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
How to Host Successful Partner Events with Reveal's Isaac Morehouse & Will Taylor
In this episode, host Camille White-Stern sits down with Reveal's Isaac Morehouse and Will Taylor for an in-depth discussion about partner events.
From sourcing partners, to cross promotion, to measuring success, Issac and Will share the inside scoop on how to create event partnerships that benefit both parties.
0:01 – Introduction
7:38 – Deciding to Host Partner Events
12:00 – Finding the Right Event Partners
19:50 – Defining Goals and Measuring Success for Partner Events
30:17 – Aligning – and Staying Aligned – with Partners
35:05 – Creating a Partner Event Playbook
42:20 – Building a Partner Ecosystem
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- Get to know Reveal: https://reveal.co/
This is Checked In with Splash. Welcome to the Partner Power Play how to Maximize Event ROI. My name is Camille Whitestone. I run experiential marketing here at Splash and I am so thrilled to be leading this virtual discussion today, as we serve up tactical advice on integrating partnered events into your event strategy and empower you to elevate your own brand experiences and drive event success. Today, partner events truly go way beyond just sharing an attendee list or slapping a logo on marketing collateral. They're now seen as strategic alliances that can revolutionize your event-led growth go-to-market function. To help me dig into the impact of partnered events on maximizing your event ROI, I will be joined by two incredible thought leaders in the near-bound space Isaac Morehouse and Will Taylor. But before we dive into the good stuff really quickly, let's just run through some housekeeping items, because I'm pretty sure we have a few first-timers in the audience today. So if that is, you welcome.
Camille White-Stern:At Splash, we support marketers across the globe from the world's leading brands and their efforts to unlock event-led growth, and we're doing that by providing a tool that helps you simplify your processes, amplify your organization's brand and measure your results in order to grow your business through repeatable event programs at scale, whether they're in-person, online or hybrid. Let's get into why you're here and tuned in with us today to chat through the power of partner events in your event-led growth strategy. Let's just start with a refresher on what exactly event-led growth, or ELG, entails. Think of ELG as a dynamic go-to-market strategy that revolves around creating scalable, measurable event programs, ones that are strategically aligned with specific pipeline and revenue goals, making them incredibly valuable in today's go-to-market landscape. So, put simply, companies use various marketing channels to convey their message and connect with their buyers. With an ELG motion, events become a powerful tool for organizations to seamlessly integrate their brand narrative, messaging and value proposition in meaningful interactions with their audience. What sets ELG apart is its ability to complement other go-to-market motions, and that's why you've essentially tuned in today, I'm guessing, to learn about the power play of partner events and how they can fit, and should fit, into your overall event strategy.
Camille White-Stern:Partner events allow companies to extend their reach beyond their immediate network, tapping into their partners' audiences and making it 10 times easier to help accelerate business growth. And when you can pool resources, expertise and audiences, partner events can deliver an enriched experience that would be much more challenging to achieve single-handedly. This collaborative approach not only boosts brand awareness, but also drives stronger event ROI through shared costs and increased value for attendees. And partner marketing goes beyond just driving attendance to your events. It's about leveraging these relationships to create deeper, more meaningful connections with prospects and customers alike. And by associating with trusted partners, businesses can enhance their brand credibility and perception, positioning themselves as true leaders in their industry. And this halo effect not only boosts brand awareness but also fosters trust and loyalty among attendees, laying the groundwork for long-term relationships and repeat business. That's what we're here to do, right. So, in essence, partner marketing within an ELG framework is not just a nice to have. It's a strategic imperative for organizations looking to thrive in today's event-driven landscape.
Camille White-Stern:Okay, now that we've all gone through a little refresher on ELG and how and why partner events should fit into your ELG strategy, get ready, because I'm just so excited to bring up two partner marketing pros who are absolute rock stars to join me on stage. But before they come up, let me give you a quick little background and intro on their backgrounds. First, we're gonna be joined by Isaac Morehouse, who is the CMO of Reveal and co-host of the Nearbound podcast. He's casually founded a few companies, written thousands of articles and loves rallying people around a vision through partnerships and content. We'll also be joined by Isaac's esteemed colleague, will Taylor.
Camille White-Stern:Will has helped create the Nearbound category with behind-the-scenes execution of you guessed it the Nearbound Summit. He's a podcast host for the show Howdy Partners, a multiple first-time hire, content creator, practitioner and current head of Nearbound Partnerships for Reveal. Global teams work with Will when they want to execute on tactical insights, simplified methodologies and spread influence in ecosystems. They serve from sales to marketing and customer success. These guys are super legit and we are so lucky that they're joining us today. So, without further ado, I'm absolutely thrilled to bring onto the stage Isaac and Will. Hey, isaac.
Will Taylor:Hello.
Camille White-Stern:Will.
Will Taylor:Hey, that was probably the best intro I've ever had, so thank you. Thank you, Isaac, for writing that for me. I'll put that in my yearly review.
Isaac Morehouse:Listen, it was great. One of us is definitely legit and we're not going to tell you which one, okay.
Camille White-Stern:Someone said in the chat, too legit to quit, and I concur, Tim. No, seriously. Thank you both so much for joining me today. Really excited to be able to do a bit of a live brain pick with both of you. Before we dive into my first question tell us a little bit more about Reveal.
Isaac Morehouse:Yeah, so Reveal is a platform that allows you to connect with your partners. So if you have app partners and companies you do integrations with, you can connect with them and view your account overlaps in real time so you can see common customers or prospects of yours that are customers of your partners and vice versa. And there's all kinds of things you can use this data for, for example, identifying which partners you may want to do events with. If you find, oh, we have a ton of overlaps in our joint prospects or joint customers with a couple of our app partners. That's a great way, a great starting point for figuring out which people surround your customers and working with them to reach them, and that, in essence, we talk about near bound all the time as this third leg of your go-to-market stool. In essence, that's all it is is figuring out who surrounds your customer, who they trust besides you, and working with them to reach the customer, and reveal is one of the tools that can help you do that love it.
Camille White-Stern:I must say, shamelessly, that we use reveal here at splash and it has been a total game changer for me, particularly in thinking through our event strategy and who we should be partnering with for different event programs. So if you want to learn more about how I've been leveraging Reveal in my strategy, I'm an open book, happy to share what I love about the tool and, like I said, just really excited to have you here. When I think about events, community building and partner marketing, I think of Reveal and Splash. So I feel like we're going to have a great discussion today. Let's make the most of our time and just dive right into discussing some of the dynamics of partner events. So I'm wondering if you can provide some insights into, and kind of share your thoughts on, how organizations can begin to assess whether partner events even align with their overall strategy and maybe, additionally, what are some of the effective ways to integrate partner events into your broader event-led growth go-to-market strategy.
Isaac Morehouse:No, I'm going to give a simple answer, and I'll let Will, because he's more sophisticated than me. He can give a more sophisticated answer, but here's the simple answer. If you are doing events of any kind, you should be doing them with partners. There's really nothing but benefit Reaching your buyers directly, just you trying to reach them, get them to come to your events. Put the programming together for your events.
Isaac Morehouse:It's not as effective as when you can pull in other companies that surround your buyer because they have audiences that you don't. They have trust with people where you don't, and vice versa. So you get to expand the reach. If it's something that has a cost associated, you get to reduce or split the cost and then you get to bring the messaging together and pull in different voices again and create more of a sense of trust with your audience.
Isaac Morehouse:That it's not just like hey, come to my company's event, it's about my company, we're going to shill our company. It's like, hey, we're talking to you about a problem you need to solve and we got multiple companies here who are all trying to help you solve this problem. It just works better. To me, it's about flipping the burden of proof Instead of asking when should we or should we bring partners in? Your first question should be why would we not? The default assumption should be we need to work with a partner who's the right partner, and it should be very hard to come up with a reason to not involve a partner in your events.
Will Taylor:Yeah, so that was a great simple answer that covered basically everything that I was gonna talk about. But one thing for a rule of thumb to keep in your mind is a simple equation Events with partners are two times the reach for 50% of the work. Because you have two teams, you're effectively distributing that work. You're getting more reach. So every partner that you add into the event, you're getting even more and more reach because you're tapping into their network. And I like to talk about this idea of a trust coefficient. The more of this who that is surrounding your buyer that you include in these events, the higher the trust coefficient, meaning the more trusts you will have, because for every voice you add, there's going to be a reduction in inherent bias, so it leads even further to value. Well, I'm going to disagree with you already. We're going to be a reduction in inherent bias, so it leads even further to value.
Isaac Morehouse:Well, I'm going to disagree with you already. We're going to fight. You can back me up on this. I agree in general with the thrust of your formula. It's not quite that neat because it's not just double the reach for half the work. There's a reason that people don't always work with partners because it is work. There is some extra work involved getting things coordinated, waiting to hear back from people. Some people don't respond to email as fast as I do and it makes my eye twitch, right, you know what I mean. There is something there. So it's important to find partners that you actually like working with and they're easy to work with, or it can be burdensome and then you can be like, well, screw that, I'm never doing that again, camille.
Camille White-Stern:I'm sure you've had this experience where not everyone's easy to work with yeah, no real talk. And I feel like one of the reasons why I clicked with both of you so early on was just that mutual I see. Oh, I see we're both going to bring the same kind of hustle and grit to the table and we have enough shared goals and shared objectives that we're both going to do all that we can to not only make the event successful but the partnership overall successful and make sure that there's that mutual benefit. So, totally hear you there. I think it's a different kind of work, right, and you're able to kind of distribute the work in different ways.
Camille White-Stern:And Will? Something that you said really spoke to me. You said like 2x the reach To me. I'm like I think 2x the reach. I'm like, oh, I always go to ROI. What's the ROI going to be?
Camille White-Stern:Not only the ROI of the event, but like the ROI of the partnership, right, looking at what is the value going to be, not only for our attendees but for my organization, for the partners, organizations that we're working with, and so I think this is kind of naturally leading to my next question, which is how do you ensure strong ROI from an event. From my perspective, it's getting the right people to your event right. And so, similarly, when I think about targeting the right partners for your events, I guess my question would be how do you do that? What are some of the key considerations to keep in mind when selecting partners for these collaborative events? You need to ensure alignment. You want to make sure that both brands see value, that even there's alignment in some sort of messaging right, and there needs to be alignment in, like the marketing objectives and then the outcomes of the event. So I'm curious how do you think about approaching that and any tips for not only sourcing the right partners, but like when is someone not the right partner?
Will Taylor:So a partner that's not a good fit is one that may play in the same sandbox but doesn't actually provide value to the customers that you serve. So what I mean by that is maybe I sell sales software and there's this document sending software that focuses on the legal firms, but they try and play in the sales area as well. So there's like kind of an overlap, but our tools they'll never integrate and there's no value. If there's no value, then no one's going to care about the message that you try and put from the you know square peg round hole. So one thing to really identify is do we actually play in the same area and are we sharing any clients or prospects? Are we trying to move forward in the same direction? So that's how you can start to navigate and of course Reveal can help with that, to show you the account specifically that you would want to work on. But outside of that, you should have a joint message of value in some form, whether that's through your narrative or that's through the actual tool integrating into the other. Why is company A and company B better together? What is that better together story? So I think that is critical and I'm starting there because that's the most important. You can have everything else that I mentioned, but if you don't have this first piece, then it's going to not provide value and no one's going to care. They're not going to listen.
Will Taylor:So the other piece is do they actually want to do events, and is it like even in their strategy at all? Because if it's not, then they won't know how to follow up with any of the leads that are attending an event, they won't know how to execute the strategy and you're going to be left doing all the work. Sometimes that's okay, but if you are trying to generate value for both organizations, you don't want to just do all the work or else you just run the event yourself. So do they actually have another strategy? Do they have the capacity to help?
Will Taylor:And then I would say identify from there the strengths and weaknesses. So if you don't understand the strengths and weaknesses, you're not aligned on. Hey, you're good at this, I'm good at that, maybe my social strategy is really good, your ad strategy is really good, but I don't have the capacity for it. Diffuse that responsibility and clearly set out that work, and that's how you can get even further into the alignment of who's doing what when, and I'm a huge advocate for writing it all down. What are we working towards? Why are we running this event? Is it thought leadership or is it generating demand? Those are going to be two completely different events. So write that down and then, like I mentioned, with who's good at what, put that into a work back plan and make sure you agree on that and then you can move forward and you'll actually execute on a good good, I'm going to fight you again.
Isaac Morehouse:Will? We're going to disagree again? You ready for?
Camille White-Stern:this I love it.
Isaac Morehouse:No, just a caveat, and to something that Alyssa said as well. So I agree in general, jump on reveal, see who has a lot of overlap with you, see which accounts tend to create the best win rate boost for you. And that's a good starting point. If you figure out, you have the same goals for the event. Big difference between someone who's just like leads, leads, leads, and someone who's like, hey, this is about thought leadership and just creating some influence, as long as you vote, whatever it is. If you have the same thing, that's fine.
Isaac Morehouse:And then do you like working with them? When you get done talking with them, do you feel drained or do you feel excited? And if it's drained then it's probably going to be horrible. If it's excited, great, but I don't think they have to do events. That's a huge bonus if you both already do events, but sometimes that can make it harder because you both have your own motions and you're kind of stuck in your ways.
Isaac Morehouse:Sometimes there's a real opportunity with a company where there's a great story you can tell together and there's a great audience and you like working with them and they've never done events before. This was one of the things that I've really enjoyed, where something that we do really well and we do all the time content or events we will sometimes find a partner that's new to it and one of the advantages they maybe have a bigger customer base than we do, but we have the ability to execute on this particular motion better than they do. And that's sometimes a way where you can play upmarket. You can partner with somebody that's bigger than you and it's a bigger win for them. Right, they're going to bring more of their customers to the event than you are, but they don't know the execution side, so sometimes those can be really great opportunities.
Will Taylor:I guess the asterisk there is, they have to at least want to do it.
Isaac Morehouse:Yeah, there you go.
Will Taylor:Yeah, and they have to be able to mobilize their team in some form to either help out a little bit or at least, like I mentioned, like follow up from a sales capacity, so that they see value in it as well, because if they don't care, then it's not going to go well for them in their minds.
Isaac Morehouse:Yeah, everybody's been done an event with somebody where you could tell the other party just it was a throwaway for them, they just didn't care, and that's not fun.
Camille White-Stern:Yeah, yeah, I would say, like probably early on in my days, of kind of getting into the partner event waters just out of motion. Or strategy within your broader event led growth strategy. These are really important things to think through and ways to kind of evaluate who might be the best fit for your next event or your next event program. Okay, and seeing Alyssa's comment, yeah, just provides a baseline for what expectations need to be communicated and roles. And to Will's point, I am a huge advocate in having everything written out, not only your game plan for how you're going to kind of design, market, execute the event, follow up to right.
Isaac Morehouse:Follow up is key that's where you actually get the ROI from an event but making sure everyone's really clear on the roles and responsibilities everyone involved, especially different partners this real quick is where, by the way, to marketers listening, I give a huge shout out to Will and to partner teams everywhere, although most of them are not as good as Will, so that's why I love working with him. So he's in partnerships, I'm in marketing, but when we're doing events with partners, I get to kind of show up on that call where we're talking about the event and we kind of share the vision, the story. We get all excited and Will is documenting everything. He's putting everything into a next action Because ultimately he owns the relationship with that partner and he doesn't want to burn trust. He wants them to be happy so that they end up generating revenue for us and vice versa. And as a marketer, I'm more incentivized on just the outcomes of the event itself and so having that combination where that relationship is what he is making sure is going well, I'm focused on the event content and he really helps organize and keep those things in play.
Isaac Morehouse:We mentioned earlier that it's not necessarily less work always doing an event with a partner. It can be more, it can be less. It's a different kind of work and it's a kind of work that marketers are not always expert in. If you have a partnerships team. You've got a partner manager that can come and help you. Sometimes that makes it so easy and then it ends up not adding any work to the marketing team if you can pull in the partner team.
Camille White-Stern:That's such a great point and, I think, again, another great segue into the next area that I'd love to dig into with you, which is around defining the goals. As an event marketer, I'm always thinking about the event goals and the ROI that I want to see and tying that to the business outcomes that I have said we were going to generate. Right, but when you're doing partnered events, you can't really just be selfish and just think about what you want to achieve, and so I'm curious how you think about defining measurable and achievable goals for partnered events. Obviously, goals that benefit your organization, but you also want to nurture and deepen your relationship with your partners, so you need to make good on what you say this event is going to offer your partners. What are the benefits for the partners being involved? So how do you kind of think through that, and I'm curious if you can share some best practices with our audience here.
Isaac Morehouse:Okay, I'm going to give the horrible answer because I'm going to be honest and then Will's going to give the much better answer. I'll tell you, I fall on one side of the spectrum with different types of marketers. I'm all about the vibes, baby. It's all about the vibes. Look, I don't over-focus on numbers. I think that a lot of the times, the numbers don't tell us as much as we think they do. I'll give you an example.
Isaac Morehouse:If you've ever run an event or any kind of marketing campaign where you just know in your gut you were there and you're like this event rocked. Everybody loved it, all the partners were thrilled. It was buzzing all over LinkedIn. People are talking about it. If somebody came to me and said the numbers don't look good, I'd be like I don't know if I care, I don't know if I believe you Right. And, conversely, if you run an event that sucked and you know it sucked, and people are like, oh, we got a lot of clicks, I'd be like I don't know, like cause? I know in my gut what I experienced. That doesn't mean that I completely discount those things, but I think as a starting point, I ask this question because, at the end of the day, humans are making human decisions. How did my partner feel about it If they walk away being like this was amazing, this felt great. Then that's primary. Now, usually it requires some minimum level of numbers that you hit for them to feel that way, but it also requires more than that.
Isaac Morehouse:One of my favorite marketers ever has got a TED Talk Rory Sutherland. He has this TED Talk. It's really old, but he's like look, if you try to solve everything with an engineering brain, you miss opportunity. In England they're trying to make some train go like 10 minutes faster across some two-hour journey and it was going to cost like billions of dollars. And he's like instead of spending billions of dollars, you could spend like a couple million to have supermodels serve everyone champagne and people would be begging for the train ride to be slower. Right, like it's about the overall experience of how you feel.
Isaac Morehouse:Obviously, that involves getting from point A to point B, but it involves more than that. So I really truly look at things like how much buzz are people talking about it? And there are ways you can measure those things. You can look at your call recordings after the event and say how many people mentioned it in our demo calls If you have a how did you hear about us field, how many people are saying that they heard about it at the event, and similarly with your partners, some of those more qualitative metrics I actually am a big fan of. Okay, well, you do the serious quantitative stuff.
Will Taylor:Yeah. So working with Isaac and our his other crazy idea compatriot, Jared, who also works on the nearboundcom side, they do a lot of this where it's like big idea, now let's execute, and I'm the one that needs to execute. Now, of course, there's a much bigger team, which I'm very thankful for, and I agree to an extent. Now your board might not agree. They might be like well, you need to put up numbers and we need to generate revenue and all of that. But, like Isaac said, it's not that you're just ignoring them, but they're not the only indicator, and the way that I like to think about partnered events is they're not going to be that much different from a metrics perspective from your other events. It doesn't make sense to add complexity. The only thing that you're going to add is tracking what came from your partner so that you can properly attribute and, of course, more strategically follow up with those accounts. Because if your partner sent you 100 of the 200 registrants, then that is relevant for when, let's say, sales is going to reach out or marketing is going to add a follow-up touch. So that's the only additional piece of data or information that you're going to consider tracking. Everything else you should treat exactly like every other event Because, like I said, there doesn't need to be added complexity.
Will Taylor:When people think partners, they may think, oh, there's so many more moving parts and how do we make this work and realize value from it? It's going to be the same. Just make sure you have a very tight process in your sales follow-up and I would say partners add to the ability for anyone in sales or demand gen to capitalize on the event, because it adds this additional layer of value and another reason to reach out. And, of course, you can see that data and take action accordingly. Whether they are, let's say, a customer or a prospect, Are they a shared prospect? Are they a customer of your partners and your prospect? If that's the case, then you can use that in the outreach and that's going to again provide a much better value statement to them. So do not add complexity. The only thing you add is did they come from a partner or not? That's going to then help you attribute.
Isaac Morehouse:I'm not going to fight you this time Will but I do have one thing I want to throw in there, just a thought. It kind of depends on where you are focused in the buyer lifecycle too. So, for example, if you're doing an event with an integration partner that's very much focused on activation it's like, hey, how to use our products together then you're going to have a much more numerical goal how many people actually activate it. And if eight people show up and nobody activates, that's probably not something you're going to repeat. Right, that's an investment that you say okay, no, whatever that number is.
Isaac Morehouse:But if you're doing something that's more on the demand creation side if you think of the ROI like a virtual event like this is an hour, an hour of your time, a little bit of prep you're doing some promotion. As a marketer, I'm not that worried about immediate signups or anything like that, because I'm taking this. We're going to be able to use clips from this. We're going to be able to insert this in our other content. We're going to be able to use this on demand afterwards, especially if you're using a great platform like Splash. You've got a lot of different tools in here and it's like I would take a call with one person for 30 minutes or an hour even to kind of share these ideas with one account. If I get 50 accounts to show up for an hour long, like what's? The cost is quite low for virtual events in particular. Physical events are a whole different calculation, but so I think it's like it's sort of weird. We kind of put this demand like the virtual event has to achieve some bar, where you don't ask that when your sellers get on a call, like does every call have to? No, like I got 50 people in a room, that's better than one. That's actually really good, right, and it has these long-term effects that can tend to compound.
Isaac Morehouse:So one tiny anecdote finally, and I know I've talked too long on this question, but we did an event with PartnerStack a year or two ago and it was really fun. It was like this big ecosystem week thing and we both had a great time and we got really good reg numbers and everything. And if you look at, we had a tracking link like okay, go book a demo with PartnerStack. Very few people clicked on that, so the attributable trackable link showed very weak results. But when they looked over the next couple months at their call recording software for keywords, the number of people. It was like 40% or 50% of those calls mentioned Ecosystem Week.
Isaac Morehouse:So it was like, again, the traditional attribution doesn't always do a good job. So one cool thing we've kind of played around with hacking is using reveal, where you look at all of the accounts that registered or attended the event. Before the event, you look at what stage they were in for each of your companies and then, like a month after the event and you can at least get a ballpark like hey, the 100 people that came to that event, 50 of them moved to the next stage in the sales cycle. Doesn't mean the event necessarily caused it, but it gives you something at least to kind of start with and that could be an interesting way to track some of those things.
Camille White-Stern:Yeah, I think we're.
Camille White-Stern:I've a lot of strong thoughts and opinions and I know our CMO, kate, does as well.
Camille White-Stern:On just the whole attribution game, I think you know, unless you have a very sophisticated multi-touch attribution we're in the day and age where it's like 30 plus touch points along the buyer's journey it's really hard to accurately track every single one of those touch points and attribute it to the specific tactic or activation that caused that interaction or that touch point to take place. If you don't have a very sophisticated multi-touch attribution which honestly a lot of companies don't have and you are looking at first touch and or just last touch, that's only two touch points out of this 30 touch point journey and so you're not necessarily going to have the full picture of what is driving someone through the buying funnel. So I totally hear you, Isaac, on the metrics do matter. I am a very data-driven marketer and there are also new ways that you can start to gather more data, more buying intent. And you mentioned looking at call recordings. You know another kind of mechanism you could kind of employ or rely on is like self-reported attribution. Right, and in self-reported attribution we see our events.
Isaac Morehouse:Look at the chat logs in these events, by the way. Right, that's a really interesting thing. You can see. You can see sentiment, you can see people saying specific things. You can follow up with those people.
Camille White-Stern:Yeah, yeah, so really helpful points here. And also, will I also don't disagree with you Like, we don't have to reinvent the wheel in terms of like, how to define goals and measure success for partnered events. I am a big proponent of like. Depending on what your goal for the event is, you are going to be paying attention to slightly different metrics, right, like, if your goal is to raise brand awareness, maybe you do want to be looking at, you know, traffic to your website pre event and then post event, right, versus if you're trying to drive pipeline, right, that's a different metric. You're probably looking at, like meetings and opportunities, right? So this is just a really helpful lens to think through how to actually measure success from your partner events. So I guess I'm curious.
Camille White-Stern:My next kind of question is around once you have clarity on how you're going to measure success and how you've defined your goals and, isaac, I know you deeply understand this it's one thing to set internal expectations around what the objectives are, and then you have your whole like internal communication plan. You want to make sure, like sales is bought in and supporting the event, or and or your, your CX team. How do you approach that with partners? Again, you want to make sure everyone is aligned and on the same page. Like what does success look like? What are our expectations and objectives? And so I'm just curious if you have any particular tips, whether it's a certain tool for streamlining communication or just how you go about making sure that there is that general alignment between your organization and any partner organizations that you're bringing on board to work with.
Will Taylor:I would say always ask the question and agree on effectively every step. Are we doing this for this reason, thought leadership or demand gen? Are we doing this type of topic because it's relevant or because it's a hot topic, and really making sure that there is actual confirmation? I come from a sales background and so really asking direct, hard questions I think is the best way to find alignment, because you can't just assume it. You have to ask and then you'll get clarity on it. And, like I said before, if you're documenting everything while you're doing this process, are we doing it because of thought leadership? Yes, we are. Okay, great, this is our North Star. Who's doing what by when? Oh, it's these people, these dates. These are the key things we need to do. Great, here's now documented and have a source of truth, like a simple Google Doc and that can quickly get out of hand if you're creating content and writing a bunch of stuff. But, honestly, if you're putting key dates in there and always having the North star and the next step at the top, then you have that source of truth.
Will Taylor:I also love communicating with people where they are already, so Slack is a really good one. I love just immediately connecting with a partner on Slack and then sending them updates there, sending them reminders there as well. What I would do, especially last year and the year before, was I would send in a channel, maybe an at here tag, or tagging the right person that's supposed to be managing this. Hey, by the way, this is a due date coming up. This is just a friendly reminder. So having this constant communication that we agreed upon and holding those people accountable not leaving it to just them to execute, but actually actively bringing it top of mind, I think is really key and that's going to be appreciated by the partner. So drive alignment by agreeing, by asking the hard questions, document it and again agree that this is this path forward and what we want to do at the specific time. So I'm a stickler for action plans.
Isaac Morehouse:Yeah, and Will's great at just nailing the basics of like making sure everybody knows who's doing what next and getting that agreement. I think the real magic happens once you get beyond, because kind of all of those things are the same things you would do for sort of your own events If you weren't working with a partner. It's just another party's involved. The magic happens when it comes to the content and the promotion. Where you can really start it's the partner, but it's also anyone else that we think is influential to the person who we want to come to this event. So that can dictate what kind of people you're inviting to be speakers, or even people who aren't speakers or aren't partners. That you might say to your partner like, hey, I saw you went on that person's podcast. Do you have a relationship with them? What if we wrote a post for them about this event? You think they'd be willing to share it?
Isaac Morehouse:And a ton of what this this is the near bound play right Is trying to reach people through the people that surround them. A ton of that involves just writing content for people the number of emails, linkedin posts, things that we draft for people in their voice and then go to them, whether it's the partner you're working with or elsewise and say, hey, here's this thing we put together for you to help promote this event. Would you be willing to share it? It's amazing how the difference between just saying could you promote this and could you promote this? I already wrote a post for you. I already drafted an email for your newsletter, right? I already made a video clip for you. That is like night and day. I made a graphic for you. It's amazing. So it takes a little bit of work up front, but once you get that engine rolling, exponential growth to your reach and your ability to drive people to events and get them excited.
Camille White-Stern:I love it. We're getting into what I wanted us to dig into next, which is really like unpacking the partner events playbook and kind of sharing some of these super tactical ideas that people can execute on, and I'm wondering if you can just share a little bit more and kind of elaborate on some of the other essential components for a really impactful partner event playbook. How are you doing it? And if you want to dig into some of what you've done around the Nearbound Summit, I think that'd be great because obviously you've had so much success with that and I think myself, my team can learn and I'm sure our audience can learn a lot from you guys as well.
Isaac Morehouse:So Will. I'll have you walk through the details just to give context for people. We run a summit two years now, a virtual summit called the Nearbound Summit, and we've had about 5,000 people register and close to 2,000 people show up during the course of a four-day event. And we ran I don't know, will, how many unique plays do you think we ran Distinct different.
Will Taylor:I have a list of 25 that I wrote about, and there's probably more.
Isaac Morehouse:Yeah, why don't you dive in Because that's good? Now, smaller events. We might not use all of them. It might not be that extensive, but some subset of these apply to almost everything. So I'll let you share and dive into some of those, or maybe some of your favorites.
Will Taylor:Yeah, absolutely. So I just popped the post in the chat there that you can take a look at. Not all of these are like partner specific, but they do tap into this idea of this network effect, which can be with partners or it can be through your social network. Some of these are things like networking sessions pre-event and during the event Really good way to increase the attendance and, of course, you can give your partners an opportunity and your sellers an opportunity to chat. But it's also another medium to bring people together and another thing for people to sign up for.
Will Taylor:We made our own song about the event or for the event. We were getting in the newsletters of our partners. We were having other media companies promoting our event and we would do the same in kind. We were doing things like guerrilla marketing, where I bought these cyberpunk masks and we went to another event that was in person wearing them with the words of the event had near bound on it and people were taking pictures with us and it got even more exposure for the event. You know people are like why the heck are you dressed up like this? Well, we were running this event, so this is like some promotion for it. Those are just some, but the main Some other things.
Isaac Morehouse:I throw in there real quick, cause, like you always want to ask yourself the question the people that are influential to my buyer, what would make them excited to say something about this event? And everybody thinks, either bring them as a speaker Okay, that's great. Or bring them as a speaker Okay, that's great. Or bring them as a sponsor or share leads with them as a partner, or something like that. But there's a lot of other creative things you can do. So we, for example, did like it wasn't necessarily part of the official event, but at the end of each day we did a recap podcast episode about that day's content. But it was a crossover episode. It was live, where we said it's the near bound podcast plus marketing against the grain. So when we went to them we said, hey, let's do a joint podcast episode together your podcast and our podcast, and it's at this event. And so now they have an incentive to market it, we market it, it goes on their stream, it goes on our stream. We went to different podcast hosts to do these live sessions and then also find ways to make other people famous. So taking someone who's done something relevant to your event and then highlighting them, saying this person has made this concept famous. They've done all this amazing stuff. And like talking them up even if they're not a speaker at your event, and then tying it to what you're doing at your event, they will say that and be like wow, this is great. Now, I'm thankful for that. I'll share that.
Isaac Morehouse:Right, like finding ways to get the audience to participate early. Like doing pre-event laid back, like hey, we're doing a LinkedIn live or we're going to talk about some of the topics at the event. Come, chat it up with us. And even if there's only a handful of people, you create this camaraderie. You get people who are bought in early, make someone and they'll want to take a picture with that t-shirt. Things that would make people want to post about your thing sending a few people a pair of custom made Nikes that say near bound on them. Those people will post pictures of that on LinkedIn and it doesn't cost that much. Right, like it's really fun when you start going.
Will Taylor:Yeah, and the main concept there is think of ways that people will be excited or incentivized to share for you, and that's where you're going to get these network effects. When we released a book, we implemented a pretty similar strategy where we had some influencers post a picture with the book. Now, we only asked maybe three or four people and then we did it ourselves, but then we saw just an onslaught of social posts of people doing it, because they were like, oh, these other people are doing it, I'm going to do it too, because it gets engagement, we get highlighted, all of that stuff. So we are incentivizing this activity where we're getting additional promotion, and you can think of this through the lens of social networks, through working with partners or a media company or a community.
Will Taylor:You can consider all of that part of the near bound strategy, but the core focus there is what is going to make one plus one equal three by me doing one action. That might be one to one, but then it creates you know that person refers three of their colleagues, which was another strategy. I don't think it's in that list, but because we are a partnerships tech company, we asked our customers, who were probably already going to attend to invite their partners in. So now we're getting free promotion through the network because we're simply asking for this additional promotion. Like I said, when you ask, you can move mountains and it is going to create this network activation. That's the whole ethos of the place there.
Camille White-Stern:I love it. I always say if you don't ask, you don't know. So be bold with your ass. And I think you guys are really kind of sharing some just helpful ways to think through how to get people to take action right, incentivizing them, getting them excited and also like doing some of the work for them, like you said, isaac, like write the LinkedIn post for them, write the email newsletter little segment that you want to be included. It can go a long way and if you make it easy for them to engage and you incentivize, it's not only a win-win, it's like a no brainer for them.
Isaac Morehouse:It's kind of amazing too. When you start mapping out, there's a lot of people you may not even know that would be willing to do that If you ask them. Like, if you're in a venture backed startup, you've got investors. Some of your investors are probably pretty public on social media. If you go to them as a portfolio company and say, hey, we're doing this thing, I wrote this post and it's kind of in your voice, would you be willing to share it? It's amazing. There's a lot of influence. That's already. People you're connected to, who are connected to your buyer, that you can start to work with when you open up and it's easy to just get stuck as markers and be like it's our job by ourselves to drive everyone to register for this event and forget who else could drive them for us. Who could we work with that would be excited to do this and really expand that horizon?
Camille White-Stern:Well, this has been such a great conversation. I want we've been really focused on, like, partner events. I would like to just zoom out a little bit and have you guys kind of share your philosophies around just building a partner ecosystem in general, because, whether you have access to an awesome tool like Reveal or not, I think one component here is like in order to tap partners to come on and support your events and get better ROI from your events, you do need to have some sort of partner ecosystem that you're tapping into. So I'm curious if we can just zoom out a little bit and for you to unpack, like what is the secret sauce to building a successful partner ecosystem. You know, how can you keep those other partner organizations thriving, how can you nurture mutual growth? And, yeah, just how do you kind of approach that like long-term partnership strategy?
Will Taylor:Yeah. So there's a lot of pitfalls that partner people make, where they get a lot of momentum at the start of a partnership but then it quickly fizzles out because everything's, you know, pie in the sky theory, which is always a good idea until they actually execute. So what do you do to actually incentivize? You know, building a good ecosystem and getting partners to stay engaged? Constantly dangle the carrot, and the way that you can do that is, of course, focusing on the specific list that you want to target, pull it from, reveal or whatever you have, whatever you want to share with your partner, but then also have regular activities with them. Don't just do an activity once, once you've done your kickoff as a partner, and then say figure it out in the partnership. You should constantly be including them in your content. When you're gearing up for your next big content launch in marketing maybe you're putting together a white paper ask where can we put partners in here? Why wouldn't we include partners? You will probably have a better time creating that content if you are including partners and it'll make make them think oh yeah, that's my partner. So if I am partnering with a competitor and they're not doing this, I'm going to be thinking about the one that is generating activity, because that's going to be valuable to me. I'm going to take a look at these accounts, the activities and what's actually being put up on the board, so you should constantly celebrate what's winning and show the data as well.
Will Taylor:Hey, partner, we just closed a deal. It's because of you, because we ran this event, that is going to incentivize them to go. Oh well, maybe I'm compensated for that, maybe our client gets more value, maybe they're now going to be retained better, so I should do more of that. If you're showing the numbers, maybe they're now going to be retained better, so I should do that more of that. If you're showing the numbers, if you're doing regular activities and you're including them in more than just the ethereal, hey, this is a good idea we should partner and more focused on. Hey, here are these list of accounts that we should focus on. They're going to be like a better word, stupid to not engage there, because you're showing them the path forward. You're including them, so you're showing them how they can get there, and you're showing them where the money is essentially, which is what they're held accountable for. So that's the best way to build the partner ecosystem.
Isaac Morehouse:Yeah, I posted in the chat. This is not a public thing yet. We're playing around with it and testing it. We're building the Nearbot. So if you go to nearboundcom, we have tons of content about how to run partnerships, how to do all kinds of different things there, and this is just a little chat bot that has ingested all of this stuff and you can ask it questions like this. So it's still getting dialed in, but definitely check that out.
Isaac Morehouse:But I think one of the biggest things is just to start with. Rather than like how do I build a great partner ecosystem? That's like massive and huge. It's like saying, how do I build a great personal network? Well, start with just like one or two relationships at a time. So where is the handful one or two companies where it just makes sense to try to forge a partnership and work together? And if you're running against resistance, constantly go to the next one. Where you find one where it's like it's working, we have a good relationship. Just start there and then come up with a few activities, prove the value. Hey, we did a campaign together, we did an event together, we did some stuff together and we got results. Now let's see if we can do this with the next partner instead of like how do I sign up 50 people to my official partnerships program and then create badges and medallions for them and nobody cares? Start where you can prove the results and start small if you need to.
Camille White-Stern:I love that and it really fits in with how I think about an event strategy.
Camille White-Stern:If you are just thinking about doing a one-off event and then you're going to disappear and go back to your other marketing tactics, your event strategy is never really gonna get off the ground and you're never gonna mature and you're never gonna get to the point where you actually have a successful event-led growth motion.
Camille White-Stern:And so I think what you're saying is really resonating with me right, like don't just do one activation or one activity with a partner and expect the partnership to just suddenly thrive and produce all these amazing results, needs to be nurtured.
Camille White-Stern:You need to be thinking about what's the next moment that we can partner together, create that shared benefit and shared success. And kind of going back to what I said at the beginning of the conversation, I really do believe if you are focused more so on community marketing and community growth and you're not investing in events or in partnerships, you are missing the boat. And vice versa, if you're only focused on partner marketing but you're not leveraging events and not thinking about how you can also be building just community, a really thriving community, at the same time, again, you're kind of holding yourself back. And so I like to think about whether or not you're at the type of organization where you have specific departments or roles focused on each one of those verticals or motions or tactics you can take it upon yourself to think through how can we make this not just an event marketing play but a partner play and ultimately grow our community? All of those kind of tactics and motions combined, ultimately you're going to lead to revenue growth, and that's what we're here to do, right? Folks?
Isaac Morehouse:Well, events are like the absolute secret weapon for all of the. They feed all these other strategies your content strategy, your community strategy, your partner strategy because none of those have a forcing function of a date. Right, it's like this event happens at a specific date and time, so everything has to be done. It drives action, whereas if you're like, hey, we're doing an ongoing content campaign, there's not really a deadline, like an article can go out, linkedin posts can go out. Hey, we're doing a partnership where we do stuff together. There's not like a forcing function, right, community is ongoing. It's ongoing conversations happening on social or Slack channels or at in-person meetups. That forcing function isn't there.
Isaac Morehouse:The event is such a beautiful way to bring these things together. I think of all of marketing is really about conversations. Are you driving conversations that are creating value for your customers by either making them aware of new problems, aware of new solutions? Eventually it's going to bring value back to you. And conversations are happening continuously, but they come to a head at these impactful moments called events and if that's not a part of your play, it's not like a foundation of all of your other marketing and partnership stuff. You're playing on hard mode really.
Camille White-Stern:Yeah, reach, isaac, wow, that was a very good soundbite. I'm going to have to package that up and spread it to the world. We've got two minutes left. So, will and Isaac, I want to thank you both for joining me live today. What is the best way for folks to stay in touch with both of you and or learn more about Reveal and how they can leverage Reveal in their partner marketing and overall event strategy?
Isaac Morehouse:Yeah, so LinkedIn, we're both real active on LinkedIn. Connect with us on there, always, always happy to chat. And if you are not using any kind of account mapping, any kind of software that lets you see partners in overlap, or even if you are and you don't know much about it, maybe your partner team is. There are so many use cases for marketers to be able to access new leads, target specific accounts, find out which partners you might want to work with, and we've got a free version of Reveal. You can hop on and play around so you can go to revealco if you're interested in that, or just hit me up on LinkedIn. I'm happy to chat with you and see if there's anything there. I must say, camille, I didn't know. You guys have splash pillows. I see behind you there's a Re, a reveal blanket I've got somewhere here in my house, so the collab was meant to be.
Camille White-Stern:I love it. I love it. Home decor branded home decor. Don't count it out, folks. Great and Will. How can folks stay in touch with you? I'm assuming LinkedIn?
Isaac Morehouse:He lives in Canada, so it's carrier pigeon only.
Will Taylor:That's right. Yeah, yeah, we actually carve the message into the snow. It's like a smoke signal, but we can't light fires here. Yeah, LinkedIn and hit me up if you are actually taking action on what Isaac just said, which is sign up for a free reveal account. I can help you get set up and run you through the tactical plays. I got all the plays under the sun, templates, et cetera, and I love helping people.
Camille White-Stern:Love it. Thank you so much. Thank you both for being such open books and, you know, dropping so much wisdom and so many gems with myself, my team who's backstage shout out to Haley Kaplan and Chelsea Hill and, of course, our amazing audience. 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 even Sweetgreen, visit our website at wwwsplashthatcom. Until next time, take care.