Checked In with Splash
Welcome to Checked In with Splash. Consider this your VIP backstage pass to learn from experts about how to create meaningful experiences that drive ROI, boost engagement, and tip the scales in your favor.
Checked In with Splash
Using Data to Build a Third-Party Event Strategy That Gets Results with Alex Reynolds (Part Two)
In the second half of this two-part episode, host Camille White-Stern and Vendelux CEO and Co-founder Alex Reynolds continue their conversation around using data to fuel event-led growth motions.
Tune in to learn how to strategically use data to attract target event attendees, personalize outreach, get internal buy-in, and more.
In case you missed it, check out the first half of Camille and Alex's conversation in the previous episode: Using Data to Build an Event Strategy That Gets Results with Alex Reynolds (Part One).
- Follow Splash on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/splashthat-com
- Get to know Vendelux: https://vendelux.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. Hello, hello, hello. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of Checked In with Splash. I'm Camille White-Stern, Director of Experiential Marketing here at Splash, but you can think of me as your event marketing peer If you're new to the show. We cover topics ranging from effective event-led growth strategies to event planning pro tips, how to best market and promote events, playbooks for best-in-class event management and execution, crucial event technology must-haves and inspiration for impactful event design and attendee experiences.
Camille White-Stern:In this episode, we're sharing part two of my conversation with Alex Reynolds, CEO and Co-founder of Vendelux. If you missed part one, I highly recommend you go back and listen to that first. In it, we explore the need for data in developing an impactful event strategy that generates revenue for your business, how to leverage that data to get the right people to your events, and more. In this second half of our chat, we share practical ways to attract your target event attendees and dive into the power of using data-backed insights to fuel your event-led growth go-to-market motion. Let's go ahead and get checked in with Alex Reynolds. All right, folks, we are back and Alex is back with us, so excited to continue the conversation of how powerful a tool like Vendelux can be in your event strategy.
Camille White-Stern:We talked in our previous episode a lot about not only having the right data at your fingertips to inform your event strategy, but being able to target the right people. Alex, let's dive right in. I'm curious what is one of your biggest pieces of advice for getting VIPs or decision makers quote in the room, whether that is in the room of your own event or, honestly, just getting face time with them, getting a meeting on the books with them? How do you do that? Because we want to be driving engagement with VIPs and decision makers at the end of the day. So what's your take on that?
Alex Reynolds:Right, and everybody wants the VIPs, so every company that's at the event is fighting over a small group of folks. So I think there's a few key pieces of advice here. Number one act early. The earlier that you can get in touch with somebody and get on their radar that you're trying to make something happen, the better. That might be easier said than done, but the sooner you can start to create that touch point, the better. Number two it's about the existing relationship, especially if this is somebody that's in your pipeline. If this is somebody that's an existing customer, you'll have that relationship.
Alex Reynolds:And so really leaning on the sales rep or the customer success rep, business at the end of the day is about relationships. It's about the interaction between people, and so do you have that foundation to build on where you're not just reaching out to them and it's the first time they've heard from you in six months? It's, this is somebody that you want to talk to and you want to see. And then the third thing is really about making it worth their while. I mean, it's not about fancy swag or what have you but like, do you have something, a reason why they should come and spend their time with you? Do you have a compelling value proposition? Are you offering sort of an exclusive VIP event and activation that can be really interesting and you know, or do you have amazing content that you're curating Right? So I think it's about making sure that they have a reason to spend that time with you.
Camille White-Stern:Yes, that is huge. We preach that a lot at Splash. When I think about kind of the psychology behind really effective event marketing, there has to be reciprocity, right. You're asking someone to give you their time, whether it's by attending an event or just meeting with you and connecting with you, and so I think it would. You can communicate what that value is going to be upfront in your outreach. And then of course you have to deliver on that right. You can't just say they're going to get some value or benefit from it and then not deliver on that promise.
Camille White-Stern:But I whole, wholeheartedly agree with that. And then I think, just strategically, as you said, act early. I always say like act early and also like follow up. You know, like don't just send one note or one invite, and then you know there's multiple touch points that should be involved. There are a number of ways you can engage with someone leading up to that event or leading up to that meeting, because on the one hand there's getting someone to agree to attend or getting them to register or getting them to book the meeting with you, but then you got to make sure they actually show up.
Alex Reynolds:Show up right, yeah, exactly.
Camille White-Stern:So I love that breakdown. Super easy to think about those three things acting early. What was the second one? You said?
Alex Reynolds:Having the existing relationship or like having that connective tissue early.
Camille White-Stern:Yes, yes, that's the other thing. Just a cold outreach out of the blue if there's no relationship already established might not work so well for you, and then, as you said, making sure you're really actually delivering value and offering something that is going to be worth their while, as you said.
Alex Reynolds:Yeah, in the first episode you described it really well. You're saying that it's a whole story, right? So when you look across all of these touchpoints, across different events, across different activations, you have this narrative, and so any one event is a part of that, and so the more that you can have that whole story in mind when you reach out, the more targeted you can be, the more relevant you can be, and so you said it really well in the last episode.
Camille White-Stern:Yeah, this is kind of a great segue into another question I wanted to ask you, which is really about personalization and some of the tactics that you can leverage. I feel like everyone is talking about account-based marketing, abm. It's really buzzy. I understand why. So how can you think about infusing personalization and specifically leveraging Vendelux to do that, to get your ideal customer profile? But, more specifically, when I say ideal customer profile, sometimes it's like we're thinking a little bit up here and, at the end of the day, we're talking about real people, real contacts, that have needs, that have expectations, that probably have some history of interacting with your brand or your organization or you specifically in some way. So how can we tap into a deeper level of personalization, using Vendelux in your strategy to drive people either to your event experience or, like I said, just to get them to agree to a meeting?
Alex Reynolds:Yeah, so we think about the world in kind of three buckets. There's people, actually specific people so I know that Megan is going to be at Shop Talk companies, we know that Vendelux is going to be at Shop Talk, and then personas, or ideal customer profile. We're looking for CTOs in supply chain. So you don't know who that person is, but you can have an overall sense of that persona, and so what Vendelux does is help based on you know. You know who those people are, those companies are, or there's Personas will help understand where those people companies and Personas are going to be as more information comes in, and we'll send alerts to update that information, and so all of this should provide a good picture of where you should be as a company or where people that you care about are going to be, and all of that can then lead to the next step, which is once you know where they're going to be.
Alex Reynolds:Now you have to reach out.
Alex Reynolds:You have to make sure that you're going to have a touch point, because you can have all the most amazing people in the world worth, you know, a bajillion dollars at an event, but if you don't meet with them, then it doesn't really matter, and so what we try to do is make it easy, once you've identified where you should be, to reach out to those people, whether it's one to one, whether you know LinkedIn, email, get in touch with them, invite them to your activation and have that level of personalization where you have that story at your fingertips.
Alex Reynolds:You understand, with your CRM as well as with kind of the, where they've been in the past, where they're going in the future. When you reach out, it's not that cold outreach that you mentioned of hey, you know, we'd love to meet with you. It's hey, I see that you're going to these types of events in these places, so it seems like you're interested in this topic, this solution. Here's how we can provide something for you that's going to be relevant and I'd love to have a drink and have that conversation. And so, yeah, we just find that the response rates, the meeting rates and, ultimately, the conversion rates on those types of interactions are much higher than benchmarks, because you know you're a real human, you're not a robot sending off an automated key to your. You know you're genuinely kind of creating that connectivity.
Camille White-Stern:Right, and you're kind of eliminating the need to, like you know what we call like spray and pray, right? If you just know oh, you know, I feel like pre-Vendelux our process would be okay. We go to the conference page. We see who's sponsoring, all right, okay, we're going to email every single contact from that company. If it's Amazon sponsoring, for example, I mean, that could be so many people when really maybe the target people you should be reaching out to is maybe 200 people, right, but how do you figure out which 200 people to actually reach out to? And so it's just incredibly powerful.
Camille White-Stern:And then this kind of segues nicely into my next question for you and kind of also a comment for me is that it's not just a marketing play, right? This then becomes a really strategic method for your entire revenue organization to get in touch with, to have meaningful interactions with, as you said, with the right people. So I'm curious what are ways that you and the kind of best practices even if a marketing team or an events team at a company is maybe the main owner or main user of Vendelux, that's not the only user of Vendelux necessarily and how can other teams at an organization, like your sales team, your customer success team really come together to facilitate better cross team collaboration and ultimately see better results from showing up at a conference with a large team or even being on site at your own event. What are some of the ways that you suggest revenue organizations again not just marketing revenue organizations leveraging Vendelux in their strategy?
Alex Reynolds:Yeah, and it's so important. Right, like as a marketer, you can do everything right. You can pick the best event, you can have the right activation, you can invite the right people. But if sales, customer success, if other stakeholders don't show up and do their job, then you may not see the true value of the event. So we talk about events as a team sport. It's very much collaborative and almost every person at a company touches events in some way, shape or form. So this is so core to the ethos of Vendelux and how we think about the world, and it's really challenging. I mean, as the sales reps, customer success they have a lot going on and so sure you can have a kickoff and talk about where the booth's going to be and try to galvanize everybody to be excited, but it's very challenging. And so what we see is that ultimately, if you can help sales and customer success understand the why and the value that you can generate together and sort of start with the end outcome, then you can work backwards from there.
Alex Reynolds:So how we think about it is that for sales rep, their ways are focused on their pipeline, right, that's what they care about. These are the deals. If I close a deal. I'm getting commission, like this is a win. And if your customer success you're thinking about your customers, of course, and so, if you know, if instead of the conversation is, hey, show up to the booth and we hope that the right people are going to be there and you should scan people's badges when they show up.
Alex Reynolds:If instead, the conversation is I know that these 10 companies in your pipeline are going to be at this event and these 20 stakeholders that I can see in your CRM are connected to this deal are going to be there and here's their contact information and here's some copy to reach out. Right, just make it really easy for them. Then, all of a sudden, for a great sales rep, their minds going to be blown and the lights are going to be going off. Or they're saying, okay, yeah, I can have that in person, touch point, I can break bread with this person, I can make it happen.
Alex Reynolds:Same thing with the customer success side hey, I see that these 10 customers in your portfolio are going to be at this event and it looks like these two customers are up for renewal this quarter, so let's make sure that they come to the activation so that we can make sure that we're hearing them out in not just a corporate checkup call, but like let's actually sit side by side, let's have that conversation, let's really get into the nitty gritty of what's going on. And so I think if you can paint that picture for your stakeholders whether it's sales, customer, success, sdrs help them understand the real, true value of what showing up and meeting with these people is going to mean, then that just makes all the difference.
Camille White-Stern:Preach, preach, Alex. It's all about communicating what's in it for them and you said it, they have a lot going on. It's not easy to be an SDR or a salesperson or a customer success person, especially in today's kind of business landscape. They have tough jobs and so I think, as marketers, when we can put ourselves in their shoes and communicate in ways that is going to translate to value for them, right, that is huge. So, speaking of today's business landscape, today's event landscape you've been around for a while and you've seen the evolution.
Camille White-Stern:I'm curious just if you have any thoughts on I'm sure you must have some any thoughts on how the event landscape has changed over the years. You know you started Vendelux two and a half, almost three years ago, and even in that short period of time there's been just a drastic amount of change. I'm curious just if you have any big thoughts on what that change has been and if you see anything else on the horizon coming. And also, I feel like and it's not just Splash talking about event led growth right as a business strategy, but why do you think events in general, event led growth, has become more powerful versus the kind of like one-off events and activities that I think businesses were much more used to doing previously. I think you know, back in the day it used to be well, let's just do an event for an event's sake, and that's I wouldn't say that's best practice anymore. What are your thoughts on that?
Alex Reynolds:Yeah, I think you know, like we were talking about in the first episode a little bit. Right, it's harder, now more than ever, to get FaceTime with your prospects, your customers, your partners, even your own team members. Right, like, a lot of people are not in the office, they're remote, they're global, they're distributed, and so I think the focus of events has changed or has solidified a little bit more. Right. So, connectivity, generating connections, meetings there was always a part of the value proposition, but I think it was kind of like one tenant, right, and a lot of it was content, a lot of it were the speaker sessions and things like that. I think the focus has really narrowed in on those meetings, on generating those touchpoints, because you can have a webinar, you can listen to a podcast, right, like, there are other ways to consume content and to learn. The one big differentiator of being in the room at an event, a conference, a trade show, is that you have all those people together in person. You can build those relationships, you can have the conversation that you would never be able to have over Zoom or over a phone call, and so capitalizing on that and making sure that that is, first and foremost, the focus is really critical.
Alex Reynolds:And then I think, in general, every dollar in the marketing budget is more scrutinized now than previously. So it's your point. It's like let's have an event and you go and have, you spend a bunch of money and it was great brand awareness and that's the end of it. I think, with some of the changes that we're seeing on the digital side, performance, marketing, demand generation you can track down to the dollar. What's my ROI, what am I seeing from every dollar? How is that changing over time? What does that look like across different segments and different product lines?
Alex Reynolds:And so what that means for at the CMO level and the CFO level is that every dollar is scrutinized and so you can't just say gone out of the day, is right where you can say, oh, we have to be at this event because we've always been there or our competitors are going to be there. If you can instead point and say, no, we have $20 million of pipeline, it's going to be in attendance, so we have $10 million of actual customers and we think that that 10 million can turn into 15 million if we're there and we're helping them to understand our new product line, that then puts you, as a marketer, on even footing with these other marketing teams, or potentially even better, right? Because I think we all know that we're biased, but we all believe that events are the best channel, and so it's off top. My personal goal is that event marketing is the best path to get to CMO, because event marketing is the most impactful marketing channel, and so a lot of CMOs should come from event marketing because it is the most impactful channel.
Camille White-Stern:I love it and I could listen to you talk about this all day and I couldn't agree more, Alex. I fully believe, and we at Splash believe, that events can be the most powerful marketing channel and one of your strongest revenue drivers. I think you do need the right marketing tech stack. It's hard to do it if you don't have the right tools in place. I will say that Events are inherently challenging, especially when you don't have the tools right. When you do, then there's a lot that just becomes unlocked, because you're then spending less time tinkering with all of these manual processes and you can really then focus your time and your attention on the things that can't be automated, the things that can't necessarily be done for you. So I fully believe in everything you're saying.
Camille White-Stern:I'm curious, as we wrap up here, Vendelux approach to event-led growth as a go-to-market channel, where you see that going and you've already very clearly articulated the role that events can and should play in business success and strategy today. And yeah, I would just love if you want to share a little bit about how Vendelux thinks specifically about leveraging events in your own business strategy and in relation to, when I say as a go-to-market strategy, I always think, listen, events can be one of your better performing go-to-market motions. It doesn't necessarily mean you don't need any other type of inbound or outbound motion, but I think we know very well today that and most business leaders will probably admit this that some of the more traditional go-to-market motions aren't working the way that they used to work and email is just oversaturated and digital ads people are scrolling and not necessarily clicking through or it's not converting the way that they used to. So I'm curious your kind of philosophy on that and, specific to Vendelux, and how you're thinking about your event strategy for this year and beyond.
Alex Reynolds:Yeah. So maybe not surprisingly events are far and away our best channel across all parts of the funnel, so top of the funnel, mid funnel and for seeing customers as well. So I think you laid it out really nicely in the last episode of your event strategy. You have a lot of different tools in your toolkit. It's not just hey, we're going to go have this huge booth activation and we're going to spend 80% of our budget on one event. You can send individual sales reps, you can have your satellite and ancillary events. You can throw your own events outside of a trade show, and so we experiment with all of these.
Alex Reynolds:We went to over 100 events in 2023 and I have a feeling we'll go to more than that in 2024. And for us, that FaceTime is just irreplaceable, and so our AEs are on the road, our SDRs are on the road, our customer success team is on the road, we're on the road as founders, and so just trying to drive as much FaceTime as possible and we're it's going to be a shocker, right. We're very data driven about this. So we'll look at Vendelux. We'll figure out. Vendelux will help us understand what events we should go to, what level of investment we should make. Who from our team should we send right? Whose pipeline is going to be there, whose customers are going to be there? If we send one sales rep and another sales reps accounts are there then we're going to coordinate to make sure that we're having at least some kind of a touch point.
Alex Reynolds:So we're very data driven, highly focused on the people themselves who are going to be there to make sure that we're talking to the right stakeholders. We sell to event marketers, we sell to sales teams and so we have very specific ICP. And then we love ancillary events, right. We love bringing our customers and our prospects together. Feel like that organic conversation, right. We talk to us all day, but when you hear it from actual customers who are seeing the value firsthand, to us that's the right, a chef's kiss, exactly. So it's evolving, right. We're learning a lot every year and understanding what events are going to be great for us, kind of where we want to double down, but it's been incredibly effective for us, which is great.
Camille White-Stern:I love it. Thank you for the breakdown and kind of the peak behind the curtain. I always like to understand how other people are thinking about their event strategy and I will say you mentioned kind of like your investment might look different. You're not showing up with a one size all fits approach to every single event. My last blog for Vendilux is it's been instrumental for me to create our own internal kind of tiered investment system at Splash. So you know, based on the data that we see in Vendilux, if it's over or under a certain number of prospects are attending an event. That's how we determine what our level of investment is going to be. So it's nice to know that we're kind of also operating with that best practice, as you are, as you know, the founder of one co-founder of Vendilux and CEO, so always like, just like, to learn from other marketers and other event professionals what they're doing, what's working.
Camille White-Stern:We are at time folks. I have been just so into this conversation with you, Alex, I feel like we might need to bring you back on at a certain point, maybe dive into some other topics that we maybe didn't get to cover today. But thank you, thank you, thank you again. This has been truly such a wonderful conversation. I hope our listeners are inspired not only to kind of evolve their own event strategy, but to check out Splash and check out Vendilux and see how you can leverage the right tools to execute a best in class event strategy that's going to lead to increased pipeline and, at the end of the day, more revenue for your organization. So, Alex, again, thank you so much.
Alex Reynolds:Thanks for having me. This was a blast.
Camille White-Stern:All right folks. Until next time, take care. All right folks. That's it for today. If you enjoyed today's episode or are a fan of the podcast in general, please 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 thatcom 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 MongoDB, UCLA, Okta, Zendesk or Sweetgreen. V isit our website at www. splash thatcom. Until next time, take care.