Kate Hammitt:

Forward-invest in working with your marketing operations team and whoever's controlling your CRM to start to make those connections so you can constantly be capturing data. I know we get really bogged down in the day-to-day event issues, and nothing is more important in today's world, in my view, than capturing the data that you need to prove your program successful.

Alyssa Peltier:

Great events create great brands. But pulling off an event that engages, excites and connects audiences, well, that takes a village, and we're that village. My name is Alyssa.

Rachel Andrews:

I'm Rachel.

Felicia Asiedu:

And I'm Felicia.

Alyssa Peltier:

And you are listening to Great Events, the podcast for all event enthusiasts, creators, and innovators in the world of events and marketing.

Rachel Andrews:

Hello, everyone. What is going on in this wide, wide world of events? My name is Rachel and you also have my co-host, Alyssa, as your host today for today's episode of Great Events.

Alyssa Peltier:

Hey guys, how's it going?

Rachel Andrews:

So Alyssa and I recently talked in our last podcast about our very exciting acquisition of Splash. We are so, so excited to welcome them into this event family. But I'm even more excited to introduce our guest for today, Kate Hammitt. She is the CMO of Splash. Welcome, Kate.

Kate Hammitt:

Thanks for having me, ladies. Excited to be here.

Rachel Andrews:

Yeah, we are too. Fun fact, Kate is actually a former Cventer, and back in the day, Kate actually hired me at Cvent 14 years ago. So a holy full circle moment, Kate. Welcome back to Cvent, and glad to have you back as a co-worker.

Kate Hammitt:

I mean, what a great hire.

Rachel Andrews:

I'm still here.

Kate Hammitt:

14 years later after just exploding this program. It's always been fun to see from the sidelines all the magic you've been making over the years, but really excited to be back in the fold now. Definitely full circle moment.

Rachel Andrews:

Yeah, it's awesome. Well, before we dive into the meat of it, and obviously after bragging about Kate, Kate's an amazing marketer. I've been following her career since she left Cvent and has done some really kickass stuff. Kate, I'd love for you to take our listeners through. So just so for our listeners, I know we have a whole myriad of listeners from event marketers to planners to students all over the board, but for our listeners, why don't you just level set with them who is Kate? Tell us about yourself. Your career journey, events have obviously been woven into your makeup coming from Cvent obviously, and before that, so take us through that.

Kate Hammitt:

I started in events, actually. My first job out of college. I was a UVA grad, wahoo-wah to the Virginia Tech grads who are hosting this podcast. But yeah, my first job was with the US Golf Association and I was focused on all of their championship events and I was a paralegal, so everything from the security contracts to the liability insurance to the liquor licenses, all the logistics of these events that was on me. Loved the events part, did not like the legal part, decided to not go to law school, which was my original plan, and got into events. So I got deeper into sports marketing and just decided that I should really pivot into the tech industry. And I was telling Alyssa before, just applied to a job on Craigslist. So that's really way, way back. A little tech company in Arlington, Virginia at the time.

And Reggie called me after getting my application and I applied to Cvent. So when I was at Cvent, it was majority hired for field marketing, what is now field marketing, doing communications and events and started to expand from there. So obviously, as you both know well, our team grew exponentially, opened up different divisions, whether it was in PR or product development as we're launching Hospitality Cloud. And during that time it was a really exciting time to be in marketing the dawn of digital advertising, the dawn of social media. So it was a really exciting time to start to add all of these different channels into the mix and then see how they came together for different audiences. And during that time, Cvent became a platform, which was an incredible journey to be a part of. So in 2013, I wanted to see if I could repeat the success that I had had at Cvent being the leader of my own marketing department, starting from the ground up.

So I really focused a lot on growth companies while I've been away. I've been focused on SaaS and growth companies generally. And so it was in healthcare, went to another organization after that, that was in healthcare, retail, financial industries, really bringing brands to the forefront of consumer consciousness through reviews and reputation management. And then I found my way back to Splash. So I joined the Splash organization shortly after COVID had quote, unquote, "ended" and wanted to, I was excited to be back in the event space, but really to take a growth company to the next level. I did not foresee such a fun intersection of my past and present with joining Splash, but it's really fun to be here and be a part of the next chapter.

Alyssa Peltier:

I have a follow-up question to that because a little looking in the mirror, I feel like I have some of your CV going on here. I've actually worked under Rachel and helped found the event marketing function, so some ties here from the field and the events. So I'm curious because I know a lot of our listeners, and Rachel alluded to this already, how did you navigate that shift from more of a traditional planner and more logistics facing role, more onto the marketing strategy piece here? You made it successful leap, and that's not always that easy to do given the skill sets are not always the same. So I'm curious about that experience from your end.

Kate Hammitt:

Yeah, I think something really tactical is in terms of how to make the leap, is to think about how you report and communicate on the outcomes of your events. I think when I have utilized events throughout my career, of course events come with lots of stories, lots of anecdotes, lots of feel-good moments, and those are really important to obviously share, but being able to report back on the ROI, what the revenue in the room is, being able to do that actually pre-event as well and make sure that your sales force and leadership are in lockstep around who is going to be at the event, what the key stakeholders are, what your next steps are, and making sure that not only you expand the relationship or get an initial engagement within that event, but that you report on that after the event and you're able to tie that through.

And getting that data prepared throughout the pre, during, and post-event journey as well as the year-end wrap ups, I mean, where we are now with budgets and everything like that, being the sort of events person who comes with that ROI data helps make that transition almost natural into more marketing opportunities. People come of course with different skill sets, but that's something that you can definitely learn and skills that you can hone to start to open up your aperture for opportunities within the broader go-to-market motion.

Alyssa Peltier:

I love that. That's great. Yeah, really speaking the language of business and not just the language of events, and I think it's really easy to get pigeonholed in that space when there is so much to do within the event itself. You can sometimes get stuck in the details of that, right? As opposed to, like you said, widening the aperture and bringing it up to a business conversation.

Kate Hammitt:

Yeah, I think you bring up a really good point too, because when you're dealing with the lumps and bumps of events, we should say, I mean, there's always something that's going to go wrong, need extra attention. We all know that. But how do we carve out that time, that 10% to stay rooted in strategy to up level? I think, Rachel, this is something that I was always amazed that you did year after year is just up the ante both from an art and science from the event. How do you get more creative, more impactful in the experiential piece? And then from a science or from a data perspective, from a revenue perspective, how do you up the ante to increase your goals and take that from attendance to revenue?

Rachel Andrews:

Yeah, I think there's other little things you can do because events can be the central fabric of things, but then from that comes product marketing. How are you aligning your products at your events or your offerings or content or what martech are you using? That just starts to bleed out into the other marketing functions. Learning that, you can creep up into all the other marketing areas without even realizing it, even SEO, like you can creep into that with events and then go and learn more in that rabbit hole too. So I feel like there's a lot of ways you can do it. Keep taking little pieces here and there and then you understand it all.

Alyssa Peltier:

Yeah, I think there's a lot of cross-functional learning opportunities in the world of events. And Kate, I think it was interesting because your career started in field and oftentimes that is the core building blocks for a lot of organizations to build an entire marketing strategy around, which is a good segue to talk a little bit more about Splash, because that's really the reason why we brought you on here. So I do want to talk more about Splash and the amazing work that this company has done and the amazing work that you've supported and your time there. So tell us a little bit more about Splash, because Rachel and I gave our audience a sneak peek at the advantages of Splash and everything that it's done for the market thus far, but we'd love to hear it from your point of view as well.

Kate Hammitt:

I like to break down what Splash can do in four different buckets. To me, as just as an events person, as a marketer, these are the things that I'm trying to do with my event and experiential programs. I think one that's really, really tactical, but an important pillar of Splash is simplifying the process, whether it's with your integrations, with your marketing operations team, with the broader event team and all the opportunities to create content around an event or how it all comes together. Are you on a platform that's going to help you simplify your process and be something that you can scale with in that way? A lot of the reason why Splash was originally created was we felt like there was an opportunity to really be brand forward in events from every single touch point, make sure that that buyer's journey is super tight.

So the elements of Splash weave together that visitor's journey, that attendees journey, that registants journey. So your brand stands out in the way that your design team would be proud of. And also in a way that, again, going back to the simplify the process, doesn't bottleneck. You can easily replicate that design impact, and that's a really large strength of Splash's. Measure your results. So what we talked about earlier, be that events person and that marketer who's able to measure the results of the program. I mean, we're in a profitable, efficient growth world now, and everyone is turning to say, what are our efforts yielding in terms of revenue? And so for every single marketing channel, we have to be able to measure the results.

And then growing the business is the final pillar of Splash, and I see this in two ways. One is scaling event programs. So you can do more of what works in a really simple and easy fashion as well as grow the business, grow your revenue, grow your engagement, expand your customers, involve your employees, and be able to scale the business aspect too. So those four pillars are where Splash thrives within marketing teams and what we bring to the table.

And what we're trying to accomplish with all of our customers and accomplish ourselves as an organization is event led growth. So I define that as event-led growth is the most powerful marketing channel for revenue acquisition, retention, data capture, of course, authentic connection as we all know, and engagement. So how do you do that in a programmatic way as you would with digital marketing channels or with a product-led growth or partner-led growth or inbound? There are all these different go-to-market motions that you can use to capture your audience. And for many, many companies, event-led growth is a really strong growth lever to pull and a really perfect go-to-market motion to get connected to buyers and customers.

Alyssa Peltier:

I love this stance and Rach, I know you probably have a question here too, but I just love the stance that Splash has taken on that. I think Cvent has touted for a really long time that Cvent is part of an omnichannel marketing plan, and it's really important to be included and to bring that channel into the broader mix. But it's one of many, right? And I think the stance that Splash takes is, but it's the leader of all of those channels. It can quite arguably be the most important of all of those channels that you're operating on. So it's just really hats off to you because I think that that stance is a really compelling one. Rach, I'll pass the ball to you.

Rachel Andrews:

Yeah, no. I was just going to say with events being anywhere from 20 to 30 to 40% of a marketing budget, for people that don't lead with event-led growth, let's say you're a digital first company and you only focus on SEO as ways to grow and you work in a marketing team. I'm just trying to think about our listeners for a second. If you work in a marketing team that maybe doesn't prioritize events, how would you start an ELG, event-led growth program, and speak to the C-level in that same voice of say, hey, this is actually important. We should be leading with these events to close business. I know a lot of heads of events that struggle with how do I actually track ROI? That conversation isn't just a buzzword. It's so hard for some companies, especially smaller companies that don't have all the data in one place. What would your advice be to somebody trying to build an ELG program on their team?

Alyssa Peltier:

I can't prove it, right? It's first, but we can't say that it's first. Where's the rough [inaudible 00:14:35]?

Kate Hammitt:

Yeah, you got to start somewhere, right? It's chicken or the egg. I think the best way to go about it would be we encourage customers as an example to look through the funnel. What are you looking for in your business goals and how do you augment event-led growth to make sure that you're meeting that business strategy? So if you have issues top of funnel, then I encourage more of a webinar approach. There certainly could be an in-person element to this, but you want to make sure that that's super targeted and customized and use the right tools to make sure that you can have that bespoke event and that you're curating your guest list and all of those things. There's a program for that, if you're looking for top of funnel growth.

If you're looking at your business strategy and saying, we need to get closer to customers, they're a huge part of our revenue and we need them to utilize our product more, you'd be looking at more customer-led events that you would be trying to conduct both in-person and then also virtually to give them either the tools they need or the camaraderie and community. It depends on what those goals are, but usually we start to talk first with customers. And when I'm talking to marketers, what's your business strategy? Where are you looking for juice? And start there with events and customize your event program to that strategic initiative because that's really where it's going to have teeth. And then when you're able to prove through the value of the event with this business need, then you can start expanding and start getting honestly more event expertise on the team. So you can start to think full funnel, so you can start to think about how you can increase customer engagement, capture more data, do all the great things that events can offer.

Rachel Andrews:

Yeah, the initiatives that you're doing around event-led growth as far as trainings and learning more about how to do that. Do you want to share a little bit more about that?

Kate Hammitt:

Oh, I'd love to. Yeah. So I've always found that it's hard to get educated around events. It's very much trial by fire and experience, and you work your way up. And just like we were talking about earlier, making the transition from logistics into event marketing roles or future, it's hard to know where to start, and it's hard to know how to set up a program and how to create a business case around events, how to start tracking ROI. There are so many different ways to do it. You throw a little attribution in there, it can really make your head spin.

So what we have done at Splash is create an event-led Growth Masterclass and certification. So we bring people through two hours of in-depth programming to make sure that at the end you feel locked and loaded to understand exactly what you need to do to create those programs. You're certified, so you can tell your boss, "I've got this." And it really gives people a leg up with either growing new programs or being more confident in their role. And it's the first certification of its kind. So that's going to be launching in 2025, so we're very excited. It'll probably be out by January.

Alyssa Peltier:

Where might listeners be able to find that, Kate?

Kate Hammitt:

Yeah, so we should put it in the show notes for sure. And you can also find it on splashthat.com, and you'll get right in the program. We have a waitlist now, so you'll see that banner and just click in and we'll let you know as soon as it's available.

Rachel Andrews:

Do you think Alyssa and I can get to the top of that waitlist? I feel like this is a certification that I'd like to take.

Kate Hammitt:

For you guys, I'll pull some strings and make sure that you get to the top, although you could probably teach a few levels as well. We're hoping to build on it too, so it's not just this initial course, but more advanced levels. So we'll tie into those as we go on.

Alyssa Peltier:

That sounds great. And I think so many individuals, I know we're talking about the planner and the marketer and the synergies there and how you weave between the two roles, but everyone's really looking to quantify ROI. Even in other more traditional marketing channels, it's still an elusive thing for many. So managing that data, trying to drive your programs forward with a more consistent, concise strategy around ELG is really compelling right now. So I love that. For 2025, I think this is a really good initiative. I think there's market readiness around it.

Kate Hammitt:

And I should mention, you don't have to be a Cvent customer or a Splash customer. This is not about product. It's about strategy and execution and the frameworks you need to be successful.

Rachel Andrews:

I have to ask, I feel like it's the elephant in the room, but not really. It's like, why Cvent and Splash? I know some people have asked why does this make sense for us to be together just from a technology standpoint, but also for the industry? Why did it make so much sense for us to merge together?

Kate Hammitt:

I go back to when I was interviewing for my job at Splash. At first I was like, why would I want to go up and compete against Cvent? But as I heard more about Splash, I was like, oh, there is an opportunity for Splash to excel because it's more of the repeatable event programs, more directed towards the marketer. And Cvent does so many incredible things within the Total Event program, but this is a place where Splash really has a great strength and let's see what that looks like. So that's what brought me to Splash is what brought Cvent to Splash as well, because I think when you think about just working with marketers and what they need, and as the industry has really changed, if you look at Forrester and Gartner and how they're evaluating our tools, and there's like 3000 event platforms available to everybody, the criteria has changed along the way, changing from logistics and event management tools to, you're starting to see even more of an emphasis on marketing.

So I think that's where, interestingly enough, lots of our customers are also Cvent customers. So for their Total Event program, they're using Cvent for their more complex, multi-day conferences, and then they're using Splash for the repeatable events that they're trying to accomplish weekly, monthly, and get out the door for revenue and expansion. So it's really interesting to see how our own customers had discovered that mix in many cases and now being together as one organization is pretty cool.

Alyssa Peltier:

Yeah. And I'll just underscore that because I think from the Cvent vantage point, I think there's always been this opportunity to have one provider for the total event program. And I know Cvent has talked about this Total Event program for years, but it's not really been a dream realized, right? It's been like a notion that we've put in market, but it's not necessarily something that we could truly, truly act on from a technology standpoint. So I think the Splash-Cvent partnership here is going to be one that will enable and empower marketers, planners, procurement, all different types of hosts and attendees of events to execute on one single technology system. So it's an exciting time to be in the meetings and events tech space at Splash or Cvent, honestly.

Rachel Andrews:

Yeah. Well, awesome. This is, I feel like a good place to tie this up with a bow. I feel like we talked about a lot. I love talking to people that have been in events, but also transitioned into marketing. So thanks for sharing that journey with us, Kate. If you had to leave our listeners with one piece of advice or a trend or just something to look out for, what would that be?

Kate Hammitt:

Yeah, I would say forward invest in working with your marketing operations team and whoever is controlling your CRM to start to make those connections so you can constantly be capturing data. I know we get really bogged down in the day-to-day event issues, and nothing is more important in today's world, in my view, than capturing the data that you need to prove your program successful. So I would spend that time, I would forward invest that time, work with people in your organization to make sure that that's prioritized. If you want some help, you can connect with me on LinkedIn because I've done this at many organizations, but it's necessary for event folks to be able to prove this business value. And it's really impactful. It's going to truly wow your leadership and stakeholders at your organization on how much events can do, whether that's you're trying to engage an audience, you're trying to expand a customer, you're trying to get net new buyers, or you're mixing them all together. So that would be my advice for anyone listening. If you haven't done that, make sure you check that box.

Rachel Andrews:

Awesome. I would just echo that. I feel like a lot of people in the industry, especially leads of events, sometimes get bogged down in too much data. And I just want to harp on what Kate said. Figure out those six things that you need to say, this is what makes our events important. And just track those for a year and then add another, and then add another if you want. But that's a place to start, because people sometimes look at the whole picture and get super overwhelmed. And if you just pick a couple tactics and say, here, we're just going to track these three things, that's a place to start. And then start to add to your event-led growth data sets year over year to make that better.

Alyssa Peltier:

I mean, what Kate was talking about earlier is getting really, really prescriptive about what your business objectives are for each event. So if it's a brand generating event, what are those data points that you actually need? It might not be six, it might be two, right? What are those particular points that you need per event type or per event program or whatever it is that you're supporting, and really, really get religious about making sure that you're capturing all of that data for every single one of those events that you do. And certainly in a platform like Splash, there are a lot of events that are going on. So there's a rigor that goes into just collection of data itself. But it always talks back to the outcomes and objectives to me, so [inaudible 00:24:55] a really great conversation on that.

Rachel Andrews:

Amen. Well, Kate, thank you so much for joining Great Events podcast. It was a pleasure talking to you and having our full circle moment. For our listeners, we have a ton of resources that we talked about today that we will definitely link for you. Splash has many tools and content for event marketers, so we'll make sure we link to all of that. But Kate said, splashthat, and obviously you can connect with her on LinkedIn or Alyssa and I, we're always available. Thanks again, listeners, for joining.

Kate Hammitt:

Bye.

Alyssa Peltier:

Thanks for hanging out with us on great events, a podcast by Cvent. If you've been enjoying our podcast, make sure to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode.

Rachel Andrews:

And you can help fellow event professionals and marketers just like you, discover great events by leaving us a rating on Apple, Spotify or your preferred podcast platform.

Felicia Asiedu:

Stay connected with us on social media for behind the scenes content updates and some extra doses of inspiration.

Rachel Andrews:

Got a great story or an event to share. We want to hear from you. Find us on LinkedIn, send us a DM or drop us a note at greatevents@cvent.com.

Felicia Asiedu:

Big thanks to our amazing listeners, our guest speakers, and the incredible team behind the scenes. Remember, every great event begins with great people.

Alyssa Peltier:

And that's a wrap. Keep creating, keep innovating, and keep joining us as we redefine how to make events great.

Bethany Murphy:

Before you even go down the road of committing to do a user conference, it is super important to get executive buy-in, right? This is not the type of event that an events team or really even a marketing team alone can pull off. It is a full company event. We need sales, we need customer success, we need product. Everyone needs to come together to support this initiative or it will not be successful.

 

Alyssa Peltier:

Great events create great brands, but pulling off an event that engages, excites and connects audiences, well, that takes a village, and we're that village. My name is Alyssa.

Rachel Andrews:

I'm Rachel.

 

Felicia Asiedu:

And I'm Felicia.

 

Alyssa Peltier:

And you are listening to great events, the podcast for all event enthusiasts, creators and innovators in the world of events and marketing. Hello everyone and welcome to today's really exciting conversation. My name is Alyssa Peltier. I am the director of Market Strategy and Insights here on our Cvent consulting team. Today we're going to be talking about this growing significance and this increasing popularity of a very specific event type, the event type of a user conference, which Cvent just so happens to do as well. 6sense runs a thousand-person, US-based conference known as Breakthrough, that was recently done towards the end of last year for this organization.

So today, we're switching it up. It's not going to be one of those boring PowerPoint webinars that you might be used to. We're going to be super conversational. Fireside chat type discussion with Bethany Murphy, who happens to be the head of events at 6sense, welcome Bethany to-

 

Bethany Murphy:

Hi, happy to be here.

Alyssa Peltier:

Thank you for joining us today. So today, we're going to discuss the unique nature of this conference for 6sense as an organization. We'll talk a little bit with Bethany about the strategic planning and the thought process that she and her team go through in order to execute this event. We'll get kind of into the nuts and bolts of conference management in terms of budget management and timelines, all the really sexy stuff when it comes to conferences. And then, my favorite part is how do we measure the success of this program. So with that, Bethany, give us, the audience just a little bit more of a background about yourself and what you do at 6sense.

Bethany Murphy:

Sure. So I have 20 years of experience running events, mostly in the B2B tech space. I have been at 6sense heading up events for coming on two years in June, which is crazy. And my team manages our user conference, which we're going to talk lots about. We also run our larger internal events, so our sales kickoffs, our President's Club incentive event, third party events, so lots of trade shows and kind of all larger scale customer and prospect events, so lots of fun. Lots of fun-

Alyssa Peltier:

Quite a large portfolio, right?

Bethany Murphy:

Yes.

Alyssa Peltier:

Fast and complex, I'm sure. How many events total annually between both the external and internal events?

Bethany Murphy:

I would say between all of the ancillary events that we do on top of our larger scale events, maybe like 75, pretty robust portfolio. We're a team of three. We just became a team of four.

Alyssa Peltier:

Okay. So let's talk about this team at ... Perfect transition there, honestly. The team and kind of this ethos that it sounds like you've established within the 6sense organization. You and I talked a little bit about delivering these unique moments with Impact and it seems that that's an important priority across all of these 75 plus events that you do. So let's talk at a high level talk about the value of this entire event portfolio. Can you tell me a little bit more about this kind of importance and the unique value that events bring to that overarching marketing strategy at 6sense?

Bethany Murphy:

Events are a huge part of our overall marketing strategy, and we take our events really seriously. And I think that is because they're such a unique way to bring the 6sense brand to life. And so, I think especially for our user conference, we are planning this B2B Tech conference and we're competing with all of these other conferences. So I think not only does the content have to be amazing and useful to our attendees, but the experience really has to be incredible. I think coming out of COVID, people need a real reason to go to in-person events. We try really hard to continue to exceed expectations year after year, and that's really hard. That's hard as budgets get decreased and prices go up.

And so, I think we try really hard to think about the customer journey at all of our events and how we're kind of carrying that through from the second they walk on site until the second they leave. And so, how do we create FOMO for people that aren't there and how do we make sure that people want to keep coming back to our events? And we'll talk a little bit about how we kind of do that through experiences at the event. But I think in terms of the overall portfolio, again, it's really taking your budget for the year. And thinking about what your goals are and then  creating a strategy that way. So brand awareness is one thing. We might go to certain events and we say, we just want to get our brand out in the marketplace with this event.

This is a group of people that don't really know us, so we're going to do X, Y and Z at this show. Every year, we kind of continue to tweak our strategy as we get more brand awareness and as we increase our product portfolio and we have different audiences that we want to hit. And I think it's also the event types. Not only do we do a user conference, we talked about, we do third party shows and we continue to grow in that area and tweak which events we go to every year. We do some really cool dinner series. We do virtual events when we don't have budgets do in-person events. And so, how do you just think about your portfolio as a whole and how you can drive impact for the business?

Alyssa Peltier:

Well, I think what's really unique about what your group is doing, maybe not unique, but it's a finer point to make, is that you're always starting with the objective of the event in mind, but driving that objective through experience, right? So your team is organized around kind of a common goal of generating the best experience tied to that outcome, which sounds very basic, but at the end of the day, I think sometimes we get so hung up on executing and just ticking the boxes. We're very to-do list oriented, and so, we can be distracted from what is the ultimate goal of the thing. And I think as a leader within this space, I think you're doing some things right when it comes to keeping your team aligned on a commonality, which is the event objective, right?

Bethany Murphy:

Well, my boss always says data plus experience equals pipeline. And so, that's kind of a north star for us.

 

Alyssa Peltier:

I love that. Okay, so let's get down into the brass tacks on Breakthrough itself, as just this specific event type within your portfolio. Talk a little bit about your thought process, that strategic planning and how you're generating alignment internally. I know that can be a friction point for a lot of organizations. Give me a high level overview of this conference, the number of days, the number of people, all of those different ... the event design and even the location. Where is this hosted?

Bethany Murphy:

In 2023, we had our largest breakthrough yet. We had a thousand sales and marketing professionals for three days in Frisco, Texas. So we're at the brand new Omni PGA Frisco. We had a complete buyout of the property. We had three overflow of hotels and basically, we had three evening events, two and a half days of content, and that's internal and external keynotes, that's breakouts mostly featuring customers. We had a partner showcase, so we bring together a bunch of partners in our ecosystem and yeah, it was an amazing couple days and in 2024, we are targeting 1500 attendees at the brand new Fountain Blue in Vegas. So we're super excited about that one-

Alyssa Peltier:

I might need to go to that one.

Bethany Murphy:

Yeah. Planning is already well underway for that one.

Alyssa Peltier:

How many years have you been doing this ... not you specifically Bethany, but 6sense as an organization, what's the number of years?

Bethany Murphy:

I think six.

Bethany Murphy:

It has really grown pretty significantly year over year. And in 2022, we had about 650 people. So, last year we were over a thousand and this year, we're hoping to be close to 1500, all in.

Alyssa Peltier:

That's awesome. Congrats, because it's not an easy feat to grow to. A thousand plus, right? That's kind of a big milestone in that-

Bethany Murphy:

Yeah. Yeah. It was certainly a big milestone for us.

Alyssa Peltier:

Yeah. Let's run this quick video that I think will give some of our listeners today a little bit more of a visual look and feel to what this breakthrough event is all about. Yeah.

Speaker 4:

I think you're here to learn, to get inspired.

Speaker 7:

I believe that collectively together, we can all be more.

Speaker 4:

If you get a chance to get a hat, it makes you feel like a different person. I'm starting to get this Texas thing.

Alyssa Peltier:

So let's talk about that kind of origination of this conference for the 6sense brand. How do you approach this thought process behind even creating a user conference like this? We'll have many listeners that are just kind of getting started, they don't know if they're ready, they're not sure if this is the right time. Do they have enough customers, do they have enough prospects? What types of timelines are typically even involved in the planning process here?

Bethany Murphy:

Yeah, I mean I talk about this a lot. I think before you even go down the road of committing to do a user conference, it is super important to get executive buy-in. This is not the type of event that an events team or really even a marketing team alone can pull off. It is a full company event. We need sales, we need customer success, we need product. Everyone needs to come together to support this initiative or it will not be successful. So I think that that is the key starting point. And then, I think it's like you have to have something to say, right? You're bringing all these people together. What are you going to say? Are you offering certifications, trainings?

Do you have a new product launch that you want to feature? Really think about what you're trying to message to your attendees because they need a reason to come, other than it's going to be fun, which is great too. But you need some good content to get people there. As far as timelines go, I think it depends on scope. I feel like, because I love sourcing. I think now, with just lack of hotel inventory and things, depending on the size of your event, you really have to be thinking 18 months plus in advance. I think if you're smaller and you're just getting started, sure you can be within a year. But what I would say is the longer you have to plan, the better. You're always going to need more time. The sooner you can get started, I would say the better. We wrapped up our conference October 20th, 2023. We launched pre-sale tickets for 2024 a month later. And so, we never really stopped. We just went from one, the contract was already signed and we moved on to the next.

Alyssa Peltier:

Yeah, it becomes the event that won't die. I feel very ... for our Cvent CONNECT conference. I didn't really introduce myself in that way, but I actually ran our event marketing for Cvent CONNECT. So I was very close to the conference timelines and believe me, I get it when you're feeling like you're consistently trying to drive registrations for one thing, it becomes a little bit like Groundhog day every day. But I love what you were saying about this groundswell of support, not just from your marketing or your planning organization. This isn't something that you just wake up and decide even within this year's budget or even the next year's budget, "Hey, we're going to do this thing" and now, we're going to try to jockey for support from all of these different departments.

It needs to be something that the organization decides to do. And the meetings and events team and marketing team are the ones kind of rallying the troops, but the troops are all aware that we're going into this together.

Bethany Murphy:

And I actually had a very relevant conversation. Someone reached out to me through a network and asked to talk, her organization wants to do a user conference and she wanted some guidance and she knows that they're not ready. She's like, this is not a good decision. We are not ready as an organization to do this, but how do I tell my executives that? And so, we had a really good discussion about it and I was like, my recommendation is, think about what you can do this year to get ready. Maybe it's a road show and a customer advisory board. Start small and figure out is the organization ready to drive registration to something like ... right, if you can't get 20 people to register for a dinner, you're probably not going to get 200 people to register for your user conference.

Alyssa Peltier:

Totally.

Bethany Murphy:

You have to steer it somewhere.

Alyssa Peltier:

It's funny because we have our president of sales, Chuck Ghoorah, would tell this story, when rallying our sales organization, the importance of Cvent CONNECT, like we have very much buy-in from our executive team for our conference as well. I think Cvent CONNECT is in its 13th or 14th year somewhere in that timeframe. And he tells a story about Mark Benioff at Salesforce, which of course, Dreamforce is the Mecca of user conferences. We use that, I'm sure every user conference uses that as the inspo, right? Take little elements of it, but it kind of sets the standard for what's trending in the user conference space.

And apparently, our Chuck Ghoorah was at dinner with Mark Benioff and any question that came up or any part of the conversation, Mark would just say, "Go to Dreamforce, go to Dreamforce." Conversation wasn't even related to the user conference at that time. The point being, was so important at the CEO level to drive customer participation in this that it became second nature to just be promoting always on. So it's a perfect testament to showcase, that's how you get there. The whole company has to be bought in from truly the upper uppermost echelons of the organization. So really good point.

Bethany Murphy:

Yeah. I love it.

Alyssa Peltier:

All right. So can you tell me, Bethany, how you usually plan and organize user conferences from that choosing of the venues and then handling the logistics? I know we kind of touched on it briefly here, but what does that look like for you?

Bethany Murphy:

I think it takes a long time to and user conference and it takes a lot of planning and organization. I think before even the real planning kicks off, right? So my team ahead of launching internally spends months in the background building out our timelines, working with the MOPS team to get the project built out in a sauna so that everyone cross-functionally has transparency into their deliverables. Then we do kind of an internal core team kickoff, and that's probably eight months or so prior to the event. And that's content design, MOPS. That's all the kind of large stakeholders that are going to be involved in the project.

And by that time, we already kind of had the agenda structure confirmed. We've got our evening events confirmed, we've got everything kind of high level locked in, but that allows the core team enough time to try to get their ducks in a row before deadlines start creeping up. And they do, October seems really far away. It'll be here sadly before we go.

Alyssa Peltier:

I know, I know, right? Again, it doesn't die. So how do you start to bring in those stakeholder groups along this journey with you? You've got your ducks in a row, you've got your project timelines, but there are these other groups that are involved, whether it is just ancillary marketers, whether it is your sales teams, your CS folks, your product. If there's launches that are coming along, how do you start to shepherd them along in this process, which can be very tedious at times.

Bethany Murphy:

We're really lucky here at 6sense that Breakthrough is this internal mobilizer. It is an event that people wait all year for and it makes my job easier. I don't have to beg CS in sales to get people, the second registration launch. They were on top of it, right?

Alyssa Peltier:

Yeah.

Bethany Murphy:

But, I think to our earlier point, that comes with time. It takes time to get everyone to the point that they support an event. And so, I think if you're just starting off ... And I was talking to this woman the other day about this too, I think data is really important. How can you prove internally to the organization the value of your events? And if you can do that, they will help you. We talk a lot about how at Breakthrough, the last two years, we've had a 100% of accounts that come to Breakthrough Renew. That's really amazing. And that's something ... Our CS team is like, "Wow, I'm going to take that and run with it." And so, I think the more you can kind of use data points like that, it will help you be successful internally.

Alyssa Peltier:

Yeah, the word that came to mind was results. Results drive the investment not only from the financial side but also, from time spent because that will be the biggest pushback in starting a user conferences. We don't have time to talk to customers about this. We're talking about all these other things, but if you can show that these are achieving their objectives through a different kind of channel, which is the event, it's a win-win for everybody, but it really is kind of that what's in it for me mentality. We are all very myopic.

Bethany Murphy:

You need, I would say CSO or head of sales buy-in too, because sales is doing a million things. It's always going to be end of month, end of quarter. They're always going to be pushed in a million different directions. And so, unless you have that from the top, it will be very challenging.

Alyssa Peltier:

Yeah, and this helps tie it all together, organizationally. This is helping driving an annual goal for the organization. So okay, let's shift gears a little bit and talk about something that's very near and dear to my heart. It helped shape the content strategy. First, the Cvent CONNECT for several years. So let's talk about your event planning timelines and strategy and where that intersects with content strategy at 6sense.

Bethany Murphy:

Yeah, I mean content is a huge part of the event, and I talked about it before. Events just can't be fun. There has to be compelling content. This breakthrough is primarily a customer event. We do have a couple key prospects and attendance, but it's primarily a customer event. And so, we want our customers to come and learn best practices, learn from each other, right? How other customers are using our platform to be successful. So in 2023, we had 50 breakouts and I would say 45 of those were customer led breakouts, 12 keynotes, over 75 speakers. And we're just really thoughtful in the way that we create an agenda because again, we want people to come and learn and really hear from each other.

Of course, we have our own keynotes and we have a couple of product sessions, but we find the most impact comes from customers hearing from other customers, about how they're using 6sense in their roles.

Alyssa Peltier:

So how do you add that creativity then into this planning process really to ensure that you're driving things forward, but also to break up the monotony of just, okay, we've got the breakouts, we've got the general session. How do you get back to that team mission of creating a real experience here for your breakthrough attendees?

Bethany Murphy:

Yeah, I think that's one of my favorite parts of events. How do we create these experiences and how do we wow our customers, prospects and employees too, right? And I've worked for a lot of companies. I've been around a long time and in 6sense, we take our events really seriously. And so, I think for Breakthrough '23, we were in Frisco, Texas and we just leaned in to the location and the theme for pretty much everything. So my team, we created a lookbook with outfit inspiration for the evening, event attire. Our final party was corporate Coachella, which people really went ... they went in on. It was pretty awesome. And we, were Western all over the place. So we had bandanas and cowboy hats.

And on our final night, we had hair and makeup because we were festival, we just kind of leaned into the festival vibes. And again, it's really just to create these events that people remember. It wasn't just a welcome reception and there were drinks and there was food, right? There has to be some other kind of experiences. So we also kind of leaned into the personalization aspects. So we tried ... we had these little buttons that people could add to their lanyards to show common interests to encourage networking. So it's like one had a book and one had a little pots and pans. I like cooking, I like reading. And just again, a way to get people to kind of talk to each other.

We had a water bottle station that we gave away these Owala water bottles that were like, I couldn't keep them on the shelves, but we had stickers. So we had all these fun. We had Rebi like our little mascot on some stickers and breakthrough and all these kind of fun western themed stickers that people could customize their water bottles and people loved that. And then for our VIP, our customer advisory board event, we had this third generation hat maker come and they could customize their own cowboy hats. So he was steaming the hats and branding them with initials. That was really fun.

And sometimes ... I mean, that was not inexpensive, but the buttons on the lanyards was a really inexpensive thing that just added a little something to the event. And so, I think there are ways to create memorable experiences that don't have to cost you a lot of money.

Alyssa Peltier:

Yeah, and I think ... I mean, that's a perfect transition to what we're going to talk about here is just kind of the value of this event and how you're kind of quantifying all of this. While it's not the cheapest thing to do luxury or up level things, you already told me that you have 100% retention of your customers from these. So what is the value to your organization to detract from a lost customer? What's the value of losing a customer or a saved customer, for example? I mean, those are the types of business conversations we need to have with our executives when we're trying to prove the investment into these types of user conferences. So let's talk about that, shift gears and really talk about the event value to 6sense.

Really the why behind your conference at large, not just for the buttons and the pins and the cute customer experience, which we love. And of course, from an event planning, that's kind of what makes our heartstrings excited. But there is the business side of this too, both the cost and the benefits. So Bethany, I know you really like to talk about budgets. I might go take a little nap while you're talking about this part, but let's start with a very important equation in your ROI calculation, which is the budget management. So it can be daunting, especially when there's a lot of intricacies. This is usually conferences are multi objective, lots of different vendors, suppliers.

You've already mentioned you had multiple locations at your hotels that you were dealing with. So tell me a little bit about some of those key considerations that you're making. Maybe a specific example of that effective budget management for a user conference.

Bethany Murphy:

It's funny, I really could talk about budgets all day. I love budgets. I think there's just something about the satisfaction of managing and reconciling and tracking everything and hopefully, coming in under budget at the end of the day. But a couple of things that I try to focus on. I think number one, keep your budget up to date in real time. I am in my budget every day. From months and months prior to the event and I'm moving buckets around and I get actuals and I'm plugging them in and then, I'm moving things. And I'm also responsible for revenue, right? So we have ticket and sponsorship revenue. And so, it's constantly trying to adjust and figure out, "Okay, where are we tracking with sponsor revenue? Where do I think we're going to end up?"

Because those are huge offsets to the budget at the end of the day, and I need to know where those are coming in so I can plan other things accordingly. So I think real time, that's super important. Number two, have a buffer. I'm probably extra crazy about this, but I think five to 10% of your budget should be in your back pocket hidden away. Maybe don't tell your CFO that it's there, but you never know what's going to happen, right? Costs always come in higher. You have consumption at the bar. Our final evening event at Breakthrough, it was a crazy party. We had a thousand people. Like I said, I tallied up the drinks after we served 7,000 drinks on the final night at Breakthrough.

That's a lot of drinks, and had I not had a buffer in my budget, I would've been in trouble probably because I would not have thought a thousand people would drink.

Alyssa Peltier:

That's a per.

Bethany Murphy:

Have any drinks. It was impressive. And then, I think third, it's super important to partner with finance and be transparent throughout the process. I meet with my finance team, biweekly. We're always talking about where we are with actuals and tracking. And again, just making sure that we're on the same page. And there's always changes, right? Finance will say, "Oh, actually we need to move this over here." And so you have to be transparent and you have to be talking to your finance partners throughout the planning. And I think by doing all those things, I pride myself on ... And again, I'm probably extra crazy, but I came in 10% under budget for Breakthrough, which is ... I don't know, sometimes I'm like, is that good or bad?

Because then finance might take money away from me for next year, but it's a good thing. Again, we're trying really hard to not impact the attendee experience, but manage the budget as tightly as we possibly can just given the environment out there and-

Alyssa Peltier:

Yeah, I was going to say, I mean, we definitely are in these inflationary times, right? So I think having that kind of obsessive nature about budget management, and I think your best practice on just plan for the unexpected is probably the best advice here, because it is quite an unexpected and unprecedented for many in the business environment right now, especially when you're working with so many different suppliers, vendors, agencies across the board. Cost can go unbridled very easily if they're not managing it like that.

Bethany Murphy:

And I think advocate to get the money that you need to put on the event that you want to put on, I think that's really important. I say all the time, I'm like, is your grocery bill the same as it was two years ago? Because mine is not, right? And so, when finance comes and says, you have the same budget year over year, but we want you to grow the event by 50%, it's like, "Okay, well that's just not going to happen." That's not a reasonable request. And so sure, I will try to sell more sponsorships and we will try to get more ticket revenue, but we can't be unrealistic in what we're asking and so-

Alyssa Peltier:

That's a very common conversation across all of our customers who I'm talking with from all different types of industries, not just from the technology software space. So this is common across any conference you're supporting or any event for that matter. Okay, so let's talk about the benefit side of the equation here for 6sense, kind of that ROI event value. I think we talked a little bit about pipeline. We talked a little bit about retention, but can you give me what that bi, picture opportunity is for 6sense Bethany?

Bethany Murphy:

Yeah. I mean, again, user conferences are huge spend for companies, right? So, given the huge line item of Breakthrough, we have lofty ROI goals to achieve. And these goals are really important. And I think we've talked about executive buy-in. In order to get executive, buy-in, I need my team to do everything we possibly can to hit these goals. And we have, again, pretty lofty goals. So our standard, I would say across the board for events is 10X ROI on sourced pipe for an event. And that's really hard for a user conference. So an event with 95% customers, your customer upsell is not going to be as much as the ACV of a new deal, right? And so, I think it's really important to set realistic goals for each of your events.

And so, we work really closely with MOPs. We look at our attendee breakdown of the past years. We look at the accounts that have registered, we look at the average deal size, and we try really hard to determine realistic pipeline goals based on historical conversion rates. And so, I would say Breakthrough is the one event that like, 10X ROI, that's super hard. But again, what other metrics are we looking at there to make sure that this event is worth the spend? And another key metric for success for us on this event is meetings held on site. And so, we use Jifflenow recently, new acquisition by Cvent. We went into the event for 2023 with a goal of 500 meetings on site, which is a lot.

And so, it's basically like we want every account in attendance to have one meeting. We exceeded that goal. We had 539 meetings held on site, and that was a huge effort. That was a huge cross-functional effort between Sales, CS, RSCs, marketing. We have all these SMEs on site that are taking these meetings. It really is a collective effort and a ton of teamwork that goes into being able to host that many meetings over a course of two and a half days. But we see value in it, and that's why we do it. We are able to talk to our customers. We're able to get them in front of subject matter experts. We're able to talk to them about issues that they're having. We're able to talk to them about potential upsells.

So there's a lot of value in these meetings, and it's become a huge component of breakthrough. And then, I think post event, we have this Slack channel, it's called WinWire. And so, it's just so amazing to see after the event, all these deals coming in and they're saying, "Thanks to Breakthrough, because that made a huge impact. We talked to our customers three days on site with nine months worth of meetings that we would've had to have if they didn't come on site." And so, we have dashboards and we're constantly looking at the dashboards and looking at our influence. Influence Pipe is another one we look at really closely. And that number is fun because when you have so many accounts going to break through, that influence number is pretty high.

But again, we just want to make sure that we're doing everything we can to drive value for this event so that we're able to keep doing it year after year and able to keep getting our CFO and our CEO to sign off on the budget because it's not an inexpensive event at all.

Alyssa Peltier:

Right. Well, and it sounds like you all have a pretty balanced way of looking at the value of this conference, right? I think a lot of organizations default to Pipeline as the only metric, but I think I just alluded to this. Conferences are multi objective. And to your point, for breakthrough, it's 95% customers. So, it's not all about pure new business coming in. It really is about retaining the existing and then upselling them on new products too. So let's talk a little bit more about these other phases of the customer journey. There's also top of funnel type of activity, brand awareness, brand affinity. 

 

And then, there's also the down funnel opportunities on the customer adoption, these raving fans, customer loyalty. Oddly enough, those two kind of intersect the brand affinity and customer loyalty. So let's talk a little bit more about how you're driving those experiences, a little bit more depth and more strategically than what we talked about already. And then, proving value across those other stages of the journey. Beyond that, just the lead acquisition piece, not just pipelines. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?

Bethany Murphy:

Yeah, so I think we kind of touched on this a little bit earlier too, but events really have an amazing opportunity to create brand affinity and 6sense, I always say this, has a ton of fan boys and girls, which almost makes my job harder. It's like the expectations are really high, and we're constantly trying to raise the bar and create these memorable and amazing experiences that leave our customers wanting to come back year after year. And I think that's really important. And I think the events go a long way in creating brand loyalty. And that's in large part to our amazing CS team. Again, we talked about this, but we meet with every customer onsite at Breakthrough, sometimes more than once. To ensure we're understanding their needs, we're doing our best to help them get the most out of 6sense and relationships.

The relationships that our CS team is able to build with our customers is really important, and we're so lucky that events have the opportunity to bring them together and to nurture these relationships. And then, I think renewals, and we've touched on this, 100% of accounts that attended Breakthrough over the last two years have renewed. That's pretty amazing. And that goes a long way in helping our team drive attendance not only to Breakthrough, but to all of our events. And so, I think when you're able to create an events program that sales and CS support rate and they understand the incredible impact that events can have, it makes them so much more eager to help you get people to any of your events.

And so, we do dinner series, like I talked about. We launch a dinner and it sells out within two weeks. I mean, we very rarely struggle to get people, knock on wood, to our events. And I've been at a lot of companies and had a lot of trouble getting people to events. And so, I think it's a combination of the affinity toward the brand, or the dedication of our internal teams, and we do a ton of enablement. And so, we spend a lot of time ... I've never done this much internal enablement ever before. We are just on top of them all the time with all the things we're doing. And I think, again, if they didn't have faith in what we were doing, they would just not ... they would just be like, yeah, that's one more thing, right?

I think we're just really lucky in that we've created this brand and this events program that has internal support cross functionally.

Alyssa Peltier:

And it sounds like there's quite a bit of a snowball effect. The $1 invested in, you're getting X in return. It really continues. It's something that pays in dividends. So sounds like 6sense is doing some things, right? So let's talk a little bit about what did you learn last year that you're kind of applying to this year's plan, this year's strategy, this year's experience? What are some of those key takeaways that you're applying to your next year's approach?

Bethany Murphy:

It's very easy to look back at an event and be critical and overanalyze and think about how we could have done better as planners. Most of us are type A, OCD people, and that's why we're successful. But I think for Breakthrough '23, I would say I should have ramped up logistics planning earlier. And we talked about the event's never end, it never ends. Never enough time. But this was a brand new property, and I think I didn't really ... I was like, it'll still be fine. It's beautiful. It's brand new, but there were a lot of things that ... and I think we pushed the boundaries of this hotel. We were doing things that they had never done before.

Alyssa Peltier:

The drone show.

Bethany Murphy:

The drone show. Yeah, they had done a drone show. We erected these two huge tents to feed people, and they had a preferred tent bender that they'd never worked with before, but they were their preferred ... and so, it was engineering and all these teams had to get involved. So there's always things that come up. And so, I think I would've started, I would've started a little earlier, but I had a million other events. I mean, we always have ... it's not like Breakthrough is the one event that my team is working on. And so, I think just kind of thinking about those key things and starting earlier, that would've been good.

And I think when we talked about this, don't embark on the journey of doing a user conference without full cross-functional commitment from the top down. A user conference is not something for the faint of heart. And I think it's really difficult to be successful if you're going at it alone. Again, even marketing alone is not going to be successful in pulling something like this off. And budget and resources, we've talked about budget, I think resources. And that again is like, do your internal teams have the bandwidth, right? Does MOPs have the bandwidth to do all the things that it's going to take to all the emails and all the dashboard and all the things.

Your design team, our design team does a ton for Breakthrough to make sure that it comes alive, our brand comes alive on site. Vendors, it just takes a village. And so, I think just be really thoughtful about that and make sure you have resources aligned from the start.

Alyssa Peltier:

Well, I have thoroughly enjoyed this conversation today, Bethany, I feel like we could talk for hours about user conferences. Thank you, Bethany. I really do. I think these conversations are so invaluable to our listeners. I hope that those that were listening today got some great actionable takeaways that they can infuse into maybe their budding event strategy or even a mature strategy. But once again, thank you all for joining us and thank you to Bethany and thank you to 6sense for sharing her with us today. Really appreciate your insights and your perspectives from your planning point of view. Great conversation.

With that, thank you to all of our listeners and have a great rest of your week. We'll see you next time.

Bethany Murphy:

Awesome. Thanks everyone.

Alyssa Peltier:

Thanks for hanging out with us on Great Events, a podcast by Cvent. If you've been enjoying our podcast, make sure to hit that subscribe button so you never miss and episode. And you can help fellow event professionals and marketers just like you, discover great events by leaving us a rating on Apple Spotify or your preferred podcast platform.

Rachel Andrews:

Stay connected with us on social media for behind the scenes content, updates and some extra doses of inspiration.

Alyssa Peltier:

Got a great story or an event to share? We want to hear from you. Find us on LinkedIn, send us a DM or drop us a note at greatevents@cvent.com.

Rachel Andrews:

Big thanks to our amazing listeners, our guest speakers, and the incredible team behind the scenes. Remember, every great event begins with great people.

Alyssa Peltier:

And that's a wrap. Keep creating, keep innovating, and keep joining us as we redefine how to make events great.