Three Critical Mistakes Your Event Team is Making and How to Course Correct

Jan 25

Featuring neil wu becker and maeve Naughton

Neil Wu Becker is an award-winning marketing and communications executive who has led global teams at a variety of IT, security and enterprise software firms – from Dow Jones Component and bellwether stock companies to small-caps and pre-IPO unicorns. He is an adviser for startups and has been a CMO for various companies. He is also co-founder NextBound, which provides interim CMO and proxy CMO services, as well as brand marketing, PR, and corporate communication services combined.

Maeve Naughton is the president and owner of MKN Consulting Group, a company that provides partner marketing consultations for tech companies. She has 25 years of experience creating event sponsorship programs, driving millions in revenue for large customer events and regional conferences. As an experienced marketing professional, Maeve focuses on lead generation to support sales and channel revenue goals by creating customer reference programs.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

Understanding the varied impact of events on analyst relations, media, and lead generation
How expanding skill sets beyond traditional logistics to include positioning, messaging, and content creation will be increasingly valuable
Why event practitioners should proactively educate company executives about event strategies

In this episode…

In this episode of The “Solution Seekers” Podcast, Paige Buck sits down with two of the industry’s top marketing consultants. Neil Wu Becker, co-founder of Nextbound, brings thought-provoking insights into the role of event planning teams, urging them to step beyond people-pleasing into adopting a strategic business mindset. He emphasizes the importance for event planners to be discerning in their decision-making, strategize based on revenue goals, and avoid being order-takers. Becker also explains that showing a return on investment in events is crucial, especially when it comes to significant operational expenses. He passionately advocates for event professionals to be both thinkers and doers, blending strategic planning with efficient execution to truly drive a business forward and stand out in the industry.

Maeve Naughton, from MKN Consulting group, echoes a similar sentiment, noting that the post-COVID era ushers in a prime opportunity for event planners to reinvent their approach. She foresees a landscape where smaller and more unique events become the norm, creating more engaging and memorable experiences that blend personal enjoyment with business relevance. She encourages planners to utilize this transitional phase to elevate their strategic influence within their companies.

DOWNLOAD THE TOP TAKEAWAYS FROM THIS PODCAST EPISODE FOR FREE

Resources Mentioned in this episode

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by Kennedy Events.

Kennedy Events creates stress-free conferences and events, providing expert management and design for all your corporate event needs—from in-person to hybrid and virtual events.

To learn more about our services, visit our website at www.kennedyevents.com and schedule a consultation today to find out how we can guide you in making your event successful.

Transcript

Three Mistakes Your Event Team is Making, and What To Do Instead

Paige Buck [00:00:01]:

Hello and welcome to the Solution Seekers podcast. I'm your host, Paige Buck. Past guests include Pam Perez of the Chase Center, John Silva of Culinary Eye, and Elaine Honig of Studio 4Forty, to name a few. Today's episode is brought to you by Kennedy Events. Kennedy Events creates stress-free conferences and events, providing expert management and design for all your corporate event needs, from in-person to hybrid and virtual.

You can learn more about us at kennedyevents.com

Today I am delighted to be joined for the first time by two guests, and I have with me Neil Wu Becker and Maeve Naughton. Neil, would you like to introduce yourself?

Neil Wu Becker [00:00:52]:

Yeah, happy to, Paige. Thanks for having me, by the way. Hello everyone. My name is Neil Wu Becker. I am a Chief Marketing Officer by trade and more currently the principal and co-founder of a company called Nextbound, which provides interim CMO and proxy CMO services, as well as brand marketing, PR, and corporate communication services combined. And I'd be remiss if I didn't say this too, Paige, I've been around the tech sector most of my career, all over the place. Big companies, large ones, Dow Jones components, down to startups. But along the way, I ran into Maeve at my last place.

It was a Texas-based company that was in the enterprise software space, and that's how I ran into Maeve. I was referred to her by one of the executives that was on the team and never looked back when I met her. She is, I'm just going to say unabashedly, the best partner marketing practitioner I've ever worked with and probably ever will in my career. So happy to be on this podcast, both with you but also with Maeve.

Paige Buck [00:01:54]:

Wow. Thank you. And that's quite an introduction, Maeve. Would you like to build on that and tell folks-

Maeve Naughton [00:02:00]:

No, I’m done. I think this has been a great podcast. Let's go home.

Paige Buck [00:02:05]:

We can wrap now.

Neil Wu Becker [00:02:07]:

Maeve's done.

Maeve Naughton [00:02:09]:

So I'm Maeve, and I run MKN Consulting group, primarily focused on partner marketing, which, as Neil mentioned, I just finished a contract up with a company that we were both working at. And Paige, I was lucky enough one of my first consulting gigs when I started the company was with a client who used Kennedy Events. So I've been very lucky in that I've worked with both of you in different aspects, and I'm super excited for this conversation. I think there's a good stuff that we're going to be unpacking. Neil's got a bunch of really good tips and tricks. And I think coming from the partner side, where I have helped partners sponsor events, I've helped put on events, I've been sidelined with the events team as well as obviously attending events. So I think I've got kind of a unique experience in the way that I've perceived events. So I'm very much looking forward to this conversation. So thank you for having me.

Paige Buck [00:03:12]:

Me too. I'm delighted because I think that Neil's bringing a perspective that our audience and our clients don't often get the benefit of, and they don't often get the benefit of your consultative services. And boy, do we wish more of them would. They need you. They need both of you! This is really great. So when Maeve introduced me to you, Neil, and we had this conversation ahead of this call, we're sort of highlighting that in all of the CMO roles you've had, events is one piece of the total marketing mix, and it can end up being this little siloed, maybe sometimes sad or underresourced team. But you see a lot of opportunity there for what the best event teams could be doing and what mistakes get made by the ones who aren't the best in class.

Paige Buck [00:04:04]:

And so share with folks the first mistake you notice when you come in to consult or when you come into a new project.

Neil Wu Becker [00:04:11]:

Yeah, Paige. And before everyone throws tomatoes at me, I'll say there's mistakes made, but none of us are perfect, obviously. And I would also kind of frame it as an opportunity that I'm about to share with you. There's three. We'll get into it before this is over. The first one to your point is probably maybe the most important from an initial step. I'll share a quick story to kind of answer that question.

At one of the companies I've been at in my career, which will remain nameless, I was the head of marketing for that company. It was a public company. And when I first met the team, when I got the job, I met the events manager. They had an in-house person there, and she came up to me and said, Neil, I'm really stressed. Can you help me with this? And I said, of course. And it was basically a spreadsheet. And she goes, I've got about 50 to 80, 60, I'm not sure yet, events we’ve got to go to this year, and I just don't know where to start.

So my first question to her which may not have been diplomatic, but I said it in a diplomatic way because she didn't want to hear it at the time. She wanted help with the problem. But I said, why are we doing 50 to 80? Can we rationalize that? And the anecdotal premise that I'm trying to say is that I think there's a huge opportunity for us when we look at the events part of the marketing mix to right-size and rationalize how many you actually need in the context of your revenue and business goals. Not just marketing goals, but revenue and business goals. So the first step out of these three that I was going to share today is really kind of a tops down look, not bottoms up into marketing. And this could, by the way, be applied to anything, PR, digital marketing, email, any aspect of the mix. But on the event side, if you understand what your revenue is and what your revenue goal for that fiscal year should be. So let's say it's $100, just to use a round number, and you understand through either yourself or your marketing leader, what percentage of that revenue is going to come from marketing versus SDRs or sales or other outbounding, or from Maeve in partnering. Then you can start reverse engineering the math to determine, well, if we're going to say, contribute 15% of our revenue to marketing, let's say 15 of those $100, and half of that's going to go to program dollars, the other half to headcount, let's say seven to $8 now.

And out of that, a percentage of that is going to go to events, probably, I don't know, 20%, and then say 70% to digital and 10% to everything else. If you keep up with that math, you essentially can reverse engineer back to, well, we only have $2 million to play with for events, or $500,000 for events. And if I'm going to do 50 events, there's no way we can afford it. Okay. Our EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) is going to get blown up just by the events themselves. So the tops down approach of applying the events function not just to the broader marketing mix in context of their goals for lead gen and pipeline building, but ultimately to where those lead gen and pipeline goals start. Which is what is your ARR or your revenue figure that I didn't see happen enough, including the job I inherited that I'm talking about. Anecdotally, once you figure that out, I was able to sit with her for literally one more meeting, less than an hour, and say, wow, we only need to probably do about 22 events.

In fact, out of those 22, I may only need to travel to maybe half of them. Whereas she was thinking, how am I going to travel 50 out of 52 weeks a year? And I have a family because we're trying to do 50 to 80 of them. You don't even have to do it. Go to Kennedy Events to help you scale. So that would be the first thing. I'll stop there before I give you too much of fire hose on that topic. But thinking tops down from an operator or an executive or a CMO perspective around how many events do you really need to do? And when a sales guy or a CEO or a CMO even comes to you, say, I want you to do 50 to 80 events. If they can't rationalize it, you have every opportunity, and I think it's your obligation, frankly, to be able to stress test and say, may I suggest an alternative way of looking at this, which is, let's right-size it based on the goals of revenue. Lead gen pipeline, which, if you do that math. Watch this. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Looks like we only need about 20.

Paige Buck [00:08:34]:

Yes.

Neil Wu Becker [00:08:35]:

Does that make sense?

Paige Buck [00:08:36]:

Yeah. Maeve, what do you notice about the way your clients approach that, like, approach setting up their portfolio?

Maeve Naughton [00:08:46]:

Some are better than others, but I love that approach, because then the events team doesn't just become a tactical team in the company. They become more of a strategic team, because they know exactly why they're not doing events. And it's not because the top sales guy said, we have to be there, which happens a lot. And usually those requests come in, oh, there's a conference next week. We need to be there because of X, Y and Z. So having a very strategic approach to the events, I think, is so, so important because it sets the event team up to be seen as a strategic part of the marketing team, which, unfortunately, a lot of time, the events team have been seen as being tactical. They're ordering the carpet, they're ordering the giveaways, they're making the hotel reservations, and that's it. So they're kind of pushed to the side and like, oh, it's just the events team.

But I think having this very strategic approach to it really elevates their presence within. And at the end of the day, it's going to make them look good because they're being more strategic, but also they're going to have much more of an impact on that revenue that the company is going to be having, because they're not wasting x amount of dollars going to a trade show, because Matt, the highest paid sales guy, says, that we have to be there. If your name is Matt and you're a high paid sales guy, this is not directed at you, but you get the point of it. It just helps them be a lot more strategic versus being tactical.

Paige Buck [00:10:19]:

Yeah, yeah. And well, you're queuing this up perfectly for Neil's second mistake and really critical observation about how those teams do get pigeonholed. And I think the way you put it to me was like just accepting your fate. That's it. That's your position and you're going to complain about it, but there's a failure or a lost opportunity. Yeah. So jump in and share about that.

Neil Wu Becker [00:10:47]:

It's really about the Persona to what you're alluding to, Paige. Maeve and I, maybe not every single day, but we would also debate and discuss and even at sometimes talk in concerned fashion about how we were right siizing different parts of the mix, events being a big part of it, especially in her world. There's a lot of field events too that involve partners. The way I would kind of frame this next part, I guess, Paige, I appreciate the tee up, is you can think or you can do, Or number three, multiple choice, you can do both. And to what Maeve was saying candidly, I would say, is that events teams are by nature high energy. I find them probably the highest energy marketing practitioners across the team.

And more than a graphic designer or a web guy or product marketer or demand gen, these people run on high octane energy that I just don't know where they get it from. But in so doing, I think they fall into this, whether they know it subliminally, whether they know it or it's subliminal, they fall into this trap, unfortunately, of I have to be a people pleaser and I'm going to press any button people tell me to and I'm going to be that order taker. And you don't want to be a yes man or a yes woman in that condition. Because like I said, you're dealing with millions of dollars potentially in many companies of OpEx spend, not to mention event spend, that if you can't show ROI on it from a return on marketing investment ROMI standpoint of which events has a big percentage of, then that's not a good feeling either when it's QBRs or board time. So on the event side, the way I'd like to kind of look at it is be a business person first, practitioner second. That goes for any job. Whether you're an engineer, HR accountant, product development person, a compliance or a legal person or a marketer. And if you're an event marketing practitioner, if you think business first, kind of like that first point, I was saying. Let's tie what we're doing so we don't overspend or underspend, but we right-size the amount of activity and budget spent based on the goals we're trying to achieve at the revenue level. If you do that, then you're in better shape to actually be this business first, practitioner second character in the story that could really drive the business forward. Where I see a big mistake, if I can use that word. It's a bit harsh, but a mistake is they want to please so much they'll just say yes to everything and they even know it's wrong. And I know it because when I wasn't a CMO and I was in rank and file jobs, they would tell me that man, so and so just told me to do this. It's the dumbest thing, Neil. I said I know. So why are you doing it? I don't know.

They told me we got to do it. No, you don't have to do it. It's kind of the give back. Last time I checked, and this is going to sound candid, too. I can get an intern for free to be a yes man or yes woman, but we get paid five to six digits and in the tech sector it's usually more like six digits. On the event side we better make that value and money count to the company. We have a right to have a voice and a brain and to actually provide consultative partnership and guidance back to the business when we feel something's not being done right. So I would actually say the think and do, like do both, right. You want to be a strategist and be able to strategize, rationalize, ideate, create, but then that's think, but then also do, which is execute.

And no one usually questions the events team on execution because they execute about as efficiently in a crazy mode as I've ever seen. Right. They're just so multifaceted in what they have to cover every day. But if you can think and do with the business first, practitioner second mindset tied to the tops down, thinking of what your revenue goals are, you will stand out from- You'll be the 1% that stands out from 99% of other events teams that I've seen both in-house and contractor and agency alike where they're just trying to people please and then they can actually run a company into the ground financially if they're not careful. So that's a perspective I'd share, not necessarily from maybe a marketing manager level, but one when I got to the VP level and to the CXL level, to where every dollar and second counted more directly and accountably. The event side was the area where I saw so much waste, where I developed this perspective. It's very easy to do, and you should be emboldened to do it. If you're not, find a team that allows you to be that way.

Paige Buck [00:15:22]:

Yeah. Maeve, what are some of the questions you ask your clients to help uncover whether they've done this? They've got the strategic answers..

Maeve Naughton [00:15:34]:

Just, why are we doing the event? It's a very simple question, but a lot of people will ask, where's the event? When is the event? What verticals is it supporting? Is it my mid-market? Is my large market? Those are the questions that are generally asked. But the simple why are we doing this event? And that should go on both sides. It should be from the sales leadership as well as the marketing team. And as Neil mentioned in the first point, if you've got that list of events that you're doing and why you're doing it, you're doing it because it's lead gen. You're doing it for brand recognition. You're doing it to support the AR team. Whatever you're doing it for, make sure that you have that answer and it's solid. Otherwise you are going to fall into the trap of just being a yes person and doing all the events that you do.

It's a simple answer, Paige, but it's very rarely asked. And I think it's a huge missing part in the event space.

Paige Buck [00:16:37]:

Yeah. So there's why. And there's, what goals are you, why is it happening? What goals are you trying to achieve? Are those achievable? Are you clear? And then what happens when the answer is because we've been every year for a decade, or we're creating this 500 person conference because the CEO said so, or Matt, that really assertive guy from sales, again, said, we got to go there. Our biggest client is there. Those still don't feel like complete answers to the question. What do you do when you hear those?

Neil Wu Becker [00:17:14]:

Yeah, I've got an answer for that, Maeve. Okay, let me start with another analogy. Sorry, I'm an analogy guy, an anecdote guy. We all have, most of us, I would think, IRAs and 401ks. All right? And they have ETFs, mutual funds, bonds, stocks, you name it. Some of you might even buy corn and gold. Who knows? But the point is, you diversify your assets so that you have an insulated chance to be successful versus put all your eggs in one basket. So the approach I've taken with the events in the past, with all the events managers, when I encounter those very problems you're bringing up, Paige, is, let's do a portfolio approach to events.

Maeve, actually hit it. Maeve, hit it. Which is no event is the same. And if you imagine for a second, I'm not showing a slide here, but if we visualize a bar chart, like with an x and y axis, with x being all these different variables and y being the importance, there are different reasons why we go to events. May have hit three. Analyst relations, could be a great event for media, could be a great event for lead gen, could be for speakerships. Competitives there. So we have to do scouting and reconnaissance.

Our customers are there, or prospect deals, sales closure opportunities. Partners are there. It may be a big thing with the partner community that's there. We may actually have so many different reasons, and I have about eight to ten of these variables will string along the x axis. And if you just do simple, just do simple, don't do calculus, and you just make the bar chart on a scoring scale of one, two, or three, three being awesome, one being, and zero being nothing, then go draw that bar chart from zero to three. For each of those variables, you may go to an event. And no analysts, a little bit of press, major lead gen, major competitive activity, no partners, and I get a speakership there. And then another event. A lot of analysts, a lot of press, a lot of customers, a lot of partners, and lead gen, all the above.

So if you cobble all of those 22 events, using my previous example, or however many you have in your portfolio on any given fiscal year, you should have a pretty equitable balance of, I've got plenty of events for lead gen. I've got that covered, which is what we always look at, but always, wow. I actually have some good brand awareness ones here with the media and the analysts and some of the speakership opportunities we can do to influence on a thought leadership level, and then also some speakerships on the customer and sales levels. Then you can start seeing if you think about the food groups in any healthy diet of an event portfolio. Hey, I'm missing some fruit and vegetables, but I have plenty of meats. Well, maybe let's double down on the events and calibrate it that way. So if you think of it in a portfolio approach, just like you do your own retirement funds, it starts to become very clear.

Like why are we just one-dimensionally going to events? Because a, to Maeve’s point, they're asking us to, and b, because it's all just because of lead gen, which is important. But to do lead gen, you also need awareness and brand building. So why wouldn't you portfolio that thing up? So the third point I was alluding to at the beginning, you gave me a great segue, Paige, is, yes, think tops down your business goals tie not just to marketing, but also the ultimate revenue and business goals from the events function. Secondly, think and do. Be a business practitioner, a business person, then a practitioner second. If you inherit that type of Persona, then it becomes pretty easy and natural for you then to influence off of I'm going to have a portfolio of events that I go that have variability from event to event, but collectively they give us everything we need for the year. And now I'm going to present that to those same folks asking me, why aren't we at this event? Or why can't we do this and what have you. So it gives you some form of a mechanism beyond just your subjective perspective to be able to say, here's how we're rationalizing events, knowing we're only going to be able to spend x amount of dollars on y number of events this year. Any questions? No? Great boom. Alignment.

Then you just go and you don't get those questions anymore. Or if you do, they weren't listening. But the goal is to be able to rationalize it. And my message to any executives listening too, is if you don't enable, empower, embolden your team to be able to do that, you will hurt them. You will hurt your team, not help them. So this is not just on the events team. They have to be like any marketer. They have to be enabled, empowered to do their jobs effectively, both strategically and tactically. So it's also on the leaders of those organizations to do that and run interference, and if needed, be the bad cop against others outside of marketing who may be pecking at the events team for things that just aren't right.

So it is a mutual partnership, I would say, between the leader of that marketing organization and the events team, which is usually inclusive of an in-house person, and the Kennedy events style adjunct that provides scale and support. So I don't know you guys react to that, but that's my philosophy.

Maeve Naughton [00:22:16]:

Yeah, I'll add to that along that whole portfolio concept. When you've got your own 401K and all that, we get monthly statements about how the portfolio has gone up and down and what has changed. So the events team absolutely has to create campaigns, whether you're in Salesforce or HubSpot, whatever it is, so that you can track that. You can track how many net new leads you have, how many sales qualified opportunities you have, how many of those turn into the opportunity. So when you're going back and having those discussions, you're like, yeah, we just spent a ton of money on this conference, but we didn't get anything out of it, so let's not do it next year. And along those lines, it's okay to do an event and fall flat on your face as long as you're learning from it. So don't do it next year. Do a different one that falls into that matrix that Neil mentioned. Make sure that you're keeping a diverse portfolio, but you don't have to stay with the same events that you have always done. So learn from the mistakes that you have. But I would say the big thing is make sure you've got campaigns running so you know exactly what has happened with every single person that you had a contact with.

Maeve Naughton [00:23:36]:

And that leads into the idea that an event isn't just an event, there is the lead up to it. There's what happens during the event and then what happens after the event. You've got phone calls from the sales team, you've got emails going out. Maybe you're going to do a webinar. So use the event as part of a campaign, not an entire campaign by itself. Because if you do that, it's going to be so hard to validate the reasoning why you should do it again. Because again, when sales comes back, if you can say you have x amount of closed opportunities or closed won deals, there's going to be no conversation. You're not going to have to justify yourself at that point.

Neil Wu Becker [00:24:20]:

That's going to either prove that we're going back or not. To your point.

Paige Buck [00:24:24]:

Thousand percent. Gosh, I have a number of observations in here based on the things that you guys said. One, I would say, Maeve, I heard you say there's real value in failing, trying something, failing, as long as you're learning from it and adapting. And that makes me think that I think there's value in Neil, if you were making a matrix, having a place for, I'm running an experiment. Like among this whole mix.

Neil Wu Becker [00:24:51]:

Yes.

Paige Buck [00:24:52]:

We're setting aside this much budget or this much time and energy to run some small experiments on this event or this event, and this is what we think and hope will happen and then we'll check ourselves against that. And maybe that's what happens and that's successful and that's great. Or maybe something else positive comes out of it. We didn't attract this audience, but wow, unexpectedly there were analysts there and that was worth it. We need to change how we try to assess these events. Gosh, something you said, Maeve, with respect to the campaigns, is the number of times that we've produced and been deeply engaged in events with clients, and they don't have a post event plan. going back a decade. We don't do this as much anymore. Just the nature of the work has shifted a little bit, is when clients would say, absolutely, we want to record every single session. Okay, what are you going to do with those? We're going to put them up on the Internet.

Paige Buck [00:25:52]:

How are you going to do that? Do you want the scope of work for that video production to include post production on each of those? And are you going to slice and dice them into an hour long session or into social media content? Do you have the budget for that? What are you going to do with it? How are you going to leverage it? Or is it going to sit on somebody's hard drive and you never look at it again?

Maeve Naughton [00:26:14]:

And usually it's the latter.

Paige Buck [00:26:15]:

It's the last of that. There's $50,000 you can cut from your budget right there.

Neil Wu Becker [00:26:20]:

Exactly.

Paige Buck [00:26:20]:

Let’s not do that.

Maeve Naughton [00:26:22]:

And like you said, you can do emails, you can do social snippets, you can do videos on your website, you can do blog posts, you can use the content for email campaigns. If you have speakers at an event, you have so much knowledge there. And these people have raised their hand and said, I want to spend two, three days with you, or even one full day, which is so hard to get right now. If they're going to do that, make the use out of their time, their money, if they're paying for it, even if they're not paying for it, the time away from work. So yeah, use that content as much. But also the pre-event is just as important, I think, as the post event. And during the event, if you can tweet out key comments made by people. Post pictures of people who are at the event so that you're building the recognition for that event and or your company at that event. So there's so much you can do. And it goes back to Neil's point before about as an events person, you don't have to stay in a box.

Maeve Naughton [00:27:31]:

You have to be able to work with different teams, make sure you're working with a product marketing team, make sure you're working with the demand gen team, the web team, the sales team. You can't sit in the corner and put on these amazing events if you don't have the buy in and the support from other people within the organization.

Paige Buck [00:27:50]:

Yeah, I would add if you listen to all of this and you have a C-level person who does not empower, embolden, and enable you as Neil would coach, the job market is strong. Looks like we're coming in for a soft landing, despite everybody's hemming and hawing and woes of worrying about a recession. If you are an empowered and emboldened person who wants to challenge, why are we doing this? My CEO, entrepreneur, Tech world, Silicon Valley thing is like, your ego is not the reason we're holding this event. Your ego, CEO of tech company who said, great, we had a successful 500 person conference. Now it's going to be 5000 next year. Events do not work like SaaS products. So that $5,000 figure is for your ego.

And if that behavior resembles your boss, then start looking for another job.

Neil Wu Becker [00:28:55]:

Counsel them, try, and if it doesn't work, then start looking.

Paige Buck [00:28:57]:

There's your other small experiment. I challenged him. It didn't work. Time to do something else. One other thing I heard in there, Neil, when you were describing your matrix and your bar chart, I thought it was like your 401k, one fund does not do all things for all people for all needs. I would challenge anybody to say that one event is checking all of those boxes.

Neil Wu Becker [00:29:25]:

Yeah, absolutely right.

Paige Buck [00:29:27]:

Whether you are attending or you're incepting something and building something of your. own If I also worry when I hear, oh, this event needs to do this and this and this and this and this and this and this, and Gartner needs to be there or we failed, then we've got a problem.

Neil Wu Becker [00:29:46]:

Totally right. I mean, my reaction to that, too, just listening to you riff off that is, if we come full circle to what we were talking about a few minutes ago, you have the ability to think, do, or both. And if you do both, part of that think and do mentality is to be able to consult back and set expectations, even proactively, before someone even has a chance to sneer at it and say, look, hey, we're going to go to x amount of events this year. These seven are going to be hardcore lead gen. This is probably what you guys care about in the field. Yeah, I thought so. Now these others are going to be lead gen, but they're also going to do X, Y and Z for us. And here's why.

Any questions? If you're able to consultatively on a proactive basis, consultatively coach and educate your business and company and execs and non-execs about the rationale for what your event's motion is. It kills off a lot of the gaps that get filled by them saying how come we're not going to this event? Or how come Gartner didn't come to our booth? Or how come I didn't get 2000 leads and we only got 200. Because we didn't set expectations. Now I was saying it's on our end as an executive team to help empower, enable and embolden. But I would also flip the script and say it's on the event practitioner to make that choice of am I going to take that emboldenment, if given, and actually be a consultative partner or am I just going to sit back and push buttons? Do you want to push a red button, the blue button? Just tell me which button. And if you do the latter, you're essentially committing reputational suicide. Not just for yourself in my opinion, but for your entire profession. Because as Maeve said at the very beginning, the events group is often looked at as a high energy team that gets stuff done. That's a noble image.

But in so doing they just get told what to do. They don't snap back and they just do it. Like Nike, just do it. And sometimes you can't do that. And I've always heard the product marketers push back all the time, and I won't say that there's a direct correlation, but product marketers get paid the most out of any marketer in the marketing mix, even more than demand gen people. And it's usually because they know the business, the product, and therefore that acumen they use to actually say yes, no, or consult. There's no law saying events can't do the same or any other group within the marketing mix. So I would use this as a CTA or a call to action, this podcast, Paige, around if there's ambitious events personnel, practitioners, both in house, but also for agencies that consult and contract with in house teams. It's a simple choice.

Which one are you going to be Persona wise? Because there's a lot of them that are doing the latter, like I was saying before, but if you can do the former, you stand out and you also help the professional image of all events folks. I would argue it never hurts. They need it. It's a very thankless job sometimes, and I've noticed that too. Not even as a CMO. But when I was CMO, all the time, because they're the ones who don't get to sit there and have a drink with the team when everything's done. They're still cleaning up, rolling up carpet, getting shipping and stuff, and then they come back exhausted and take two weeks off and then they come back, everyone's forgotten about their great work and it was a thankless experience for them. So I just think to be more inclusive, it starts with the atomic unit, which is that events person. You have a choice to make. You're going to be involved or not and consult or not.

If so, you can completely flip the script on how you're viewed brand wise and make a bigger impact on the team, not just the business.

Paige Buck [00:33:07]:

Could we bottom line all of these tips as like, do like an event planner. Think like a product marketer.

Neil Wu Becker [00:33:18]:

I can't say no to that.

Maeve Naughton [00:33:21]:

And I would add too, even just thinking like a product marketer. Change your language. The events people should possibly change their language. And that don't talk just about the number of booth scans that you got because we all know grandma four houses down wants a free lunch, so she's going to go to the free conference and she wants that Teddy bear for her grandson. So change the language. And don't necessarily spend all your time talking about vanity metrics to the sales team and the larger organization. Talk about what they care about. They care about the actual number of SQLs or sales-qualified leads and opportunities that they have, what came out of it.

And it's really hard for events people. And I would say it's even hard for marketing people to change the language and talk the language of other people instead of just talking about, oh, but we've got great new vests that came out, and everyone look at the vest that everyone's going to wear, and everyone's not going to wear jeans. At the end of the day, it is important for branding, but you have to be talking the language of the people who these events are for.

Paige Buck [00:34:36]:

Such good advice. That's fantastic. All right, we'll do a lightning round. Anything you see as a big thing coming down the pike in 2024 or beyond. Anything you see about the way event marketing is shifting, besides the advice we're giving folks about shifting their own thinking.

Neil Wu Becker [00:34:56]:

I do. The ability to expand your skill set beyond the traditional event logistics and management, specifically around positioning and messaging and content creation.

Maeve Naughton [00:35:12]:

Nice.

Neil Wu Becker [00:35:12]:

I know it's lightning. I'll say it as fast as I can. A lot of events companies or events people when I was in-house would come to me and say, can someone do all the keynotes for our speakers, our exec team at Sko or at this event? I have a panel. I need some slides done. There was not even one attempt at trying to storyboard the storyline with key messages about what they would say because they didn't know the business. They just knew how to pull carpet and put up a booth to what Maeve was saying earlier. So you have a chance to, if you're going to be business first, practitioner second, get involved in the creation of the content that gets thrown out there at the event, too, not just the actual logistics themselves. Big opportunity for events folks, because I've never seen them do it before, and they're the closest front row seat to the event.

Why wouldn't they actually try to learn what we should be saying there?

Paige Buck [00:36:04]:

Yeah, that's fantastic. Otherwise, you're just creating a really beautiful empty container with vests and teddy bears.

Neil Wu Becker [00:36:14]:

Yeah, totally agree.

Paige Buck [00:36:15]:

Maeve, how about you?

Maeve Naughton [00:36:17]:

I think this is an incredible time for events people to really up level their game and become that strategic person rather than tactical. Covid shut all these events down. People are starting to go to events again. So I think it's a perfect time to reinvent the events team in your company or wherever you are. There's a lot of new opportunities that are coming up. I'm seeing a lot more smaller events that are much more not sit down and learn. But there's a fun part to it, something that people wouldn't necessarily do by themselves. I just had a local company, got a fantastic LinkedIn message from one of their sales guys, but it was for a Warriors game, which normally I wouldn't go to, but it's a Warriors game, and he's like, you can go ahead and bring someone else with you.

In fairness, we are going to be talking about the product for a little bit, but it's something different that I'm both getting something out of it for myself personally as well as something for the company. So I think, yeah, it's a fantastic time for events people to reinvent the events wheel, essentially.

Paige Buck [00:37:33]:

That's a great note to end on. I like that high note. Yeah, it's all just big opportunity right now, and it's how you harness it. So I hope, I think we've given some really strong positions. We're taking some really strong positions on what you can do for yourself. It's fantastic. Well, thank you, Neil. Thank you, Maeve. We will have in our show notes, real detailed info on how to find you two. And I hope you have a fantastic 2024.

Maeve Naughton [00:38:04]:

You too, Paige. Thank you.

Paige Buck [00:38:06]:

Thanks for being here.

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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.