Why the Smartest Marketing Teams Still Bet Big on In-Person Events

Speaker A: This is the RevOps Hero podcast where we talk to real life revenue operations leaders to learn what it takes to turn you into a RevOps hero at your company. Hi everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the RevOps Hero podcast. I'm your host Chris Strom and for this episode I recorded it live at Dreamforce, the annual Salesforce conference. I went around and I talked to marketing leaders at five different companies who were presenting at Dreamforce. The topic I wanted to ask them was why and how do they incorporate events like Dreamforce into their go to market strategy? Specifically I asked them five questions each. First question is why invest in events like Dreamforce as part of their go to market? Then what are their goals for the event?

Speaker B: What are the steps they go through

Speaker A: leading up to the event, what are their post event follow up steps and

Speaker B: then how do they track the success

Speaker A: of their event campaign and attribute any pipeline revenue from it. So with that, let's get into the interviews.

Speaker C: This is Anne Marie Fleming from Traction Complete. I am the product marketing manager here and we are at Dreamforest and it's pretty wild. I'm loving it. Events is a really big part of what we do at Traction Complete and the reason we love getting out here is really because we want to meet customers where they are. We're in a world of remote and it's nice to have an opportunity to go face to face and have conversations, show our products in real life and just add a bit of relationship building to what's been digital for so long.

Speaker B: So coming to something like this is probably 20 times more expensive than putting on a webinar for instance, but you still do it anyways. Why do you put in the time and effort to do that versus just putting on a webinar or making an ebook or something?

Speaker C: Yeah, we do a lot of webinars, trust me. Yeah, we do love the digital world, don't get me wrong. But I think you just need a balance of a bit of everything, a mix. And I think if anything through Covid, we were just reminded of how powerful being in front of someone can be. And it's all about trust and letting people see who you are authentically and you can't really do that all the time digitally. So events are due for us because we're not just in this amazing campground, we're also doing events outside of the event. And and so how do we bring people that are coming to Dreamforce to get to know us outside of this very hectic floor? And that's through Happy Hours one on One sessions, meeting with our sales team, meeting with our CRO, our CEO. Uh, just having opportunities for people to interact with us in different ways. It's just not possible online.

Speaker B: So leading up to this, what are the steps you go through coming into the event? Do you do like personal invites or you're sharing it across your general marketing channels?

Speaker C: Yep, that's a great question. And it honestly takes an army. So one of the things I love about Traction Complete is just how collaborative everyone is. Doesn't matter if it's marketing, sales, customer success, even dev. Um, we all get involved in trying to bring people to the right events at the right time. And so we start months ago, just personal invites. Our CEO reaches out to our customers, to prospects. Our CEO is on the phone. Marketing is doing all of its promotion. You work with content partners, we work with influencers, we leverage social media. It really is a barrage on all levels because there's just so much noise right now. And so how do you cut through that and say, we really want you to come to this event and this is why. And to tell that story, you just have to take different channels and different approaches and different people to make that happen.

Speaker B: And then what are your specific goals for coming out of this event?

Speaker C: Yeah, I think there's a lot. Of course sales is always important for us as an organization, but I think even more than that is just letting people understand who Traction Complete is. We were spun out of a very large consulting firm a few years ago and we're stepped outside of that shadow and we're trying to build our name and our brand and build that trust as an innovator. And so we're here really to showcase what's happened over the last year in terms of software development for us, what use cases we've been able to solve, what challenges we're taking on and just sharing those stories and that success with as many people as possible. So that when problems come up with data management in Salesforce, if it's duplicates, if it's hierarchies, if it's lead routing, if it's relationship mapping, the first words out of their mouth will be Traction complete. If we've done our job right.

Speaker B: Oh, nice. So then you know, you're at the event now and then you're scanning badges, you're doing like personal meeting one on ones happy hour you mentioned. And then what are your follow up steps after this event is over?

Speaker C: It's complicated. Yeah, I think that we've made it more complicated because we do so many things. Just if it was just the booth. We would be using our lead scanner and that would be it. But because we have all of these events, we do a lot through Slack. We have an army at home that we've been talking to all day long. They may not be here physically, but they're here in spirit. And so sometimes it's a photo of a, uh, business card, sometimes it's a manual process, sometimes it's actually automation through our forms, and sometimes it's through the lead scanner. But we make sure that either we're communicating it, if it has to be someone on the other end getting the information in, or if we can automate it, we'll automate it. But yeah, it's. With so many moving parts, it requires so many different people to help make that happen.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker B: So you're putting in like badge scans, maybe create new lead records in your salesforce or like with existing contacts. You're like log in the meetings on the, uh, contact or the opportunity records.

Speaker C: Yeah. We want to make sure too, if it was a really meaningful conversation, that we capture the essence of that conversation. Because the person who took those notes may not be the person following up. And we want to make sure the handoff is very smooth. So I write copious notes for that reason. I want them to feel the excitement if it's an exciting conversation. I want them to feel the relevance if it's a real problem that we can solve. And make sure that when they reach out, they have that context. And even outside of what we put through digitally, we'll have conversations with the reps before they follow up as well.

Speaker B: Just make sure that getting on the same page about the game plan for the follow up.

Speaker C: Exactly. Because as you said, this is an expensive event and it's for us, it's a big chunk m of our company that came. We came with an army and we, we mean business. We want to really achieve our goals and meet as many people as possible, have those meaningful conversations. And all of that would be, uh, wasted if we didn't capture the information properly, get it in our salesforce so that we can follow up effectively.

Speaker D: Oh, yeah.

Speaker B: Cool. And then last question is, how do you approach campaign tracking and campaign attribution for this and other events? Yeah.

Speaker C: So we do have. The Dreamforce is our umbrella, but we have all sorts of different resourcing. Just like I was saying, we take all these different paths. We use our own employees, our leadership team. We use social media, we use influence. And so making sure that we're capturing that lead source is huge. For us, because we need to know what's working right. Is, uh, the employee referrals bringing in us in leads that we wanted, registrations to the events, Is it the influencers that are working? Is it content creation? Is it the webinars? Is it these events outside of Dreamforce? And each one of those has their own unique resource and we're trying to layer that in with what specifically under those umbrellas was working and resonating and. And we have again, like a team at home that's really making sure that we are getting that visibility as detailed as possible so that we know what really did bring us the value that

Speaker E: we were hoping for.

Speaker B: Oh yeah, they're doing all of, they're doing the data management for all of this while you all are out here on the show floor itself.

Speaker C: Yep, exactly. And we even have, working with Slack created a way that if all you could do is take a photo and take a photo, upload it through Slack and uh, marketing operations guru man, that would be the one that takes that and puts it into something valuable in Salesforce for us. So there is no reason that we cannot capture the lead. It may not be all the same way, but we make sure it works, it's effective, and it gets into our Salesforce.

Speaker D: Oh, yeah.

Speaker B: Awesome. Cool. Thanks for walking us through it here.

Speaker C: Oh, uh, I love talking about it. It's exciting times.

Speaker B: Yeah, Great, thank you.

Speaker F: I'm Laura Sweet, the VP of marketing here at Riva. And Riva helps capture and connect client interactions into your CRM, um, to help close those data gaps which can help prevent really impactful agentic AI.

Speaker B: Okay, nice. And so we're at Dreamforce, uh, here and so obviously doing a big in person event like this is a lot of time and effort and expense and budget and everything. Way more than just doing a webinar or something. So why do you feel it's worth it to do in person events like this?

Speaker F: Events actually are our largest budget line in marketing at Riva. There's a few reasons. So in general, in person events facilitate a much quicker relationship development for our team. So when we meet people, we can expedite that funnel very quickly. It also gives us the opportunity to meet with partners and clients here in person as well. And then we host activations around the events too. So I think that relationship thing is key, but also access, so access to new leads, new people that we wouldn't necessarily have the ability to meet otherwise. So all of those things really do contribute a lot of success. And then Dreamforce specifically, which is our largest event in the year of the year because we are uh, one Salesforce partner and then also are building our solutions around the salesforce ecosystem as well. We think it's really important to be here to make sure that we are viewed as that sort of leading solution for what we do. And then also great ability to capture new leads as well for us here too.

Speaker D: Yeah. Cool.

Speaker B: Coming into this event, do you have like specific goals or outcomes, uh, you're shooting for here?

Speaker F: Always. So I think events for us, for me specifically are always a mix of direct attribution for revenue, but then also an awareness side. And awareness is a little more challenging to measure. So as I mentioned, having a presence here is really important for us because we're an ISB partner. So just to have that here from a competitive perspective, from the audience perspective, that's something that we just as a bare minimum of what we want to achieve here. But then we want to obviously have revenue goals associated with the event as well. When it comes to an event that's really towards lead generation, I look for a minimum of a 5x investment on our return on our investment is what we look for right now.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker B: Cool. So now we're at the event, but what were the different steps of the process you went through leading up to the event?

Speaker F: So those vary slightly depending on the event. Uh, typically out of the box. We have our marketing, sales and customer success teams all working in coherent like cohesively to do outreach to various segments.

Speaker B: So we will like personal invites and things like that.

Speaker F: Exactly. Like again we do it marketing the one to many but then we also have that one to one and a lot of it is for success rate. When you have a relationship, you're more likely to get someone to respond and engage. But then also just because the outreach that they're able to do in tandem, having that sort of like multi step or account based approach drives a lot more success for us while we're here. Uh, so we have our marketing cadences, our email marketing set up, our social media setup, all channels and then we mix that in with that uh, one to one interaction with our sales team and our customer success team.

Speaker D: Cool.

Speaker B: And then the logistics of all the uh, booth set up and the swag and everything too.

Speaker F: Oh yes, there's all that one I mentioned too. We do activation so when we do our pre event planning, it's for driving traffic to our booth obviously. But then and setting up one to one meetings with our customers, one to one meetings with partners. But Then we also have those other activations. So we had an event on Monday evening. So we also had in tandem, um, a plan to drive attendance for that event as well.

Speaker B: Like a side event.

Speaker F: Exactly. So when you talk, when you talk about logistics, like we were planning for our sponsorship, but then also for that evening activation that we did as well. So it was a big, big team effort.

Speaker B: Oh, yeah, absolutely, 100%. And then, yeah, after everyone heads back after this, what are the steps you go through for the follow up?

Speaker F: So again, for this one specifically, it's a little bit more layered. I usually like to have the follow up happen immediately, as closely after their travel day. For instance, everyone' going to be here till today or Thursday. Friday people will be traveling. So we won't start our outreach until Monday, but it is immediately as soon as people are back and we're still fresh in their mind. So we will have our marketing outreach happen right away. We have a cadence built for that based on segmentation as well, based on whether they attended at the booth, we saw them at the activation, etc. And then we'll also have our sales team. So we're pretty. Salesforce is great about getting our, um, booth lead list to us pretty quickly. So we will have that load in our CRM with tasks assigned immediately for the sales teams. Then go through their cadence for follow up as well.

Speaker B: Oh, okay. Yeah. So for your evening event, you have, you can start following up with the attendees yourself. You have the list already. And then for everyone you talk to here. Yeah, they're scanning the badges and then Salesforce runs all that and then they send it out to, uh, every day actually.

Speaker F: They're really great. Some events take a little bit longer, but Salesforce is wonderful.

Speaker B: Oh, nice.

Speaker G: Yeah.

Speaker B: All right, cool. And then so that's the steps you go through afterwards. And then, so what are, how do you then measure the success of the campaign and any pipeline attribution from it?

Speaker F: So this is what I was talking a little bit about earlier as well. So there is a general awareness factor that we know how many people are attending. The uh. Right. People are attending. And so that we have this presence and they know the ring of logo. Right. So really driving that brand recognition and driving brand equity. And that's a little bit more difficult to measure. But we can look at things like how many people do come to our booth. We do have some. We have a floor graphic there as well. So how many scans of that happen, how many scans of our swag go through. So we can just see that overall like how much presence did we have that go towards that? And then did that drive additional page views to our website? Did that drive additional interactions with our social media? So that's more on just general awareness measurement.

Speaker B: But yeah, kind of different types of impressions.

Speaker F: Exactly. What kind of lift did we see while we were here at this event? Across all channels and we report back on that. And then from a direct revenue attribution side though, we obviously then look at one lead uh, source. So we don't necessarily often see people

Speaker E: at first time here.

Speaker F: So it may not be the source of their. Our first interaction with them. But if it is, that's a direct attribution to event revenue. If a deal comes out of that and closes. So that's what obviously I love to see. The more brand new leads, this is the source we can say oh wowforce is worth that investment for us because we were able to drive this much new revenue for the company. So that's a very easy one. So get them, track the CRM, upload the list. We have this as this lead source score and then the opportunity source for any future pipeline. But then also we have to deal with the multi touch attribution which are potentially leads or customers that we already have that came here. But based off of the conversations here, we either one created a new opportunity out of it. Great.

Speaker E: Or we help push them along a

Speaker F: pipeline of an existing opportunity. So if stage changes happen quickly we can attribute that as well. And then right now we have it so that we're just tagging it so that we can say look, this had an impact from Dreamforce or any event

Speaker B: like tag them to a campaign and Salesforce.

Speaker F: Yeah. So we'd be able to see that from a reporting standpoint. And then where I want to evolve with Reva, I'm a little bit newer to the company but we're actually going to allocate a certain percentage of revenue of deals towards attribution as well. And those are. This is an instances where it's not brand new that came out of.

Speaker B: Yeah, but it's like uh, an influence on an existing contact.

Speaker F: Exactly. Yeah. So just influence and then being able to add revenue towards that from an ROI perspective. Again, this is our most expensive program that we run. So it's very important for me to understand the customer acquisition costs and roi.

Speaker D: Oh yeah.

Speaker B: So you'll be rolling out a more. A more granular multi touch attribution in the coming months here.

Speaker F: We're actively building it right now.

Speaker B: Oh nice. Are you doing it through? Are you using like an attribution tool of a. Are you building your own or what?

Speaker F: So we, uh, again, we are a Salesforce partner, so they are a dedicated CRM, but we do leverage HubSpot for marketing. So we're building it out in the HubSpot right now. And they're. They've come a long way when it comes to their tools, so we're able to do pretty much most of it there. Some of it when it comes to the customer acquisition cost and anything around that. We do that separately. So take the data from HubSpot and then measure it. But everything else is done in HubSpot.

Speaker B: Uh, yeah, using their multi Touch attribution tool.

Speaker F: Yeah, exactly. And then feeding it back into Salesforce so we can report on Salesforce as well.

Speaker B: Yeah, we do a lot of that ourselves with our clients. Connecting HubSpot and Salesforce and yes, connecting the campaign data on the contacts in HubSpot with pipeline data in Salesforce.

Speaker F: Exactly. So that's what our revenue can work

Speaker B: really well as long as you set it up right. It was great.

Speaker F: And exactly like our RevOps team is the one that are actively doing that for us right now. So they're living in that world that you know very well.

Speaker B: Oh, nice.

Speaker F: Yeah, we can always leverage help from companies like yours to make it go a little faster, but yeah, fantastic job.

Speaker B: Oh, that's great to hear. Yeah. All right, cool. Thanks for walking us through all this.

Speaker F: Oh, it's my pleasure. Thanks so much for asking.

Speaker B: So tell me, what's your name and what company you're with and what you do?

Speaker H: Sure, absolutely. So my name is Rachel Kim. I lead marketing at Mutiny. We're a growth stage startup that's helping companies break through and reach their target account list. We have targeted account research and a personalized landing page experience that we help people build at scale. And we do a lot of different initiatives that help companies really break into their enterprise accounts, which we've determined is like the hardest set of accounts to break into.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker B: The most labor intensive and.

Speaker H: Yep.

Speaker B: The most. The most wine and dine accounts out there.

Speaker H: Yep, exactly. And also I think those are those types of accounts that are getting inundated with a lot of messaging.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker H: Uh, they require more high touch experiences, they require more personalization, they require more research and intelligence. And that game is only improving and increasing as new tools come on the market. So that's who we're there to help.

Speaker B: So.

Speaker D: Cool.

Speaker B: So you guys do a lot of event marketing as part of your go to market process. And of course it's very expensive and very labor intensive and time consuming.

Speaker G: Yeah.

Speaker B: Why do you feel it's worthwhile to do?

Speaker H: Yeah, so events is a big part of our strategy. We do a number of events every year. We do three types of events. So there's events like this one where we go to a larger industry conference. We know a lot of our ICP is already there. We try to do something around that event. So. So that's what we're doing at Dreamforce. We have a second set of events which are very bespoke, CMO specific, which are small, off the record conversations with CMOs around a table to talk about what's actually happening within marketing, trying to create a safe space. And then we have a third set of events which is once a year, annual. Last year we did that in Gardenville, California, where we do an overnight event where we bring the smartest ABM marketers, which is really the power user of the Mutiny product, together to talk about what the future of ABM folds. So those are our three sets of events that we're doing. We're not just having one set of events. We have three separate strategies throughout the year that help us reach our target audience.

Speaker B: And that third one is like your own Mutiny flagship event? Uh, yep.

Speaker H: It's called the one to one conference. It happens once a year and people fly in from all across the country to go to it.

Speaker B: Oh, wow. Nice.

Speaker G: Oh, uh, yeah. Yeah.

Speaker B: So with this event here. So we're at Dreamforce 2025 and we're doing an evening event here.

Speaker H: Yeah.

Speaker B: What are your goals out of this whole Dream Forest Week, specifically?

Speaker H: Yeah. So we look at it in two vectors. The first, when we do an event like this, it's really just about top of funnel awareness. There's an important industry event that's occurring, in our case Dreamforce, where a lot of our ICP already is. We want to be a part of the conversation. So how do you be part of the conversation? You have an event, you do something. And so by having an event, you have credibility. We're a real company. We have real people here in San Francisco. We're part of what's going on here. We're part of the zeitgeist. So top of funnel and drive awareness. Second thing that we do is we're looking at a target account list and we do have out of that set of 50 that are here at this event, there's a set of those accounts that we're really trying to penetrate and build a relationship with or maybe move a, uh, deal Forward, depending on the status of that account.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker B: So top of funnel awareness in general.

Speaker H: Yes.

Speaker B: Show that you're legit and not some fly by night company with a landing page and that's it. And yeah, also trying to create some pipeline with your target accounts.

Speaker H: Yes. Yeah. So both of those things are important.

Speaker B: Cool.

Speaker H: Yeah.

Speaker B: All right, so then when you're planning out this event, what are the steps you go through leading up to it?

Speaker H: Yep. So we're always going to start with the target account list as like a point of reference. Of course. So when we start this event planning, we look at our target account, we make in a, uh, kind of an estimate of what percentage of that target account do we believe is going to be here? Not everyone has to be in San Francisco to be here. Right. Because people fly in. So we make an estimate and then we say, do we think we have enough target accounts we can go after that? It would make sense to invest in this event because for every event we say yes to, there's 12 other events we say there's not a big enough pool or population for us to invest in doing this.

Speaker B: To make it worth.

Speaker G: Exactly.

Speaker H: To make it worthwhile. So for this, because we knew that enough of our target account list was going to be here, we had concentration of people that we had high confidence would be here. That's. Yes, let's do it. Once we decide we're going to do it, we have an entire playbook. Sella, who's here, is really responsible for some of those individual contributions related to the events. But I can speak from a high level as the lead in the marketing organization, that we actually do a lot of one to one landing page creation using our own tool. So we're eating our own dog food. At Mutiny, we build a landing page experience. We say, hey Alex, we see you work at Bright Grove. We want you to come to this event. We send him that targeted account, sorry, that landing page. And we're going to use three sort of different channels for that. Number one, we're going to use outbound. So our BDRs are going to use an email cadence to get in front of them. We'll use LinkedIn ads and we're going to use LinkedIn in mail. So we'll hit them across those three places and by doing so we have pretty high engagement and conversion on those target accounts to get them.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker B: LinkedIn ads. LinkedIn in mail. Email. Uh, email. One to one email.

Speaker H: Yep. With a landing page that says we specifically want you to be at the event. And we're building those landing pages on Muti.

Speaker D: Oh yeah.

Speaker B: And they click on it and it's personalized just to them, um, and their company.

Speaker H: Exactly. Yeah. So then they get to see the product a bit in action which helps us sell our product without selling.

Speaker B: Oh nice. Do you, on the landing page, do you try to call attention to that?

Speaker H: We do. We try to be a. Yeah. We're like hey, we built you this phage. P.S. we built it in Mutiny.

Speaker B: Oh nice event.

Speaker H: Yeah.

Speaker B: Oh nice. Yeah.

Speaker H: Try to be playful with it.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker B: Oh nice. Yeah, that makes total sense.

Speaker H: Yeah.

Speaker B: So that's, that's what leads us to here today.

Speaker H: Yep, exactly. And then we'll fill out the rest of the list. We say hey we want 50 people here. We're going to obviously use our target accounts but then we're going to fill up the rest of them with just smart people, great people. Like we want this to be fun. We want you to feel like you're networking so you don't necessarily have to be on our target account list to be able to come to this. But we want to make sure there's a good concentration of target accounts and then we fill the room with other people that we are friends and family as we like to say to uh, make that feel like a really robust, exciting event. So that's the event itself and then from a follow up perspective it's the same thing. We had a specific conversation, we would update a landing page for that specific account or that specific individual using MutMe. Uh, with next steps certain accounts are in deal so we might like actually send an update to our ae. Like we met this person at the event, here's what we learned, here's what we found out and then ideally some of these kind of introductions or conversations will lead to a pipeline generating activity and closed one opportunities.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker B: Are you logging them to use Salesforce for CRM or using HubSpot?

Speaker H: So our marketing team uses HubSpot and that's because all of our outbound and emails and everything are being sent through HubSpot. Our sales team uses Salesforce.

Speaker B: Okay, so Salesforce, lets hear from.

Speaker H: Yeah, yeah. But from an email automation perspective, in all our workflows, HubSpot is our source of choice.

Speaker B: Oh yeah, the marketing email tool and the marketing analytics and everything. Yes. And they're feeding that in. And Pipeline is in Salesforce.

Speaker H: Yes, exactly.

Speaker B: All right, cool.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker B: That leads to the last question here is how do you track the success of a particular campaign and how the campaign may or may not the attribution of that campaign to the sales pipeline.

Speaker H: Attribution is really hard. We use fast such attributes theme of

Speaker B: the year, I think.

Speaker H: Yeah. So we use last attribution at Muni M because we're still in an early stage business that doesn't want to spend a ton of cycles on like, like, I don't know, more robust attribution models. But every time an activity on an account occurs, we're obviously logging that in our CRM and so when we have a closed one, we'll look at every touch point and if an event was part of that touch point, then we say that the event was part of the decision making process.

Speaker D: Oh yeah.

Speaker H: But is Events going to get the full credit? Probably not. Because ultimately actually what's most likely going to get the full credit with the last such attribution model is Outbound because our BDR team is very likely going to fall. But every single person was at this event for the next step, the demo or the next conversation, a POC in some cases. And so Outbound is probably going to get the final credit for it, but

Speaker B: it's still not based on that model at least.

Speaker H: Exactly. So it's not perfect. I wouldn't look at us as like necessarily doing anything too avant garde on the attribution perspective, except for to say that we know as a marketing organization it's going to take multiple touches and we know that Events plays a big part in our ability to drive pipeline and so we just believe in it philosophically. Whether or not Events gets like the final credit in a attribution model, it doesn't really matter so long as we know Events was part of the closed one opportunity, then we can give some partial credit to Events M and we'll continue to invest in the event.

Speaker D: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: And it's not worth going through the whole process, the whole long process of building out some super customized multi touch attribution model just so you don't like point fingers at each other.

Speaker H: And um, we're a small team, we all work really well together. We have really strong GTM alignment. Everyone knows that Events is helping to drive the end result that we care about. No marketer signs up to be a marketer to fight about attribution. So it's just oh yeah, don't bother.

Speaker D: Oh yeah.

Speaker B: Some of them end up being forced to fight about it. But yeah, I feel like maybe that's a sign that there's deeper issues going on there.

Speaker H: Yep, absolutely. I feel really lucky. Jaleh, our co founder and CEO, she really believes in just trusting Marketing and she believes in events, and so she's willing to help make the investment decision.

Speaker D: Oh.

Speaker B: Oh, that's awesome to hear.

Speaker H: Yeah, we're really lucky. So, yeah, we're gonna keep doing events.

Speaker B: All right, cool.

Speaker H: Yeah.

Speaker B: All right.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker B: Thanks for walking us through this here.

Speaker H: Absolutely. Thanks so much.

Speaker E: I'm Melissa Hollins, our managing director of our revenue excellence practice here at Spalding Ridge. They have three different practice areas that we have built out throughout the last seven years. We're a global systems integration partner, not only on the Salesforce platform. We built out a lot of different systems that collectively speak to each other, and we lean in with a data first mentality.

Speaker B: All right, cool. So that's who you are and some context. So we're in Dreamforce right now. Why do you want to go through the time and effort and expense of, um, doing in person events like Dreamforce as part of your own go to market process?

Speaker E: Yeah. Such an incredible event. There's so much energy over these this week. There's so much information to learn and explore and understand. The platform is always evolving. There are constant updates and there's constant new tools that are coming out each and every day. So we love the announcements that come out of Dreamforce. We love the collaboration with Salesforce and our partnership we have with them. Um, and we really, truly love our clients. We have 450 clients here this week and we've had a lot of in person here in person at Dreamfort. They are eager to learn just as much as we are eager to support them in their journey. But they're coming from all over the world and have made their way into San Francisco to this wonderful experience.

Speaker B: And so because of that, 450 of them here in person. That's why you feel it's worth the time and expense of doing this compared to just another webinar or, uh, another ebook, another article on your website?

Speaker E: Yeah, things like that. I think there's nothing that takes place of a personal experience and a face to face interaction. We really love our clients and we get to know them outside of work. They ask us a lot of questions oftentimes. Is this a good use of their time and investment? We always say a resounding yes, but we feel the same. Again, not only is it our clients that are here that we've hosted a lot of sessions where our clients have spoken about their journey and the journey we've supported them in, but we have about 1800 clients worldwide. So this allows us to then understand and share out with them some of the New features, some of the new outcomes, some of the new KPIs that other customers are experiencing. So it's not just a way for us to say, okay, we're here, we're present. We believe in the partnership, we believe in the product and the platform. We want to meet our clients where they are, but it's a way for also to continue to support our clients and our prospects and our future clients in the future.

Speaker B: Coming into this, are there any specific goals you have for this event?

Speaker E: There's a lot of goals. Obviously we love the area and opportunities again to meet new faces and new team members. So we also like to make sure we're spending time with Salesforce in the partnership. And so it's been a great experience to understand listening to the keynote and Marc Benioff's talk around where Salesforce is being positioned in the agentic era and across the enterprise. But we also love the fact that we have Snowflake here and there's a real partnership formulating there around data. And it's an area of expertise that we've leaned into. So for us, it's not just again, building out this one technical component for our customers. We're trying to really understand the whole ecosystem. One of the things we are doing is hosting a lot of sessions throughout the week where we've had a lot of thought leadership, where we've invited people to come join us and hear their perspective around AI of where they're at, what the future holds for that. Uh, we've had great events and happy hours where we just really enjoyed each other over a great view in San Francisco. So I think a lot of what we're looking for is there's a lot of execution that needs to happen in this. Following this event, we've been able to scan over 600 leaves just here in the booth and so just in three days here, just in three days at our booth. And that does not include all of our registrations for, for our events that we've hosted and all the sessions that we've hosted. So in total, we will have a lot of prospect lists to mine following this. And we've taken a lot of documents and notes around our conversations here as well. So the technology has allowed us to do that quickly and then create those lists and understanding of follow up and execution on each of those.

Speaker B: Oh, wow. Oh, that sounds, that's. That sounds totally worth it.

Speaker E: Yeah, it is. And sometimes you evaluate that as a go to market leader and trying to understand where you're going to make your investments. In roi, I think you do have to set the expectation. A lot of work goes into these kind of events. We have a team of 30 that's here on the ground from Spalding Ridge, uh, that not only again have been meeting with partners and clients and here at the booth and hosting different sessions throughout the week. They're also making sure we're communicating and coordinating with each other on a constant basis. So we've been running in and out and joining other clients when needed. So it's been a real joint collaborative effort between our teams this week.

Speaker B: Oh, nice. Leading up to this event here, what are the steps you go through, uh, leading up to it so much I'm sure.

Speaker E: Just think logistically putting 30 people and they're flying in from all over the world to the. So just making sure we've an existing system of connectivity, making sure that we're understanding which clients are doing. Making sure we're creating a curated event for them for their experience. Working with our marketing and alliance teams to invest in swag, invest, um, in products and invest in what we're going to be able to demonstrate here. And then we mine a lot of lists. There's a lot of list building that goes along with this. Not only the list that we get for our registration, our sponsorship, but we have existing lists of our channel partners that also are mining their list. And so we do a lot of slicing and dicing of the data. We spend a lot of time exploring messaging and content to make sure that we're laser focused on our message and our connection with those where they're at and what industries and businesses they're at.

Speaker D: Oh yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: Segmenting your own CRM and defining the messaging for the different groups of people in there.

Speaker E: Yeah.

Speaker B: Also working with your partners is there segmenting their CRMs as well?

Speaker G: Yes.

Speaker E: Yeah. So it was daily standup calls.

Speaker B: Oh, daily leading.

Speaker E: Yeah, daily. Like the last two months it was a daily standup call with the team. Know before you go, we have this shared list of different files and formats and we're always constantly trying to get feedback and make sure communication is key here. And so I think it's been a great experience and journey for us at Dreamforce this year. We're continuing to learn, we're continuing to solicit feedback, what works, what didn't work. We'll have a follow up around that. Where areas that we invest that we did see roi. Where areas we invest that maybe next year may not make as much sense for us.

Speaker D: Uh, oh yeah.

Speaker B: And then after the event is over Then what are the follow up steps you go through?

Speaker E: Oh my God, so much. We are meeting on Monday as a team and we're starting divvying out a list of hot leads that we have documented and calculated just from the booth activity alone. Then we'll go through the list from our channel partners and sessions and events and we'll assign those out to a leader that's going to be responsible and accountable for each one of those follow up. So we've got some draft messages, we've got some draft content ready to go, um, that's going to immediately go out. So we have some meetings that we're setting up immediately as well. We're organizing, actually leveraging AI on um, those hot leads. Which ones we should prioritize, which ones felt like the most pressing for the needs of the customers that we spoke with.

Speaker D: Oh yeah.

Speaker E: So we are actually leveraging our tools as well. Well, to make sure there's a level of efficiency but a level of expedience that we're deploying here.

Speaker B: Yeah, I was talking to. I forget Reggie. Yeah, yeah, I was talking to Reg about it a little bit earlier.

Speaker E: Yeah, it's incredible. Yeah. Uh, we could not have done that a few years back. So it's just keeping up with the advancement of technology and all the tools out there at our disposal. We're going to take advantage of it, we're going to try to leverage it as well into our clients hands. But this is a great way for us to learn experience. Experience how to create opportunities and leads and generate those pipeline opportunities as well and then obviously go into bookings.

Speaker B: Yeah, so cool. And that goes to the last question then is how do you measure the success of this campaign and attribute any pipeline from it?

Speaker E: Yeah, so we did set out a goal and a target. We were very realistic. Normally when you try to look at a spend of an event, we base that on around sort of 10%, 10 times that on return on investment should be the expectation 10 times investment on bookings. So then you have to think of pipeline and that's three times pipeline. We did make a significant investment. We applied the 10, 10 times rule just for what the expectation is as far as bookings. But what that has to equate within the next year as far as pipeline generation associated with the campaign, that we can track the opportunities, whether it be how many meetings we had, how many conversations were needed or required, what was the follow up steps? Was it, was there a cost associated with that as well of winning that deal? So we drill a lot down on the data. There's a lot of data that we associate with our decision making and helps us make more informed and better decisions moving forward.

Speaker D: Oh yeah. Okay.

Speaker B: So you really thought through it?

Speaker E: Yes.

Speaker B: Yeah. Ten time. Ten times the billings revenue which leads to goal is three. Three times that. Opportunities in the pipeline associated to. You tag everyone with the Salesforce campaign for this event and then use the campaign for like Last touch attribution for the pipeline.

Speaker E: Yes, that's exactly it. That's that we set the expectation very thoroughly to the team who's here. We expect their goals and set the goals out as well. And then we just drive it together collectively. And we'll have a lot of follow up calls, we'll have, uh, weekly status calls. This is an ongoing process. A lot of nurturing has to happen as well. But we feel really good about our investment here already. We're already seeing obviously just from the numbers alone and the reports that our chief technical architect has read out to us that there's been a lot of opportunity for us here at Dreamforce this year. We're going to take full advantage of it, expand and worked really hard to get as many deals through the pipeline as possible.

Speaker B: Yeah, it sounds like it.

Speaker E: Yeah, it's been great.

Speaker B: Awesome. Thanks for taking the time to talk through all this with me.

Speaker E: It's been great talking to you as well. Thank you for the opportunity and thanks for chatting with so many other leaders in this ecosystem that are trying to make sure they're revening, generating roi, making better decisions in a go to market, uh, competitive landscape. And I think we can all do this together. So thank you for the time as well.

Speaker B: Oh, awesome. You're welcome.

Speaker G: All right, My name is Axling and I am the vice president Product marketing here at kado. Kado help people build on sev. So we're DevOps for Salesforce. So every customer, uh, Salesforce can be in customer pado.

Speaker B: So you're doing this huge event here at Dreamforce. You have this whole lounge, you have two booths over at the main Dreamforce area. A lot of time and effort and money went into doing all this. So why do you think it's worthwhile to do in person events like this versus just virtual or online content?

Speaker G: Well, I can say for me we're very people company and uh, it's always been in our DNA and our culture, meetings like this, you get to sit with people and when people have that face to face contact, you get so much more information out of them. You learn they get to see the product. You get that real time connection. So for me, like I said, everything we do is on salesforce we solve problems and empower people to build what they need to on Salesforce. And the best way to do it is be with the place where the customers are, where our partners are, and you can bring customers, partners in pado all together. With Salesforce, it's all about the human connection, making sure the conversations go a little bit broader.

Speaker B: Yeah, that connection to us get the customers talking with the, uh, prospects. Get them learning from each other.

Speaker G: Yeah, we connect customers, prospects. We connect partners and customers. We connect salesforce partners, customers, prospects, and have so many types of meetings. And, uh, everyone benefits because everyone's learning from each other because everyone's trying to do the same thing. They're trying to be successful on Salesforce. And it's such a huge ecosystem, um, and the possibilities are endless. The innovation's big. So things are constantly changing. So these events allow everybody to learn from each other and really strengthen relationships. You meet someone in person, it's so much easier than to connect with them remotely because you've already had that human connection. So I think in person. Jen's yeah, we missed them in Covid. It's great to have them back again.

Speaker B: Uh, so then for this event here that you're doing, what are some of your specific goals?

Speaker G: So the goals are everything's got relationships. So speaking to existing customers, existing partners, meeting with new passengers and their carts. So it's really about sharing knowledge, sharing what we're doing, finding out what other people are doing, finding out what our customers need, sharing roadmaps. So relationships and sharing knowledge are probably the main goals of an event. Y things.

Speaker B: Okay, so then what are the steps you go through leading up to this event here?

Speaker G: It's a dream for events. So a dreamforce event, we would probably have been empowering for not weeks, but months, no?

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker G: So it's huge because I can see there's a lot of branding that needs to be done both here and stand. So you want to create an experience. So a lot of steps are first, what's with nested? What do we need to talk about? We need to talk about with. And then have different ways we can tell that message and commencing customers. So we have events here at our headquarters where we can bring customers, they can have, uh, dinner, lunch, all different kind of meetings with us. The booth is from our prospects because that's normal. People who don't know who we are go to the event and they'll walk by the sound, find out what Picard will do. If they're really interested we normally would send them to here and then we have a more closer meta conversation with them. So a lot of fun. A lot of fun. Meet existing customers, market to prospects, get the message out there to get the message ready.

Speaker H: Yes.

Speaker G: A lot of work.

Speaker D: Oh yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: And then not to mention the invites and the signups and the attendee attendance tracking and all of that too.

Speaker G: Uh it's on your tracking attendance. You're tracking the stands but you also want to make sure you're making meetings, you're making with most of those meetings and then the follow up. So you got pre event, that's where you're trying to get the connection of who you want to see and speak to. Then at the event you speak to them and was obviously going to be the follow up. You meet new people, then you have to make sure you make the connection follow up again. So it's all about brand building, relationship building, existing event.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker B: So what are the specific post event steps that you do?

Speaker G: Host events where the first thing we do is we have scans everybody. So we thank everybody. So we make sure we make mention where everyone's called to and scanned, remind them of inspiring to meet them. Uh we have meetings, we book meetings here. So we make sure we follow upon every single meeting that we had that was set up. So the meetings will take place that we booked the connection for. Everyone will meet. They'll get an end to end email then everything there. Yeah it's just follow up and again it's continuing the connection as soon as we get back. You don't want to miss an opportunity to speak to customer or solve a problem. So yeah we just then will reach out to everybody. So the BDR team will start calling out sales people to start to call out marketing people will start sending out buying different marketing channels. But the first message is thank you for taking time and taking the way to get to know us. And um then his love, how's he helping?

Speaker D: Uh oh yeah.

Speaker B: So you scan everyone. You either create or update log the event to their salesforce lead record or

Speaker G: contact record so that we do that. Then we make activation and yeah we just follow up and then connect buyer like we book meetings for some of the meetings are already in place and then the next ones is like I said say thank you and then follow us with how can we help?

Speaker D: Oh uh yeah.

Speaker B: All right and then last question here then is how do you, how are you measuring the success of the campaign and how do you look at attributing any pipeline that came out from all of this.

Speaker G: Well, we track everything. So every conversation, every meeting and every follow up will be tracked. So we would know how successful the event was from a pipeline. And then a conversion part did that convert for us. Um, but it's also matches the about pipeline and sales. We learned a lot about what our customers want and that impacts our roadmap. So we will take that back and listen to are we building the right things? Are we responding to what our business really need? So it's about pipeline, it's about revenue generation, but it's also about knowledge and how do we build the right things to solve the problems. So like I said, it's all about knowledge sharing.

Speaker B: So yeah, you're getting a lot of knowledge and feedback from what people are telling you to.

Speaker G: So it's about what we're learning and what they want and then it's that follow up. So yeah. So roadmap is impact high ground generation. Existing customers have connected, they're even standing V needs. So there's so much out of the bent like this. So everyone's hoping they retire. Um, for the big thing at the pun and the follow up is making sure that we make that continued pension.

Speaker D: Oh yeah.

Speaker B: And then for the tracking itself. Are you do using Salesforce campaigns associated

Speaker G: with the people A lot of our. So everything we do we use part of we got our own Salesforce instance. So Salesforce is the engine that drives our business and it's our engine that makes uh, things work as well.

Speaker D: Oh yeah.

Speaker B: And then do you do getting more technical. Do you do like mostly do like first touch, last touch, multi touch attribution?

Speaker G: Yes, of course that's what everybody's doing. But we also want a lot of effort viewing elements. We do want to make sure that we do try the multiple approach like different ways and we want to do it with respect to people. We don't want to bombard them with messages and make it very irrelevant or not personal to what they want. So a lot of what we're doing is very focused around understanding the role of the person, how we connected with them, what we already know. And then how can we make that next Mexican meal like it's not spam. It's not. We're not just sending you messages. Fingers crossed that we did understand how we connected and now we're trying to follow up. So capturing information on what they were interested, why they wanted to know, how we connected with them and using that intelligence to make sure the next method is more personal.

Speaker D: Oh uh, yeah.

Speaker B: How you can personalize it and contextualize it and to make it relevant for them.

Speaker G: Ah, everyone gets a lot of unwanted messages and we don't want to do that. Yeah, there's no blanket marketing. Apart from maybe the thank you, which would be like. We would give everyone a thank you, but if the next connection's got to be personalized and relevant.

Speaker D: Oh, yeah.

Speaker B: All right, cool. Thanks for taking the time to talk through all this with me.

Speaker G: M. And thank you for coming to our headquarters here and yeah, look forward to. Like I said, if you ever want to know anything else or. We're very warm, happy man.

Speaker D: All right.

Speaker A: What a great set of interviews we had with the people there at Dreamforce and super grateful that they took the time to do that with me. As to my first question about what is the value of doing these in person events? Everyone there felt that there was a lot of value that comes from doing those events. The value comes from several things. It really accelerates the trust building and relationship building with the people they're looking to connect with. It's a lot easier to have trust and feel a connection with someone that you're actually talking to and meeting in person, not just a face on the screen. It's a differentiator. Especially these days, it's a huge differentiator. Everyone gets lots of webinar invites, emails, download this paper, that paper, this PDF. So in person events are, uh, a big differentiator. It's not just another webinar. Another big benefit is that they get their prospects talking with their current customers, and that's super valuable. So it's not just the prospects talking to a salesperson all the time. It's talking to a happy customer who's actually using the product that the company is selling and talking about why they use it and how they use it. And then they also get product feedback itself from the customers that they can take back to the product teams. And then there is tangible pipeline impact. Oftentimes there's a fair amount of that directly sourced pipeline from the event. But also, in addition to that, everyone said there's also an intangible brand lift from the relationship building from the word of mouth that you can't track directly in the CRM. But everyone felt that it was still a, uh, huge factor to the overall pipeline generation. So those are some reasons everyone agreed that it was good to do.

Speaker B: They also talked about how you do

Speaker A: have to know what you're getting into. It is a lot of work. Most of them said it was months of planning that they were doing leading up to it. A lot of coordination across teams, multiple people on the marketing team, bring in sales teams, solutions, architects, team, oftentimes partner marketing teams. Uh, a lot of coordination between those teams and then a lot of very consistent pre event, during event and post event steps to go through. So it is a lot of work and you have to plan out how you're going to approach it all ahead of time. And you do want to measure everything that you can from it. Even though a lot of the intangible brand lift is impossible to measure, you can still take the opportunity to measure everything that you can. So measure and track the badge scans that you're doing. Uh, meeting bookings coming from the event, meetings booked at the event, meeting bookings from the event, tracking all of your follow up calls, emails and things like that. Consistently track any other form conversions at the event or on your website from it. You can't track everything from events, but you should make sure you're tracking everything that you can. Overall, I got a lot of great insights here. Um, I'm super thankful for everyone who spent the time to talk to me about it. I'm really looking forward to seeing how events like this evolve going forward in the years to come as well. Before we wrap up, I'd also like to ask, how do you incorporate events into your go to market strategy at, uh, your company? Do you do it? Why do you do it? How do you do it? I'd love to hear how you approach it at your company. So if you do events as part of your go to market, let us know why and how you do it in the comments below. And if you haven't yet, make sure to subscribe to our Revops Hero podcast here so that you'll get notified for all of our future episodes we're putting out as well. And we will see you next time. You've been listening to the Revops hero podcast from ClearPivot. To learn more about how our team of revenue, operations and HubSpot experts can help you become a Revops Hero at your company, visit our website at www.clearpivot.com.

Speaker G: Sam.