Cultivating Your Marketing Approach for Customer Trust With Julie Liu of AvePoint

Plan Better EventsSmart Event TipsLeadership InsightsPodcast

Aug 11

With Guest Julie Liu, Senior Vice President of Global Marketing at AvePoint

Julie Liu is the Senior Vice President of Global Marketing at AvePoint, a SaaS and data management platform that manages and protects data to secure collaboration in the Microsoft cloud, SharePoint, Salesforce, and Google. Julie is an industry-recognized marketing leader, most recently mentoring others to create scalable marketing strategies, launching a sustainable global partner program, and establishing AvePoint as a publicly-traded company.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn: How Julie Liu shifted her marketing strategy during the pandemic

Julie’s tips for creating targeted content
AvePoint’s approach to resolving audience needs
Julie shares where to acquire industry knowledge and how to hone your marketing skills
The benefits of hosting live events for customers
How to build trust with your customers and team
What companies should consider when working remotely

In this episode…

With the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses have been forced to alter their marketing approach to accommodate the resulting decline in attention spans and shift in customer demands. So, how can you adapt your campaign to effectively reach your audience and solve their most pressing issues?

Creating a serviceable marketing campaign requires understanding your audience’s needs. Julie Liu says that one way to achieve this is to create a brand survey that generates feedback from customers. From there, you can establish your intention and coordinate a short, informative virtual event that addresses the pain points outlined in the survey. Focusing on the knowledge you can provide to your clients will allow you to build trust and meaningful relationships with them.

In this episode of Solution Seekers, Paige Buck sits down with Julie Liu, Senior Vice President of Global Marketing at AvePoint, to discuss honing your marketing strategy to build relationships with customers. Julie shares how she’s shifted her marketing strategy during the pandemic, her tips for creating targeted ad content, and how to garner trust with your clients and team.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by Kennedy Events.

Kennedy Events is excited to bring you “Solution Seekers”! At Kennedy Events, we create stress-free conferences and events, providing expert management and design for all your corporate event needs—from in-person to hybrid + virtual events.

Events are stressful, time-consuming, and expensive, making you feel exhausted and set up for failure before you’ve even begun.

Kennedy Events provides expert management and design for all your event needs—from in-person to hybrid and virtual. Our proven process makes the experience stress-free and even fun; freeing you up to focus on your marketing efforts, sales enablement, and leadership priorities.

Schedule a consultation today to discuss how we can guide your next live, in-person, or virtual corporate event on the road to success!

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:04

Welcome to the Kennedy Events Podcast where we feature top marketing, communications and future of work leaders and share their biggest takeaways and insights. We love these conversations and hope you will too. Let's get started.

Paige Buck 0:23

Welcome This episode is brought to you by Kennedy Events. Kennedy Events create stress free conferences and events, providing expert management and design for all your corporate event needs. From in person to hybrid and virtual events. You can learn more about us at Kennedyevents.com I am super excited to introduce Julie Liu as AvePoints Senior Vice President of Marketing Julie heads up a wildly creative global team known for doing whatever it takes. She is an industry recognized marketing leader, most recently venturing to create pandemic proof, scalable marketing strategies, launch a sustainable global partner program and establish AvePoint's foothold as a publicly traded company. She's very well caffeinated, which translates to extreme agility in response to market demands. all from the comfort of her Seattle home, though she's coming to us from an awesome studio in DC today.

Julie Liu 1:20

Hi, Paige, how are you?

Paige Buck 1:23

Good. I'm so glad you're here with me, it's really good to see you. And this is a great way to catch up. to ya.

Julie Liu 1:31

It's been like two years since we were together. But we stayed in contact through the pandemic, you know, exchanging ideas. I'm so excited that events are now back in our world, and they're picking up incredible pace and velocity now,

Paige Buck 1:43

it sure feels like that. So I'm super curious to jump in from there. Everybody, you know, I hate the P word pivot. But everybody had to do it. During the pandemic, the never ending pandemic? How did you shift your strategy? And then how have you shifted since the world that opened back up?

Julie Liu 2:02

Oh my gosh, yeah. So I think you know, when we talk about marketing, as point of reference is a b2b SaaS company, right. So our clients are not necessarily the same as you would do to entice and delight the consumer brand. So ours is really out of necessity, we build confidence for people to go faster, so that they can trust us when they need to stop that when they need something to fall back on. That's the crux of that point solutions. So when we talk about like marketing, and just the you know, how events kind of played into it, it was honestly like running an agility course, you know, we went back down in what, March of 2020, a month before that, or she a week before that I was actually in San Francisco and Oakland was kind of in like your backyard. And then we went to lock down I had just come back from your is it's alive, it comes down to a multi touch marketing approach. So we're fortunate enough to have both digital presence as well as in person presents, but to move from that capacity and say, okay, all of our demand generation, all the events that we do, where we actually engage with people that are of a different caliber, then you know, their self discovery and self journey online, goes away immediately. So then what's left? So then our live our marketing approach became, okay, what is the business need now, now that everybody is going to lock down, business still has to continue, and everybody's gone. And nobody was hybrid at that time was just 100% work from home. So our strategy pivoted to okay, what kind of digital events can we experience with? What kind of virtual sponsorships can we experience with going from our long webcasts which we had been doing prior to 2020 because it was educational, as informed, he came around with five different bullet points. And now all of a sudden, like people's attention spans where there's a child, there's a dog, things need to happen, there's dinner that needs to be cooked, there's like, you know, 14 people living on top of each other about 14. But you know, there's just so many different factors that need attention all at once. So we kind of just like 30 minutes. Now, it's like, okay, all of a sudden events came back in a rush. And now it's about finding budget for like, different activities. And also, you know, we did take a break from events for almost two years. So now, there's new folks in marketing. There's a lot of upskilling there's also just intentional event in design, to really make it worth people's time when there's so many different options of events. Again,

Paige Buck 4:36

you just hit on something I really want to dig in on that being intentional with your event design. In this. This was always a necessity, but it sometimes got overlooked in favor of like, we have to cram all this content into people's brains. I feel like it's often the case and I know you've experienced this too, that you have an ideal concept in mind where or there's this beautiful balance between socializing and networking and something fun and memorable and content. And then often demands for like squeezing in content, just kill all the fun and all the all the extra stuff and all the spaciousness. But you also touched on what happened to people's attention spans during COVID. And now it's like, in my mind, and I advise, like, we're, we're broken, we're permanently broken, our attention spans actually weren't good to begin with. Yeah, literally just shined a light on it. Because now we're all in our little like zoom and team spaces. And you could watch us like,

Julie Liu 5:38

tick tock tick over exploded in it now. It's just like exacerbating our issues.

Paige Buck 5:43

We're just like, in the moment, like, what have you done for me in the last three seconds? Three seconds, three seconds? How do you like what do you think? Whether it's whether it's virtual or live? What do you think? Successful, intentional design looks like?

Julie Liu 5:59

Yeah, I think the the idea of like, creating things with intent is that it's actually not about us, you and I can sit here until we're blue in the face talking about like, what content we think should hit the market, or like what we think that people want to hear. But it's actually about the experience of the audience. Right? So when we talk about smaller events, where we have multi session, virtual activities, you know, 10, to 15, to 20 minute sessions around it, a lot of it's just what am I getting out of this? What are my takeaways? Can I use this in a future state? And if not, then why would I tend, it doesn't have to be long. It doesn't have to be, you know, like, your brain dump of every single thing you think about ever, but it has to be curated for the audience. So now, instead of like people choosing their own path at what would be in person events, we're kind of telling them, this is what you are getting upfront, join us or not, but you will get value out of the time that you invest in it. And I think is the we're creating with intent also means like creating trust, right? Like that. We want them to come back to engage with us on multiple levels, not just events, and not just, you know, blogs and such. But across the board is a multi touch marketing strategy.

Paige Buck 7:11

So the trust component sounds to me like, and then tell me if I've got this, right. If you've successfully built trust in me as a customer, or prospect, then I am buying into your idea, like you're giving me this much content, you're telling me trust me, this is what you need, right? Now, you're gonna come away better and happier for it. It's only this long, it's not, I don't know, 10 tracks, overwhelming me for two or three days. It's digestible. It's right sized. And it's the right thing for me in this moment to have that right.

Julie Liu 7:44

Yeah. And I think it's actually even more, it's even a little bit more than that, too, right? Because when you Google something, you're probably googling for one specific answer. If the answer is nested in the middle of an event, that's an hour long, I've lost your attention somewhere between zero and 30, give you the tippet information at 30 to 32 minutes, and then continued on, you're just like, Okay, I get that those things are the things that I need, I really only needed to understand one thing. Now education is different, right? So again, that intent comes with understanding the audience and setting the goals upfront for what we're actually trying to achieve out of our marketing activities and events.

Paige Buck 8:28

How do you discover from your audience what, what they want and need from you?

Julie Liu 8:35

A few things. One, we ran a brand survey at the end of last year. So that helped us set quite a few based baselines for what direction we should be going in we are we have a phenomenal and extensive customer success team, that of which we get a lot of feedback from, we have a great sales team that has their ear to the ground, where we take a lot of direction from because that's market trends, right. And then we have a product team that basically is tied with our sellers, to really point a direction of what market needs are going to be, what solutions we actually need to bring to market and how we can get advance of that from that thought leadership perspective.

Paige Buck 9:18

So a lot of it sounds like you've a lot of like really good practices in place internally for feedback loops and dialogues across teams. So you're not silo alized you're getting really good intelligence from one another.

Julie Liu 9:32

We are and I think that was actually a practice that became even more diligent during pandemic because we were all working from home to we didn't have the luxury of time. There's a finite amount of time that you have to enter the market based on solutions and topics and problems. And that thing for us was work from home. And how did you work from home ready, right, you don't get that you for every week that we spent thinking that this could be a potato idea for us to do a webinar or to do events and things like that. You lose a lot of real estate in marketing. Yeah.

Paige Buck 10:07

So early in the pandemic, you had clients who didn't have all the tools that they needed to be successful working at a desk across the room from their child trying to go to zoom classrooms. Yeah. That was a that was an opportunity. Huge opportunity. It sounds like for you guys to give them and train them in those tools.

Julie Liu 10:27

Yeah, for sure. Both on the back end, as well as like, you know, you and I, as end users. Not all companies are as you know, tech savvy as we may be. Some people didn't have video conferencing, some people have like 14 different systems of communication. How do you dial that in? I'm pretty sure like, all the people doing the backend management, like systems were just a call. No, there are so many people working from home, there's security issues, permissioning issues. It's a lot. It's a lot. And that that time is probably the time where a lot of buyers are like, Oh, crap, right, we need something. We need some software. And hence, you know, it kinda is critical to marketing.

Paige Buck 11:04

Yeah, for sure. So you have like to say that you're making SAS sexy, how are you doing that? Especially? Forgive me, but some people would say nothing. Nothing. Microsoft is sexy, but I'm sure you would beg to differ. So tell us higher?

Julie Liu 11:20

Yeah, so so we went public almost a year ago at this time of the recording. We're currently in June, we went public July of 2021. And we did a brand survey and he basically came down to look at point is probably a company with a lot of bite and very little work. Because it is because again, nobody talks about this unsexy stuff in the back house. Right? So AvePoint you know, with with SASS and style, which is our brand campaign, with the launch of this, the well everything that comes with it comes from ads, it comes from videos, it comes from like, the what we are doing on earn a paid media, things that we will start doing with events that we may have seen a little bit of already, a lot of those different components comes down to that hybrid life, and work from home life is actually almost a lifestyle. Uh huh. Right. And when we talk about lifestyle, we almost treat all the tools that we are given as accessories, how do we make how do we elevate how we work through tools and solutions to make it easier to make you look better. So a lot of that comes from like the assassin style, motivations behind what we are doing now.

Paige Buck 12:42

I love the I really love what you get out of those, you know, you can do a brand survey and be like, Okay, people think x of us, but you seem to really have a gift for honing in on that insight, and then spinning it up into something that's meaningful for your clients. Which of those things like you just gave a really great example, where are you seeing success with that? Like, what is? Which? Which platforms? Which angles, you know, which approaches are working for you guys?

Julie Liu 13:11

Yeah, so we actually, I'll link it here in the podcast notes and such, but one of the things that our brand team actually worked with agencies on is to develop a video and at the end of the video there, you know, they kind of say the words like, Wait software company, like there's just kind of shock factor where you're kind of enticing people and delighting people with all the imagery of very high fashion in a very stark contrast. It was filmed in Spain, right? Our ad was filmed insane. And then you come out of that and you go, Wait, software company. Interesting. And the whole idea is for you to create a self journey to go and look at okay, askmen.com, like it, backslash, InStyle route. What is this? What is this? And like, what's the, what's the draw was the cache like, it's just to create some kind of little shock factor. Yeah, all the things that tie into it, the style guides, the the blog posts, all of our media interviews, all of that is kind of tied together to bring to life this idea of like, how marketing as a whole is more than just any one thing. It's truly all encompassing, and you get it from all directions.

Paige Buck 14:23

I love it. I also love you're building something. It sounds like super aspirational. I want to I want to picture myself in that image. I want to be where those models and actors are in that shoot. I'd like that to be my life. And you're telling me as pointed out me do that. I'm all over it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Um, what? Where do you go to like, correct me if I'm wrong, but you have a master's in public health. You weren't. You weren't born doing this formal education. How did you learn to do the job you're doing?

Julie Liu 14:56

Yeah, I actually was I did my undergrad like developmental economics. It's also nothing to do with marketing at all. But I also graduated around the time it tells me so I am actually pursuing a master's public health that took a that took a backseat. And that's probably going to go take a backseat for quite some time. But no, when I was doing my undergrad, a lot of it came down to it, this is by chance, a lot of it came down to the financial crisis of 2008, not knowing so I left Boston moved back to New York. And AvePoint offered me an incredible opportunity in a period of change, to to, I didn't know what I was doing in marketing, necessarily, but I do know that I am incredibly organized, that I can figure it out. And all of that came down to having a really strong team of people who knew what direction we want to run in, and given me a lot of creative freedom and a lot of creative freedom to basically go and run. And I've had phenomenal mentors that have helped me along the along the way,

Paige Buck 15:56

as mentors was that who are some of those mentors? Yeah, so actually,

Julie Liu 16:01

one of the ones that first came on board was Heather Newman. So she actually works at Microsoft now. But she ran creative Maven for a period of time, which was also a lot of event design. So and she but that was our thing, right? It was about creating enticing experiences and such. And I think that was really key to the kind of how I started doing it best, because prior to that, it was really just organizational and getting it out the door. And then Jeffrey piece, who was our CMO in 2014 2015 timeframe really taught me how to operationalize and create the rest of my marketing toolkit to bring to life all the other aspects tied in with this really strong event mentor, right. So all these things tied together has kind of led to where we are now. And even now we have a phenomenal cmo Chief Brand Officer, we have people that are really big with the ideas that can bring to life, the storytelling aspect of AvePoint as a brand.

Paige Buck 16:58

Nice and now they you have a ton of knowledge, confidence, a really robust team. Sounds like you still have people like above and around you that you learn from how about out in the broader world? Where do you go to learn?

Julie Liu 17:15

Well as a consumer of many webinars and blog posts No, I think a lot of it comes down to things like CML clubs, a lot of working with industry peers, because it is as much as we say that, like marketing is is a industry is a role as a job is actually much more nuanced than that. Right? If I'm doing something like Coachella or Lollapalooza as an event, it's very different than what I'm trying to bring to the audience around like the man generation. So we go in with these intense there's a lot of me like a lot of see I spent half my time like beating Gartner Forrester reports around the the shifting landscape of marketing. It's tremendously boring. Nobody's saying that, like even even the SAS marketing on how to market content is not necessarily the world's most like, dry and analytic. Yeah, well has. And because it is data driven, right. I mean, it's a very data driven organization, I care, I look at numbers every single day, probably every single hour, probably more frequently than that. And a lot of it comes down to in a highly competitive environment, when you're constantly trying to do more and more. And with people's attention spans decreasing, you have to find a balance around like what appeals to them almost emotionally. And I think that that's the shift that we see that becomes more personal. So this you know, it talks about Sass and style, but a lot of it is to evoke feeling, rather than just say like this is software you need Yes, yes, I can say that over and over again. But until you come to that conclusion yourself, you know, yeah, it doesn't

Paige Buck 18:55

work until you as a from AvePoint find a way of connecting to the emotion the pain or the problem that that person is having a moment or that what they're trying to learn aspire to. Whatever so you you hit on something I want to dive in on that on live events for a second Yeah, pre COVID We produce an event together for AvePoint called shift happens yeah, you tell me a little bit about exactly that like what events do for your customers and your prospects? What problem they solve for you trying to you know hook people that make you want to have a live event what you know when you can have budget and space to produce live events.

Julie Liu 19:43

Yeah, live events are all Island live events are insane. In both sense, like the the upfront cost is insanely hard to like stomach that and then also they actually produce some of our highest generating opportunities that We've had here AvePoint. So just happens was one that we partnered with you on. It's it's one where, you know, we set up goals, right, we knew that it was going to be focused and targeting our existing customers, a lot of that was making sure that they were utilizing our software to the fullest extent that they cut to maximize what they were getting out of what they were already paying for. The other component is that we're not going to be the people to solve every single problem. So we also brought in partners and had then kind of CO share their thoughts and services and solutions around how they fit into our ecosystem and how they fit into the clients perspective. And, you know, I told you, upfront, I gave you a budget. For those, those you look, we want to make this this is for existing customers, we want to excite the light, and honestly, my job here is to really just born no better term, be a good steward of the AvePoint brand and create this experience that will help them understand the value in their investments in actual life as their investments.

Paige Buck 21:08

I think one of the things you hit on that I think it's easy for us as planners to take for granted. And so I feel like I'm being reminded or relearning something I might have once understood is that when you are bringing in a partner, you are signaling to your clients, we can be we we are a solution for you. And we are a resource for you for other solutions. Yeah. Think of us first. And because we're thinking about all of the problems that you have, and all of the potential solutions, build buildings, which just steal my water, you know, that's just fine. I overuse this phrase, but that's a virtuous cycle. Yeah. Which in turn builds trust? Yes. Yeah.

Julie Liu 21:55

I mean, but that is what it is. If you think about all of our own personal relationships, it is a feedback loop. It is about it the circle, and events, live events, especially gives me that FaceTime. Yes. And I think that is one of the most important things to building partnerships, because it's much harder to say no, or say like, I don't need that or like to just shy away from a conversation if you don't have personal connection.

Paige Buck 22:20

Right? Right. Right. So there's that human connection. There's like, Oh, my God, I'm really seeing you in three dimensions. I think we've all had that, like delightful cognitive dissonance of like seeing people again. Yeah, yeah. Which makes you appreciate like, that thing you took for granted and the value of being together in person. But what, um, yeah, so do you? Do you set goals? You're looking at data all the time, do you have any sense of the long tail of a live experience versus a virtual experience, like how memorable how long it lasts for somebody.

Julie Liu 22:57

I, I can see what I read. I know that people still talk about shift happens in 2019. As as far as, when we talk about more qualitative feedback, people still talk about the one that, you know, we worked with and alive, it was just it was a delightful experience, we had the agent that was represented on Narcos presented very enticing and very, very, very different perspectives, I made it a little bit more fun at the end of the day, after a long day, right, there's things that I think I will make a lasting impression. But you can draw commonalities from the same way to extent of which, you know, people may talk about sports, or they was on last night, or whatever it may be, it's just not a point of connection. So I think longtail wise is definitely more key. I think virtual events are a lot less personal in the sense that if I don't want to engage with you on a virtual event, I don't have to, I don't have to ever make eye contact with you, most of our attendees may not even be on video, there's a lot of things that you know, are, are great, to a certain extent, but have a different goal tied to it. Right, that usually, you know, when I say we lay out the bullet points of what you can expect for some of these shorter engagements, you know, ducks, our Chief Brand Officer does a ton of, you know, LinkedIn content. And all of that comes with like, the two or three things that you can take away in a very short timeframe, because that's all the time you have. That's all the attention that he's going to get other folks. And I think that that's true of virtual events, too. So the virtual event I, I would say, our goal there is more not just brand awareness, but like point

Paige Buck 24:40

problem solving. Really quick takeaway is that will solve a problem for them quickly and again, like hook their attention and help build trust build. Yes,

Julie Liu 24:51

exactly. And it has to be very specific, right? Like you have to make sure that you're solving their problem or making sure that they know what they're going to get out of it versus our lives. And we, we had a lot with a luxury of time, we had the luxury of attention, we had the luxury of being able to educate and plant seeds for future. Yeah,

Paige Buck 25:08

yeah. So I'm sure that I was going to ask you about milestones. I'm sure that a really big one was going public a year ago, as you mentioned. And congratulations, that's a huge moment. And you were saying, like, the timing on IPOs are funky. How did that? How did that come together? What did that feel like? And then what did what did you do around that? To celebrate it and amplify it?

Julie Liu 25:34

Yeah, I'm there. There's a lot of things that go into events, the same way that I lean on you to make sure that you know, whatever venue staff, it's not just about the event design, right? It's about the nuances that like you have a coffee station, if you have coffee station, you have cups, where do you put the tea bags? Where do you put like the sugar at the beginning or the end of the line. So a little trash can for the coffee, stir, things like that. That's almost what event planning actually is. So this whole we we went public, we we had a few days of which were options for us to actually do the celebration to list to go to NASDAQ to do the speech to bring hit the buzzer, things like that. We didn't really know what she was gonna be until like two and a half weeks in advance. Wow, that required you know, it was celebratory because we had been this is a major milestone for us. We want to bring together a lot of people that put in a ton of work. And they were spread out everywhere. So getting logistics done for that bringing them in getting in venue. We did have a celebration after you know, we had to create a ton of graphics who Charley are now content and creative director and she, I'm pretty sure she was working 80 hour days, if not more to get this done with her team. Because rush, we ended up buying out all the billboards in Times Square, you know, and it's such a large undertaking in such a quick amount of time with such turnaround that everybody has a role to play. But everybody also pitched in on every single front. Yeah, you seem to

Paige Buck 27:05

have an amazing corporate culture, I mean, quotes, but you seem to have an amazing, loving, warm, appreciative team, who are really all like rowing in the same direction together, but also, you know, respecting and valuing one

Julie Liu 27:22

another. Yeah, I literally cannot say enough good things about the team that we have here. They they've won kept me sane, through pandemic timeframe when we were all working from home. But there's just there's a lot of trust built, right there's a lot of here's the direction in it go run. That's how I was, I spent the last 10 years my career here at AvePoint. And that's kind of direction into people that we want to build and culture, we want to foster guide guardrails in place, of course, and also a lot of the pandemic, I would say also changed how we work in terms of you're not working eight hours in a row, you're not working like, you know, or I mean, I don't really think either of us working hours. And that will be that will be nice. But like,

Paige Buck 28:05

you exceeded leaving my desk, but I'm probably not working it

Julie Liu 28:10

even but even then, right like to the opposite spectrum. We are a global organization. So that sometimes meant getting up at four, and then going away for a little bit at noon and then coming back online, around like one and going until eight or nine. Like it really just depends on how we work. So a lot of it comes down to resourcing staffing, making sure people are taking well taken care of literally like bed, taking care of bed hydrate.

Paige Buck 28:39

Are you eating? Are you drinking?

Julie Liu 28:41

Are you anything? Which is honestly not that different than like event life? I mean, I'm pretty sure you and I list each other like did you eat today? Like hauled

Paige Buck 28:48

away? Totally. I am told new clients when I'm explaining like what a show book is that it's like a minute by minute I'm like we will put if it's a gala, we will have in there like Julie, have you applied your lipstick? Yes. Right now and go change because you haven't paused all day. And there was about dressed up people here. Yeah,

Julie Liu 29:10

yes, that go change and also like maybe take like an oil patch to your face or

Paige Buck 29:14

something and eat a bite of it. You just hit on something. And I want to try to like, pull back to Oh, in all of this. I think a trend that you mentioned that we it's probably easy to take for granted is how much asynchronous work we're all doing and your clients are likely doing because now we're at minimum spread out across multiple us time zones. Or even if your entire team were in one major metropolitan area, their lives have shifted so that they're going offline to pick up the kids from school at midday or to walk the dog or practice some self care or take a bite of food and we can't sit lay eyes on one another in the same way. What do you think are some Ways and whether you can answer this however you like whether from like workplace culture or marketing, you know what it requires to get somebody's attention, we can and should be thinking about asynchronous work.

Julie Liu 30:12

Oh, boy, you know, that's actually a really funny question because offwhite kind of thrives in an asynchronous work, in terms of our solutions and business values as well. I will say, I think, you know, we, we are a software company, I built software for us in mind first, so we we use all the solutions that we actually sell. And I think a lot of it comes down to setting communication standards. So that was one of the things that we actually beginning of the pandemic talked a lot about was internal communications, what do you use, where and when with. So we predominantly are a Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft stack in general organization. So emails need to go away a little teams chats need to be utilized, teams channels need to be utilized for very specific purposes, let's make sure that they're thoughtfully created. Let's make sure that we are tagging the right people making sure notifications are going out. And alive, it came down to let's not work in silos. And I'm not saying there's a we are far from perfect. We just had two days of which we discussed how to reorganize our internal communication structure to make sure that we're not people know where they're getting it from. Right. I think that that has shifted a lot in the asynchronous work frame of mind. I think, also, I did not turn on my video for the first two months a pandemic because I thought video was a little not to say out of nothing to say, because it's bad, but because I spent so much face time with people. So usually it was just a call. And it was usually two to three minutes. And that was it. But then I stopped catching up people, there was no more water cooler talk. So getting people's attention was like, Hey, I'm just going to message you because you're just, I need a question answered. That's it. And then I realized at some point, I was like, okay, but if I will turn on my video, nobody else will, if nobody else will. I actually don't know how they're reacting to what I'm saying. Nor do I know if they're actually listening to me. Now, almost, you know, as long as it's not before 6am, my video will be on? Yep. Yeah,

Paige Buck 32:15

I had the flip side during COVID. Where I was like, I've been on video, I bought into it immediately. Yeah, I think that's where I think perhaps because we're smaller, a smaller team were like, more more isolated and more separate. But then I hit like, a hit a limit where I had to do the opposite, right? Like, when can this not be video? When can this just be a call? And it doesn't matter if I'm staring off into the distance instead of locking eyes with you. Yeah, but I think that's a real like, level setting. Each potential communications channel is a challenge and an opportunity. We're all Yeah,

Julie Liu 32:52

yeah. And it's also like, do movies need to be an hour long go to museum be half an hour long? Probably not. Right? Do they be like 15 minutes? If it's just a biweekly checking, or something like that? Start with that. But also, like, you know, as far as team practices, go Monday, take 15 minutes to decide what meetings you need the recurring ones because it's always nice have recurring wants to remind you that you probably need to think about that topic. Yeah, even if you have no updates, maybe shorten it, cancel it, move it, figure it out.

Paige Buck 33:18

Do the homework to catch up on your post to do that. Yeah,

Julie Liu 33:23

exactly. But I think it also gets tricky too, because we've because of the way that we're set up. So I'm I'm normally West Coast based. We have a team in a large, the majority of our team is actually East Coast based. And then we have teams in honestly, anybody in Europe gets the best of both worlds. They're always, they're always considered. But we always get the short straw a little bit. But it also came down to we had to run meetings twice, sometimes once for a pack, because there's there's very little overlap between APAC, EMEA and Americas at the same time. And then once a once in the mornings, East Coast time for Europe. Yeah. So it kind of also created an additional workload to to a certain extent, which we're managing. we've shortened meetings, we've made meetings much more topical, I don't want you to necessarily tell me all the things that you already wrote in the pre notes or we have homework for meetings and framework pre work for meetings, rather come prepared for like a two to three points. And then two to three asks, we don't necessarily talk about the points that you want to just update people on they have I speak and read, ask the questions, because the questions are actually what we're there to answer. So that kind of model of marketing assign that marketing meeting efficiency, I think has helped the marketing team a bit. Because there's otherwise it's just just spending 30 hours a week in meetings.

Paige Buck 34:54

Right, right. The concept of like, when is it a headline, and when is it a topic Have any discussion? And that's that's helping us. But it's a it's a real challenge. Yeah. Especially if you're doing it twice, or, like get time to times that was that will never align. Yeah, it just is. Yeah. Like that is I mean, that's also a super useful insight across every there's just no area of the world that isn't struggling with this. And I'm fascinated by this like ongoing future of work dialogues. And thank you, I think there was some really good insights. And I'll just wrap us up by asking you one last question, which is, what do most people not know about you got any quirks or? Oh, yeah. Coffee because you can just eat coffee.

Julie Liu 35:39

Okay, you thought of your What did you want to know about me? Um, I may, along with the caffeine thing. I may also be a little bit of an adrenaline junkie. I don't know. Like, I just die like extreme sports. Actually, extreme sports. I just like doing sports extremely.

Paige Buck 35:59

Okay, give me one example.

Julie Liu 36:02

I did alpine skiing when I was in college, I still see now I started snowboarding because skiing got boring. I like to go for speed is of great concern. I started electric unicycle Lane during the pandemic. So if you don't know what that is, look it up. It's electric, unicycle electric.

Paige Buck 36:22

Link in the shadows. It's a wheel.

Julie Liu 36:24

It goes fast, sometimes electric unicycle and so you know you just cruise along. I spent most of my pandemic in Seattle. So you just cruise along the water you go get brunch, meet up with friends, and then you go home. Is that Yeah, so? Yeah, so there are things I definitely put myself in concerning situations. Given the fact that I opened the door I opened our I'm in early two right now I opened our office door not quite enough this morning, shut my body through it. Just like I got one handful of coffee. My other hand, that's my person. I just got to open this door and run in.

Paige Buck 37:02

This is extremely self care.

Julie Liu 37:06

For a person who is largely uncoordinated, I think a lot of risks.

Paige Buck 37:14

And uncoordinated don't sound like they go together, but I recall you gently twisting the arms of your team to go SoulCycle like, at 5am in the morning at event when we looked at you like ah yeah, we will be setting things up. But tell me i very i really smart.

Julie Liu 37:34

Yeah, but here's the thing, like the team here and they all run together. They love running. But I do think that like you need an outlet. You have an outlet. It's like, you know, I have somebody here from Long Island. I post kickboxing almost every day. And I just like great, fantastic. You should absolutely go maybe go twice a day if you need to. But everybody's not like everybody has something to you know, de stress, or do

Paige Buck 37:55

I envy that and I really you're inspiring me. So thank you, Julie. And thanks so much for joining me today.

Julie Liu 38:01

Thank you so much for having me Paige.

Outro 38:03

All right. Thanks for listening to the Kennedy Events Podcast. Come back next time and be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes.

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PAIGE BUCK

Paige Buck is the co-owner of Kennedy Events, a large-scale event management company based in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City. Our team creates stress-free conferences and events with a positive impact, which allows our clients to resonate with their audience. Kennedy Events specializes in producing flawless product launches, award ceremonies, fundraisers, and multi-day conferences while keeping our eye on retention and engagement goals.

About Kennedy Events

Kennedy Events began with one goal in mind—to produce high-level corporate events with just as much strategy as style. Maggie founded the company in 2000, found her match in Paige, and in 2011 the two became official partners. Since then, these two resourceful and brilliant creatives have pooled their strengths to build one one of the most the most sought after corporate event companies in San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles.