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Checked In with Splash
Using Data to Build a Third-Party Event Strategy That Gets Results with Alex Reynolds (Part One)
In this episode, host Camille White-Stern sits down with Alex Reynolds, CEO and Co-founder of Vendelux. They explore the need for data in developing a third-party event strategy that generates revenue, how to leverage that data to get the right people in the room, and more. Plus, they discuss how marketers use tools like Vendelux to gain data-backed insights that help them find their audience and drive their third-party strategies.
- Follow Splash on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/splashthat-com/
- Learn how to maximize your presence at third-party events: https://splashthat.com/blog/how-to-maximize-your-presence-at-conferences-and-trade-shows
This is Checked In with Splash. Hey friends, welcome back to Checked In with Splash. If you're a new listener, I'm Camille White-Stern. I lead experiential marketing here at Splash and I am deeply passionate about helping other marketers reach new heights of success and unlock new levels of career growth, all by breaking down the keys to impactful event marketing and the steps required to achieve event-led growth. In today's episode, I sit down with Alex Reynolds, CEO and Co-Founder of Vendelux.
Camille White-Stern:Vendelux is an AI-powered event intelligence platform that offers users insights on attendees and sponsors of over 200,000 B2B events around the world. I've been using Vendelux here at Splash since the summer of 2023, and it has completely transformed the way I approach our third party or conference and trade show strategy for Splash and has become an integral part of my event marketing tech stack. In our conversation, I get Alex to share some background on his career journey, why and how he created Vendelux, the importance of data in crafting an effective event strategy, and how to use that data to target the right people to register for and attend your events or engage with your brand. This is part one of a two-part conversation, so be sure to tune into the second half of our convo, where we dig into more tactical ways to drive event registration and attendance, especially among your VIPs and decision makers, and how to build a holistic, event-led growth strategy with data-backed insights. Without further ado, let's go ahead and get checked in with Alex Reynolds.
Camille White-Stern:Alex, thank you so much for joining me on the Checked In with Splash podcast today. I'm really thrilled to have you here for a number of reasons. Personally, I'm a huge fan of your company's tool, your company being Vendelux. Of course, I think there are so many interesting topics we can dive into today not only how you created Vendelux, but the importance of data when it comes to events, how to get the right people in the room with specific tactics that we can dive into. There's a lot of ground I'm hoping we can cover today. Let's go ahead and dive right in. I would love to start by just hearing a little bit about your career journey to date how you went from platform solutions and business development to becoming a full-fledged entrepreneur and creating such a successful company and tool like Vendelux. Tell me how you got started and how you got to where you are today.
Alex Reynolds:Absolutely. Thanks for having me on the show. From an early age, I've been really fascinated with how or I was fascinated with how people built and maintained relationships. We moved around a lot when I was younger and it was like how do you maintain those friendships, how do you build new ones, how do you bridge those gaps? I've always been really interested in just building teams, building businesses, whether it was a lemonade stand or what have you. Those two themes have really permeated throughout my career. I was a strategy consultant, solving problems with team members, then spent about a decade in strategic partnerships really thinking about how do you build great relationships with other companies, how do you build these win-win relationships? Then ended up building a business unit within a public company as an entrepreneur. That's where we got the idea for Vendelux. Now, for the last two and a half years have been building the startups.
Camille White-Stern:Those themes have really been the core of the journey so far. Very cool and very up-preposed to, I think, relevant to what event marketers our audience thinks about every day. It's all about building relationships to drive revenue for our organizations at the end of the day. I love how you've brought up these themes. I think these are going to be themes we'll come back to again and again in this conversation. Just also so interesting to hear how you got to where you are today as a CEO of Vendelux. Tell me a little bit more about the specific challenges that you started to become aware of. That gave you that initial inspiration for a tool like Vendelux and led you to that realization that there is a need for the solution that you provide today.
Alex Reynolds:Yeah, absolutely. I was at Shutterstock, a public tech company, with my co-founder, Stefan. The two of us were building this brand new business unit around our API and around our data. We were doing first of its kind relationships. We found that the best way for us to drive new customers and to keep existing customers was through events. When we met people at events, amazing things happened.
Alex Reynolds:The problem was, when it worked well, it was amazing. When it didn't work well, it was a huge waste of time and money. We looked at each other and said this is great, but we have to figure out a better way to make sure that we are getting the most impact from the channel. When we ended up talking to the broader event marketing team at Shutterstock, we realized, okay, this isn't just an issue that we were facing as a small business unit. This is something that the event marketers at Shutterstock were facing. Then we ended up talking to hundreds of event marketers and it was like, hey, actually, events are anywhere from 24 to 40% of B2B marketers' budgets, Yet it's actually really difficult to make data-driven decisions. We said, hey, if we can help companies and event marketers with this major problem, there can be something there.
Camille White-Stern:Yes, I think you've definitely hit the nail on the head on some of the major issues and challenges that marketers face today. Like you said, really getting as much value in ROI from a channel that can be very powerful. But, as you said, when things are not working well, then it becomes a very expensive channel and really hard to justify continued investment. Can you break down a little bit how could an event marketer benefit from working with a tool like Vendelux today? What could their process look like? And then I have a follow-up question for you, which is more so around tips for event marketers who maybe are evaluating Vendelux. Maybe they don't have the budget. How could they kind of prove a business value case for bringing Vendelux on board? But before you get there that's a two-parter question and it's meaty Tell us a little bit more about how Vendelux can be added to the event marketer's tech stack and how it might change their process in working.
Alex Reynolds:Yeah, and we'd love to hear how you're using it as a customer right as well, right?
Camille White-Stern:I will absolutely share how I use it. I want to hear from your brain how you intended it to be used.
Alex Reynolds:For sure. So I think there's a lot of parallels, sort of pre-Vendelux, a lot of parallels from the event space to where advertising was pre-digital. So it's kind of like we know 50% of our spend is working, we just don't know which 50%. Or everybody is kind of aligned that when you bring people together for a shared reason in the shared space, that magic can happen. Not really tying the value from those touchpoints, those analog touchpoints, to business outcomes, revenue pipeline retention is very difficult. And so without Vendelux, a lot of marketers are already trying to do this right.
Alex Reynolds:I think sort of everyone understands that it's important to know. If I can understand who's going to be at an event, if I can reach out to them in advance, if I can book a meeting or invite them to my Splash event or basically get that f ace time, that really good things can happen. And if you're exhibiting at an event, you're spending 25K, 50k, 200k, $2 million on the event and that's a sunk cost and so you have to make sure that you're doing everything in your power to get as much value from that as possible. So without Vendelux, marketers are trying to do this, but it's actually very difficult to know where people are going to be.
Alex Reynolds:50% of event attendees don't sign up until the last two weeks before the show, so oftentimes they don't even know what conferences they're going to. And so that's the main challenge that we're looking to solve today at the beginning, even before you've committed sponsorship or exhibitor dollars, before you go to that show, how can we help marketers understand what types of people, what types of companies and what types of personas are going to be at a show so that they can cross-reference that with their pipeline, their CRM, all the information that they care about, to make more informed decisions ahead of time, and then, as the event starts to come up, make sure that you're reaching out to those folks as early as possible so that you can get on their calendar the most in-demand people. They have tons of options. Lots of people want to meet with them, so the sooner you can lock them in and make sure that you're going to be the one to meet with them, the better chance you have to drive meaningful outcomes for your company.
Camille White-Stern:Yeah, thank you for the breakdown. I really want our listeners to understand how they could benefit. As you said, I can speak from firsthand experience. Not only has leveraging Vendelux's data completely transformed the way I approach annual and quarterly planning for our events. As you said, it has changed the way we go outbound with our event promotion, whether or not we are investing in a booth at a conference or a trade show or we're going to be a little bit more scrappy and maybe just host our own ancillary or wrap-around event.
Camille White-Stern:Either way, it is invaluable to know who's going to be attending that conference or trade show.
Camille White-Stern:I want to know if my prospects are going to be there, if my customers are going to be there. I want to know who else is sponsoring that conference or trade show and I also want to know if my competitors are going to be there. So, being able to look in Vendelux and see all of that data both the predicted data and the confirmed data, as you said, as we get closer to that event, it feels like I don't even know how we operated before. To be honest, sometimes it feels like you're flying a plane with a blindfold on and no technology or GPS or no air traffic control to help you figure out how you're going to land the plane, and so for Splash and our team, that has been just an absolute game changer. And I will say firsthand I saw the value right away with Vendelux. As soon as I saw the tool and I had my first conversation with Megan about it on your team I was kind of sold and, to be transparent, I was sold and then I had to convince my leadership team and my.
Camille White-Stern:CFO that this is going to be a tool that we need in our tech stack. Luckily for me, Splash is an event tech company as well, so we already internally really understand the value of events. I don't know if it was as hard a sell for me as it might be for someone else. I'm curious if you have even just one tip that comes to mind that you could share with anyone who's trying to make the case to bring Vendelux on. What would you say to them to kind of equip them with a really strong way to build a business case really for adding Vendelux in an age where we hear this all the time? People want to consolidate their tech stacks, but I think consolidation is fine. Everyone is concerned about budget, but I think it can't be understated how important it is to have the right tools at your fingertips. So what would be kind of your number one tip for someone who's trying to get their CEO, their CFO, to see the value?
Alex Reynolds:Yeah, totally. I mean, one bad event costs more in sponsorship dollars and time than Vendelux is going to cost. So that's you know. It's interesting. We think about what we're doing as category creation. It's not like there's some large company that does what we do and we just do it with AI or do it in the cloud. And so, to your point, the justifying budget and helping to make that case is something that we have to help a lot with, because it is hard and most CFOs or CEOs are going to be skeptical, like why do we need one more tool in our toolkit?
Alex Reynolds:Every company claims that they're going to help you with ROI, and so for our customers, if they, as long as they're going to enough events right, because, of course, if you have, if you go to one event a year, maybe it doesn't make as much sense, but if events are a key part of your strategy, then for the price of one sponsorship, if you can help to optimize the other, you know 95% of your budget make better decisions. That's ultimately going to help you drive more revenue, help you decrease the risk of your strategy and even decrease costs. Right, we have a. We had a lot of customers that were in a cost cutting environment where every marketing dollar was being scrutinized, and so to be able to cut out the events that you can say, hey, my core audience is not going to be there, and then allow you to double down on the events that matter, allows you to do so much more with less.
Camille White-Stern:Yes, I agree, I can attest firsthand and it's kind of similar with Splash. I think what is interesting between both the mission of Splash and the mission of Vendelux. We're ultimately we're here to help our customers get better ROI from their event spend right. And when I say better ROI, we want to see that in bottom line right, we want to see that in revenue. So I think this is kind of a perfect transition into my next question that I want to kind of dig into with you.
Camille White-Stern:I want to talk a little bit more about the importance of data when it comes to events and drill into some of the challenges that companies are facing when it comes to driving pipeline from events, because that's the name of the game at the end of the day. If we're investing in events, it's because we want to see revenue from these events right. So I'm wondering if you can provide some insights into just how you think about maximizing event impact in the marketing channel and even if you want to touch on kind of my next question I like to sometimes give a preview of my next question is talking about the role of first party data versus third party data. With cookies kind of gone right, I think events play an even more critical role in a business's ability to collect relevant data, and I'm just wondering, as the CEO of Vendellux, what's your take on all of that and the role of events evolving business decisions and being able to make, as you said, more data driven decisions? How can we get there?
Alex Reynolds:Yes, so there's first party events and there's third party events, and it's slightly different, I think, for first party events. I think Splash's example is a great platform to help show the ROI of your own first party events. Right, because you can tie who's going to be there to your CRM to be able to track that journey and you kind of control the end to end experience by you know, because you know who's going to be there ultimately, right? So whether it's first party or third party, it's all about who's going to be at the event. Right? You could have the best person, right? Somebody that you're doing a $20 million deal with at an event, but if you don't have the right conversation with them, or if you have a trade show conference, you have a booth, they don't come to your booth, you don't meet with them then that's a huge missed opportunity. So I think that without understanding who's going to be at an event and without making sure that you actually meet with those people, it's almost like in product. You know, if we build it, they will come. It's an imbalance strategy. You're hoping that you set up a booth and that people come to you.
Alex Reynolds:So we really think about turning that model on its head, where you start with the people that you want to meet with, and that could be people in your active pipeline, in your CRM.
Alex Reynolds:That could be your existing customers, that could be the personas of folks who you know. You know you sell to TTOs and supply chain, and so you want to have that type of persona come to your event and if you know where those humans are going to be, then you can invite them to your first party events. You can find them at third party events and you can create those touch points and then from there you just need to be able to measure it, and this is not. I think this is difficult, especially for third party events today, where there's so much analog activity that happens at an event. There's so many side conversations. You meet someone at the bar or you meet someone in passing, and so to be able to translate all of that activity into digital data points is something that I think there's still not a clear solution, something that we want to help with in the future, but I think that's the next step. If you meet with the right people, then it's translating that into your actual, your funnel and your pipeline.
Camille White-Stern:Yeah, and you know you mentioned your CRM we use Salesforce at Splash, and so I mean, I know that Vendelux has an integration where you can connect your CRM, your Salesforce, to Vendelux, which is really to your point. You're collecting all of these important data points. You need all of that to feed into your source of truth, your data source of truth, and that, to me, is really another really powerful value add, because you don't now have these like disparate Systems and platforms of event data that aren't talking to each other. Right? I mean, again, I can speak firsthand how we use Vendelux at Splash.
Camille White-Stern:We are looking at the data we see in Vendelux. We can easily tie that into the rest of the data that we already have in our CRM and then we see this really kind of rich story come together and, to your point, we know now not only okay, if I look at a specific account or contact in our CRM, I know, you know if they're a prospect or a customer. I can see where they are in their kind of buying stage with us a little bit, I know which events they're going to, right, I know I can empower my sales team or my customer success team more easily to say, hey, we need you to reach out to these people. It takes a lot of the guesswork out of it, out of the strategic planning and the execution. So I feel like we could go on and on about the importance of data when it comes to Developing a thoughtful event strategy and being able to maximize your event spend and get better ROI.
Camille White-Stern:I am curious let's stay on this topic of being able to target the right people and really Capitalizing on the data that you have at your fingertips, ideally with Vendelux right helping you there and providing a lot of clarity there To get the right people in the room, because, as you said, that's really what this is all about. How do you see the connection between the success of events and Getting the right people in the room, and what are some of the challenges that you Saw before you created Vendelux that allowed you to build such a powerful tool to help people accomplish this more easily?
Alex Reynolds:Yeah, I mean, getting the right people in the room is everything. Right. If you do that, then you Are on the path to success. If you don't, you could have the best event in the world, the best activation, the best Content, but if you don't have the right people there to experience that or to build those relationships, then you're not going to get anywhere. So to me, it's all about that, and Getting the right people in the room is harder now more than ever.
Alex Reynolds:Right, I mean, you used to be able to go on a traditional road show and you know I would go out to San Francisco and meet people at Facebook and Google and Microsoft and Apple, all in one trip, and they they wanted to show you their campus. Now those people are, you know, working in their pajamas all over the world. And so your earlier point right, like it's, people are the SDR playbook. Right, like people are over saturated. So to actually get FaceTime with people is harder now, then, that's why events are more important now than ever. Right, because they are really this incredible opportunity. Just bring the right people into the room.
Camille White-Stern:We're kind of in a more remote world and, at least from my perspective, it's not as simple as in the old days. I feel like even if you you know you're, you're planning a roadshow, you would look at like, well, where is the company headquartered at? And that's how you kind of figure out your target attendee list. But now, just because the headquarters in Seattle or San Francisco or New York or Atlanta, doesn't necessarily mean your target audience, your target attendees are going to be there. To me that's also just another huge value add of Vendelux and to me Just changes the strategy of how you even figure out who your target invite list, who that should include, right, yeah, if you can do an activation around a large trade show.
Alex Reynolds:like you know, people are Coming to this place for this purpose, right there, that they're gonna invest Three days a week of their time to travel across the country and leave their family and be at a trade show, a conference.
Alex Reynolds:They're almost primed there, they're in a almost like a different state of mind, and so if you can access those people, you have your own satellite or you wrap around event around that trade show, you know who's gonna be there, you know they're gonna be in the right frame of mind, you know they're open to new ideas and we just find that there's that. I mean, I'm from preaching of the choir for your audience, right, but there there is this magic there that you don't see Elsewhere and it's just outside of events, it's really not there. And so you know the best companies are the ones that are taking advantage of those opportunities and you know it's really creating Almost like two divergent groups of people that are that have realized Okay, yes, we still need to meet our customers and our prospects in person, and the ones who are not and the former group are the ones who are winning yeah, and another thing I would love to just sing Vendelux praises for is how easy it makes it to Identify the right conferences and trade shows to invest in.
Camille White-Stern:There are so many events out there. There are so many conferences and so many trade shows. I Can't tell you how much time I would spend my team would spend, before we had access to Vendelux, just researching, manually researching. I mean I wish I could get those hours back. I can't that that ship has sailed.
Camille White-Stern:Yeah the time savings of just being able to go into Vendelux. My ICP lists are already Uploaded and in there right, based on my CRM. You know I have my target titles, even like target accounts you can look at and it just takes a lot again, I said it before but it takes a lot of the guesswork out of it, like where should we be investing our time, whether that's, you know, investing money in a booth or some sort of sponsorship. Sometimes we get really scrappy and we say you know what? We're not gonna invest in a booth, we're not even maybe gonna host our own wraparound event. Shocker, I know we host a lot of events but yeah, sometimes there's value in you said it just getting meetings booked with the right people who are attending these Conferences and trade shows. And we can send a really small boots on the ground team Maybe it's one or two sales reps and they're gonna go and they're gonna get meetings, have them on site or go and connect with people in real life and then get the follow-up meeting booked.
Camille White-Stern:But because of your background, you must have had a just deep understanding of, like I said, the challenges that these are typical challenges. Right, there are whole teams at companies. Their Responsibility is conferences and trade shows. Splash is, you know, my experiential team. We do it all. We do our third-party conferences and trade shows, we do our own events, we do our webinars. So we really have to maximize our time and Really can't afford to spend weeks, months, years Honestly researching to get the right strategy in place. So I just have to sing your praises and say thank you, because you have made it a lot easier to Identify and also to align with your budget, right, like, let's say, you say, okay, we could only go to 10 to 12 conferences and trade shows this year and there might be thousands that would be relevant for your ICP. So figuring out, you know, for us the way that we have leveraged Vendelux, we look at the events that have the highest concentration of our ideal customer profile and, based on that, that's how we're gonna prioritize which events we're gonna invest in and, to your point, sometimes it's a booth or a traditional sponsorship, sometimes it's our own wrap-round or ancillary event, which can yield very high ROI, I must say. But either way, we're still leveraging that data to make these informed decisions and to get the right people in the room or, you know, to connect with the right people on site.
Camille White-Stern:I want to ask you one final question for this episode Because, folks, if you're tuned in, we will have a part two. We're gonna dig into a little bit more tactical ways to get the right people in the room and then zoom out a little bit and talk about how to build a really effective event-led growth strategy with this really powerful data and insights. But any final thoughts on Determining the best people to reach out to, based on your business goals, or how you would Leverage Vendelux in your event strategy? If you're just getting started, where would you start as an event marketer who is Hopefully about to, after they listen to this episode, reach out to their team and say, hey, team, we really need to bring Vendelux on board. You know what does it look like to get started with Vendelux and implementing that into your event strategy? Any final thoughts or advice on that?
Alex Reynolds:If you can link to revenue and you kind of touch on this, right, if you can link to revenue, that sort of what everybody wants to do. But the very difficult, easy to said, hard to do and so even being able to show a few of those wins hey, we met with this person at shop talk. They were in our, in our pipeline and now, a month later, we've closed that deal. Right, that's a tangible story that can show a true win from the events channel and I think that it can be easy to sort of Stay high level with with leads. You know, have your badge scans and then talk about all the leads that you're generating.
Alex Reynolds:But really being able to answer that next question of saying, okay, we didn't just get a thousand lead scans, but we were actually able to drive Revenue, is like the critical component and that's where we can come in and help quickly. It doesn't you don't have to do the CRM integration to be able to figure that out and it can be a quick win to show to your CFO, your CEO, like, hey, we were, this is the kind of impact that we're driving because it's happening. Right, it's happening even without, you know, a platform like vendor likes, like those impactful touch points are happening, but being able to tie it back is difficult.
Camille White-Stern:Yeah, yeah, I think you you said it very well. It's. It's really telling the story of event impact and the full story. So, alex, thank you so much. This has been such a fun conversation. Folks, if you're tuned in, like I said, there's gonna be a part two, so definitely tune into that episode. But, alex, again thank you so much, not only for joining me on the show but, as I said, for creating Vendelux, because at this point, can't imagine operating without it. How can folks? What should their next step be if they're interested in learning more about Vendelux and bringing that on for their organization?
Alex Reynolds:Well, we have a free account so people can go to Vendelux calm and sign up and take a tour of what we have and reach out to us If there's interest in expanding and you can find me on LinkedIn. I write a lot about events, event strategy, building a business so many of the topics that we're talking about here so feel free to reach out on LinkedIn as well.
Camille White-Stern:Wonderful. Well, again, thank you so much, and to our folks, tuned in until next time, take care. All right, friends, if you enjoy the checked in with Splash podcast, let us know. Support this show by subscribing on your preferred podcast platform and, while you're at it, leave us a rating. We so appreciate feedback we receive about the show. So if you ever want to get in touch, you can email us at podcast, at Splash that calm, or, better yet, join our slack community where you can message me directly. Last but certainly not least, if you're a marketer using events to help your business grow and want to learn how Splash's platform Can take your events to the next level, like we have for TikTok, Zoom, Uber, Amazon or Open AI, visit our website at www. splashthat. com. Until next time, take care.