
Epic Events by vFairs · 2026-06-10 · 29 min
Key moments - from our scoring
Substance score
58 / 100
Five dimensions, 20 points each
Eddie Reynolds challenges the common assumption that simply attending or sponsoring conferences drives revenue. The core issue: most companies haven't defined their ICP (ideal customer profile) and buyer personas with sufficient specificity, making events inherently wasteful. Reynolds advocates for a foundation-first approach where companies map their target audience narrowly (e.g., manufacturing CFOs with $50 - 500M revenue in specific geographies), then layer events as one lever in a cohesive GTM system. For attendees, this means researching event guest lists (via Pavilion Slack channels, Zoom Info, Clay, or direct requests to organizers), pre-arranging meetings with ICP members, and stacking conferences with scheduled conversations rather than random networking. For organizers of intimate dinners and lunch-and-learns, mixing existing customers with prospects so peers sell to peers - combined with a tangible follow-up offer - creates compound value. Reynolds illustrates this with examples from Salesforce and his own consulting practice (UnionsCorp), demonstrating how even small teams can execute powerful event strategies. Speaking engagements and booth sponsorships warrant scrutiny too; a $50K speaking fee to 50 people with only three in your ICP may underperform a targeted webinar reaching 300 prospects. The GTM efficiency pyramid framework (unionscorpconsulting.com/frameworks) ties it all together: define ICP and buyer personas, build step-by-step process, implement systems (like Salesforce campaigns to track invites, attendance, and follow-up), and measure ROI rigorously.
Start by defining your ICP and buyer personas with specificity, then evaluate each event format (dinners, conferences, webinars, ads) based on whether it reaches your target audience and delivers measurable ROI. Don't pick formats based on opinion; use data to decide where to invest, reallocate, or double down, because events are just one channel in a broader GTM system.
Ensure the right people attend by targeting your narrowly defined ICP, mix existing customers with prospects so peers share best practices, provide tangible value for every attendee beyond your pitch, and execute a deliberate follow-up process (e.g., offering a PDF, newsletter signup, or sales call) to convert relationships into opportunities.
Request it directly from the event organizer as leverage for buying your ticket; use Pavilion's Slack channels (which show attendee names), screenshot and convert to text with AI, then search LinkedIn and Zoom Info to find emails and filter to your top ICP prospects for outreach before the event.
Probably not - you'd likely get better ROI running a webinar to 300 target prospects, an organic LinkedIn post, or an ad campaign that reaches 10-100x more ICP buyers. Speaking ROI depends on audience size and ICP concentration, plus whether you have a clear follow-up offer (QR code, PDF, newsletter signup) attached.
Eddie flags booth sponsorships as expensive ($50K - $100K+ with staff and materials) and notes that badge scans generate unqualified follow-ups; the transcript suggests being strategic about booth ROI relative to other investments, though a full answer on booth execution is truncated in the episode.
Our reviewer’s read on each dimension, with quotes from the episode.
The episode offers practical frameworks (ICP/buyer personas as foundation, event ROI measurement, pre-event guest list research) and some concrete tactics (stacking conferences with pre-arranged meetings, using Pavilion's Slack channel to identify attendees, converting booth scans via nurturing funnels). However, significant portions consist of general principles already familiar to GTM practitioners, and Reynolds frequently hedges ('this is not my area of expertise,' 'it depends') rather than drilling deeper into novel approaches.
the first thing that you need to do is say, OK, let's make sure we get the right people in the room. If you get the right people in the room and you have a really, really fantastic and valuable event
the first thing that I did is say, okay, which event is going to be a target rich environment
While the guest articulates sensible GTM principles (ICP focus, event-as-funnel mapping, pre-meetings at conferences), these ideas are neither counterintuitive nor proprietary to Reynolds. The frameworks echo industry consensus: narrow ICPs, measure everything, follow-up systems, and treat events as part of a cohesive flywheel. The Pavilion case study is personal but not a novel insight into how events drive revenue.
ICP and Biopersona is at the foundation of all go to market
we're investing in marketing to get an ROI. And the challenge with that, as we all know, is that attribution is a pseudoscience
Reynolds has genuine operator experience: 10 years in GTM consulting, prior tenure at Salesforce managing event strategy and sales at scale (Dreamforce, Salesforce World Tour), founder/CEO of Union Score Consulting. He has executed multi-million-dollar event programs and used them to generate pipeline for his own business ('generated a few million dollars of revenue in my small business just by doing exactly that'). Credible practitioner, though not a household name and somewhat modest in positioning himself.
Eddie has spent 10 years helping B2B SaaS company fix broken revenue engines
And so just for a frame of reference, just in the last couple of years, I've generated a few million dollars of revenue in my small business just by doing exactly that
Reynolds provides some concrete examples (Pavilion Slack channels, Dreamforce vs. Salesforce World Tour comparison, $5,000 event-in-a-box at Salesforce, $50k booth costs, 180,000 attendees at Dreamforce, 600-person Pavilion events) and actionable steps (screenshot Slack, use AI to convert to text, search LinkedIn, pre-arrange meetings). However, he avoids naming most companies, offers few hard metrics on what actually converted, and largely relies on anecdote rather than data ('I happened to run into some of those people').
There's 180,000 people there. And of those 180,000 people, if I happen to just bump into people and start rubbing elbows, What are the chances that I'm going to run into a chief revenue officer
we paid $5,000 for these events. And they just produced it and put it all together
The host (Younas) asks logical follow-ups and tries to narrow the conversation (lunch-and-learns, conference attendance, speaking, booth ROI, user conferences), demonstrating intentionality. However, questioning lacks real pushback or productive disagreement. Reynolds frequently deflects with 'this is not my area of expertise' or 'it depends,' and Younas rarely presses him to go deeper or contradict himself. The exchange is friendly but soft - more of a friendly consultation than a challenging interview.
Eddie, if we just pick up a medium sized B2B company, and let's assume that their budget is a couple of million dollars
What you suggest is the right way to approach attending a conference so it actually generates pipeline versus, you know, just someone just being a few days out of the office
Computed from the transcript - who did the talking, and the words that came up most.
Eddie Reynolds has spent 20+ years in B2B SaaS revenue, at Salesforce, in consulting, and now running Union Square Consulting, and he's seen this story play out hundreds of times. The problem usually isn't the event itself. It's everything around it. In this episode, Muhammad Younas goes bottom-up through six event formats with Eddie: → Attending a conference → Speaking at one → Hosting an intimate dinner → Running a happy hour → Sponsoring a booth → Putting on your own conference
Transcribed and scored by The B2B Podcast Index.
Younas, CEO Hello, everyone. Welcome to Epic Events podcast. Today I have a very special guest, Eddie Reynolds. Eddie has spent 10 years helping B2B SaaS company fix broken revenue engines, and events are one of the most misused tools in the GTM playbook.
I have a lot of questions for Eddie today of how we can make use of events the proper way and can have GTM events as one of the core strategies as part of any GTM playbook. Eddie, welcome to the podcast. Eddie Reynolds Thanks for having me. Younas, CEO Eddie, in this world of AI, and I just looking at your post, it looks like you just interviewed someone for, I don't know, today or sometime this week who turned out to be a college graduate making use of AI for pretty much everything.
So I found that LinkedIn post pretty interesting. How are you seeing events within this AI world and how much you feel that that's helping anyone with their GTM strategy? Eddie Reynolds Well, I mean, in some ways, I'm not sure that I like necessarily see the connection between events and AI. I think that as a general, all the technology we're using, all the Zoom meetings, everything from the pandemic, we're seeing a massive demand right now for people to do in-person face-to-face events.
I think we are all like after six years of this, like pretty burned out on Zoom calls and we want to meet in person and have that human connection. And I think that from a company perspective, from a marketing perspective, there's a lot of opportunity to do live events right now, it's not that there's not a competition and that it's easy, but it's easier than trying to post on social media, trying to do webinars, trying to do the Zoom meetings, because that's been just such a saturated market the last six years.
And I think, I don't want to say we are seeing, I think we have already seen a comeback to in-person events. And I think as it applies to AI, AI is impacting every single step. of everything that we do across the entire business. And I'm happy to sit and break that down with you as it applies to events and marketing and go to market in general.
But as a broad sweep, it's kind of hard to answer that question. Younas, CEO Eddie, if we just pick up a medium sized B2B company, and let's assume that their budget is a couple of million dollars in a year for events team in particular. I would like to kind of brainstorm what are some of the ways within the events landscape of what a chief marketing officer or a chief events officer Like how should they kind of allocate that budget? And I'm assuming that, you know, something like user conference would show up, something like intimate dinners would show up.
So just want to pick your brain on someone, a chief marketing officer listening to this. How would you help, like how would you suggest that they spend a budget, like a couple of million dollars within the events landscape? Eddie Reynolds Sure. So I'm not going to give my opinion on whether this type of event or that type of event is better than the other or that it's better than some other marketing channel because it's not my area of expertise.
And I think lots of people have opinions about what's better or what's not. But ultimately, I want to look at the data. And so we're investing in marketing to get an ROI. And the challenge with that, as we all know, is that attribution is a pseudoscience.
Trying to understand where this customer came from, what influenced their buying decisions is very difficult. But we still have to do the best that we can to get access to this data and make intelligent decisions about whether or not it's worthwhile to continue to invest or to double down or to move or reallocate budget elsewhere. And so when we think of events, for me, as somebody who specializes in go-to-market, not events specifically, I think about it as just one of any channel.
We have our marketing budget to spend on everything from doing podcasts like this to doing events to doing ads. And we have to think about where we're allocating that budget. We also have budget to hire salespeople to make cold calls. And we want to build a system where all of those things work cohesively together.
And so I think the first part of my answer to that question, because I could literally spend the entire podcast just trying to answer that one question, is we need to think really clearly about the foundations of our go-to-market. And the very base layer foundation of our go-to-market is our ICP and our buyer personas. So we need to ask, if we're spending money on events in whatever flavor that is, you and I talked offline about many different ways to approach events. If we're spending money on events, are we getting in front of our ideal customer profile and our buyer personas in those companies?
If we're not, then by definition, this is not going to be a good use of funds. If we are able to get in front of those folks, we have to think about what the customer journey is for them to learn about us, find out about us, and explore that path, how we're going to measure that, and whether or not that's actually ultimately paying off, or whether we need to reallocate that budget elsewhere. Younas, CEO Makes sense. If we pick up just more like a lunch and learn or a dinner as one of the events format, just based on your experience, do you have any best practices of how to get best out of a dinner or a lunch and learn as an event format as part of the GTM strategy?
I'll just tell you just on the flip side from our side. I've seen companies when they're making core calls, they need a hook. You know, if it's a steal, you'll get into a call. The conversion rate has been very less compared to, by the way, we are arranging a dinner or a lunch and lunch with 20 other executives.
Would you would want to attend one of those? Just wanted to kind of understand a bit more about what you're seeing in the market for something like. Eddie Reynolds Well, again, I don't think this is my area of expertise. This is something I spend a lot of time of my personal time doing.
A lot of my energy goes into our own marketing programs and thinking about things like this, but this is not the thing that I shout to the world that I'm the expert in. What I can tell you is just like anecdotally, I'm a big fan of these small intimate events. And what I experienced when I was at Salesforce and what I've done with my own company in the 10 years since I left Salesforce and started this company is that These events can be really powerful if you get a group of people together and get them selling to each other.
I think a lot of us want to go and meet with peers so that we can share best practices. For example, I flew out to San Francisco a few weeks ago to attend a dinner hosted by one of the large VC firms that you would know by name, but I don't want to name drop, and all of the rev ops leaders and go to market operations leaders that were in their portfolio. I wasn't going there to sell. I was going there to learn from other practitioners of this practice what best practices they were sharing, share my own, et cetera.
I think that's a really, really compelling pitch. And another way to think about this is this is like an interim pitch on the back of whatever you're ultimately pitching, which is your product or service, right? And so when you get somebody to a dinner, the question is, how many of those people that go to the dinner end up entering your sales funnel? One great way to do that is to take your existing customers and mix them with your prospects, and then you have your existing customers selling to your prospects.
But you have to make sure that there's value for every person involved that goes to that event. if I'm an existing customer, let's just say that we are doing an event for manufacturers in, sorry, CFOs in manufacturing, as a random example. Well, the existing customers that have solved their problem with our product, what is the value for them to come to this dinner? and then the prospects that are considering our product or maybe not considering our product, what's the value for them to come and meet those CFOs that might share with them how they're using our product.
It's got to be more than just the product. It's got to be best practices. It's got to be each person taking some value away from that dinner. But then you might also want to think, how can I then drive those people to then start to consider maybe entering our funnel?
Is there some other offer that I can provide with them on the back of that dinner and say, hey, if you're interested, we could do X, Y, or Z for you. And I think the first thing that you need to do is say, OK, let's make sure we get the right people in the room. If you get the right people in the room and you have a really, really fantastic and valuable event, they're going to tell other people about it. They're going to want to come back for more.
And this is something that I saw working really successfully when I was at Salesforce. And I also want to caveat this with Salesforce is a really big company. So you kind of imagine this massive machine putting this on. But in reality, it was like my team of six people and an outsourced firm that had like an event in a box, we paid $5,000 for these events.
And they just produced it and put it all together. So this is something like a startup could have easily executed in the exact same way that we were. And I found that to be incredibly powerful. But I also think that you have to think about like the soup to nuts customer journey of the event, in this case, this is intimate dinner, just being one step in that journey.
And how are you going to take these prospects through that entire journey, as opposed to just having some random event where you bring a bunch of people have dinner and then hope that they just call you the next day and beg you to sell them your product. Younas, CEO Thanks for that, Eddie. Eddie, if I zoom out, just trying to learn a bit more from you about the GTM Foundation that makes any event work, just what's the planning foundation you think every company needs before any event can drive revenue?
If you can just guide us a bit more on the ICP and buyer persona work that has to happen first, that would be amazing. Eddie Reynolds Absolutely. So like I said, I think that ICP and Biopersona is at the foundation of all go to market. And specifically, I think most companies are not specific enough about who their ICP is and their Biopersona.
So I use the example of CFOs in manufacturing companies. Are we targeting all manufacturing companies in North America, in North America and Europe? Are we putting on an event where we're going to spend a lot of time and money having this intimate dinner with CFOs in all manufacturing companies? well, what is that dinner going to look like?
If I have one CFO of a manufacturing company that has $2 million in revenue and another CFO of a company that has 200 million in revenue and another that does 20 billion, are those folks going to get value from each other? Maybe, but that's a question we need to ask. I would venture to say maybe not. And so if we're more narrow and we say, you know, the companies that we do best with are manufacturing companies that are this size and this geography that have this particular problem.
and you filter it down as much as you possibly can. Then this goes into your event strategy, your advertising strategy, your marketing content, your sales pitch. Everything gets narrower from there. Then you need to think about this step-by-step process.
We're imagining this intimate dinner where we have a bunch of people coming to this dinner and having a good time, but there's a whole series of steps that happen before we arrange that dinner to get the right people to that dinner to make sure that they attend. There's a whole series of steps on the back half of that. to make sure that we maximize the value of the relationships that we built at that dinner. And so for me, the foundation of go-to-market, which we have outlined in our go-to-market efficiency pyramid on our website at unionscorpconsulting.
com backslash frameworks, like shares these bullet points in the pyramid. And the base of that pyramid is defining the ICP and the buyer personas and then defining that step-by-step process and then building into the systems. So as an example, If we're going to put these intimate dinners together, do we have a tool like Salesforce, for example, where we have all the customers and all the prospects in a way to mark them, either that we want to invite them to an event. For example, we could use campaigns.
I don't mean to get into technology here, but we could use a campaign in Salesforce or a checkbox or something to say, OK, here's all the people that we want to attend this event. Who did we invite? Who accepted? Who showed up, et cetera?
And then what's the step-by-step process after we've invited all of these people? And that, to me, is the breakdown, right? hard enough to put on an event, but then if we put it on and then like that's it and the follow-up isn't there, we lose all the opportunity that we created in putting this event on in the first place. Younas, CEO One of the things that I typically get from our salespeople is how they want to attend some conferences where they feel that they can just meet that ICP, that buyer persona.
Because from their perspective, it's a low cost, low complexity entry point into just trying to meet with the right person. What you suggest is the right way to approach attending a conference so it actually generates pipeline versus, you know, just someone just being a few days out of the office. Any guidance on that? Eddie Reynolds Yeah, and so just for a frame of reference, just in the last couple of years, I've generated a few million dollars of revenue in my small business just by doing exactly that without a better plan.
And there is a better plan. I just happened to be pretty busy and didn't have time to execute it. So I think the hardest thing is you go to the event and you rub elbows with people and you just run around shaking hands and kissing babies and hoping that you meet the right person. And that turns into an opportunity.
And in this particular example, that's exactly what I did. I haven't been to many events because we have a lot going on in this business. But the first thing that I did is say, okay, which event is going to be a target rich environment, which is going to have the most people that are in my ICP and buyer personas. So I did an analysis of all the events that we could go to and you think about something like Dreamforce, right?
We work with B2B tech companies and we help them with their go-to-market strategy and engineering. It makes sense to go to Dreamforce until you think about the fact that there's 180,000 people there. And of those 180,000 people, if I happen to just bump into people and start rubbing elbows, What are the chances that I'm going to run into a chief revenue officer in a B2B tech company with $50 to $500 million in revenue that has the exact problems that we solve? There's so many people at this event that I feel like it would be finding a needle in haystack.
So instead, we went to some smaller events where you had a lot more concentration of those kinds of people, and it was virtually impossible not to run into them. I happened to run into some of those people. We also work with private equity and venture capital firms. where people in the organization that are former CROs and CMOs help those portfolio companies and they appreciate what we do and oftentimes introduce us to those portfolio companies.
Those are the types of people that I met at the event. Now, take it to the next step. Now you've registered for the event, can you get a guest list? Can you figure out who is on that guest list?
Can you reach out to those people and pre-arrange meetings so that when you go to the event, you just have the entire event stacked with meetings? A meeting could be something as simple as, I will text you and I'll meet you over at the Zoom Info booth. I'm standing in front of the Zoom Info booth because we don't have a booth ourselves and I say hello. I stack that entire conference with meeting after meeting after meeting like that.
That is going to be 10 or 100 times more productive than just showing up and hoping that you rub elbows with the right person. If you can do that before the event and even invite people to the event, especially if it's like a free event or something like that. The Salesforce World Tour is an example. is night and day different from Dreamforce.
It's been a while since I've been there, but the last time I went to the Salesforce World Tour, it was free. It's one day, it's at the Javits Center in New York. And so you could message somebody and say, hey, by any chance, do you want to pop by the Javits Center? In fact, let me take this even a step further.
Here are some of the talks that I think that would be valuable for you. I know that you're trying to solve this problem. There's a speaker speaking about this. What do you say that we both attend this?
We can go watch the talk together and then we can catch up after the talk. And now you've made this event that could otherwise be you just randomly walking around a conference hall trying to bump into random people to having a series of meetings scheduled with your most valuable prospects. Younas, CEO I love that. I'm going to copy that up because I, I think just one quick question.
You know, you're going to a conference, getting the guest list in that conference would be in many cases a dream come true. You know, if you can do that for free, et cetera, how do typically people go about it? Do request the event organizer to share with the guest list with you, which I doubt someone would share or are there just other ways that through AI and through kind of scraping the data out there of who has outstanding. What's the best way to go about that part?
Eddie Reynolds Yeah, I mean, the first thing I would just ask the event organizer, do you have a guest list, right? They may or may not be willing to share that. They may be willing to show that before the event or after the event. Keep in mind, these people that are selling these events are selling tickets to the event.
They want you to buy a ticket so you have some leverage. And so you can say, look, I'm only buying this ticket if I can ensure that this is a target rich environment for me. And that's a perfectly reasonable thing to say. If the people I want to meet are not at this event, then I can't afford.
to spend $3,000 or $5,000 on your event ticket plus flying across the country, getting hotels, et cetera. So you can ask what type of people are going to be at this event. Can I get any indication sample, like what size companies, what industries, et cetera, et cetera? You can get on the phone and talk to these folks.
I it's literally their job to sell these event tickets. So that's a perfectly reasonable request. Now, will they give you the actual guest list? Maybe, maybe not.
In this particular example, the events I'm thinking of, like I've been to a number of Pavilion events recently, and Pavilion has a Slack channel, and as soon as you register for the event, they put you into a Slack channel together, and you can see the 600 other people that are attending. You can take a screenshot of that. You can then go and pop it into AI and ask it to translate these screenshots into text. Then you can go and search LinkedIn.
You can send connection requests to all these folks. You can go into Zoom Info or Clay and find their email addresses. You can filter that and say, well, these 600 people, here's like the 20 that I want to meet. You can send emails and LinkedIn DMs out and can have a whole process around how am going to maximize the effectiveness of this event?
That's what I was talking about at the base of the go-to-market efficiency pyramid is what is that step-by-step process for us to make this thing successful, whether it's events or whether it's ads or organic content or cold sales calls. Younas, CEO Yeah. Love that. What's the GTM value of speaking?
So attendee to attendee connection, that's one thing, but when you're a speaker and then attendees are listening to you, I'm assuming that that will change the dynamics significantly. How should companies think about just speaking in conferences as a pipeline player rather than a brand plan? What would you suggest is the process for that also? Eddie Reynolds Yeah, I I think that it can be incredibly valuable.
I've done some of it myself. However, I think that just like anything, it depends, right? You're making a bet of time and money on speaking in hopes that you get some kind of brand recognition or leads or pipeline or revenue out of it, right? And I think one thing that's difficult for me about speaking is if somebody says, look, like, we're going to run you through the ringer.
You need to pay $50,000 to speak on the stage. There's going to be 50 people in the audience. only three of them are in your ICP and buyer personas, and then you try to catch those three people versus I can go on LinkedIn and put up an organic post or an ad or what have you and get in front of 10, 100, 1,000 times more people. can run a webinar and invite people to that webinar.
Who's going to convert more? If I've got three people at a public speaking event versus 300 people on a webinar, which one is going to give me more bang for my buck? Well, I think the answer is obvious, but these are the ifs that I'm thinking through, right? So if I'm invited to speak at an event in front of 500 or 1,000 people and every single one of those people is my ICP and buyer personas, then that's probably worth a hefty fee if I have to pay a fee to go speak, not to mention all the hoops you have to jump through to speak.
But I think that, again, a lot of times folks are not necessarily thinking about all of these factors. like, oh, that'd be great for me to go speak. and you go speak and you're speaking to the wrong group of people. And so you're not going to get the conversions that you want.
And then again, I go back to that step by step process. Is there a QR code at the end? Do you have some kind of an offer that's tangible and has real value for somebody that they can go and pull up the QR code on their phone and then go download some PDF document or something that you have that's going to be actually of value and then get the opportunity to subscribe to your newsletter or to reach out to get a sales call or what have you. What is that follow up process going to look like?
Younas, CEO Perfect. So instead of just speaking, and maybe other than speaking, what do you think about sponsoring a booth in a conference? How do dynamics change for something like that? And do you see ROI in being an exhibitor for one of these just big conferences?
Eddie Reynolds Well, so like, you know, and I like the way that you're asking this because we're and like we talked offline, we're kind of going from like sort of lowest calorie, lowest expense to highest calorie, highest expense. And the challenge with the booths is it's just extremely expensive. Right. So you're investing fifty thousand, one hundred thousand dollars, not just the booth, the fees, all the materials, flying people out, et cetera, et cetera.
And then one of the biggest problems that I see with booths is is now everybody's badge scanning. And so I walk past a booth and I just say, hey, you know, nice logo or whatever and they're like scanning my badge and then I've got 15 phone calls after I visited the booth. I have zero interest and intent in that product. And so I'm not necessarily saying that like we shouldn't badge scan, but the problem is that if we say, okay, we're to go and spend 50 or $100,000 on this booth so that we can scan 300 badges, we scan the 300 badges, we then hand it over to our SDR team.
They call each of those people 15 times. we get one meeting out of it and zero qualified sales opportunities, well, then that's obviously a failure, right? Now, what are the dependencies that are going to decide whether or not that's a success? Well, the first dependency is obviously going to be, the right people walking past your booth?
Are you able to bring them in? There's obviously some nuance and what's the conversation that you're having. Do you have senior salespeople there that are able to have real conversations with folks and convert them? Do you have sales engineers?
Do you have experts on the product? Are you able to add real value in the interaction that they have at that booth? Are they then identifying who's actually genuinely interested versus who's not? What are you doing with the people that are not really that interested where you've scanned their badge and you've got their name and their email, but they have no indication that they're ready for a sales conversation?
Are you going to put them into some kind of a marketing drip nurturing campaign? Or are you just going to have the salespeople call them and then give up when they don't answer the phone and they say that they're not interested? You've got to map out that process step-by-step. You've got to measure it.
And then after you've done the booth, then you can do the ROI analysis and ask, OK, how many people did we get to buy from us? How many people did we get into our pipeline? How many leads did we get? How many people did we get to sign up for our newsletter or the webinar or whatever the offer was in the back of that booth?
And what is that worth? What would it cost me to achieve the same results if I decided to just put an ad on LinkedIn or to buy ads on Google or what have you? How does that compare and should I spend the next 50 or $100,000 on the next event booth or should I spend it on another marketing channel or even another type of event? Younas, CEO I see that you consult a lot of companies for the GTM strategy and whether it's Pavilion, whether it is the SESTER, one of the things that's always highly recommended is you trying to run your own user conference, even if it's a small one.
And if you're not Dreamforce, if you have even 50 to 100 people who can attend your user conference. And you can imagine running, like owning a conference is even more risky, expensive than just having a booth in someone else's What's your suggestion on that? At what point you feel that a company is ready to host a conference of their own? And then just what are some of the best practices of converting that user conference into something that generates pipeline, you know, increase attention or increase attention?
Eddie Reynolds Yeah, so I mean, I think that those can be incredibly valuable. Obviously, I had firsthand experience with this at Salesforce between Dreamforce and the Salesforce World Tour. So like I said, the first thing you have to do is figure out how to get the right people to the conference. Or maybe the first thing you have to do before that is figure out how you're going to add value to these people.
How are you going to have this amazing conference? And that's a heavy, heavy lift. So I don't think organizations should take this lightly. You should put on an event like this if you can't make it an absolute 10 out of 10.
Assuming that you can, You get the right people there. You have all these sessions. And then again, like map out that step by step process. How are we going to drive people to this event?
When I worked at Salesforce and we were trying to drive people to Dreamforce, we had every single salesperson in the entire company plus dedicated SDRs and interns that were making calls, sending emails. We would go through the event and say, like Mr. Miss customer, I know that these are the particular challenges that you're facing here. The presentation sessions that we're having here, the fireside chats.
here the private invite only sub events that are at the conference. These are the things that I think that you would find valuable because I know that you're trying to solve this particular problem. That's more of like a one-to-one sales effort than like a marketing email which is different or an intern making cold calls to anyone and everybody to try to get them to the event. So you've got to map that strategy out.
How are we going to get all these people to attend? Then I mentioned previously, how do you set up all these meetings at the conference? So when I- worked at Salesforce in New York. I went to the Salesforce World Tour in New York every single year, and all I would do is just try to get all my customers to the World Tour and then try to set up all these back to back meetings like I mentioned, trying to get them into the right sessions so that the session was selling them for me, try to get them to the right booths.
At Salesforce, for example, a lot of the buying decision is not only based on Salesforce, but also the partners in the Salesforce ecosystem. So I might say, OK, I know that the problem you're trying to solve is actually not served directly by Salesforce, but by one of the partners like Zoom or Zoom Info or what have you. Well, let me take you over to their booth, introduce you to an SE, get a demo, take you over to another booth at Salesforce, get a demo from a Salesforce SE, and now you have what equates to multiple different sales calls and interactions and demos and presentations that would have taken hours and hours and we just knocked that out in like 15 minutes because we're at a conference.
Then we have to think about what's happening at the back end of that conference, right? So we talked about badge scans. What are we going to do with all of those folks? Who is sales ready?
How do we score those leads to determine which leads that we're sending to the sales team? Which leads should remain with marketing to nurture? Are we going to have takeaways that people can have, worksheets, workbooks, PDFs, demos that people can see, et cetera, et cetera? What are the things that we can offer people in the conference so that they can sign up, opt in, and carry the ball forward and continue down that customer journey and evaluate potential solutions to their problems further?
We really have to map that out and then figure out what that follow-up process looks like. What is a marketing drip nurturing campaign look like for the leads that are not ready for anything else? What does the sales follow-up look like for the hot leads that are actually interested? What are the offers that we can extend to people that have left the conference and want more?
What demos can we give them? What webinars? What workshops, et cetera, are available for them to dive in deeper to whatever thing sparked their interest at the event? Younas, CEO any, just want to flip, just the roles here.
Clearly you you have had a successful career at Salesforce, you know, trying to kind of close a lot of sales. You're consulting a lot of companies with their GTM motion. I want you to imagine yourself as a prospect who has impressed you the most with their GTM strategy, where you were their prospect and then eventually you became your customer. which one of those companies, whether through a cold call, email, you meeting them at a conference or at a booth or at an event, who does stand out for you?
Eddie Reynolds Good question. mean, it's tough because I have to filter this through the fact that I'm a small business owner. And so you don't get the same budget allowance that you have at the kind of companies that we target for our clients. Younas, CEO Maybe through their brand, maybe someone didn't call you or email you, but it's just the brand followed you somehow on LinkedIn or somewhere.
Eddie Reynolds I mean, one thing I will say is like, give a lot of credit to Pavilion. I'm a big fan of the community that they've built. I'm a big fan of their marketing. I'm a big fan of their events, what they've put out.
And it's a good example of there's just continuous value being added at every juncture, right? They have a podcast. They are active on LinkedIn, right? So I'm seeing them all the time.
They've got CRO school and CMO schools and all these things that I can sign up for. They've got these live events. across the country, they've got local events and the intimate dinners, right? And so what this creates is this customer journey where I can go through the entire process and I can sign up for all of these things.
And then for me, I could potentially sponsor a booth at a pavilion event. I could potentially spend a lot of money with them. And so all of this stuff just nurtures me through that process. They sell me the membership, then they sell me on flying out to...
DC or Nashville to go to the event. They sell me on coming to the free dinner that's being put on. And it's just to this continuous loop of adding value, which continues to get me thinking, okay, what more might I want? Do I want to sponsor some kind of an event?
Do I want to invest money into Pavilion? And I think that's been a pretty positive experience, including the interactions I've had with their sales team. Younas, CEO I agree. The selection is also active.
You ask a question over there, you get some help, and then eventually you became a member, and then you attend one of the events, and then you attend one of those CR workshops. So I know exactly what you're referring to. They sell you without even trying to sell you at any point. Thank you so much for being on the podcast.
know a lot of people would be, would want to learn a little bit more from you about your GTM Playbook, et cetera. What's the best way for them to connect with you? Is it on LinkedIn? Is it on email?
If you can share just your contact details. Eddie Reynolds Yeah, absolutely. You can find me on LinkedIn, just linkedin.com, and Edward Reynolds, or just Google Eddie Reynolds.
Sorry that that doesn't match. Or you can go to our website, unionscoreconsulting.com. Backslash frameworks is where we have all of our biggest and best pieces of content.
And backslash newsletters is where we have our semi-weekly newsletter that we publish. You could also find us on Spotify or Apple under Go To Market Science. That's the name of our podcast. I think that's it.
Younas, CEO Thank you so much, Eddie. Thank you so much for being on the podcast. Thank you everyone for listening and we'll see you on the next episode. Thanks, Eddie.
Eddie Reynolds Thanks for having me.
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