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Checked In with Splash
Advice from VPs: How to Approach Event-Led Growth
In this episode, Splash's Director of Experiential Marketing Camille White-Stern and CMO Kate Hammitt record live from Forrester's B2B Summit.
They're joined by VP of ABX at 6sense EJ Oelling and VP of Corporate Marketing at Highspot Lucas Welch to discuss how marketers can use event-led growth strategies to better their marketing and grow their business.
In their panel discussion, they share:
- How to create alignment and set event expectations between sales and marketing
- The leading and lagging indicators they use to measure event success
- Tactics for using intent data and engaging with buying committees
- Strategies for maximizing revenue with existing customers
- Their number one tips for starting an event-led growth strategy
...and more.
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This is Checked In with Splash. Good morning and welcome everyone to, first of all, the Splash Strategy Suite and to Rise and Strategize. Thank you so much for joining us bright and early. My name is Camille Whitestone. I lead the experiential marketing team here at Splash. Thrilled to be here with all of you, have to shout out Haley and Chelly on my team for producing this event. Great job. And I have to thank our panelists this morning EJ, lucas and Kate. We are in for a treat. Think of this as an intimate brain pick learning session. Us marketers can learn together how to unlock an event-led growth strategy to grow our businesses in a more effective way. I am going to make sure I pull out my notes so I don't miss any of the important questions that we have for our panelists today, and I will let each of them introduce themselves very briefly. Ej, why don't you kick us off with a little brief intro? Your role I know. Obviously you lead ABX 6sense, but tell us a little bit about what that entails.
EJ Oelling:Hi everyone. My name is EJ Oelling. I'm the VP of ABX 6sense. What does that include. It includes so much. So I would say we do anything from event marketing, field marketing, go-to-market strategy and partner marketing. So we really look at that go-to-market strategy to drive revenue.
Camille White-Stern:Love that.
Lucas Welch:Hello. Given the coffee shop vibes maybe we get like snaps in the audience. My name is Lucas. I run global corporate marketing for Highspot. That is, brand, comms, content, demand, field marketing, and events internationally and really excited to have this conversation and grateful to be here.
Camille White-Stern:Thanks, Lucas.
Kate Hammitt:Last but not least, Kate. Hey everybody, great to see you all. So Kate Hammitt, CMO of Splash, lifelong event marketer, started with sporting events like the US Open and all the way up to corporate events now and excited to talk. Event-led growth Wonderful. All the way up to corporate events now and excited to talk event-led growth Wonderful.
Camille White-Stern:So casually, we have three seasoned marketing and events leaders here on the stage, so we will leave time for questions at the end. So if you have any, please feel free to chime in. I'll let you know when that time comes. I'm going to kick us off by just laying the foundation here a little bit and ask Kate to kind of break down the evolution of event-led growth as a go-to-market strategy. Obviously, businesses have been doing events for years, for decades. But what does that look like today and what do you think the key drivers are that have led to this increased popularity around event-led growth as a strategy?
Kate Hammitt:Thanks, Camille. So, and esteemed panel, please jump in with your thoughts as well. I'll take it right there, check, please. Well, events have been driving revenue and expansion forever, since inception. When we think about what's happening today growth at all costs and a shift into more efficient growth you know there's a squeeze on marketing teams, so we're looking at every channel and saying what are we getting out of this channel? What's driving our growth? What's driving influence in our pipeline? And so I think that shift is probably the largest shift. When you look at the pandemic and what occurred with virtual meetings, it started to expand. What can we do top of funnel? What can we do bottom of funnel? How can we incorporate virtual events, this newly valued format, into our event mix and into those marketing channels? So I think these elements have all kind of come together and brought us to a point where event management is no longer kind of the, I guess, jargon that we would use. It's about event marketing, it's about driving pipeline, and so that's the shift that we're seeing today.
Camille White-Stern:I love that. I want to ask Lucas and EJ to chime in as well on. You know Kate mentioned driving pipeline. If you want to unpack that a little bit and also just share some additional benefits you've seen from your teams and or other organizations adopting an event-led growth strategy, what can businesses stand to gain today from doing so?
Lucas Welch:Pipeline is absolutely the phrase that pays, literally and figuratively.
Lucas Welch:It is interesting.
Lucas Welch:You know you talked about nothing like a airborne virus to really change the dynamic of how people engage in events, and now that we are on the other side of it and you're looking at the variety of experiences that you can create, I think you pointed at it well, which is like there are opportunities to impact every stage of the funnel in ways that we weren't forced to necessarily think about four years ago.
Lucas Welch:And so, as you've seen, the agility necessary to first adapt to what was happening during the pandemic and then on the other side of it, you don't want to lose all of the efficiency that comes with some of those virtual experiences. They just need to be very finely curated and targeted, because everybody did it. So now you need to have some real creativity there. But if you can, I think that's where you can start to integrate different types of experiences at each stage of the funnel so that you get your top of funnel awareness play. At the middle you can start to actually create real pipeline and at the bottom, hopefully, you can influence or accelerate through to close one.
Camille White-Stern:Love that EJ, anything to add? I mean everything you both just said.
EJ Oelling:I'm at that point. Thank you everyone, it's been a pleasure. No, I would say I mean for ABX, our core function is data plus experience equals pipeline. I mean I say that often. So we really want to look at the data. So it's curating the right audience. You're trying to generate that pipeline at the end. So what's the experience that aligns to that data? So I think you do you just it's just not years ago, it was throw a party and be done right. So I think it's not necessarily events, it's even activations and experiences. So how do you build on a program approach? But pipeline is key. You don't get the ROI, then why is it worth doing?
Camille White-Stern:Yeah, and Lucas, you said something you know about being really targeted and intentional with different event programs that you are leveraging in your strategy EJ. You know, 6sense, what can you unlock? I mean because I understand and you know, shameless plug. We 6sense customers and we are soon to be Highspot customers too, probably, and I just am curious if you can talk to us a little bit about how your businesses can leverage buying intent data to be more intentional, to be super targeted in terms of the attendees that you are marketing to and inviting to these events and activations and experiences in order to drive pipeline, and what that looks like for your team or for customers. That you've seen has worked really well.
EJ Oelling:A simple answer would be this when you're building out an event strategy, you're thinking about the attendee journey. What's that moment they walk in? What is that experience they're going to have? So that's super important. But when you build out your event strategy, you're looking at what is the buyer's journey. So, by using the right intent, you can see, are you giving them a high-level brand experience? Are they more engaged? What are? We can see what the keywords that they're looking at. You know to really drive those more bespoke and curated experiences that they could have. So the intent will help you drive where they are in their stage to then give them the right experience that they're going to get for their event. So I think you have to look at buyer and attendee journey almost equal as you're planning out your strategy.
Camille White-Stern:I love that and we're talking a lot about, you know, engaging with and activating with buyers who are in market, who are ready to engage with your brand. That's kind of to me that's almost like an external lens, and then I think about well, how can we be more efficient internally as well and fine tune our strategy? So, lucas, I'm curious you know EJ and I were talking about earlier you might have your sales team and no offense to any salespeople in the audience, this is a safe space.
Lucas Welch:We're in the trust tree.
Camille White-Stern:We're in the trust tree for sure you might have your sales reps or sales leaders saying like, well, we want to get these companies or these logos or these accounts to our events. The intent data might be telling you something very different. And so, Lucas, I'm curious, like you know, with Highspot's mission to empower go-to-market teams to really unlock the most sophisticated enablement and execute consistently, how are you seeing the event-led growth strategy in motion, kind of mature and evolve through kind of your lens and your line of work? What does that mean for enablement and kind of driving really tight alignment for your events?
Lucas Welch:Yeah, and just following up real quickly on EJ's comment, for any of the businesses that you're operating in Europe, I think it is interesting. So I got the opportunity to go to Hamburg, Germany, two weeks ago for an event there with our central EMEA team and afterwards I'm sitting with the sales team. So this will lead to the sales and marketing alignment point and because of GDPR, particularly the double opt-in, in Germany you can't get as many signals online as you can in North America or even in Northern Europe. And so what they were telling me to underscore the power of event-led growth is depending on the region. The event may be one of the few opportunities the sales team gets to have a proactive buyer want to have a conversation with them and be able to do that on site in a way that follows both cultural and business norms for that given region. So just depending on how large scale all of your businesses are just something to consider about. I saw a second level of power of the event as the meeting place in a region where, digitally or through virtual experiences, you may not be able to engage as many people as you can in North America, etc. To your other question, Camille, what we've seen is.
Lucas Welch:At the end of the day, I look at it as you need three things. First, I would never do an event if sales leadership doesn't want the event. I do not market for marketing sake. I market for sales, the end of the day. If my team, so we own a 15% pipeline ARR contribution for this fiscal year. So if I don't deliver that number and I don't see a high return on that in terms of close one revenue, then my programs didn't work. So I'm not going to go do this summit or a high-end VIP experience or whatever it is, unless both my North American and or international sales leader partners have said yes, we absolutely want that. Our teams are going to make the most of it. Tell us what you need them to do. We'll hold them accountable. So no software, no level of data, nothing is going to fix it if you aren't aligned with sales leadership on their teams making the most of whatever the investment is that you're making. So then, underneath that and this is where the intent, data and the signals you can get in so many different ways comes in is that account prioritization? So who are we trying to target and do we legitimately believe that there is an opportunity to create a buyer conversation there. That then allows something like an enablement platform or even just enablement team.
Lucas Welch:What I'm about to describe is a heck of a lot easier with Highspot, but you can certainly do it in a variety of ways. At the end of the day, you want a very clear CTA for a given sales role, so not just the whole sales team like get everyone to this event. But if I'm in for sales and I'm trying to do new business, no matter if we're driving people to the same event, the CTA and what we're trying to achieve there will be different if we're talking about a customer who we've landed but now we need to expand, and so in high spot, we'll create a play that will have very specific CTAs for the different roles. It will give them coordination with their account list in our CRM so they know exactly who to target if they're in market or not, using intent signals and give them all the materials to do that in a way that they can just click, push, move and in some cases, particularly as technologies like 6s ense have advanced, in some cases that's now automated. So you'll have maybe one tier of accounts where it's like no, this is hand touch, we're not going to just send them the generic email, but in other instances it's either AI or an automated sequence that's driving that engagement. That all flows through the play. So at the end of the day let's say we're three weeks out from the summit I'm able to go into the summit play that we created in Highspot.
Lucas Welch:I can see, of the teams that should have looked at the play, how many looked at it. I can see if they looked at it. Did they view the content? If they viewed the content, did they pitch it? If the content was pitched, did it get opened? And how many opportunities open, opportunities with revenue associated in Salesforce, how many of those have engaged? So I can see an influence revenue number in route to the event.
Lucas Welch:If those numbers aren't all trending up three weeks before the event, I go right to the sales leadership. This is a true story. I said Martin, we got a problem. People aren't doing it. So sure enough, emails underlined all bold meetings, everything in. Like a 48 hour time period got booked, that play view went up a hundred percent. Like a 48-hour time period got booked, that play view went up 100%. And so by the time we got to the two-week mark, everyone had viewed it, the pitches were way up, the meetings were starting to get booked and we were able to drive the engagement with the sales team to ensure we get the most out of this investment, because I had the play and the system to hold them accountable.
EJ Oelling:You hit the nail on the head with. Enablement is key, I think, for events you have to think about. We say we lay it out on a teal platter for everyone I'm not wearing too much teal, just my shoes but I would say we lay it out on a teal platter at 6s ense, because we really want to make sure that the templates are correct, they're in the right voice, you're using ABM techniques, where you're targeting your audience the right way, that everybody, whether they're a sales or CS or your marketing team everyone knows what their role is and how they're getting the audience. I think that is one of the most important things that people don't talk about often, but it's such a core part of what your event strategy should be. For sure, I totally agree.
Camille White-Stern:Absolutely, kate and I often talk about at Splash. Events aren't just a tactic that you run within your marketing strategy anymore. They're really a team sport. Kate, I'm curious if you because you've had such a tenured career in this space and enabling different sales teams to rally around events if you had anything else to add. But also I just want to comment, lucas, that is an incredible level of accountability that you described.
Lucas Welch:Because I can go find the person that hasn't viewed the play or hasn't done the thing and be like hey, mac, what's going on here? I'm just trying to help you close pipeline. And then maybe it leads to a real conversation where he's like oh, I didn't understand X, or I actually don't have an account here, but could I try this? And then you build a partnership, you build trust and you make the most of your investments.
Kate Hammitt:Absolutely.
Camille White-Stern:Yeah.
Kate Hammitt:It's one team, one dream for sure with events. So if you don't have your sales team kind of engaged with you know also we're doing like huddles before events like this every morning. What are we doing? How are we deploying together the shared metrics that we want to see out of? It can't just be.
Camille White-Stern:Well, you just said one of my favorite words metrics.
Lucas Welch:Really, that's one of your favorite words, okay.
Camille White-Stern:I'm a data-driven marketer. I like to make sure we're measuring success.
Lucas Welch:Okay, that'll be in your review.
Camille White-Stern:I think, ultimately, why is enablement so important? Why is having an event-led growth strategy so crucial? It's because, at the end of the day, we're trying to drive pipeline. That's one metric you can look at, but I'm curious if we can get each of your perspectives on just what it means to measure success. What does it mean for an event or an event program or your strategy to be successful? What other metrics are you looking at? And I think there are kind of different levels of importance. Right, there are going to be certain metrics that are really important to your sales team, to your marketing team, to your broader entire revenue organization. I'm curious what your counterparts in leadership care about as well. So, ej, I'll start with you. We can kind of go down the line, if you guys will humor me. What does measuring success look like 6sense?
EJ Oelling:So your follow-up to your event is almost the most important part of your event, obviously the lead and enablement, but really it's what are you getting out of it in the end? So for us we were just laughing about this earlier Some people are like, oh, the food tastes great. You're like great. But we really drive. Our measurement is based on meetings. So meetings are a key part of our event strategy.
EJ Oelling:We look at what we want our source pipeline to be at the event. We think about the average deal size that's going to happen by segment and then we come up with here's the amount of meetings we're going to have in our space. Let's just throw out, let's say 200 for this week. So then we take it by. We're going to look at the audience that happens. So I take the meeting quota, I divide it by segment, so commercial, enterprise and strategic. I even break it down further and I say, okay, strat, based on your audiences. Here, from looking at the intent data to see who would be here or the list that we receive, we say okay, so your audience, you need to get 50 meetings.
EJ Oelling:We know X amount are going to be new business or an upsell within an account. So my team has a meeting quota. How many are going to be upsell, how many are going to be new business? They have that as a baseline. We also have a source pipeline goal. We have an attendance goal based on the different functions and the different parts of our program. That's just for an event like this. So we really look down to the very bare minimum of numbers and then we work with our CS team and our sales team, our BDR team and marketing team to really make sure we're getting the output to follow up that way. It's not an easy play. We know there's a lot of factors that go into it, but because pipeline is so important, we need to know that we get a baseline ROI coming out of it.
Camille White-Stern:I love that breakdown. Lucas, I'm curious any similarities or differences in how you're kind of measuring success? Yeah, absolutely.
Lucas Welch:If you came here for a lot of debate, you're probably not going to get as much of that, but you, hopefully, are getting some actionable insight. So far, and building off what EJ said, I think one of the things that's really interesting is how do you look at your leading indicators versus your lagging indicators? So I talked a little bit about the leading indicators. You could get through something like Highspot to understand if sales is engaging and preparing you to make the most of an event. But for marketing, we've turned our MQL to pipe up conversion rate. So, using some of the tactics we're talking about here, a year ago it took 50 days for an MQL to become a pipe up, on average, of course, of the cohort that became Pip opportunities. This quarter that we just finished, on April 30th, it's now 28 days. So we've accelerated that motion through a number of tactics again, including some of this.
Lucas Welch:But that pipeline is still, if it's within quarter you're looking at, still a 60 to 90 day lag on whether or not you actually generated the pipeline.
Lucas Welch:That is often your ultimate goal. So you still want to see some leading indicators and EJ gave you a few of those that are going to tell you A the day after the event, the week after the event, do we feel like we hit the moment? We have that follow-up now you're seeing follow-up meeting books or maybe it's demos or maybe it's business value presentations, but are you seeing through the funnel on the accounts that you engage with the next step activities that are giving you a sense of all right, we're making progress towards what we were trying to ultimately achieve? And if you aren't, you still have time, particularly in those first couple weeks after the event, to ensure that you're pulling levers in the follow-up. Maybe you've got a follow-up more curated, like VIP dinner experience after the big broad-based event that you're going to drive certain attendees or people you engage with to. But I think really be thoughtful about what your leading indicators are that can help you understand if you're ultimately going to get to the lagging indicator that is, pipeline and or close one revenue.
Kate Hammitt:So all of the above, no debate here. Some other things that you know looking at with related to customers running events. Typically you're doing education. Love to see kind of product usage from that, how customers are engaging with your tools, your services and what those metrics are after they go through an event program or one event. Another thing is like message pull through, so love to see how our messages come across, either in social media, you know, through an event. Today we're talking a lot about event led growth and that's obviously a really core pillar for Splash. So loving to see when events are, you know producing the content that aligns with your message and that you're able to use that to repurpose and feed other marketing channels as well. So those are just a few extras.
Camille White-Stern:Lucas, you mentioned some data and metrics around everything that happens pre-event, right? What other data do you guys look at just to kind of get a sense and keep a close eye on whether your event strategy is working or not? We talked about, like these key metrics of measuring success. But what else can you look at to kind of fine tune your strategy, make sure you are investing in the right types of event programs? You've all kind of talked about leveraging events throughout the funnel, but I'm just curious if there's anything else we haven't touched on. I want to leave no stone unturned today. So you know, and make sure that we're really talking about, like I said, all of the keys to unlocking a successful event-led growth strategy. Is there anything else that you can think of that you might look at to say what we're doing is working or we can improve in this area?
Lucas Welch:I'll jump in and maybe I'll say something wild and we'll actually get a debate and EJ and Kate will be like he doesn't know what he's talking about. I thought you actually did bring up a really good point, which is, at an event like this, a large conference, if you've been doing your job beforehand, you're likely to engage with both customers and prospects, and so I'll double down on some of your kind of customer side experience, where we do a global user conference every year in the fall, and the sessions and the tracks are specifically curated to encourage customers who may be using one license type to explore the capabilities of an additional license type which is setting you up for cross-sell. And so one additional area I'd say is you know, set aside whether you do a user conference or not and just think what event opportunities do you have to engage your existing customers? And of course sounds kind of capitalistic, but that's where we're at is what else can I sell them and can you create opportunities where you can give clear signals to your post-sale team that such and such account where maybe they've struggled to get executive buy-in and they're only dealing with a lower level individual who doesn't have full purchase power, or maybe they're in one division but they're trying to get to another division. So what signals, what ways can you use the content, the conversations, the demos, the experiences, whatever it may be at a given event, to engage that customer, to understand the broader range of value that you can offer them, and then ensure that you're in a position metrics, to measure what those touch points are, so that that post sales team can capitalize and, at the very least, maybe you get Intel that's like hey, this customer might churn. I'm going to get those signals today to that account manager, let them know. And that kind of Intel you can't necessarily put on the stat sheet, so to speak. But I'll give you a very real example.
Lucas Welch:I was at the booth yesterday. An individual came up, said hey, I think my company has high spot, I'd love to learn more about it. It turns out, through just the weird serendipity of the world, she is the backfill for a former colleague of mine at a customer of ours and he's out and she's in, and I didn't know that, but now I do, and so I'm able to go tell the account management team hey, this is the new person that you really need to make sure you're engaged with. I'm connected with her. Bring me in. We'll have a peer-to-peer conversation, make sure that we've got the right account coverage, and so is that going to show up in the stat sheet in any way? No, but the intelligence allows us to deliver and hopefully maximize the customer engagements that we have.
Camille White-Stern:The power of events is real folks. I love that Also something you said, lucas, just being able to. Maybe you're struggling, your sales team or a rep is struggling to get buy-in right. It just sparked this thought that also we were talking about the other day. The buy-in committee is not just one or two people anymore. Ej, I know you have a lot of thoughts on this. Can you kind of like talk to us a little bit about the marriage between ABM, engaging the entire buying committee, leveraging events to do so?
EJ Oelling:Absolutely we have, I think, for our Strat customers. It's like 23 different people have to be involved to get a deal done for some of our larger accounts, right, it's not just hey, that sounds great, we should buy that, you know. I mean that was wonderful when that happened, but I think it's going back to really doing curated, targeted approaches, right. So, to go on to kind of your earlier question too, I think we sometimes as event professionals we get said go throw up this event, like we're going to put it on, we're going to go do something, and you're just kind of quick to it. But we actually realize sometimes you need to change your content strategy. Like, sometimes you put out a landing page Are they getting the right impressions? Is it getting the right hits? So I would say you don't always have to settle for just the one time you push something out. So maybe you need to change up your email structure a little bit differently. Maybe your messaging needs to be more targeted. Maybe you're using a tool like a mutiny, where you're doing really a customized page in some way for different things.
EJ Oelling:I mean, I think you just have to think about how you are approaching your audience different, because you're going to speak to a CFO very differently about an event. We talk data. A data scientist is a different persona for us. You're going to have a very different conversation with a data scientist than a CMO. We're all going to talk data, but they're going to be very different. The wow factor is going to be very different at that event. Right, very engaging. So I think we really look at it's a much larger. You want to find your mobilizer in your accounts. You're working with your sales and CS team, but we really need to be based on those persona outreach that helps us get it done at the end of the day.
Camille White-Stern:Yes Actually reminds me. You know you might have to tweak your content, your messaging. I think a theme that all of you are kind of talking about, without maybe necessarily using these exact words, is having the right tools at your fingertips, having the right tech stack powering your team and powering your strategy is really paramount. I know Kate and I were noticing, you know, registration one of the leading indicators right was a little low. On one of our recent webinars I went to Kate and I said would it be crazy if we changed the title of the event and change our marketing messaging a bit? What'd you say, kate?
Kate Hammitt:Yeah, absolutely it was like the game changer for us and immediately, you know, just shot up in and we nailed it. But I feel like that's the key with like buying signals and you know what keywords people are looking at and the way that we're looking at the funnels. I was thinking about this. That's also something that's changed in our marketing world of not looking at the buyer's journey the way we want to, but the way it actually is and the way the buyer is independently researching and you're not always going to know what the data scientist wants. Chances are you will have no idea.
EJ Oelling:But you'll know their keywords by looking at it.
Kate Hammitt:But you'll know their keywords and you'll be able to curate your content and then, not being afraid to you know, be bold, change the title. I guarantee nobody knew that we changed the title, but you know we got a whole bunch of reg from it, so it was worth it.
Lucas Welch:What was the winning title? Do you remember?
Camille White-Stern:Yes, it was. Make sure your biggest events aren't a big, aren't a bust.
Kate Hammitt:I do remember, because we were debating, using the word don't let your events suck essentially, and so I was like so edgy. So edgy I know.
EJ Oelling:I would sign up for that.
Kate Hammitt:Yeah, I'm in, and so I was like can we say suck on a webinar? I don't know.
Lucas Welch:We went for bust, we went a little safer, but you still made it sharper.
Camille White-Stern:It was basically the switch. We were in for the punch.
EJ Oelling:The title was a little too safe before, but you have to make a splash Pun intended. You have to make a splash to yes, ej, yes, thank you.
EJ Oelling:You're welcome. That's why they paid me the little bucks. So I would say but you have to find a way to make noise out there now. There's so many events that are happening. There's so many different things. We were talking about it earlier. I'd rather throw one big thing with the right partners in place, so everybody comes together and we all talk as a group, than be fighting for everybody's time. I think that is really challenging for the audience. People are prioritizing differently, so how are you going to make your event stand out in some way is super important now, more so than it was before.
Camille White-Stern:Absolutely. I think we've talked about buyer behaviors have changed drastically, which is why an event-led growth strategy can be so beneficial to businesses today, and so to have attendee behaviors right. So I'm curious, kind of just looking ahead, what do you all see on the horizon? There's been so much change in kind of the marketing go-to-market business landscapes up to today. How do you stay agile, how do you keep your teams evolving so that you're not kind of like falling behind and trying to stick to something that worked last year or a few years ago that's maybe not going to work today or moving forward?
EJ Oelling:Sure, I love calling my team and saying I have a crazy idea. It probably terrifies them.
Lucas Welch:I'm sure they love that. I was just going to say do you think your team loves that?
EJ Oelling:No, probably not. But I'm like, hey, quick question, can we hop on for five minutes? Crazy idea here. But I do tell my team like think big, like think, take budget out of the mix. Let's come up with a crazy idea and then become realistic about it. Right, because you can take these wow moments and these really unique moments that you're putting together and just make them for a smaller audience. We talked about. We used to do a big party here at this event and we're like that's great. We needed the brand awareness at one point. Now we're doing really highly curated things. So I would say the trend for me for 2024 and probably into 2025 is micro events, really targeted events. Get the right people in the right space customers and prospects they can talk together. We used to divide them, you know, and do a prospect dinner. We still do one specific stuff for prospects every once in a while, but we do know that your customers sell you best right, absolutely.
EJ Oelling:Getting the right people in the right space to have that talk tracks. And it's okay to be smaller. I would rather have six amazing accounts in one space than 22 people in a space. It's okay to be smaller and intimate because at the end of the day, we're all human and we're all kind of talked out at the end of an event. So sometimes I just want to talk about bad Netflix shows and connect with everyone that way, and then you get into business as well. Yeah.
Camille White-Stern:I mean, that's how you build real deep relationships. And buyers are people. At the end of the day, they want to buy from other people that they trust. I love that. And also, yes, retweet quality over quantity all day. Lucas, what do you think?
Lucas Welch:I mean, I do like clothes a lot. So if you think about, you do Turns out. But if you think about the argument you make to yourself to buy the really nice pair of shoes over the Well, they look almost the same but they're like a third of the cost I take that same principle and I think about yeah, but if I buy the really nice shoes, particularly if they're made by a vendor that is trusted and I have experience with, I'm like those might last me the rest of my life. The shoes that I got from H&M, they're going to last me for six months. So then I'm going to buy another pair, another pair, and we can set the environmental impact of that aside.
Lucas Welch:And just think about if you're going to spend a dollar, you want to spend it on something that's really going to have a lasting impact for the goals that you're trying to achieve, and that means you don't want to be everywhere.
Lucas Welch:You want to be at the few key places you believe, based on intent signals, based on account prioritization, based on alignment across your sales leadership, based on your industry, what you sell, et cetera.
Lucas Welch:You take all that in and you say all right, if we only have X amount of money and we have these big, crazy ideas, as EJ was talking about.
Lucas Welch:What are the realistic ones we think will really move the needle that we can also measure and iterate on as we continue to learn from the metrics that matter so much.
Lucas Welch:And so I definitely agree with the quality over quantity, and I would then double down on that and say an event at Summit may not be the right fit if you don't have the budget to really ensure that your presence, like what Splash has done here, what 6sense has done so well with Club Six, you obviously have the investment ability to do these additional surrounding engagements, so you're putting your best foot forward and you're driving another level of experience. And if you just have a booth at the event, if you can't do that, it might not be the right like big conference for you because you'll likely get lost in the mix. If you do get anyone coming for your fidget spinner, they're probably not qualified and you're not going to get a return on that money. You felt like you had to be there but you didn't get the most out of it, and so kind of have the courage to say no to certain instances if you don't think you have the setup to really stand out.
Camille White-Stern:Absolutely, kate, we really have.
EJ Oelling:H&M shoes, though Can we?
Camille White-Stern:just talk about that, yeah.
Kate Hammitt:I know, absolutely not. Sorry, kate, sorry, and I think about it, no offense. I mean H&M has nice stuff, apologies to H&M. I think about it, too, with the value that you're trying to provide the attendee, like not just doing an activation to activate, but thinking about what you're bringing to the attendee at that moment in time. That's going to you, going to differentiate your organization and also make sense for the attendee to say, okay, I'm going to travel here, I'm going to find childcare, I'm going to invest my time and a lot of times that's that connection between your customers and prospects or like-minded individuals with similar challenges.
Kate Hammitt:I can get content online anywhere. I mean with similar challenges, I can get content online anywhere. I mean that's another like shift that we're up against post pandemic and that you know we can consume this content everywhere. So how are you making those connections? One of our magic spark series, where we bring event marketers together, has been really powerful because of what our attendees do together and has nothing to do with, you know, our organization, our platform, but really just the power of getting like-minded individuals together. So I always try to think about that and prioritize that too, of what's the value to the attendee and are we bringing in, are we curating that experience? So, amongst yourselves, you're taking away something that we could never imagine possible but happens when you get those people in the room.
Camille White-Stern:I love it. I want to be mindful of time. I know the conference agenda is going to be starting soon and you probably have other places you could be soon, but I do want to ask before we wrap and if this is your time audience, if you have any questions after this one question, you can chime in. I'm curious what your advice would be for event marketers or marketing leaders who don't yet have a sophisticated event strategy or event led growth motion at their organization. What would be your advice to them in terms of, like, how to get started? Where do you start? There's a lot you need to do, not only just coming up with the strategy, but like how do you get even that internal buy-in and alignment from leadership all the way down to your ICs who are going to be executing on that strategy?
Lucas Welch:Well, you could talk to Splash.
Camille White-Stern:I didn't pay him to say that. Folks, I promise that could just be one starting point.
Lucas Welch:I'll go briefly first. This is maybe a little weird, but, like, talk to your salespeople, like legitimately ask them what they hear from their prospects, what they hear from their customers. Where are those individuals going Like? We actually have gotten some really good recommendations on either curated small experiences to what EJ was just talking about or a a given conference or event, because we had an open line of mutual conversation with key salespeople who had been champions and had advocated and used our events successfully in the past. So they set the template for the rest of the sales team and because of that I want to make sure they don't just have an open line to the person on my team that runs field. They have an open line to me to say, hey, this is what my accounts are saying, or this is what I heard about, or such and such is going to be here. Is there a way that we can get there?
Lucas Welch:And so one of the things we did was we created a program this year that is essentially funding for sales to go to events that we're not sponsoring.
Lucas Welch:So there's a running budget line item for me that, hey, you can apply If you have a certain number of accounts that meet in a certain AR threshold, then we're going to pay for this sales individual to go.
Lucas Welch:They'll have enough money to take the customer prospect out to dinner, et cetera.
Lucas Welch:So if you don't have a big enough budget to go sponsor, think about building a partnership with sales. They want to get out on the road, they want a free steak dinner, they want to go meet with their prospects, they want to close deals right. So use them as your reconnaissance team to go out, check out a couple conferences, check out a couple experiences, report back and you spend a fraction of the cost it's going to take to fly everybody out there, sponsor a booth and hope it works and instead they can come back and be like I did this in France just two months ago sent the sales leader to this event. He came back, never sponsored this. It was lame. It was like great because we almost did, but instead we paid a fraction of the cost for him to go and just attend. We learned that that's not the place for us to be and now, when that sales leader knows, when he feels like he really has something, we've got that trust and relationship to make the most of the spend when we do put it on the line.
Camille White-Stern:Sales-led events for the win. Cx-led events for the win. Kate, I feel like you're ready to chime in.
Kate Hammitt:Yeah Well, I was thinking about just with we do, sales-led events, so just what Lucas was describing. Also, CX-led events, you know, when they want to go bring customers together and expand an account, how do you facilitate that? Third-party events, so what we're all here for now. How do you activate here? We have, you know, a series of tiers that we think through. Is it, you know, just boots on the ground? Is it a major? You know, sponsor booth and the whole shebang?
Kate Hammitt:Also, community-led events, and so we really think about what the strategy looks like related to all of those different formats, different opportunities. Then match that up with your funnel and figure out where your gaps are, where do you need help in your approach and where do you feel like human-to-human interaction is really going to accelerate and could put a fine point on your relationship? Or, like what EJ was saying, there's a time when you need brand awareness. So how are you coming out of the gate and doing that? Is it a huge party at a major B2B event that's going to be full of your ICP? Are you doing that through virtual events and hitting top of funnel and making sure that there's impact there? So, lots of analysis, lots of data and then layering on where the value would be Love it.
EJ Oelling:What do you think? I agree with what both of you said, but I'm going to go a different direction.
Lucas Welch:Yes, At the end we go sideways. Thank, you.
EJ Oelling:Welcome to my world. Everyone Okay. But I would say, if you're going to be building out a program where you're going to have sponsors, if you're going to be building out different audiences, I tell my team all the time, put yourself in their shoes. If I'm a sponsor, what do I want to get out of my sponsorship packet? You know what is valuable to me, I go. You just can't say like, hey, you get two passes and some brand. No one cares about that. Are they getting one-on-one meetings? Are we doing a speed dating? Are they doing this or that? So I really tell my team all the time put yourselves in their shoes.
EJ Oelling:Same with sales we send them. We do the same thing. We send people on site. What's the value they're going to get about going there? How are they tracking the information the right way? So when you're building out your strategy, it doesn't have to be the moon and the stars, but just what are your basic things? You need to get out of it and put yourself in the shoes of the audience member that's going to be there, Because, at the end of the day, our budgets are not what they used to be and things cost significantly more than they used to as well. I hadn't noticed that Never. So I tell my team all the time spend the money the right way. You can still spend the money, but let's spend it the right way, on the right things at the right time.
Camille White-Stern:Absolutely and to your point in terms of just getting buy-in externally or internally. Everyone is always thinking what's in it for me, so if you can clearly communicate what's in it for them, it's a great starting point. Ej Lucas, kate, thank you so much. I am so grateful that you've all lent your brilliant minds to this discussion today. Hope everyone in the audience got some value out of it and learned a few things. I know I did Quick scan Any burning fire questions for our panelists before we wrap up. No, all right, oh, we do. We have a question. What's your question, anna?
Audience:So, Anna, I lead our local field marketing team for Airtable. It's about organizational structure. I believe field marketers are essentially like the quarterbacks for the sales business. They need to understand the business. They need to understand what the the pipe gen, the pipe math, whatever and influence marketing tactics outside of events but also own certain tactics that might fill in those gaps.
Audience:There's these very little room for event logistics and execution. So I'm kind of playing with what is the right model to have these strategic field marketers making kind of decisions on where investment happens, but then the team that can go execute the field marketing responsibility of events and plays and things like that. Is it the agency model? Is it having an events team that the field working team leverages? I don't know if you've all thought about that or what your team models look like and what's going to be worked or not worked.
EJ Oelling:I'll take this one, because my model is actually really unique at 6sense. I'm a recovering field marketer and so I love.
EJ Oelling:The first step is admitting you have a problem, exactly I knew you were going to go there, so I took the pause. There you go. So when I came into 6s ense, they had event managers and go-to-market strategists. We didn't have field marketing, so my event planners were menu venue they hate when I call them that, but they were menu venue logistics right. And then I had my go-to-markets who are doing campaigns. They're doing one-to-one, one-to-few, they're really doing that. But I didn't have anyone in between because I go cool, I need someone who can dive deep in with the sales team but then also know how to do a booth and don't hate me at the end when I make them do a booth. Okay. So I will tell you my event logistics team. They're a powerhouse, but I have started to teach them how do you read your dashboards, how do you do your metrics. So they're still event led in the way of. They're doing the logistics and the look and feel and brand and they're starting to get towards the metric side.
EJ Oelling:My go to markets I call them the mini CMOs of my team, so they each sit in a strategic group. They're getting in the weeds with the accounts. They're doing some virtual events here and there, but they're mostly doing campaigns or one-to-one plays or one-to-few, and I just hired a field marketer that sits in the middle and so that field marketer, she does very specific events where she goes and like a third party. So for example, she did like Adobe Summit for me. So she'll go in and she's doing the true field marketing so she can do the events and the booth and all that. But then she also gets in the weeds because I only have one of them. She will toggle between. She'll take a couple of the events throughout the year, but if not, I pair them up and I make everybody pair. So I take an event person plus a go-to-market and they together create a field marketer and so that way the accounts are aligned. They're going in the weeds with them, they're driving the pipeline the right way so they know who's in the room. And then the other side they're just doing that look and feel. So because they partner, it's not all in. They can kind of balance the weight a little bit. So I don't know if there's a true play. I know all events not all teams have eight. I have eight people who can do that globally where they pair up.
EJ Oelling:But it is a unique situation we do for some things, so we use an external agency when we have the budget for it, to do decor. So, for example, for Summit this week we have an outside agency that helped us with our decor of our space. But all the meetings, all the logistics, all the dinners, that's all done by my team. It's just them. But for example, then we'll go to another event and my team they'll own it. So I think it becomes on the bandwidth for them and the budget you have. But if we do have an agency partner for production, when we do our user conference, we do use an agency for that.
Lucas Welch:On agency, ours is similar. Kind of the concept we use is the closer you get to the buyer, the less I want to use an agency. But the closer I get to the decor, the event logistics, event logistics, the ground level, the more an agency model makes sense. So as an example I have one, what I would call event operations lead for north america. She can't possibly be at even if we just did five events, let's say for the year, third parties she's not going to be able to be at all of those, even if it's just life reasons forget about like work balance et cetera.
Lucas Welch:So I want to make sure I've got some agencies that I can work with where. Hey, I just need somebody in this city to do these things, set up these logistics. You don't have to know our message, you don't have to engage with the prospect or the customer, but you do have to know the fine level of details of like, if you're in San Francisco, then it's union labor et cetera. So I think the closer to the event as it is is where I feel like agency can work really well and be quite efficient and also means you don't have to overextend headcount investments. But the closer you get to the buyer. I want more and more of my internal expertise present in that engagement. I mean I do like flowers.
EJ Oelling:I can't so many things.
Kate Hammitt:I think that's been really important, especially for sales-led events. I do not want our salespeople looking for restaurants that are appropriate to bring prospects and customers. Like we have kind of a bat phone resource, who we've worked with, who globally can source a restaurant and then, you know, our salesperson can take care of the rest. So I feel like it's always good to have some logistics folks who can even, you know, just kind of narrow the field of like what venues are available, like do the bulk of that? We have a, you know, a small event team of three people. You know I want Camille talking to partners and doing things like that and not worried about menus and venues.
EJ Oelling:But I will say this but if you find someone who has a great specialty at what they do, use it. I have a woman on my team. She loves hotel contracts. You couldn't pay me enough money to love hotel contracts Okay, like I would rather look at an AV contract any day of the week than a hotel contract, but she loves it, so I don't have to use an outside agency because she, like, really enjoys it. So I'd say, find your team's superpowers and empower them to be amazing at them and then fill in the gaps.
Camille White-Stern:Great question. Any others? No, all right. Well, I want to thank our esteemed panelists again EJ, Lucas, Kate, of course. Thank you so much. Thank you to everyone who showed up today. We are going to be the Splash team is going to be in the strategy suite all day. So if you need a break from the conference and you need a refreshing beverage or a snack, come and join us. We're here. If you just need to take a brief respite from the hustle and bustle, that is it for our Rise and Strategize breakfast panel. Again, thank you so much. Thank you All right, folks. That's it for today.
Camille White-Stern: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 that dot com 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 www. splashthat. com. Until next time, take care.