Name: Pipeline Plays Top Demand Teams Are Running
Uploaded: 2026-07-21T18:16:18.438Z
Duration: 1 h 1 min 40 s
Description: Pipeline Plays Top Demand Teams Are Running

Transcript for "Pipeline Plays Top Demand Teams Are Running": Hi, everyone. Happy Tuesday. Thanks for joining us for today's webinar called Pipeline Plays Top Demand Teams are Running. I am Cindy Dibond, the director of demand gen for Goldcast here at Cvent. In a couple moments, I'll introduce my speakers. I'll bring them on stage. But before I do that, I wanna just give a shout out to Martech, our promo partner. If that's how you found us, Love it. So today, as we're walking through pipeline plays top demand teams are running, we are gonna explore plays that caught our eye. So inspo in the wild, I will be sharing my own as well as my two speakers, plays we love to run. So these are active plays. We are each are running with our own demand teams. And then our favorite event plays because if you know Goldcast, you know we are all about events. With that, I'd love to welcome my two speakers onto the stage. Nick, Kelly, please join me. Hi, guys. How are you? Good. How are you doing? I'm. so ex awesome. I'm so excited. Before we get started, I'm gonna have Kelly, why don't you start us off? Yeah. I work at Vector. I lead demand gen there. there. And I'm I'm from Oklahoma City. We're fully remote distributed, but a lot of, a lot of our core teammates are in Boston, actually. And, we are a contact level ad and de anonymization platform, so really great for activating kind of an ABM plays or broad demand gen motions. I'm building demand gen engine from the the ground up, and right now, we are launching our kind of first ABM, program this quarter, actually. So that's where my head has been at, like, for the last quarter. So, yeah, very excited. Eric, how about you? Thanks, Kelly. Yeah. So I'm Nick Bennett. I run events in ABM at ReachDeas, which is a gifting and direct mail platform. I also run influencer marketing there, as well. Just found that out the other day, so that's fun. So yeah. No. Excited to be here. I'm in Boston, just outside Boston. I saw some people from the South Shore, Mass. I'm in Burlington, Mass. So not too far from the city, not too far from the South Shore. Excited to be here, excited to learn with you all, and, hopefully, have a good time. Awesome. It's gonna be a quick one. So many plays, so much knowledge. I know during our prep calls, I'm excited to learn more about each of your plays. So the first one we're gonna start with is a play that caught our eye. And just for the audience, this these are plays that we saw out in the wild either on LinkedIn, our peers doing, and it's kinda what's, piquing our interest these days. So, Nick, I'll have you start first. What is a play that has caught your eye recently? Yes. So I've seen this one where, metadata actually did it a while back, And so it was custom bobble hawk bobbleheads. And so they did it for their target accounts. It was actually hilarious. It was back before, like, people were actually doing, like, cool, like, really targeted account based stuff. And so it was the real person. looked so much like the real person that I was like, woah. Like, that's kind of crazy. And so sometimes I starts in two ways. So sometimes they would actually, back when Jason Widup was there kind of leading marketing with Mark Huber, like, they would post it on LinkedIn, and they would tag that specific person, which was hilarious because, like, if anyone out there scrolls TikTok, like I do, which is probably a whole separate issue, like, it's like, you know, hey. If this isn't for you, like, keep scrolling. And so that's kind of like what it was for LinkedIn. It was for that person, but so many people would, like, jump on it and, like, tag them. It became this whole thing. But all also, I saw where you they would just ship it to them, and it looks so much like them that they would post it on LinkedIn and tag everyone. There was really, like, zero tech with this. Like, no workflow. It's just one physical thing that made people kinda feel seen. And it was so interesting to me because I think in, like, 2026 and beyond, like, most of us reach more automation. I I know I have been guilty of that as well. well, like, this kinda goes the other way. It's one object made for one person, and it really puts goes to, like, the core of what I believe in is people first. And it's like, it puts the buyer at the center, not the brand, and I think that's why people share it. I I'm gonna ask a question, Nick, just like swirly thoughts. I think when we hear about these types of plays, it's always like budget. Like, it feels really expensive to do. And you coming from reached us, like, what's your what what what are you saying back to that? Like, because it is expensive to do. Right? Yeah. It's expensive to do, but to think about, like, what your ACV is. Like or, like, if you can accelerate deals. Like, it depends what you're using it for. You're just blasting them out to everyone, that's not as special. But if you have a true ABM motion and you're not saying my ABM account list is 5,000 accounts, like, then it's something where it's impactful. If you say, like, listen. I have a 100 target accounts. Like, we're using this as a way to either get into that account or accelerate that deal. Then if you're spending and, again, I don't know the exact price off the top of my head, but let's say you're getting a 100 of these. My guess is it's probably in that, like, 3 to 5 k range all in, which isn't really bad when you think about the return on the investment on that. Like, totally worth it. I haven't seen someone do this recently, and it's got me thinking that, like, I kinda wanna do it. So for whoever's listening, like, don't steal that idea for me. Or if you can tag me in LinkedIn at least. Kelly, I know Vector does quite a bit of brand motions as well. I'm curious if you have any reactions to this because part of this is, like, for all of us, right, we're all after pipeline. But the other part of this too is, like, the brand piece of it. You know? And I think it's hard it's hard to, like, do a a campaign like this and be like, well, people will post about it. I mean, for either one of you, do I'm curious if you have a thought. Like, do you force people to post? Are you, like, just there's trust that people or will organically post? Like, how are we kind of banking on the brand piece of this? Yeah. That's a great question. We've we've talked about it a little bit. We're working on kind of what our gifting strategy is for the rest of the year. And, you know, we've seen everything from kind of, like, a incredibly, like, bespoke, gifted, customized to a person to really land a huge Target account to, like, AirPods that get you booked meetings with with people. And, personally, I love AirPods. So anyone out there targeting me, love AirPods, sending out to the wild. I love them, and I lose them all the time. But so I so I do think that there's, like, a a sweet spot between kind of the, the, like, the wild custom crazy idea and, like, the sort of, like, everyone's offering this. The offer really matters. And I think the offer really matters for the stage. I I would say, like, right now, we use kind of our swag and our brand more in in pipeline deals and also kind of in the, like, customer success realm. And we're wanting to move more into, like, how do we make this, like, a customer acquisition strategy where we're actually using this, like, book demos primarily. But but we have sort of different standards for, like, what is brand versus what, like, books medium. We're starting we're trying to figure that out right now. Anything odd, Nick, on your end? I know you do a ton of gifting. Do you do you force people to post when they receive a gift? No. I don't I don't force people to post. I think it's more of, like, you know, hey. If you found this interesting, cool. Would, like, would love for you to post. But, like, again, like, don't don't do it. Like, if it's becomes forced, it becomes scripted. It becomes something that, like, yeah, they don't really wanna do it, and then, like, they're not gonna probably answer the comments on it. And it's just it's wasted opportunity. But if someone really wants to post it, they're gonna engage with it. Like, they want to be a part of the the whole thing. So totally leave it up to them. Okay. Kelly, why don't we jump into your play? Yeah. So, this one is from Jake from Lindeo. He's he's a buddy, and he has a really cool, use case where, basically, what they did is they took so they have a very, like, tight target account. It was 500 accounts. It's not very dynamic. It's very static. They know exactly who they wanna go after, and they've tried all sorts of different things to try. They they go to a lot of events throughout the year. What they wanted to do what they wanted to accomplish is essentially getting their AEs more in front of the buying committee and just getting more used to, like, talking to who's in the account, to warm up those those ongoing touch points. So they built a campaign where the two AEs there's two AEs talking to each other about the industry that's relative to their target accounts. And they're talking about industry dynamics. What they solve for is sort of woven within, but that's not the main focus. It's not like a product pitch. It's more of, like, thought leadership type ads, like you're talking through dynamics. And the production quality, it looks like a podcast. Like, two guys with s m seven b's sitting across from each other in some chairs. Really good quality. They take those, those kind of industry verticalized type videos and then run them against, like, a one to few campaign on all these on all these accounts. And what they found is, like, they on, like, $4,000 in the first two weeks, they booked five demos with their target accounts. They had, like, a 50 to one pipeline, to spend ratio. And then as they started going to events, people who were in their target accounts were like, oh, I know you. You've been in my feed. And so they were starting to get, like, even more booked demos, like, anecdotally attributed to, like, what happened just by the nature of having kind of a face in the feed. So to be totally honest, like, that that one I find really interesting, and, you know, it's something we wanna play with at some point and figure out what our version of that is. It wouldn't work in the exact same way, I don't think, but, I think it's a really cool play, though. I feel like anytime you can, like you know, people always say, like, when everyone's digging zagging, right, like, in format and how you're presenting video, visuals. I actually just sent something off to the team today because, like, anytime something interrupts me in my feed, I'm I'm just like, why? Why? And it's it's usually just because, like, it's different or it's something I'm used to seeing but for something else. Right? So I think for podcast, it's like you're used to seeing in some the same type of promotion, but, like, doing a little twist on it is very interesting. Nick, I'm curious if you have any reaction, to what Kelly shared, if you've seen anything similar that's kind of worked on you. No. It's more of like I love when people do, like, really creative videos that make it seem like it's kinda for me, but not like I feel like text content is so easy to scroll by. But, like, videos are funny, like, memes or GIFs, like, stuff like that. Like, I I kinda love that stuff, and I find it so fascinating. It does, like, like, if I'm scrolling, like, LinkedIn and, like, again, it's just text post after text post, But, like, I see something that's like, oh, like, it's a video. Like, usually, I stop and and watch it. I know it's been difficult because, like, LinkedIn is so heavy to push, like, thought leadership content now. Like, I get stuff from, like, people selling houses. It's kind of crazy. And, like, obviously, like, I scrolled past those, but, it's just yeah. It has to be something that's unique. And I put so much of my life outside on, like, the social media that, like, it's not that hard to purse something for me and, like, get it in front of me. But, like, still, so many people just copy and paste and, like, it it just goes in the delete folder like everything else. Like, it's not that hard. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Okay. Before I jump into my play, I wanna let everyone know that we opened up our first poll. So curious what your primary event motion is today. We're walking through a few plays, and then our last round, obviously, is gonna be on events. And so just curious, are you guys doing mostly webinars, virtual events, mostly in person, a mix of both, or if you're still building out your event program? And definitely let me know any additional commentary in the chat that'll be helpful to us. So my play is actually, and I'm gonna show up both of them here because I have a slide to go with my talk. But my play actually is what one of Vector's, other customers, Araba, Tess. This play, weirdly enough, caught my eye because I was doing, some I think an exit five competition where we're talking about ads that we ran. And Tess, oh, man. This motion, she beat me. She beat my LinkedIn thought leadership ad, but you know what? It was a good good program that she ran. So what was really interesting was, like, I think when we go to conferences and events, the fallback is always to get for a booth. And I think for those of us who follow the LinkedIn, bubble, it's like the booth we're all trying to get away from the booth. We all know the booth's a big money suck. We either wanna do a booth but do it different, but then the venue won't let us. Or we're like, how can we do something booth adjacent? So Tess, over at Ayurved, sponsored a pre event happy hour to get the attendee list. And I know there's other ways to get attendee list, but for her, this is how she got it. Kudos to her for supporting the conference, but also not going all in on a booth. She uploaded that list to LinkedIn, and she ran two ad creatives. The first creative was what we've all seen. Let's talk at the conference, book a meeting, stop by the booth. And the second one was win a dog pen. I man, I was looking for I she gave me this dog pen, in person probably to remind me that she won the competition. But, she gave me this dog pen. Really cute, super small. It's a pen that looks like a long, like, wiener dog. And no surprise, like, the the dog pen ad won. I think I think if we sit on that for a second, like, I've seen ads that are like, meet at the conference and get a $100 gift card. And I think even if we ran that in this particular situation, the dog pen would still win. I have a dog pen, and I'm like, I can see why. And so I think what's interesting is, like, she wasn't thinking about targeting necessarily, like, to get the the meeting. Right? She's obviously trying to get in front of prospects either way, but she there was thought that went into the creative. I think everyone in the conference, as we all know, we going to a conference, a working conference, everyone's trying to get a meeting. And, to put it shortly, like, she zigged when everybody was zagging. And so intent data, I believe, was a big part of this campaign. She also, I think, knew that 65 of conference attendees that has visited their website before the event. And so it gave her another at bat as well. So she's running this ad trying to see who's engaged at the event. There's folks that click through, end up on her website, and, like, maybe don't even follow through, but she has a leg up and already knows that they're somewhat in the ecosystem. And so she can come at them again with another ad, or she can deanonymize and go outbound to them. We'll probably have to have her on a webinar so she can talk through that. But the the number she threw up was 11 k in ad spend, 11 on-site meetings, five post event meetings, currently three open deals, and this was, like, two months ago. So over 2000% ROI. So no booth, no, branded, you know, pull up banners. I would imagine less staff to go into the conference and work the booth for all those days, but, just just a dog pen and some ads to get and then the the happy hour, obviously. Julie, I'm gonna have to find I see you asking, like, what's a dog pen? I'm gonna have to find a picture of it. I know it's floating somewhere on LinkedIn. And I will try to share that. Or Tori, if we can Google that ad somewhere, you might be able to find it. Tori's in my back my green room, so she can help us find that out. But, yeah, I I just was like, of course. Of course, a dog pen is just what's gonna, like, beat everybody out on this this conference. Like, everyone running ads trying to give away AirPods to Kelly because they know Kelly wants AirPods. But, like, for the vast majority of folks, like myself who already has AirPods, we're like, yeah. I want a pen. Like, that looks like a dog. Any any reactions from my fellow speakers here? say, so I was just at Cvent Connect not to to you know? Obviously, it was a great event. But the trade show piece, they had dog. I don't even know the vendor that was doing this, but there was dogs in the back right corner. And, like, the line was so crazy. I don't know how they promoted it or what they did, but, like, these dogs are, like, so tiny and, like, they were the coolest thing ever. And, like, I've seen that at few a few conferences lately. I forget the other company that that does this as well. But, like, they they run ads and they promote, like, oh, hey. You'll come adopt a dog or come, like, you know, pet dogs and stuff like that. And, like, every who, like, who doesn't love puppies? And so, like, we've actually even leaned into, like, creating, like, custom dog bowls. Like, people it all goes together really well. But at Connect, like, I was just I stood in this line forever to see these dogs, and I was like, it's literally the coolest thing ever. Like, I'm not even gonna go back and work the booth. I will say there's a lot of cool things about what Test did. I love the innovation that comes around constraint, like, when you don't have budget for something and you just have to sort of innovate on the fly. But maybe the most impressive part is that she how quickly she activated. You know, like, the fact that you've, like, got a, like, a happy hour and you immediately turn them into ads the next day and then are able to push those in a meeting. So I think it's really really really great idea, and just unique swag too. she came up and gave me one, and I was like, can I have two more? Like, Right. just because they were so cute. I dropped the link. So I found the pens. They weren't Air AirBets pens, but because I have one, or three, that that's what the pens look like. So, if you are interested in pet care or the pens, please reach out to Tess. I'll I'll try to find her LinkedIn and drop it too. Tell her that I sent you her way. We'll we'll keep us moving. So we're gonna jump into actually, let's bring up the poll results before we do that. So, the first one, I mean, can't say I'm surprised. We have a pretty sophisticated bunch here on Insider, but it looks like a mix of virtual and in person events, you know, followed by mostly webinars and virtual. I think the reach relative to cost there can't be beat, and then we have folks doing in person. Kelly, Nick, curious what your mix looks like for the back half of this year. I would say our biggest investment, both in, like, time and resources, is probably in physical events in person. That being said, we we did, like, a webinar series that was really designed more for our customer base to start. And so so we had our director of CS, and she would interview someone should interview me. Someone should interview a customer, and we would just kinda talk through, like, basic uses of a vector or advanced uses of vector. But after we did the first one, we had such a positive response. We ended up kind of opening it up more to anything in pipeline or any prospects, and we started seeing some really great results from getting booked meetings out of that and helping advance deals. So, like, to be totally honest, we're kind of in that, like, okay. Let's rethink how we're doing, webinar strategy moving forward because we started to see some early momentum with that, sort of, like, unintentionally, to be honest. Like, we were kind of, like, planning on just a physical event as being, like, our main motion, and then now we're moving more back towards, webinars. But, yeah, for us, I would say the investment still is mostly in person events, this year, but I I think we are gonna ramp up a webinar motion. Yeah. I was gonna say so similar for each test. So, like, we run a monthly webinar called the pattern break, actually. And so Jess from Vector was on, our episode our last episode. And so, basically, the whole idea of, like, what a pattern break is kinda like we said. Like, how do you stop someone scrolling? And so the goal of this, like, webinar series is, like, how do you get people to stop what they're doing to care about how to implement, like, different plays and, like, each of our guests kind of walk through different pieces. So, like, Jess walked through a really interesting play that, like, Vector was doing. And so, like, we kind of we kinda similar to this. Like, we break it down, and each part of the series kinda ties into a larger over or I guess a larger theme of, like, marketing and sales alignment and go to market and stuff like that. But we also do a lot of events. So, like, we were just at connect. Like, we'll be at, it's gonna take me forever to HubSpot. I still call it inbound. I know it's unbound now, but, like, I'll still always inbound. So, you know, what we we do we have probably second half of the year. There's probably a good, I would say, five or six in person events, and then we run a monthly webinar. We do a lot of partner webinars too mixed in with that. So, yeah, I mean, events are the number one driver of everything that we do. I mean, same for for us. I would say we're definitely leaning more more into in person events probably in the back half, partly because of seasonality. Like, there's the fall see you know, trade show circuit, and so we try to do, adjacent events, ancillary events that complement that. And then I think we run so many webinars, for obvious reasons. We are a webinar platform. And so we can't necessarily do more. We are gonna spin up some, like we're gonna try to mirror field events in a virtual event setting. So ABM type, not widely publicized. And so just bring your target accounts into a small closer closer knit experience, if you will. Let's jump into plays we love to run. Nick, I will have you go first. So tell us about a play that your team is running right now. And regardless of timing, you're probably always running it. Yeah. So, you know, I've been a huge believer of g two reviews and, like, word-of-mouth and all of that. So something that I've run, you know, not only a reach test, but it could really every company that I work with is kind of like a g two review kind of velocity on autopilot. So, ultimately, we all know everyone wants more g two reviews. And, like, whether you think, like, that's the right thing where people actually go look, like, is is a whole different conversation. But, like, no one really has a system for it. And kind of the way that I think about it is three steps. So, like, the trigger, the steps, and then, like, the nudge behind it. So from a trigger standpoint, like, we actually have a a milestone kind of document. And within that milestone, there's probably about 10 different things in there. And so each of those milestones triggers a different part from HubSpot that triggers this whole g two piece. And so maybe it's a renewal. Maybe it's a win, a support save, a QBR. And so that fire is like the HubSpot workflow. Now HubSpot hands the contact to Claude. Claude drafts the ask, personalizes it to the account, routes back through the workflow, and then it goes out. So we're kinda connected through the MCP, between that. Now the the whole nudge piece of it is there's a gift waiting on the other side. Like, you gotta, you know, eat your own dog food at the end of the day. And so, you know, everyone says, oh, you know, hey. We'll give you a $25 Starbucks gift card, but, like, why not give a physical gift? And so what we do is we have a real physical thank you. Once that review lands, it triggers it. And, ultimately, that gets people to to move from, like, I'll get it done to, like, oh, I'm gonna do it because, you know, if anyone wants to bribe me or give me a gift, like, cool. Like, I'll I'll take it. Like, I don't care. And so I go through, and we get about, I would say, about a 100 a quarter right now. They were before I kinda took over this program, they were getting about seven reviews a quarter. I think most people that run g two kind of review programs are probably in that, like, seven to 20 range, but I'm consistently getting, you know, a 100 to 200 a quarter right now. It's skyrocketed the reports and all of that. I think what kind of, like, the the whole focus is is like, hey. Listen. You know, we send you a gift based on, like, who you are. It's personalized. If you don't like it, the whole thing is you can actually exchange it for something that you do want. So at the end of the day, if I send you let's just say, I'm a big, you know, Red Sox fan. They're on a tear right now. If I send you a Red Sox jersey, it's not really your thing. Cool. Maybe you're a Yankees fan. We'll never talk again. That's okay as well. But, like, you can ultimately pick whatever it is that you wanna get. And I think, ultimately, like, reviews really aren't luck. Like, they're a workflow with a gift at the end of it. And if you can figure out how to automate that, and AI has made it incredibly easy to, automate a lot of these things and make it so that you can scale it really, really quickly. I think it's a fantastic thing, and I can tell you it's made a big difference, the amount of inbound website traffic. Like, just even to our events, the amount of people that come up to us, the amount of customers that are introducing us to other people, it does make a real difference regardless of what you think of review programs, at the end of Awesome. Kelly, you wanna share your play? Yeah. I the thing that stuck out to me, I I think it it in some ways, it's repeatable. In some ways, it's not, to be, like, totally honest. But I you know, we all like to run close loss plays. You know? Like, at particularly end of year, it's, like, a great time to be like, what pipeline do we drive that we have a chance of, like, getting back low hanging fruit? I approached it a little bit differently in my last role, and there's sort of two iterations that evolved. Like, one is, in the product that I used to work for, the partner ecosystem was incredibly important. So there's a lot of people that And and in general, I think partner ecosystems are kind of underutilized in demand gen and underutilized in ABM. But what we did essentially is we instead of going back into closed loss of, like, our new products road map that came out since last time and trying to kind of get them excited around a feature, we actually created, like, a a bundled offer. So we took some of what the partner created, some of their content, some of what we had, like, kind of hosted their content. And then we took some of their bespoke data that they hadn't published. So, like, we asked them specifically for, like, stats that you say in sales pitches that you don't say, like, publicly, and this is going to, like, a private curated list of our closed loss. This isn't going on a a blog or anything like that. And we essentially built a outbound and marketing touch point to drive engagement on our closed loss. And, what we what we saw from that, we saw about, like, 12 closed loss revenue from our target our tier two accounts come through. And all of them were at kind of the ACV of our enterprise segment, which is our highest segment of enterprise. So it was it was incredibly, like, high effort because you have to work with a partner to build, to get the data, to build kind of the prototype, and and build the content assets that kind of show what they do, how it works inside your ecosystem, the bespoke data. All of that took, like, a ton of effort, but then it's automatic. And, like, we can we can have that as, like, a continuing bundled solution that we, like, show time and time again. And we have a trigger set up basically eight months from sort of a closed loss that the that all those accounts get reenrolled in. The the layer we added to that is for our tier one accounts. So for our tier one accounts, what we specifically did is we looked for companies that we had been in contact with, but it was bad timing or, like, there was no budget. And we we gave them, like because they were enterprise accounts, we gave them about a year. And for those, we actually sent them, like, a fully provisioned headset. So, like, in the the, the company I worked for worked in the XR manufacturing space. So we would build, you know, kind of like a whole bundled solution inside the headset so so we could send that as a sales touch point for someone to put on, experience it for the first time, and have, like, a really strong experience with what they would end up purchasing without having to go through, you know, a three to six month sales process before you ever get to look and and see and feel how the product works. And so that was incredibly effective. It opened up two of our, like, top whale accounts. And I know one of them closed, and one of them still in in pipeline. I'm no longer with that company, but that that was my favorite just because it's it's a really fundamental framework. But with, like, the effort of putting in, like, the the partner work and kind of pulling in the bespoke data and the unique experience, it actually opened up, you know, opportunity for us in close one revenue. We have a question, Kelly. What type of offering did you send in the email? Was that content or report? Yeah. So it was actually kind of a mixture of both. So we had sort of their we had we had two different touch points on the asset. One was highlighting what they would get access to in the, use cases that we were providing them, And then the second one was sort of the bespoke data that you only get to see kind of behind a sales pitch normally. So we had sort of the report as this the follow on from the use case. We wanna lead with sort of the value of the product before we went to, like, kind of the ROI and social proof of it. That that makes a ton of sense. Nick, jumping back just for yours, do you think that gifting is a huge component for that referral channel? Like, do you because I'm curious. Like, do you think that would be for folks that don't have a ton of budget or, like, maybe don't have gifting plugged in, like, can that work without that budget? Yeah, man. I I think it can still work, but you have to give them maybe it's not a gift, but, like, maybe there's, like, a free audit or free report or something. Like, some type there has to be, like, something to kinda give them. Unless you, like, just absolutely love the product, I just don't think there's a a huge way to scale this. I've done this for about twelve years now just like different g two programs. I've tried both, like, without gifting, with gifting. Like, what does that gift actually look like? Is it more of like a, like, donating to a charity of their choice? Like, stuff like that. But I think it's, like, ultimately, if they're happy, they're gonna wanna leave a review regardless if you ask them or not. Like, I think there's just always gonna be happy customers that just wanna leave reviews. But then, like, hey. If you know, some people just really put a lot into these programs and wanna scale them. And if you wanna get into that, like, 100 to 200 a quarter range, like, you have to figure out a way creative way to get people. And I'm not saying, like, you're bribing them. Ultimately, you're incentivizing someone to leave, you know, feedback, whether it's negative, neutral, or positive. Like, I don't care what the feedback is. I just want you to leave it because then I can route that to the the direct people as well. And I think so many people think that, like, gifting with those types of programs are considered a bribe. But, again, you're not saying you're you're bribing someone. You're just ultimately incentivizing someone for feedback. And same with me. Like, I I can't tell you how many, like like, just the amount of tech that I bought, like, the amount of companies that say, like, hey. Can you leave a program? Every single one of them now are leveraging, like, gifting. And, usually, it's it's a lot of gift cards, which is super easy to to leverage these days. You can even buy them off Amazon or something. But, like, hey. You know, leave a review. We'll send you a $20, like, Starbucks gift card to go grab coffee or something like that. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. I do think the three of us is tend to, to, focus on new business. scale, it up. with, like, what Nick's talking about, there's so much opportunity from, like, an expansion, retention standpoint, upsell, cross sell, all of that. And so I think reviews are a really easy starting point for a lot of those activities. And so I hope I hope some folks I know we have customer marketers on here from time to time. I hope, please chime in if you guys are seeing results with that, or if you're anything anything similar. I I do so I I agree with you there a 100%, but I do think the amount of people that say, like, hey. Listen. It's just like, you know, Gartner and all these other companies out there. Like, people do check those out and, like, read those reports. Like, it is a great way. We do see a lot of, like, net new come from it that just read the g two piece of it versus just, like, expansions. So you can run that entire motion through it as well. Do you find that like, I'm curious for myself. Do you find that those tend to be more smaller type deals? Because there's been, like, within our marketing team, where our point of view is, like, folks enterprise folks don't tend to come in that way. I mean, I it's I've definitely seen more, like, SMB mid market, but there has been I know in the last year, there has been at least one or two enterprise customers that have come that way for sure. And it's probably a lot less, like you said, than the others, but, like, SMB mid market heavy, Enterprise, very few. like, that's the other whole piece. You know, I'm not promoting g two by any means, but, like, they they have a whole LLM partnership with, like, all of these things now. So they also surface like, hey. What phrases are showing up within the l l l m's that then tie back to g two? So, like, it's I end up put doing a LinkedIn post about this while back, but it's so crazy to see, like, what people are searching and then where you kinda come up in that conversation as well and what platforms. So, like, that's a whole different kind of piece that, like, they have in their platform now that you can start to see and and mold, like, what content you're putting out there as well. Awesome. I'm gonna share my play. And our play, you may have heard me talk about this before, but it's, an SDR webinar playbook that we run. It's something that we experimented, I believe, around this time last year, maybe in May of last year. We had a four day virtual event, and my BDR manager on the team at that time actually was like, we're doing so many events, so many webinars, and this particular virtual event was running across four days. We're gonna work it like an in person event. And what that meant for us was tracking every registrant pre event, reaching out to our target account list pre event as well, trying to get them into this virtual event. This virtual event, for those that have joined, it was called summer camp. It was across four days. It was all about mindshare, video. It was very thought leadership focused. We wanted folks to come in, experience the platform, but more importantly, leave with takeaways, on how to do video better and how to use their webinars or use, podcasting as a way to do that. And so our SDRs, did pre event outreach. You know? And I'm not talking, you know, book a meeting with me and come to the event. Like, they're just trying to connect with folks and nurture these leads. We're talking about, you know, connecting with prospects and saying, hey. There's this event coming up. I saw that you're involved in webinars. You might this might be of interest to you. Saw that you guys post very really regularly on LinkedIn. Wanted to share us the event. Leading up to the event, we're sending notes like, are there any questions that I can have my speakers, you know, address for you? So that VIP experience because people's time are is valuable. Right? And so if they're joining and they have burning questions, certainly for our key prospects, like, we wanna make sure we answer those questions. And then our product has a functionality. Some of you might have noticed we have messages. So you have the ability to DM other folks during this event. Some of you may already have some messages from my SDRs during this event as well. Like, they're you know, we're here to help. We wanna make sure your questions get answered. In the event that you are in market for a new webinar, you know, platform, we would love to chat. We also use gifting very strategically as well. Sometimes we're running an ABM box that we we do pre event that's theme themed with the event. And then, you know, during the event, we might you know, someone some lucky person in the audience might be getting, a JBL speaker in their messages if you are checking your messages. And so the other piece of this too that I'm I'm not mentioning is, like, our product is well positioned to help our SDR action on this, and so we're integrated with Slack. If you're using Slack, you'll be able to see a Slack alert for when your key prospect prospect is registered so you can start your, you know, connection request then if you haven't already. The when they join an event, you also get an alert. And then I believe post event, you're also getting, some notification of, like, their activity during the event if they're answering certain polls, downloading certain assets. And so all that to say, like, we treat our virtual event much like we do an in person event without the added cost of, like, t and e, you know, for our entire SDR team, and it's something that we've seen. I gotta let me see what. I forgot. I shared the slide. 11 demos from summer camp, 2,200,000 in pipeline, and this was all from one event. And so we run one of those types of events each quarter, but then we have these webinars once a month. The numbers for a webinar obviously isn't quite like this because for a virtual event, we're running across multiple days. There's multiple sessions, multiple, ways to connect with your prospects. So, yeah, that's, that we actually also have a playbook written on our website, and so I'll have Tory drop the link to that for those who for folks who wanna learn more. And you're also welcome to connect with me, actually, any of us on LinkedIn if you have any other questions or, wanna deep dive into any of the plays we're sharing today. I'm gonna open the next poll if So curious as we go into our next round, a favorite event play, what program are you most focused on growing in the next twelve months? If it's not listed, please let us know in the chat. But, yeah, what what about you guys? What are you focused on growing in the next twelve months? Nick, I'll have you go would. I would say more more, like, webinars. I I think it's something that we do, but, like, we kinda wanna spin off and do, like, more series of, like you know, we have the pattern break, but we we used to do a couple other series as well. So I I definitely think that because I think we got the the in person event piece pretty nailed down. Like, now it's just like it's we know what we have to scale there, which will scale, but it's more of, like, figuring out the right way to leverage at some of these events that we're gonna be at in person and tie it back to the the webinar component. How about you, Kelly? Yeah. Yeah. I think, right now, kind of our core focus, we're doing something called the ghost tour tour, which, Cindy, you were you were on with us in our last, Yes. last stop first stop, actually, and last stop. And, essentially, like, it's kind of our our VIP, dinner with our target prospects, a few, customers or, partners that come along with us. And, essentially, like, we actually do a private dinner, and then we go on a real ghost tour, which is very on brand for us. The last one with our our host was wild, and he had, like, a blue beard. And it was kind of weird, but it was awesome. So I think, like, the the main thing for us that we're folk trying to focus more on is, one, making sure that, like, at the at the events that we're being very intentional with who is in that ghost tour, like, as our our target account list overlay. I think sometimes with events, you're a little bit at the mercy of the attendee list, but we're trying to be a little bit better about actually, like, looking more around location than just around event and sort of taking the opportunity of where we're gonna be to pull in our target accounts, on future stops. So it's not just like an automatic, like, if you're in the attendee list of the event you're coming. So that's kinda one thing. And then also just, I think, kind of handling our pre event, like, driving book meetings and driving engagement at the booth is kind of the other thing that we're we're working on. Awesome. Yes. I was at that ghost tour, and it is a legit ghost tour. It's not it's not unfortunately, it's not Kelly doing a ghost tour, although that, I think, would be a different adventure, full of ghosts as well. But, yes, it was we were in San Francisco. I believe just shameless plug because I love some of the stuff that Vector puts on. Their next one is at Drive. Is that correct? Yes. That's right. Drive. and inbound. Right? Yeah. So if. you will be at. those two, send Kelly a note and see if you can fish for an invite. I we I we gotta keep moving because I think we'll run out of time. So I'm gonna have us jump into, favorite event play. Nick, I'm gonna have you go first. Share your favorite event play only because I see a question, in the chat that you said you're gonna get to for Margo as well. Yeah. So I think so what I'm gonna talk about is tiered pre event gifting with custom store portals. So, we have this thing where we can basically build a custom store portal. So think of it as, like, just any, like, shopping experience that you pop on. You can browse items, check out, ships to your house. Cool. Right? So we build a custom store portal for each event that we go to. And, again, we were just at connect. We actually didn't bring any swag with us. People were coming up to us, and they were like, where's your swag? And I was like, it's on this iPad. You wanna see it? And, people loved it. And so you stock it with local stuff for the city that you're in. So if, like, you're in Austin, for example, like, we did hot sauces, dog bowls, like, small fun kind of, like, regional, like, non branded junk. And so, like, the hook to the prospect is really, like, don't carry anything back. Pick what you want. We'll ship it to your house free. And so it's beautiful because, like, no one wants to throw more stuff in, like, their suitcase and carry it home. But, like, think about it. Like, you get home, you get another package, and it's like, oh, this is fantastic. Like, I get to open up something else. And look forward to it when you actually get home. So what we do is, like, two touches, tiered by accounts. So, like, the bigger accounts get kinda, like, the bigger treatment, and then the rules in Salesforce and how we tear them and everything basically decides who gets what. And so, like, post meeting, what actually happens is, like, say they sit down with us, and and the whole thing of this, like, store portal is into basically book a meeting, but it's to show people, like, what's possible. And if they're like, hey. We'd love to, like, learn more. Like, cool. Sit down with us. And because we sell and market to marketers and a lot of field marketers and event marketers, like, we say, like, hey. Here's a $100 spa gift card. Like, think about it. We're going into event season, fall, spring are the two busiest seasons. Like, go decompress. Like, you're wiped out. Like and people love that one. They're like, oh, this is fantastic. Like, you can pamper yourself. Do whatever you want with that. And, people really like it. So what we do is, like, we leverage like, Salesforce holds all of our, like, tiering systems, and we use, like, key play and a bunch of other kind of, like, intense stuff to be able to figure it out. And so we have tier one, tier two, and so on. Now we leverage Claude through the MCP. Claude's pulling the right target accounts based on, like, who we enrich, based from the event itself. And as Cindy mentioned, there's lots of ways to to get that event list. However you get it, fantastic. Enrich it, and then kinda go through. And then I say, like, alright. Great. Pop it in, Claude. Say, you know, what are these tiers? Based on that tiers, I kinda go right into a working document. There's no manual export, and then I basically will enrich it as needed. And then the reach desk ultimately fires the gift off or the store portal invite for each account tiered by the rules. So, like, Cvent Connect, for example, a good good play. It was recent. It was just feels like weeks ago, but it was, like, last week. And so we were able to to prebook around 25 meetings. And a lot were inbound, well, some were outbound. But gifting really isn't the play. It's the trigger, the tearing, and the follow-up gift are the play. Like, that's the wiring that ultimately fires it. Most people think like, alright. You know, you're saying, like, hey. Come in with me. I'll give you a $100 gift card, a $50 gift card. That's not really the play. It's like the the the initial gift is more to, like, peak interest and, like, get them excited about wanting to talk to you. For sure. I was blown away, Nick, that you walked into I feel like this is what everyone's after when they have space on the floor. It's like, how do you have meetings on the calendar before you get to the meeting before you actually get to the conference. Right? Because once you're there, it's just like there's so many people. You don't know if you can get it can catch them. If they're coming by your booth, can you catch them? Are they already stocked on their calendar? Right? And so I think that's that's awesome. And I just wanna say, like, the three of us on here obviously uniquely market to marketers, and we are fully aware that that's a very niche, space to be in. I just wanna tell folks that, like, if you're not marketing to marketers, these general concepts still work. And so maybe it's not, you know, gifting. Maybe it's if you have a bunch of content offers. It's presenting the content offer in a unique way. I think the point for me, what I'm taking away from Nick is, like, you know, the gift is, like, you're in with them, but it's not ultimately the end game. Like, we're not trying to get people there to be, like, so excited. I mean, for Tess about the dog pen. Right? But, like, she's trying to have a conversation about pet care with you and, like, providing that service, and that is an interesting conversation starter. Thanks, Nick, for sharing. I remember, you used to be with Alice, and so you'll love this. But at at a 6 Cents event, many years ago, that was the first time I saw, like, a store. I'm like, this is so cool. Like, to be able to pick swag and not have to figure out how I'm gonna fit it into my, like, carry on or the backpack that I brought. And so I really think that there's so much more that we probably could do with, like, a store and figuring that piece of it out. So, Kelly, please share your favorite event play. Yeah. So one of my favorite plays, we we sort of we had been doing kind of so this is, again, my last role. I was running all of our event strategy at at my last role when I was leading to DemandGen there. And, we had done a lot of, like, sort of micro VIP dinner type plays, and I wanted to experiment with a bigger bigger group and see how that went. And, generally, the rule of thumb for me, whenever you do sort of an event attached to another event, is you don't really want more than three prospects per person who can, like, handle talking to those three people. So, to to scale into a larger group, it meant that I needed more bodies, and we couldn't afford to send, like, a ton more people because this particular event was in Belgium, actually. And so, what we did, we did two things. We we kind of pulled in some, partners who we worked really closely with, and we we one one thing I like to do with with those events, every event is different in terms of what you get in terms of attendees. Some of them give you the attendee list. Some of them give you the names of companies attending. Some of them give you nothing. A lot of the ones we worked with worked at, and this one in particular, gave you an app that you can log into, and then then you would see all the details. You would see, like, first name, last name, email, and you could even, like, message them on the app. But getting that data out of the app was really painful. So we built I built an app simulator, and then I use Claude to essentially, like, pull that information out directly. And then so we have the attendee list. We use that attendee list to then build kind of a perfect list between us and two other partners. We built a co branded happy hour event, and we had about a 150 people that were very top tier, like, in our we had sort of three core segments we were going after. So we had education, manufacturing, health care, and it, like, perfectly matched kind of that. Included in that, that group of it, we had, one of our our whale accounts, which was, in the educational realm, but it was actually, like, an entire country's educational government. They came, which was kind of the win of the night, honestly. We landed a pilot with them. They're in open pipeline, pipeline right now. The scale up on it is going to be probably one of the biggest ACV contracts of the whole thing. And it was honestly because we we created an atmosphere where we had mutual prospects and customers talking to each other. So our rule was essentially, like, 15% or so of friendlies, and then the rest in terms of, like, our customers that would be in the room with us kinda added social proof, and then the rest would be sort of split between what what we were mutually going after. So that that entire event, just that one, which was much bigger than the micro, like, VIP dinners that we did more towards tier one tier one accounts, was about 80 net new opportunities from that one event, and it basically, was two x as impactful as our flagship event that we've done earlier that year. So, like, to me that what worked about it was kind of the co branding. And, honestly, like, the size actually did have something to do with it because I think a lot of times, micro events can be, like, a little intimidating. People get socially awkward. Bigger events, like, people can kind of it it feels more exciting. Like, several people were coming in and being like, man, I actually, like, want to be here more than the thing that the the event is hosting. Mhmm. So, we also had, like, some really cool, like, show and tell booths at the at the spot that generated, like, a lot of engagement. So that was probably my favorite that I ran the whole time just because it sort of went against the grain of what I thought could work. Because I thought at that volume, we wouldn't kind of get as much opportunity. We'd miss people. We wouldn't talk to people. But when we had enough bodies to kind of ban, like, how big it would be between us and partners, it ended up being, honestly, our most successful event that year. Kelly, I'm curious for that event. For, like, the in in evening or, like, in event, how much structure is there. You mean, like, during the day or or in the evening piece? in the evening piece? Like, I guess I guess just when you're on this campaign, like, are is there a run of show and, like, this is what everyone's doing? Is it kinda, like, mix and mingle? I think it's hard to know. Like, you don't want people to show up and, like, be standing. in the corners. You wanna, Sure. like, encourage. conversation. Great question. But then you, like, also wanna, like, kinda talk about your products, but you don't wanna make everyone sit through a pitch. Right? Because that just. kinda. burns the whole experience. Yeah. So we did we did kind of two things. Like, one is, there were a couple of people who specifically we knew wanted to talk about certain things. We reserved tables for them so that we could talk through some of the topics they wanted to talk through. But we had, like, an emcee, so it was the person who was kind of leading from our side. They got up and just spent kind of a few minutes, like, setting the stage for who are the people in the room to talk to about different things, who are the SMEs that weren't on our team, but just people that others should know. And we found that that, like, just setting the structure at the front end of who we are, who these companies are, where you can engage with sort of the product, where you can have conversation with SMEs. That was enough direction for for that event to really work for us. Awesome. Thank you. I'm gonna run through my favorite event play, that we run here at Goldcast. And so Goldcast has this thing where we really try hard to only put on events that we because we market to marketers, in many ways market to ourselves, we only wanna put on events that we personally would wanna attend. And so, of course, in true fashion, with a marketing team that's predominantly women, we were like, let's book a nail salon adjacent to and this was also inbound last year. And Goldcast has done this, like, quite quite often at other shows as well, but I was personally at the inbound nail salon event. So we rent a nail salon. We buy out the whole venue. It's walking distance from the show floor. We are reaching out to our target accounts, prospects, the attendee show list, past attendee show list. We're doing some level of, like, enriching. Right? So we wanna make sure these folks are our ICP. They are investing in tech. They run some level events because, ultimately, like, we are trying to convert these folks into two customers. And so we are booking at the nail salon offering thirty minute mani pedis or foot massages to event marketers. And part of this is that we all know event marketers are on their feed all day, probably rolling in their two suitcases full of swag that they don't trust FedEx to deliver along with their tablecloths and any other things. And so also at the mercy of sales asking, where's this handout? We're out of this. Can you go get me this? When am I gonna get my break? And so we invite them to go off the floor for twenty, thirty minutes to get their nails done. We have food, catered food. We always know conference lunch sucks, for the most part. Lines are long, and you gotta get back to your booth. And so there's food. We had eye mask. We had all the things to present and experience for them to kinda relax. And we had some sales reps there. We also had our product marketer there. I was there. And a lot of this is just to have a conversation and put a name to the face. Right? And I think so much of this with events is that's the first step. It's like, hey. I'm Cindy. I'm I work at Goldcast. I'm just checking in. How are you? How are things? What do you think of this event? If you have any interest, if you have a need, if you know anyone in need, like, this is what Goldcast does, and you leave it there. It's an event that I we every so often, I see a LinkedIn post about this activation or an activation similar to us that we ran at another conference. But I would say, like, we had, you know, most hours booked, 75%. 75% of the chairs were spoken for. And then of that hour, one to two demos at least came out of it. And so, very, very high ROI event for us. And believe it or not, the investment is not as high as you would think. A lot of Neil Salon will work with you. And so, yeah, that's that's what, my favorite event play is because that's personally one that I would like to experience as well. Four minutes left. I'm gonna jump into q and a. Our last poll is gonna be open. I won't have as much time to talk through that, but please submit your questions. If we don't answer on here, we will get you a reply. Probably in post event outreach, we'll get a a answer to your question. But the first one I see is, should we do conditional gifting, for example, sending swag after completed meeting versus offering upfront to book the meeting? So, Nick, I'll have you answer it first, and then, Kelly, I'll have you answer it philosophically, what you think. Yeah. I So, I think we do yeah. I Go it's a great question. Like, I think short answer, do both. I don't think it's like a a a not an either or. Like, you use them at different moments. So, like, upfront gifting is how you get the meeting. It's low cost, fun. Like, that's where, like, store portal could come in or something. Like, you're not really buying the meeting. You're earning a reply kinda like Sydney mentioned. Like, conditional gifting is how you reward real intent, at least in my mind. Like, that's the bigger gift. Like, you know, that that $100 spot gift credit we talked about kind of that's how we thought about it. It comes after they actually show up and meet with you. You know, interest is real. So you spend more on the people who earned it. So, like, the rule that I follow is simple. Small gift to open the door, bigger gift to say thank you once they walk through it. And I think the reason why, like, a two touch kind of works is if you only gift upfront, you attract people that take the swag and ghost. Conditional real gifting really fixes that at the end of the day. Kelly, what do you think? Okay. I mean, this might be controversial. I don't know. Nick, don't hate me. Don't blast me later. I personally would think, like, swag and gifting to me serve two different purposes. So, like, swag to me is, like, about the brand, and it's about, like, after you've already earned the brand attention and you're building brand with someone in pipeline or or or customer for expansion down the road. And I see gifting as a way to open up book meetings. So, like, gifting wouldn't necessarily be, like, about like, we we have, like, branded Lego sets, for example. Like, I wouldn't necessarily use that as the way to open up a book meeting. I might use something that would be more relevant to the prospect that they would really enjoy regardless of whether they knew who my brand was or not. So I would see them as, like, almost, like, two different strategy points. Alright. Last question for us. It's the lead up to it is basically it's very hard to get RSVPs for VIP events. Having AEs do outreach, and then, that's not always successful. How do you get RSVPs? How are you finding that you're getting RSVPs, whether for your virtual in person events? Tips for our audience here. Yeah. Kelly, you wanna, go first? one oh, sorry. I. was just gonna say one thing that we just ran that was really successful, our our VP of sales ran this, but they, we did, like, a mixology event. And so, this was this was like an online webinar where, basically, like, you got sent a a cocktail kit, and then they kinda walk you through how to make these really nice cocktails. And I think, to me, the the thing that can guarantee, like, an RSVP is the experience. Like, if you're able to, like, offer, like, a value add on the other end. Otherwise, it's just it's gonna be very difficult to get any kind of RSVP, I think. Yeah. I I was just gonna piggyback up off that. Like, absolutely agree. I remember years ago in New York, you could rent out Nike, and they had a, like, basketball court that you could, like, play. But, basically, the whole hook was, like, come and create some, like, custom Nike shoes. Again, marketing to marketers. So maybe, that was just kinda, like, what they were into. But, like, maybe it's if it's developers, maybe it's like, like an escape room where they can use their brain or something like that. It's just figuring out ultimately what your audience likes and, like, creating that experience, something that, like, they would wanna spend their time because, you know, dinners are awesome. Absolutely. But, like, a lot of dinners, you're stuck at one long table, and you're stuck at each side of it, and you'll get to talk to people. tap on that. I think is what matters. in, our nail salon. event, it came really easily because it's something people want. It's useful. It's worth their time. And so I think, you know, index on what's in it for them. And if it's worth their time, you're competing with a bunch of other folks, and so it has to be very, unique and also worth their time. Alright. We are one minute over. Thank you so much, Kelly. Thank you so much, Nick. I have so appreciated this conversation. You're both welcome back anytime. You're welcome to exit the stage while I close this out. But next month, if you wanna join us for Insider, we are running it back but a little bit different. We are gonna be going through some high level stats from our webinar benchmark report, but we're gonna be specifically talking about how to get more out of your webinar program, leveraging the data from 522 b two b companies, August 13 at 1PM eastern. I will see you there alongside with Alex Bleecker, our head of content and brand. And then lastly, thank you all for spending your time with me today. It was a blast. I hope you enjoyed it. I would love to hear, if you have any feedback for me, please find me on LinkedIn and share your feedback or respond to the post event email. We see them all, and we read them all. Hope you all have a wonderful Tuesday. Enjoy the rest of your week, and we'll see you at the next one. Bye all.