um thank you for joining us today I'm coming to you live from La where we just survived a 3-day rain apocalypse um still standing still going strong which is great um Katie and I are standing between you and an awesome roster of speakers and a big thank you to that group for joining us today so I'm going to keep this brief um as you may have seen in your inbox today mark the launch of our event maturity model Katie is going to walk you through the model in just a moment but before we get there I
want to answer one question which is always a great question to start with and that question is why why did we create this uh there are a ton of paths you can take to land the CMO role whether you come from a traditional marketing function like demand generation content product marketing brand PR or Communications seems like there are numerous well-worn paths to the top what's interesting is that his historically event marketing has has been left out of that equation vml intelligence recently p
ut out a report that called 2024 the year of emotion earing this report highlighted that people are feeling burnt out they're feeling disconnected they're feeling jaded and 77% of the respondents to that report said they just wanted to feel something to feel anything just to feel alive so the report notes that companies and brands that cater to that emotional need what they call emotion earing will win um that idea of emotion earing is what I think event marketers and the folks on this this digi
tal event today have been excelling at for decades it's a function that makes people feel uh it crafts new ways for customers to connect with companies and partners that mean the most to them um and it's important today more than ever as events are the real strength of many marketing programs but as I'm sure we all know emotional connection is really hard to measure it's not a language that go to market leaders speak um and that forms the fundamental disconnect between event leaders and their re
venue teams and so to us it forms a disconnect between event Professionals in the SE Suite um it's a lack of the ability to communicate event success and event value in a way that translates to broader Revenue goals so that brings us to today the event maturity model is designed to create that shared language it's designed to open channels of communication between event teams and revenue leadership it frames events success the success we're all going for every day around goals and metrics that t
ranslate across the business not just in terms the event team understands so we really hope this model will start a conversation we hope it'll get Revenue leaders to finally pay attention to events and their impact and if we can't tie emotion directly to money then let's tie the dollars back to events so with those very lofty goals in mind I'm going to pass the mic to our director of product marketing Katie goolan over to you Katie thanks so much Chris uh it's been so so fun working on this new
framework together um it's really been months in the making and what better way to launch something new than at an event we hope it Spurs conversations and can be a tool to unlock opportunities to grow your events now before we dive in I'd love to expand a little bit more on why we created it if you could go to the next slide um as Chris mentioned it's clear that while event leaders understand the value of their event strategy there's not always clear alignment across Marketing sales and the ove
rall business objectives in that that it's a clear opportunity to think about the way we measure the ROI of events making sure that this Roi can be laded back up to the overall business objectives and also as you add more events to your event strategy are you thinking about how you use registration and attendee insights to maximize your Roi story so our three key goals for this model are to one create better alignment across Marketing sales and the business two help event leaders get a seat at t
he revenue table by Shifting the way we think about event-driven revenue and three develop a tangible framework to mature your event strategy so I'd love to take a quick poll on how this group currently measures the ROI of their event strategy if you mind slip to going to the next slide um you'll see the question how do you measure event Roi on the right side of your screen you'll see a poll um with this question if you could go ahead and select the answer that resonates most with you and it's m
ulti- select so feel free to answer more than one um a ticket sales and sponsorship dollars B new business one from attendees that come to your events C customer upsells retention and renewals or D other and if you're putting D other please drop in the chat what that other is we'd love to hear from you while we gather the results of the poll I'll dive into how we've been looking at Roi which is a key component of the model all right we're commonly seeing three key buckets emerge as we look at ho
w event leaders are measuring the return on investment from their events the first is event specific Revenue this looks like total ticket sales sponsorship Revenue total donations if potentially that's um if you're a nonprofit organization that equation could look something like the total revenue from the event minus the total dollar amount you spent on the event the next two columns incorporate business focus metrics into your Roi measurement how are you helping to drive your overall business g
oals forward depending on the goal of your event it could be focused on winning new business or growing and retaining current current business or maybe a combination of the both depending on your industry and how you measure new business you could be looking at leads pipeline bookings memberships or maybe new students driven directly from attendees that came to your event the key goal here though is measuring your events influence on new business for your organization on the customer growth and
retention side you'd be incorporating goals and measurements around customer expansion retention product adoption if you're launching a new product or overall happiness of the customers who attend your event which could look like measuring net promoter score or MPS Chris I know this topic has come up quite a bit during our Discovery sessions I'm curious about your take on where you see the industry swaying in terms of measuring Roi uh Katie I think it's been a really interesting conversation um
I think what I've noticed in in my conversation with customers is that really this is there's really no one clear answer from from the folks that um that think about Roi I think that's probably reflected in the results from the the poll today um I think it also depends on the kind of business um you're in and the maturity of that business and the goals of the business there are some folks probably who are on this digital event who um work at businesses where the event is the business um and that
's day in day out what the business thinks about and is focused on and in in that case you've got a really clear seat at the table and you know exactly what it takes to be successful um in other cases I guess that I'm guessing people on this this digital event are in businesses where events are um a way of achieving other business objectives and so in those cases I think you start to see um a little more Nuance around how you calculate Roi even the question of what you're going to invest in your
events program um you know looking back at last year thinking about increasing investment or decreasing investment is a question that doesn't usually have a black and white answer um and so I my my take on this is that there there are a variety of of different answers to it and I think over the course of this uh this digital event and also in working with the model we're going to provide different answers that you can use to articulate the value of your events back to the rest of the business t
hanks Chris yeah I now that we're seeing the results come through looks like split about 33% ticket sales 31% new business 23% customer upsells and 12% other which I'm really interested in digging into that other category and seeing how else organizations are measuring the ROI but I'm really clear that we're seeing kind of a lot within majority within bucket one event specific revenue and then we're seeing second place is really in that new business um which is you know it makes sense and I thin
k part of what why we develop this model is to start thinking about that shift of events specific revenue is so important to measure right we we have to know how many people are coming to the event what is that direct attribution Revenue coming from your event but if we're not really looking at the new business or customer growth and retention really how we're moving the business forward we might be not really painting the full picture of our Revenue potential for events um so thank you all for
participating in the poll and super excited to go through the chat later and see some of the other responses that came through for other so now without further ad Ado let's take a look at the event maturity model before we dive in I do want to clarify that maybe this doesn't hit home for everyone if you're an organization that is solely focused on internal events this might not be for you but if you have a focus on using events as a way to drive new business for your organization or make your cu
stomers happy and want to do more with you then this is for you there are five key stages within the model that we'll talk through today there are also three three levels within each stage that go from activating to mastering this morning we emailed everyone here a guide that we launched today that digs deeper into each stage and the levels within them so today I'm going to try to keep it high level and walk through the stages and the big shifts that happen between the stages it's also important
to note that this is not necessarily binary you can be in multiple stages at once and at different levels of maturity or adoption within each stage we see this quite often actually you'll also notice a familiar metric that we just discussed on the Y AIS which is event Roi the way we see Roi playing into this model is as you shift from being primarily focused on event based event based metrics and lean more into business driving metrics like new business Acquired and customer growth and retentio
n you start to move up the model on the X or bottom axis you'll see number of events as you grow your events portfolio you can move to the right on the model but your data strategy how you measure Roi how you partner across Marketing sales operations and key business partners across your organization plays a role in moving you really up to that three through five stage okay now let's move through the model stage one is all about increasing registration the Baseline for this stage is focusing on
seamless branded and friction-free registration EXP experience the goal is to have a high registration conversion as you mature through this stage you introduce personalization you could have a personalized registration experience based on attendee title company or registration type let's say you want to know the biggest challenges C are facing so you add a question to your registration form specifically for guests who register with that title organizations that are mastering this stage are part
nering with other teams like sales and customer success to align on questions to surface in the registration flow to add value to Future conversations stage two builds off of stage one you're asking the right questions in your registration process to apply those insights in stage two to your attendee experience what are the predominant titles of attendees attending your event how did they answer questions you asked during registration to create content and experiences during your event that are
relevant to them your insights don't stop at registration either you gather data on the sessions your attendees went to whether they're inperson or digital sessions like we are today um what they engaged with and you pass that data back to your sales and customer success teams to have meaningful conversations Chris I know stage one and stage two is often an area we see many organizations sit any good examples come to mind to you for an organization that fits within one of these stages yes uh sta
ge one stage two SP comes to mind especially Circa 2023 um there are many people in this event who who may have been may have joined us at our last uncon which is short for unconventional our customer event which happened last year in Portland I would put us somewhere between stage one and stage two in terms of the maturity of that event um we were dusting off the cobwebs after covid we hadn't been in person for three years um and we were really focused on number of people in the room uh getting
a really seamless registration experience capturing insights from those attendees and then we measured the success of that event um based a lot on NPS some on uh Revenue driven metrics but also uh really talking to people in the room and seeing what the feedback was awesome thanks Chris yeah it's kind of fun to plot our own organization on this model and also it's not bad to be in a one or or two it's actually really great and having those different levels of adoption gives you room to grow wit
hin those stages so um thanks for that example uh now as we shift to stage three this is where we really start to focus on two big things the first is a shift towards business focused Roi metrics how are you using your events to drive new business for your organization or retain and grow current business it's about having a strong relationship and you'll hear me say this over and over over again strong relationship with marketing demand generation sales operations and customer success to make su
re you are setting goals collaboratively this this is also where quality of attendees starts to weigh more heavily than quantity of attendees don't get me wrong quantity is extremely important but I let just last week sorry just last week I met with an event operations leader that talked about how their webinars are seeing a high volume of signups but they aren't converting to pipeline they aren't winning any new business from their webinars now not every event is going to convert new business i
mmediately but stage three is about setting goals collaboratively and having the tools and technology in place to measure these goals and measure event attribution having a CRM strategy and marketing automation solution is a strong signal of moving to a Mastery level at this stage if you've moved to stage four you've been able to prove the business value of your events you've shown event leaders and other leaders at your organization how events can help you grow the business and you've gotten a
seat at the revenue table events are now strategic pillar in your integrated Revenue campaigns now this might be a new term for some integrated Revenue campaigns I'm used to um integrated marketing campaigns but this is a fun spin on how you can focus your marketing campaigns to really Drive revenue for your organization for instance if you're launching a new product your marketing team will run an integrated Revenue campaign to launch that product and drive multiple offers or tactics around tha
t launch if events are a key pillar in your integrated Revenue camp aigns you've made it to stage four organizations who make it to stage five are looking at their events as a portfolio they have different levels or different events for different audiences and can measure the overall effectiveness of their event strategy they understand the goals and outcomes associated with different event types and they may have a branded event portfolio and they're making the shift to truly Drive community an
d customer lifetime value through their events Chris I know lassan as a customer that comes to mind for stage five um what's your perspective on what makes them a stage five organization um it's a great question I think they one of the things that stands up to me about atlas's approach to events is just how closely integrated events are to overall company strategy um at Lan's mission is to unleash the potential of every team um and so teamwork and collaboration is is really foundational to to th
e company um their stock ticker symbol is actually team uh and so when when they think about teamwork and collaboration and inperson in digital collaboration events are so Central to the company's overall strategy um that they've got their their annual um Flagship event which is which is called team in um in Vegas in April and then a portfolio of events around that that really support different pillars of their strategy so it's a great example of where the company's whole strategy is connected a
nd tied into their events yeah absolutely I think one of the things that stands out to me about atlassian 2 is just their focus on building community and really building that kind of strategic partnership with the attendees that come to their events um and I know Chris you and I have talked about kind of how do you measure Community right if anyone has a great kind of way to measure the ROI of community this is an opportunity for us to absolutely dig in deeper um because this is one I think you
know if you get that right like that would be incredible um the goal is to really you know USE events to create a community so great thanks for sharing that Chris um and now that we've made it through the model I want to hone in on some of the big shifts that we see between the stages um I always love the acronym kiss keep it simple stupid so I'm trying to keep it simple and make sure we're kind of honing in on some of those key shifts that we see within the model so moving from stage one to sta
ge two is all about personalization personalizing the registration experience to capture insights that can then inform your event cont content and attendee experience moving from stage two to stage three is a shift in measuring Roi there's a focus on quality of registrations over quantity of registrations and this involves a strong partnership with Marketing sales customer success operations Business Leaders and a data strategy that helps you back into showing that quality moving from stage thre
e to stage four is about having a seat at the integrated Revenue table events are SE seen as a strategic pillar in the go to market function at stage four and you have a clear picture of how events influence business and revenue goals and then a leap from stage four to stage five is about having an event portfolio and using your events as a way to build community and become a strategic partner so we're super excited to keep this conversation going um if you want to go to the next slide we do hav
e um a QR code here for you to be able to um scan and access that maturity model guide we launched today it also should be in all of your inboxes if you've registered um we really want to encourage the discussion um we know we don't have all the answers here but we're hoping that this maturity model guide helps to create some really thoughtful and meaningful discussions amongst our community um so we're really excited to continue that there's also a poll um in the kind of Q&A area where you can
choose to sign up for a kind of personalized overview of the maturity model so if you're interested in learning more feel free to let us know and I will do a personal call with you um to go over it in more detail so thank you so much for your time today Chris thanks for joining as well um and let's give it up for Nick Bennett who runs field marketing events at some of your favorite Brands and is joined by our Steph Duo today they'll be talking about giving your attendees a voice which is kind of
ironic because I can't hear any of your voices today but without further Ado the next session is give your attendees a voice
Comments