The marketing movement. Why we find laughs? We had a last minute substitution for Gittano, so Mark Jung from Dooley is joining the panel this morning. So I'm sure he's got plenty of interesting things to say.
Well, I mean, if you want to hear about how I tortured my friend Kyle here with some hot sauce, that's always a fun story for the state of virtual things. It's your favorite thing to talk about every time I see Mark. You almost died. Mark almost killed me.
But those people are on the call. Yeah, fortunately we're still friends and, well, I'll let Kyle and brother deny. Was it like one of those things where you try to eat progressively spicier sauces on camera? Essentially, we over at Dooley when we were early days, we created a version of Hot Ones for Sales on LinkedIn Live.
And Kyle was one of our fun participants. We had a great time. So if you want to see HD footage, yeah, it's truly like the slack messages after. I thought you got NFT, by the way, so expect that this month.
I drank almost an entire gallon of chocolate milk and not like store brand, like, overwise farm brand, but I had to go lay down. I could not move. It was terrible. It's actually, it's hilarious to watch.
I'll pull up that link right now for anyone that wants to laugh after. Yeah, drop it in the chat. Cool. So everybody is jumping in here.
The topic of the day is going to be events and conferences. As you might have seen from some of the LinkedIn back and forth, the reason that we wanted to have this debate is because we got a couple of differing opinions here. So it was kicked off on Twitter. It was actually Gattano who said, hey, events are a waste of time.
Nick chimed in and said, you know, the booth is a waste of time, but there's some interesting stuff you can do around events. And then Kyle actually jumped in and said, hey, I disagree. So figure me to get them all together to chat about it. Glad that we've got awesome turnout today.
Please drop questions, comments in the chat throughout. We'll be taking questions and comments later in the session. But to kick things off, I'd just like everybody to go through and introduce themselves and tell me a little bit about why you feel the way you do about events. And I'm going to start with Nick.
Yeah, everyone's up Nick. I'm a director of ABM and field marketing over at Alice. And so, I mean, being a field marketer, events has always been a part of the component and like I've done thousands of them. And I've just never been a fan.
It's weird. You don't hear many field marketers feel that way. I'm not saying that conferences and events in general are a waste of time. I'm saying that there's other activations besides paying $100,000 for a booth that you can do.
All right, Mark, what's your take? All right. Well, I would call myself Gattano White. So definitely the slightly unpopular opinion here is I think most marketers are forced into a position where they need to justify a very specific ROI against leads or some type of pipeline metric for events when in actual facts, sometimes the experiences that you can create are so much more valuable and really like cascade down in a way where, hey, if we need to go and just run a Wii Play and we'd scan people or build some type of motion and have branded air quality, whatever it is that we're giving away to book meetings, it's like you're going to be forced to run the same cycle.
So I'm a big believer of the fan that you don't need to cater to the other booths there spending half a million dollars to build something. You can come in with a $5,000 budget, get scrappy and be the hero of the conference and I have some really great examples from not my company, but good friends who have been able to disrupt things early days that might be able to help you carve out some ROI. Tell me a tell the group about one of those examples just to bring it to life. Yeah, so if you don't know Saul Colt, big fan Saul is he is very much a polarizing person and early days add a friend of mine who was at FreshBooks.
So FreshBooks, cloud account software, pretty competitive against the QuickBooks space and rather than spending 200 can or big booths, what they would do when they would go to events is they would create these fun kind of magic moments. The best example was for those of you who are interested in development fans, they created a real life of banana stands. So they would have spent $500, they built a banana stand like a pool building and they had QR code of bananas and had a $5,000 sponsorship and walked around the booth and gave bananas away and exactly exactly. And they ran out of bananas and had to like cost go buy boxes of bananas and like QR sticker them for day to day.
And even when the main speaker went on stage, they were like, hey, you see the banana stand guys over at FreshBooks, right? Like you can't pay for that even when you're a diamond tier response or putting half a million dollars, right? So I'm the big believer that like creativity is the superpower for marketers and that spending more money is just a lazy way to do it. You can still have massive ROI and be the top of the conference if you're creative enough to break through that way.
Mark, when Gattano first posted this, like no conferences was awesome take on Twitter. He said that it was an unpopular opinion. Do you think it is an unpopular opinion? I think it depends.
I think January speaking most marketers when their CEO taps them as like, hey, we're sponsoring like a dream force or some X thing, like go do it, right? There's like a small part of you that dies. But you know, the other day, I think it depends on what leadership's vision is. So I've had great conferences, but typically what happens is it's a great conference because of that amazing executive dinner, that networking connection you had that right speaker that changed something in your good market strategy.
It wasn't, oh man, I have this amazing meeting with this company that I'm like super pumped for that demo and to then it sent me some air pods. So I know if I was like a great player, I could like did awesome things and like power to you and it was, but yeah, I mean to each their own. Kyle, you were objectively the most pro events person. You're not alone in this.
I think PEP chined in on Twitter and then a bunch of other people chined in on LinkedIn and said if you're anti events, then you haven't been to the right kind of events. So tell us more about your opinion and tell the audience who you are. I think probably reputation precedes you, but that's not true. But I appreciate that.
What's up, Steve Watt. See Steven here with most luxurious hair and marketing. I know between us, we have appropriate amount of hair. Absolutely.
Okay. So I serve the marketing teams of Leslie and seismic, seismic acquired Leslie in August. So I'm serving both teams right now. So I think the only thing that makes us relevant is marketers is the experience that customer prospect has with our brand.
And the only way to do that appropriately and effectively is highly, highly engaged experiences through events in my opinion. So that could be virtual. I think what we've experienced as Leslie over the past now, almost two years, which is crazy to say is we can get highly, highly targeted with virtual and we're seeing a 90% attendance rate on our virtual events. Now those are small or you're not getting a thousand people in a virtual event, you're getting between 15 to 30, but you have so many different options of what to do in a virtual event.
Guys, it's easier for people to go to virtual events, right? You don't have to drive to downtown New York. I know people in New York, you don't call it downtown. I'm sorry.
That's very gone from Indiana. You don't have to drive to a large city and park and go to dinner and meet a bunch of people. You can put your kids to bed and get on zoom and have great and still have a great experience. So I'm all for them.
If somebody, Nikki here in the chat said, what can you do to be creative with a virtual booth? At fall conferences are getting canceled as she doesn't see the point in putting the amount of money you would put for an in-person conference into a virtual conference. I mean, I can open it up. I think there is a I'm all for these virtual conferences with virtual booths.
I think there's so many different ways you can do it. I wouldn't even do a virtual booth, frankly. I just I appreciate the the software companies out there that are trying to incorporate virtual booths within their within their suite, but just to accommodate, I just don't get it. So I can't get sorry, Nikki.
That's a turn. I'm not even answering your question. I'm just gonna be. Yeah, but it's your advantage, right?
Like when you're thinking about your customers and what they care about what's experience that you can reallocate that budget for like work with the end in mind. What was the end in mind for this event sponsorship to begin with? What were you trying to accomplish? How can you then reallocate that budget to do something different?
Maybe it's like, hey, I'm gonna book five helicopter sunset tours and a private, you know, what's that you're at claira and you're in your neck and you're trying to do something that's like, hey, pipeline forecasting, don't do this in the dark, right? Maybe you book dinners in the dark and you book like a sunset helicopter tour and bring together like the CROs and that company to have an experience and then maybe you have some type of like get together about some warnings, right? Bring on 70% prospects, 30% customers and have a really focused conversation around what that might be. And then side note, if you want to get better data, you know, to make your forecasting, obviously selfish plug use duly.
But that's the way that I would be thinking about it and I would try to come to your C suite with the plan saying, hey, I know we have this budget, but with this going in mind, I don't think a virtual EV and C is going to do that. Here's where I'm proposing instead, would you be open to us exploring this as a task maybe with a third of the budget at first? We'll validate it and then we'll see like, could we cascade that forward? Yeah, I was going to, I was going to chime in too.
Like the thing is, so I did at my last company, we actually did AWS reinvent when it was virtual and they were still charging. I think we paid $150,000 for a virtual gold sponsorship that had a virtual boot. You want to know how much traffic that virtual boot drove, we drove zero from an ROI perspective from the boot alone. Granted, we had other activations like that were around in like marks that you'll create experiences for people.
The only good thing about virtual booths is you don't have to like sit there and man something for like eight to 10 hours a day. You have your SDRs or BDRs like popping in when people want to chat, but traffic's way lower than it would be in person as well. How do you do a good activation around a virtual event? I mean, I think a lot of it comes into like the, you know, driving content, paid social and driving experience.
Like what do you want it to be like? What does that buyer's journey that you want them to experience leading up to a virtual event and then like post event? You can't just think of like, this is the event like the end all be all like what does your plan look like leading up and is that as well as like post event? And then you know, it's a mixture of channels and tactics that ultimately should hopefully drive a memorable experience for your prospects and customers that are there.
I mean, a big piece of it is the content as well as the redistribution of content, which I know you're like a big fan of as well. Kyle, I see you dropping some thoughts about this in the chat. Yeah, I so the activation of it, you know, we go highly targeted. So we've tried to stay away from massive virtual events that might be might be big conferences in person, right?
Because I think that Greg mentioned this, they're just expensive. Like they're still charging the same amount for the event as in person and it's not the same. So our best activation strategy is include customers, include prospects and include sales. So that's number one.
Number two, which I put in here is to make it an experience. Like we do not talk about our product at any of our virtual events ever. You let the customers do that for you. If you actually have a product that we're talking about, which is a whole other, a whole other discussion.
So we don't like have sales engineer there like talking about less than Lee and how they can use the product. You just put you put half customers, half prospects, give them wine, whiskey, cooking class, whatever. There's now magic. There's there's tons of stuff you can do now.
It's great. And just let them converse and let them become friends and make introductions and all that stuff. So that's what we do. Are you running your own virtual events?
Are you participating in other company or third party virtual events or a mix of both? There's more hours because it's targeted. Like I don't need to pay a company a hundred grand to get a list of a thousand people that show it's a webinar. That's not an MQL team.
That's not a market qualified lead. So highly targeted is just work for us because it allows for relationship building. Now that's not a volume play, which I think is a different conversation. But that's just how we use postal.
They have a virtual events marketplace basically that helps us kind of pick and choose. And that's the field marketing team does at it, at Leslie. Are they the people you invite to them? Are they all prospects in the pipeline or are they dream accounts or how do you decide who to invite?
All above. The sales team kind of runs that and then we help support the customers. I need to be there. I'm going to mark.
I'm going to get you involved again in just a second. But I do want to hear what Nick dropped in the chat here about the five to nine events that you're running. That sounds like a cool program. Yeah.
So we've created like a whole hosted strategy around like it's basically like everyone knows what your nine to five job is. But like what are you passionate about outside of your five to nine basically. So we started all of these events like sushi and sake, rumtastings, floral arranging, like Latin dance, like wellness classes, yoga. And so basically we're actually doing one that's we're creating like a B hotel.
And so we're sending everyone an eco-friendly box that has everything to make like a B hotel that you can put out in your garden or donate a part of it gets donated to charity as well. And so we basically use that in a like for our top 20 accounts. Each rep has a top 20 list and then they have a name to count this after that. And then we have like our broad Sam market.
And so we kind of withhold these events for like our tier one and tier two, as well as acceleration of deals because I think that's another big piece that goes like on miss for like using events. How do you know what kinds of events are going to appeal to what people? Yeah, I mean, we basically just try everything. Like we've got a pretty good strategy of our platform knows what people's interests are.
And so like we can kind of tailor specific events around that as well. Plus we sell the marketers and like being someone that has purchased software like this before. You just kind of know what these people are into. Mark, before we all jumped on today, I had a couple of comments, including from Gattano and from Nick that events are often a waste of time and budget, but you have to do it for brand visibility.
What do you think about that take? So first thing before I jump on the activation front because, you know, Big Plus went to Kyle, which is if you're standing there, like the CFS company is talking to your product in a giant booth with big pictures of your products on the back wall and on the signage and stuff, you're going to blend in like everyone else and whatever you're trying to do with activation. If you're Ray Vans, whatever you're, it just it's going to fall flat. So the biggest lesson that sort of I've taken has been to look at the best B2C.
And some of my favorite examples have been mall based guerrilla marketing. So there's this great company out in Mexico that has an app and it's a sneaker store, really high end popular by trending sneakers. And when you're in the mall, you have an app randomly while you're in that geofencing that mall, you get a notification and it will say, hey, you have seconds to get back to the store and whatever seconds left when you get back to that store, the discount that you get. So it starts at 100 and you would literally see people like drop their bags and go running to the store because they want 80% off.
So they can make it there in 20 seconds. They're going to get 80% off their $500 purchase. And it created a frenzy about people getting what is going on. There's a reason why people pay to have folks on whatever the North American equivalent is of standing in line.
You can pay people to stand in line and create fake buzz around your booth. But generally speaking, I would say for the activation question, are you doing something that's going to get everyone hyped up and excited and thinking about what's going on and having energy that tracks back to your brand? And my witness test is, would I go home and tell my family, my friends, or my partner about this thing that I experienced. If it's not that good that you wouldn't be like, hey, so like I saw this really cool thing today and this company blew up a 100 foot inflatable plane and put us in it.
And then we did like a socket tasting in this inflatable plane and there was a DJ. It's like you probably tell your whatever about that. Right. So coming back to the question about brand MJ, the I'm a big believer.
And you know, if any of you seen the marketing of Dewey early days, we've done some pretty wild things. Like I mentioned with Kyle Lacy and having hot sauce and watching music videos. And I mean, we're fortunate enough that the chain smokers join our cap tables. So we're going to work with them and doing a lot of cool stuff.
But events are what you make of them. And I think that you don't need to come in with a $500,000 booth to do it. I think you can come up with a bronze booth like fresh books in the banana stand. But there definitely is some area of controlling the narrative that's important.
Right. So when you're not present in all the key events and your competitors are, you're letting them tell the narrative and just in virtue of you not being there, there's definitely some element of like being pocketed. But it really depends on if you're able to do that in other ways. So I'm a big believer in Kyle's point and I'm kind of passing on that that you need the best way to create these memorable experiences is in person.
And you have the ability to create bonds that sometimes you can't virtually. But if you can't do in person, like I said, you send folks hot sauce and do really wild things or invite them into music videos or whatever is going to like create that moment of magic. But they would then go tell a friend, a family, a partner, the network, whatever it might be. So what do you think, what do you think causes this problem where we're forcing the ROI of events to be managed or measured in a very particular way that ends up incentivizing the wrong behaviors?
I'll keep this one in Nick because you and Gattano had some comments on this going in. And you just made a comment about measuring ROI. I assume you've got a particular way you approach that. Yeah, it's definitely, we look at it from like a hosted perspective, we actually break it down from hosted in like third party.
And so for us, we don't use MQL, he's the MQA method. And so there's kind of like a few buckets that I break it down into like, okay, does this equal success. So like the first thing is growing the marketable database tied to named accounts. That's one of our key success metrics.
And you can kind of get that from some of this. And then it's like, okay, what are the number of MQAs generated from named as well as non named? And then you've got your source pipeline and source revenue. We do for customers that do join, we look at retention, percentage expansion, we percentage within those.
But I think the first couple that I mentioned are like, truly what we look at to see, okay, how do we actually measure the ROI from this from a success standpoint? Like, was it good to do it again? Or basically, do we need to iterate off of that and try different versions of it? How you're not measuring ROI on events, why not?
Yeah, and I want to preface this by saying everybody's business model is different. Okay. And for less than the way that we measured success for sales and marketing from an ROI, perspective with the board was one CAC number, CACLTV number, one number that covered all sales and marketing. What was brilliant about that early on is that it allowed my marketing team to figure out how to budget appropriately and make and invest on high end experiences as long as we kept that one number at a certain point where the board was happy.
Now, if you're running a profitable company and EBITDA is an issue, the ROI model is a little bit different, right? So we took 30% of our budget, our every quarter that included headcount and put it towards a brand. So, Direct Mail, events, and my task for the team was I want you to make this the most creative experience possible, the best experience you possibly can. And we're not going to worry about ROI, we're going to worry about the experience.
And that allowed creatives, like designers, our brand team to not worry about whether or not they can keep the cost low. Now, there was a budget, they couldn't go over the budget. Like, it's not like we were free for all spent underground on 15 people in a wine tasting. And, you know, we wanted people to attend.
So if you make a really creative thing, like, if we designed a Lego llama that you can put together, if nobody wanted it in the Direct Mail, then you got a problem, right? So it was interesting to see how the team responded when I talked more about the creativity of the challenge and not whether or not we're going to get a 10 to 1. Now, that changes as you move up market, enterprise sales, longer sales cycles, pipeline contribution, right? Netbooking, like all this stuff.
It changes depending on the business model. For less than it just worked for us, because we have one ROI number across the GoToMarket team. Has anyone ever just pulled out of an event or not even signed up for an event and said, I don't care if people are walking around saying what happened to them and my competitors have a brand presence and I don't. I mean, we've definitely pulled out of like some virtual events and I mean, the gifting space isn't that large.
So I mean, you know who all the players are that are out there. It's like, you know, sendosos usually out there at most events and we have kind of taken a step back and like we are very selective from like a third party perspective on like what we do versus what we don't, but we do focus on the hosted and we don't like promote those to like we don't really post on social about them because it's very targeted on like what that experience we want for those process. Do you think that in general, your own hosted events perform better than third party events or how do you look at how to plan between those two options? Yeah, I mean, I definitely think so from for our business, it works incredibly well.
Like we probably break the budget down to like 70% hosted, 30% like third party for like our like event budget is actually like very, very big. We do a lot of different pieces and then we also, we sponsor communities, which is another whole aspect of it and getting into like the events from like these communities like Rev Genius and like Pete and all these other ones. So another huge play there. Mark, how have you seen ROI on events measured at the company's people?
Yeah, so for me, before I moved to SAS, I was in a very niche space. So kind of thing with management consulting and like executive coaching for big banks and like really kind of top tier financial institutions. So we would typically have a list of 80 companies and it was just building relationships and multi-threading with like the C level and the decision makers and also procurements within those big banks. And that was like our niche and that's where we built almost all of our business.
So for us, ROI about events at that time was purely about are we continuing to like create these amazing experience and like multi-thread and get people on a place where it's like, hey, what's happening with the CFO at TD? And right, like those are the moments that you know there's ROI because when something comes up and you need a decision maker to come in and you can like text that person, right? And then he can just send a message and make something happen. It's really hard for us to kind of put an ROI value on that.
But the way that we would that it was how much influence do we have within a 24-hour period with key decision makers at those named accounts. So if something were to change and procurements, evidence, and A, but we can't approve this thing, do we have enough people at the CC or at the table within 24 hours to influence that decision? And it was more that's how we started to look at other ROI. It was like, what was the executive influence we needed to help get deal signs?
And it was just like a very specific measure. But I think one of the biggest things coming back to your previous point around ROI, MJ, is that opportunity cost is one of the biggest things that plays marketers. And I think at the end of the day, CEOs and leadership not getting marketing and thinking that two things. One, you can be at every event, you can be all things to all people, and that everything needs to generate leads, just incentivizes the wrong behavior.
And oftentimes, if you're investing a ton of money and effort into an event, that's virtual, that you're doing as a table stake to show up because your competitors are there. But then you have five people in your team who are not working on a creative demand gen project or something else. When you're not working with the end in mind of what you're trying to achieve, that's going to be the death knell. And I think it's still the biggest thing that I hear frustration when I talk to marketers is just like opportunity cost and needs to be more talked about.
Rather than, oh, it's fine. You'll just do this and fast. It's like not how that works. Yeah, I think Matt Chinella in one of the comments coming into this on Nick's post said like it takes so much time to build a booth and there's so many moving pieces that you have to manage that like that's one of the biggest arguments against the booth route is like whoever's playing the event doesn't have time to be creative because they're just trying to cross the T's and dot the I's Nick.
Is that what you've seen in your experience? Is that part of your argument against booths? Yeah, I think that I want to think that they like you could be spending $100,000 to be next to the bathroom. Like it's just like say for example, you go to Dreamforce every single year, you're going to the same conference year over year.
At some point, the net new contacts that you'll be getting and the opportunities will decrease year over year because it's not like more people are going to the event. You just got to be more creative to get to the other people that haven't come by your booth like year over year. It's like, how do you reach say there's 30,000 people there? How do you and you get, I don't know, say 400 people that come by your booth over a week or whatever, how do you get access to all like those other people through different activations that aren't going to make their way to the bathroom and walk by your booth.
And like that's why that's another reason why I haven't been a big fan of it. And then it's just like again, like you said, you can't, it's more of, you don't have the always the freedom to be as creative as you want to be because you've got to fall inside like a certain box to be able to get something done. And it's just like you end up everything kind of looks similar to everyone else's as well. It's like you can't, you can't stand out if you want to spend a ton of money, but it's not always worth it.
Kyle, are you on this anti-boost train too? I'm on anti-boring train. I don't care what you're doing. Like I don't, I hope there's no like booth manufacturers in here.
I'm not hating on a booth. You can make a booth awesome. You can make a booth actually work. You can make a lot of things work.
I am like Nick said, I am against looking like everyone else. And you know, I don't put a booth by a spot and just put a table. You think I'm going to get more people talking to you? Yeah, they're going to be like, what the hell are you doing?
You don't have a booth. You don't have a couch I can sit on with a champagne glass. But I do want to speak to one thing that Chris asked on when leadership says something like, we have to, we have to have a presence there because people are going to say, well what happened to them, they're not exhibiting, they must be in trouble. The way that I have navigated that in the past is, before I say we're not going to do it, I have a plan on how we're going to reach the right prospects that will probably be attending the event.
And that's all they care about. At the end of the day, there's one thing that we all care about in high growth software, pipeline, which is revenue. Right? So the organ leader is saying that their only issue is, oh God, somebody's going to think we're in trouble.
They're not going to call on us. We're not going to get the deal. So show them how you get the deal without having the booth presence. But again, I'm not, I'm just against a lack of creativity.
What's an example of a way, an alternative you have presented, like this is how we're going to get them instead. We've done at, I mean, somebody said dream force, dream force is a great example. We decided not to sponsor and they've just had people attend and invite them to a really high end experience, a high end dinner. That's not that creative and ideas, everybody does it, but you don't have to have a booth at dream force.
The other thing is just highly targeted direct mail if you know people who are attending, if your sales reps understand, hey, I have a group of people who may be going to this event and get the addresses do highly targeted direct mail. That's not a cup or t-shirt. Nobody needs more of those, right? Do something creative that has to do with the event and try to get them on a call, you know, tie the event in as much as possible.
But you don't have to be there. Now, there's tons of different robots to get there, but that's kind of the best approach we've taken in the past. And it's more named account, right? It's more like, that's more of an ABM approach than like, or another one is buy a billboard in a highway on the way to the event.
You're going to get way more eyeballs on that billboard than you are your booth. It's a billboard creative. I've heard of a company buying the things that hook on the front of hotel room doors that do not disturb signs and like branding them and then hanging them in the hotel, which I think is probably like not legal, but they did it. They got great brand recognition from it.
So, Mark, I know, I'm sorry, Nick, I saw this, the thing with direct mail is somebody working from home. I don't know if you're going to respond to this, we probably should. So for us, we ask for their home address and they usually give it to us. And if you use a third party to do that, then people are more likely to give it to you because you don't have an A.E.
asking for a home address, which is creepy. But we use a third party to do it. Yeah, I was going to add to that too. Yeah, same for us.
If we send someone something, they actually have to give us their address beforehand as well. But I want to go back to the Dreamforce thing because when I was at Clary, we actually did this in Dreamforce in 2019. And we didn't have a booth. We didn't sponsor the conference itself, but right next to it, we rented out seven suites at a hotel next door.
We drove 200 in-person meetings with execs from companies. And we also rented a bar down the street. We basically threw a party every single night. We drove over $30 million in pipeline from one week from doing that.
And I think we spent, I'm trying to remember, it was probably around, probably around like $50,000 that we spent on that, which I mean, look at that, RY. That is literally insane. And like, that is just something for these bigger conferences that you can do. If you play strategically, if you work together as a company and you have your AEs, SDRs, marketing, CS, whatever, working together to get the right people to these in-person meetings with your exec team to ultimately drive those conversations.
There is in fact, a good building person in the event. So Jay, if you want to come on, bring you on, but I'm not going to force you to come on. But if you want to come on, just say yes to the channel where you want to come on. I'm not shy.
Jay. All right. Let's tell us about what you're thinking about this discussion. I mean, I don't disagree.
I think a lot of the tactics people bring to treat you as a trash. I mean, if you're not thinking about that experience and the attending journey, yeah, it's a total waste of money. I always show like Dreamforce. There's so much noise that there was shows.
If you're not thinking about how you're going to drive people your space, you're just hoping people have to do it back. I mean, that's the biggest thing. That's been the biggest change in a lot of our industries thinking about that overall experience. Have you heard anything that you disagreed with on the so far?
The trade shows are always the money. Tell me what people should really think about trade shows. You know, I think you really need to be focused. There are a lot of, you know, they were talking about old practices and histories.
Like, you know, you don't have to just go to the show because you've always gotten to the show. It's making sure that the ROI is there, whatever your ROI might be. If you're making an awareness play, yeah, you're going to want to be in more places. But it's really just making sure that it's justified.
The talking to the sales reps and saying, oh, we've always been with the show. That is the worst excuse that you can have. And you're just going to throw away money. It's always having that purpose.
Mark was talking about being in the end of mine. It has to ladder up to the overall company objectives. Otherwise, what's the point? From your perspective, how do you tell the difference between a good show to attend and a bad show, not worth it to attend?
You can't really blanket it that way. I mean, you know, you got to look at the target audience and get a lot of these associations. I've shows are not as transparent as probably the nicest way to put it with what's going on. Who's actually there?
I think Kyle mentioned earlier, like a virtual trade show through an association over the past year and a half is a total waste of money. I mean, they're just trying to replicate what they're doing in person online. Like, you might, I think a better play would be a matchmaking type of the arrangement where it's like, yeah, we want to drive people to your space. But they were forcing people into a platform that most of them were horribly run.
And it was just like, oh, cool. I get to look at a 3D picture of my booth where people can't actually do anything with it and get a little window this big to talk to people. You can't arrange anything. It was, you might as well set up your own webinar and get more use out of it that way.
Cool. Well, thanks for letting me put you on the spot. Mark, we haven't heard from you in a while. Has anything stuck out to you?
Yes. I mean, a few things to talk about for me. Victoria was asking, you know, getting people as attention after hours. And with so many people trying to fight for attention, especially in the before and after moments, because those matter a lot, how do you do that?
I'm a big fan of primary. So typically, if we're doing some type of event, I think about it in three different ways. Number one, people are arriving in this location. How can I create an amazing experience from the moment that they touch down?
They're thinking about in this case, like, do we, right? So when they're getting to the airport, if I have five party buses that are out of the airport and I have a list of people and I know when they're there and they're talking about on social or posting, and I have some marketing up on it. It's like, hey, when you get the airport, if you want to ride over this conference, like, come join the do we party bus will bring you there. Right?
That's their first experience hitting the ground. They're not even at the event, but they're here having a good time. Right? Like they're assisting with a brand when they go to the event.
And even if you don't get permission to do it, I'm a big believer in like forgiveness over permission because I guess where the best marketing comes from. Sorry. It's all the events I sponsored and yes, our legal team is great. So that helps me.
But if you go and stand up a hundred foot inflatable plane, right outside that event with your branding and bring people in it, right? That's a big, interesting thing. You know, like when we had Kyle with the hot sauce, right? I was renting, we think it's a chance to pull the trigger this 20 foot inflatable volcano that we were going to stand up because we were doing this hot sauce thing.
And it's like, you're going to see that. You're going to know it. You're going to think, do we? That's going to be an experience, right?
And then in the event, don't just stay in your booth. That is like the worst thing you can do. You need to have activation squats. I'm a big believer in like, just go get something like cardboard signs, wax models, like Flintstones, little cars, whatever it might be.
And you set your activation team going around the booth. And if you can time something like if you're a music festival, like a coach, or something, they have like bracelets that light up, you can give people things that you can turn on or activate to get people's attention, especially if it's during like a speaking event of a competitor to get people's focus away or something like that. You know, like, that's what you want to do. And when you prime up from beginning of event to entering event to an amazing experience in that booth and then bringing people together, that's what's going to generate buzz.
And if you back that into something where it's like, hey, we're running a scavenger on this event. And as long as you hashtag do, we can take a picture of that stuff. That's going to be showing up in people's feed, right? Like you geo-defense that area and you're going to market to that list as well.
So then anyone in that area you're advertising to as well. And my last point was like, don't do the same thing. If everyone's trying to get people to a dinner, do something different, right? Hey, I'm going to pick you up in this helicopter, you and four four CROs, we're going to fly this island.
We're going to go horseback riding and we're going to have a campfire and talk like CRO horror stories in this, right? That's something that's unique that's been cut through. So that's going to my long-winded way of saying like prime, activate, have a squad, stand out and be different. And I do like do it in a way that creates a spectacle where you become larger than the event itself, because you can turn that into the foundation for your own event going forward in the future.
You know, like that's what we're thinking about here at Dooley right now. Well, one thing to know real fast, which Laurie mentioned at InChat, I do think you really have to know your audience. What's interesting about this conversation is that Nick, Mark, and I have sold primarily to people who like all this stuff, marketers and salespeople. Everybody in this room, right?
You got to be very, very, very conscious of your use case, right? Like do you want a huge inflatable plane at a financial services conference? Probably not, right? I mean, it could work, but just keep that in mind.
Like I, it's really easy for the three of us to talk about this because we sell to the coolest people ever. You know, so it's, you just got to keep, not that other people aren't just throw that out. So it'll be like shares that sound like it roasted, but just keep that in mind. You got to remember the use case.
Matt, you want to come on and talk about this, the version of this that works for industrial manufacturing companies? I know you're in there. Oh, you care enough. Does anybody, if anybody's on that wants to come on, Chris, Chris does insurance.
Chris, Chris. Hey, Chris. Hey, what was the question? Oh, being able to do cool stuff.
Yeah. So like, you know, do you think about it differently because you don't work into the same audience that Kyle and Nick and Mark, Mark it do? Yes. I think it are industry because there's a lot of insurance and risk thinking people.
There's a lot of risk of a verse thought when it comes to two events and shows. And the question I was earlier is we have these leaders who for decades have been spending $100,000 to $250,000 on a big booth because that's what we've done. And then that just picks up steam like what Jay mentioned. So this has gotten me thinking a lot about, hey, can we take $100,000 of that and try something a little bit crazy?
Can we push the boundary a little bit more? But I can't remember who mentioned it, but also, you know, we have an events team, but they're busy on this hamster wheel of running from show to show to show booth to booth to booth. And, you know, we don't have like one or two really big ones. So there are all these different challenges, but we do have to kind of be cognizant of, are we going to be doing something that's like big and distasteful or might hurt our, you know, however many year old legacy brand that we've built and it's very delicate and fine.
And, you know, I'd love to be able to stuff in a flable plane with a whiskey tasting and, you know, we have like fire breathers outside. But we got to find like the equivalent of that for our audience, like Kyle was mentioning. So, you know, it's a fine line, but an interesting one to try to find. Yeah, appreciate that perspective.
People wanted to hear about your opinions on swag. Anybody got strong phone? Oh, I have very strong feelings about swag. What was it?
Was there a question or what you should do? Or what's the? Man, it was way back here. I think they just said, you know, that was me.
I'm just mean. I'm just mean. I'm just like, I run our buildings. Yeah, I'm just having a hard time with virtual swag.
I also just hate swag. I've been in this industry for a while, and I've always just wanted to show up at like, you know, reinvent with like an empty booth. Because everybody knows those first like six hours are just like, you're standing, you're handing a teacher, you're like, what size would size? That was always shot now.
But I want to see anybody's done that. But now that we're hybrid and virtual and we're actually planning our first user conference, which is going to be virtual and I'm trying to like figure out to be Duke, and mailer. It's, you know, free to register. So our attrition rate is going to be really, really high.
But what can we do that's like engaging in our interactive that people have seen that they've liked or that's worked? Justin, if you want to send me, I don't know, with your email, I can say some examples of what we've done for our events, but we try to incorporate the direct mail into the event. So like, you have a bell or it's, it's wine tasting or whatever. Like it's, it's not just a lesson, like gear, it is the event gear, right?
So we, the other thing that we did was in order to differentiate from swag that you'd be given a conference, we launched an e-commerce brand. So an actual clothing line called Ollie Waman Co, which you can go buy right now, any of you could can. And that, that kind of, that set apart just handing a t-shirt that said, lesson on the front. The one thing that we've done, I do all of it internally, I don't have an agency that builds this stuff out.
Like I don't go to a swag agency and say, what should we do? Right? Because they never have the best ideas. So I have our brand team build out the direct mail and we do all custom.
So whether that's an Ollie llama that's a Lego or a board game or, or a golden llama, whatever is associated with our brand, we do it internally. What does everybody kind of spend budget wise, like as a percentage of your total budget? Or is it just case by case, depending on the high touch and the visibility of the event? Are you talking per event or just over?
Yeah, more on a per event, not like overall event budget for the year or something. Yeah, I can't speak to Mark. I can't speak to Pervan. Yeah, we kind of, we don't really do a per event.
And we also don't use an agency or anything. We basically, we do everything ourselves. We're only like a nine person marketing team. So we wear many different hats and like I do a lot of like the creative pieces for like our direct mailers.
And we are big, obviously, on like the digital gifting piece. And so like, we actually have our conference coming up on the 23rd this month. And so we're doing some really creative direct mailers for for Kia Council. We've also got, we've created like themed marketplaces from a digital standpoint that we're able to kind of go on and kind of like have like a swag store, basically a both like branded stuff, but also non branded stuff as well that relates back to the event and the sessions that kind of go around the event.
Like it's not just content around like ABM and events for our event, but like we're also bringing in like, hey, we have someone coming to do like wine tasting, we have someone coming to do like a floral arranging. So they'll be like a mixture of like bringing that five to nine to the actual conference too. Great. Cool.
Thanks guys. So I had a couple of comments in chat and this has been on my mind for a little while. Maybe we'll start with Mark. Like how, what kind of things do you prioritize or how do you make trade offs when you have a really small team or really small budget?
Yeah. So typically though, if you're in that spot, we're right, you're going up against the person spending 200 can of booth and it's like that, you know, looks like the outside of a bank, right? It's got like the industrial architecture, it's got all these things, like five screens, you know, like 30 people, you have like one person and like a bronze sponsorship and you got to figure out like, oh, how many creative experiences, how many creative memorable moments and like, what am I going to do here? And everyone comes back to you like, I think, I'm not going to have the same philosophy, which is like creativity wins the day and you don't need the biggest budget, right?
So like the example I gave before about like the FreshBooks Banana Stand or like something you can do to create hyper urgency. I'm always a big believer in thinking about coming back to like, I'm a big fan of linking to like the emotional and social pains people are experiencing. I think that's a big part of why, you know, even like meme language, you know, even for executive buyers like hit someone because like it's reinforcing in a quick image that someone is feeling. And if you can take that and link it back to an experience, right?
So think about like how everyone's doing t-shirts, everyone's doing swag and you're like, oh, what am I going to do? What could I do to create an experience that maybe links back to something, right? So it's like, maybe I can have these like really small tea, light candles made that have like a signature scent that is like, you know, the feeling when your CEO says like, you just sponsor all the conferences that you're selling to marketers. And then maybe you have like a $1, you know, like neck massager or something like that or a signature like bubble bath scent.
And you like create this like named collection link back to like the pains that people are experiencing. And you pack this up as empathy for marketers, read maybe it's like the jelly beans, you know, those jelly beans like Harry Potter that have flavors that are really bad. That's what it's like being a marketer. Sometimes you get dealt with a shit jelly bean and like that could be part of your experience back.
I'm like, hey, I feel that you all feel really stressed. So we're going to have like a little bath time. We're going to have our little tea light candle and we're going to eat our bag of jelly beans and one might be shitty and maybe you name that flavor. Right.
And it's like when the zero is like, where are my thousand leads? Right. So that's like a really tightly off the cuff of experience you could create if you were selling to marketers, right? Try to do events, Nick, feel free to steal this.
And that's something that you can do really, really scrappy. And then rather than getting, you know, other people's t-shirts of played, I'm a big fan of this. Typically, everyone's going to have like this giant bag of swag from other brands that they don't like is get stickers, get markers, get decals, be like, Hey, like we're going to customize a swag you got from another company. Like let me make that cooler for you, make that better.
Right. Like that's something that you can do with other people's stuff. Whether or not they're happy about that is kind of unclear. But typically, that's the way that I would approach it is like track back to a pain, something emotional, work back from there.
And then my team and I usually have a creative brainstorming session and think about like a low lifting. So last example that I would give that there's a reason for us is we did a big G2 push last quarter and we ranked like top momentum we did across the grid, we did all the stuff. And rather than doing like a traditional G2 push and the same thing for an event is we filmed GQ magazine covers and we filmed a music video to like fly like a G6 and replace it with G2 and we did like a whole experience around them push that out. It's the same kind of thing you could do for events, right?
Even if you didn't create something for someone, what digital assets you could create, could you put them on the front of a magazine cover? Could you Photoshop them next to their favorite celebrity or whatever it might be? So that's my, I think slightly long take but over you all. I mean, I can remember, so I don't have the, I don't have the small team now.
But when we did, I think the biggest mistake marketers make is who they hire first when we're building on the team. You hire growth first because you best be producing revenue or pipe if you want to do all these great ideas because you're going to get fired if you don't. Growth is number one or demand whatever you want it. Number two is an amazing designer.
You can hire everything else later, but the problem is that you don't follow that. Great revenue, great, great design and you're going to have the potential to grow to scale a brand and scale a culture but also scale revenue. And then you build from there. I am, go ahead, Nick.
You have additional thoughts? No, no, I was going to say I totally agree with that for sharing. Like we kind of like, I'll just kind of leave it with this. Like the way that we break it down is like, okay, you have to create the man build brand by educating providing insight to like your target buyers.
You have to know your ICP, your secondary ICP. Like what are the communities that they leverage when you create and build that demand, build that brand. How do you then capture that demand on your website by optimizing your messaging, clear CTA's offers, like remarketing all those to events too. And then you have to activate the upbound piece for sales and marketing motion name, like your target accounts, plus your in-market accounts.
All of these three kind of like levers will also, because you can use the same exact thing for building your event strategy as well. I want to ask a terribly selfish question, because I am a really bad field marketer, personally, much more of a demand-gen product marketing person. If you're a marketing leader and field marketing is not your strength, how do you, you know, encourage the team to make these kinds of things happen? If you don't have somebody with fantastic ideas like Mark, Kyle, you too know.
So I am that person. So your third hire is a great field marketer, is like baby Mark should be your third hire. Right? Outside of that, you copy.
You copy people. You copy Mark. You copy Nick. You copy the lessonally sized my field marketing teams.
Right? I mean, that's the only way you can do it. Until you have the ability to hire somebody that has that creativity. Usually when you have a great designer, they can think outside of just design.
I'll create a person's a creative person. So I'm going to run up on time to show. And Mark, do you actually consider yourself a field marketer? No.
I consider zero people on our team by doing the field marketers, and I am a terrible field marketer. I'm like more brands demand think of creative ideas, cut through the noise, and that just happens to translate into in. But I'm not like, I'm going to put them on LinkedIn not a field marketer. I'm like, I'm going to quote this and put this.
No. Don't box me in, man. I don't know, Mark. Like when we talk like a couple of weeks ago, like you had some great idea.
You could fit right into the crowd. He's an idea guy. He's a great demand-in leader idea guy. Nick, anyone take away you and leave people with from this discussion?
No, I would just say like be creative. Like be, don't be afraid to try something different. Like, it's okay. If you try something that is different and it feels like, at least you're trying something different, then you can course correct and go from there.
But like, just doing the same playbook everyone else is doing isn't going to get you as far as it did, even a year ago. All right. Well, let's wrap with that. I got to say, I'm a little disappointed because ultimately, I think you guys agreed on a lot of stuff and I wanted to have a heated debate, but we kind of knew this was going to happen.
So. Screw your mark. I wasn't going to tell you. I did my best.
I got the C version instead. Thank you, Kyle. Thank you, Nick. And thank you, Mark, for all your time.
A lot of people had great comments in the chat about how valuable this was. So appreciate you joining us. And this will be on YouTube for anyone that wants to watch again later. Yeah.
I'll be back on the doctor. Bye.