CMOs discuss, debate user conference best practices & ROI

As someone mentioned in the chat highlights below, events these days are "stupid expensive." Whether you sponsor someone else's events or produce your own, doing them right is a massive lift of budget and people resources.

And yet, for some companies it's their most important and impactful marketing channel. They can put you at the center of your category, drive pipeline for the whole year, and dramatically impact renewals.

If you do them right.

Last week's CMO Coffee Talk session featured a wide-ranging discussion about user conferences in a variety of permutations.

If you are a B2B CMO or head of marketing and want to join a community of 3,200+ of your peers, let me know or click here to learn more and sign up.

Just to make sure, are we talking about user conferences in the broader sense of the word? (Meaning not just for your users, in the way “Inbound” is definitely not just for Hubspot users)

Forrester Conference is a user conference…

OK so more like “Company Flagship events” - got it (A rose by any other name…)

two birds one stone?

Ye that’s a good point - always the debate on whether your model is an industry conference or a true user conference

sometimes urgency is a good thing and provides focus

Too much time is better than not enough time! Especially when it comes to events.

I assume people did not have to pay for virtual event?

How many people were you hoping to attract in person?

To charge or not to charge?

To sell sponsorships or not?

They are all over the place, CMO is west coast

Did you focus only on thought leadership or mix in some product specific content?

If it’s not just for customers, and in-person I would say 100% yes

I think its hard to give customers the detail they need and make the content relevant to prospects at the same time. Did you have 2 tracks? Customers and Prospects separate.

There is so much competition with free online content. It’s almost expected.

If you can pull it off why not? Helps pay for the costs and positions you as a leader IMHO

Did the event impact favorably CAC, conversions, and adoption?

Was there an agreement or contract for those speakers to amplify or a certain threshold of a social audience they had to have to be eligible?

“Dogfooding” love the shorthand

These attendance numbers are massive! Well done!

How many people were in person versus live online?

“If it was easy, than everyone would do it”

For those doing virtual events…do you find it difficult to keep people engaged for longer than an hour or two?

To address some of the questions - this was very much focused on thought leadership, so we did not split customers and prospects. We very lightly teased our new gen AI features, but that was not the focus on the event. Honestly, we should have done more. But just educating and engaging users increased customer adoption in the end.

Been doing it for a decade and it is NOT easy

You spent? 3x my total marketing budget!?? YIKES

We did Q&A throughout the sessions to help with engagement. And - the spaceman extraordinaire - was highly entertaining in between sessions.

I hope the snacks were good

Oof! Building back is always tough!

What’s the upsell/cross-sell potential and avg deal size to retain?

The T&E plus the opportunity cost to take so many people out of the field to attend. I bake that into the calculation too

If the programing is right, we’ve had great luck. We had 80% of live attendees still on at the end of the 5-hour virtual summit. We were pleasantly surprised ourselves!

It killed me that a competitor reached out to sponsor and my leader running the event said no. Killed me - I would have been all for it from the thought leadership perspective. But reaching out for sponsorship would have been a heavy and unnecessary lift.

With the high production cost do you have a tidal wave of content to deploy?

I’d have to think hundreds of hours of footage and live on site video at minimum? Maybe on site podcasts that could fuel a years worth of content?

Recently invited to a user conference and they have many customers as sponsors for the event.

Seems only mega vendors with strong partner ecosystems can get the audiences for large turnouts for in-person events

The cost of in-person is sooo high when budgets are so small.

I also think in-person vs digital is who you are selling to. Execs can swing paying for in-person events, ICs have to justify and it can be tough.

Sometimes its best to not do too much math...

I would think the time is the bigger issue for in person.

Side shows like those at Forrester with Club6 make it a brand specific user conference.? And 6sense did it first (post Covid) and continue to do it best

We’re doing the roadshows still - 21 localized events. It’s exhausting. Flirting with the idea of one big instead.

But then the sales teams whose accounts won’t fly to Dallas or whatever are gonna cry.

we’ve gone the other way - used to do a centralized conference, we’re now doing regional ones. Just had the first one yesterday

Can I ask you what process you went through to ask clients what they wanted and what would get them to your event or any event?

Have any of you tried to coordinate co-locating regional roadshows around larger marketing/industry conferences?

I worry sometimes these events are vanity events for CEOs and founders...

No personal experience here - but I’ve heard good things about the “middle ground” - for example - rent a crazy villa and invite ~150 of customer/prospects for a truly unique experience

What’s the yield for 21 of these events? Is there and revenue number tied to the performance?

I try to do this with my sales team on the road at industry events.? Happy hour roadshow stuff.

Would be interesting to know if they succeed in getting people off the show floor to make that worthwhile.

We do cyber industry events and try to attach our own mini-event to them. For BlackHat we have half day mini event then event event hosted by the Howie Mandel called Black Hat’s Got Talent

I have. But more so with an annual event strategy and portfolio. The red thread is keeping the conversation going year round - main event, regional events and live broadcasts - all linked.

On the internal production side, i reengineered who was involved and ensured that it was cross functional, with lines of communications going right up to the respective executive level.? Made a tremendous impact on ensuring everyone at company contributed to securing attendees, contributing to the content, speaker, sponsors, etc.

I think you’ll see great participation overseas with the 1-1.5 day event

that is the ask what did it generate ARR wise, retention, attach rates, anything, something meaningful to the core OKR’s

your transparency on what didn't work was refreshing, thank you. We are struggling w/ in person events too & have had to cancel some recently. Can you share the headline stats? Also what industry are you? I heard you say $2.5M spend, 200 some attendees, great energy live but ROI not there.

We did that training + event format at Snow, which sold to IT - worked great with that audience

offering training pre-conference has worked well for us, along with a special exec-only briefing/advisory group before the regular conference.

We are having the most success with having our main user conference in the fall but leading up to that the 6-hour roadshow event with the C-suite only at those orgs. We’ve found that the c-suite buyin at those roadshows actually helped us get both them and their teams at the bigger user conference in the fall as well.

We did credits and training days

We have done it for state and local gov. It is a huge lift in attendance but 1000 hoops to get it approved for CTE.

We have created a user conferenced tied to our community - we have held it only in EMEA - but this year we are going to move it to the US (Austin) as most of our customers are in the US.? Looking at 2 day event - one labs and one presentation.? I’m looking at pricing it to just cover our costs. The success for us is driving attendance from the community.

I have too — done pre-event training and CPE. Also give discounts for multiple people attending from each company

Def drove admins and economic buyers to the event and made it dual retention and net new audience in that we had them talking to prospects at the same time

The value I’ve seen with doing our own single vendor events has been the collection of assets to be used post event. We had our execs, partners, customers and thought leaders on a nice stage and created short clips for digital ads and mini customer case studies for our website and YouTube etc. For one company, we did this over two years ago and I still see them heavily using those assets in their marketing. It’s the halo effect that created more ROI than the day of the event.

It adds so much pressure to have CPE because the content needs to be approved in advance right?

Done lots in healthcare with CME credits — Continuing Medical Education credits which are in high demand

When we did it, pro serve owned that - marketing just provided the logistics and promo support

working really hard to get people to our exec track for a May event as well.

We made the c suite our keynotes

the only that worked for us was having Gartner or Forrester speak at it for a C-Suite level split that and CAB events with a very well know leader on the stage

We did that at SiriusDecisions… Executive LeadershipExchange (ELE) track for CMOs, CSOs, CPOs that Forrester has continued

We secured c-suite by making keynotes and making the exec track one day (arrive night before for dinner), depart by 4pm next day

Forrester Summit will be interesting this year, have heard from more people that aren't going since they aren't Forrester/Sirius client anymore.

what ROI metric do others use? 10x? I had used 4x previously in professional services

Its a very different company than it used to be

Break even on user conferences LOL (they’re SO expensive!). 3x on tradeshows for me

I think size of org and operational maturity is a factor here on that assumption of X for sure

Attribution to event is something you have to work hard on - get your sales team to ask them

Shoot for payback period of 4 months

I always ask for 10X source pipe on cost of event (whether it’s an owned, sponsored or just attending.? People have to understand the MROI is key.? If anyone wants a refresher on MROI - my CFO sent me the HBR article last week ????

To clarify— Revenue generated, not pipeline

We had an exec track planned with a special keynote and an invite-only while glove approach to the executive program (including covering their travel costs) and we ended up cancelling because our sellers couldn’t get to the execs so we only ended up with 7 exec registrants. ??

Yeah, 10x on externally sponsored event, it is way squishier on the user/owned events - there was a halo effect that was hard to define as cleanly as sponsoring, plus the human cost was so much higher.

That’s a CRAZY good no-show rate

Event attendance is driven by hype/past experience and great relevant content.

Best practice for sales to set up meetings beforehand and also to have customers/prospects cell phone #s if possible to make connections easier at the event to facilitate connections.

Budget, size and operational maturity def factors here as well

The Brand value never seems to make it into the spreadsheet on ROI!

Is 10x source pipeline the standard?

I’m not going this year. I found last year’s sessions weren’t the quality of previous years.

Would love to see the budget lol

Def have heard this as well

Not attending this year in person. more of an every other year event for me now.

Yea with a series A budget Beastie Boys aint happening…even though the founders might thing so ha!

worse than separating the M&M colors in the back stage room

For real, what’s the budget lol ??

My guess is $3M

I’d say higher lol

Same. Late stage prospects (or folks that might live local to the event site) could attend our customer conference.

Any customer conference or event I have done has been a customer only. Same, with a special pass for an almost “signed on the doted line” prospect.

A client used their events as POC and does so very successfully based on sales engagement - especially for the execs. Focused on CISOs and it worked well

I was a prospect at the first Breakthru and now drink the koolaid.

Timing is everything. Have you found certain times of the year yield better outcomes for user conferences?

Did you share the roadmap content after the event more broadly or was that live only?

I've been in businesses that were too worried about competition and it prevented the sharing of content people wanted.

Love idea of tickets as part of renewals

Wild. Absolutely wild.

I remember going to IBM straight from a series A, after RSA I asked what the ROI on that event and they looked at me like I had 3 heads ha! Different worlds with different expectations on budget/ROI

Agreed the larger companies don't even try to calculate ROI. . . its sad.

“Distilligence” :-)

The thought is we have to be there…we’re going to do it regardless, so why bother putting the work in to try and track/manage ROI

Likely they accept it as a part of doing business in an enterprise market vs scraping every penny mentality

My husband runs their trade shows and I see their spend and it blows my mind. I asked about the budget and he said they just need to get it done - so whatever it takes. Meanwhile I’m assembling things at my kitchen table…

Marketing has always owned the number for my events - when it was more enterprise, we hounded the CSMs and AEs to help, there were some spiffs, but at the end of the day we still owned it.

We had mandatory numbers for AE’s to attend

Would be great to share positive keynotes experiences for your conferences. My budgets have not supported A level keynote speakers, but these were highly rated by our attendees at events over the years: Billy Beane, Mike Massimino, Bryon Reese, Rohit Bhargava, Josh Bersin, Jason Dorsey, Sir Clive Woodward, and more

Did marketing drive that though? I can’t imagine getting the sales leader to actually own that - we had to drive it even if they were “required” to invite customers.

The company I work for is a dwarf compared to IBM... but the spend on the # events/conferences we sponsor is staggering. New CMO here, aiming to wrangle it. Anyone have any tips on how you've stopped / controlled spend in this area? i'm in a professional services partnership so it's not as simple as just saying STOP.

Massimino is a fabulous and affordable

If it can’t be tied to revenue it’s a slam dunk, but if the CEO won’t call the baby ugly it may stay on….sometimes events are vanity badges for social or reputation types vs ROI depends on the leader and maturity of org

Bersin is impressive

for our exec track we also did a CMO + CRO bogo, so if you had both register it would be 1 ticket cost

I am in Healthcare— 1/2 our budget goes to shows - I have tried to trim back at this job and my previous w/o luck

I killed every event that didn't deliver new business opportunities. Data makes those decisions easy if you have the data.

Interesting bundle offer

Great discussion everyone! I love this round-robin format. Gotta go! ??

So many conferences, so little time...

and the content for exec track was geared towards sales/marketing alignment

I took over a team who was having Fabio at the booth every conference so oh boy was that interesting.

How many give gift BAGS at the conference?

love to see the formulas lol drop files on that math :D

or calculating hours formula

It's a large time commitment for the design team too.

Events are stupid expensive these days.

I used to get that at Sirius but not Forrester

It’s just because he knows we have so much potential.

I appreciate it. In another community I’m in someone was kicked out recently for not abiding by community rules and everyone I know was SO thankful. It’s important!

Same, I dream of selling everything and living on the road

It sounds fascinating, but I reallllly love showers

Yes! Love branded community-building events

Psyched to learn on this topic

I asked Microsoft Copilot for a list of user conferences recently and it was pretty solid. I didn't ask cyber security specifically, though

A great event research tool is Vendelux.

I heard Wynter's conference was really amazing

I’ve bought Vendelux twice. They have every kind of event, globally.

How do you decide which speakers to pay and which not to?

When you talk budget, anytime you can share the actual numbers it’s helpful. What did you spend on the event and promotion to get this return?

Surprised by more paid adoption as an outcome, but i guess makes sense - less tire-kicking

Also curious if your buyer is the same persona as your user, and how those two profiles were treated differently if they're different.

Why did you choose not to have partners/sponsors?

What did you use for your event platform?

Did you measure attribution to the $15K sponsorship email send?

Seems like everyone is using Goldcast today

I’ve had good experience leveraging Goalcast for virtual events.

Does anyone have a user conference upcoming or in planning mode? Would love to hear how you're thinking about it, justifying the cost/resources internally, etc.

How did you measure engagement

https://www.goldcast.io/

(How) did you consider competitive industry events in terms of timing, focus, in-person vs. virtual, etc. ?

We just finished a regional one in ANZ. It’s a huge resource suck, but I think the business sees the value after the fact. In advance we felt a lot of what Julie was describing of having to say no more often.

Do you do hybrid events? If so, Can you talk about how you decide which presentations /content you decide to do virtually vs in person?

How many users do you have? I.e. the registrants represent a % of how many

We did! It was by far our biggest driver of registrations, and we even got them from customers who didn’t engage with in-app and our owned emails. We actually are engaging with the more on sponsorship and dedicated emails given the success.

We hosted a 2-day virtual event during Covid and we were surprised at the impact it had on company morale. It really brought the company together and got everyone excited about our vision and future.

thanks for the learning, like how sponsorship played in. Learned a lot from seeing the low-cost model brought to life

We look at different ways to justify spend: sourced pipeline, customer retention AND brand awareness. We have meeting metrics, an account attendance goal and then we look at engagement through all of our channels to support budget/resources

Add-on to regional Event- beautiful tactic

would you mind sharing the name of the vendor you engaged with for this partnership?

Agree. Plus all the content that you can leverage from the event.

Yes! We got 6 months of content out of our event

Attendance versus registrations (46% showed), time spent in the event, as well as questions that were asked live and in social.

How do you involve partners? It's always a balance of their sponsorship.amd expectations

Feels like energy for in person events is back in full force - at least in 1H ‘24. Industry event/ big shows and smaller customer gatherings.

I’ve created a partner track in a past life and their preso had to include a customer.

And we look at the percentage of win rates when they are influenced by our user conference

What back-end technologies are people using for managing conferences? And do they plug into Salesforce?

I did that on a virtual event, where they only needed to provide a raffle prize in some value and in return got to have a "table" in the virtual networking session

We did have partners do sessions - but again, it had to be thought leadership, no pitching. They also sent attendees.

The beauty of Goldcast is also in the "after" the event. Their platform let's you take the recordings and repurpose it for further use.?? It's GOLD ;-)

Gives partners a sponsor prospectus with clear benefits - everyone is seeing the same thing

We look at what WE would want as a sponsor. Content, connections, activations and more. We can’t just use them as a revenue stream.

We are in the very early planning stages for an event next year (our first in person big conference)

Doing partners is definitely a mixed bag

And how do you handle their desire to want attendee list. ??

The test of a true “industry event,” will you let competitors attend? It also significantly drives the direction of the program and content.

ah the argument over partner sourced vs direct vs marketing vs sales owning opps - have seen this at multiple orgs unfortunately

did they do a presentation of what marketing should be doing but it was from 2009?

I’ve seen CEO’s block this before usually depends on the culture and confidence aspects

Instead of a session - maybe it’s a creative joint CTA, good follow up materials, doing something virtual with them later. How do you JOINTLY want to influence the audience

We hired a content person whose role was to “make sure” both the deck and the preso was “high quality” prior to the user conference.? It’s not 100% effective but it does help a LOT.

Mitigate/balance “pitchy sponsors” - speaker coaching (for everyone) as part of the event. A click up from than just “slides are by X date for review” having a cadence or check-ins and guidance for speakers can really up-level your content.

One good tactic for sponsors, is to have a “pitch off” — 5 minute session with winners and prizes.

We offered to send an email to our registrants on their behalf if they provide the content. No hard sells, but they can promote content or value adds. Additionally the partner team would take their requests for introductions after the event but we basically said, get out there and shake hands. We’re not handing you a customer list to spam with sales messages.

We did have one of our designers review and clean up every preso. They had to use our template as well. Drove her insane, but the quality was good ??

Concur with what everyone is saying. Curation and collaboration is critical to create quality programming with underwriters.

Any sponsor session we do, the topic must be approved by marketing, they must submit an outline, prep sessions, etc.? It has resulted in better content. I no longer do sponsors. Bc I found they all expect reciprocation to sponsor their shows which are very expensive and don’t lead to meaningful business.

Oh man, I agree with that. Very much for the Adobe conference.

Identiverse is another good example of a user conference that ended up an industry conference for Ping Identity.

And yes, you have to let competitors be there

Our head of content strategy was heavily involved in developing tracks, sessions, speaker topics, etc.? to make sure it all flowed from a customer POV.? And that we could leverage it afterward.? You need the event planner and content strategist to be tied at the hip!

You need to build your content like you build a wedding menu. It’s not what YOU want, but what the audience will enjoy and remember.

As a small company in the past, we evaluated partner participation on a “budget or backbone” basis. Bigger partners that didn’t want to help lift and carry contributed Budget. Smaller scrappy folks like us contributed Backbone - working the check-in desk, helping plan and execute, etc.

And if they wouldn’t promote to their database, they were not in our bag of co-sponsors.

What about sponsoring giveaway bags?

Is there an example of a users conference that lets competitors sponsor / attend / etc? I doubt Hubspot would let Marketo sponsor or present at Inbound, for example. But maybe I’m wrong!

It depends on what’s IN the bag.

Agree, having a process and managing to it tightly is key. Heavy lift but significant ROI in terms of session content.

We attend some of our competitors that are also partners, I thought they'll kick us out, but they didn't and even invited us to re do it next year (Fintech - they are large company we are small, but we take them a good chunk of business)

We did have multiple practice sessions for everyone - one to sort content and one as a dry run. We did catch one that was overly pitchy that way.

From what amount of customers do you believe it is viable to have an in-person event?

Best user conference I have been to was Hashiconf by Hashicorp. Like it was almost like a seminar the way the people were fans there.

Does a Customer Advisory Board meeting count as a "user conference"?

Speaker coaching for internal presenters is critical.? You can position it as development as well.? I've seen "okay" presenters level up significantly with some pro coaching.? And it carries through in their day-to-day

Charging something helps with attendence

We did this at my past company and the impact was huge! It helps for a whole range of speaking engagements - internal and external

How do you mitigate the customer conference taking over a small team?

Is anyone charging for their owned conferences anymore? Post covid?

I don’t think you can ??

I’d love learning on this too - how you handle the process of speaker training.

To mitigate the “bad session” risk, we pre-recorded several of our sessions last year and played them during our virtual conference. Feedback was very positive and no one expressed concern that it wasn’t live. (We tried to make it seem like it was live). The quality went up b/c we could do multiple takes and edit out the nervous moments, then edit in video that referenced what they were talking about much like you would see on the big screen during a full scale event. This was all done in house.

I had the same thought. We’re a bit too small for a meaningful user conference, but are considering hosting CAB events instead for now.

The best run corporate user conference are designed to impact over 50% of the annual pipeline. We found this in my previous job at an event meeting automation platform.

We chat about this, do we really want them there, no. Are they going to see everything we are discussing online, on social media after, yes. So while we don’t want them there, we know that if they were there, nothing is really a secret. It’s less of them hearing what we are discussing vs them pithing our clients.

We included tickets to our annual conference in the price of renewal

We did that as well

I was wondering - getting folks to fly for something, you’d think you’d want to imply enough value to take the time out etc

Sounds like an unlock win/ win for additional engagement.

We have too few overall customers at the moment, but I could see us tagging onto someone else’s event as a partner. Or finding someone in the industry who is complimentary but non competitive and working together.

We brought in a virtual coach and ran three months of group and 1-1 sessions

Great way to include small companies that may not have a bag of cash to put down for partnerships

My CRO claims the minimal amount is 200 customers (B2B)

I can go back and look - the Execs (CEO, CPO, etc) had 1:1 coaching and then we did group training with session presenters.? The style of coach you want is "quick feedback, tricks, etc".?? The small things corrected makes a big difference

I was wondering about this too - is it better to charge something, if so what amount is reasonable, especially for smaller companies.

And if you are targeting a region, will they also pay for fly & stay in addition to paying for the conference?

If you are paying you are more likely to attend

I've had great success timing a CAB to coincide with a major industry conference at one of our Innovation Centers

At Marketo (pre-Adobe), we had the good fortune of having a rabid community that was more like a cult. The summits were highly successful because customers genuinely wanted to engage with one another.? Seems to me that to what degree the customers are a tightly wound zealot community makes a big difference for user events.

Ideas/successes getting entire company engaged in promotion? How to build internal excitement?

Agree. I find smaller targeted events more useful

We do events where we invite the top 20-30 clients to a small format 3 day event where we share out thought leadership but also facilitate their conversation about the challenges they want to solve.? Comes off very high touch, elevated experience - without a big stage and lights.

Definitely customers should pay - in our industry with SMB’s it was $695 - $895 per attendee with a variety of promos.? But I’ve never seen a user conference be a money-maker.? Even with sponsors and paying attendees.

We gave every employee a stuffed mascot and asked them to post selfies with it on social. It was silly but fun and people loved it.

we did an 45 person event closed more ARR than the 200+ one sometimes intimate depending on ICP helps move the needle deeper vs spreading the butter aka $$$ across larger dazzle elements

always start with “Why” and then “Who.” Once you align on those, it creates a frame for all further decisions.

We brought our customer conf back for the first time in 9 years - it’s 3 weeks away. We tried charging for the first time ever this year to minimize attrition and boost the credibility of the event - while keeping the investment minimal ($499). I think that charging this first year back was as mistake - we needed to make it free for all, build momentum and then start charging

How do you take a larger conference, feel like an intimate gathering? Targeted workshops, dinners, activations. Event within an event. What are others doing to personalize this approach?

We’ve had to give out tons of free promo codes to get butts in seats.

We had all of our employees write 2-3 handwritten welcome notes for attendees.? It was such a great personal touch/welcome and a way that each employee could get involved even if they couldn't attend.

Conference as a Service?

“The Roadshow"

Conference in a Bag?

Breakouts, interactive discussions, workshops - all great ways to do that. Wynter did do a great job of that with Spryng this year.

My experience with user conference pre-COVID was that... it was exhausting, it felt like the whole year was centered on the user conference, planning, execution and post-event and getting into always delivering more with less was a struggle... speaking from a regional standpoint where replicating the US user conference flagship was not a given!

Yup, the exec dinner roadshow is my favorite for enterprise. Very targeted, very high ROI.

Going back to the partner discussion, I’ve leveraged large strategic partners like AWS by using their office space to host user conferences. Using their space didn’t cost anything; we just needed an internal AWS host on-site and to go through their vendors for catering, etc. Saved us a ton of money.

Requires as sales team that has built relationships

Same here. And all the CEOs seem to love doing them but sometimes they expect a deal out of every one or it’s a miss.

That’s the difference for exec conference vs user conference

Happy hours as a VIP event (capped and smaller) before the main opening reception. So it’s an easy flow and where the attendees already are…

Micro-events, smaller and targeted will drive the right pipeline you need, more so than a broader audience. You are not necessarily saving $$ but you are using it the right way.

What size are your teams to be able to execute something like this? Or do you outsource?

If you do a HH at a conference, I found that the registrants are more likely to accept an SDR outbound email to meet at your booth or suite if you have registered. Like a crazy %.

right, I have found CEOs don't realize it's a step in a nurturing/relationship building process

We've started doing an executive regional masterclass (half a day and a lunch). It is really not easy to get people over

https://kennedyspeech.com/

Cliff is excellent!

Anyone using AI for events somehow, eg to personalize content or captures insights in real time?

Industry partners are good ways to outsource the logistics and recruitment of your ICP to those small dinners. Even though the cost can be a lot, they have access to the execs you may not be able to get directly and deal with organizational logistics.

I love doing exec dinners with a partner (versus an events vendor) to fill rooms

No but you should take a look at Splash That - they have some interesting AI functionality

Operational rigor aka chasing, early event messaging multi month chatting in advance, tying AE’s to a number to attend that had to show to justify the small scale event investment $

We are also struggling to get executives to smaller luncheon type events (less user conference). Pre-COVID we saw more attendance to these.

G2 would buy multiple booths and trade to make a mega booth for Dreamforce

YES! piggy back like the small fish to the shark ??

ride the wave the ICP is there swim around it lower cost vs buying booths and the floor time

How long in advance are you planning these?

Depending on the industry, they may need to earn continuing education credits each year so if you can make those events count for that, that helps recruit people.

We hosted a series of luncheons with this company that performed really well: https://www.dhirubhai.net/company/business-development-institute/ - they get you the attendees and do all the logistics and you bring the speaker.

Yes! I remember the first year of that Ops stars event, it was really well done

Would love a session at a later time, building off of this event discussion to talk about creative ways to break through in a large expo. Booth wins/ other activations etc.

We used it to do analytics based on previous year’s performance (e.g., responses to event survey), development of the agenda/schedule, and now drafting personalized invites for registrants, participants. Will most likely use for post event comms as well.

and https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/kerrigarbis/

When I start my year I do a reverse workbook plan against budget, seasonality, known events we have to be at and then tiered launches and lot them in between quarter to quarter based on pipeline and sales feedback loops - there are some smaller ad hoc asks that that aren’t “on the yearly calendar” but it helps to see at a glance that gaant view yearly to quarter to month etc let’s us resource people and budget thoughtfully

We learned that a group of our customers did a mini-user conference without us and so we talked to several of them about what they did and what content they wanted.? And asked several of them to partner as we developed our sponsored user conference and then be an influencer.

That’s incredible if they were so invested in your product they met without you. Smart activation off of that!

Totally, we try to do that as well. I guess my question is how long in advance do you open registrations for these events for clients and prospects to register?

Picking the date can be one of the hardest things!!? Overlap with other events your customers may be attending,? end of quarter close if you want sales people there, analyst availability, etc.

And personally - I feel like April 18th this year was THE date. Several excellent CMO conferences on the same date

At the end of the event we used to announce the next year, the date and location as well as a landing page with a block the date sent to "early registrations"

The best way to get users to conference that worked for us is from Sales team and Customer success team.

We went after procurement managers and directors

Everyone wants to be validated for making the right choice and being part of a winning team.

It really helped us build a list of folks we were having trouble finding/accessing

Does anyone incent sales or CS to get attendees?

We did contests with Sales and CS to drive registrations.

For that small % of paid attendees could you give them something extra prior or at the show. They're extra special, exclusive.

That is my favorite book this year. Horst Shulze's Excellence Wins is also very good

I've done some events with https://meetingpool.net/ they produced events for huge companies (MSFT, Amex, Nike), but at the same time do 10x10 or virtual and startup events. Tara the owner is a real event pro (tell her I send you, she's a great person and agency to work with)

I’d make the same rec for Ugod from NWA’s book “Raw”. One of the most non-marketing books that I thought about marketing a ton.

Thanks! Curious as to how much budget you set aside for the luncheons and the vendor? Did you find it to deliver good ROI for you?

I've been in companies where the sales person can only get in if they got X amount of meetings/registrants

And ensuring you have non-alcoholic cocktails. That matters..

Was with Starwood for 10 years - the company was made on brand through traveler experience. How to make a box, an intimate and intended brand experience - touch, sound, smell. 100% on it’s all the small things that add up to the memorable experience.

That’s why Wynter was a good event: great people attending, excellent food and started at 10am

I also recommend - How Emotions are Made by Lisa Feldman Barret. It covers a lot of emotional understanding through events.

thanks everyone great convo