. Because this is very specific, that's a very good feat. And I think also to highlight the context, you had zero. Now you have two and a half thousand people on your database. Anything you put out in the market, people will then follow you. That's amazing. How did you construct all this? Or was it that just abundance of content that you just kind of ended up with, that you started slicing and dicing and how, how that got about. I've asked you this at the very beginning.

It's funny because I remember when you. I thought you were joking when you first contacted me on LinkedIn saying, have you got an agency who's helped me put this together? I'm like, who is this joker? And then I started like, oh, oh, no, he's not joking. I didn't know because the way we've done it is literally just to go back and think, why do we need to exist? That was everything. It allowed you a gut feeling for why it's going to work. And that was that belief that the purpose is right. So just shift to the client's perspective. Spend every second thinking what wouldn't and what would work? What would I need if I was a sales director, an md, a CEO, and what would and wouldn't work and where do I need help to fit into that cause? And that's all we've ever done. We've just regularly reviewed it every time, seen what's working, seen what's not working. That's it. And I can go back in time and say why and what happened. But actually when we were doing it, it was just. That feels right because we've got the correct calls.

Right? So it was initially then, okay, we need to be here for my market, for our market, we need to be adding a lot of value. You have now a series of paid for sessions because everyone, again the question, and I'm kind of being the devil's advocate here, everyone is going to say, okay, great, but yeah, great in leads grading stuff, how does the revenue come into play? And I would like to kind of weave that as well into, okay, so right now, how does your business outlook and perspective look like now, moving forward?

Yeah, well, I'll be completely open about this. Up until, like I said earlier, eight weeks ago, we were having a booming time. It was amazing and like getting amazing results. We're not at that point yet. Right. But we've had a time where we're building this community, doing the right thing for people to get through this. And in the last two weeks, sorry, in the last week we've booked three brand new. Well on the verge of booking one of them. So two brand new and on the verge, but brand new bits of business with companies we never even worked with before. One of them exceptionally. No, two of them exceptionally big. Who 100% because that's what they've told us. They've come to us because of this. Now we did do, and we still are doing the paid for impact workshops. And those impact workshops basically came out the content of the webinars where we introduced three behaviors that salespeople needs to be demonstrating. Then we did a deep dive impact workshop because we are trainers at heart, hour long, which we just charged a nominal fee of £25. They're still on demand now. We made a little bit of money, but ultimately it's not going to make or break the bank. It was meant to be affordable. For people, which it is. But what we found works better is actually because we've got that community and because we can then look into the data and see what are the companies we want to work with, how many people have engaged with our community, how can we get them involved in the conversation? So we got them involved in flume chats, etc. So then they advocate it within their business and then we can go to these different leaders and influences with different ideas. One is loads of your people are already engaged, so you may as well do something and make it look like it's yours. Two, is that a silly, well, not silly idea. It's a cracking idea, but an easy idea, which is actually, well, why don't I do an hour long Q and A for your company to bespoke at 100%, which then brings all of that audience in front of us finding out how to do things. They take stuff away and then it just forges these relationships which I believe will last forever. And that's a big part now is I deeply believe what we do for the industry right now will last forever in terms of sentiment and feeling and trust. And we always, always as a business have always prided ourselves on doing stuff for the right reasons. We just haven't been overtly extrovert or vocal about it, whereas we are now. So we are now starting to see money. That's the wrong phrase, but kind of some commercial impact of this. But we never knew how long that would take and we realize that we probably might be waiting five, six months until any of that's happened. But doing the right thing for people and being vocal about it and proving it has started to open up revenue channels.

And I think that's kind of a very interesting scenario because I think for those of you guys that organize events or that are kind of looking at what that digital pivot is. Taking elements of our previous webinar where we were discussing with Julian about the digital. The different metrics, the different digital KPIs that one needs to take into account. I think you're a very good example because you have engagement on the webinars, then you have engagement on your social channels, then you have engagement on your YouTube channels, and different people consume content in various different ways. So essentially that community is dictating which way you should go about doing things. If we look into how an event organizer with a portfolio event is kind of monetizing that then you're going to start to look at, okay, what is happening as a result of this webinar. Or this kind of a live virtual event, how did you slice that content? How was the engagement in those different areas? Because in many cases you would be surprised as to how your audience consumes content. And I think one important element I think is not about the live webinar. It's not about the live virtual event. It's what happens after. Right. And I think that's fine. So, Raoul, so what's the moving forward? How does that look like anything that you can share? I mean, are you still running a sales training event or is it looking more like, is it a different company?

Now.

Ultimately, where I say we're a sales training company, that's where we excel. We are very, very good at it. I'm very proud of that as our base. But there are other ways we've realized we probably would never have looked at for, well, maybe ever that we now have accelerated massively because we've realized how many different ways we've been much braver because we've had to be right. But kind of looking forward, we've just put out a message yesterday on LinkedIn to ask the industry to get involved in what I feel is the most pertinent and important and urgent conversation right now, which is around setting a benchmark for sales excellence post outbreak. Because my belief, and we kind of heard this a little bit from Joe just now, and we're hearing it from so many people who are joining webinars and they're like tuning out after two minutes because it's like you can behave differently as audience members. Clients are having to have a watertight business case, which means that sales excellence is being like, it's so exaggerated the importance of sales right now. And so right now, what sales excellence looks like has been defined as we speak. And what we want to start and what we're trying to drive is a conversation with the industry where they work with us to help define sales excellence coming out of the outbreak. And so we've committed to a series and we're not going down a webinar route necessarily. It's a series of conversations. So we're going to be releasing proper information about it in the next couple of days. But the idea is we're going to be introducing research, we're going to be introducing discussions, we're going to be introducing plans as way forwards, roundtables, essentially lots of different interactions to drive conversations from the buyer's point of view, the audience point of view, and therefore the sales and events companies, the media companies point of view to create a benchmark which then becomes a benchmark for sales within the industry, which ultimately will allow us to kind of position ourselves in a place of excellence. But I'm very proud to say we are very good and I think we're a good place to do that. But equally, we don't know every answer and we want the community involved to help build it because we believe if they help build it then they're going to want to stick to it more. And that's always been our problem is it's easy for us to tell people what to do or train people, but getting people to actually want to do it and follow through with it is tougher. So we're going for the co creation approach and I'm really excited about it as you might be able to see.

And I think this is amazing. I think that the key summary that I have here is that as you call it, the, the co creation, even from Joe's point of view is the agile. You have to be agile. You can't get too bogged down into the details. You just have to iterate, iterate and iterate. Raoul, thank you very much. Now let's just kind of open, open the panel for Fergus. Fergus has the context of many organizers or many organizations because you guys within Collingwood Advisory are currently helping some companies through the digital pivot. And it seems that Joe and Raul have been doing things like mostly driven by conversations with the audience, driven by the massive abundance of energy. But it is not like that. There is a process and there is probably, they knew it or not, but there is a process that they probably have been following and the background is a process and a framework that you guys have developed that you guys are kind of basically driving forward. So Fergus, welcome. Do you want to give us a bit of introduction about yourself and about Collingwood and then we can just get, get into the meat of it? 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, 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 these 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 continue 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 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, Fergus, I have this slide about if you, whenever you want me to bring it up, I will bring it up if it's, 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 kind of 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 are speaking. Course, 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 running 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, yeah, happy to. So this is a process that we continue to iterate onward, but it's one founded in a very successful process. It's one that's worked for digital product development for 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 3, 6 12, 5 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 this is that 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. Yeah, 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. You can obviously play on the fact that, you know there are some business challenges that have been amplified by Covid, but the more you can play on actual like what is the CEO? What keeps a 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. It's 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. 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 you're 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 outcomes 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. Yeah, top of the class.

I've been kind of looking at this process for a while and I think, yes, kudos to Joe and Raul 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.

Let's see. We have a lot of questions. One thing that I wanted to kind of ask, one thing is if everyone is at this point in time doing some sort of product development, product iteration, if you care to have a bit of a laugh, I'll strongly recommend you look at Piers Burn series sabbatical product development, where he's just basically been documenting every single day the trials and tribulations of what Ventrepreneurs or any entrepreneur is at this point in time facing. So I strongly recommend you do that. You might as well have a laugh at, at the whole process. But on a serious note, it is kind of extremely, extremely important to be agile. So we've got a lot of questions, and we only have four minutes. I wanted to ask the panelists if it is okay, from your point of view, to extend it for a bit of five minutes after we finish the hour. I'm gonna basically ask the audience, if you don't mind, or if you want, we can stay five minutes answering those questions. And then if it's okay with you. I mean, there's obviously a lot of questions for Joe, and there's some questions for Raoul and Fergus. If you can't, if you're not able to do it, what we'll do is. But my promise is I will make sure that I'll pass on the questions to them and I'll publicize that through my follow up email. So Joe Fergus roll. Are you okay to extend it for a bit of time or do you guys have a hard stop?

Fine.

Yep, I'm okay. Yeah, Good.

Perfecto. I just wanted to kind of put this into the for vote. Okay, this is a question for Joe. Did you vary the different types of formats you used across the event and what approaches engaged your audience best?

Yep. So we did a mix of pre recorded talks, live hosted panel sessions and then they were linked together by our live hosts. And then we were then taking attendees out to Slack to take part in discussions, speaker Q&As and interactive exercises. I think that mix was really good. I think it changes up the pace a bit like you would in a in person event. It's still, I think if you just had talk talk, talk, Talk Talk is less exciting. I suppose the thing, the big mindset shift that we've had is that you can't expect somebody to sit in front of their computer for four hours. It's not like an in person event. People are much more likely to pick and choose the sessions they're interested in. So our average viewing time is 45 minutes, which we were actually really, really pleased with because I think that suggested people were watching probably two sessions and then participating in some discussions. But yeah, I think, I don't know if we have. I don't think one of the drawbacks of the hey Summit platform we used was that we didn't get really detailed attendance data for each session. And so it's difficult to tell exactly when sort of when people were dropping off or whether panels are better than talks. But my gut is, my gut feel is a mix is good.

Okay, good. Thank you. Thank you, Joe. Now I think this would be Dee McKenzie with your permit. Oh, so this is one what I would be. This is probably for Joe and Raul and Fergus because I know Fergus, you've done a lot of work on the understanding the tech or the platforms. What will be the top three requirements for an events platform going forward based on the learnings thus far, Joe, from.

My point of view, audience data information, so tracking on who's viewing and what they're looking at and then also like lead gen tracking. I think, I think using something that's tested so there's a load of new tech springing up left, right and center makes me a little bit nervous that some of it isn't tested. So I think something that's been around for a little bit longer might be a good option and then always something to consider. At least. And then for us, something that's really important is now looking at something where we can have the content so really securely behind a data or paywall. So I really, at the very least, if I'm giving away the content for free, I really want to get a load of data so that. So, yeah, something where you can collect the data is really important.

Good, Raoul, from your point of view.

Yeah, for me, I think, because at heart, we're a training company, a platform that allows you to engage with the audience and allows the audience to engage in different ways, whether it's through polls or whether it's through breakout rooms or whatever. That's really important for us because ultimately we want people to stay there and not just leave the platform. I think for us also, because a lot of all of our stuff is on demand afterwards. The video playback quality, it sounds like a small thing, but it's quite a big thing. Like Zoom, for example, in my opinion, has better video playback quality than crowdcast as an example. Although crowdcast is very good for collecting data and research and things like that. So balancing that and that ability. Joe just said it. But to research your audience, we've never had that before. Crowdcast, not that I'm advocating for that over something else, but gives you a really great ability to catch a brilliant data and ask brilliant questions. So for us at the moment, that's probably the most important stuff, but that might change over time.

Fergus, you've done an analysis extensively of all the platforms. What's your thoughts?

Yeah, not quite all, but certainly ones I'd say were relevant for events and publishing entrepreneurs. I think there's two things here. One is, and Joe pointed to this, everyone's running at this ball at the moment, right? And there's loads of companies developing loads of tech. Event technology has been around event platforms, digital event platforms.