Chris Strom:
Hi, everyone, welcome back to another episode of the RevOps Hero Podcast. I'm your host, Chris Strom, and for this episode, I recorded it live at Dreamforce, the annual Salesforce conference. I went around and I talked to marketing leaders at five different companies who were presenting at Dreamforce. The topic I wanted to ask them was, why and how do they incorporate events like Dreamforce into their go-to-market strategy? Specifically, I asked them five questions each.
First question is, why invest in events like Dreamforce as part of their go-to-market?
Then, what are their goals for the event?
What are the steps they go through leading up to the event?
What are their post-event follow-up steps?
And then how do they track the success of their event campaign and attribute any pipeline revenue from it?
So with that, let's get into the interviews.
Ann-Marie Fleming:
This is Ann-Marie Fleming from Traction Complete. I am the product marketing manager here, and we are at Dreamforce and it's pretty wild. I'm loving it. Events is a really big part of what we do at Traction Complete, and the reason we love getting out here is really because we want to meet customers where they are now. We're in a world of remote, and it's nice to have an opportunity to go face-to-face and have conversations, show our products in real life, and just add a bit of relationship building to what's been digital for so long.
Chris Strom:
So coming to something like this is probably 20 times more expensive than putting on a webinar, for instance, but you still do it anyways. Why do you put in the time and effort to do that versus just putting on a webinar or making an e-book or something?
Ann-Marie Fleming:
Yeah, we do a lot of webinars. Trust me.
Chris Strom:
Yeah.
Ann-Marie Fleming:
We do love the digital world, don't get me wrong, but I think you just need a balance of a bit of everything, a mix, and I think if anything, through COVID, we were just reminded of how powerful being in front of someone can be, and it's all about trust and letting people see who you are authentically, and you can't really do that all the time digitally. So events are news for us because we're not just in this amazing campground. We're also doing events outside of the event, and so how do we bring people that are coming to Dreamforce to get to know us outside of this very hectic floor? And that's through happy hours, one-on-one sessions, meeting with our sales team, meeting with our CRO, our CEO, just having opportunities for people to interact with us in different ways. It's just not possible online.
Chris Strom:
So leading up to this, what are the steps you go through coming into the event? Did you do personal invites or you're sharing it across your general marketing channels?
Ann-Marie Fleming:
Yep. That's a great question, and it honestly takes an army. So one of the things I love about Traction Complete is just how collaborative everyone is. Doesn't matter if it's marketing, sales, customer success, even dev, we all get involved in trying to bring people to the right events at the right time. And so we start months ago just personal invites. Our CEO reaches out to our customers, to prospects. Our CEO is on the phone, marketing is doing all of its promotion. You work with content partners, we work with influencers, we leverage social media. It really is a barrage on all levels because there's just so much noise right now. And so how do you cut through that and say, "We really want you to come to this event and this is why." And to tell that story, you just have to take different channels and different approaches and different people to make that happen.
Chris Strom:
And then what are your specific goals for coming out of this event?
Ann-Marie Fleming:
Yeah, I think there's a lot. Of course, sales is always important for us as an organization, but I think even more than that is just letting people understand who Traction Complete is. We were spun out of a very large consulting firm a few years ago, and we're stepped outside of that shadow and we're trying to build our name and our brand and build that trust as an innovator. And so we're here really to showcase what's happened over the last year in terms of software development for us, what use cases we've been able to solve, what challenges we're taking on, and just sharing those stories and that success with as many people as possible so that when problems come up with data management in Salesforce, if it's duplicates, if it's hierarchies, if it's lead routing, if it's relationship mapping, the first words out of their mouth will be Traction Complete if we've done our job right.
Chris Strom:
Oh, nice. So then you're at the event now and then you're scanning badges, you're doing personal meeting, one-on-ones, happy hour you mentioned, and then what are your follow-up steps after this event is over?
Ann-Marie Fleming:
It's complicated. Yeah. I think that we've made it more complicated because we do so many things. Just if it was just the booth, we would be using our lead scanner and that would be it. But because we have all of these events, we do a lot through Slack. We have an army at home that we've been talking to all day long. They may not be here physically, but they're here in spirit. And so sometimes it's a photo of a business card, sometimes it's a manual process. Sometimes it's actually automation through our forums, and sometimes it's through the lead scanner, but we make sure that either we're communicating it if it has to be someone on the other end getting the information in, or if we can automate it, we'll automate it. But yeah, with so many moving parts, it requires so many different people to help make that happen.
Chris Strom:
So you're putting in badge scans, maybe create new lead records in your Salesforce or with existing contacts, you're logging the meetings on-
Ann-Marie Fleming:
Absolutely.
Chris Strom:
... the contact or the opportunity records?
Ann-Marie Fleming:
Yeah, we want to make sure too, if it was a really meaningful conversation that we capture the essence of that conversation because the person who took those notes may not be the person following up, and we want to make sure the handoff is very smooth. So I write copious notes for that reason. I want them to feel the excitement and if it's an exciting conversation. I want them to feel the relevance if it's a real problem that we can solve and make sure that when they reach out they have that context. And even outside of what we put through digitally, we'll have the conversations with the reps before this all up as well. Just make sure that it's-
Chris Strom:
Getting on the same page about-
Ann-Marie Fleming:
Exactly.
Chris Strom:
... the game plan for the follow-up.
Ann-Marie Fleming:
Exactly. Because as you said, this is an expensive event and for us, it's a big chunk of our company that. We came with an army and we mean business. We want to really achieve our goals and meet as many people as possible, have those meaningful conversations, and all of that would be wasted if we didn't capture the information properly again, in and or Salesforce so that we can follow up effectively.
Chris Strom:
Oh, yeah. Cool. And then last question is how do you approach campaign tracking and campaign attribution for this and other events?
Ann-Marie Fleming:
Yeah, so we do have the Dreamforce as our umbrella, but we have all sorts of different lead sourcing. Just like I was saying, we take all these different paths. We use our own employees, our leadership team, we use social media, we use influencers. And so making sure that we're capturing that lead source is huge for us because we need to know what's working, right? Is the employee referrals bringing in us leads that we wanted registrations to the events? Is it the influencers that are working? Is it content creation? Is it the webinars? Is it these events outside of Dreamforce? And each one of those has their own unique lead source, and we're trying to layer that in with what specifically under those umbrellas was working and resonating. And we have, again, a team at home that's really making sure that we are getting that visibility as detailed as possible so that we know what really did bring us the value and that we were hoping for.
Chris Strom:
Oh yeah, they're doing all of... They're doing the data management for all of this.
Ann-Marie Fleming:
Exactly.
Chris Strom:
What you all are out here on the show floor itself.
Ann-Marie Fleming:
Yep, exactly. And we even have, working with Slack, created a way that if all you could do is take a photo, then take a photo, upload it through Slack, and marketing operations guru, Amanda, would be the one that takes that and puts it into something valuable in Salesforce for us. So there is no reason that we cannot capture the lead. It may not be all the same way, but we make sure it works, it's effective, and it gets into our Salesforce.
Chris Strom:
Oh, yeah. Awesome. Cool. Thanks for walking us through it here.
Ann-Marie Fleming:
Oh, I love talking about it. It's exciting times.
Chris Strom:
Yeah, I agree.
Ann-Marie Fleming:
Thank you.
Laura Sweet:
I am Laura Sweet, the VP of marketing here at Riva and Riva helps capture and connect client interactions into your CRM to help close those data gaps, which can help prevent really impactful agentic AI.
Chris Strom:
Okay, nice. And so we're at Dreamforce here. And so obviously doing a big in-person event like this is a lot of time and effort and expense and budget-
Laura Sweet:
Absolutely.
Chris Strom:
... and everything.
Laura Sweet:
Yes.
Chris Strom:
Way more than just doing a webinar or something. So why do you feel it's worth it to do in-person events like this?
Laura Sweet:
Events actually are our largest budget line in marketing at Riva. There's a few reasons. So in general, in-person events facilitate a much quicker relationship development for our teams. So when we meet people, we can expedite that funnel very quickly. It also gives us the opportunity to meet with partners and clients here in person as well. And then we host activations around the events too. So I think that relationship thing is key, but also access. So access to new leads, new people that we wouldn't necessarily have the ability to meet otherwise. So all of those things really do contribute a lot of success. And then Dreamforce specifically, which is our largest event of the year, because we are, one, a Salesforce partner, and then also are building our solutions around the Salesforce ecosystem as well. We think it's really important to be here to make sure that we are viewed as that leading solution for what we do. And then also great ability to capture new leads as well for us here too.
Chris Strom:
Yeah, cool. Coming into this event, do you have specific goals or outcomes you're shooting for here?
Laura Sweet:
Always. So I think events for us, for me specifically, are always a mix of direct attribution for revenue, but then also an awareness side. And awareness is a little more challenging to measure. So as I mentioned, having a presence here is really important for us because we're an ISD partner. So just to have that here from a competitive perspective, from the audience perspective, that's something that we just, as a bare minimum, of what we want to achieve here, but then we want to obviously have revenue goals associated with the event as well. When it comes to an event that's really towards lead generation, I look for a minimum of 5X return on our investment, is what we look for right now.
Chris Strom:
Yeah, that makes sense.
Laura Sweet:
Yeah.
Chris Strom:
Cool. So now we're at the event, but what were the different steps of the process you went through leading up to the event?
Laura Sweet:
So those vary slightly depending on the event. Typically, out of the box, we have our marketing, sales, and customer success teams all working cohesively to do outreach to various segments. So we will all-
Chris Strom:
Like personal invites and things like that?
Laura Sweet:
Exactly. Again, we do it marketing the one-to-many, but then we also have that one-to-one. And a lot of it is for success rate. When you have a relationship, you're more likely to get someone to respond and engage, but then also just because of outreach that they're able to do it in tandem. Having that sort of multi-step or account-based approach drives a lot more success for us while we're here. So we have our marketing cadences, our email marketing setup, our social media set up, all channels, and then we mix that in with that one-to-one interaction with our sales team and our customer success team as well.
Chris Strom:
Cool. And then the logistics of all the booths set up and the swag and everything too.
Laura Sweet:
Oh yes, there's all that one I mentioned too. We do activation. So when we do our pre-event planning, it's for driving traffic to our booth, obviously but then in setting up one-to-one meetings with our customers, one-to-one meetings with partners, but then we also have those other activations. So we had an event on Monday evening, so we also had in tandem a plan to drive attendance for that event as well.
Chris Strom:
Like a side event.
Laura Sweet:
Exactly. When you talk about logistics, we were planning for our sponsorship, but then also for that evening activation that we did as well. So it was a big team effort.
Chris Strom:
Oh yeah, absolutely.
Laura Sweet:
A hundred percent.
Chris Strom:
And then, yeah, after everyone heads back after this, what are the steps you go through for the follow-up?
Laura Sweet:
So again, for this one specifically, it's a little bit more layered. I usually like to have the follow-up happen immediately as closely after their travel day. For instance, everyone's going to be here till today, Thursday. Friday, people will be traveling. So we won't start our outreach until Monday, but it is immediately as soon as people are back and we're still fresh in their mind. So we will have our marketing outreach happen right away. We have a cadence built for that based on segmentation as well, based on whether they attended at the booth, we saw them at the activation, et cetera. And then we'll also have our sales team. So Salesforce is great about getting our brief lead list to us pretty quickly. So we will have that unloaded in our CRM with tasks assigned immediately for the sales teams then go through their cadence for follow-up as well.
Chris Strom:
Oh, okay. Yeah, so for your evening event, you can start following up with the attendees yourself. You have the list already and then for everyone you talk to here, they're scanning the badges and then Salesforce runs all that, and then they send it out to you after that.
Laura Sweet:
Every day, actually. They're really great. Some events take a little bit longer, but Salesforce is wonderful.
Chris Strom:
Oh, nice.
Laura Sweet:
Yeah.
Chris Strom:
All right, cool. And then so that's the steps you go through afterwards. And then, so how do you then measure the success of the campaign and any pipeline attribution from it?
Laura Sweet:
This is what I was talking a little bit about earlier as well. So there is a general awareness factor that we know how many people are attending, the right people are attending, and so that we have this presence and they know the Riva logo. So really driving that brand recognition and driving brand equity. And that's a little bit more difficult to measure, but we can look at things like how many people do come to our booth. We have a floor graphic there as well. So how many scans of that happen. How many scans of our SPI go through? So we can just see that overall, how much presence did we have, that go towards that. And then did that drive additional page views to our website? Did that drive additional interactions with the social media? So that's more on just general awareness measurement, but-
Chris Strom:
Yeah, kind of different types of impressions.
Laura Sweet:
Exactly. What kind of lift did we see while we were here at this event across all channels and we report back on that. And then from a direct revenue attribution side though, we obviously then look at one, lead source. So we don't necessarily often see people at first time here, so it may not be the source of our first interaction with them, but if it is, that's a direct attribution to event revenue if a deal comes out of that and closes. So that's what obviously I love to see the more brand new lead, this is the source, we can say, "Oh wow, Dreamforce is worth that investment for us because we were able to drive this much new revenue for the company." So that's a very easy one. So get them tracked in the CRM, upload the list. We have this as this lead source score and then the opportunity source for any future pipeline.
But then also we have to deal with the multi-touch attribution, which are potentially leads or customers that we already have that came here. But based off of the conversations here, we either one, created a new opportunity out of it. Great. Or we helped push them along a pipeline of an existing opportunity. So if stage changes happen quickly, we can attribute that as well. And then right now we have it so that we're just tagging it so that we can say, "Look, this had an impact from Dreamforce," or any event.
Chris Strom:
Like tag them to a campaign in Salesforce?
Laura Sweet:
Exactly. Yeah. So we'd be able to see that from a reporting standpoint. And then where I want to evolve with Riva, I'm a little bit newer to the company, but we're actually going to allocate a certain percentage of revenue of dealers towards attribution as well. And this is an instances where it's not brand new lead that just that came out of this.
Chris Strom:
But it's like an influence on an existing contact.
Laura Sweet:
Exactly. Yeah. So just influence and then being able to add revenue towards that from an ROI perspective. Again, this is our most expensive program that we run, so it's very important for me to understand the customer acquisition costs and ROI.
Chris Strom:
Oh, yeah. So you'll be rolling out a more granular multi-touch attribution in the coming months here.
Laura Sweet:
We're actively building it right now.
Chris Strom:
Oh, nice.
Laura Sweet:
Yeah.
Chris Strom:
Are you doing it through... Are you using an attribution tool of a... Are you building your own or what?
Laura Sweet:
So again, we are a Salesforce partner, so they are a dedicated CRM, but we do leverage HubSpot for marketing. So we're building it out in the HubSpot right now, and they've come a long way when it comes to their tools. So we're able to do pretty much most of it there. Some of it when it comes to the customer acquisition cost, and I think around that, we do that separately. So take the data from HubSpot and then measure it, but everything else is done on HubSpot.
Chris Strom:
Using their multi-touch attribution tools.
Laura Sweet:
Yeah, exactly. And then feeding it back into Salesforce so we can report them to Salesforce as well.
Chris Strom:
Yeah, we do a lot of that ourselves with our clients, connecting HubSpot and Salesforce and connecting the campaign data on the contacts in HubSpot with the pipeline data in Salesforce.
Laura Sweet:
Exactly. So that's what our RevOps team-
Chris Strom:
It can work really well as long as you set it up right, it works great.
Laura Sweet:
Exactly. Our RevOps team is the one that are actively doing that for us right now, so they're living in that world that you know very well.
Chris Strom:
Oh, nice.
Laura Sweet:
Yeah, we can always leverage help from companies like yours to make it go a little faster, but did a fantastic job.
Chris Strom:
Oh, that's great to hear.
Laura Sweet:
Yeah.
Chris Strom:
All right, cool. Thanks for walking us through all this.
Laura Sweet:
Oh, it's my pleasure. Thanks so much for asking.
Chris Strom:
So tell me what's your name and what company you're with, and what you do.
Rachel Kim:
Sure, absolutely. So my name is Rachel Kim. I lead marketing at Mutiny. We're a growth stage startup that's helping companies break through and reach their target account list. We have targeted account research and a personalized landing page experience that we help people build at scale. And we do a lot of different initiatives that help companies really break into their enterprise accounts, which we've determined is the hardest set of accounts to break into.
Chris Strom:
Yeah, the most labor-intensive and the most wine and dine accounts out there.
Rachel Kim:
Yep, exactly. And also I think those are those types of accounts that are getting inundated with a lot of messaging. They require more high touch experiences, they require more personalization, they require more research and intelligence, and that game is only improving and increasing as new tools come on the market. So that's who we're there to help.
Chris Strom:
So cool. So you guys do a lot of event marketing as part of your go-to-market process, and-
Rachel Kim:
Yes.
Chris Strom:
... of course it's very expensive and very labor-intensive and time-consuming. Why do you feel it's worthwhile to do?
Rachel Kim:
Yeah, so events is a big part of our strategy. We do a number of events every year. We do three types of events. So there's events like this one where we go to a larger industry conference, we know a lot of our ICP is already there and we try to do something around that event. So that's what we're doing at Dreamforce. We have a second set of events which are very bespoke, CMO-specific, which are small, off-the-record conversations with CMOs around the table to talk about what's actually happening within marketing, trying to create a safe space. And then we have a third set of events, which is once a year, annual. Last year we did that in Guerneville, California where we do an overnight event where we bring the smartest ABM marketers, which is really the power user of the Mutiny product together to talk about what the future of ABM holds. So those are our three sets of events that we're doing. We're not just having one set of events, we have three separate strategies throughout the year that help us reach our target audience.
Chris Strom:
And that third one is like your own Mutiny flagship event?
Rachel Kim:
Yep. It's called the one-to-one conference. It happens once a year and people fly in from all across the country to go to it.
Chris Strom:
Oh, wow. Nice.
Rachel Kim:
Oh, yeah.
Chris Strom:
So with this event here, so we're at Dreamforce 2025.
Rachel Kim:
Yes, we are.
Chris Strom:
And we're doing an evening event here. What are your goals out of this whole Dreamforce week, specifically?
Rachel Kim:
So we look at it in two vectors. The first, when we do an event like this, it's really just about top of funnel awareness. If there's an important industry event that's occurring, in our case Dreamforce, where a lot of our ICP already is, we want to be a part of the conversation. So how do you be part of the conversation? You have an event, you do something.
Chris Strom:
Talk to them.
Rachel Kim:
Having events, you have credibility. We're a real company. We have real people here in San Francisco, we're part of what's going on here, we're part of the zeitgeist. So top of funnel--drive awareness. Second thing that we do is we're looking at a targeted account list. And we do have, out of that set of 50 that are here at this event, there's a set of those accounts that we're really trying to penetrate and build a relationship with or maybe move it a deal forward depending on the status of that account.
Chris Strom:
Yeah, so top of funnel awareness in general.
Rachel Kim:
Yes.
Chris Strom:
Show that you're legit and not some fly by night company with a landing page and that's it.
Rachel Kim:
Exactly, yeah.
Chris Strom:
Also trying to create some pipeline with your target accounts?
Rachel Kim:
Yes. So both of those things are important.
Chris Strom:
Cool.
Rachel Kim:
Yeah.
Chris Strom:
All right. So then when you're planning out this event, what are the steps you'd go through leading up to it?
Rachel Kim:
So we're always going to start with the target account list as a point of reference, of course. So when we start this event planning, we look at our target account, we make kind of an estimate of what percentage of that target account do we believe is going to be here. Not everyone has to be in San Francisco to be here because people fly in. So we make an estimate and then we say, "Do we think we have enough target accounts we can go after that it would make sense to invest in the events?" Because for every event we say yes to, there's 12 other events we say there's not a big enough pool or population for us to invest in doing this.
Chris Strom:
To make it worthwhile.
Rachel Kim:
Exactly. To make it worthwhile. So for this, because we knew that enough of our target account list was going to be here, we had a concentration of people that we had high confidence would be here, that's yes, let's do it. Once we decide we're going to do it, we have an entire playbook. Stella, who's here, is really responsible for some of those individual contributions related to the events, but I can speak from a high level as the lead in the marketing organization that we actually do a lot of one-to-one landing page creation using our own tools. So we're eating our own dog food at Mutiny. We build a landing page experience, we say, "Hey Alex, we see you work at Brightgrove. We want you to come to this event."
We send him that targeted account, sorry, that landing page, and we're going to use three sort of different channels for that. Number one, we're going to use outbound. So our BDRs are going to use an email cadence to get in front of them. We'll use LinkedIn ads and we're going to use LinkedIn InMail. We'll hit them across those three places. And by doing so, we have pretty high engagement and conversion on those target accounts to get them.
Chris Strom:
Yeah, LinkedIn ads, LinkedIn InMail, email.
Rachel Kim:
In email.
Chris Strom:
One-to-one email.
Rachel Kim:
With a landing page that says we specifically want you to be at the event. And we're both using those landing pages on Mutiny.
Chris Strom:
Oh, yeah. And they click on it and it's personalized just to them and their company.
Rachel Kim:
Exactly, yeah. So then they get to see the product a bit in action, which helps us sell our product without selling.
Chris Strom:
Oh, nice. On the landing page, do you try to call attention to that?
Rachel Kim:
We do.
Chris Strom:
Like built of Mutiny?
Rachel Kim:
We're like, "Hey, we built you this page, PS we built it in Mutiny to work any of that."
Chris Strom:
Oh, nice. Yeah.
Rachel Kim:
Try to be playful with it.
Chris Strom:
Yeah. Oh, nice. Yeah, that makes total sense.
Rachel Kim:
Yeah. So that's what leads up to it.
Chris Strom:
Share the event here today.
Rachel Kim:
Yep, exactly. And then we'll fill out the rest of the list. We say, "Hey, we want 50 people here." We're going to obviously use our target accounts, but then we're going to fill up the rest of religious smart people, great people. We want this to be fun. We want you to feel like you're networking. So you don't necessarily have to be on our target account list to be able to come to this, but we want to make sure there's a good concentration of target accounts, and then we fill the room with other people that we are friends and family, as we like to say, to make that feel like a really robust, exciting event. So that's the event itself. And then from a follow-up perspective, it's the same thing. We had a specific conversation. We would update a landing page for that specific account or that specific individual using Mutiny with next steps.
Certain accounts are in deals, so we might actually send an update to our AE, like, "We met this person at the events, here's what we learned, here's what we found out." And then ideally, some of these kind of introductions or conversations will lead to a pipeline generating activity and closed one opportunities.
Chris Strom:
Yeah. Are you logging them? Do you use Salesforce for CRM or using HubSpot?
Rachel Kim:
So our marketing team uses HubSpot, and that's because all of our outbound and emails and everything are being sent through HubSpot. Our sales team uses Salesforce.
Chris Strom:
Okay.
Rachel Kim:
So Salesforce less CRM.
Chris Strom:
[Inaudible 00:24:46] and all that.
Rachel Kim:
Yeah, yeah but from an email automation perspective and all our workflows, HubSpot is our source of truth.
Chris Strom:
Oh yeah, the marketing email tool and the marketing analytics and everything.
Rachel Kim:
Yes.
Chris Strom:
And they're feeding that in and pipeline is in Salesforce.
Rachel Kim:
Yes, exactly. Yep.
Chris Strom:
All right, cool. Yeah, that leads to the last question here is how do you track the success of a particular campaign and how the campaign may or may not, the attribution of that campaign to the sales pipeline.
Rachel Kim:
Attribution is really hard. We use last-touch attribution-
Chris Strom:
Theme of the year, I think.
Rachel Kim:
Yeah. So we use last-touch attribution at Mutiny because we're still in an early stage business that doesn't want to spend a ton of cycles on like, I don't know, more robust attribution models, but every time an activity on an account occurs, we're obviously logging that in our CRM. And so when we have a closed one, we'll look at every touch point. And if an event was part of that touch point, then we say that the event was part of the decision-making process.
Chris Strom:
Yeah.
Rachel Kim:
But is events going to get the full credit? Probably not. Because ultimately, actually what's most likely going to get the full credit with the last-touch attribution model is outbound because our BDR team is very likely going to fall that every single person who was at this event for the next step, the demo or the next conversation at POC in some cases. And so outbound is probably going to get the final credit for it, but it's still a long-
Chris Strom:
Oh, just based on that model, at least.
Rachel Kim:
Yeah, exactly. So it's not perfect. I wouldn't look at us as necessarily doing anything too avant-garde on the attribution perspective, except for it to say that we know as a marketing organization, it's going to take multiple touches. And we know that events plays a big part in our ability to drive pipeline. And so we just believe in it philosophically. Whether or not events gets the final credit in a attribution model, it doesn't really matter so long as we know events was part of the closed one opportunity, then we can give some partial credit to events and we'll continue to invest in the event, yeah.
Chris Strom:
And it's not worth going through the whole long process of building out some super customized multi-touch attribution model just so you don't point fingers at each other.
Rachel Kim:
Exactly. We're a small team. We all work really well together. We have really strong GTM alignment. Everyone knows that events is helping to drive the end result that we care about. No marketer signs up to be a marketer to fight about attribution, so it's just-
Chris Strom:
Oh, yeah.
Rachel Kim:
Don't bother.
Chris Strom:
Oh, yeah. Some of them end up being forced to fight about it, but-
Rachel Kim:
Yeah, I feel like, I think we're really lucky-
Chris Strom:
... maybe that's a sign that there's deeper issues going on there.
Rachel Kim:
Yep, absolutely. I feel really lucky. Jaleh, our co-founder and CEO, she really believes in just trusting marketing and she believes in events and so she's willing to help make the investment decision that runs this.
Chris Strom:
Oh, that's awesome to hear.
Rachel Kim:
Yeah, we're really lucky. So yeah, we're going to keep doing events.
Chris Strom:
All right, cool.
Rachel Kim:
Yeah.
Chris Strom:
All right. Yeah, thanks for walking us through this here.
Rachel Kim:
Absolutely. Thanks so much.
Milissa Holland:
I'm Milissa Holland, I'm managing director of our revenue excellence practice here at Spaulding Ridge. We had three different practice areas that we had built out throughout the last seven years. We're a global systems integration partner, not only on the Salesforce platform, we built out a lot of different systems that collectively speak to each other and we lean in with a data-first mentality.
Chris Strom:
All right, cool. So that's who you are in some context. So we're at Dreamforce right now. Why do you want to go through the time and effort and expense of doing in-person events like Dreamforce as part of your own go-to-market process?
Milissa Holland:
Yeah, this is such an incredible event. There's so much energy over this week. There's so much information to learn and explore and understand. The platform is always evolving. There are constant updates and there's constant new tools that are coming out each and every day. So we love the announcements that come out of Dreamforce and we love the collaboration with Salesforce and our partnership we have with them. And we really truly love our clients. We have 450 clients here this week and we've had a lot of that-
Chris Strom:
In-person here?
Milissa Holland:
In person at Dreamforce. They are eager to learn just as much as we are eager to support them and their journey, but they're coming from all over the world and it made their way into San Francisco to this wonderful experience.
Chris Strom:
And so because of that, 450 of them here in-person, that's why you feel it's worth the time and expense of doing this compared to just another webinar or another ebook, another article on your website, things like that?
Milissa Holland:
Yeah, I think there's nothing that takes place of a personal experience and a face-to-face interaction. We really love our clients and we get to know them outside of work. They ask us a lot of questions oftentimes, "Is this a good use of their time, an investment?" We always say a resounding yes, but we feel the same. Again, not only is it our clients that are here, that we've hosted a lot of sessions where our clients have spoken about their journey and the journey we've supported them in, but we have about 1800 clients worldwide. So this allows us to then understand and share out with them some of the new features, some of the new outcomes, some of the new KPIs that other customers are experiencing. So it's not just a way for us to say, "Okay, we're here, we're present. We believe in the partnership, we believe in the product and the platform." We want to meet our clients where they are, but it's a way for also to continue to support our clients and our prospects and our future clients in the future.
Chris Strom:
Coming into this, are there any specific goals you have for this event?
Milissa Holland:
There's a lot of goals.
Chris Strom:
Oh, yeah.
Milissa Holland:
Yeah. Obviously, we love the area and opportunities again to meet new faces and new team members. So we also like to make sure we're spending time with Salesforce in the partnership. And so it's been a great experience to understand listening to the keynotes and Marc Benioff's talk around where Salesforce is being positioned in the agentic era and across the enterprise. But we also love the fact that we have Snowflake here and there's a real partnership formulating there around data and it's an area of that expertise that we've leaned into. So for us it's not just, again, building out this one technical component for our customers. We're trying to really understand the whole ecosystem.
One of the things we are doing is hosting a lot of sessions throughout the week where we've had a lot of thought leadership, where we've invited people to come join us and hear their perspective around AI, of where they're at, what their future holds for that. We've had great events and happy hours where we just really enjoy each other over a great view in San Francisco. So I think a lot of we're looking for is there's a lot of execution that needs to happen in this following this event. We've been able to scan over 600 leads just here at the booth.
Chris Strom:
Oh, wow just in three days here.
Milissa Holland:
Just in three days at our booth. And that does not include all of our registrations for our events that we've hosted and all the sessions that we've hosted. So in total, we will have a lot of prospect lists to mind following this, and we've taken a lot of documents and notes around our conversations here as well. So the technology has allowed us to do that quickly and then create those lists and understanding of follow up and execution on each of those.
Chris Strom:
Oh, wow. Oh, that sounds totally worth it.
Milissa Holland:
Yeah, if it isn't... And sometimes you evaluate that. As a go-to-market leader and trying to understand where you're going to make your investments in ROI, I think you do have to set the expectation. A lot of work goes into these kind of events. We have a team of 30 that's here on the ground from Spaulding Ridge that not only again have been meeting with partners and clients and here at the booth and hosting different sessions throughout the week, they're also making sure we're communicating and coordinating with each other on a constant basis. So we've been running in and out and joining other clients when needed. So it's been a real joint collaborative effort between our teams this week.
Chris Strom:
Oh, nice. Leading up to this event here, what are the steps you go through leading up to it?
Milissa Holland:
So much.
Chris Strom:
Oh, I'm sure.
Milissa Holland:
Just think logistically putting 30 people and they're flying in from all over the world to this event.
Chris Strom:
Yeah.
Milissa Holland:
So just making sure we've an existing system of connectivity, making sure that we're understanding which clients we're dealing, making sure we're creating a curated event for them for their experience, working with our marketing and alliance teams to invest in swag, invest in products, and invest in what we're going to be able to demonstrate here. And then we mine a lot of lists. There's a lot of list building that goes along with this. Not only the list that we get for our registration and our sponsorship, but we have existing lists of our channel partners that also are mining their lists. And so we do a lot of slicing and dicing of the data.
Chris Strom:
Yeah.
Milissa Holland:
We spent a lot of time exploring messaging and content to make sure that we're laser-focused on our message and our connection with those, where they're at and what industries and businesses they're at.
Chris Strom:
Oh, yeah, yeah. Segmenting your own CRM.
Milissa Holland:
Yes.
Chris Strom:
And defining the messaging for the different groups of people in there. Also working with your partners as they're segmenting their CRMs as well.
Milissa Holland:
Yes. Yeah, so it was daily stand-up calls, we had-
Chris Strom:
Oh, daily leading to-
Milissa Holland:
We had daily, like the last two months, it was a daily stand-up call with the team. Know before you go. We have this shared list of different files and formats and we're always constantly trying to get feedback and make sure communication is key here. And so I think it's been a great experience and journey for us at Dreamforce this year. We're continuing to learn. We're continuing to solicit feedback, what works, what didn't work. We'll have a follow-up around that where areas that we invest that we did see ROI, where areas we invest that maybe next year may not make as much sense for us.
Chris Strom:
Oh, yeah. And then after the event is over then, what are the follow-up steps you go through?
Milissa Holland:
Oh my god, so much. We are meeting on Monday as a team and we're starting divvying out a list of hot leads that we have documented and calculated just from the booth activity alone. Then we'll go through the list from our channel partners and sessions and events and we'll assign those out to a leader that's going to be responsible and accountable for each one of those follow-ups. So we've got some draft messages, we've got some draft content ready to go that's going to immediately go out. So we have some meetings that we're setting up immediately as well. We're organizing actually leveraging AI and those hot leads, which ones we should prioritize, which ones felt like the most pressing for the needs of the customers that we spoke with.
Chris Strom:
Oh, yeah.
Milissa Holland:
So we are actually leveraging our tools as well to make sure there's a level of efficiency, but a level of expedience that we're deploying here.
Chris Strom:
Yeah, I was talking to... I forget his name.
Milissa Holland:
Reggie, yeah.
Chris Strom:
Yeah, I was talking to Reggie about it a little bit earlier.
Milissa Holland:
Yeah, it's incredible. Yeah, we could not have done that a few years back. So it's just keeping up with the advancement of technology and all the tools out there at our disposal. We're going to take advantage of it. We're going to try to leverage it as well into our client's hands, but this is a great way for us to learn experience, how to create opportunities and leads and generate those pipeline opportunities as well, and then obviously go into bookings.
Chris Strom:
Yeah, so cool. And that goes to the last question then is how do you measure the success of this campaign and attribute any pipeline from it?
Milissa Holland:
So we did set out a goal and a target. We are very realistic. Normally, when you try to look at a spend of an event, we base that on around sort of 10%, 10 times that on return on investment should be the expectation, 10 times investment on bookings. So then you have to think of pipeline, and that's three times pipeline. We did make a significant investment. We applied the 10 times rule just for what the expectation is as far as bookings. But what that has to equate within the next year as far as pipeline generation associated with the campaign that we can track the opportunities, whether it be how many meetings we had, how many conversations were needed or required, what was the follow-up steps, was there a cost associated with that as well of winning that deal. So we drill a lot down on the data. There's a lot of data that we associate with our decision-making and helps us make more informed and better decisions moving forward.
Chris Strom:
Oh, yeah, okay. So you really thought through it.
Milissa Holland:
Yes.
Chris Strom:
Yeah, 10 times the billings revenue, which leads to your goal is three times that-
Milissa Holland:
For pipeline.
Chris Strom:
... opportunities in the pipeline-
Milissa Holland:
Yes.
Chris Strom:
... associated to you tag everyone with the Salesforce campaign-
Milissa Holland:
We do.
Chris Strom:
... for this event and then use the campaign for last-touch attribution for the pipeline.
Milissa Holland:
So that's exactly it. We set the expectation both thoroughly to the team who's here. We expect the goals and set the goals out as well. And then we just drive it together collectively and we'll have a lot of follow-up calls. We'll have weekly status calls as is an ongoing, a lot of nurturing has to happen as well. But we feel really good about our investment here already. We're already seeing, obviously just from the numbers alone and the reports that our chief technical architect has read out to us that there's been a lot of opportunity for us here at Dreamforce this year. We're going to take full advantage of it, execute on it, and work really hard to get as many deals through the pipeline as possible.
Chris Strom:
Yeah, it sounds like it.
Milissa Holland:
Yeah, it's been great.
Chris Strom:
Awesome. Thanks for taking the time to talk through all this with me.
Milissa Holland:
Yeah, it's been great talking to you as well. Thank you for the opportunity and thanks for chatting with so many other leaders in this ecosystem that are trying to make sure they're generating ROI, making better decisions in a go-to-market of competitive landscape. And I think we can all do this together. So thank you for the time as well.
Chris Strom:
Oh, awesome. You're welcome.
Milissa Holland:
All right.
Aishling Finnegan:
My name is Aishling and I am the vice president of product marketing here at Copado. Copado help people build on Salesforce, so we're DevOps for Salesforce, so every customer on Salesforce can be a customer of Copado.
Chris Strom:
So you're doing this huge event here at Dreamforce. You have this whole lounge, you have two booths over at the main Dreamforce area. A lot of time and effort and money went into doing all this. So why do you think it's worthwhile to do in-person events like this versus just virtual or online content?
Aishling Finnegan:
I can said for me, we're a very people company and it's always been in our DNA and our culture. Meetings like this, you get to sit with people and when people have that face-to-face contact, you get so much more information out of them. You learn, they get to see the product, you get that real-time connection. So for me, like I said, everything we do is on Salesforce. We solve problems, empower people to build what they need to on Salesforce. And the best way to do it is be with a place where the customers are, where our partners are, and you can bring customers, partners in Copado all together with Salesforce. It's all about the human connection, making sure the conversations can go a little bit further, it's just that connection test.
Chris Strom:
Get the customers talking with the prospects, get them learning from each other.
Aishling Finnegan:
Yeah. We connect customers prospects. We connect partners and customers. We connect Salesforce partners customers prospects, and we have so many types of meetings and everyone benefits because everyone's learning from each other. Because everyone's trying to do the same thing. They're trying to be successful on Salesforce and it's such a huge ecosystem and the possibilities are endless, the innovation's big, so things are constantly changing. So these events allow everybody to learn from each other and really strengthen relationships. You meet someone in person, it's so much easier than to connect with them remotely because you've already had that human connection. So I think in person then, yeah, we missed them in COVID, it's great to have them back again.
Chris Strom:
So then for this event here that you're doing, what are some of your specific goals?
Aishling Finnegan:
So the goals are everyone's got relationships. So speaking to existing customers, existing partners, meeting with new customers and new partners. So it's really about sharing knowledge, sharing what we're doing, finding out what other people are doing, finding out what our customers need, sharing roadmaps. So relationships and sharing knowledge are probably the main goals of an event like this.
Chris Strom:
Okay. So then what are the steps you go through leading up to this event here, a pre-event?
Aishling Finnegan:
So a Dreamforce event, we would probably been in planning for not weeks, but months.
Chris Strom:
No, yeah.
Aishling Finnegan:
So it's huge because I can see there's a lot of branding that needs to be done both here and stand. So you want to create an experience. So a lot of steps are first, what's the message, what do we need to talk about, just who we need to talk about with? And then how the different ways we can tell that message and connect the customers. So we have events here at our headquarters where we can bring customers, they can have dinner, lunch, all different kind of meetings with us. The booth is from our prospects because that's normally people who don't know who we are that go to the event and they'll walk by the stand, find out what card to do. If they're really interested, we normally would send them to here and then we can have a more closer connected conversation with them. So a lot of fun, a lot of fun. Meet existing customers to market to prospects, get the message out there and to get the message ready. A lot of fun.
Chris Strom:
Oh, yeah. And then not to mention the invites and the sign-ups and the attendance tracking and all of that too.
Aishling Finnegan:
It's only you're tracking attendance, you're tracking the stands. And we also got to make sure you're making meetings, you're meeting with most of those meetings and then the follow-up one, so you've got pre-events, that's where you're trying to get the connections you want to see and speak to then at the event you speak to them and there's obviously going to be the follow-up. You meet new people, then you have to make sure make the connection and follow up again. So it's all about ground building, relationship building, existing event.
Chris Strom:
So what are the specific post-event steps that you do?
Aishling Finnegan:
Post-events where the first thing we do is we have scans everybody. So we thank everybody. So we make sure we make a connection with everyone we spoke to and scanned, it's just to remind them of [inaudible 00:43:56]. We have meetings, we book meetings there. So we make sure we follow them on every single meeting that we had that was set up. So the meetings will take place that we've booked the connection for everyone we meet. They'll get an end-to-end email, get everything there. Yeah, it's just follow up. And again, it's continuing the connection as soon as we get back. So you don't want to miss an opportunity to speak to customer or solve the problem. So yeah, we just then will reach out to everybody. So the BDR team, we start calling out, sales people will start to call out, marketing people will start sending out via different marketing channels, but of course we have to just thank you for taking time and taking their right to get to know us and then as to how do we help you.
Chris Strom:
Oh, yeah. So you scan everyone, you either create or update, log the event to their Salesforce lead record or contact record Salesforce.
Aishling Finnegan:
Yes. So we would do that. Then we make that connection and yeah, we'd just follow up and then connect via like new book meetings for some of the meetings are already in place. And then the next one is like I said, say thank you and then follow up with how can we help.
Chris Strom:
Oh, yeah. All right. And then last question here then is how are you measuring the success of the campaign and how do you look at attributing any pipeline that came out from all of this work?
Aishling Finnegan:
Well, we track everything. So every conversation, every name and every follow up will be tracked. So we would know how successful the event was from a pipeline and then a conversion probably back to work for us. But it's also not just about pipeline and sales. We learn a lot about what our customers want and that impacts our map. So we will take that back and listen and say, "Are we building the right things? Are we responding to what our prospects really need?" So it's about pipeline, it's about revenue generation, but it's also about knowledge and how do we build the right things to solve the problem. So like I said, it's all about knowledge sharing.
Chris Strom:
You're getting a lot of knowledge and feedback from what people are telling you to...
Aishling Finnegan:
So it's about what we're learning and what they want. And then it's that follow up. So yeah, roadmap, its impact, pipeline generation, existing customers have connected. They're even standing their knees. So there's so much to out of the event like this. So everyone's holding the tire for the big thing [inaudible 00:46:14] and the follow-up is and making sure that we make that continued attention.
Chris Strom:
Oh, yeah. And then for the tracking itself, are you using Salesforce campaigns associated with the people to track?
Aishling Finnegan:
Of course. A lot of our stuff. Everything we do is [inaudible 00:46:29] we got our own Salesforce instance. So Salesforce is the engine that drives our business and it's our engine that makes things work as well.
Chris Strom:
Oh, yeah. And then do you do getting more technical, you do mostly do first-touch, last-touch, multi-touch attribution?
Aishling Finnegan:
Yes, of course that's what everybody's doing. But we also want a lot of that reviewing elements. We do want to make sure that we do try the multiple approach different ways that we want to do it with respect to people. We don't want to bombard them with messages and make it very irrelevant and not personal to what they want. So a lot of what we're doing is very focused around understanding the role of the person, how we connected with them, what we already know, and then how can we make that next connection meal. It's not spat, we're not just sending you method and fingers crossed that we did understand how we connected and now we're trying to follow up. So capturing information on what they were interested, why they want to know, how we connected with them and using that intelligence to make sure the next method is more personal.
Chris Strom:
Oh, yeah. How you can personalize it and contextualize it and to make it relevant for them.
Aishling Finnegan:
I guess a lot of unwanted messages and we don't want to do that. Yeah, there's no blanket marketing apart from maybe the thank you, which would be like we would give everyone a thank you plus if the next message has got to be personalized and relevant.
Chris Strom:
Oh, yeah. All right, cool. Thanks for taking the time to talk through all this with me.
Aishling Finnegan:
Thank you for coming to our headquarters here and yeah, look forward to, like I said, if you ever want to know anything else or we're very warm and happy to help.
Chris Strom:
All right. What a great set of interviews we had with the people there at Dreamforce and super grateful that they took the time to do that with me. As to my first question about what is the value of doing these in-person events, everyone there felt that there was a lot of value that comes from doing those events. The value comes from several things. It really accelerates the trust building and relationship building with the people they're looking to connect with. It's a lot easier to have trust and feel a connection with someone that you're actually talking to and meeting in person, not just a face on the screen. It's a differentiator. Especially these days, it's a huge differentiator. Everyone gets lots of webinar invites, emails, download this paper, that paper, this PDF. So in-person events are a big differentiator. It's not just another webinar. Another big benefit is that they get their prospects talking with their current customers and that's super valuable.
So it's not just the prospects talking to a salesperson all the time. It's talking to a happy customer who's actually using the product that the company is selling and talking about why they use it and how they use it. And then they also get product feedback itself from the customers that they can take back to the product teams. And then there is tangible pipeline impact. Oftentimes there's a fair amount of that directly sourced pipeline from the event. But also in addition to that, everyone said there's also an intangible brand lift from the relationship building from the word of mouth that you can't track directly in the CRM. But everyone felt that it was still a huge factor to the overall pipeline generation. So those are some reasons everyone agreed that it was good to do. They also talked about how you do have to know what you're getting into.
It is a lot of work. Most of them said it was months of planning that they were doing leading up to it. A lot of coordination across teams, multiple people on the marketing team, bring in sales teams, solutions architects team, oftentimes, partner marketing teams, a lot of coordination between those teams. And then a lot of very consistent pre-event, during event, and post-event steps to go through. So it is a lot of work and you have to plan out how you're going to approach it all ahead of time and you do want to measure everything that you can from it, even though a lot of the intangible brand lift is impossible to measure, but you can still take the opportunity to measure everything that you can. So measure and track the badge scans that you're doing, meeting bookings coming from the event, meetings booked at the event, meeting bookings from the event, tracking all of your follow-up calls, emails, and things like that consistently.
Track any other form conversions at the event or on your website from it. You can't track everything from events, but you should make sure you're tracking everything that you can. Overall, I got a lot of great insights here. I'm super thankful for everyone who spent the time to talk to me about it. I'm really looking forward to seeing how events like this evolve going forward in the years to come as well. Before we wrap up, I'd also like to ask how do you incorporate events into your go-to-market strategy at your company? Do you do it? Why do you do it? How do you do it? I'd love to hear how you approach it at your company.
So if you do events as part of your go-to-market, let us know why and how you do it in the comments below. And if you haven't yet, make sure to subscribe to our RevOps Hero Podcast here so that you'll get notified for all of our future episodes we're putting out as well. And we will see you next time.
