About this episode
Eddie Reynolds, CEO of Union Square Consulting with 10 years of B2B SaaS revenue acceleration experience, joins Epic Events podcast to explain why most companies waste their event budgets and what's missing from their go-to-market strategies. Eddie's core insight is that events are not a problem; the foundational work before events is. The majority of event failure stems from skipping ICP definition and buyer persona development, which must happen before any event dollar is spent. Most companies either broadcast to everyone or run events with zero follow-up process, turning expensive gatherings into lead-generation theater. Eddie shares his playbook for stacking conferences with pre-arranged meetings to generate millions in pipeline, how intimate dinners where existing customers sell to prospects outperform booth badge-scanning by orders of magnitude, and the specific step-by-step post-event workflows that separate five-figure losses from five-figure wins. The conversation covers booth ROI analysis, user conference strategy, speaking engagement evaluation, and why Pavilion exemplifies a go-to-market engine that sells without trying.
What we cover in this episode
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2:15
Why events matter in the AI era Post-pandemic surge in in-person demand as alternative to saturated digital channels like Zoom and social media.
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4:45
ICP and buyer personas as event foundation The base layer of event strategy must define who you actually want in the room, not broadcast to everyone.
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8:30
Intimate dinners with customer-to-prospect selling Mixing existing customers with prospects in small dinners creates more value and conversion than large sponsored booths.
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12:00
Pre-arranged meetings and guest lists Stack entire conferences with scheduled one-on-ones using attendee lists, AI transcription, LinkedIn research, and email outreach.
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18:30
Speaking and ROI vs. other channels Speaking engagements only make sense if audience is ICP-heavy and follow-up mechanism exists; compare to webinars or ads.
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22:00
Booth sponsorships and badge scanning Expensive but ineffective if leads are unqualified; success requires senior sales, real conversations, and post-event nurturing workflows.
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27:30
User conference strategy and execution Only viable if company commits to 10/10 experience, one-to-one sales-led promotion, and complete end-to-end customer journey mapping.
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36:00
Post-event follow-up process Most event ROI is lost after the event; critical to map lead scoring, sales outreach, nurturing campaigns, and continuous offers.
The lines worth sharing
If we're spending money on events, are we getting in front of our ideal customer profile and our buyer personas? If we're not, this is not going to be a good use of funds.
Eddie Reynolds · 5:20
I stacked that entire conference with meeting after meeting after meeting. That is going to be 10 or 100 times more productive than just showing up and hoping you rub elbows with the right person.
Eddie Reynolds · 13:45
If you can't make it an absolute 10 out of 10, you shouldn't put on an event like this at all.
Eddie Reynolds · 28:00
Most event ROI is lost after the event; what's happening at the back end of that conference is just as critical as getting people in the door.
Eddie Reynolds · 36:15
Common questions from this episode
What foundational work must happen before investing in events?
Define your ICP and buyer personas with specificity (size, geography, problem). Then map a step-by-step process for pre-event promotion, in-event engagement, and post-event follow-up. Build this into your CRM so every stage is tracked and measured.
How do you get attendee lists from conferences and use them?
Ask event organizers directly using your ticket purchase as leverage. Look for Slack channels or attendee platforms. Screenshot attendee names, run them through AI to convert to text, search LinkedIn, use Zoom Info or Clay to find emails, then filter to your 20 highest-value prospects and pre-arrange meetings.
Why do intimate dinners outperform large conference booths?
Small dinners with existing customers selling to prospects create value for every attendee and high-intent conversations. Large booths with badge-scanning attract unqualified traffic that floods SDR queues with uninterested leads and low conversion.
When does speaking at a conference make sense?
Only if the audience is majority ICP and buyer personas, your topic solves a real problem they face, and you have a clear follow-up mechanism like a QR code to an offer, newsletter signup, or sales call.
How should you measure event ROI against other marketing channels?
Track leads generated, pipeline value, conversion rate, and customer acquisition cost. Compare to webinars, LinkedIn ads, Google ads, and other channels. If the same budget in another channel delivers better results, reallocate. Attribution is pseudoscience but data-driven decisions beat guessing.
What is Pavilion's GTM strategy that impressed you most?
Pavilion adds continuous value across podcast, LinkedIn, CRO School, CMO School, live and intimate events, membership, and sales interactions. This creates an entire customer journey where every touchpoint nurtures prospects toward sponsorship and deeper investment without overt selling.
SEO meta description
Eddie Reynolds explains why events don't drive revenue: skip ICP definition and buyer personas at your peril. Master the GTM foundations first.
Target keywords
Eddie Reynolds
Union Square Consulting
GTM strategy events
ICP buyer personas
event ROI measurement
conference strategy
intimate dinners marketing
booth sponsorship ROI
user conference
go-to-market efficiency
pre-arranged meetings
Pavilion GTM
Read the complete conversation
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Read the full transcript · 34 KB
MUHAMMAD YOUNASHello, everyone. Welcome to Epic Events Podcast. Today, I have a very special guest, Eddie Reynolds. Eddie has spent 10 years helping B2B SaaS companies fix broken revenue engines, and events are one of the most misused tools in the GTM playbook. I have a lot of questions for Eddie today of how we can make use of events the proper way and can have GTM events as one of the core strategies as part of any GTM playbook. Eddie, welcome to the podcast.
SPEAKER_01Thanks for having me.
MUHAMMAD YOUNASEddie, in this world of AI, and I was just looking at your post, you know, it looks like you just interviewed someone for, I don't know, today or, you know, sometime this week who turned out to be a college graduate making use of AI for pretty much everything. So I found that LinkedIn post pretty interesting. How are you seeing events within this AI world, and how much do you feel that that's helping anyone with their GTM strategy? Well, I mean, in some ways, I'm not sure that I, like, necessarily see the connection between events and AI.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI think that as a general, all the technology we're using, all the Zoom meetings, everything from the pandemic, we're seeing a massive demand right now for people to do in-person, face-to-face events. I think we are all, like, after six years of this, like, pretty burned out on Zoom calls, and we want to meet in-person and have that human connection. And I think that from a company perspective, from a marketing perspective, there's a lot of opportunity to do live events right now where it's not that there's not a competition and that it's easy, but it's easier than trying to post on social media, trying to do webinars, trying to do the Zoom meetings, because that's been just such a saturated market the last six years. And I think, I don't want to say we are seeing, I think we have already seen a comeback to in-person events. And I think as it applies to AI, AI is impacting every single step of everything that we do across the entire business. And I'm happy to sit and break that down with you as it applies to events and marketing and go-to-market in general.
SPEAKER_05But as a broad sweep, it's kind of hard to answer that question. Eddie, if we just pick up a medium-sized B2B company, and let's assume that their budget is a couple of million dollars in a year for events team in particular, I would like to kind of brainstorm what are some of the ways within the events landscape of what a chief marketing officer or, you know, chief events officer, like how should they kind of allocate that budget?
MUHAMMAD YOUNASAnd I'm assuming that, you know, something like user conference would show up, something like intimate dinners would show up. So, so just want to pick your brain on someone, a chief marketing officer listening to this. How would you help, like, how would you suggest that they spend a budget, like a couple of million dollars within the events landscape?
EDDIE REYNOLDSSure. So I'm not going to give my opinion on whether this type of event or that type of event is better than the other, or that it's better than some other marketing channel, because it's not my area of expertise. And I think lots of people have opinions about what's better or what's not, but ultimately I want to look at the data. And so we're investing in marketing to get an ROI. And the challenge with that, as we all know, is that attribution is a pseudoscience. Trying to understand where this customer came from, what influenced their buying decisions is very difficult. But we still have to do the best that we can to get access to this data and make intelligent decisions about whether or not it's worthwhile to continue to invest or to double down or to move out or reallocate budget elsewhere. And so when we think of events, for me, as somebody who specializes in go-to-market, not events specifically, I think about it as just one of any channel. We have our marketing budget to spend on everything from doing podcasts like this to doing events to doing ads. And we have to think about where we're allocating that budget. We also have budget to hire salespeople, to make cold calls, and we want to build a system where all of those things work cohesively together. And so I think the first part of my answer to that question, because I could literally spend the entire podcast just trying to answer that one question, is we need to think really clearly about the foundations of our go-to-market. And the very base layer foundation of our go-to-market is our ICP and our buyer personas. So we need to ask, if we're spending money on events, in whatever flavor that is, you and I talked offline about many different ways to approach events. If we're spending money on events, are we getting in front of our ideal customer profile and our buyer personas in those companies? If we're not, then by definition, this is not going to be a good use of funds. If we are able to get in front of those folks, we have to think about what the customer journey is for them to learn about us, find out about us, and explore that path, how we're going to measure that, and whether or not that's actually ultimately paying off, or whether we need to reallocate that budget elsewhere.
MUHAMMAD YOUNASMakes sense. If we pick up just more like a lunch and learn or a dinner as one of the events format, just based on your experience, do you have any best practices of how to get best out of a dinner or a lunch and learn as an event format as part of the GTM strategy? I'll just tell you just on the flip side, from our side, I've seen companies, when they're making cold calls, they need a hook. You know, if it's a field of getting to a call, the conversion rate has been very less compared to, oh, by the way, we are arranging a dinner or a lunch and learn with 20 other executives. Would you, would want to attend one of those? Just wanted to kind of understand a bit more about what you're seeing in the market for something like that.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, again, I don't think this is my area of expertise. This is something I spend a lot of time of my personal time doing. A lot of my energy goes into our own marketing programs and thinking about things like this, but this is not the thing that I shout to the world. That I'm the expert in. What I can tell you is just like anecdotally, I'm a big fan of these small intimate events. And what I experienced when I was at Salesforce and what I've done with my own company in the 10 years since I left Salesforce and started this company is that these events can be really powerful. If you get a group of people together and get them selling to each other, right? I think a lot of us want to go and meet with peers so that we can share best practices. For example, I flew out to San Francisco a few weeks ago to attend a dinner hosted by one of the large VC firms that you would know by name, but I don't want to name drop. And all the RevOps leaders and go-to-market operations leaders that were in their portfolio. I wasn't going there to sell. I was going there to learn from other practitioners of this practice what best practices they were sharing, share my own, etc. I think that's a really, really compelling pitch. And another way to think about this is this is like an interim pitch on the back of whatever you're ultimately pitching, which is your product or service, right? And so when you get somebody to a dinner, the question is how many of those people that go to the dinner end up entering your sales funnel? One great way to do that is to take your existing customers and mix them with your prospects. And then you have your existing customers selling to your prospects. But you have to make sure that there's value for every person involved that goes to that event. So if I'm an existing customer, let's just say that we are doing an event for manufacturers in, sorry, CFOs in manufacturing as a random example. Well, the existing customers that have solved their problem with our product, what is the value for them to come to this dinner? And then the prospects that are considering our product or maybe not considering our product, what's the value for them to come and meet those CFOs that might share with them how they're using our product? It's got to be more than just the product. It's got to be best practices. It's got to be each person taking some value away from that dinner. But then you might also want to think, how can I then drive those people to then start to consider maybe entering our funnel? Is there some other offer that I can provide with them on the back of that dinner and say, hey, if you're interested, we could do X, Y, or Z for you? And I think the first thing that you need to do is say, okay, let's make sure we get the right people in the room. If you get the right people in the room and you have a really, really fantastic and valuable event, they're going to tell other people about it. They're going to want to come back for more. And this is something that I saw working really successfully when I was at Salesforce. And I also want to, you know, like caveat this with Salesforce is a really big company. So you kind of imagine like this massive machine putting this on. But in reality, it was like my team of six people and an outsourced firm that had like an event in a box. We paid $5,000 for these events and they just produced it and put it all together.
SPEAKER_05So this is something like a startup could have easily executed in the exact same way that we were.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd I found that to be incredibly powerful. But I also think that you have to think about like the soup to nuts customer journey of the event, in this case, this intimate dinner, just being one step in that journey. And how are you going to take these prospects through that entire journey as opposed to just having some random event where you bring a bunch of people, have dinner, and then hope that they just call you the next day and beg you to sell them your product?
MUHAMMAD YOUNASThanks for that, Eddie. Eddie, if I zoom out, just trying to learn a bit more from you about the GTM foundation that makes any event work. Just what's the planning foundation you think every company needs before any event can drive revenue? If you can just guide us a bit more on the ICP and buyer persona work that has to happen first, that would be amazing.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAbsolutely. So like I said, I think that ICP and buyer persona is at the foundation of all go-to-market. And specifically, I think most companies are not specific enough about who their ICP is and their buyer personas. So I use the example of CFOs in manufacturing companies. Are we targeting all manufacturing companies in North America, in North America and Europe? Are we putting on an event where we're going to spend a lot of time and money having this intimate dinner with CFOs in all manufacturing companies? Well, what is that dinner going to look like? If I have one CFO of a manufacturing company that does $2 million in revenue and another CFO of a company that does $200 million in revenue and another that does $20 billion, are those folks going to get value from each other? Maybe, but that's a question we need to ask. I would venture to say maybe not. And so if we're more narrow and we say, you know, the companies that we do best with are manufacturing companies that are this size and this geography that have this particular problem. And you filter it down as much as you possibly can. Then this goes into your event strategy, your advertising strategy, your marketing content, your sales pitch. Everything gets like narrower from there. And then you need to think about this step-by-step process, right? So we're imagining this intimate dinner where we have a bunch of people coming to this dinner and having a good time. But there's a whole series of steps that happen before we arrange that dinner to get the right people to that dinner to make sure that they attend. And there's a whole series of steps on the back half of that to make sure that we maximize the value of the relationships that we built at that dinner. And so for me, the foundation of go-to-market, which we have outlined in our go-to-market efficiency pyramid on our website at unionsquareconsulting.com backslash frameworks, like shares these bullet points in the pyramid. And the base of that pyramid is defining the ICP and the buyer personas and then defining that step-by-step process and then building it into the systems. So as an example, if we're going to put these intimate dinners together, do we have a tool like Salesforce, for example, where we have all the customers and all the prospects and a way to like mark them either that we want to invite them to an event. For example, we could use campaigns. I don't mean to get into technology here, but we could use a campaign in Salesforce or a checkbox or something to say, okay, here's all the people that we want to attend this event. Who did we invite? Who accepted? Who showed up, et cetera. And then what's the step-by-step process after we've invited all of these people? And that to me is the breakdown, right? Hard enough to put on an event, but then if we put it on and then like that's it and the follow-up isn't there, we lose all the opportunity that we created in putting this event on in the first place.
MUHAMMAD YOUNASOne of the requests that I typically get from our salespeople is how they want to attend some conferences where they feel that they can just meet that ICP, that buyer persona. Because from their perspective, it's a low cost, low complexity entry point into just trying to meet with the right person. But what do you suggest is the right way to approach attending a conference so it actually generates pipeline versus someone just being a few days out of the office? Any guidance on that?
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. And so just for a frame of reference, just in the last couple of years, I've generated a few million dollars of revenue in my small business just by doing exactly that without a better plan. And there is a better plan. I just happened to be pretty busy and didn't have time to execute it. So I think the hardest thing is you go to the event and you rub elbows with people and you just run around shaking hands and kissing babies and hoping that you meet the right person and that turns into an opportunity. And in this particular example, that's exactly what I did. I haven't been to many events because we have a lot going on in this business. But the first thing that I did is say, okay, which event is going to be a target rich environment? Which is going to have the most people that are in my ICP and buyer personas? So I did an analysis of all the events that we could go to and you think about something like Dreamforce, right? We work with B2B tech companies and we help them with their go-to-market strategy and engineering. It makes sense to go to Dreamforce until you think about the fact that there's 180,000 people there. And of those 180,000 people, if I happen to just bump into people and start rubbing elbows, what are the chances that I'm going to run into a chief revenue officer in a B2B tech company with $50 to $500 million in revenue that has the exact problems that we solve? There's so many people at this event that I feel like it would be finding a needle in a haystack. So instead, we went to some smaller events where you had a lot more concentration of those kinds of people and it was virtually impossible not to run into them. I happen to run into some of those people. We also work with private equity and venture capital firms where people in the organization that are former CROs and CMOs help those portfolio companies and they appreciate what we do and oftentimes introduce us to those portfolio companies. And so those are the types of people that I met at the event. Now, take it to the next step. Now, you've registered for the event. Can you get a guest list? Can you figure out who is on that guest list? Can you reach out to those people and prearrange meetings so that when you go to the event, you just have the entire event stacked with meetings? And a meeting could be something as simple as, I will text you and I'll meet you over at the Zoom Info booth. And I'm standing in front of the Zoom Info booth because we don't have a booth ourselves and I say hello. And I stack that entire conference with meeting after meeting after meeting like that. That is going to be 10 or 100 times more productive than just showing up and hoping that you rub elbows with the right person. If you can do that before the event and even invite people to the event, especially if it's like a free event or something like that. Now, the Salesforce World Tour, as an example, is night and day different from Dreamforce. It's been a while since I've been there, but the last time I went to the Salesforce World Tour, it was free. It's one day. It's at the Javits Center in New York. And so you could message somebody and say, hey, by any chance, do you want to pop by the Javits Center? In fact, let me take this even a step further. Here are some of the talks that I think that would be valuable for you. I know that you're trying to solve this problem. There's a speaker speaking about this. What do you say that we both attend this? We can go watch the talk together and then we can catch up after the talk. And now you've made this event that could otherwise be you just randomly walking around a conference hall trying to bump into random people to having a series of meetings scheduled with your most valuable prospects.
MUHAMMAD YOUNASI love that. I'm going to copy that up because I think just one quick question. You're going to a conference. Getting the guest list in that conference would be in many cases a dream come true. If you can do that for free, et cetera. How do typically people go about it? Do you request the event organizer to share the guest list with you, which I doubt someone would share? Or are there just other ways that through AI and through kind of scraping the data out there of who else is standing? What's the best way to go about that part?
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, I mean, the first thing I would just ask the event organizer, do you have a guest list, right? They may or may not be willing to share that. They may be willing to share that before the event or after the event. Keep in mind, these people that are selling these events are selling tickets to the event. They want you to buy a ticket. So you have some leverage. And so you can say, look, I'm only buying this ticket if I can ensure that this is a target rich environment for me. And that's a perfectly reasonable thing to say. If the people I want to meet are not at this event, then I can't afford to spend $3,000 or $5,000 on your event ticket, plus flying across the country, getting hotels, et cetera. So you can ask, what type of people are going to be at this event? Can I get any indication, sample, like what size companies, what industries, et cetera, et cetera? You can get on the phone and talk to these folks. I mean, it's literally their job to sell these event tickets. So that's a perfectly reasonable request. Now, will they give you the actual guest list? Maybe, maybe not. In this particular example, the events I'm thinking of, like I've been to a number of Pavilion events recently. And Pavilion has a Slack channel. And as soon as you register for the event, they put you into a Slack channel together. And you can see the 600 other people that are attending. You can take a screenshot of that. You can then go and pop it into AI and ask it to translate these screenshots into text. Then you can go and search LinkedIn. You can send connection requests to all these folks. You can go into Zoom Info or Clay and find their email addresses. You can filter that and say, okay, well, of these 600 people, here's like the 20 that I want to meet. You can send emails and LinkedIn DMs out. It can have a whole process around, how am I going to maximize the effectiveness of this event? And that's what I was talking about at the base of the go-to-market efficiency pyramid is, what is that step-by-step process for us to make this thing successful? Whether it's events or whether it's ads or organic content or, you know, cold sales calls.
SPEAKER_17What's the GTM value of speaking? So attendee-to-attendee connection, that's one thing. But when you're a speaker and then, you know, attendees are listening to you, I'm assuming that that will change the dynamics significantly.
MUHAMMAD YOUNASHow would, how should companies think about just speaking in conferences as a pipeline player rather than a brand player? What would you suggest is the process for that also?
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, I mean, I think that it can be incredibly valuable. I've done some of it myself. However, I think that just like anything, it depends, right? You're making a bet of time and money on speaking in hopes that you get some kind of brand recognition or leads or pipeline or revenue out of it, right? And I think one thing that's difficult for me about speaking is if somebody says, look, like, we're going to run you through the ringer. You need to pay, you know, $50,000 to speak on the stage. There's going to be 50 people in the audience. Only three of them are in your ICP and buyer personas. And then you try to catch those three people versus I can go on LinkedIn and put up an organic post or an ad or what have you and get in front of 10, 100, 1,000 times more people. I can run a webinar and invite people to that webinar, like who's going to convert more? If I've got three people at a public speaking event versus 300 people in a webinar, which one is going to give me more bang for my buck? Well, I think the answer is obvious, but these are the ifs that I'm thinking through, right? So if I'm invited to speak at an event in front of 500 or 1,000 people and every single one of those people is my ICP and buyer personas, then that's probably worth a hefty fee if I have to pay a fee to go speak, not to mention like all the hoops you have to jump through to speak. But I think that, again, a lot of times folks are not necessarily thinking about all of these factors. They're like, oh, it'd be great for me to go speak. And you go speak and you're speaking to the wrong group of people. And so you're not going to get the conversions that you want. And then, again, I go back to that step-by-step process. Is there a QR code at the end? Do you have some kind of an offer that's tangible and has real value for somebody that they can go and pull up the QR code on their phone? And then go download some PDF document or something that you have that's going to be actually of value and then get the opportunity to subscribe to your newsletter or to reach out to get a sales call or what have you.
SPEAKER_15What is that follow-up process going to look like?
MUHAMMAD YOUNASPerfect. So instead of just speaking and, you know, maybe other than speaking, what do you think about sponsoring a booth in a conference? How do dynamics change for something like that? And do you see ROI in being an exhibitor for one of these just big conferences?
EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, so like, you know, and I like the way that you're asking this because we were and like we talked offline, we're kind of going from like sort of lowest calorie, lowest expense to highest calorie, highest expense. And the challenge with the booths is it's just extremely expensive, right? So you're investing $50,000, $100,000, not just the booth, the fees, all the materials, flying people out, et cetera, et cetera. And then one of the biggest problems that I see with booths is, is now everybody's badge scanning. And so I walk past a booth and I just say, hey, you know, nice, you know, logo or whatever. And they're like scanning my badge. And then I've got 15 phone calls after I visited the booth. I have zero interest and intent in that product. And so I'm not necessarily saying that like we shouldn't badge scan, but the problem is, is that if we say, okay, we're going to go and spend 50 or $100,000 on this booth so that we can scan 300 badges, we scan the 300 badges. We then hand it over to our SDR team. They call each of those people 15 times. We get one meeting out of it and zero qualified sales opportunities. Well, then that's obviously a failure, right? Now, what are the dependencies that are going to decide whether or not that's a success? Well, the first dependency is obviously going to be, are the right people walking past your booth? Are you able to bring them in? There's obviously some nuance in what's the conversation that you're having. Do you have senior salespeople there that are able to have real conversations with folks and convert them? Do you have sales engineers? Do you have experts on the product? Are you able to add real value in the interaction that they have at that booth? Are they then identifying who's actually genuinely interested versus who's not? What are you doing with the people that are not really that interested where you've scanned their badge and you've got their name and their email, but they have no indication that they're ready for a sales conversation? Are you going to put them into some kind of a marketing drip nurturing campaign? Or are you just going to have the salespeople call them and then give up when they don't answer the phone and they say that they're not interested? You've got to map out that process step by step. You've got to measure it. And then after you've done the booth, then you can do the ROI analysis and ask, okay, like how many people did we get to buy from us? How many people did we get into our pipeline? How many leads did we get? How many people did we get to sign up for our newsletter or the webinar or whatever the offer was in the back of that booth? And what is that worth? What would it cost me to achieve the same results if I decided to just put an ad on LinkedIn or to buy ads on Google or what have you? How does that compare? And should I spend the next $50,000 or $100,000 on the next event booth or should I spend it on another marketing channel or even another type of event?
MUHAMMAD YOUNASI see that you consult a lot of companies for the GTM strategy and whether it's Pavilion, whether it is the Sastr. One of the things that's always highly recommended is you trying to run your own user conference, even if it's a small one, you know, like if you're not Dreamforce, if you have even 50 to 100 people who can attend your user conference. And you can imagine owning a conference is even more risky, expensive than just having a booth in someone else's conference. What's your suggestion on that? At what point do you feel that a company is ready to host a conference of their own? And then just what are some of the best practices of converting that user conference into something that generates pipeline, you know, increase attention or increase attention?
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, so I mean, I think that those can be incredibly valuable. Obviously, I had firsthand experience with this at Salesforce between Dreamforce and the Salesforce World Tour. And so like I said, the first thing you have to do is figure out how to get the right people to the conference. Or maybe the first thing you have to do before that is figure out how you're going to add value to these people. How are you going to have this amazing conference? And that's a heavy, heavy lift. So I don't think organizations should take this lightly. You shouldn't put on an event like this if you can't make it an absolute 10 out of 10. Assuming that you can, you get the right people there, you have all these sessions. And then again, like map out that step-by-step process. How are we going to drive people to this event? When I worked at Salesforce and we were trying to drive people to Dreamforce, we had every single salesperson in the entire company, plus dedicated SDRs and interns that were making calls, sending emails. We would go through the event and say, okay, like Mr. or Ms. Customer, I know that these are the particular challenges that you're facing. Here are the presentation sessions that we're having. Here are the fireside chats. Here are the private invite-only sub-events that are at the conference. These are the things that I think that you would find valuable because I know that you're trying to solve this particular problem. That's more of like a one-to-one sales effort than like a marketing email, which is different, or an intern making cold calls to anyone and everybody to try to get them to the event. So you've got to map that strategy out. How are we going to get all these people to attend? Then I mentioned previously, how do you set up all these meetings at the conference? So when I worked at Salesforce in New York, I went to the Salesforce World Tour in New York every single year. And all I would do is just try to get all of my customers to the world tour and then try to set up all these back-to-back meetings, like I mentioned, trying to get them into the right sessions so that the session was selling them for me, try to get them to the right booths. At Salesforce, for example, a lot of the buying decision is not only based on Salesforce, but also the partners in the Salesforce ecosystem. So I might say, okay, I know that the problem you're trying to solve is actually not served directly by Salesforce, but by one of the partners like Zoom or Zoom Info or what have you. Well, let me take you over to their booth, introduce you to an SE, get a demo, take you over to another booth at Salesforce, get a demo from a Salesforce SE. And now you have what equates to multiple different sales calls and interactions and demos and presentations that would have taken hours and hours. And we just knocked that out in like 15 minutes because we're at a conference. Then we have to think about what's happening at the back end of that conference, right? So we talked about badge scans. What are we going to do with all of those folks? Who is sales ready? How do we score those leads to determine which leads that we're sending to the sales team? Which leads should remain with marketing to nurture? Are we going to have, you know, takeaways that people can have, worksheets, workbooks, PDFs, demos that people can see, et cetera, et cetera? What are the things that we can offer people in the conference so that they can sign up, opt-in, and carry the ball forward and continue down that customer journey and evaluate potential solutions to their problems further? We really have to map that out and then figure out what that follow-up process looks like. What does a marketing drip nurturing campaign look like for the leads that are not ready for anything else? What does the sales follow-up look like for the hot leads that are actually interested? What are the offers that we can extend to people that have left the conference and want more? What demos can we give them? What webinars, what workshops, et cetera, are available for them to dive in deeper to whatever things sparked their interest at the event?
SPEAKER_31Eddie, I just want to flip just the roles here.
MUHAMMAD YOUNASClearly, you know, you have had a successful career at Salesforce, you know, trying to kind of close a lot of sales. You're consulting a lot of companies with their GTM Motion. I want you to imagine yourself as a prospect. Who has impressed you the most with their GTM strategy where you were their prospect and then eventually became your customer? Which one of those companies, whether through a cold call, email, you meeting them at a conference or at a booth or at an event, who does stand out for you?
SPEAKER_08Good question. I mean, it's tough because I have to filter this through the fact that I'm a small business owner.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd so you don't get the same budget allowance that you have at the kind of companies that, like, we target for our clients.
SPEAKER_31Maybe through their brand. Like, maybe someone didn't call you or email you, but it's just the brand followed you somehow on LinkedIn or somewhere.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI mean, one thing I will say is, like, I give a lot of credit to Pavilion. I'm a big fan of the community that they've built. I'm a big fan of their marketing. I'm a big fan of their events, what they've put out. And it's a good example of there's just continuous value being added at every juncture, right? They have a podcast. They are active on LinkedIn, right? So I'm seeing them all the time. They've got CRO school and CMO schools and all these things that I can sign up for. They've got these live events across the country. They've got local events and the intimate dinners, right? And so what this creates is this customer journey where I can go through the entire process and I can sign up for all of these things. And then for me, I could potentially sponsor a booth at a Pavilion event. I could potentially spend a lot of money with them. And so all of this stuff just nurtures me through that process. You know, they sell me the membership. Then they sell me on flying out to D.C. or Nashville to go to the event. They sell me on coming to the free dinner that's being put on. And it's just this sort of continuous loop of adding value, which continues to get me thinking, okay, like, what more might I want? Do I want to sponsor some kind of an event? Do I want to invest money into Pavilion? And I think, like, that's been a pretty positive experience, including the interactions I've had with their sales team.
SPEAKER_12I agree. You know, I, the selection is also active. You ask a question over there, you get some help.
SPEAKER_30And then eventually, you know, you became a member. And then, you know, you attend one of their events. And then you attend one of those CRO workshops. So I know exactly what you're referring to.
MUHAMMAD YOUNASThey sell you without even trying to sell you at any point. Thank you so much for being on the podcast. I know a lot of people would be, would want to learn a little bit more from you about your GTM playbook, et cetera. What's the best way for them to connect with you? Is it on LinkedIn? Is it on email? If you can share just your contact, it is.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, absolutely. You can find me on LinkedIn. Just LinkedIn.com backslash and backslash Edward Reynolds, or just Google Eddie Reynolds. Sorry that that doesn't match.
SPEAKER_01Or you can go to our website, unionscoreconsulting.com backslash frameworks is where we have all of our like biggest and best pieces of content.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd backslash newsletters is where we have our semi-weekly newsletter that we publish. You could also find us on Spotify or Apple under go-to-market science. That's the name of our podcast. And I think that's it.
SPEAKER_17Thank you so much, Eddie. Thank you so much for being on the podcast. Thank you everyone for listening. And we'll see you in the next episode. Thanks, Eddie.
EDDIE REYNOLDSThanks for having me.
