Host Takeover: Balancing Execution, Data Prioritization and Innovation

Alyssa Peltier:

How do we adapt our messaging so it's more relevant to the customer business? How do we adapt our support so it's more relevant to a particular industry or a particular vertical? All of that just means our technology will be more impactful and ultimately deliver more outcomes, better business results for those that are investing in any sort of event management technology, but certainly Cvent. That makes me excited. It just shows that Cvent, while very large company, is really reinvesting back into the customer experience, and that's exciting stuff for people that work here, because we want to do right by our customers.

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. What has been going on in this wide, wide world of events? My name is Alyssa and I am joined by my lovely co-hosts today, Felicia and Rachel, for the first time in what feels like ages for I'm going to say a very special episode of Great Events. We've been talking about this episode for a while. We're like, "Hey, we miss talking to our fellow hosts." So why don't we just jump on a podcast and start talking about what's been going on for the past, what? Six months, nine months? It feels truly like it's been almost the whole year since we spoke.

Felicia Asiedu:

Nine months. I know we love, love having our guests, but I miss you ladies. I actually don't know what's going on with you at all. What's going on in the wide world of your events?

Alyssa Peltier:

Yeah, and I will say, I'll preface that with Steven just hosted a huge senior leaders retreat. Honestly, it's still ongoing since we have some of our global leaders at our headquarters office right now. But Rachel's team, she likes to say, "The ducks floating above the water with their feet pedaling beneath it last week." Executing a senior leadership retreat week, which is no easy feat, since it's all senior executives who have quite demanding schedules and quite demanding needs of our events and our events leaders. So Rach, how are you doing?

Rachel Andrews:

It's good. No, I'm good. I'm exhausted. But honestly, weeks like those are great because everybody comes together, and we actually get to sit down and talk strategy, which involves a lot of what's going on in the meetings and events industry. So it is really interesting to hear all sides of the business come together. We are doing a lot as a company and that part's cool. Organizing it, obviously, there's a ton of micro events that happen throughout the week. But it's always good to have everybody come in and it does remind you of how much involvement Cvent has across the industry. We're not just event tech. We're sourcing too, and there's a lot of conversation around that.

Alyssa Peltier:

Events are critical to us getting our business done. We have these moments in the year. We've come on here and talked about our company-wide and our SKOs, and that's a huge inflection point in our year. I think September has another one of those moments where the coming together, the face-to-face, the in-person connection, not to mention also hybrid connectivity because we do have a ton of virtual participants that don't fly in for that, it's huge. It's huge for our business to be able to have in-person and hybrid events be a linchpin for us to conducting our strategy.

Felicia Asiedu:

I couldn't agree more. As one of the hybrid participants, it's a challenge still to be a hybrid participant. But at the same time, you value and appreciate the fact that you need to be in this meeting and you need to hear all these things. At these types of leadership meetings when you are all together, I think it's a solidification of things that you thought we were doing as a business, a clarification of the things that have become messy and almost disoriented and disjointed. Then it's like, "Nope, this is the direction that we're actually going in." Then a chance to just ask questions. I really love the fact that within those internal meetings, everybody gets a chance to speak. I know it's hard for people that are the introverts and I know we've done podcasts on that to really pipe up on those big, big meetings, but there is an openness to it. We've done a lot of studies and research on the value of internal events and we live and breathe it and we do them. And Rachel, your team's absolutely fielding it.

Alyssa Peltier:

We take it for granted. It's like, "No, this was a massive conference that just took place." So I think our opening today's podcast with, "Rachel, how you doing?"

Rachel Andrews:

That's a trick question. I'm very blessed that we have a lot going on. But with that come challenges. I think everyone in the industry feels like ... We're at what? Month nine of the year? But the joke is we're on month nine of like ... We're on month three or year three of this year. That's how it feels for us. There's just a lot going on. But we're staffing up and we're looking towards 2025, so I'm not going to go into the negative Nancy mode. I think all event profs right now are just feeling the pressure because of how important events are and how demanding they've become. Now that we're expected to be data scientists all the time, we have to have time to do both. Our company is pressuring me to do more of that. That is totally fair. It's just like how do you level yourself up, get out of the execution and into that data mindset, is also a challenge for me right now, which I'm sure it is for a lot of event leaders.

Alyssa Peltier:

Those are completely different muscles to flex and it's not that easy to jump from one to the other, to be on total execution tactical mode.

Felicia Asiedu:

I was going to say and have the time. Because I know Rachel and I are knee-deep in doing planning, executing Cvent CONNECT Europe, alongside lots of accelerates. But I also know that Rachel's knee-deep in planning Cvent CONNECT 2025. For a lot of event planners, this year is finished. Not finished in execution, but in their minds, they're already planning for every single event that's happening next year. So it's like you are running ... Like you said, it's like a year within a year within a year for you, because you're having to think and your team's having to think about, "Did that work last year?," which is technically January, and then, "Can we do it again?" It is just a lot to really think about. We've been pulling out data on even RFID for our event for CONNECT Europe, of where were people walking? Should we do that again? Should we let them walk there again? It's like we put food there. I don't know.

Alyssa Peltier:

It's really funny because I'm looking at some of the notes that I was thinking about, like how can I reflect on what I've been talking about and bring that to the conversation today? I am thinking back in the conversation I had with Jared. He's on our digital analytics team. I think there's an acknowledgement that we're bringing in new players to the space who may not be as fluent in the meetings and event space, but certainly bring a different flavor to the data and analytics side of the conversation and certainly a digital backbone. But there's still the event data that has to be managed too. It's just data, data everywhere. That's still a core competency of the meetings and events team that your digital analytics team isn't necessarily going to care about. They're not going to be looking at the intricacies of foot traffic at 2:00 PM on a Tuesday during your London event. You have to pull that, you have to harvest it, you have to know what it means and react to it. It's just there is a lot to do.

Rachel Andrews:

So one of the things I'm praying, and I know it's happening, but I was talking to our VP of product marketing last week. I said, "Isn't there just an easy button we could press? We need to build this." Hint, hint, Cvent and other tech companies. But an easy button that's like, "Tell me, did my event perform?" It's AI and you just push a button and it's like, "Here are the last three years of results and here's how you trended up or down." I'm like, "I know it's coming." I know some AI probably already do it. It's just like where are those easy buttons for us? Because people like me and other planners don't have time to build it, learn it. They're like, "If you just handed it to me on a silver platter, that would be epic."

Alyssa Peltier:

Let me look for event data like I look for things in Google, and then I'll understand.

Felicia Asiedu:

It's so funny. Okay, so here's a funny thing about AI. Not to pitch our products in our podcast, so that would be abhorrent. But I remember asking the hospitality team, "What new features are coming in AI in our product?" They were like, "Do you know? It's nothing fun, it's nothing exciting." Then we watched the product features in our internal meeting and they were like, "You can do long string searches." I was like, "Oh my God, that's amazing." I just think people don't understand. All I want is to chuck whatever's in my brain into a thing. And then it says, "You mean this. You were really searching for these key things." Yes, I was, Miss AI. I'm like, "What do you mean nothing interesting?" That's amazing.

Rachel Andrews:

How amazing would it be to be like, "Okay, post-event survey." I know you pull it and then you have to analyze it and it's a lot of work. But how amazing would it be to push a button, that says, "Put this in a PowerPoint for me"? And you could have filters and stuff, and I'm sure you can do that in other-

Alyssa Peltier:

Or even more simplistic. Like searching through all the answers, you get a ton of qualitative results. It's like AI, whatever, ChatGPT, whatever we want to call it. What was the overall sentiment of my event?

Rachel Andrews:

You can do that now. You can put it in raw data and say, "Hey, spit out couple things, a couple themes of the event," and it'll do it now. I want it to build me a beautiful PowerPoint that is executive ready.

Felicia Asiedu:

This is where Beautiful.AI comes in, which I use a ton. Do you ever use Beautiful.AI?

Rachel Andrews:

I need to.

Felicia Asiedu:

Amazing. It does build things.

Rachel Andrews:

No more PowerPoint decks. Maybe just a report. What a novel concept!

Felicia Asiedu:

I love this. Death to the PowerPoint. I want to be able to say to the senior leadership, "Just look at the report. Just look at what the data was and figure it out." No, no, no.

Alyssa Peltier:

And then an executive brief. There's always a place for that, but that also could potentially be prepared by AI. But maybe we're moving beyond just static documents.

Felicia Asiedu:

I hear that. I think this is back to ... I know at the moment, we're assessing all the events that we're looking to do in '25 and we're looking at it through the lens of what kind of event is this? Is it brand awareness event for us or is it a lead generation event for us? And just trying to give them different criteria. I think for say the ones that we determine are going to be brand events, we shouldn't make those PowerPoints. We should just accept them for what they were and look at, "Okay, well, what was the footfall in that event? How much visibility do we think we got? Okay, done. Park that conversation." Whereas fine, if we've gone to something that we've determined specifically for leads, we have to do that data analysis. Then maybe, maybe these events we attend need a little bit more of a PowerPoint presentation.

Alyssa Peltier:

I'm going to bring this up and I'm going to just put us all on the spot here. Steven had some really interesting news over the past couple of weeks. We acquired a new company, Splash, which has been quite a large player in the event marketing space over the past decade or so. We're really excited. We're really excited to be able to take more of this field marketer events that you attend, events that you host. Certainly, Felicia was just talking about brand marketing. And really infuse that into the Cvent culture moving forward. I think Cvent has been a brand that's been synonymous with event planning, management execution. But we have new muscles to flex. But in the event marketing space, so it's really exciting news. We don't know what exactly that will mean for the Cvent platform, the Cvent universe. But it's something worth mentioning since it's quite noteworthy and it's happened in the last couple of weeks. I don't know, Felicia, Rachel, if you've had a chance to digest that news yet on your own?

Felicia Asiedu:

I digested it the minute it came out. I was like, "Yes! Hell yeah!" I've used that technology before as a marketer to build my events, and I know how easy it is for marketers to embrace that, and I want to make life easier. I always put in my bios ... My bio that's written when you go to these events and you speak, it says, "I love technology, but I love more so how it makes life easier for people that need it." So I think as a marketer, I appreciate the fact that we are investing in technologies for marketers, because we need to make their lives easier.

Rachel Andrews:

Yeah, I'm excited that Splash has an experiential marketing team, that they've just done some really cool things with, their own technology. So I honestly have just scratched the surface with them. But just the ease of use of how they use their own product for marketing. I'm sure we haven't even gotten there. We haven't talked to them about how we want to use it. But they're known for their beautiful web pages and beautiful ways of email marketing. So I'm excited to hopefully incorporate that and make our event marketing team's life easier by looking into that. But these kind of acquisitions take a lot of time. I don't know if people that are listening have been through acquisitions before, but there's a lot that goes into it. There's a lot of strategy, there's a lot of thinking through. Like how do you incorporate it into your own system? How do you keep moving for them with their customers? Because it's such a great product, we want to continue using it.

Alyssa Peltier:

It's really funny that we're talking about this right now. I actually sat with a member of our mergers and acquisitions team, which sits under our project management office here at Cvent, and was talking about maybe we should bring that perspective onto the podcast in the future, because there are so many event planning organizations of event departments that go through that. And what does that mean for not just the technology but for the team, the resourcing? So certainly, I'm going to put a pin in that and say, "We need to talk about mergers and acquisitions and what it means for your events program." It happens. It all happens all the time in every industry.

Felicia Asiedu:

So pivot, because you're like, "We should do this." I just thought, what are you both looking forward to?

Rachel Andrews:

Honestly, I'm excited because for the first time ever, we're getting ahead of the budget planning cycle, and we are really digging into ROI and prioritization. Is it going to be perfect this time around? No, but I'm just excited that we're doing it and that the focus of the business is on that. Because I really do think that we can't do it all. The more we grow as a company, the more we obviously need to do or want to do. That's fine, but we also need to prioritize what is actually an important event for the business.

I think one of the other things I'm excited about is the conversation of MQLs versus brand and how we track the importance there. Because that's something that we've struggled with for so long, is how do we say, "Okay, this is a brand show. Brand awareness show versus a truly lead gen show, and what kind of prioritization do we put on each? How much money do you put on each?" That's what I'm excited for, but also keeping me up at night because I'm not sure which direction it's going to go in. I know both are important, but how do you define the importance of each?

Felicia Asiedu:

I'm with you there. I'm here for that ride.

Alyssa Peltier:

Yeah, I think I'm related to that, Rach, is I'm excited how much more specialized Cvent is making its business. I would say whether that's understanding our marketing efforts to be more brand or lead gen specific, like the purpose-built. I think that's going to be reflected in our customer experiences as well, which is where I situated mostly these days. So a lot of the stuff that we're talking about internally, is how do we adapt our messaging so it's more relevant to the customer business? How do we adapt our support so it's more relevant to a particular industry or a particular vertical? All of that just means our technology will be more impactful and ultimately deliver more outcomes, better business results for those that are investing in any sort of event management technology, but certainly Cvent. That makes me excited. It just shows that Cvent, while very large company, is really investing back into the customer experience. That's exciting stuff for people that work here because we want to do right by our customers.

Rachel Andrews:

This is why I love coming back together, because we all are on the same page. We haven't talked in months, but we're all on the same page as always, and that's awesome.

Alyssa Peltier:

Felicia, give us what you're most excited about before we wrap this bad boy up.

Felicia Asiedu:

So I'm going to India soon and I'm excited A, to go to India, never been before. But actually, what I'm super excited about, every call I'm on now with our massive team in India, I'm like, "I can't wait to get there so we can work on this together." I can't wait to get there so we can figure out how to prioritize like you said, or how to figure out that process that I've been fighting for so long because I hate processes.

But it's more like, let me understand and I really want to get into the core of our business, so that I can execute better. I have a massive thing about self-serve because I'm a field marketer and I know my team are competent and capable to do things. So I want to understand where can we take some of that stress off of our team in India and just self-serve? So that we can go. If we need to do 10 dinners, I want my team to be able to do those 10 dinners. We're talking about tiering events and all sorts. So you can tell I'm excited, and I'm also trying to make sure that you are able to get where you need to go.

Alyssa Peltier:

I love that. All right, ladies. It is per usual always a pleasure to catch up with you both. I wish we could do this more. But of course, we need to divide and conquer and we can get all of this great content into our podcast, so such is life. But I really appreciate the conversation. I hope you felt the same. And with that, listeners, we hope you have a great rest of the week. We'll see you next time.

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.