Maximizing Your Conference & Event Impact: A Strategic Guide for CEOs and CMOs
Two Templates to Drive X-team Alignment and Peformance
How do you maximize the impact of your tradeshows and conferences and make them worth your company’s time and huge investments? Industry events can be one of the top-performing marketing activities for many B2B companies. They serve many different purposes of building awareness, introducing you to new clients, accelerating deals, and nurturing customer and partner relationships. They are often a great forcing function for launching your own products or news to the market. So, how do you get the most out of them? The challenge is that in serving many different objectives at your company, there is often not an OWNER watching all of the components. An events manager in marketing is often AN owner of some aspects, but they may not have the strategic influence to big launches, galvanize the company, maximize the CEO’s meeting interests, or say no to a deluge of attendees who want to bill their own department. Huge events bridge more than just the events team and more than the standard booth, evening events, meeting space, and lead gathering. Additional categories include:
Strategic Company Planning: How does (or should) your event schedule fit into the other big initiatives of the company - product launches, momentum announcements, campaigns, etc? Often, the events team itself has little influence at this level - the CEO and CMO can influence launch dates far in advance to use big moments to drive deadlines and drive more buzz. See my blog on Creating a C-Suite Buzz Calendar here
Speaking calendar: Speaking is one of the most impactful levers and can be used even if you aren’t sponsoring a tradeshow. Prospects value (and trust) education and learning more than paid marketing. This responsibility usually sits outside of the events team, sometimes in PR or content. Pitching customers to speak at events in addition to company employees can be very impactful
Campaign integration: How does the company's overall campaign strategy consider event inflection points? Are there new designs? New product lock-ups? New customer stories? Are there new assets to deliver at the booth or in nurture campaigns around the event?
C-Suite meetings with other speakers: Often, the most valuable people to meet at the conference are listed on the speakers’ lineup. Who is in charge of combing through it to see who would be valuable for the CEO to meet - partners, prospects, investors, customers, #dreamlunch folks? Conferences give you special access to hard-to-reach people when you’re backstage in the green room. Someone needs to thoughtfully and proactively manage this process.
Press meetings: If you’re successful in pre-planning launches or company inflection points around an event schedule, your top executives might have an opportunity to brief press at the event. How do you make sure these efforts are integrated with the rest of your experience at the conference?
Invites to other companies’ VIP events: Sometimes, there are big events thrown by other sponsors that would be valuable for your executives or team to attend to build relationships. How do you network to find out about them?
The events team is often the driver but needs team leads in these areas above to be effective.
Planning Best Practices
To maximize your impact, it’s critical to have a clear action plan, a regular cross-functional team meeting with sufficient C-Suite visibility, and assigned ownership and goals. In the template below, I’ve highlighted a high-level guide for activities and owners for the core events activities and supplementary components.
The categories I cover in the template include:
Performance review of last year
Goal Setting & Planning
Campaign Prep
Speaking
Tradeshow Booth
Company-Hosted Events
Company-Hosted Meeting Space
Company Attendees
PR
C-Suite Meetings
Partner Meetings
External VIP Events
Customer & Prospect Meetings
Performance Review
As I was working on this overview template, the amazing Katrian Wong the new CMO of New Relic, shared her MEGA EVENTS PLANNING SPREADSHEET with me as well. This was originally designed for a big Dreamforce presence but is applicable to many events. She covers many of the same things I captured in my overview spreadsheet but has an even better team-planning-at-scale design with sub-tabs for each person on the team and some more detailed ideas on social engagement, SPIFFs for partner reps, deep-dive customer days, and more. Thanks to Katrina for sharing. Enjoy!
Datadog’s Event Dominance
Alex Rosenblat, formerly the CMO of Datadog, optimized tradeshows to be one of their top-performing lead sources, funding huge growth in investment with a clear ROI. Among his hottest tips was establishing an on-site booth CEO who had the power to direct and manage the whole team, orchestrate all of the efforts, and even send people home if they weren’t performing their duties. Alex had a very detailed model for tradeshows where he used conversion stats from previous years or other events to calculate booth working volume to see if they could meet and convert enough people to justify (and expand) the expense. His model included the total number of conference attendees, % of his ICP, # of people he had working the booth, # of people per hour per day they could talk to. He would add to this the downstream conversion rates to model outcomes and in-booth, per-person goals. Datadog’s booth captains would keep track of booth engagements -- if a prospect’s conversation or demo was going long, they would take them “backstage” in the booth to meet with an offsite sales engineer to continue a longer engagement while booth workers kept working the shorter engagements and hitting the aggressive per-person-per-day metrics. They started small, but based on the strong ROI they would get with his fastidious process, ultimately ended up sending 550 people to the AWS Reinvent, with 15 tradeshow people running 3-4 booths. They had a C-level area, a private meeting area, semi-private area, hosting 8-900 meetings throughout the conference. (Alex justified the ROI based on first-touch within a 6-month period). Amazing performance and scale.
Many companies are vying to be seen and heard at conferences. It takes fastidious planning, execution, and creativity to really stand out.
What else have I missed? Anything else you’ve done to maximize your company’s event attendance?
This is very detailed and well planned out.
Especially for CMO who wants perfect recommendations and increasing standards within Thier core limits.
I love the spreadsheet very honest and well planned out.
Thanks so much for sharing the truth.
You are a pathfinder.
This is awesome Carilu! Great advice and love the templates.
One I would add: Side events are always incredibly productive for meeting senior leaders in a more relaxed environment. There's a relatively new site that's collecting and publishing side events at major conferences. https://conferenceparties.com/.
Highly recommend having the team keep an eye out there, find and RSVP to relevant events, and extend their networking hustle hard into the night. 💪