AMA: Salesforce Vice President, C-Suite Marketing, Kexin Chen on Event Marketing Strategy

This can be a challenge, but generally once you have one or two, the rest become easier over time. A few approaches to consider: 1. Run analysis to understand who is relevant to the audience you're targeting and would be a hook for them to see. I've worked with social media agencies to look at specific handles for the key contacts I'd like to target to then analyze in aggregate who were the top commonly followed influencers and then worked to book those luminaries/thought leaders/authors to speak at my event. 2. Check with your C-Suite and who they know that could be a friendly to recruit as a subject matter expert/firestarter. Often times, the approach is to lean into the business solution that your product solves as part of the invite. However, staying more in the thought leadership realm and having your C-Suite lead a conversation on the current top of mind challenges and priorities in the space and positioning the invite to be about learning and networking w/ likeminded peers may help. 3. Depending on the title you're targeting, it can be relatively easy to hook Directors at large organizations via hospitality, email campaigns, etc. With the executive audience, you could also consider building research and using it as the hook to join and hear the latest to keep pace with the advancements in your space. 4. Depending on your budget, you may want to start with a balance of third party sponsorships where they will generate the audience for you to ensure you're hooking relevant top companies to start and capturing their contact info to engage later for your proprietary events. This largely depends on your event strategy and if it's a mix of audience members across the buyer journey.

For ROI, it's helpful to know what the outcome of the event is meant to accomplish (IE: generate, progress, and or close pipe).Can impact the content strategy and the audience criteria you target. It can be for both, but having clarity here also helps with aligning your criteria for ROI. We currently look at the spend efficiency of a program so that is looking at our Marketing Pipe divided by the total cost to run the program. To ensure we are efficiently spending, I also keep an eye around Host: customer ratios; Customer: Internal Company (Host+ Support) ratios; and Total Program cost (T&E+Marketing Spend), cost per attendee. For programs where it is targeting an enterprise executive audience and may have longer sales cycles, we look at leading indicators to ensure we're hitting the appropriate quality attendees by ensuring we have coverage of 1) our top accounts list 2) our biggest open deals for the next two quarters 3) specific title floor (IE: VP+), and 4) balance of prospects vs customers. On an annual basis, I also run a cohort analysis to see for the executives who participated in a program against a similar audience that didn't, what was the deal size lift; product penetration (if multiple products); velocity of opportunities, etc. While it's correlation, it is still a helpful one I like to lean on and also a great stat to use on the field to get them to drive further engagement and invites to my team's programs ;-) Last but not least, asking for qualitative feedback from customers and hosts has always been helpful as well.

For large scale events, create different content focused on the key buyers you know will attend and their key objectives. It may mean you have a range of break out sessions from deep dive workshops, 1:1 expert meetings to thought leadership roundtables. Having a good attendee survey tool to check on whether you were resonating with the different audiences will help you optimize over time. I like to remind my team that the follow up is just as critical as the event itself. Having custom follow up can help advance the conversation forward. For larger scale events, ensuring you have a sound follow up strategy with your fields teams as well as nurtures set up can help drive conversion at scale. If this is meant for a smaller scale executive event, we often will create a prep doc to inform the hosts about the key attendees' pain points, interests, and who they know at the company. We'll audit the session and/or collect notes from the notes from the host to ensure a customized follow up goes out via the host and includes the account team to continue the discussions where needed. If it's a buyer earlier in their journey, building an email nurture campaign with thought leadership content around the topics discussed at the event can also help primed them to take a call at a later stage. 

Despite working at a Fortune 500 company, we're relatively simple. We use a good amount of our own technology (IE: Marketing Cloud for invites at large scale events, Salesforce CRM, Slack, Tableau). For event logistics and project management towards an event, we primarily use Google spreadsheets and Quip. We've also explored Asana to support this as well. We also have our go to agencies and vendors for event production and work with them via Slack. Given how big our event portfolio can be across the company, we have a Tableau dashboard that allows us to see which events are coming up. We also have a self-serve pre-event and post-event Tableau dashboards for our event leads to pull performance. 

The events team funds the overall structure and footprint of our event. However we partner heavily with the field marketing teams who have supplemental budget to fund ancillary events and the content and programming needed. Having clear tracking and reporting put into place to be able to measure each sub event and also qualitative attendee feedback can help over time to see how each sub event is performing within the broader even to make optimizations.

Being in B2B, I personally find B2C to have the best experiential marketing. I truly believe you can find inspiration for events in your day to day life. It's about creating memorable moments. Customers now expect the experiences they have in their personal life to carry over to the type of ease and seamless experiences offered as a guest at work events as well. If you have a budget, doing something as a team building like a trip to Disney Land for recon can always spark some good ideas ;-). To stay ahead, we request our agencies to provide analysis each year on what occurred across the industry. I personally attend Cannes Lions and find ways to attend third party events where I can see how partners and competitors are bringing their events to life. I’ve also spent time to request introductions and get to know my counterparts at similar size companies across industries to hear their best practices and innovations.