Transcript: Masterclass: Proven Strategies for Successful Event Delivery

so just in time welcome to our next episode of event ninja podcast and today we are live we are live from three conferences at the same time and run events the company has two roles first we're exhibiting you and we're also providing the full software tech for the conference this is european cloud and collaboration summit it's european bizapp summit and what was the first one Collaboration, BizApp and Cloud and AI Summit. That's right. Matt, we are already tired after one year. Yeah, it's been long. We are here at the Expo and at the same time, this is a very unique podcast. For the first time, you have the second Damir with me. That's true. Welcome, Damir Badjari. Thank you. Great to have you here. Thank you. Damir is also an exhibitor. That's right. We had some preliminary talks. You're from the company Syskit. That's right. From Zagreb. also global company exhibiting all over the world and now we as an exhibitor we had a chat yesterday and you said all those conferences are not about immediate sales that's right but you're exhibiting here I am exhibiting here but you are more pro in this area what are your reasons why are you here does it make sense oh it it does you know that's that's it's a very interesting question and it's a lot to unpack, so we can, we'll try to, we'll try to summarize it a little bit here, but we can, we can have a whole series about this. It's really unpacking what, you know, about conferences, but just as an overview, No, it's a long-term game, right? Going to conferences. You're building relationships with people. So that's really the, that's what I look at it as relationship building. So it's hard to, if you just look at it as one conference and you just focus on that angle, what was our return of investment? And looking at, and I get that question a lot after a conference. What was our return of investment on that? And they only look, usually they look at it from direct sales. And then I actually had to talk about this a couple of months ago. I did my own presentation about and then I really went deep and thought talked about it. But it's not just about direct sales. You want just direct sales and you look at it through that lens. It's it's it's from one like just focusing on the one conference. It's not you can't get that return of investment, but on the long term. And it's a lot of indirect things that happen that build your brand, build your relationships, grow your awareness that lead to indirect sales. So in the long term, it's very worth it. And it's in those little interactions you have with current customers. So we have current customers we meet, so we're strengthening our relationship with customers. We're meeting new people. We're listening to what is in the industry. So people, we always have new feedback. Oh, people are now talking about oversharing. That seems to be the biggest concern or is it co-pilot? Is it power platform? So you're gaining industry, uh, uh, perspective. So, and that stuff you can't really measure in direct ROI. So there's so many things we're even having our own meetings on the side. We're having, we want to have really in depth meetings. So we have a side room and we're having really long one hour meetings. And those are very valuable listening to our customers, listening to insights in depth, listening to different ideas. Some don't even, you know, won't always match what we need, but we're really learning. And so there's talking to speakers, Microsoft MVPs, right? And I build relationships with influencers, MVPs. Then we end up doing ebook. We just did a great ebook with nine different MVPs. We do webinars. And a lot of that relationship is built at the conferences, right? I mean, we can go on. There's so many things, indirect ROI. Yeah. And brand awareness and building that really in the long term, you need to go. And just as a statement, Cisco is going to six conferences in the next two months. So two weeks ago, we were in Vegas. We were in Dubai. Now we're in Germany. We're going to Vienna. We're going to London. We're going to Slovenia, all within like two months. So I'm pretty busy. I just want to say, I think I understand why you're doing this job. But that's the positive side. There's also the other side. So it's not just relaxing job going to the conference. No. So I understand you said it's not about media, it's serious, but it's a very complex mix of very different things. On one side, you have this marketing stuff. You present yourself so people at least get that you exist. That's right. When you do something. There's the second thing. At Brand Events, we use the term ambassador for people to influence us. We work with it, but we see it as a win-win situation. So they provide insights to us. And that's exactly what you said. We're sitting in this glass house. We have no idea what actually people mean. when they say something because the context is missing. We're not providing directly to them, but the influencers are speaking about the issues and we get this and we can actually have this conversation here. And it's all about the conversation. However, on the other side, I was in my previous job for eight years, chief financial officer. And you know, this is a very evil topic. Chief financial officer is asking questions like, yes all nice for this free goodies and all this stuff all those guys just go to your booth to get some free goodies right where's the return on investment that's a that's a very debatable question yeah we always we always have this um talk uh when I come to a conference you know we have there's there's some great vendors here maybe they have a bigger budget and they'll they'll give a beer they'll give out, you know, a lot of, a lot of free stuff that a lot of people come and that, and that's great too. That's not a bad thing to have brand awareness. You're maybe you're just like, Hey, we're, we're a fun brand. We want to just share, you know, a great experience, throw a party. Those aren't bad things, but that's a, that's a big investment. And that's, that's, it might make sense actually, just, just like coming to a conference where brand awareness, this is another level, but it's, you know, uh, we, we always have this debate, uh, do we want someone to come to the booth, uh, just to, you know, to scan our draw, you know, that's not really the type of people we're looking for, but at the same time, you know, I've had a lot of great conversations, um, when someone just like, Oh, uh, Oh, what do you think? Oh, I want to answer the draw. And then they ended up being like a perfect match, uh, for our product, but the having something to, you know, uh, with a break the ice because people are, can be really, uh, yeah. If I understand properly, you're into this perfect balance. There's a balance. That's right. So you can overspend and, and, and if you have the budget shirt, like this is just my, this is just my perspective. If you have other budget, that's fun. You can go spend a lot of money and, and, and, but there's, um, there's, uh, gotta be careful because people want to be the most popular. You want to be the fun booth. But you have to also set your ego aside because I'll come and I've thought everything through and my team members come and go, yeah, you know, those guys are a lot more fun. Yeah, but are they attracting the right people to your booth? So there's a balance. And I'm saying if you have the budget, you want to splurge a bit, maybe you won't get the ROI. That's fair. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. But, you know, maybe something in the middle. I love doing the Lego draw. Everyone loves Legos. It brings people in. It's not a great, it's not a big cost, a Lego, besides like, you know, giving out beers, which probably costs like five thousand, having a coffee truck. Those are all great things. Yeah. but it's a it's a big investment but you know lego is great and it still breaks the ice because people are people are scared to come to the booth yes you know where people were afraid to approach someone we haven't met but you know you have a lego there you have some stickers and they all and then it's a nice just ice break oh do you want into our draw you enter into conversation some people won't be a fit for your brand and that's okay definitely but you've you've done something at least to bring them to your booth right without it's and it's not a big call so I I like the I like our kind of mid level approach and even giving out merch you know you can have all this free stuff like uh socks and all these free things and just display it and then people are going like yeah I want I want that and that's okay too but what we do is we'll we won't we won't have like nice things visible but when we have a great conversation with someone we go hey here's here's a gift like a nice gift here's a book we have we have some great books so it's I like to reward Great conversation. In your case, this is really a reward. This is a benefit you get when you provide value. And I would say, if I understand correctly, both sides should provide some sort of value. If just one side is providing, that's missing something. That's right. I was at the IMAX conference. This is pretty event management. It's one of the biggest conferences in Frankfurt last week. And there was a much bigger than many other conferences when it comes to exhibitors and countries like exhibiting. So like Morocco and Malaysia and Japan and then Middle East. So I was running to the conference and this is like sixty percent and the other side is tech and everyone else. So there was a boot of two consultants. Yeah. who already just wrote consultants. There's literally nothing on the boot. And the fifty meters away, there was a boot of Oman, like four floors with huge, very luxurious and luxurious booth. And I was just thinking, it's very hard to understand where is the balance between a proper booth yeah and how should you invest is there a a trend that you say okay people are going crazy with the booths or they're going back to the standard booths or is there something in between what is the current view well let's say I mean I've even had this discussion with our with our ceo ceo last yesterday we're looking at all the booths and we're like well you know what like we there's a there's some nice custom boots and that's great They look beautiful, but that's a huge cost. There's a lot of logistics. There's a lot of paperwork. There's a lot of storage. And that's a huge budget. If you have money to splurge, yeah, you can have a custom booth. It's not a bad thing. it's a that's really when you have a huge budget and you're really going out all out on conferences what I like is this kind of middle approach and I love the I love the booths here at run events it's very simple you it's you know you send your graphics you show up your graphics are good everything looks beautiful the t we can order the tvs very easily the lights very easily I show up my booth is ready to go. And it's this turnkey, but very simple. And most of the most of the booths are following, I think, that middle ground turnkey because you can go a little, I guess, a level lower and bring your own pop up banners and things. But then things don't look consistent. But it's great here. This is one of the best looking conferences in the Microsoft three sixty five sphere because, you know, you go to some other ones, it's not consistent. And then everyone brings their own thing. The lighting's bad. this guy brings a roll-up banner the other curtains so but this is there's a very good consistency here because everyone's going in that middle ground it's a great price it's not over inflated and it's very easy to order everything happens when we arrived there was just one uh four booths and they're placed so they had to kind of turn everything around and things can go wrong absolutely is there any thing that you can remember that really went wrong for you and say okay every time there's something that goes wrong and there's I mean we can we we should do a webinar just on things that go wrong yeah like a example I showed up a few weeks ago to a conference I won't name it but I had my booth I knew where it was organized and then we show up it was moved one over and someone else had the corner, not what we planned. And I've, I've seen almost everything over the last seven years. I'm like, well, that's not what we organized. I picked the corner booth, you know? So that's, that's, that's one example, right? Of things that, wrong. You didn't get the booth to look and they're like, oh, it's okay. It's still good. I'm like, no, but that's not what I, what I agreed on. Right. There's been all sorts of situations, the carpet, like, I mean, that's a little thing, but you know, the carpet was just like you said, the one, I had the carpets switch from ours was orange. There was gray. We wanted it, uh, you know, opposite, but they just matched our wall with the carpet. And it was like an over orange booth, the, the, ground and the walls orange, but we wanted a contract and it's like the little things that, you know, but we, we really went and thought about it and things go wrong all the time. Even my flights delayed now on the way home. And we're now like, uh, trying to figure out how to get million things go wrong. People are late, people get sick. uh you just gotta go with the flow if I put my other hat on as I said brian events have two hats here at the conference one is the same so it's the one who suffers with you yeah and who understands your pain from the other side the run events as a software company we provided the tech I kind of like what you say in a way that it really confirms what we think that automatization is the key. Yeah, what we should do for sponsors is to take those automatic manual steps away, so that you have actually less work to do. And you have a proper checklist with all overview of stuff on one place yeah that's that's what out of all the conferences I go to I run events is like the sim like honestly it's a breeze it's the like I'm not even saying that it's it's it's such a breeze to to order my booth to send the graphics the checklist is there there's there's a special page for sponsor faq which is constantly updated so it's whenever I need info uh I know where to go. And then obviously the support team's great too. So they're very responsive. But the whole process is easy. It's on one invoice. All my lead scanners are included. There's not extra things I need to purchase. There's no surprises. So I really love, like in terms of, I wish all the conferences used run events. I'm not just saying like, cause it's just, it's, it's, it's very simple and no one really thinks of the sponsor side. You know, everyone's always for event platforms and, probably conferences in general, think of the attendees and that's their priority. But how about art procedures? You know, there's how many sponsors do you have? Well, like, I. Eighty-four, I think. Yeah, yeah. You know, that's eighty-four processes. Eighty-four processes. Eighty-four people like me, you have to talk to. And everyone is unique well that's true so it's not that your needs are the same with everyone else so just order for everyone that's that's a beauty on one side the other side you need to manage this and everything can go wrong and you know mafia if something can go wrong it will go wrong it does and that that's the topic that always uh I could say it in a very bad way, but many see sponsors as ATM. That's right. Yeah. Sometimes the feeling too. Uh, yeah. I mean, it's just not their priority. You know, once they get the sponsor, once we sent them the invoice, they're not thinking about, well, wait, like you have like, like me, I have the plan, uh, the conference that's mine now. Like you have your, like you you're the conference, but I have my, the booth is my conference. And I have to get my team ready. I have to get my graphics ready. There's a million little things I need to know when, and sometimes they'll throw me like a curve ball, like two months ahead of a conference. They're like, we added a, we added an extra day, but I already, this is like for a North America conference. I already booked my flights. Yeah. Now, now you're incurring costs to us, you know, or they throw, or they give information at the end, like a week before, but I need this. needed that information uh three months ago already planned already booked I already sent my team I already have everything in place and now you're like oh there's a sponsor dinner you know in the last minute but I'm already yeah so so yeah uh so you're not about getting a dinner so that's not no no but you know I just they gotta think of our perspective the sponsor and like like there's eighty one you have to keep eighty one people eighty one companies you know yeah and their procedures in in mind you know definition of success is very personal and it's always case oriented and it could be even that in the same case two different persons have different definition of success but I what I hear from you is definition of success for sponsors is both business and fun value so it should be great for the brand it should get a good vibe that's right I should have fun but it should get results, analyze return on investment needs to be somehow displayed. And well, at the same time, organizers earn money with the conference, but you also need to present your results to your boss. Yeah, yeah, we have our, yeah. And they'll ask us, you know, how was the conference? Like, did you make any good relationships to, you know, have any good leads, customers? So yeah, we have our perspective and sometimes it's not considered as much. And you know with run events we try to put a lot of pressure on those manual processes to just disappear that's right uh the one thing is that you have different phases of event management where you can really separate the task and all this stuff that's right the next step will be definitely we will use ai are you scared no no I think that I I can see a lot of potential like let's say I think you're mentioning like ai can match like that that's interesting Like, match me with what companies would really – or maybe we can even define the criteria or some of our needs, and then it can match us, and vice versa, matching us with speakers. Maybe it can match us with sessions. Maybe attendees can get matched with sessions. Hey, this is your role. We recommend you take this track or this. You know, this would be – you know, so there's a lot of potential there that, you know, will make – I guess just give a better result for the end user, a better experience. So I'm not worried about it. This is what you said at the beginning, and I still remember this, is connections. That's right. But the value of connection is represented through the connection, who is connected to whom, and what is the benefit for both sides. Just being connected is LinkedIn. Oh, let's connect. I don't know if you see this. We should connect and have some mutual benefits in the future. Yeah. Whatever. And the thing is that you don't want those connections to be just connections, but to get something out of it. As I said, AI can really help us to connect real people with real people in a way that they have a reason for that. It's not that you don't want to have meetings. You're here for the meetings. You don't want to have stupid meetings with wrong people. Yeah, I mean, over the course of a conference, you're going to have a lot of meetings. Some will be... good, some are bad, but overall, the general, if you can raise the quality of the conversations by using AI to to predict or give you recommendations that that's a huge help because we're valuing a value valuing uh meetings a lot in our company we're really like we're having that side meetings where we were really reaching out to customers we want to really hear and have that in-depth valuable conversations more than quantity yeah I I see it in this case that this is also not only for the sponsor this is also for attendees They also want to find the real reasons, uh, the real results. And if they want to visit the sponsor in your case, you have to offer, uh, your offer is exactly what they're looking for. That's right. They're also happy. Yeah. You know, there's, there's people we, we meet and. You know, they don't know about Cisco, but you know, you, you end up talking to them and they're like, yeah, I really, I really do have this problem. Yeah. Yeah. We can help you. But we, they, it, one, they maybe, maybe didn't even know they had a problem, but they didn't know about us. So they had a problem. they don't know that we can offer, offer it. And it'd be great if someone like, you know, AI or like a tool can just give them some recommendations, you know, just cause there's probably a lot of people we didn't even meet today. that probably potentially could have used this issue in our industry, lots of people can be introvert. That's right. On the other side, from the sponsor side, most of the people are extroverts. That's right. They sell. It's very hard to connect in real life, because when introvert guy starts speaking to the extroverts, he's shutting down. That's true. Okay, I don't have time. I will come later. But from the other side, if you confirm that both sides will have ten meaningful meetings, not forced meetings, but we offer you meaningful meetings, I think this is a huge improvement. And on the other side, when you add services, like you lose your badge, we are in Germany. Normally, if you lose something, you need your lots of documentation, personal ID, blood test, whatever, to get the badge again. And it would be amazing to just say, okay, I lost my badge. Can you print it? your application knows who you are, you know, that you're approved and just saying, okay, it's already printed, go to counter two. This is what we all dream about, not to do things that we are forced to do, but try and focus on some other things. Yeah. We were discussing that earlier. It's like that little thing, like, you know, uh, you lose your badge, and now you have a process. It's a little detail, but for someone who loses their badge, it's huge, and you've considered that, and that little detail, they'll appreciate that so much. That's really cool. Actually, just to add, when I was registering my badge, checking in, the process was so awesome. With Run Events, I just scanned my badge, or my QR code, and the thing printed, and Like it was just so fast. I think in like, twenty, thirty seconds, I was checked in. That was really awesome. Last year, we made this that everything is beyond eight seconds. It's really amazing. In my case, I just showed my code and I got my badge and we didn't have any queues. That's right. There you are. One of the things that why we pushed, we don't know why actually, we believe that first impression is the best. If you go to the conference and then wait for an hour, and then you're frustrated and have issues with badging and everything, and you go to your book, I was going to say, you know, yeah. And then but they're wasting time in the in the line also. So you speed that up. Now they have more time to talk to you. Exactly. So you let you speed up. We want to bring them in the best possible way. That's right. People are happy to say, OK, I'm in. Let's do this now. OK. And this is if I follow the conversation, I just say life events make sense. That's right. Yeah. So we should be here on the other side. We should also focus on things that make sense of valuable connection. creating opportunities in direct sales. The booth is very complicated. Many things can go wrong. That's right. But still, we need to find a balance somehow to have a bit of fun, a bit of benefit for the people coming from the other side. What I really liked in your approach is that it's really a very, very valuable mix of business That's right. Community feeling. Yeah, I was about to say you can't just be completely business here. We're just going to talk to people that really interest us and not be part of the community. So you do a Lego draw. You give out free stuff. We do videos with MVPs. You've got to give something back. We do that e-book. you know, we, we can, we give it out for free and we, uh, had nine MVPs and it's, it's a great educational resource, but you gotta give it a little back and you'll, and you'll, uh, prosper in business as well. It's not, it's not like it'll come back eventually, just not directly, but. Being part of the community is very important. It could be a very nice quote because I heard it from a person. You don't know what will happen. That's right. But if you do the right things, the right things will happen. Yeah. So if you approach people in a way that you give them something, as today there's this trend, go give it mentality. There's one guy who wrote a book that exploded and everyone is following it. But basically they say, don't just request something from people. give them something, make it win-win, make that both sides have a value out of this meeting. And I understand on offline events, live events, there is a different type of value. We didn't speak about hybrid and online because we can spend probably an hour. If you mix them, we can probably spend two hours about problems that might happen well we had uh here a bit of this offline online because we connected keynotes into a room so there were keynotes into that's right so that's the first step into you know perhaps in the future that could be really remote whatever but you can't really replace life you can't you know like just an example we you know we sell internationally uh yeah our product and Most of our demos are on Teams, but having that real in-person interaction in front of a TV, you get to see their body language. You get to see where their eyes are moving. You can ask them more intimate questions. It's such a different experience uh just for our team to demo and have that in-person interaction and then you can leave them with something a gift it's it's such a more powerful connection when you have that uh when you meet someone in person right yeah definitely so that's why I don't think in-person events will ever go away uh even even with uh all this uh teams and you know you zoom you can you can you can connect but they're still here they're still so important you mentioned zoom and there was this wonderful meme on the internet there was a big picture of zoom headquarters and why zoom have offices yeah yeah yeah that's right that's right yeah everything is so fine so but I think this is a very good closing quote sure sure why do we have live events we have live events thank you so much it was great having you two dummies I think we provided valuable insights I hope so it was an amazing conversation and we had wonderful one day I think second day will be even better thank you so much for watching until next time bye bye bye