Events with Intent: How CMOs Turn Brand Moments into Growth

Drew: Hello, Renegade Marketers! If this is your first time listening, welcome and if you're a regular listener, welcome back. Before I present today's episode, I am beyond thrilled to announce that our second in-person CMO Super Huddle is happening November 6 and 7th, 2025. In Palo Alto last year, we brought together 101 marketing leaders for a day of sharing, caring and daring each other to greatness, and we're doing it again! Same venue, same energy, same ambition, to challenge convention with an added half-day strategy lab, exclusively for marketing leaders. We're also excited to have TrustRadius and Boomerang as founding sponsors for this event. Early Bird tickets are now available at cmohuddles.com. You can even see a video there of what we did last year. Grab yours before they're gone. I promise you we will sell out and it's going to be flocking awesomer!

You're about to listen to a recording from CMO Huddles Studio, our live show featuring the flocking awesome B2B marketing leaders of CMO Huddles. In this episode, Ellina Shinnick, Isabelle Papoulias, and Kevin Ruane share how they approach event strategy, what's worth the spend, what drives ROI, and how to make every moment count. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to the podcast and leave a review. You'll be supporting our quest to be the number 1 B2B marketing podcast. All right, let's dive in.

Narrator: Welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite, possibly the best weekly podcast for CMOs and everyone else looking for innovative ways to transform their brand, drive demand, and just plain cut through proving that B2B does not mean boring to business. Here's your host and Chief Marketing Renegade, Drew Neisser.

Drew: Welcome to CMO Huddles Studio, the live streaming show dedicated to inspiring B2B greatness. I'm your host, Drew Neisser, live from my home studio in New York City. CMO Huddles is a niche brand focused on a tightly defined community of B2B marketers. What happens when you widen the aperture? Have multiple targets, multiple use cases, multiple types of events, and the ROI story gets a little more complicated, which pretty much brings us to today's episode. With that, let's bring on Ellina Shinnick, CMO of HUB International, and a returning guest who has previously appeared on the show to discuss content, digital media mix, and leadership in a hybrid world. Hello, Ellina, how are you and where are you this fine day?

Ellina: Hi Drew, always great to be here with you. And I'm in beautiful, sunny Chicago.

Drew: There it is, Sunny Chicago. Yes, you should have some rain, because we're getting some rain soon.

Ellina: Soon. I started in the summer this morning, and I will end in the dead of winter. So it's going to be a really interesting and colorful day.

Drew: All right. Well, speaking of colorful, let's talk about your event strategy overall at Hub.

Ellina: Sure. So HUB International, we're a leading full-service insurance broker. We offer consulting on all aspects of insurance, employee benefits, retirement, and private wealth, and we work with private client individuals. And so that context is important for the listeners, because such a critical aspect of delivering on our value prop is protecting what matters most, whether you're talking about a person, his or her family, their assets, their business, and to deliver on that requires building rapport and trust. And as you can imagine, events are critical aspect of that strategy and delivering that trust and credibility. We are, of course, in an omni-channel digital world, but at the end of the day, when someone is making very complex decisions about their benefits strategy or securing three or four homes or an art collection, they're trusting an individual to do that. And events give us a platform to meet our clients personally, in addition to delivering opportunities to connect with the brand through digital platforms.

Our event strategy consists of a couple of things: sponsorships, partnered events, where we host them, but sometimes bring in partners to do that, or we host the whole thing ourselves and speaking opportunities. And we really do, I would say about 200 plus a year. We focus on tier one, what we call national sponsorship strategies. And we also go very niche in our geographies, because we have a distributed sales force. And so regardless of whether the strategy and the investment is on a national scale or on a niche scale, there are three core pillars of how we execute these strategies to ensure success.

So we think about success as the following: delivering high-impact experiences as what you just started out, creating brand credibility, but also proving out ROI. So the three ways we approach any strategy is the following. It starts with sales alignment before any event. We align with our sales leaders who are partners, whether that's on the national scale or on the local scale, to determine the audience and the target list. We also work hand in glove on writing the KPIs and establishing the target audience together. We don't do that in silos. We know from day one who we're going after. We collaborate on the list, and we also collaborate on the go-to-market strategy. Without that kind of transparency and shared interest in driving KPIs, you're not going to have ROI and that's really part of the secret sauce, and developing the relationship and positioning marketing as a business pillar, not just a creative arm of executing a beautiful event that someone might expect.

From there, we audit the opportunity. So for going after national sponsorships, even if we're leveraging a couple of the sponsorships we've done in previous years, the truth is, the world changes, and even those events tend to change. We've seen, you know, I don't really tend to use the phrase much anymore after COVID, because it's now been so many years. However, one of the lingering impacts of COVID is that, look, budgets are still a bit tighter, and people are very specific about where they're going to invest their time. So we don't make assumptions that all events that were successful in the past will continue to be successful in the future, because conferences switch up their formats all the time based on what attendees are doing.

So another critical aspect is auditing the list of events where you are going to invest dollars and ensuring that you actually have a fit for your ideal customer profile, and ensuring that the conference is still going to offer you opportunities to engage with those clients and prospects, and perhaps they've added more capabilities that you're looking for. They're going to give you lists today. Are they going to create creative opportunities to position your subject matter experts, or in this case, ours, in speaking slots outside of keynotes. So that's also really critical - auditing those sponsorships and asking very specific questions, even if you've been there in the past.

And the third piece is, of course, impact. And how do you make impact? It's about bold thematics. So for us, we launched our thematic, our latest one in 2024. The thematic is "breaking boundaries," and we work with business leaders to help them navigate their own journeys and how they're going to innovate in their organizations and break boundaries. Now we use that thematic across multiple sponsorships throughout 2024 and we'll likely use that in 2025. We use that to set up our video for the brand that we often use in beginning of keynotes. We use that to establish the creative and engagement strategy on the marketplace floor. So we bring in artists or other creative partners when we put our booths together. So it's not the same old thing you expect on a booth at a show floor, and then we use that to extend through social media and nurturing.

And the idea of using it throughout the entire year and in multiple shows is critical, because then it gives us efficiency so that we can track the ROI. We're not re-spending dollars on new creative every time, and frankly, it gives us head space to not have to recreate the creative wheel every single time. We know it's working, we can tweak some of the aspects of the message depending on the show where we're going to be, but it gives us more time to think strategically about how we're activating at the event and working with sales to ensure our booth is sound and that we have surround events.

And the final piece I'll say is that we work a lot on the training aspect of it. A lot of times we bring in subject matter experts across our entire value proposition to these big shows. And as you can imagine, in large companies, not everyone is an expert in everything, but in order to have a seamless experience, no matter who someone engages that is representing Hub, they should be able to articulate the value proposition. So we also spend a lot of time on training, creating scripts and creating flow so that there can be very natural and elegant handoff to ensure that we're capturing those interested leads on the floor and it doesn't feel disjointed. So that's the general summary of our event strategy: macro niche alignment with sales, bold thematics and owning KPIs and developing them in partnership with sales, not as a handoff process.

Drew: Okay, folks, that was just a master class. Good luck, Kevin and Isabelle with the rest of the show. So sales alignment, audit annual, love the idea of a bold thematic. First of all, bold, because most event experiences are the opposite, but having it go through it, it just makes life easier. So you have to get to a big idea, or a big-ish idea, and then finally, training, because I have to say, how many shows do you go to where you see people like sales people just looking at their phone, or, you know, talking to each other, and they're not engaged, and they don't seem to have an engagement strategy. All right. Well, that was amazing, Ellina, but now we got to move on. So thank you for that.

All right, let's welcome Kevin Ruane, who is the CMO of Precisely, who previously joined us on the show to shed light on the intricacies of brand consolidation and driving change. Hello Kevin. Welcome back, and how are you and where are you this fine day?

Kevin: I'm doing great Drew. Thank you for having me back. I am at Precisely's headquarters just outside of Boston in Burlington, Massachusetts, today.

Drew: All right, well, we're working our way east, but I think we're going to be going back to Chicago in a little bit. So I, you know, I'm curious. You heard Ellina's master class. How does that align relative to where your events range? What are you, what are some of the similarities or differences that you're taking for Precisely?

Kevin: Yeah, Ellina certainly did give a master class, so I owe you one, Drew, for making me follow her, but I will tell you a lot of that resonated to ring true. I think what was interesting for us this year, precisely, is we decided to take a little bit of a different approach. So a lot of our event strategy in the past, and a lot of the things Ellina so artfully kind of educated us on, were things that we had focused on, but we were very, very centered and focused from a demand gen perspective on our event strategy. And for this year, we decided to take a step back, and we made some incremental investments in some bigger events where we really took the perspective of brand and brand building. So we're a relatively new brand. We've talked about that in the past. We launched four and a half years ago, you could kind of do the math and what was going on in the world at the time. And so I think we have some what we really came to understand as a leadership team and with our investors was we have some brand building debt that we carry with us. And so we made a set of decisions on some events that we hadn't been participating in, that we wanted to sponsor, some events that we just wanted to be around and attach ourselves to without the formal sponsorship, and we made some investments in things around those events that we hadn't previously done, in terms of some digital out of home advertising. So we were in some terminals in the airport in Orlando. We were in Penn Station in New York City, and on the Acela trains in the Northeast for Amtrak, and so we really kind of combined this digital, out of home, geo fencing strategy with some events that we were going to be at. And I think what was kind of surprising to us, Drew, is not only, you know, do we feel like we're making some strides on the brand building piece, it seemed to really have a positive effect, in certain cases, on the demand gen aspect of things. So this notion of the importance of both the brand and the demand. I think that's been enlightening for a lot of us here, precisely to see. And we had an event, the event I mentioned in Florida. It was kind of a big industry event. Again, we didn't do the formal sponsorship, but we, we did sort of the hotel buyout on the sidelines with some branding there. We did a Top Golf event, a really nice dinner with our CRO and then we, you know, we also did the airport advertising. And interestingly enough, we've have a very nice ROI in terms of revenue off of that effort by the end of the following quarter. And that's not something we've traditionally seen, where sometimes the sales cycles tend to be a bit longer to get the benefits from the demand side of some of the investments we make in these events.

Drew: So let me just paraphrase this for a moment. This is like a news flash, folks, but you purposely said we're going to focus on brand, we're going to build awareness, we're going to do surround sound around some big events and make a lot of noise, and that translated into revenue, huh? Boy, that must have surprised a lot of people inside the organization.

Kevin: It did. And I think, you know, as I thought back about it, Drew, I think the other piece it just got us to do is get, you know, it's interesting, we position ourselves in the market as a data integrity company. So we help large enterprises manage their data and organize and cleanse it so that they can get trusted insights from their analytics or their AI initiatives. So we tend to be very data focused and data driven, but, but what focusing on the brand and the brand building allowed us to do is just get back to some of the fundamentals that we had, candidly, probably lost our way a little bit on. And one of the great benefits of working at a company like Precisely, is we've got 93 of the Fortune 100 as customers. We have 75% of the Fortune 500 as customers. And so we also then really put the customer in the center of this and put our customer stories forward. So at the events where we had speaking opportunities, we made sure that we had amazing customer speakers like MasterCard and BMW and Generali Real Estate that were presenting with us. And that certainly went very well as well. So I think it just got us refocused on the fundamentals and freed us up from some of the sub-optimal decisions you can make when you're only focused on, you know, the leads and the pipeline. And it was just interesting that getting back to those fundamentals ultimately helps you in those areas that you know often your CEO or your board and investors are so concerned about.

Drew: I mean, it's such a great thing. I want to go into more depth on it, because it is such an important thing. You know, if you look at B2B spending roughly 90% is sort of demand gen, because we theorize that's going to get to leads and get to pipeline and ultimately get to closed won. But in truth, you're dealing with a very narrow end of the funnel. And what you guys did, in effect, is broaden it. Say, hey, we could go broader here, but still, you know, I mean all that exposure that you got a lot of that wasn't against the target, but the hotel great example of one where most of people at the hotel are at the event. I love the notion of getting speakers out there that, you know, that's social proof, right? These folks are talking on your behalf. What could be better than that? You know, we've had this conversation in regular Huddles a little bit. And I'm curious. There are a lot of folks who are shying away from the big booth. I saw that particularly in the middle part of this year, where folks are saying, you know what, we're not gonna go to the big RSA show, or we're not gonna go to Dreamforce, but we are. We're not gonna go big exhibit wise, but we are gonna do surround, you know, do events around it, sort of guerrilla, and take advantage of the fact that people are in town. Where were you in terms of booth implementation and all of this in some of your bigger events?

Kevin: Yeah. So we, the way that we look at it, Drew, we kind of have a designation. We have our big kind of corporate events, and then our field focused events, which do tend to be a little bit more focused on the pipeline and those types of metrics. And so for the big corporate events, they're sort of a, you know, we're fast approaching a billion dollars in revenue as a company. So there's a certain level and status if we're going to go to an event that we think we should be showing up at. So for some of the events, like the Gartner Data and Analytics events that are very, very core to our audience in our space, we went in, you know, kind of at the level, you know, the bigger booth level that you'd expect from a company our size, and that, you know, our competitors are certainly in there at. But on a case by case basis, there were others where there's an ecosystem we participate in, kind of a large, three letter tech company, you know, we sort of have a little bit of a specialty and a niche there, and we didn't need to go in with the multi $100,000 booth. And that's where we decided, hey, let's focus on, sort of the events on the sidelines. Let's focus on the branding in the airport. And the other piece that it frees you up to, and I don't want to get myself in trouble here, is there's all sorts of rules if you're a sponsor about what you can hand out and what you can do. And so, you know, we push the envelope a little bit, and the security people out front aren't really that mad if you're handing out branded bags and T-shirts, it turns out. So it also, I think, freed us up for a little bit of that guerrilla marketing and just being a little bit more scrappy and creative.

Drew: Right. Oh, so interesting. So there are times where it really makes sense to have a big presence. Other times where you can be a little scrappy, or even if you're close to a billion dollar brand. I love that. All right, we will be back to you now. We're going to talk to bring in, and good luck with this, Isabelle Papoulias, who has graced our stage before to delve into the topic first 90 days building a dream marketing team and shifting into position post acquisition. Hello, Isabelle. Wonderful to see you again. How are you and where are you this fine day?

Isabelle: Hello, Drew, thanks for having me. I am like Ellina, in very, very sunny Chicago. I'm sorry to hear that it's not sunny in New York, but we're better.

Drew: We're doing fine. We're doing fine, just fine. It's Always Sunny in New York, in this office, right here, right now. All right, you heard from Ellina and Kevin. Anything you want to double click on that? They said that, you know, sort of goes, yeah, that's exactly right. Or yeah, they missed this.

Isabelle: I love hearing about brand leveraging events for brand building, not just having a conversation on pipeline creation. I also really liked, Kevin, how you dissected, sort of the corporate events versus field events, because I think that's an important distinction. And as we, as we think about brand building with events, I think it's an opportunity to rethink the metrics. And really, when we see ROI, then how do we measure ROI? Because it shouldn't just be pipeline in that context, right? So are there engagement metrics? So we can start considering, like, traffic at the booth, how many meetings did we have with customers, how much content did we create as a result of the event? I mean, I'm brainstorming here. I don't know, like, you know, what are more of the brand metrics right that we can then bring to the board and say, hey, we move the needle in that regard as well.

Drew: So it feels like, particularly that kind of on a Gartner event, where so forth, in theory, they're running surveys, they ought to be able to give you pre and post unaided and aided awareness metrics. Really that ought to be one of the things if we're trying to build brand, then one of them is, do they know the brand right? Obviously, you'd love to get more detail in terms of what do they know about the brand, and what association and likability and all that, but just that baseline. So, you know, tapping into your to those folks to help do the research, feels to me like an opportunity to really measure brand, because engagement is tricky, right? What we call booth traffic. I don't know how you would measure that.

Isabelle: I love that idea. Work with the partner to do a pre-post survey or something like that. Where I was going next is, I'd like to say a little bit about the event strategy for startups, because very small companies don't necessarily have the budgets, or, I should say, don't have the budgets right. Comprehensive event strategy, and I love Ellina's, you know, very comprehensive approach. I hope to be able to do that sometime. But the reality is, the budgets aren't always there, and so it's more Field Marketing, like Kevin described it. And what I find success with is with bespoke dinners for with active prospects, late stage prospects, sometimes even customers. I would say there's a high demand for that, and you know, definitely meeting creation and deal closing from those types of brand experiences. Surprisingly, I've seen success with speed dating events. I know this can be controversial and not very sexy, but sometimes you meet the right person at work, it's not a big investment to do those types of things. And then as far the last point I'll make working with startups is trade show presence. And again, I like the conversation with being scrappy. I think it's important to be there, because you can't stay out of the conversation, but most of the time you cannot afford the big booth, and so, yes, create the events outside of the events. Sometimes just send sales reps there and have them work the floor. So I would say these are all event tactics that I have seen work well for smaller companies.

Drew: So I've seen this work for a number of companies, where they do the dinner sort of hijacking at the same time as a big conference where they say, I mean, like Six Sense used to do the breakfast outside, you know, in front of the Forrester thing. Or they'd have their own side. And I know that it's funny John Miller, when he was at Engagio, would do a thing right outside the big Marketo thing. I feel like, if you were to do a bespoke dinner right now, and you just randomly say we're going to do a dinner in Chicago, you would struggle to get people to come, whereas if they were all going to this other event, and I don't know, I mean, I'm trying to figure out if any brands are having success, and what are they having to do in order to do a bespoke, you know, dinner of 12 CFOs, for example, getting them to show up. What do they, you know, are you seeing that happening?

Isabelle: I'm actually seeing a lot of success with that. And it seems to be easier than ever to get people to register and attend. In fact, lately, that doesn't seem to have been—uh, usually there's about a third of a drop off between who you invite and who actually shows up. We're not seeing that right now, and the approach is very one-on-one outreach. It's not through a vendor that will, you know, book the place for you and do the outreach to find people. It's very much like mostly active prospects, right? So you're using it to continue to move them down funnel, and it's the sellers reaching out to their personal networks. So it's very much one-on-one. And I've seen that work very, very well. And there's a lot of these types of, again, dinner or experiences happening right now, very successfully.

Drew: I think one of the themes that came out of the pandemic was that there is a desire for people to get together with their peers for the most part. And if you can have a customer there who will do the talking, and they are late stage, you can close deals, right? And you can make that work. I don't, I'm very curious about its effectiveness on a sort of a cold lead, right? Just random person, but it feels like, if they're in the funnel somewhere, they are an active prospect, then it's brilliant, right? Exactly, because, in theory, they've already raised their head and said, "Yeah, I want to learn more." Great. Oh, I get to meet other people. Great. So you're at that point in time they're looking for the education. And, you know, the meal is a nice benefit.

Isabelle: Exactly. And then to add a nuance to that, because I've seen success with that, but not very recently, but we were doing this when I was at Mediafly with very late stage prospects. So at the time was during COVID, I had to bring COVID back in the conversation. So we were doing these wine tastings virtually, and we were doing them only with very late stage prospects. So at that point, it was simply a warm and fuzzy "I like you. You like me. Sign on the dotted line," because they knew everything they needed to know about the company already. And we actually had a lot of success getting the deals to close from those events. Now it's correlation, it's not causation, but we saw it several times, and we kept doing those so I think knowing very much who you want to bring to whatever the experience is, whether it's an active prospect, very late stage, or it's a complete new cold lead, the experience should be different.

Drew: Experience should be different, depending on the stage. But I want to get back to this causation/correlation. Is that just because you did the event and then they ended up closing, but there were a lot of touches that happened before that, and so you're saying it's hard to attribute and say 100% this dinner was the thing that closed the deal, right? And therefore, we should do more dinners, because it helps close deals. But you can't look at it as—it's funny. I'm thinking back to what Heidi Bullock said about you can't separate the meat from the shell of a taco, right? And so you can't just look at this one event and say the ROI on that was—well, it took a lot of time and energy and things to get—is that what you're saying about causation, or would I just make it...

Isabelle: Yeah, yes. And more specifically, I mean, I will say, look, if we had the wine tasting, and let's just say we had, you know, making this up, 15 people and, you know, three signed immediately after a week later, two weeks later, which is, you know—so there's—recently, it happened very quickly, right? It gets reasonable to say it helped. Was it the only thing? Absolutely not, like you said, there were many, many touch points, but it's a portfolio of marketing activation, is not a single tactic, right? That makes it happen.

Drew: We need to measure the whole taco.

Isabelle: Yes, we love that analogy. I had not heard it, but I will steal it. Thank you.

Drew: Yes, yes, you can separate those, but it feels like—and it's even with Kevin's conversation about brand and the notion of awareness and all these activations that ultimately led to demand. Well, yeah, right. And so it's funny how we're trying to so often tactically measure and isolate a specific thing, because in theory, we want to put money where it's going to be more effective. But it's really hard.

Isabelle: It's also crucial to know your audience, because having been in sales tech, MarTech, and also having been in cybersecurity. They're, you know, completely different audiences, right? And, for example, one thing we know from cyber at least, my experience talking to customers at Black Box over and over was they—trade shows are very important to them. You know, these network engineers, they're going through the trade shows to be educated. And I can't imagine—I could be wrong on this, but imagine it would be hard to invite a network engineer to a fancy dinner.

Drew: Yeah, harder, harder, but not impossible. All right, we're going to switch gears a second, because it's time for me to talk about CMO Huddles. Launched in 2020, CMO Huddles is a close-knit community of over—gosh, it's over 400 highly effective B2B marketers who share, care, and dare each other to greatness. Given the extraordinary time constraints on CMOs, everything about CMO Huddles is designed to help leaders save time and empower them to make faster, better decisions. So if I bring you all back and you are all incredibly busy, I'm wondering if you could share in a specific example of how CMO Huddles has helped you, any volunteers I can—

Isabelle: I can go first. I mean, the thought leadership, knowledge sharing that happens during the webinars, I have gotten tremendous value from the personal relationships I have created, right? The people I have gotten to know and then the one-on-one conversations I have. So the network I've built has been transformative.

Drew: And we appreciate that. And it was funny because you were at the Super Huddle, and that was just—we saw that in action. If you knew the folks that could just accelerate the conversations, and of course, even the folks that you just met now, it'll be so much easier. So there is a blend between what we just talked about in events in this thing. Ellina, anything you want to add here?

Ellina: Sure, I would echo that point. It's been really wonderful to get to know peers across many industries and learn about, you know, things that are unique, but also actually how much overlap there is. And also, I've learned about new vendors that perhaps—or that I may not have been exposed to, or may have been exposed to later, that have helped me create projects or, you know, push initiatives forward. So that's also been a very tangible outcome, in addition to the relationships and the content we learn on a monthly basis.

Drew: I love it and Kevin, anything to add at all?

Kevin: Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, encourage me. You know, it's easy to talk earlier about an event strategy that's leading with brand, but you know, as you know, Drew from our one-on-ones and from just our conversations with fellow Huddles. You know, getting the courage to go and have that conversation about brand, with your CEO and with your investors is easier said than done, and so it certainly made me feel less alone, and kind of some of the things I was thinking about and gave me the encouragement I needed to take that forward. And it's been a journey, but when you start to see the benefits of that play out, it's quite amazing. And then the other thing I just say that I think you do an amazing job of at CMO Huddles is just bringing in some high quality speakers. I think of the session I had a chance to participate on with someone like Chris Voss and a very small group. I hear his raspy voice asking those questions for those tough conversations. You know, often, as well as people like Stan Phelps, it's been terrific to have access to some of those great experts and thinkers.

Drew: I appreciate that. By the way, I add to that list Michael Watkins, we had recently. It's worth a listen on all the Huddles. Get an advanced view of it whether or not they show up. But yeah, another amazing one. And I, Chris Voss is like, I've tried not to fan boy out on him anyway. Thank you. The three of you, if you're a senior B2B marketer who needs a shortcut to B2B greatness, or just as flocking awesome, take a second to sign up for a free starter program at cmohuddles.com. Okay, so this has been interesting because we've talked about ROI together, and the challenges and the opportunities, because these are so multi-dimensional. Ellina, you started to talk about, you know, you talked about agreeing on KPIs up front. I am curious if we started with pick any kind of event type, because I know you do multiple ones. How do you look at the ROI of your events?

Ellina: We look at brand and pipeline to the conversation that has happened. So on the let's call it tangible side, we do measure number of new leads we've generated, what percentage of pipeline we accelerated. So again, to the examples that were shared, we know that often, many of our active leads are attending these shows, and this is another opportunity to connect with them, and frankly, it's both a defensive and an offensive position. So we're talking about that, and then we track revenue as a result of the event. Now, again, I don't get too bogged down in was this event the only reason someone became a customer or not? Because I'm of the opinion that it's a partnership and in a sales-led organization, particularly in consulting, where the sales organization is front and center so much and sometimes we're coming in mid-funnel, that is effectively how things should work, right? So I don't over kind of index on any one of those aspects, but we're tracking all of that, whether we're generating the lead or accelerating.

We also track engagement in terms of social impressions, the event attendance that we have, whether it's on the floor or surrounding events. And we also look at what other tactics do we have that we're building community for, that we created engagement for. So what I mean by that is we have a women's community, women in risk management, and what we track is, let's say we have an in-person event surrounding one of our sponsorships, and that event is something like women in leadership. Well, we now engage with people that perhaps don't know about our digital community called Moxie. So we try to say, of all of those people that attended live at said sponsorship, or multiple sponsorships, what was the uptick in opt-ins now for our Moxie platform, and Moxie will be a digital platform, or we may take that in person.

So that's how we do it. And the other kind of thing I'll say, and I'll leave you with this, was, I would say, kind of touched on throughout the conversation, but storytelling back to your colleagues or to leadership is really critical, so we'll do executive summaries that really paint a full picture. And of course, at the end of the day, there's a lot of conversation about the ROI and about the pipeline, but that's not the first slide. The first slide is, why was this investment critical to the business? It helped us get in front of customers that we otherwise wouldn't have had. Those slides typically feature a lot of quotes from prospects who attended our event, how much they learned. It features quotes from our sales force that was on the floor that said, "Wow, I met three new people that I had an opportunity to engage, and they've been on my pipeline." So again, painting the picture with some of that qualitative data, and then, of course, taking down the metrics to the pipeline.

And oftentimes, we also talk about what our competitors are doing, especially if they're your top tier of competitors, and if they're showing up with a booth that's a specific size or an activation that's at a specific level. Again, that's all about the defensive and offensive position, about brand building. But I don't typically say this is what we did to create brand. I typically just say in order to achieve our business outcomes, here are the three ways this investment does that. Here are the things we tracked, and here are some anecdotes that bring the story to life. And then the final thing I'll just share in the education piece of the stakeholders is that it often takes a few years to hit your stride. In any event, year one you're there, you're kind of getting a feel for what size booth should you have? Who should be there? How is the audience really reacting? You take that, then year two, you get a little better, and typically by year three, you really hit your stride. And that's the other aspect of storytelling and setting expectations I would just share with the listeners today, is that it's okay if you have a 1-2-3 approach, and your investment follows that kind of cadence, but you're setting the expectations with leaders, that it's a long play, and you're going to see incremental results, so you have to have a little bit of patience too, as long as you're delivering in each of those points in time in a smart way.

Drew: So many thoughts, though. One thing that I think is really interesting, and I'll get both to you and Isabelle and Kevin, saying one thing is often folks are thinking about this as binary as we got to get them from here to here, and it's just we meet them and we close. And what I thought was so interesting is with the Moxie story, is that you sort of mapped out a journey that suggested there was a longer-term relationship to be built. I thought that was really very interesting to the notion of anecdata and the power of those things, and not just starting at pipe, but starting at the bigger objectives. The third thing I just want to sort of talk about, and Kevin, I want to ask you about this is defense, offense notion, like, if you aren't at an event and your competitors are, boom, you know that moment in theory, they have the opportunity. So, you know, often folks look at it as, well, how much is this going to cost us to show up? But how much is it going to cost you if you don't? Exactly, and so that, I think, is really interesting. And Kevin, I'm wondering how you sort of use that knowledge when you're sort of deciding, do we sort of guerrilla this? Do we need to show up? And so forth.

Kevin: Yeah, I think that's a huge part of it, Drew, and I kind of mentioned the Gartner events this year. And I think probably the thing that we hadn't factored in to our previous decisions was just the impact it has on the relationships with the Gartner analysts who cover us and who are doing those evaluations. You know, it is a sign of respect to them, to show up and to learn from them and be a part of that ecosystem. I can't tell you how many of them were like "We're so glad to see Precisely here. We can now send people over to your booth." And so I do think it matters. And you're a part of an ecosystem, and if you're not present and participating, there are going to be others there who are going to fill that void for you. So that is something that we factor in pretty heavily. And I think we've kind of maybe learned the hard way of how we factor that into the decisions that we need to make going forward.

Drew: And so, Isabelle, you were sort of representing the smaller brands here, and it's so funny, because I've worked with so many smaller brands over the years, and it's like, there's CES and they've got a one-room suite off in a hotel off the strip, right? So they're not on the floor, but somehow or other, they make it work, right? They throw a party, they do something, and their sales people are on the floor, and they're working it. But it's hard if you don't have a presence sometimes on these.

Isabelle: Exactly. That's also, again, I'm glad that Kevin talked about this. It's a point I made earlier as well, which is, you cannot afford not to be where the conversation happens. So how can you do it in cost-effective and creative ways, right? And I made a comment earlier, can you get network engineers to sit at a fancy sit-down dinner? Maybe not, but you can certainly get them to a happy hour with beer, right? So I agree with everything that was said. I also want to really underscore Ellina. First of all, Ellina for president! Exactly just the wealth of insights you've shared, but your point regarding the storytelling back to the executive team is huge, because we often go back just with the metrics, and then it becomes a pipeline conversation. You know, where is the pipe? I don't see enough pipe, and the qualitative story and the anecdotes are not in there. And so I think that's fantastic advice. Thank you for that.

Drew: Yeah, and I think it is. It's so funny because, in Kevin's case, in your case, you went in with brand so you had air cover already. Well, we're just going to be exposed. It's going to be a thing. And yet you ended up with pipe, which is sort of ironic and a wonderful thing.

Kevin: It's not just about being present, because everyone else is there. When you're there with everybody else, it also creates a really interesting opportunity to stand out and differentiate. And so, one of the things we did was we noticed that at these analyst events in particular, everyone wants to put up on their booth something about AI, or the categories that Gartner analysts cover to show what they've got. And what we ended up doing is something a little bit differently, which is we rolled out a new brand campaign that was all about "your data is meant to be loved." And we looked at sort of this complex relationship that businesses have with their data, where they want to love their data and trust it, but in order for your data to love you back, you have to love it too. And there are things you need to be doing. And it just opened up a different type of conversation. And we had an ability for people to kind of pick their own word—"your data is meant to what"—and drive just interesting kind of fun discussions around it. And I think it gave us an opportunity to showcase that we're a little bit different, that we have a great culture within Precisely and smart people. And I think it allowed everyone to experience us in a different way, in the context of the ecosystem and the competitive landscape in which we participate.

Drew: So funny, because you're so right, and B2B tends to be so boring, as in business to boring, that any kind of little twist like "love your data." Just we call, thank God somebody did something interesting. Because you go, you know, it's, "We're the number one blank, blank, blank in this space. We're AI driven, data driven, you know, buzz word here, Gartner, first quadrant, you know thing." And here you are talking about, love your data. It's like, what? Just boom, it. And so people forget how easy it is to cut through if you think about some kind of human emotional hook. And this goes back to, you know what Ellina had talked about at the very beginning, and if you can find that and stick with it, I love it. By the way, the notion of you got to keep doing it year after year, I think that's true to a point. You know you can, at some point, you sort of realize, "Wait, we're spending all this money, the show is getting tired. Our team isn't tackling it with fresh eyes. We got to shake it up somehow." And I feel like that happens. I've seen that happen over the years, especially back in the renegade days, we used to do the main stage show for Panasonic at CES and you know, it was depending on who you could sometimes do something really interesting, or it's no, "Here's our new video camera," right? No, all right, we're gonna keep going. Events are not events. Events are a continuum, pre, during and post. And I'm curious, I want to focus on post for a moment in terms of the follow up and so forth. And I'm just wondering what kinds of things you have found have been effective to sort of connect the dots from the event to the thing. And I'll start with with you, Ellina and where, how do you make sure that all the joy and everything that happens at an event continues into the follow up conversation?

Ellina: So it's segmented in our world, and if it's leads, or if it's pipeline that we've already been engaged with, the producer is really responsible, or in our case, the advisor is responsible for picking that conversation up. And we track that, and they can use our collateral. They share all of our content. So sometimes there are specific things we do, but if they're major shows like risk management, for example, we talk and we're at the largest risk management conference. Our entire marketing strategy and content calendar, in many ways, talks about risk management. So we don't necessarily create something new just for that event. We are efficient with our content, we enable our advisors, and we encourage them to participate in those conversations. And they can be late stage, so frankly, they're pretty close, and then we stay close. We meet with them on a monthly basis, the entire team that was at the show, and we are tracking the results for others that are newer leads. We look at which segments they are part of, because some of these shows enable us to engage different buyers or persona types, and so we put them into various nurtures, but often what we see is best is if they actually get invited pretty quickly to an upcoming niche, hub, owned event. So perhaps they met us at one of our corporate shows. They got to know the brand, and now we know that they're an employee benefits decision maker, a media Risk Manager at the organization. We know what geography they're in, and if we have something coming up that would be a fit for them, we try to get them into that, whether it's a webinar or a huddle and event in person, and we see that really accelerating the conversation.

Drew: Kevin, with your event where you were doing the love, you know, the "love your data" thing, what was the follow up like? And were you able to connect the dots creatively? Post event?

Kevin: Yeah, I'd say it's still, still work in progress. You know, one of the things we've learned Drew is, I think it's kind of, you know, it's a continual, ongoing conversation, right? And one of the things we've figured out is we've got to plan out a little bit further of where we're going to be, because our customers, you know, they maybe pick a couple of things a year that they can, you know, actually go out and do. And so the more we can arm our customer facing team members with, you know, that six month, nine month, 12 month view of where precisely is going to be, we can almost start to map out individual plans. And then what we've tried to do is augment that with to the point Isabelle was making earlier. We have had success. If then we can kind of group based on different interests, either, you know, parts of the portfolio, or challenges that they have, or geographically to then do either smaller dinners, or we've been putting on more piloting customer experiences where we, you know, to get people out. Maybe it's a little harder to the dinner, but if you get them to the suite for Monday Night Football or a pilot this year at the US Open in New York to, you know, again, create some of these experiences with a subset of maybe the most promising. You know, kind of leads or conversations that you had at some of these bigger events.

Drew: It makes me want to be a precisely customer. If you've got you're doing something at the US Open. "You love your data Drew. I can love my data as well as anybody you know." Just tell me what, uh, what else that that means? What it occurs to me in this is so interesting in these conversations so far is the problem of isolating events as a singular point in time versus this long term and B2B, 12-18, month cycle, plus you've got renewals, plus you've got all these other things. Just the notion that a single event could pay out in a short term, and that you could calculate that within three months, seems like lunacy. You know, you've got to have a plan in this, this longer term plan of, okay, these group of people, their current clients, well, can we upsell and cross sell? And then we have to have a plan for that. And these are late stage things. We still need a plan, because you didn't close at the show, right? And so this is again, we're back to this really interesting measurement challenge in the reality of isolating versus and I wonder if, from an ROI standpoint, do you try to look at it by campaign? Do you look at by segment? You look at by period of time. But how are we going to help folks? Because there is this pressure, and you know this well. Kevin, the PE firms want to know how is this paying out? And if they could, they would want to know how that digital ad that you ran yesterday on this one network paid out. So can you help us along with this? Because this conversation has showed how complex it is. And we're just talking about events Ellina, and you have the thought,

Ellina: I think it comes back to storytelling on a consistent basis. So of course, you want to share the ROI of said event in some period of time, a month out, or however, however quickly you're expected to share that out in your initial but in our case where we have long sales cycles, I'm sharing on a monthly basis, sometimes for over a year, what was generated from that event and continuing to bubble up. Everything we're doing to the ROI, I mean, it's interesting. And Drew the other day, somebody asked me, "Well, of all the investments you're making for said event, we know the ROI of each line item" to which I said to the individual, "Well that's not really an effective way to measure ROI." We land on an approximate kind of ROI that we're comfortable with as a leadership team, and from there, as long as we hit that I need to be able to give my team the flexibility to create the best mix possible without feeling scrutinized by every dollar investment, because some will be better, and we're looking at it in the totality. So I think the real power is consistent storytelling, starting with your annual plan, each company is different. I completely understand that. But if at the beginning of the year you're saying this is the overall target that marketing is driving right or supporting in the organization, we have a mix of these campaigns or these initiatives that are going to do it. And in totality, you know, we're going to hit our target, and along the way, we'll cover very specific, large investments, etc. But I, as much as I can, I try to stay out of the minutia of daily investments, because it just pigeon holes you into, like, the wrong conversation.

Drew: Yeah, you're well, you're preaching to the choir with this one. But we've got a lot of work to do in that for other folks in in this. And it's funny, I saw a post on LinkedIn from a CEO at a PE firm in praise of all the minutia line item analysis. And I, I kind of wondered exactly what was going on there. Anyway. We now we're at the point where we need final words of wisdom. We'll do this in reverse order. So Isabelle, when it comes to event strategy and measurement and ROI, what's your final word of wisdom?

Isabelle: So while going a slightly different direction, I'll say, bring the voice of the customer inside the organization. Talk to your customers about what works, how they found you, why they bought from you, and so on, right? So you're making educated decisions on which marketing tactics to roll out, and just to add on this, my customers and past experience made it very clear that trade shows are key. This is where they found us. They came the first year they came the second year and the third year they purchased right? So it's the long game and story tell to the ELT on your board around that it's difficult, but I agree with Ellina. Got it.

Kevin: My advice is just to be bold. Don't forget good marketing is both an art and a science. Don't forget the art and creative piece, you know, being a little bit different and countered to how everyone else is doing things done right? Can can really make a big impact, not only on the brand side, but how that then trickles down on the demand side as well.

Drew: Be bold. Have the courage. I mean, I if you look at it, you take 2 B2B brands, the one that has a little more courage is going to get a lot more out of the events than the one that doesn't. Okay. Ellina, a final word of wisdom.

Ellina: So I love what what has already been shared. The only thing I'll add to the conversation is in the storytelling, bring in your business partners to the table. Don't be the only person presenting. So oftentimes in readouts, I invite my sales organization to co-present and bring the anecdotes to life while they will believe me as a senior leader on the team, it's so much more compelling when your partners are selling, just like use customers to sell to prospects, use your colleagues who are in the front line selling to help you sell your strategy. It really creates much more trust and credibility in the story.

Drew: I love it, and that's sort of perfect way to sort of wrap it up, because at the very beginning of it, you talked about planning with your partners, and so of course we're gonna, if we're planning with our partners, of course we're gonna be reporting with your partners. Okay, thank you. Ellina, Kevin, Isabelle, you're all amazing sports. Thank you audience for staying with us.

 

To hear more conversations like this one, and submit your questions while we’re live. Join us on the next CMO Huddles Studio, we stream to my LinkedIn profile—that’s Drew Neisser—every other week.

Show Credits

Renegade Marketers Unite is written and directed by Drew Neisser. Hey, that's me! This show is produced by Melissa Caffrey, Laura Parkyn, and Ishar Cuevas. The music is by the amazing Burns Twins and the intro Voice Over is Linda Cornelius. To find the transcripts of all episodes, suggest future guests, or learn more about B2B branding, CMO Huddles, or my CMO coaching service, check out renegade.com. I'm your host, Drew Neisser. And until next time, keep those Renegade thinking caps on and strong!