Lessons from 6sense on Scaling User Conferences

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.