Checked In with Splash
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Checked In with Splash
Using Events to Create Demand with Chili Piper’s Tara Robertson
In this week's episode of Checked In, host Camille White-Stern sits down with Chili Piper's Head of Demand Generation Tara Robertson.
In their conversation, they discuss:
- Collaborating with partners on events
- Metrics for measuring event success
- Tools for creating invite lists and segmenting audiences
- Tara's number one tip for increasing attendance
- Top challenges for incorporating events into demand gen strategies
...and more.
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This is Checked In with Splash. Hello, hello, hello, hey friends, welcome back to another episode of Checked In. If you are a new listener here, welcome. I'm so glad you found the show. My name is Camille White-Stern. I lead experiential marketing at Splash and I'm pretty obsessed with helping other marketers of all backgrounds reach new heights of success and unlock new levels of career growth, all by breaking down the keys to impactful event marketing and the steps required to achieve event-led growth. Today, I'm joined by a very special guest. Tara Robertson is the H head of D demand G gen for ChiliPiper. Chili Piper is the only lead routing and scheduling software that improves conversions all the way across the funnel. They qualify, route and schedule leads from anywhere the lead comes from, from website forms to outbound calls, to review websites like G2, to email campaigns the list goes on. It's pretty incredible. I'm really excited to pick Tara's brain and understand how events fit into her demand gen strategy, what that even means at Chili Piper and so much more. Let's go ahead and get checked in with Tara. Tara, thank you so much for joining me today. I have been waiting to get you onto the podcast since we met at Adobe Summit, so it's really a pleasure for me today to get to pick your brain a little bit. How are you doing? I'm doing great.
Tara Robertson:I'm so glad we're finally doing this. Like you said, long time coming, so super excited to be here.
Camille White-Stern:Amazing. Well, let's make the most of our time together. I would love to have you start off just kind of telling me a little bit about your career journey to date and if you could just walk us through how you found yourself as head of demand gen at Chili Piper. I would love to know, and I'm sure that our listeners would love to learn, about your career background as well.
Tara Robertson:Sure, yeah, so I've been in B2B marketing for about 10-ish years, so I'll keep it short. I won't go through everything. But my first role this is going to age me, but I found it on Craigslist actually, which is I wouldn't recommend doing that now, but that's where I found my first job, or my first real job after university and it was for a startup. They're really small. I was originally brought on to do, honestly, a ton of different admin stuff, from answering the phone to booking travel for my CEO and then eventually it was kind of shifted into more marketing things, like setting up our Twitter account, setting up our HubSpot instance. So I really started to get involved in more of like traditional inbound marketing, content marketing stuff when it was kind of a newer trend, so that really appealed to me. I also was doing a bit of comms and PR, which I didn't love as much. So I really leaned into the inbound marketing side of things because I learned I'm not a salesperson, I didn't like cold pitching, so that was kind of trial and error that I found inbound and really kind of settled on the content marketing side of things and then, from there, kind of took a couple different roles.
Tara Robertson:d I ended up dabbling in more of the paid demand gen side of moving away from organic. Obviously, seo SEO is a whole other rabbit hole that you could go down, but I went more for the paid side and then I ended up at a company called Uberflip that's in Toronto a few years back who is doing a lot of fun stuff in the MarTech space. So learned a ton there from our head of marketing, hannah at the time, and found my way at Chili Piper Again. Kind of organically got some outreach from our former head of demand, jen Cayley. And I was actually working for a Toronto-based company and we were starting to get those emails of hey guys, it's time to come back to the
Tara Robertson:office
Tara Robertson:.
Tara Robertson:This was in 2021-ish and I just couldn't picture myself going Demand Gen after being home for a year and the flexibility we were in a very open concept office, which I'm not a fan of. I'm definitely more of an introvert, so I like having that heads down time to myself. Yeah, I just couldn't picture myself going back. So when I got outreach from this company that I had heard about, we had actually evaluated them at my previous role. So I was very familiar with Chili Paper, loved the brand and just couldn't really say no to taking the opportunity.
Camille White-Stern:Love that, love that career arc and journey can very much relate to not wanting to go back to full-time in-office life. I'm very appreciative of a remote work experience. Just really quickly tell me. I also want to say I can very much relate to even how you got started in your career, kind of assisting the CEO and then finding your way to marketing Not a very dissimilar story to my experience having joined Splash and finding my way to the marketing team. But I'm curious because I love to ask all my guests this what do you love about what you do?
Tara Robertson:One of the coolest things that I get to do at my role is part of my job is talking to people doing the same job as me, so kind of like you're doing with this podcast. But I run our podcast, Imagine Chat, and that's one of the favorite things of my role is I get to talk to really smart people about what they're doing, what they're learning, and then I can not just talk to them, but I can take that back to my day to day and learn from it and kind of go back to them and say, hey, I tried that thing that you told me about and here's how it worked for us. And it's not always like it's not always a slam dunk.
Camille White-Stern:That's the most fun part of my job you're in the marketing space in general, you kind of have to get very comfortable with experimenting, trying new things and seeing how it does work for you or for your organization. Our CMO, Kate, always says if you're not evolving, if you're not learning, you're going to become a dinosaur, and no one wants to be a marketing dinosaur. So I can definitely appreciate that and definitely relate to that as well. So demand gen encompasses, that can mean a lot of different things. You touched on a number of kind of different, I would say maybe like channels or tactics within demand gen. Tell us a little bit about your demand gen strategy at Chili. Piper Would love to understand what that means, especially for we have listeners in the audience that are demand gen marketers, so I'm sure they'd be curious to hear where there's overlap and similarities. And then for our non-demand gen folks in the audience who want to just better understand what demand generation means, what it can look like, Tell me a little bit about that, yeah you're definitely right.
Tara Robertson:It means something different depending on pretty much everyone, every company you ask. So I think a lot of people when they hear demand gen, they think of paid channels. That's kind of the natural place that a lot of people's minds go, and I think for good reason. I mean those are the channels that especially something like paid search you kind of know I can scale this. If I get more budget, I can drive more traffic, get more conversions, get more revenue and you can kind of see that scale. Not everything is that simple, unfortunately, but some channels like paid search can scale with you that way.
Tara Robertson:So when I actually joined Chili Paper, my role was really focused on our paid social presence. So we do a ton of spend on LinkedIn, which is where we spend a lot of time organically as well, and we do that just because our audience is marketers. We know they're spending time on LinkedIn and we also sell into sales who are on LinkedIn just as much, if not more, than marketers. So it's a natural fit for us to spend time on that channel. But the way that I look at my role is really how can we get in front of our audience? And I'm not too concerned about what. I don't just own LinkedIn, I don't just own paid search. It's really just where can we get in front of them, whether it's paid or organic.
Tara Robertson:I kind of try to think of everything new we can try. So in the past we've experimented with things like taking over newsletters, sponsoring podcasts and sometimes again. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, and you have to have that kind of growth mindset and be able to play around with tests and you have to have leadership that's comfortable with you making those bets. But events are also a huge part of our strategy. Obviously we sponsor some of the big MarTech events throughout the year, but we have quite a bit of our own events that we host that are more kind of invite-only, smaller scale, that we run with partners, and that's really the backbone of our event strategy throughout the year. So we're planning some right now. The summer is historically pretty slow for us, so we're kind of filling in some of that schedule with some events with partners that are a little more just kind of fun summer casual events to get people talking and meeting.
Camille White-Stern:Tell me more about. So you mentioned like kind of conferences and trade shows. Then you have your owned programs Tell me more about like. I'd love to learn more about some of the owned programs and events that you've been running or are thinking about running, where you're seeing success In a little bit. I want to get into understanding how you're measuring success and how you think about that. But first I would just love to understand a little bit more about the types of events, and you mentioned the MarTech industry events. How do you think about your event strategy? You mentioned summer being a little slow, so you're filling in with some partner events. Just paint a little bit more of a picture for me in terms of how events are fitting into your demand gen strategy and how you see that relationship working.
Tara Robertson:Sure.
Tara Robertson:So right now we don't actually have a full-time events person in-house, so we have some freelance help, but ideally we'll have someone in the seat to really own the strategy throughout the year.
Tara Robertson:So for now, what we're really leaning on is working with our partners. So we have a really strong partnership team. They're awesome and that's both channel partners, so that's people like agencies that we work with and product partners. So we work with both teams to figure out who's doing something really fun that we can jump on and take part of, and kind of vice versa. They'll come to us and say like, for example, we have an agency partner coming to Toronto, where I happen to be based, and they were doing a dinner with them in July. So it's just a partnership where it's less work for everyone involved, which is great. We're splitting the work, splitting budget, of course, and I think that's one way that we've really been able to keep this momentum going with our event strategy without having someone owning it in-house. Obviously, I would love it to be a little bit more strategic and tied to our pipeline targets more tightly, but right now we're leaning a lot on those partnerships.
Camille White-Stern:You're getting in where you can fit in. I see it, I respect it and you're not alone. I think that one of the biggest kind of trends I've seen this year is just a lot of brands and organizations leaning into partner events for a lot of the reasons that you named. You're sharing the work, you are sharing budget and then going back to kind of even the purpose of demand gen, as you articulated it, like how can we get in front of the right people? Partner events really allow you to kind of expand your target audience or target attendee reach. Maybe you're getting access to folks that you wouldn't normally get access to because a partner wouldn't normally get access to, because a partner, a brand partner, that's their core audience. Or even just being able to deepen relationships with people you are already in touch with prospects or customers, just by kind of having that industry cred or street cred, just like that.
Camille White-Stern:Another stamp or seal of approval by working with a partner, another stamp or seal of approval by working with a partner. So that makes a lot of sense to me and also I'm very excited for you to hire an events person and take the strategy to the next level. But it sounds like you guys are already kind of doing a lot with, and working smarter, not harder, but really like doing a lot with what you have available in terms of your team today. I'm curious. So you mentioned a few different types of events and the focus on, like you know, leaning into partner events. I'd love to understand. Kind of going back to that first question that you posed, like how can we get in front of the right people? What does your audience segmentation look like for these various types of events that you're investing in and how do you kind of think through prioritizing which segments of your audience to invest in, either through events or other demand gen campaigns that you might be running?
Tara Robertson:Sure, yeah, so I can start with partnerships, just because that's top of mind for me right now because I just had a call on this. But when we work with partners, we use tools like Crossbeam or Reveal to see where the shared opportunities are shared customer lists and that helps us prioritize. Sometimes location comes up in those too. So we'll say, hey, we both seem to have a lot of customers in this area. Maybe we should think about doing an event here, and sometimes it's more just a natural fit where, hey, we're going to be in Boston anyway, who else do we know in Boston? And we kind of ask around, look through, obviously, our own CRM. But that's where things like Crossbeam can really help out, because we're already connected to our partner's CRMs and we can see that overlap. So finding that overlap is key for working with partners and then for evaluating, kind of a new event or trade show.
Tara Robertson:We can't always get this kind of data, but we start with sponsor lists because those are always on the website. So that's one place you can start. But if it's an event where we've been before, we have passed attendee lists, maybe we are sponsoring, so we get some form of an attendee list. In that case, we use a tool called GoodFit that helps us score our accounts for us and that is basically propensity to close, so we can score them to say, hey, these aren't prospects or opportunities yet, but we should probably take a look at targeting these accounts and that helps us know if it's a great event, fit for us, especially say it's something we've never been to before and we're not 100% sure. Starting with that sponsor list can be really key.
Camille White-Stern:Yeah, I find that that comes up a lot, especially if you're kind of rethinking your conference, trade show or just third-party event kind of strategy in general or you're looking to expand that. That's always the question. Especially, I feel like in the MarTech space there are so many different conferences and trade shows that you could attend, sponsor, do a wraparound event for, and just knowing kind of where to prioritize your budget can feel without that right data, right Can feel like you're just feeling around in the dark. So just love to hear the different ways and tools that you mentioned. We use Reveal at Splash. I haven't used Crossbeam personally or GoodFit, but those sound like two really helpful tools to have in your little toolkit.
Camille White-Stern:And then, I guess, follow up question do you use any like? Is there any other form of intent data that you're kind of leveraging to either inform your event or demand gen strategy? Curious also like how you might work with folks, your counterparts on your team, who are more focused on content creation as well. So I feel like content and events, you're really having clear messaging tied to your events, like the value prop. I feel like it all kind of goes the value prop for attendees right to show up to your events. I feel like it all kind of goes hand in hand. So I'm just curious how you kind of think through that and how you know that you are like creating the right event or content or campaign or however you want to kind of look at it, for those different audience segments at the right time.
Tara Robertson:Yeah, it's. I mean it's ongoing. On the messaging front for sure, I feel like you get responses in person that you'll never hear online. So that's a great place to test messaging and we've done that before where we'll have our SDRs who just make the most connections and conversations at events because that's what they're pros at, but we can have them test new messaging in person and see how that resonates. So that's been something that we've experimented with in the past.
Tara Robertson:But I don't think you ever are done with that. It's never perfect. It's kind of an ongoing thing. Especially when we're marketing to marketers. I feel like we're never happy with it. We always want to do something different.
Tara Robertson:But in terms of figuring out, I like how you put it it's about what to get people excited to talk to you at an event or get them to draw. So we always try to think of what is our offer that we're giving to people. So it's not just our product messaging, because we know that's not enough. It's what are we offering people to get them excited to talk to us?
Tara Robertson:So last year at Inbound, we had a professional photographer do headshots, which has kind of been done before, but we put our own spin on it and we actually had people book a time for that photographer using our own tool. So they tested our tool kind of in the process, which was neat. So without even realizing it, they already figured out what Chili Piper was while booking that headshot. So that was just kind of one way that we could get in front of them not just hey, come to our booth and get a headshot, but also, by the way, did you realize that you booked that time with Chili Piper? And now you're kind of familiar with how we can help out in your tech stack.
Camille White-Stern:I love that. That's a great example. So, piggybacking off of, as you mentioned, your SDRs can test messaging, and especially when they're getting in front of people at events. I don't know, I feel like events are just such a special channel in that way that it's not to say that any other inbound or kind of outbound channel or tactic isn't as valuable or aren't as valuable. But events are just create those special opportunities. And I'm really curious to hear more about how you partner with your sales folks or customer success teams, what their role in the event programs or these demand gen campaigns that you're running that might involve events right, what's their role kind of before, during and after the event or the campaign? And this is one of my favorite questions to ask as well, because it also can differ so greatly organization to organization. So I'd love to hear about what that relationship between marketing, sales, customer success looks like at Chili Piper, how you guys are coming together and making these event investments or these campaign investments successful.
Tara Robertson:Yeah, that's a great question. I think we approach things a little bit differently for events because we are fully remote, so we have employees all over the world. So sometimes we'll have an event in, say, london where we have maybe we'll have one SDR, but we have a great success team there. So instead of the traditional let's send five SDRs to an event. We might send some CS folks who are well-connected in the area already and it just is a natural fit. Obviously, we're saving a little bit of budget at the same time because we don't have to fly them across the world. So that helps too. So we approach things a little bit.
Tara Robertson:Yeah, it's, it's a little different than other places. I've been where we're not like okay, we're sponsoring this booth and we need five SDRs and two AEs, and it's like some companies have a really set ratio where we're more flexible of who's local, who doesn't make sense to send who's strong at this pitch, and we can kind of combine a bunch of different factors and then, in terms of working with the different teams, we try to involve them as early as we can. We're not always the most organized just because we don't have that immense person in place, but yet yet they're coming, but we like to have, at the very least, a kickoff meeting of everyone that's going, making sure they know. Obviously, messaging is huge. If we're, especially if we're doing something like a new messaging test and we need their support on, we'll have a meeting around that and we also talk through what the follow-up strategy looks like even before we get there.
Tara Robertson:So usually that's a conversation before people are flying out or heading out to that event and after the fact we use our own tool. We have a tool called Distro that helps us distribute the leads after the fact. So any type of lead list that we come back with whether it's a happy hour, dinner, whatever it is we upload that list and get it qualified and routed to reps to follow up with right away, and typically I'll work with the SDR managers on what that follow-up plan looks like, make sure the SDRs know those leads are coming so it's not a shock to them that they're getting all these event leads one random day, and our SRI managers are great at making sure like hey, have we told the team about this. Let's hold off and talk to them first so that they're not shocked.
Camille White-Stern:Thank you for that breakdown. Tell me more, a little bit more, about that post-event kind of follow-up strategy. You mentioned making sure you're using your tool distro to route the leads appropriately and enabling people to action on that follow-up pretty immediately, I'm assuming. What does that SLA look like? What does the timing look like? There can be different philosophies around this, especially following a major industry conference or trade show or a smaller event that you might be doing with a partner. What do those follow-up strategies typically look like for your team?
Tara Robertson:Yeah, it varies so much depending on the event For something like an invite-only dinner. Obviously we don't want them getting very cold email with no context. So we usually those are a little bit. We kind of do more of like a white glove follow-up from whoever was there Usually it's an exec and for I should have mentioned this earlier.
Tara Robertson:But for large trade shows we try to avoid the like badge scan thing in general which I'm sure isn't the first time you're hearing that. But we try, if people are qualified, to just book them in a meeting on the spot so that that's already taken care of. We don't want to be hounding people just because they happen to want some socks or some hot sauce at our booth. I don't think that usually works out very well for people and I know after I go to a big trade show you get 100 emails of people saying like, hey, did you stop by our booth? I think I talked to you and they don't remember anything. There's no context. So we try to avoid that as much as we can.
Tara Robertson:But where we do follow up we get as personalized as we can is for something like a happy hour that we host. If we have. Usually we'll have a photographer there, so we'll share a link to the photos and say something like find yourself in these pictures. We'll have a LinkedIn post where they can come and comment and tag their friends that were there. So we try to make the follow up a little bit more interactive than just like hey, I'm an SDR and I saw you're on this list, so I'm going to email you now and hope that you book a meeting with us. We try to make it as organic as we can and not push that meeting so much in the follow-up.
Camille White-Stern:Yeah, super smart. I think to your point in, like the post-listen conferences are crazy town USA and before, during and after, and it's hard to stand out, and so I respect that. You're kind of, in a lot of ways, probably like just getting right to the core of what the goal is, right, getting that demo booked or that actual follow-up meeting scheduled on site, versus having to hound people over email or stalk them on LinkedIn afterwards and say, hey, we connected. Do you remember you said you were interested in a meeting? It's a lot harder to kind of get people to commit to that. So that naturally brings me to my next question.
Camille White-Stern:I'd love to understand a little bit more about how you approach measuring success for your events. Obviously, I'm sure meetings booked and held or demos scheduled is one metric. Booked and held or demos scheduled is one metric. What else are you looking at for yourself to kind of know what events were worthwhile, what you should be doing in the future? When you do have that events person, you'll probably have a sense of what's been working and what's not been working and want to communicate that to them. Talk to me about the metrics that you're looking at to do that.
Camille White-Stern:And follow-up question is like is there any difference in terms of because sometimes there can be, like in terms of how granular you get with your metrics that you care about, versus what you're reporting to leadership to kind of communicate what's working? You know, as you were, it's crazy, but we're almost at the end of Q2. And I don't know about you, but I'm already starting to think about 2025 and like at least first half of the year, right. And so I'm just curious, like the metrics that matter to you, the metrics that matter to leadership, and kind of how you're approaching that for your events.
Tara Robertson:Sure. So I'll start with when we're hosting an event. There's a few metrics that we care about that I probably would never report back to leadership unless they asked. So if we're hosting, what we really care about is did we hit our registration goal and did we hit our attendee goal, and what that ratio looks like, especially for something like a small dinner where we're spending a lot of money per person and we promised or committed something to the other partner who's hosting it with us.
Tara Robertson:Attendance is huge, so we don't not necessarily just whoever filled out our form, but who actually came and showed up, and then we look at that as a ratio. So typically for our dinners we aim for at least 80% attendance rate, which is high, but they're a smaller event and then first a bigger thing, like a happy hour party type thing with hundreds of attendees. We aim for more like 60, 70% attendance. So those are kind of what we aim for. Those are great benchmarks. I'd be curious do you publish those benchmarks for anyone? I would love to know what standard for those types of things.
Tara Robertson:Yeah, I mean that's a good question, let me follow up on that Because they seem like high numbers to me, but I'd love to hear how it compares.
Camille White-Stern:No, that's what I would aim for too. Okay, that's good to know, yeah, and then, of course, like virtual or webinars is different, so different.
Tara Robertson:If you can get 30% of people to a webinar, that's. I mean, it's sad, but that's great. Now I remember when I used to run webinars at Uberflip if we had 60%, that was great, and now it's 30%.
Camille White-Stern:So it's changed a lot. No, agreed For us. Just as a little tangent that we can get back to what we were talking about, Our webinars. I would say standard is for live attendees. I would say it would be between 30% and 40% and then with on-demand promotion we can get up to 70%, but it can doesn't always get up to 70% with on-demand. But that is the beauty of on-demand is that you can continue to promote that piece of content, that webinar, that experience, and see that attendance rate kind of take up over time. But I think those are for your in-person events. Yeah, I would definitely agree. I think like if I'm seeing less than 75% for an in-person, more intimate event, I'm probably like, Ooh, something didn't work, Something's off.
Tara Robertson:Yeah, maybe a reminder or something, yeah, mm-hmm.
Camille White-Stern:And then, yeah, I think to your point as your registration numbers kind of grow. Yeah, maybe a reminder or something. Yeah, is that happening around a conference where there might be a ton of other ancillary events going on that you're competing with, or is it like a quarterly kind of more of an owned program that you guys are running, not necessarily timed at the same time as a major conference or trade show where you might again see higher attendance rates? So there's so many factors to driving attendance so many?
Tara Robertson:Yeah, there's a lot, yeah, and even at a trade show you might get lucky and have nothing else going on that night. But if you don't nail the location, it can be really tough to get people to commit, even if it seems close on a map. Sometimes you're looking at Google Maps and it seems close, but then in reality it's just not quite the same. But I'll go back to metrics, yeah.
Camille White-Stern:Yes, back to metrics. So you mentioned attendance, registration and attendance which, leading to really your attendance rate, which you wouldn't, as you said, necessarily report to leadership. What are the metrics do you care about? And then again, what are you reporting to leadership?
Tara Robertson:Yeah, so one that actually this isn't a metric, but I found that leadership really gets excited about seeing certain logos register. So I might say something like we have this many registrants, blah, blah, blah, and then list a couple of the big companies or big customers that are on that list and that's what your leadership team will get excited about in most cases. So I wouldn't lead with registration numbers but lead with that if you can. And then for something like a trade show or something, a third-party event that you're sponsoring, obviously meetings booked on the spot are huge. And then what the actual show rate of those meetings or demos is, because we found we can drive great numbers on the spot. Our sales team is amazing. They can get people really riled up and excited.
Tara Robertson:But it's like you said, events, meetings, emails, things that came up while they were out. So getting people to commit to actually show up to that meeting. There is always going to be some drop off, but that's something that we keep a close eye on. And then, obviously, pipeline sourced from events is huge. Another big one, especially if you're doing things like customer events, could be pipeline touched. So just overall, like, how much pipeline did this? Sometimes for a small dinner, it can be huge numbers if you're getting the right crowd in the room. And then I'd love to start looking at things like velocity of opportunities, but our reporting is not quite there yet. But that's something that we'll be working on when we bring on our events higher.
Camille White-Stern:Yeah, those are all great ones, all metrics that I agree, I care about. Track, agreed with you, leadership loves Name drop some logos. Name drop, yeah with you, leadership loves name drops and logos. Name drop, yeah, name drop, it will get them very excited and it's good just like kind of quick proof of concept that, like what you're doing is worthwhile. You're engaging with the kinds of logos and brands that matter to your business, so love that tip. You're actually I've been doing that for a while too but you're the first other person to kind of like name that as like something that's not necessarily a metric, as you said, but that you would report to leadership. That is really helpful.
Camille White-Stern:And then just one more kind of follow-up question here how are you approaching reporting today? It might change when you bring your events person on. But, like, I'm just curious, what is like the kind of the cadence of reporting? Obviously there's probably like some sort of immediate post event report. But what does your kind of event measurement period look like? How long is that? Because that can also probably see different results depending on the type of event as well.
Camille White-Stern:Right, like an owned kind of more VIP, intimate dinner versus a conference or a trade show where you might be engaging with a higher number of people. Maybe some of those people are in the market looking for your solution that your tool offers today, and there you're ready to book the demo and take the demo and kind of turn into an opportunity and progress forward. But maybe you're just learning about your brand and then that becomes more of like an influenced opportunity down the line. So I'm just curious, like when you're actually kind of like looking at these metrics and how often. And then I lied. I have one more teeny little follow-up question after that. But talk to me about kind of like the reporting cadence today.
Tara Robertson:Yeah, so you did mention doing like a post event. We do a report post event and I think one thing that's important to include in that is anecdotal feedback from people that attended or your employees that attended, because sometimes you'll hear things from the reps that you just wouldn't pick up in the numbers. So that's important too. And obviously it's not a report but we just have a running doc of notes that people can add to and that helps. We try to do that as soon as people are back in the office or back working, because they'll forget I'll forget in two days if you don't ask me. So that's really important.
Tara Robertson:And then we don't really have an ongoing cadence for every type of event reporting, but it will get captured in our monthly quarterly reporting that I do on the demand gen side of things, so we'll be able to see where those demos came from, where that pipeline came from For things like dinners and customer events. I think we can always get better at tracking the impact there, but that's where things like tracking pipeline touched can help a bit. But we're noticing and I'm sure other people are seeing this too that it just takes so many more touch points to close a deal now than it did even a year ago. So every event that we can get people to is just another touch point on that, and so figuring out that attribution is, I think, a-ending project. But I think we're just going to see more and more touch points. So trying to keep tabs on what pipeline you're touching, how many opportunities eventually close that were in the room. Yeah, so it isn't a tight time frame, but in our monthly and quarterly reporting we'll capture event stuff.
Camille White-Stern:Yeah, that's super fair. Yes, the number of touch points required to bring in and then close a deal is it's insane to me, and I think you're right. I think we're only going to see that number increase. It's been trending upwards for the last five plus years quite considerably, so I don't necessarily see that trend going away and yeah, I think it's not. I'm happy to hear about how you guys kind of think about reporting and measuring success, because it's not so black and white. It's not like someone is going to meet you at your booth at a conference and then attend a dinner and then 30 days, 60 days or even 90 days later be a closed one opportunity. There are more touch points required. There are more personas and people involved in the buying committee. These days, I think in general in tech, a lot of companies are seeing sales cycles increase or days to close increase, and I think there are so many factors at play. I'm not going to try and like be overly reductive and say like and here's why and here's what you can do about it, but I think just being aware of that is really important, especially for folks who are leveraging events in their strategy, because and then you hit on another can of worms attribution is.
Camille White-Stern:This is one of my favorite slash. I have like a love-hate relationship with talking about attribution because it comes up in every conversation I have with a marketer. Because there's really, even if you have an attribution tool or software that you're using, there's really no perfect or quote right way to do it. There's, in my opinion, so much subjectivity. Again, even if you're using a tool to like help you get more rigorous in your attribution model and you're doing multi-touch, weighted attribution, who decides what the weight is? How do you know this dinner was more impactful than someone just doing their own research on your website or getting a really awesome demo or reading that case study from a customer. All of the touch points.
Camille White-Stern:I just feel like I don't know. It literally plagues me so much that I actually had a dream that I was talking to our CEO about this and I was like Matthew, I don't know if we're going to solve the attribution conundrum, and he was like. In my dream he was like, yeah, it's really tough. I don't know that anyone has a perfect answer for it. So, yeah, that's a little bit of a tangent, but I get really fired up when people talk about attribution because, first of all, I'm curious and I think when we talk about attribution, we're trying to like understand well, what's the full picture of someone becoming a buyer? What does that look like? And attribution is only going to, first of all, the way that you're measuring attribution matters, and then, like, we can't measure everything, we can't track everything as marketers, it's just impossible coffee shop that I don't have, or the link that was shared via text message, or the conversation that happens in a private Slack, group right, or community, or something.
Tara Robertson:So, anyways, One thing we're seeing that's making it even messier and I'm sure others are seeing this too. But with MarTech being, or just SaaS being how it is with so much turnover and people moving to different companies is, even if you've got all of that tracked which I don't think you can but if, say, you had perfect attribution and then they go and work for a different company and all of a sudden they come into your funnel again that your attribution software would think they're a brand new person that's never heard of you. So I just think you're never going to have that complete. You have to kind of let go of it being perfect. But trying to show the impact is obviously. Events are expensive, they take, they take a lot of time and resources. So we do have to show that impact in ways that we can.
Camille White-Stern:Retweet. Okay, I want to keep moving our conversation forward because also, oh my gosh, we've been, this has been such a fun chat and.
Camille White-Stern:I have. I have more questions for you, so we'll we'll kind of breeze through this next question. I'm really curious to just understand either some or both, really some recent challenges attribution and kind of proving the value of events might be one I do feel like that comes up often and also some wins. So I guess first question would be like what would you say is one of the biggest challenges that you're faced with today in terms of incorporating events into your demand gen strategy?
Tara Robertson:Yeah, I think I mean other than attribution, because we got that covered. But you mentioned earlier that there's just so many new events popping up, almost honestly every day. It feels like everyone in MarTech has their new own event and I feel like we just can't keep on top of it. New own event and I feel like we just can't keep on top of it. I started a spreadsheet of all the upcoming events that we shared around with partners and customers earlier this year and I think I've added like 100 lines to it since I shared it around. And it's just nonstop. There's always something, there's always a deadline, there's a speaker submission deadline that we are going to miss in a day if we don't submit tonight. So it just kind of feels never ending right now, and it could just be the time of year that the fall is coming up so fast and it's so busy, but right now it just feels like there's so much to keep tabs on and I feel like we start the year behind almost with how much is happening.
Camille White-Stern:I know, I know You're not alone in that struggle, so please don't feel that way. I think we all share in that. That's super real, I think, yeah, I don't really have any perfect solutions for you, other than just to say that I can relate and when I feel like I have it all figured out and I have my full list, there's 10 new ones that pop up in a week, so can definitely understand where you're coming from with that. Okay, going to blitz forward. I'd love to just understand, like we talked about, like measuring success, right, I'd love to know if you can share some of your team's most successful events, like when have you just nailed it when it came to either investing in a conference or trade show or a partner event? Give us some real life success stories here, if you can.
Tara Robertson:Yeah, so one quick one. It's just fresh on my mind, but we sponsored Inbound last year, which was our best event of the year by far in terms of pipeline and meetings booked. We do have a blog post on this if we want to share that later. Yes, I'll link it in the show notes. Great, so I'll link that to you later. But we ended up booking just under 100 meetings in person and that was like actual demos. It wasn't badge scans or anything fluffy, it was real meetings booked. So for us that was a record breaking event. Huge for us.
Camille White-Stern:It's massive. I love that. Also. Inbound was Splash's most successful at least conference last year, so love to hear that. I mean 100 meetings booked is actually insane.
Tara Robertson:I think it was 96, but yeah, close enough.
Camille White-Stern:Listen, we're closer to 100 than anything else. And just real quick, how big was your on-site team there for that? How many people ballpark do you think were there and led to those results?
Tara Robertson:That's a good question. It was around 10. That's really good, but not every person was booking meetings. It was really. The SDRs were crushing it because that's their specialty, but Love that.
Camille White-Stern:Well, kudos to the SDRs and really to the whole team, I'm sure, behind creating that successful play and opportunity for you guys. Let's wrap it up with some rapid fire questions. This is a little bit of a new segment that I'm going to start doing with some of my guests, so you're you get to be one of the first. But just to end on a kind of light note, we got into, we got deep in the weeds in this chat. It was so great. Thank you so much, tara. Okay, first question what are the best shoes for long event days?
Tara Robertson:I love this question. I'm so picky about shoes being comfortable. I have to say they're not the cutest, but New Balance are my favorite for long days.
Camille White-Stern:Listen, new Balance is very in. It's very hip with the kids, and being hip and comfortable at the same time Can't go wrong. Love that. What is your best productivity tip? You're juggling so many things in your role. How do you?
Tara Robertson:stay productive. For me it's. I put everything into Asana. I'm trying to get everyone else on the team to use it as much as I do, with mixed success, but it honestly keeps me sane. With things like deadlines, especially without that event person in-house, it's huge.
Camille White-Stern:Big Asana fan over here. It did take some time, but our whole team is in Asana now. We live, breathe and die by Asana. So shout out to Asana we love your tool. This was not a paid ad, I promise. I have to ask. I hope you have one. What's an unpopular opinion that you have about events or DemandGen in general?
Tara Robertson:I hinted at this earlier, but I think people need to stop scanning badges, especially before talking to someone. When I was at Adobe Summit, where we met, I had so many people scan my badge before even asking what I did, what my name was. It just seemed first of all, it's rude. It's weird Someone's coming right up to you with the scanner, but half the time I'm sure it wasn't even qualified prospect for them. So I don't think it went anywhere anyway.
Camille White-Stern:That's a hot take that I fully endorse. I agree, not all leads are created equal or are qualified, so I cannot fight you there. Okay, best piece of swag you've ever received or given out.
Tara Robertson:I have to say we've been doing this for years so I cannot take credit, but people still go crazy over our hot sauce. I wish I had been the person to come up with that, but it was years before I joined and, honestly, people still love it every time we bring it out at events.
Camille White-Stern:It's kind of brilliant and like, obviously very on brand. So kudos to that person. You inspire us. Okay, just a few more questions for you and then we will wrap up. What's one tip you might have for promoting an event and driving registration and attendance?
Tara Robertson:Yeah, so for attendance specifically, one thing that we started doing that seems super simple but it really works is that either the day or the night before an event, we send a really casual email with just a list of who's gonna be there, and we find that, especially for things like a dinner with less than 20 people, it really gets people excited to come because they can see who's going, they get excited about the connections they're going to make and, yeah, it's really it's had an impact on our attendance for sure.
Camille White-Stern:Super smart. Our co-founder, ben Hintman, always says good people get good people to go to your events. So name dropping and letting giving people a heads up is an A-plus tactic. I definitely plus one that. Okay. One thing you'd tell teams not to do when looking to incorporate events into their demand gen strategies.
Tara Robertson:I know I talked a lot about booking meetings because that's kind of our thing, but not every event. That shouldn't be your goal at every event. I think you need to approach every event and every audience a little bit differently and figure out what are we offering them? What are we getting in return? It's not always going to be a meeting or a demo. You have to figure out ahead of time what that offer is like you said, what you're offering attendees, so I love that.
Camille White-Stern:Okay, really quick. Two last quick questions Favorite podcast, book, youtube channel, newsletter or other that you've tuned into recently.
Tara Robertson:I was just listening to a podcast before this not work related, but it's called Scamfluencers and super interesting. I was just listening to the episode on Dr Oz just super good. Really highly recommend the two journalists that do it are awesome. I was just listening to the episode on Dr Oz Just super good. Really highly recommend the two journalists that do it are awesome.
Camille White-Stern:I'm going to have to get into that. I have not yet discovered that one. And then last question, finish this sentence the best events, dot dot dot Connect people.
Tara Robertson:I think you hinted at this earlier, but if I leave an event with one or two solid connections and people that I think are super smart, that we can learn from each other, then to me that's a win as an attendee.
Camille White-Stern:Amen, well said, I love that. Okay, for real, for real. Last question when can listeners and how can listeners connect with you and or learn more about Chili Piper?
Tara Robertson:Yeah, so I'm on LinkedIn. I don't post super often, but give me a follow or connect with me and follow Chili Piper too. We're almost at 70,000 followers, so we're super excited to hit that Zoom milestone. Uber I Amazon we're going to hit it next week www. splashthat. com so Awesome. Well, that is a huge milestone. Tara, thank you so much. This has been such a pleasure to get to chat with you today. I've learned a thing or two. I know that our listeners will as well. You are a gem
Camille White-Stern:and yeah, folks, if you enjoyed the Checked In with Splash episode today, let us know. Let Tara know, support the show by subscribing on your preferred podcast platform and, while you're at it, give us a rating. It helps others discover us. Sweet www. splashthat. splashthat.
Camille White-Stern:Last, but certainly not least, if you're a marketer using events to help your business grow and want to learn how Splash's platform can take your events to the next level, like we have for TikTok, zoom, uber, amazon or OpenAI, visit our website at wwwsplashthatcom or, like Tara said, give us a follow on LinkedIn. Tara, like I said, thank you so much. I hope you have a fabulous rest of your day and folks, until next time, take care. 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 splashthatcom 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.