Checked In with Splash

How to Build B2B Communities Customers Actually Want to Be Part Of with Daniel Cmejla

Splash & Daniel Cmejla Episode 63

In this week's episode, host Camille Arnold sits down with community expert and marketing executive Daniel Cmejla. Daniel has led exponential growth and employee evangelism at some of the most recognized companies in the B2B space, including Chili Piper and Apollo. He also has years of experience organizing political campaigns and events for Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and most recently, Kamala Harris.

Tune in to hear Daniel share:

  • What a community is and whether or not you should have one
  • The four foundational pieces for building a thriving community 
  • How to start a community with limited resources
  • Strategic tips for amplifying your company's brand through employee and executive evangelism 
  • The important relationship between events, community, and social media 
  • His top takeaways from building communities at Chili Piper and Apollo

...and much more.

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If you enjoyed today's episode, let us know. Support our show by subscribing and leaving us a rating. If you want to get in touch with our team or be a guest on our show, email us at podcast@splashthat.com. We'd love to hear from you.

Follow Splash on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/splashthat-com

Connect with Daniel: https://www.linkedin.com/in/greatmarketing/

Tell us what you thought about the episode

Camille Arnold:

This is Checked In with Splash. Hey friends, welcome back to another episode of Checked In. I'm your host, Camille Arnold, the marketer formerly known as Camille White-Stern. Yes, I recently got married. New name who dis.

Camille Arnold:

In this episode, I get to interview a man who likely needs little introduction, especially if you're a B2B marketer. He's the brilliant mind responsible for epic levels of growth and evangelism at well-known B2B SaaS companies and communities like Modern Sales Pro, chili Piper and Apollo, and he's also done prolific work organizing political events for the likes of Hillary Clinton, bernie Sanders and now Kamala Harris. Daniel Cmejla is, in my mind, one of the best in the biz and shares so many helpful and tactical frameworks for understanding and unlocking community marketing, while breaking down the intersection of community events and social media. This conversation is truly one of the most illuminating interviews I've done to date and I am so excited to share it with all of you. Let's go ahead and get checked in with Daniel. Daniel Cmejla.

Camille Arnold:

Thank you so much for joining me on the Checked In Show. I have been waiting for this moment for man, I think it's actually been a year. This has been a long time coming, so I want to just start by giving you a super warm welcome and thank you for being my guest today. How are you doing?

Daniel Cmejla:

I'm doing fantastic and I have also been waiting. I think we met at Inbound last year and then hung out at Dreamforce, and here we are, almost a year later. So many fun events to talk about, so many amazing things. It's an honor to be on the show.

Camille Arnold:

Thank you, the honor is all mine. You are a legend in my eyes and I would love for you to just share with our listeners. They probably know who you are no big deal but I would love for you to paint the picture a little bit of your career journey to date. Tell me how you got to where you are, because you've worked with so many impressive brands and you've built so many communities through events. Talk to me how you've done that, who you've done that for. Just do some humble bragging for a minute.

Daniel Cmejla:

Okay, well, I'll try and thank you for perhaps a little overstated on the intro, but I would say people do know me if they're into community marketing in the B2B SaaS space. So like five niches within themselves. But what's interesting and something I've found is that across my career which a lot of it is not marketing, it's fundraising or sales or political persuasion that like sales, marketing, fundraising, persuasion, it's all the same skill and it stems from really understanding two things One, you understand the person you're directing your marketing at or your political ads at, or whatever. And the other, you understand the person you're directing your marketing at or your political ads at, or whatever. And the other is you understand how to motivate those around you. I've been so fortunate across my career to have served just incredible people at amazing teams who understand psychology.

Daniel Cmejla:

I started off managing a fundraising organization in Vermont. Then I did a little bit of work for solar companies throughout the US and Mexico. I joined this community. Modern Sales Pros, as their first employee, scaled that from 1,000 to 14,000 members, brought events to 15 cities. After that I joined Bernie's campaign. I managed his persuasion effort in New Hampshire and then helped manage his events. Well, manage might be an overstated word. I played a small role in his events, did the same for Hillary Came back.

Daniel Cmejla:

I worked for a company called Chili Piper where I was their VP of community. When I left, about 80% of the acquisition was through the programs of the teams I served. We went from about 15,000 organic impressions per month to a few million. One to three million Came back. More politics stuff helped Joe Biden on LinkedIn and then I went to a company called Apollo where he had a similar groundswell. There was the VP of community, which is customer marketing, social media, marketing, field marketing, evangelism, pr, events and community, which is our relationship across all of these important kind of spheres of influence. So, long story short, or long story long, I'm here now. I'm currently kind of freelancing on my own. I have a couple of clients and me working with some former companies of mine, but my main thing right now is I'm helping elect Kamala Harris. I'm on her events team, so I help manage logistics for her events and I'm just so excited to be here.

Camille Arnold:

What a rich background you just shared with us. Thank you so much, and I couldn't agree more that community and building these meaningful relationships is really at the heart of everything that you touch on, which you've touched so many areas, and I'm just really excited to dig in with you. I would love for you to start by if you wouldn't mind humoring me a little bit kind of focusing on defining brand and community a little bit, and I would love to understand how you define community marketing and in the context, especially in the B2B space and I think we're going to get to touch on many different spaces today through our conversation, which I'm excited about, but thinking about in the B2B world you know what is community marketing and why is it so essential to business growth today?

Daniel Cmejla:

Well, I'm so glad you asked this question because it's kind of the foundation upon which the rest of our conversation will happen. Right? Because in order to have a conversation about something, you need to define what that is, and so many people have different definitions for community. So I'm not saying my definition's right, this is just how I tend to operationalize it, because it makes it easier for me to manage a team when we understand community marketing. But the first part of that is like before what is community marketing? Like what is a community? Right?

Daniel Cmejla:

In the context of our work, I define a community as a space, either physical or digital, where people who aren't explicitly paid to do so freely exchange knowledge and information. So this could be a Slack group. This could be a book club meetup. This could be a group of marketers who meet across different companies to discuss what's working. This could be a book club meetup. This could be a group of marketers who meet across different companies to discuss what's working. It could be anything, but the idea is that it's a space where people are interacting with each other.

Daniel Cmejla:

Community marketing is the idea that the new epic of marketing isn't to kind of wave your flag in those spaces as yourself, but it's to deploy the authentic customer voice to those spaces. So if we figure out here all the communities that are influencing our buyer decision it's the RevGenius Slack group, it's the water cooler room at my office, it's the backstage at Sastr or whatever Then it becomes how do we deploy the customer voice to those spaces and then market through those customers, versus directly to the spaces themselves? Because one of the cool things about communities is they're authentic, right. So, then, community marketing is meeting authenticity with authenticity. How do you find an authentic, happy customer and then how do you deploy them to the spaces that are genuinely holding influence?

Camille Arnold:

So answer that question for me how do you do that, especially for organizations or teams that are maybe grappling with this question themselves? They want to build a community, they understand what you're talking about here, but they're just not sure how to go about getting started. What are some of the first steps that you would take, or that you would advise a company or an organization or a brand takes, to start to, as you said, deploy those customer voices within a community that exists? Or, if you're trying to kind of build that community from scratch, okay, I see a few questions here.

Daniel Cmejla:

So there's how do you identify the customer voice and deploy it? And then how do you build a community, kind of from scratch, right.

Camille Arnold:

Yes or yes, answer those two. I would say maybe a third one to tack on is like. I would say, maybe a third one to tack on is, like you kind of said this already there, in some cases the community might organically exist. So how do you bring your brand into that community authentically and start to engage? Those are three questions, but let's start there.

Daniel Cmejla:

Okay, let's try to get into it. So, in a classic fashion, I'm going to introduce a fourth question first, which is, like, before you get into this, like, do you know your ideal customer profile? Like, do you know who your ICP is Right? Because so many people are out there selling a solution to product marketers that they should sell to solutions engineers, right? Or they're selling something to like a VP of sales that they should sell to solutions engineers, right? Or they're selling something to like a VP of sales that they should be selling to a frontline sales manager, or whatever. Like, part of understanding community marketing is like understanding the communities that you really want to be part of. So that first question is how do you identify and deploy the customer voice? It's first. There's a question before it, which is you know what kind of customer right? Are you trying to showcase your end users? Are you trying to showcase the executives who love your tool because it makes X so much easier, or whatever? Like, once you determine, probably like a rank, prioritized list of personas that you want to go after, then the next question becomes okay, what is our inventory of those personas? What does it look like internally? And it changes from company to company, because sometimes your end user won't even know they're using the tool. So it's tough to get end user love, or sometimes the CRO, who's the champion ultimately, is kind of far away from the tool. But ideally you understand who your ICP is. That's the first thing. And then the second thing is to kind of far away from the tool, but ideally you understand who your ICP is. That's the first thing. And then the second thing is to kind of build what I would call an influence map and I know we might talk about this a little bit later because I remember you mentioning it, but it's essentially like okay, here's our ICP, product marketers who care about the demo environment. Where are they hanging out? And this kind of answers your fourth question, which is like you want to build your own community but you also want to take stock of the existing communities that are out there. So to do this I like to interview close one and close loss customers of the personas that I'm going after and ask them things like what podcast do you listen to? Like event marketers? They're probably listening to this right now. So if I'm like you splash, it's like probably the best tool out there. Then they're like well, this guy's done a lot of events and he probably wouldn't be endorsing a tool if he didn't care about it. I do like Splash, so I've used Splash for a long time, so anyway.

Daniel Cmejla:

So you determine where the communities are that are influencing your ICP and that's kind of the second step. So now you have your customers. You know they're happy because maybe you only reached out to those who have like a high NPS or CSAT score. Then you know where they are interacting with other people. Then you kind of create this Venn diagram. It's like what's the overlap of your customers and these communities? And then there's a further level as well where it's like okay, what's the overlap of your customers and these communities and your customers who want to build their own brands in these communities? And it gets smaller and smaller and smaller until you align on these people, communities and your customers who want to build their own brands in these communities. And it gets smaller and smaller and smaller until you align on these people where activating them as advocates does not work because it's at the intersection of what they want to do and what you want to do. And there's like that 80-20 rule, right, like 20% of the value you get out of something, or 80% of the value you get will be out of 20% of the people or whatever. I probably butchered that rule. I would take it even further. That, like most brands, if they had 10 super champions who are like commenting on every LinkedIn post, like repping them all the time, like that alone could really transform a lot of these brands, particularly in the startup space.

Daniel Cmejla:

So how do you identify the customers? First you identify your ICP, then you find the customers who people will respect in that space. In terms of the community, find the existing communities by asking the customers what communities they're in, and then, in terms of being represented in the communities, have a candid conversation with your customers about how you want to equip them with resources so they can build their own brands in these communities. Now, all of a sudden, you've got a groundswell and this could mean that in the Slack groups, when someone asks a question about an event tool, splash comes up more. It can mean that at Salesforce, in a speech about event stuff, splash is mentioned. It can take all of these different forms, but the idea is you want to occupy that space, okay. The next question you asked was how to build a community from scratch. Do we want to pause there, or should we get into it?

Camille Arnold:

I want to just pause and acknowledge that breakdown that you just provided Super clear, very actionable in my opinion, thank you, thank you Literally going to share this with my team and I hope the other marketers listening in are taking notes. If this is something that you're trying to do, because it's very clear to me now, I appreciate it. I just needed to acknowledge that, thank you.

Daniel Cmejla:

That means a lot Like. One of the cool things about this, though, is like let's say, you are an event marketer watching this right now, so you build this influence map Like where are people who care about printers going to be in the next year and you build this map of all these events. Then you're like I want there are 10 speakers at every event. Let me talk to all 10 of them and see if I can get one of them, one of the 10, to give me a shout out in their speech, just for a second, just to say oh yeah, and you know who's got great printers Stevie Stevens of the Steviesons Like that alone.

Daniel Cmejla:

It's really tough to invest in that because you're like, hey, I'm going to get these people to give us shout outs from a stage where we know our ICP is and the CMO is like, okay, and how are we going to track the ROI from that?

Daniel Cmejla:

You really can't. Like you can track it directionally, but I can't be like this speech led to these QHMs because in the speech they held out a QR code that was tracked. But what happens is, if you really do invest in this and you're actually occupying and providing value in these communities, it'll just show up as direct web traffic, it'll show up as referred, it'll show up through partnerships. And this is what happened at Apollo, where, you know, when I joined, these word of mouth channels were about 15% of acquisition and then when I left, that plus partnerships and partnerships was always crushed at Apollo, but it was about 75% of acquisition and we're talking like millions and millions and millions in acquisition each month. So it really helps and there's less competition in these spaces. I highly recommend that you find your communities and provide value to them.

Camille Arnold:

So this kind of leads me to my next question. Actually, first let's go back to the building communities from scratch, but I'll plant the seed for where I want to go after that, which is double clicking on providing value and what that actually means, what that can look like. How do you really start to build those authentic relationships within these communities so that you are providing value and you're creating that trust, and not just with your customers, obviously, who are hopefully happy, but with prospective customers, who then that's where I see the revenue growth happening. But let's go back to building communities from scratch. I'd just love to pick your brain a little bit on how you approach that.

Camille Arnold:

If you had to break it down into, like a you know, phase one, phase two, phase three or 30, 60, 90 day goals, like how do you, I feel like, very clear on your kind of framework for approaching entering into communities that exist already, and do you? Well, I guess a kind of follow up question to how do you build a community from scratch is like does every brand need to do that? Because I feel like from scratch is like does every brand need to do that, because I feel like everyone wants to or is talking about it these days, and how do you make that decision where you're like, okay, we're going to build our own community, like you said, whether it's like physical or digital space, or we're really just going to focus on entering into these communities that already exist? How do you think about all of that?

Daniel Cmejla:

Okay, giving me the multi-parters. I'm ready for it, though, and I actually am really glad you prefaced it with that thing about providing value and that thing about should you create a community, because they're so connected. So let's start there. Should you create a community? Are you going to provide value to that community? If the answer to this question is no, you can stop here and go back to the beginning and not create a community. Right, that's the first rule of creating a community. What is the unique value that you're providing? And like beyond, like, oh, the unique value we provide is we got the best product, so if more people know about it, they'll have a better product, and whatever. Like that doesn't count. Everyone thinks they have the best product. So, like, what are you providing uniquely? And there are a couple of ways that you can assess this. First is like what is your mission of your community? Right, there are a bunch of things out there, like recruiting or whatever that kind of sit across different disciplines, but in general, I think at this point, unless you're some sort of community God with some sort of vision that is like amazing, like you kind of need to pick a very specific audience if you're going to build a community, so, like a community for sales, might even be too broad at this point. Community for sales development leaders makes sense. A community for sales managers makes sense. A community for sales development leaders makes sense. A community for sales managers makes sense. A community for sales operations makes sense.

Daniel Cmejla:

You can combine them all together potentially, but the litmus test is does the average person in the room of this community digital or physical share the same problems as those around them and do they have a relatively similar expertise level? Because if they share the same problems and they have relatively similar expertise, then they're going to be able to provide valuable solutions to these problems. Because that's what these communities are often about in the context of B2C or B2B SaaS. We're talking networking communities, religious communities, sports communities. There are all these communities out there and you can build them, and you can even build them in a business perspective. You can build a pickleball community and it's a sports community, but it's also a business community. So that's the first thing Are you providing value? And then the second is like is this just about you, right? Because if it's just about you, you're probably not providing value. You just think you are because it's just about you?

Daniel Cmejla:

The third thing is like are you creating something where people interact with each other? Like, a lot of companies will create a community, but it's not a community. It's a place where people go to report bugs and request features and then a member of staff will reply to those, and that's another thing. Should you create a community? It almost relates to can you create a community we come back to the definition of community from earlier a space, physical and digital, where people who aren't explicitly paid to do so freely exchange knowledge and information. Is there enough passion behind your tool to get that free exchange going? Because if not, I would say you didn't create a community, you just created a message board, a paid message board. But if you can check off these boxes, we provide value. People want to interact. There's a need that persona shares things in common. Then you can go about starting to create a community. And the first thing and this is a common theme throughout it the very first thing I would ask I would actually ask people first.

Daniel Cmejla:

I'd say hey does this community sound valuable to you to even decide? If I want to do it but let's assume they did Then the very first thing I would do is I would create an advisory board for this community. Because what's going to happen is when people join the community and this is step one create your advisory board 10 people or 50 people, whatever but when they join the community, they're going to look at the behavior and the people in the community before. What type of interactions are they having? What titles do they have? Is the community diverse? Is it diverse from a gender perspective, from a race perspective? All this stuff, like.

Daniel Cmejla:

When someone joins the community, they're going to want to very easily see someone that they relate to professionally or vis-a-vis identity or whatever, getting value in that community. So your advisory group that you start with is super important because they should model out everything for you. You should have a very explicit conversation with them. Here's the goal. We're trying to create this community. Here's my goal. From you. It really varies what their goal is. A lot of the time it's creating high, valuable content and then creating interactions around that content. But that's your first group and then, like, if you approach this kind of advisory group saying. What I want to do is I want the hundred of us to model the best ever like events marketer community ever like. We'll ask and answer amazing questions. We're going to do this for two months. Then we're going to open it up to people. Then it's not like a you telling them what to do, it's you involving them. There's a really interesting stat in community marketing that I find fascinating, which is that when you have a super fan, eventually they're going to tune out what you're asking them unless you give them more responsibility. And I talk to CEOs all the time who are like I don't want to lean too much on our customers. They'll let you know if you're leaning too much on them, especially if you ask them hey, is this too much? But people, when they get more responsibility, become more invested. So I know this is a long answer. The other won't be as long, but the first one is build your advisory group.

Daniel Cmejla:

Okay, after you've built your advisory group, then you do like a set of discovery calls with them to determine what the community even looks like. The advisory group predates the community Even. You want to approach that with a set of very loosely held beliefs and hypotheses and they'll direct you in one way or another and in some cases they'll say don't create this community. And then you have to be like, well, what if we did it this way? Or you listen to them. You don't create the community.

Daniel Cmejla:

After that you're going to want to determine some of your key metrics to drive and the platform you're going to want to use. So a community could be anything. It could be an event, but let's assume it's digital. A lot of really great software is out there for it Tools like Mobilize Slack. You can create communities on Facebook. You can create communities in the comment section of your LinkedIn page, but let's assume it's a physical house community. Let's take Slack, for example.

Daniel Cmejla:

So you figure out your community and you want to create a bunch of assets. So you're going to create like an onboarding flow, how people get in. That's going to want to have a referral flow built into it. You're going to want to create clear community standards, making sure there are rules around solicitation, around respect, things like that. You're going to want to create some sort of exclusivity nature to the community. Not anyone can just join this community. That's why it's the best If you open up your community to anyone right away, then you might just get like you might lose that, that magic. There's a ratio, it's like, of the messages that are sent in the community. How many of them are valuable? What is that value to fluff ratio within the community? You want to constantly optimize for that. And then a couple other things you want to do with this community is you want to like understand the areas of intellectual interest of the persona in there and then start populating those organically at first. Or you know, you can push it at first. Like, let's say you have an issue of the top 12 things that are most important to field marketers. You ask someone in your core group to ask a question each day for 12 days. After those 12 days you've created that ferment of activity and it'll happen kind of without you.

Daniel Cmejla:

Okay, step three is you create the most awesome metrics tracker of all time and you create hard goals. You should create goals for growth. You should create goals for unique posters per community. You should create goals for replies per post. If you have other things like a recruiting function, create goals for that, create goals for sponsorship, create goals for a lot of different things and then track those goals each week. I like to track them in Excel. I'll just use some sort of conditional formatting. So I'll be like, wow, posts are 30% fewer than normal this week.

Daniel Cmejla:

Like, hmm, what do we talk about? Something juicy? Okay, like, what are the best things to do at Dreamforce? That'll get it. There'll be a lot of responses to that one, right, and then that creates this ferment of activity. And then basically, you're going to want to create a recurring cadence to monitor everything you've done and solicit feedback from your kind of core advisory group, probably each quarter. And then also you're going to want to create a metrics harness around that advisory group to ensure that they're taking the actions you want, and if they're not, you're going to want to gently exit them from that kind of advisory group, because your core group needs to always stay strong. The last thing you need to do is you need to moderate that community, because if someone is making mistakes in the community, they're selling their solution their competitor is going to want to sell. It's going to become an unsafe space. So it's almost like having a toddler. You need to constantly watch and correct the community, otherwise it's going to develop bad habits.

Camille Arnold:

There you go, wowza, wow Again. I'm like I can't wait for the rest of my team to listen to this episode because you're dropping so many gems and as I'm listening to you, I'm hearing so many similarities between what you're sharing in terms of like strategy and approach and kind of philosophy, and how I personally think about. You know, an event strategy. So I want to get into the relationship between events and community. But another quick question that I just I have to ask before we get there. You know you mentioned you've been kind of sharing so many really applicable steps and action items that people can take.

Camille Arnold:

In your opinion, what does the team behind this kind of community strategy need to look like Bare bones when you're just getting started? I feel like I don't know. I'm just curious If you don't have a dedicated person or team at your organization who can really do this work, assemble the advisory board and, you know, kind of monitor. If you are going to build your own community in Slack or some other platform, monitor that and do the tracking of all the goals that you were talking about. Like, what does a kind of like starter team look like and what would be some of? Yeah, I guess like what would your hiring strategy be if you were the first person at an organization to take the helm of community marketing and growth strategy? How would you build out your team from there being, like you know, personnel kind of number one in charge of this?

Daniel Cmejla:

Really tough question. I think it's got to be bespoke. Each time I'll do a shameless plug for myself that this is part of what I'm doing now and I'm not working for Comlum helping companies set this up. But I'll just give away as much as I can for free in this podcast as well.

Camille Arnold:

I'm like meet you at Splash.

Daniel Cmejla:

I think you're doing great there, but I don't know, let's do it. Did this podcast just become an interview?

Camille Arnold:

Because I'm in, maybe so.

Daniel Cmejla:

No, but working for Kate has always been not always, but since I met Kate, I was like I would 100% work for your boss because she's awesome. Okay, so, bare bones, you can kind of do it with one person. I feel bad saying this because it's like your life isn't necessarily going to be fun, but when I joined Apollo, I was there for two months before Medioli joined and we got some of these gains. Like I think a lot of companies have such a low floor when it comes to their social in particular, and that's like one of the top communities out there. Like if you were to go out there and survey everyone. Do this influence map that we discussed.

Daniel Cmejla:

A lot of people are going to say they hear of you through LinkedIn because LinkedIn they just passed a billion users, right, so it's really powerful. So the very first thing I would say is that, like, community marketing is many things, but one of the things that it is is it's going from fewer to more distribution points from your brand. Like we discussed, you want to have your customers be the people who speak for you, right, but it's not just your customers. You can have your investors do it, you can have your executives do it. You can have your employees do it, so you don't need a massive team of like influencers out there or like LinkedIn experts being like, check us out. You just need an intentional mechanism to create that cultural change within a company so that people start to share. And then you need that somewhat structural process to get people from happy customer to user-generated content. A lot of companies stop at happy customer or they stop at renewal. For happy customer Great, you're renewed, see ya. But there's an opportunity to both drive that renewal relationship further but also activate them as advocates that few people think about. This is something Taylor Boger, who has an agency who focuses on this as well. You totally should hire her listener. She's expert at and I would say, after a solo version of getting yourself part of the way there, the first people you're going to want to hire customer marketer and a social media marketer.

Daniel Cmejla:

Though this is all, like I said, it should all be totally bespoke for each group, but that's the lowest level, I think, of community actualization, because it's not just about building relationships with customers, it's about building relationships with customers in public. So a community marketing motion would have like a traditional company is like look at what happened, like I was talking to this company scribe the other day amazing company AI guides, it's so cool and they talked about, they shared this internal Slack where some guy from the FAA was like I use scribe for all of my guides for airports and I was like that's amazing and they shared it internally in Slack and I was like that's so cool. Community marketing would be like okay, how do we bring this person into our community? Let's reach out to him, let's thank him, let's ask him if we can put it on the website, let's put it on social, let's create automated processes to take customer love from the customer side and showcase it on the social side. And that's why customer marketing and social media is probably the bare bones. You could probably do like a world-class job with one customer marketer and one social media manager, if they're awesome and they have an existing playbook. Because, like, not only does community marketing make your social better because you're showcasing customers, not just yourself, but it makes your social easier because you actually reduce the content burden on yourself when you create programmatic campaigns to highlight customers. And then it's like, oh well, where do I get those customers from? Well, you have someone else on the customer marketing side, creating programmatic campaigns to highlight customer love.

Daniel Cmejla:

A lot of really easy ways. You could do this In Gong, for example. You could train your CS team after every amazing testimonial to say and that's the magic of whatever your solution is, that's the magic of Apollo, that's the magic of Splash. You could just search that and gone, get all those testimonials, create a process to bring them from testimonial to website. You also could just send out a form to all your 10 NPS customers and be like who wants to be showcased on our company page? Upload a picture of yourself, answer these five questions. Boom, things like that. So anyway, tactically I've always started these myself and then grown them, and then usually they eventually include the content team. At Chili Paper, that team was nine. Towards the end, at Apollo, it was 10. It included evangelism events, customer marketing, field marketing, social media marketing, pr. But you really can do it. At first alone, it's going to be tough, and then, with a good social media manager and a good customer marketer, you can get a lot of the value.

Daniel Cmejla:

It gets harder as you ramp Going from zero to one is easier from going one to two.

Camille Arnold:

I can understand that. I just appreciate it, because some of what you're talking about I don't want our listeners to think like, wow, well, it's just me, or it's just me and our social person and or our customer marketer and what Daniel's talking about sounds like a team of 30 people and I just want people to understand what is possible with a super lean team, and so thank you for kind of breaking that down. So let's get into events and community. I am just kind of foaming at the mouth here to have you share your perspective on the relationship between events and community. I wonder if you find that it you know what are the differences and or similarities, because you've worked in different spaces. Like you said, you've worked in the B2B space, You've worked in the kind of political space You're doing political events for Kamala.

Camille Arnold:

Now Talk to me about the connection between events driving community, how community can fuel your event strategy, that back and forth and together, how they not only, you know, will help you build and amplify a brand but really help you drive towards whatever your specific goals are, whether it's growing revenue or, you know, getting someone elected. As I was saying earlier, in how you were talking about community marketing, I was hearing. So I mean, even just you know that step number one of getting your customer advisory board for the community right. I love to think of that for events. I always say, like get a host committee right, like invite more people to co-host your event with you and invite them into the event kind of design process and the event promotional process, and your event will be so much more successful that way, versus you're just doing an event for you, for your brand right. So I'd love to hear more of your thoughts on the relationship between events and community.

Daniel Cmejla:

Let's do it, but first I just want to double down on something you said a second ago, which is this hosting committee type thing. All of this stuff Events, when they're alone on an island, I think, are destined to fail. And when events are collaborative, when they're owned by the company, when sales cares and marketing cares and it's in their OKRs, that's when it matters. And something that I like to think about a lot when I'm trying to turn, trying to have projects be successful is like how do I make this project that I'm doing someone else's win Right, and then, when it is their win, I'll give them credit for it. Like it's like cause, like what matters, especially as you're a manager. Moving up is less like hey, look what I did, and more like look at the team that I serve. I'm so proud and they're sticking around right, like they're amazing. So like.

Daniel Cmejla:

A great example of this is Kayla Drake at Apollo does a phenomenal job of getting sales really invested in events, and there's someone in particular who does an incredible job. His name is David Denver and I've worked with him at a few companies now, but he's out there inviting his prospects to events, because there's this aha moment that happens with some people where it's like if you have an excellent events team, they're curating amazing event experiences and a rep sends a late stage deal to that event, they get wined and dined, they have all types, they're going to close at a higher rate. Like this is how it works. Like this is how relationships work. This is how it works. Like this is how relationships work. This is how friendship works. This is how business works. And like it's not always going to be like oh, I got you dinner now close. But it's like people want to work with those that they trust and they want to work with those that they know and they want to work with those that invest in them.

Daniel Cmejla:

And especially if at events, you're trying to create community, like the same thing, right, if at an event, you're not saying, all right, everyone sit down. Here's your timeshare presentation. You're saying sit down, I want to introduce you to hang. Like she is one of the most incredible sales evangelists in the world, and like I am actually talking about hang black in this situation, who is a former worked at a former competitor of ours, but like the power of making these introductions is really, really powerful at events. So, like what I would say is that like? How do you get community into events? It first starts from understanding that, like, events serve the company entirely, not just one function of it. So that'd be the first thing.

Daniel Cmejla:

The difference between events marketing and community events marketing is events marketing is often driven by, like, a director of demand gen who's got a specific pipeline goal, and community marketing also has that goal, but there's so much on top of it. Let's take Apollo's event infrastructure, which I was so lucky to help build and is run by two incredible event marketers right now Kayla Drake and Sarah Lieber. Kara comes from Autodesk and IBM and all these incredible spots building connected and Kayla does, and Sarah comes from Drift and a bunch of other amazing spots. So not only do they do events, but they have sponsorship for events. So partners come in and they help defray the cost of those events. And not only do those events have amazing people there, but there's content at the events. And not only do those events have amazing people there, but there's content at the events. There's a recording studio at each event to create content.

Daniel Cmejla:

So let's take that and think about how many departments it touches. Oh yeah, not only that, not only does it tie to prospects, but you invite existing customers, people with upsell potential and things like that. So now you have one event. In that event you're driving partnership initiatives, you're defraying costs through sponsorship revenue, you're creating content In some cases, like the majority of the content that your company has you're creating net new pipeline and you're creating stickiness and expansion with existing clients.

Daniel Cmejla:

Those are five things. That's the most powerful rhetorical number just because of our hands, I think. I think we like looking at our own hands, but five is really powerful. Anyway, like that is so different from like how many QHMs did you get? How many booth scans did you get Right? Like there's a company that I advise called Alto, and all of they do for marketing, as they're super early, as they do these dinners for sales engineer experts, solutions engineer experts. They film them all. They put them out on LinkedIn. What they've managed to do in the last year is associate themselves with all of the best pre-sales leaders in the world and they're getting design partners from it and all kinds of things like that.

Camille Arnold:

But the goal is to build community and if you build community events, then the customers that you're building the community with will go to bat for you on something you said which, yes, it is fundamentally important to understand that and we say this all the time at Splash events is not or should not just be owned by your events team or just the marketing department, as you said. They serve the company, they serve the business, and we always say, like they're a team sport, right. So we think of, even especially at Splash and Kate, I really feel like was kind of the one to kind of come in and start saying this phrase all the time but our entire revenue organization and I would say it even extends beyond revenue, because at Splash, like, our product team benefits from it. Right, but one team, one dream. And you know, as a team we're approaching like how can we leverage events? Not just because we're an event tech company, right, like, I think, if we could be in a totally different field and still have, you know, apply the same philosophy.

Camille Arnold:

So I just really appreciate you saying that you know and how you think about like how can I make this project that I'm working on someone else's win. I always like to ask myself, like not just for the attendee but for my internal stakeholders as well, what's in it for them? Kind of going back to when we were talking about just community marketing in general and providing value. Well, first of all, as I feel like we've kind of said, events are a great way to provide value to your community, and not just your external community of customers and prospects, but your internal community, your peers, your coworkers.

Daniel Cmejla:

Totally. And then it's like, as soon as you think about your projects, like the way they benefit the company but also the way they benefit the careers and the teams that you're serving as well, it changes the dynamic Because something you said earlier you're like you can do this with a bare bones team and it's like I have been really lucky. Chili Piper massive success. Apollo massive success. I had a bare bones team at first for both of those, but in my defense, I've had the best teams in the world. I'm so lucky.

Daniel Cmejla:

Medioli is probably the best social media manager in the world. Taylor, incredible customer marketer, like one of the best and she was nominated as one of the best and I worked with them both at two companies. And then Harry Sims, kayla Drake, zoe Hartsfield like the team. Danny Howe like the team that I got to serve was so amazing.

Daniel Cmejla:

And then when you're thinking about events, projects or whatever OKRs for your team in general, the team that you serve, it's like what I like to think about is like how does everyone have a project where, like, if they can prove it wins, like an experimental type project, it'll be like the biggest thing in their career, right? So it's like, when you're thinking about events. Think about what component is there for them, for the other people who are involved, and then how can they create something that's truly career defining for them, not necessarily just limited to events, but that goes into the project planning. There's like the business plan and the business outcome, but then there's like, oh and, by the way, when you accomplish this, I'm going to tell our CEO, I'm going to send an email to our CEO about this, and because we've achieved these metrics, I'm very confident that we'll be able to get you on full time or you'll get a promotion, or this is going to blow up on LinkedIn and I'll make sure you get credit for it, or whatever.

Daniel Cmejla:

Just like, doing things alone and doing them successful is not enough. You need to create feedback loops after that success so that the people who did the work get rewarded for it and they get kind of more power. And the opposite is true as well, where, like, when people are bad, there should probably be feedback loops around that as well, so that resources are allocated effectively and that you're not in a company where, all of a sudden, like, people are kind of holding you back.

Camille Arnold:

Yeah, yeah, a big fan of having both types of feedback loops in place. If we're not learning from what we're doing and you know, amplifying, you know the lessons learned, whether it was like, wow, this really worked, or you know this really didn't work, and here's why you know we needed more involvement from sales or CX, or we just we didn't leverage our kind of customer advisory board enough, or whatever. Whatever the lessons may be, okay, so we've talked a little bit about the relationship between events and community. I feel like and you mentioned it LinkedIn passing a billion users, linkedin passing a billion users.

Camille Arnold:

It's a lot of users Insane. Can we talk a little bit about weaving social strategy into events and community? Yes, I'd love to, because I think that if you're not thinking about how you can tie all three together, then I just feel like it's a big miss and I'm wondering if you have like I also know that you and your teams have been very successful in this like leveraging community, you know, or bringing community together to host a really successful event and then amplifying that success across social channels, and I would love for you to kind of share how you kind of think about that secret sauce a little bit. If you have any specific examples as well, would love to hear and again, this could be in the context of, you know, b2b or some of the political work that you've done, some of the political events, like I can see in both cases, like how important leveraging these social channels would be in the greater context of, you know, creating success.

Daniel Cmejla:

I love it. Let me give a political example and then I can give why what's basically standard for a campaign is not standard on the tech side and how you can do it. So basically the type of events work I do it's not that senior, I'm taking a leave of absence from my work in tech to support them and basically very logistics, logistics-oriented job and the people making the big decisions are like several rungs up. But essentially when a political candidate goes somewhere, there are a bunch of different departments and one is site. They design the site, they deal with the lighting, they find the venue, they deal with all the vendors and the other is press. I usually do press or site. I prefer press because it's easier. But site design is more beautiful. But there's this kind of balance between site and press, where the site person and the crowd person, the third people they really want an incredible experience for the people there and the press person's like, yeah, but we need to make sure the people outside of it see it as well. And there's that balance there, balancing the experience at the event with the echoes, the ripples of the event that happen afterwards. So here's a visualization framework I just totally made up now in my head. We'll see if it makes sense. I'm going to say it for the first time.

Daniel Cmejla:

But let's take the event that we met at in Inbound, for example. Imagine three concentric circles. The smallest circle, in the middle, are like your VIPs. They show up at the event. You record content with them. You give them a special hat or whatever, or you make an effort to get to know them more. You build a kind of a deeper relationship. You're intentional about that. Let's say, at your event you have a backroom with a recording studio. All of the top celebrities, all of the top prospectors, your customers with the best story come through. You capture that content. They meet each other. That is your nucleus of the event. Outside of that, you have your regular event. The attendees show up, they listen to the speaking program, they hang out with each other. They do all that cool stuff.

Daniel Cmejla:

Your nucleus, let's say, it's 10 people. Let's say afterwards, there are 400 people. So 10 people get this incredible bespoke experience. They meet the CEO, they get a bottle of champagne with their name on it. Everyone else gets a great experience. That's 400. And then outside that there's an audience of 400,000, right, the people that you can reach from the event. So it's interesting because in some cases the interactions you have with those 10 can be way more valuable than the interactions you'll have with that 400,000, because of who the people are and the nature of that interaction.

Daniel Cmejla:

But I believe that all events should focus on these three circles. You have your core group of people late stage prospects, customers with amazing stories, key partners, key people you want to hire. That is your nucleus. Outside of that, you have your event experience. You should be NPSing these events. They should be great events. They get food, they have an amazing time and things like that. Then there's that larger bubble, that 400,000. Okay, how do you reach that 400,000? This is where community marketing becomes amazing.

Daniel Cmejla:

You can think about all the different distribution points for your brand. So one is employees. All the employees there post about it. Your company page posts about it. You capture content with people, send it to them. They release that content from their page. You release that content from your page. But then there's also something else you can do. There are programs you can put in place to optimize the ratio, both of those 10 people Ideally 10 of the 10 will say something on social, or 9 of the 10, because each of them has a custom plan.

Daniel Cmejla:

But of those 400 people, what percentage of those people will go out and say something about the event? How can you create prompts within the event to drive that user-generated content? How can you increase that user-generated content from maybe 1% for people to 10%, 40 people? So now, if 40 people are posting about your event with an average of 10,000 impressions per that gives you closer to that 400,000 number. So, like these should be automated and very intentional flows that you build into the event a photo booth, a gift that they want to post. The more personalized the gift is for them, the better. Like a professional photographer that gets them nice photos, things like that, like intentional video content that you've already preselected is highly relevant to the audience. Those paths are so essential. I don't know if the visualization worked on those three concentric circles, but essentially the first two circles help you reach the third circle.

Camille Arnold:

Yep, very clear, very clear picture in my mind. Thank you, I can't believe you just came up with that on the fly, because it's, honestly, it's gold. Okay, so I want to be mindful of time. You've already been so generous. I have a few more questions. I want to get through with you, really kind of around like your kind of biggest you, and I want to preface this. You've already shared so much, so thank you Very like tactical, actionable tips and frameworks and ideas here, but I would love for you to, just if you had, take a step back and share some of your biggest takeaways or lessons that you've learned from building some of the most recognizable communities in B2B space.

Daniel Cmejla:

Okay, just biggest takeaways in general. Okay, treat the team that you serve with dignity and respect, because you're not going to be able to do it alone. That's the number one thing, that it's like there's an energy to life and an energy to work and an energy to working with those around you, and if you treat those around you with respect, they're going to pass that on to those around them and it's going to create a positive work environment. And it's the people at a company who determine the outcomes of a company. So that would be the number one thing I would say, and the easiest way to do that as a manager can sound really daunting is to just ask those around you how do you want to be managed, and check in with them a lot, and then be humble when you mess up and create spaces where your teams, the teams that you serve, can call you out on that in a safe way and then listen to that feedback. Because if you don't create avenues to bi-directional feedback with the teams that you serve, you're going to be blindsided by that feedback in an exit interview. So that's the very first thing and like honestly, you can tell, like when I was a Chili Piper, we had this incredible. We were all motivated and empowered. We all knew we were positioned to to kind of accomplish more in our career that we've ever done. All of the people from that team have become directors now. Like so and the same at Apollo, like there's just an energy about it. So that's the first thing I would say.

Daniel Cmejla:

The second thing I would say is the customer is right more than you are. It doesn't mean the customer is always right, because they're not always right, but I almost feel like customer marketing is the new product marketing. We're a lot of product marketers and I love product marketing and Apollo has an incredible product marketing team, haley Hanad. And then, like all these incredible people Neha, you know who you are Love the Apollo product marketing team. People, neha, you know who you are, love the Apollo product marketing team. But, like some companies will take a shortcut and they'll just rely on, like their experience versus asking the customer. The customer always knows and then when you ask the customer, then you're actually involving them to be part of the process. So don't build for people, build with people. And then the last bit of advice I would give would be treat people with dignity, solicit bi-directional feedback, trust the customer more than yourself. And then the last one would be to market through the customer, not to the customer, and I've said this a couple of times, oh, I'll add a fourth one and add a fourth one. But marketing through the customer, versus to the customer, is so much more authentic because it means that you have happy customers, right, like you can't market through your customer if you don't have happy customers. So they know, it's kind of true, and I actually don't even believe as much, and sometimes it's necessary to do. But, like this paid influencer stuff I'm actually not as strong a fan of as I am true organic customer love. Okay, strong a fan of as I am, true organic customer love. Okay.

Daniel Cmejla:

Last bit of community marketing is to increase the number of distribution points for your brand. You've got that one AE who's out talking on LinkedIn about you. What would happen if that was five AEs? What would happen if your CEO had an incredible brand? You look at a lot of the best brands the world has ever seen Ford, tesla is not one of the best world, but it's one of the biggest now. But look at Ford. Look at all these companies, look at all the major car companies. They're named after the founder. It was the founder's brand that drove these companies, so the power of personal brand is huge. People have a difficult time developing an emotional connection to a company. Allow them to develop emotional connections to the people within that company and the customers that are served by that company.

Camille Arnold:

I'm so glad that you brought you just said that because I want to ask you, starting with your internal, your team members, whether it's your AEs, like you said, your executive team what is your advice for, or best practices around developing and like encouraging your peers at your organization to develop their personal brand? Because I have found in past experiences, some people are super game, they're super down to do it and you know to take that challenge on. And other people, you know, they just they kind of freak. It's like well, I don't know how to do that, or I don't know what to talk about on LinkedIn and you know, or they're like overly reliant on, like hey, can you just give me something I can copy and paste? And then you have, like you know, people saying literally the exact same thing, which I feel is less authentic.

Daniel Cmejla:

Totally, totally Such a good question.

Camille Arnold:

How do you encourage people who are a little more reticent to lean into building their personal brand to start to do that? How do you kind of create that groundswell within your internal organization?

Daniel Cmejla:

Really I love this question. It's something I think about a lot. One of my first bosses in tech this guy, pete Kazanji gave me this incredible onboarding, a version of which I present to every employee on the team that I serve, even if they're two levels down. I do these five trainings with all of them, which are an adaptation of it, and one thing that Pete talks about is like the nature of bottlenecks as it relates to kind of the Six Sigma philosophy and things like that. But like when I think about trying to encourage employee evangelism or executive evangelism, the first thing I think about is a bottleneck, and you identified like three bottlenecks right there. People don't care about it, it's authentic, they don't have the resources to do it, and then for some people it doesn't work. So those are your three bottlenecks. I'd say there's a fourth bottleneck, which is that people just don't care. But maybe that fourth bottleneck is derivative of the other three, I'm not sure. So, kind of approaching these bottlenecks one at a time, let's start with the biggest one. People don't care, they don't realize the value in it.

Daniel Cmejla:

There's an aha moment within each software, like for me using Splash. One of the nice things was how I could invite past attendees within the platform and it made it so that when I host an event, the next event, I could just invite all the people who attended the last event through Splash and I would start off each event with 30% registrants because I would invite them. At the event. I'd say, sign up for the next one. Boom, 30% to goal. Like that's awesome. And that's when I was like, ah, this tool is amazing because it makes my life 30% easier from an event promotional perspective, at least just with this one feature. And that's when there's more stickiness around my usage of Splash. I'm more likely to upsell, more likely to recommend, I'm more likely to leap at an opportunity to be in your awesome podcast. And any opportunity to work with Kate I would take as well.

Daniel Cmejla:

So what is that moment for someone on LinkedIn? And I would say start with the executives. When they hire a VP or they hire a senior director through it, when they close a key deal, when a large deal is sourced through LinkedIn, when they get a PR feature, when they get a job offer, even if they say no to it, these are all indicators that something they're doing on LinkedIn has value to what they care about at the core level right, like when they can source customer interviews or things like that. So the idea is to really chat with someone and understand what value they would get from engaging in the platform and then deliver them that value to the point where they have that aha moment. Then it becomes more organic. Then they come to you asking for resources to post on social. Then when they're doing it, their employees are like Brenda's posting Are we doing this? Let's do it. Then they'll start posting. It'll create this cultural change. That's the first way I think about doing it. How do you get them to want to do it? And then they'll start posting. You know, create this cultural change. So that's kind of like the first way I think about doing it. How do you get them to want to do it? You understand what they want and then you deliver them that aha moment and then those other kind of bottlenecks within it.

Daniel Cmejla:

Resourcing teach someone how to post. What's that saying? Like? Give someone a fish they'll eat for a day. Teach someone how to fish they'll buy a fishing rod from you. They'll fish forever. But it's like giving them resources to help them build like a post archetypes for themselves in a framework that makes it easier for them, as one thing, creating structure around posting together, like a calendar invite where everyone posts at the same time, with a guide that helps them build their own post versus other things, and then highlighting those who've had success in a very public way. These all create a cultural transformation. There are a couple other easy things you can do, whereas like take public praise for employees that you serve, or take praise and take it from private to public Like on Slack wow, this person got promoted. I'm gonna post that on LinkedIn too. Now it just creates this kind of flywheel, so that's how I like to do it. I also do trainings on this, if anyone is interested. Medioli also does trainings on this and she's a genius.

Camille Arnold:

I love it. Thank you so much. I think you've shared a lot so much today, especially what to do, what not to do Anything you would. What not to do Anything. You would really want to make sure if it hasn't already been said any kind of like words of caution or anything you want to point out where you're like. You just really see a lot of companies get it wrong when they do X in their attempt to you know, really lean into community marketing and increase brand awareness.

Daniel Cmejla:

Okay, yes, I've showed a lot. I showed how to answer a simple question with a 15-minute random rambling thing.

Daniel Cmejla:

No, it's brilliant, I think I covered all of it, maybe even too much, right? No, I didn't cover all of it. I guess I would say that it's like companies need to place the customer as the hero, but actually do it by listening to the customer. Another thing I would say is, like, probably don't build that community just yet. Wait until your customers ask you for it. And then the other thing I would say is, like, when you're really throwing your hands up and wondering what do I do, the solution is always to ask how am I a good manager? Ask your employees how can I be a good manager to you?

Daniel Cmejla:

Everyone's unique and you need to honor their uniqueness. Like how do I get customers more involved in our programs? Ask your customers how would you like to get more involved in our programs? Like, it all stems from asking the customer. Like, if you ask the customers, and especially if you ask, like, a statistically significant segment of the customer, it's like a cheat code. They'll tell you exactly where to host your events. They'll tell you what type of events to do, and then you take what they said and use it as a structure for creative inspiration. And what's cool as well is then you look back to the customer and you say thank you so much. We're going to try and breathe your idea into reality and the customers become a part of that journey with you, because they know you're actually listening, not just giving them lip service. So yeah, that's what I would say. The other thing I would say is like if your community is just like questions about the product answered by an employee, that is not a community. Community sits at the intersection of free exchange of knowledge.

Camille Arnold:

I love it. That is so crystal clear. If anyone is wondering what a community is and how to approach it, I think you've just been so clear today. Thank you so much. Okay, first time for everything. Get out of here. You are brilliant. Let me humor me a little bit. I've got some rapid fire questions I'm going to throw at you.

Daniel Cmejla:

I was thinking I could do these while walking rapid fire on a treadmill desk.

Camille Arnold:

You should absolutely do that, all right.

Daniel Cmejla:

Are you ready?

Camille Arnold:

Okay, let's go.

Daniel Cmejla:

Dream brand to work with my dream brand to work with for events Salesforce or Squash what Stop? I'd love to work with Salesforce. I also really like working with Comma.

Camille Arnold:

It's pretty badass, kind of a dream, honestly working for her is kind of a dream. Yeah, I would say so In terms of community, dream, community to lead or be a part of, in a leadership company.

Daniel Cmejla:

I loved leading the Apollo community. It was so fun but honestly it would be some sort of community that doesn't exist yet, of a bunch of people who are really passionate about investment-driven governance to solve climate change or make the world a more diverse place or elect people who share values that I believe are good for the world.

Camille Arnold:

Okay, I love that Favorite community event you've ever hosted or attended.

Daniel Cmejla:

My favorite community event that I've ever hosted was probably the gala that we do every year at HubSpot, where we met, because it's just so fun and I think marketers love an excuse to get fancy. And every event that's amazing has one thing that's unique about it at least, and the best events have 10 things.

Camille Arnold:

Okay, most effective channel for connecting with B2B communities.

Daniel Cmejla:

The most effective channel for connecting with B2B communities, in my opinion, is probably LinkedIn or word of mouth.

Camille Arnold:

Okay, and then you kind of said one already. I'm going to see if you have anything else to say or add, repeat and finish this sentence. For me, the best events, dot, dot, dot.

Daniel Cmejla:

Oh, the best. Events are unique and diverse.

Camille Arnold:

Hell yeah, Daniel, you are like. I know I said it before, but I really I'm just mind kind of blown from this conversation. I've personally learned so much. I keep saying it, but I really do mean it. I can't wait to share this with the rest of the Splash team and our listeners, because I know they're going to get so much freaking value from this, and I want to just thank you and ask you where this is. You know, maybe an obvious question, but where can our listeners connect with you and learn more about what you're up to and kind of just stay abreast about, you know, in terms of all the amazing things that you're doing?

Daniel Cmejla:

Well, it was so fun. It's always a pleasure to nerd out with another event marketing guru, so I had so much fun and if you watch closely, you can see me almost swipe out on the treadmill desk in the video. So I like this should have ended with me like spectacularly destroying my house by falling down. So when LinkedIn changed the ability to do custom URLs, I snagged great marketing. So the best way to connect with me would be on LinkedIn. It's linkedincom slash great marketing. It'll lead you to my profile.

Camille Arnold:

Love it. Any final pearls of wisdom you want to share with our listeners.

Daniel Cmejla:

I would say don't be afraid. Like the outsized, wins happen at the margins and in the process from ideation to implementation. All of the cool things always get pulled from the events, but those are what make the events amazing. So find yourself a boss who allows you to make mistakes and encourages failure, and then you'll find yourself someone in a culture that allows you to do things that have never been done before.

Camille Arnold:

I love that. Thank you so much. Don't be afraid.

Daniel Cmejla:

Thank you so fun. Thank you so much, don't be afraid, thank you, it was so fun.

Camille Arnold:

You're a great interviewer, daniel, you are. I mean, you are so easy to interview and man. This, I think, is maybe one of my favorites that I've done to date, and I've done a bunch of these. Oh, it's awesome. You've got my wheels turning and I just so appreciate your spirit and your energy and your openness. So, thank you, thank you, I had so much fun, as did I.

Camille Arnold:

Folks, that's it for today. If you enjoyed this episode of Checked In, let us know, support us by subscribing on your preferred podcast platform and, while you're at it, leave us a rating, because we love ratings and we appreciate feedback. As Daniel said, we want to know what are you interested in hearing about? What do you want to learn about? Who do you want to hear from? So the best way to get in touch with us is to shoot us an email at podcast at splashthatcom. And, last but certainly not least, if you are a marketer using events to help your business grow and you 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 and so many other customers, visit our website at wwwsplashthatcom.

Camille Arnold:

And until next time, take care, folks. All right, folks. That's it for today. If you enjoyed today's episode or are a fan of the podcast in general, please let us know. Support this show by subscribing on your preferred podcast platform and, while you're at it, leave us a rating. We so appreciate feedback we receive about the show. So if you ever want to get in touch, you can email us at podcast at splash thatcom or, better yet, join our Slack community where you can message me directly. Last but certainly not least, if you're a marketer using events to help your business grow and want to learn how Splash's platform can take your events to the next level, like we have for MongoDB, ucla, okta, zendesk, visit our website at wwwsplashthatcom. Until next time, take care.