How Events Accelerate the Sales Cycle

Join us for this episode of the Xcast to learn all about the new buzz term in using ABM within the world of events for pipeline generation – aka “account based experiences.” 

Events have long been a powerful tool for amplifying brand voices and messaging, creating memorable experiences that resonate with audiences and foster meaningful connections. However, in our post-pandemic world, the need to justify event budgets has become more crucial than ever.

In this episode we explore how events can be strategically linked to the sales funnel, providing a clear path from engagement to conversion. This connection is vital for demonstrating the tangible value that events bring to the table, not just as standalone experiences but as integral components of a comprehensive marketing strategy.

Our guest, EJ Oelling, shares firsthand insights on navigating these changes and leveraging events to accelerate the sales cycle. Key takeaways:

• How experiences can speed up the sales cycle.
• The concept of Account-Based Experiences (ABX) and its impact on business outcomes.
• The role of events in brand strategy and their evolution over the years.
• Insights into structuring an Events Portfolio under an ABX strategy.
• Current trends, including the role of AI in enhancing event success.
• Practical advice for integrating account-based marketing into your events strategy.

Get ready for an enlightening conversation on maximizing the impact of your events in B2B marketing. Grab your headphones and join us! 

Transcript

Laliv Hadar:

Hi everyone. Welcome to today's episode of the InVision Xcast, where we discuss challenges related to audience engagement in today's ever-changing marketing landscape. Today, we're doing a deep dive into the critical role that brand experiences play in the marketing mix. Events have long been a powerful tool for amplifying the brand narrative, creating memorable experiences that resonate with audiences, and fostering meaningful connections for attendees. However, in our post-pandemic world, the landscape of experiences has evolved and the need to justify event budgets has become more crucial than ever.

And that's how we landed our discussion today titled, How Experiences Accelerate the Sales Cycle. Today, we'll explore how events can be strategically linked to the sales funnel, providing a clear path from engagement to conversion. This connection is vital for demonstrating the tangible value that events bring to the table, not just a standalone experiences, but rather as integral components of a comprehensive marketing strategy. Joining me to discuss is industry veteran and leader, EJ Oelling, who has navigated these first-hand changes and has valuable insights to share. We'll delve into how EJ leverages events to drive sales, the metrics she and her team use to measure success, and the innovative approaches that she and her organization are taking to ensure that every dollar spent on events is well spent. So let's get started. EJ, welcome.

EJ Oelling:

Hi, how are you? Thanks for having me. I'm very excited to be here.

Laliv Hadar:

Very excited to have you. And before we jump in, would love you to introduce yourself a little bit.

EJ Oelling:

Absolutely. My name is EJ Oelling. I am the VP of ABX at 6Sense. Yes, it's a lot of letters, but it all stands for something. So ABX is account-based experience and I love talking about events and pipeline and all the fun things around it. So very excited about what we're going to chat about today.

Laliv Hadar:

Great. I realize I didn't introduce myself, so I'm Laliv Hadar. I lead marketing here at InVision Communications and very excited to have this conversation today with you, EJ. So yeah, let's start. Let's dive right in. As said, for many brands, the primary goal of events has been traditionally to ensure a successful attendee experience on-site that engages them with quality content, networking, and an overall positive brand experience. Generating pipeline is something that is increasingly important as well. Broadly speaking, EJ, how do you consider experiences to accelerate the sales cycle? What are some key ways in which they do so and how has this changed over the past couple of years?

EJ Oelling:

So I think events or experiences, however we want to look at it, they're super important in the sales cycle. So when we look specifically at 6Sense, when we look at how ABX is used, we are either there to help drive the top of funnel. So how are we engaging with an audience to try to get those first conversations? So just net new business opportunities or even expanding within accounts. So we'll use events to talk about specific products. We'll do an overall kind of branding exercise, and that's more that top of funnel event-led growth as you would say. Or we look at acceleration. So it's top and bottom. So how are you using events to push that deal close? How are you using events to influence an opportunity in a way that you're just hoping it's going to close or a renewal? So we look at that top of bottom of funnel to help really push our agenda forward when it comes to our brand experiences.

Laliv Hadar:

Great. And then I guess related to that, how do you define ABX kind of more specifically, how does it work? I love the comparison you made or how you structure it according to the funnel. That being said, how do you measure success and what are those KPIs that you use to gauge its effectiveness?

EJ Oelling:

So when we look at ABX, ABX could be a couple of different things. So account-based experience. So when we look at that, we're doing that one-to-one or one-to-few experiences that are out there. So it could be anything from we're trying to drive a specific amount of revenue to come out of them or specific amount of pipeline that's generated from them. We look at very highly targeted experiences. I would say going back to your first question, how have things changed, I think if I look back in my career years ago, it was the bigger, the better, more people, let's get everybody there. And now we've learned to call that brand awareness. I think after years, now it's that quality over quantity that really comes in play. ABX allows you to be really, really strategic about who you want in the room, what's the value add they're getting, and how are you taking them on the journey forward to then make them a customers or continue their adoption within our product.

And I think that's super important. If I look back on how my career was, let's say 5, 7, 8 years ago, it was more of the big events that people did. How many people can you get in the door? What does your registration list look like? And it was really that more what we call now brand awareness, right? It was now we are looking at things as the quality over quantity. How are we doing, as we would call it ABX, how are we doing really account-based focused events? And from there we could say, do we have the right titles in the room? Do we have the right audience that we're focusing on? Are we generating the right type instead of just getting the random brand that's out there? So some of the KPIs we're looking at are is it a prospecting event and are we really getting that new business out of it?

Is it an upsell, cross-sell, whatever sell everybody's calling it these days? And how are you working with your customers to make sure they're adapting the product and then want to engage more? So I really think it turns into data plus experience equals pipeline because at the end of the day, that's truly what ABX encompasses. We need to have the right data so the right people in the room to get the right experience. So knowing who's there, are you doing it really highly targeted? Is it small, is it intimate, or is it a big blown production? And then what is the pipeline that we want in the end?

Laliv Hadar:

Great. And so it sounds like just a quick follow on to that, there's a lot that goes on into the pre-planning of that in order to really understand and look at your registration list. And are you working really actively with your sales team on figuring out the attendees and the context around them and where they sit within your sales funnel potentially to really drill down if you will, into that? Is there a lot of pre-planning that goes on?

EJ Oelling:

Absolutely. And this is where 6Sense comes into it. So this is not my sales pitch, but this is how we use it and we drink our own champagne, I prefer vodka sodas, but this is how we use it to help with our event experience here is we are really looking at making sure that we have people on their buyer's journey that we're targeting them the right way. So we want to know, the sales team will sometimes come to you and say, "Here's my targeted list. I want X, Y, Z company there." And then we can look at the data and say, "I know you want this company here, but these people here based on intent signals and data are showing us that these are the right people to have there. How many times have you planned a roadshow and you're just guessing that Nashville is the city should be in? Well, we can tell you now that it really should have been Atlanta."

We've all made that mistake as an event planner or a field marketer or however you want to say it now. So we are really able to do things that are highly targeted so you can get the best ROI. We just can't spend money like we used to if you think about it. The economy is different, life is different. Everything costs 30% more than we really want it to cost. And so if we're going to curate these really bespoke experiences, you want to make sure that you're spending the dollars that you're going to get that return on investment in versus just throwing really fun things and hoping that it works.

Laliv Hadar:

Related, as we think about a brand strategy and the impact on business outcomes, how does ABX redefine the role of experiences in the realm of brand strategy and what makes this approach distinctive in your opinion?

EJ Oelling:

So I think part of it is we all know that targeted events, opportunities, experiences are ultimately going to get the right people at the right place at the right time. And we know Clarity with our sales team, it's being able to light up that dark funnel. It's being able to showcase who the right people should be there. And that's a big part of our strategy. A lot of times we'll work with our sales team or our customer success team and they'll say, "We want to do this," and so we almost give them a sniff test and say, "Okay, so you want them there, what is the value of them being there? Do we know that they're engaged with us the right way? What are the keywords that they're talking about?" So we really get that deep in the data to make sure that ABX is driving the right type of revenue that comes out of it and we're not just planning dinners to plan dinners at the end of the day either.

Laliv Hadar:

And so I guess related to that, and you sort of touched on this, but how does ABX sit within... does it sit within the marketing team? How do you sort of partner with the sales team and are other teams also involved that you work with? Who's your main ecosystem internally to make this work?

EJ Oelling:

Well, it takes a lot of people to make ABX successful. I'm not going to lie. So my core structure of my team is rather unique. A lot of people think ABX, they think go-to-market strategy and that's what it is. We have under my team specifically, I have an event team, which is their logistics brand and they're really the experiential arm of it. I then have a go-to-market team. And so they're what I would call a mini CMO of each segment. And so they're really diving deep with the field teams to figure out who are the key accounts and how we're really driving revenue within that part of the organization. They sit by segment, so they have one that aligns to our enterprise team, to our commercial team, to our strategic team. I then have a field marketer in the middle who kind of rides between, she's events and she's the best of both worlds, go-to-market and events.

I also have partner marketing which sits in ABX because partners are a huge part of the ecosystem. I have a little love for the partner side of it because that's where I came from before as well. And then I also now have customer marketing and communities. So altogether I would say it's a very broad team, but if I look at the overall marketing team, we are really the nucleus because we're kind of coming up with the strategic plans and how we're going to drive these programs, but it takes design and growth and content, marketing ops, we can't do it alone. So we're really, really part of a team effort when it comes to marketing. But when I think about our stakeholders, as you're saying about the ecosystem, we partner really strongly with our BDRs. Our BDRs are hybrid marketing sales. They sit in marketing, but they support sales as well.

So we have a huge partnership, whether it's going from a direct mail campaign or if it's driving people to events. We do a lot of stuff within our BDR team as well. We partner with the sales organization. So again, sitting with them and looking at what are your target accounts. If you're working on a strategic play, obviously it's a really big robust program that we're building out. We also help with one-on-one and one-to-few. That's a huge part of what my go-to-market team works on as well as campaigns. And then we also work with our customer success because you don't want to forget about your customer success, so that's how are you building and expanding within accounts, how are we working on retention and renewals. So we kind of have our hands in a lot of different pockets and stakeholders, but at the end of the day, we are really there to help kind of move everything. And again, it goes back to that top of funnel and bottom of the funnel. So depending on where people are in their journey with us, we're able to help in either way.

Laliv Hadar:

And you touched on campaign work too, and I'm curious because one of the things that we at InVision really believe strongly in is the notion of campaigns that experiences are not one and done standalone activations, if you will. They really exist on a spectrum, on a year long or longer planning cycle for a brand, and they're a moment in time that they really ideally should be surrounded with a broader campaign that surrounds the customers with the messaging and with all of the information that the brand is looking to basically transmit to that audience, whether it's an internal audience or customers or partners or what have you. So as you were talking too about all of the coordination and organization that goes into it, talk to me a little bit about how you see campaign supporting the work of the ABX team. It sounds like it's sort of built in, but would love to hear a little more about that.

EJ Oelling:

Absolutely. So we almost look at a lot of our projects as programs, a campaign. So it shouldn't just be a one and done. One-offs are so challenging. So how do you take things and make that more of a program? So I'm going to take this campaign, maybe there's a webinar that's part of it, there's a blog that's part of it, there's thought leadership that's part of it. Do the call to actions have a strategy session with one of our thought leaders to come out of it? We want to make sure that we are giving people, I think of our lifecycle campaigns also, there's different content pieces for where they are in their journey. So content plays a huge play in it because content furthers the conversation, the campaign furthers the conversation. It's also the connective tissue. So whether it's a campaign that's just an email campaign, we have our own generative AI product, conversational email, that's really based on content as well and a campaign that goes out that way.

So how are we using AI and different tools out there? We're able to build out these programs. Sometimes they lead into third party activations, sometimes they lead into our proprietary events. So I think events can be specific cornerstones of your broader campaign, but you still need campaigns at the end of the day. I mean, even though people probably check their emails at the end of the day, but if it's really that important, whether again, maybe the campaign has digital ads to it. So I think you really think about everyone's different senses and the way that they learn. So between video ads, emails, events, we really want to be able that we're touching everybody in different ways that no matter what they're into or whatever makes them engaged in a certain way, we're able to hit them in that way in the campaign.

Laliv Hadar:

Let's switch gears a little bit to again, kind of the mechanics of how you've set up ABX at 6Sense and how you think about it. There's obviously different types of events. There's sort of a proprietary, owned and operated, there are third party events, maybe sponsorships, smaller get togethers, VIP. Talk to us a little bit about those different flavors of experiences and how you think about them in terms of planning and integrating them or when you use which one if you will, at a high level strategy.

EJ Oelling:

Sure. So I'm a recovering field marketer at heart. So for me, I love the idea of doing really highly targeted things, but sometimes you're going to go to a conference and you have your booth or you have your sessions. So we take that to the next level. So Forrester Summit would be a great example of a third party. So we sponsor Forrester Summit, we have our booth there. We have a couple sessions that we do with them, and that's the sponsorship of the third party that my team focuses on. But what else can you do around it? So at this event alone that we just had, we did two different targeted breakfasts. So we did two different personas that we worked with. We did three different dinners. One was just for prospects, one was for prospects and customers because you know your customers sell you better than yourself. So we do a combination of the two so we can cross pollinate there.

We do meeting space. Meetings are a huge part of our playbook that we have here at 6Sense. So we know that that one-on-one interaction with people is the way to go. So we always set up what we will call connect, a place where you can connect with one another. And we have meeting space, we use a meeting tool. And so when we do our events, we have a whole meeting quota. That's part of our metrics for our events as well. We also have Club 6, which is our executive lounge. So it's where can you have those really targeted executive conversations. We always throw in some fun experiential part to that. This year it was like a photo booth and an oxygen bar. We always love a good swag. At 6Sense, we believe that not all swag needs to be branded, so we'll just do a little pop of teal so you walk away knowing that you're part of our family as well.

So we take all of those things. Now again, it was all around a third-party event, but then we make it our own experience that we're driving from there. So people whether maybe they didn't go to the conference, maybe they were local in the city that we were at, but we get that level of engagement and then that goes into that bigger program coming out of it to talk about our specific products or our tools or whatever we're doing, and that becomes more of a long-tail form. So that would be third-party. So then it gets, like I said, those ancillary events, that's where you narrow it down. So that's where we're doing really highly targeted dinners. Something we did this year that was different too, as I talked about earlier, the big parties, everybody wanted to do the big parties back in the day.

I have a red list of 1400 people and everyone thought they were so cool. And then we looked at the ROI and there was nothing except for canned beer and Fritos. So we really want to look at targeted audience. So this year in Austin, we rented out Allens Boots. We ran a segment in 6Sense. We had a really, really, really targeted account list. We gave people a gift card to come in, come buy boots or hats with us. We had beer and we had a food truck and it really wasn't a huge heavy lift, but it was different.

So I would say this year is how do you make yourself stand out from someone else? So either you do one thing that you get a ton of sponsors for, so you say, "Hey, you want to meet with the ecosystem? We are all here together." And that's always a great way. Dreamforce is a great example of that. You want one thing, lots of sponsors, you all do it together or how do you make your program stand out where they're different? So you do them highly targeted, highly curated, and then that way you get the right people at the right place at the right time. And to me, that drives the best pipeline out there.

Laliv Hadar:

Let's switch gears a little bit. As we all know, technology drives so much of the growth in our industry. So I'm curious if you can talk to any trends you're seeing in the space. Generative AI is obviously a big one that we're seeing an uptick in all of marketing, I would say and beyond. And curious if you are utilizing that and or other trends that you'd like to share that you're inspired by and that you see propelling us forward.

EJ Oelling:

Oh, so many trends. I also think what's old is new, right? Everything kind of comes back around again. I would say generative AI is huge. So as we discussed, so conversational email is our generative AI product. We really use it a lot. So it's the BDR that doesn't sleep, it's my AE that doesn't have time. So it's an email. We use it on the front end of events where we say, "Hey, are you going to be in Austin? If so, come meet up with us," and then it has some human review. But again, it's that other layer of that outreach that sometimes you just don't have the team to do it. We also use it on the backend of our event. How many events have people gone to where you get these booth leads, you don't know if they're great leads, but they wanted to talk to you and you don't want to let them just die on the vine, that's not the right way to do it. So we'll use a CE campaign to just follow up those people and see if there's a level of engagement.

Use the lead scoring the right way. We use AI that way. Think about how people are using AI to write emails. All the people who are never good writers, now they have a semblance of writing. So I think AI is going to help us solve some of the problems that are out there. I don't think it's a replacement. I do not think that human review will go away. I do not think pen and paper will go away. Basic math is still there. I think the tools allow us to do that. Another tool that... my source of truth is my CRM. If the campaign isn't in there, if the contact record isn't in there, it shouldn't be just in an Excel sheet.

We make sure that we have the right fields in our CRM where we're checking things off so we can segment our audience. We can really look at reporting the right way. Because at the end of the day when we're looking at budgets the way they are, you have to be able to have the data to prove this was a success or this was a flop. And it's okay that it's a flop because you can learn from that mistake. And I think it's okay to pause and say, "Okay, we did it this way. Maybe we need to reevaluate." And I think the tools that are out there will help you do so. And then there's all kinds of organizational tools and things like that that have popped up that people use as well. And then communication, I would say at the end of the day, a lot of it is communicating within my team in itself to make sure that we're all on the same page.

Communicating with our stakeholders is super important. And so we really make sure that everything is outlined. We... enablement... actually, I'm going to pivot this to enablement as well. I think enablement is a huge, huge part of the ABX process. So whether we're enabling our internal stakeholders on how to execute this campaign or experience the right way, because for the sellers of BDRs, how are you selling this experience the right way to get the right people there? That's super important that they know how to do it.

But then we also enable our audience. Do they know where to go? Are emails clear and concise and do they make sense when they receive them? The content that they're getting is their thought leadership in it. How many, "Thank you for coming. Sorry, we missed you," emails are out there that people could care less about. So we've really pivoted to here's what we've learned at this event, how do we take this journey together? So we really look at ourselves as we're always kind of pushing that thought leadership, pushing the envelope, and going back to that attendee journey because that's super important now. Otherwise, it's like, why did I show up and where do I go from here if it's not for pipeline in the end?

Laliv Hadar:

Excellent. We're almost at the end here of our podcast, but I did want to ask you for your advice for brands that are not yet doing ABX and making account-based marketing a part of their experience strategy. What sort of initial steps or considerations do you think brands should prioritize in their thinking through how to successfully do something like this?

EJ Oelling:

I think you have to look at things in two ways. Go all in on the brand. Find different ways to showcase your brand out there. Are you the lanyard sponsor? No one's ever heard of you before, but then they're going to come up to you at your booth and figure out, "Why is your name on my lanyard". So find unique ways to put your brand out there that make people question, "Why I want to know who you are? And I want to get in front of you." So I think that's a really unique and very, very easy thing for a brand to do.

Find a way to do that guerrilla marketing even to get your brand out there. I think that's an important thing. Also, it's better to have six people at a dinner who are the right people at that dinner than to have 20. And it's okay that you don't do 20 person dinners. So find a way to use your money the right way with that right audience. And really start small. You don't have to start big. Try to do really small campaigns, really small dinners, activations, and then you can grow to be more organized. And as we kind of go into the weeds about segments and things like that, but start small and see that return and then from there you can start growing.

Laliv Hadar:

Wonderful. Well, EJ, thank you so much for joining us today and enlightening us on ABX and everything about utilizing experiences to really help propel the pipeline a big way. This has been really informative and I think something our audiences will find super useful. Thank you very much.

EJ Oelling:

Thank you for having me. This was wonderful. Appreciate it.

Laliv Hadar:

Yeah, absolutely. And for our listeners, stay tuned for the next Xcast episode, which will be out soon. Thank you for joining us.