The Demand Gen Playbook for Event Leaders

Megan Martin: [00:00:00] Events and the budgets are getting more scrutinized than ever and proving value. But value means something different to everyone. I think events have always been important. Everyone knew that, but now they're like, "Okay, well, prove it to us."

Alyssa Peltier: Great events create great brands, but pulling off an event that engages, excites, and connects audiences, well, that takes a village. And we're that village. My name is Alyssa.

Rachel Andrews: I'm Rachel.

Camille Arnold: I'm Camille.

Felicia Asiedu: And I'm Felicia.

Alyssa Peltier: And you are listening to Great Events, the podcast for all event enthusiasts, creators, and innovators in the world of events and marketing.

Rachel Andrews: Welcome, everyone, to the Great Events Podcast. What's going on in this wide, wide world of events? We are talking about all sorts of things with my good friend, Megan Martin, who manages a lot of different things. She wears like 18 different hats. So, I'm going to let her give her own welcome today because I don't think I could do her justice with all the great things that she's doing with the [00:01:00] many companies and being a founder of her own company and being a facilitator and doing all the things in the industry, including having her own podcast, which is also awesome.

You should follow that, which I'm sure we're going to talk about. So, welcome, Megan, to the Great Events Podcast.

Megan Martin: Thank you. I'm so glad to be here. Second appearance. The first time I think I was with you guys was at Cvent Connect in San Antonio last year, so glad to be back. As Rachel mentioned, I do wear a lot of hats in the industry. So, I do have my own company, M Squared Dynamics, mostly focused on facilitation, workshops, customer advisory boards. I like to think of myself as an audience insight specialist. So, getting through the noise, finding out where your people really are. I also am the VP of Marketing for EMC Meetings & Events, a full-service event agency, a boutique luxury agency. And I also lead the partnership strategy for Bear Analytics, a unified event intelligence platform.

Rachel Andrews: And she doesn't sleep ever.

Megan Martin: Yes. And of course the podcast, Event About It.

Rachel Andrews: Event [00:02:00] About It. If you don't listen to Megan's Event About It Podcast, there's some very cathartic conversations that happen and fun stories from people just sharing not just event nightmares, but a lot of different things that I've like— you have to check it out.

Megan Martin: Yeah, it's fun. I mean, there's the saying is "misery loves company," but there's also so much learnings and the hard stuff that we go through. And we're such a resilient industry, but none of us want to pull the curtain back and share the stuff that goes wrong, but there's so much opportunity to learn in those moments. So, I tried to create a safe space for people to talk about the really horrible stuff and what came out of it, so other people don't have to go through it.

Rachel Andrews: Yeah. It takes a brave soul to do that, but it's also like, why not share it? We can only learn from it and move forward. Well, we're going to get into some meatier content, but what is one of the most horrific horror stories that you've heard?

Megan Martin: I mean, we've heard a lot of [00:03:00] stories about power outages. I mean, those are never fun. I think one of the craziest stories I've heard to date is a keynote speaker had a heart attack in the green room.

Rachel Andrews: Oh, God.

Megan Martin: And refused to go to the hospital and gave his talk. An abbreviated version. They were like, "You're not going on stage for 45 minutes."

Rachel Andrews: Post-heart attack?

Megan Martin: In the middle of...

Rachel Andrews: Cardiac arrest.

Megan Martin: Yes. And so—

Rachel Andrews: He's like, "What's the difference event? I was kind of stressed all the time. Let's do it."

Megan Martin: So, we gave it an abbreviated version of his talk. The planner told us it was like 20 instead of 45 minutes or something like that. And then as soon as he walked off-stage, they put him in ambulance and sent him to the hospital.

Rachel Andrews: I don't know. I'd be like, "No, you got to go."

Megan Martin: Same. I would've not let that man touch that stage.

Rachel Andrews: Yeah. What if he got worse while he was on stage or something?

Megan Martin: Agreed.

Rachel Andrews: Well, sometimes when I go keynote speak, I feel like I'm going to have a heart attack too.

Megan Martin: I mean, there is that. But I've had another story that happened to me, an event in [00:04:00] Chicago, and I was working in an association at the time. It was before I went corporate. And the president of our association never showed up in the morning. And we were calling his room, calling his cell phone, no answer, no answer. And I finally was like, "Oh my God, do we think he's dead?"

Rachel Andrews: Oh, God, let's check.

Megan Martin: And so, we were then like, "Okay, it's been like an hour and a half. He still has not showed up, no proof of life. We had to send security to do a wellness check." And thank God, he had taken an Ambien and just overslept. But I was like, you could have... He was getting out of the shower as wellness check and security was showing up. And that was traumatizing enough to see your board president in a robe.

Rachel Andrews: Maybe I'm just millennial and I'm attached to my phone. Literally, it's literally next to me or on my hand at any time. Even in the night, which I know is not healthy, even at night I'm like, "Where's my phone?" I don't know. It's like the second tick I have. I don't think some people do that though.

Megan Martin: And if [00:05:00] you wake up to like 300 missed calls, maybe before you get in the shower, be like, "Sorry guys, I'm alive. I'll be down in 30 minutes."

Rachel Andrews: That's so, so crazy.

Megan Martin: Yeah, insane. Thankfully he was alive.

Rachel Andrews: That's good. That's good. Yeah. We had a horror story, not a horror story, but luckily the city helped us work through it. But at one of the last Cvent Connects, we had the National Guard come in and basically shut off most of the main arteries. A couple of our main conference hotels were surrounded. There were armed guards in the streets. We had to basically spin up a whole crisis comms team, preparing for basically any scenario, because you never know riots could start or whatever.

And it was a pretty much peaceful situation, luckily, but you have to prepare for Plan A through G, especially if it's during your event. And this wasn't hypothetical. This happened during, while the event was being produced on site. And so, we had to spin up all these things. And then there were things like the traffic for the shuttle buses to the evening events got [00:06:00] stopped and they were just stopped in the middle of the street and there was nothing they could do until the protests pass. But luckily, the city was communicating with us the whole time. We're doing everything we can to move them along. They're safe. They're being...

Megan Martin: I will say you guys did an amazing job communicating through that. I was an attendee that year and I mean...

Rachel Andrews: There's nothing we could do.

Megan Martin: At no point did I ever feel unsafe or that Cvent wasn't doing their part to make sure we were safe and informed of what was going on. I thought you guys handled it well.

Rachel Andrews: Quiet about it. We were just like, all right, we're prepared to evacuate this hotel if needed. We're ready to do it and move everybody to safety if needed. But I was like, "I've never done this before."

Megan Martin: Exactly.

Rachel Andrews: I was never taught this in college.

Megan Martin: Well, we'll have to get you on Event About It so we can talk. Because if I remember also, I don't want to derail the conversation, but you guys just had your sales kickoff and a blizzard hit the first day. Topics for another day.

Rachel Andrews: I know, I know. Let's dive into all the other things that we have here. So, what are [00:07:00] some expectation shifts that planners are facing right now? And I know you talk to a lot of planners.

Megan Martin: I do.

Rachel Andrews: I feel like this year is just so much pressure on us to do a million things and the expectations from leadership is changing also at a monumental rate. So, what are you seeing?

Megan Martin: I think people have always known how important events are to a business's growth, brand visibility, whatever you want to call it. But I think now events and the budgets are getting more scrutinized than ever and proving value, but value means something different to everyone. And so, I think events have more stakeholders than anyone else because you have finance looking at it from one lens, marketing looking at it from a demand and pipeline and just visibility standpoint. You have CEO looking at it, sales looking at it. And I think events have always been important. Everyone knew that, but now they're like, "Okay, well, prove it to us."

How is this [00:08:00] tying back to the business? NPS scores are great. We had 5,000 people, that's great. But now they're asking questions like, "Well, are the right 5,000 people coming?"

Rachel Andrews: Quality over quantity is the thing we're focused on too.

Megan Martin: Yeah. Badge scans really is just not a good metric anymore. It's only part of the story. And when people talk about ROI, ROI means so many things to so many different people. And so, how do you prove ROI when you have 10 stakeholders all looking at ROI in a different way?

Rachel Andrews: I think ROI is a different thing and it depends on the goals of the event too. ROE, which no one can define in our industry to save their fricking life. Is it return on emotion or return on experience, return on event, return on, I don't know, insert any other e-word in there. Correct. No one can agree on what that means.

Megan Martin: Well, and we can't define ROI because ROI means something different to every stakeholder. So, then we just started making up other RO insert whatever alphabet letter you want to try to [00:09:00] prove the value when really, if you have really clear goals and expectations, like we're coming to this trade show for brand visibility and we're going to spend all our money to get as much coverage about our brand as possible. Well, I can give you ROI on that. If you're here to build pipeline, I can give you ROI on that, but you have to be really clear about why you're doing it in the first place.

The other thing is looking at the whole portfolio because one dinner might be losing money, but your trade show might make a ton of money and you hit target accounts that you've been trying to accelerate into your pipeline and close the deal so, that dinner might be more attractive in Q4 than Q3, but it doesn't mean it's not effective. So, we have to look at the whole portfolio as just opposed to these singular moment events.

Rachel Andrews: Right. I mean, there's so many things, so many factors that could go wrong too. You're inviting the wrong ICP to a particular [00:10:00] thing, or you don't have your ICP clearly defined and you're inviting your whole universe to something that doesn't make sense. I've been to dinners where you have an event technologist, a head of event, a user of one event technology, a person that is there for fundraising, a person that's there for education. And you're like, we get in a room and like, "Yeah, we're all event props, but what the hell do we talk about other than AI?"

Megan Martin: Yeah, exactly.

Rachel Andrews: Everyone can talk about right now, but it's hard.

Megan Martin: Yeah. And I don't think we haven't done a good job I think as an industry, I don't think we've done a good job in general of preparing planners to have these marketing and sales conversations. We come up in a world and you look at the agendas of alphabet soup industry educations, they're not talking about sales and which events match up with different parts of your funnel and the sales cycle. And if you know Q3 is a low quarter for you and you want to beef that up, but you know you have 120 day [00:11:00] sales cycle, well, you need to be doing stuff in Q4 the year before to build up to a Q3 in the next year. But like, planners in general are not trained to look at their cycles like that.

Rachel Andrews: Let's help some people out in the podcast. How can they do that? Because a lot of times, we say, "You need to speak the language and be at the table." And then I'm guilty of this too. I say that and then people are like, "How do I start? How do I actually speak that language?" Because speaking of expectation shift, execs now want that. They expect it.

Megan Martin: It's a great question. I think the first couple things, and I had Mark Kilens on my podcast who talked about this and I couldn't agree with him more. We talk about sales, marketing and events need to be aligned. Really, they need to be unified because planners need to be, and this is where I think a shift has to come, they need to have a seat at the strategy table. Part of why they struggle is they don't really even know their whys to begin with. So, I would start if your CEO or someone, your [00:12:00] CMO's coming to you and saying, "These are the trade shows that we're going to do." Be the annoying person and ask why. Why these trade shows? Why do we think that market? Are these prospects?

What is the purpose of doing whichever event? Why are we bringing a user conference? Why are we having customer advisory boards? Why are we going to exhibit at these five shows so that you can understand what that C-suite or executive or whomever is looking to gain from it? So, then you know where to start putting your post-event reports. So, instead of saying we had 3,000 badge scans, you could say, "We had 3,000 badge scans, a hundred of them are accounts already in pipeline. A thousand of them are brand new to us. We've never talked to them before."

And start shifting it in terms of business, or if you're talking about marketing, "Well, we had our banner in five different locations [00:13:00] around the convention center. It's telling us we saw 25,000 people down that hallway." And so, putting it in more business terminology so that they can start connecting the dots of what you're doing because a thousand batch scans might sound great, but then what?

Rachel Andrews: Well, did you get 20 from one company? Did you get all the junior people that came by for the stuffed animal that you handed out?

Megan Martin: Yeah.

Rachel Andrews: Are they jokers coming by just grabbing whatever swag?

Megan Martin: They're just coming for the swag. Exactly. So, I'd like to think if we've all seen the farmer graphics where there's a huge leaf coming out of the ground for a carrot, but then the carrot might only be this big. So, yeah, you could say that big leafy top of your carrot might say above ground, we had a thousand badge scans and that's amazing, but then your carrot's only like this big and there's only like 20 prospects.

Rachel Andrews: Right, right. I think that's the quality over quantity. I used to hear this all the time before I started educating myself and [00:14:00] I'm like, "What the hell does that even mean?" Does that mean you just have to get the head person from every event? Not necessarily. Yes and no. I think you need to, like you said, identify what the goals are. So, if the goals are to, let's say, it's a training program, if your goals are to train your customers so that they feel more brand affinity and they're like, "I am stuck with this product because I'm in deep," that's where you dig into what users you're inviting to.

Megan Martin: Exactly.

Rachel Andrews: But if you are like, "Hey, I want to have a thought leadership event with some seasoned CMOs or something like that," that's where your questions make all the difference. For us, when we start talking about quality over quantity, we're like, okay, you have to define it for what your company wants and what the tactic is. Because if the tactic is that you want to share best practices with customers or it's a prospecting event, and you just want the people that make the decisions in the room, you have to go into those accounts and define it. Also, you have to then [00:15:00] work with your sales team to be like, "What accounts do we actually want there?"

Megan Martin: Correct.

Rachel Andrews: Because you could spray and pray and say, "Hey, let's invite the whole world to this." Then you have this weird situation where you're having a weird event, honestly, because you're inviting too many different...

Megan Martin: Exactly. Maybe that's the case. EMC has a few clients that have a big trade show next week and each of them are taking a different approach to their presence at the show because they're at different stages in their company. So, some of them are more established than others. And so, they downsize their booth and they know that most of their pipeline drivers, accelerators, the C-suites they want to meet with, they never even touch the show floor. So, they rented out an entire floor of a hotel by the convention center and that's where all their C-suite meetings are because they know those people don't touch the show floor. So, the show floor is a lot of the looky-loos, the discovery.

And so, they downsize their footprint, but then increase their spend in other areas because they finally started looking at the data [00:16:00] and said, "Well, we're not going to get these people on the show floor, so we should stop trying to drive them there. And we need to have a breakfast for the investors because they like morning meetings, not evening." And so, they really started digging into the data of where were their prospects, where were the ICPs, where were their customers already going to live at this event, and then they're meeting them there.

Rachel Andrews: Amazing.

Megan Martin: And one last tip, if you're thinking about where to start as an event planner, this where having allies across your organization really helps. So, find an ally in marketing. Maybe it's not the CMO or your head of marketing, maybe it's just someone on a growth marketing role. Just say, "Hey, I'd really love to learn more about how you frame your reports or how do you talk to your boss? I want to make sure we're speaking the same language," and just find an ally in sales, in marketing, in product, whatever that might be. Just have like, "Hey, can I buy you a coffee and can [00:17:00] I take 30 minutes and just ask some questions and pick your brain?"

Rachel Andrews: It's a really good tip because sometimes you'll prepare for like 40 hours a deck for execs and they care about 5% of it.

Megan Martin: Yes.

Rachel Andrews: So, why don't you just ask them ahead of time, "What do you want? Here's what I can offer. Is that in the same vein of what you want?" And a lot of times, they'll be like, "Oh, that'd be okay to have, but what I really care about is X." And then you can focus your efforts on that. We are all perfectionists in this industry. We're people pleasers. We want to make sure we're getting everything done. We want to be successful, but we forget to ask the most basic thing, which is what does success look like to you?

Megan Martin: Yeah, exactly.

Rachel Andrews: And sometimes if you just ask that, then you can be way more successful and then be speaking their same language.

Megan Martin: Yeah. And we have these beautiful post-event reports and you get it to your board meeting and your CEO is like, "So, what?"

Rachel Andrews: Yeah.

Megan Martin: Oh, I'm glad you had so many people. I'm glad it went well. I'm glad you had all these people at the dinner. So, what?

Rachel Andrews: Right.

Megan Martin: And you have to be prepared to answer the "So what?" What does this mean for our [00:18:00] business? Were those the right people in the right room? And that's where really understanding the why from all the different stakeholder perspectives is important and having a unified team really from the onset.

Rachel Andrews: Yeah. I think one question for event props that have maybe moved beyond the traditional event design or planning roles, how do they move into more of the marketing generalist or move into more of the demand gen role?

Megan Martin: For me, when I was getting burned out from the operation side of things and wanted to go more into a bigger leadership role, I realized I needed to learn sales and marketing. So, I just leaned on allies that I had in the industry and within my organization and just said, "I'm willing to give some of my time so that I can learn. Is there a project I can help on? Can I buy you a coffee and learn for 45 minutes?" And this is the beauty of mentorship where, I also had Kati Quigley on my podcast recently who I just think has lived the most incredible career.

[00:19:00] And she talks about going wide as opposed to climbing the ladder and that has really served me because I now have... I understand what a marketer is looking for, what a product team might be looking for versus sales because I've had those conversations and sat in those rooms. And a lot of times, I just raise my hand and say, "Can I come just be a listener in the meeting?" If I'm not going to be invited to the table, at least let me hear what you're talking about my events. So, a lot of times, it's just putting yourself out there and saying, "I want to learn. How do I do that?" And when you have advocates that know your work product, they're going to take a chance on you.

Even if you don't know the marketing 100%, you're not an expert in it, they're going to take that chance on you because they know you're adaptable and you're going to learn. But a lot of times, it just takes raising your hand and being like, "I want to learn this."

Rachel Andrews: Even where I am in my career, I raise my hand all the time and I'm like, "Hey, just for those people in the room, because sometimes we just talk in buzzwords."

Megan Martin: Yes and [00:20:00] acronyms.

Rachel Andrews: And acronyms. Can someone explain to me what this acronym is? And especially with AI and everything that's happening, I'm not an expert. I'm trying to be eventually.

Megan Martin: Yeah.

Rachel Andrews: And so, I'll raise my hand and be like, "I just want to say, because I know some of the other people in the room are too proud to raise and say it, I'll be the one to say it. I don't know what the hell we're talking about right now."

Megan Martin: And sometimes...

Rachel Andrews: Can somebody just dumb it down for me for five seconds?

Megan Martin: Exactly. And sometimes, even if I do know what they're talking about and I see other people is where having a high EQ really matters because even if you know, if you see people glossing over in the meeting, I'll be like, "I'm sorry, I'm lost," play the damsel in distress and being, "I don't know what this means. Can you please explain it to me?" And sometimes, I'll play dumb for the betterment of the group.

Rachel Andrews: For the betterment of the group. Yeah, I definitely do that. Let's do a quick lightning round. One demand gen metric every event pro should understand.

Megan Martin: So, the first one I wrote down was pipeline influence rate. So, how many of the people in pipeline are coming to events and which events are they coming to?

Rachel Andrews: How do you find that [00:21:00] out if in your Salesforce dashboard or in your sales team?

Megan Martin: Yeah, I would look at your sales CRM. I'm a huge proponent these days that your events should have a CRM because people who are coming to your events might not ever buy from you, but they're going to buy your events. Maybe you've created an environment and a community that they want to be a part of, but your product just maybe doesn't fit in what their stack looks like. So, that's where definitely tying it with your sales team and looking at your sales CRM. Time to close. So, I think events when they're getting tied to business metrics, you need to know how long your sales cycle is.

So, even for associations like your membership, how long does it take someone to go from, I'm thinking about joining to actually joining because then you can build your events at different stages and know how far back you have to work to make sure you're filling the pipeline. [00:22:00] Customer retention rates for attendees versus non-attendees I think is important because if you have event attendees that are your customers coming and you can say when they come to our events, they're more likely to resign with us.

Rachel Andrews: Or if you say something like customers that come to this event close or retain at 70%, your executives are going to be like, "Well..."

Megan Martin: We got to get people to these events, right? And I think some of the other stuff that you mentioned already is ICPs, like really knowing your audience and not just like... We got so hung up I think for a long time on demographic like females or males and this age range from this area where I think we need to get more into persona and behavior personas. The marketers are going to these sessions. Marketers are talking about this. These are the type of people we want to be working with. So, I think getting beyond the traditional demographic type personas and getting more into [00:23:00] behavior.

If you started with just those three questions and went to your sales leader as an event person was like, "How long is our sales cycle? What's our conversion? What's our retention rates?" They would be like, "Okay, we're listening now."

Rachel Andrews: Yeah. You smart. Good hire. I like it. All right. This one's a fun one. One skill future event leaders need.

Megan Martin: Storytelling. And I strongly believe as we tie events more and more to business, they've always done that, but I think there's more visibility on telling that story. And I think when you add events into your portfolio of activities for the whole year, the brands that are doing it well have this huge story arc of storytelling across their event portfolios. And so, a lot of people will come. I've seen some brands that have flushies or stuffed animals and they'll put different shirts or badges or pins on them. And then people are like [00:24:00] hunting for that booth to go get the Heddy Bear or the pin from them from that event.

So, there's these huge story arcs that come. And as data becomes more important, we have to tell a story with the data. I could put numbers on a slide all day long, but what does that actually mean? So, I think the

Rachel Andrews: You just slap a bunch of percentages up on a PowerPoint and you're like, "Here we go."

Megan Martin: Exactly.

Rachel Andrews: Let people read it and then you're like, "And that was the event." That doesn't help anybody.

Megan Martin: Exactly.

Rachel Andrews: I could actually do a better job of that.

Megan Martin: Your C-suite would be like, "So, what?"

Camille Arnold: Yeah.

Megan Martin: "The event was so pretty and everyone rated a 4.2 out of five. Okay, great. So, what?" But then even within an event, telling that narrative, I know so many brands that spend so much time on theming their events and then no one even knows what that theme is. And so, having every day of your event adding to that story so they walk away with every day you're giving another piece of the puzzle and it's building on each [00:25:00] other every day of your conference, those are important. So, I think storytelling's going to be the biggest thing moving forward.

Rachel Andrews: Yeah. And knowing the importance and how to weave it through.

Megan Martin: Yes.

Rachel Andrews: Okay. One last lightning round, one lesson every event planning team learns the hard way. I think this is a really hard one because I think it changes every year.

Megan Martin: Yeah, it does. So, one I wrote down was stop writing post-event reports that describe what happened and not the impact it had.

Rachel Andrews: So, we had an event was epic.

Megan Martin: I mean, all of this that I wrote in preparation for this was about the reporting piece of it and stop telling what happened and start talking about the impact. And I think I have learned that the hard way. I mean, definitely earlier in my career, even still now, a lot of times, I'll fall into that habit and my clients...

Rachel Andrews: For a while when we were growing Connect, we were like, "And we increased attendance from 4,000 to 4,500. It's awesome." And that was cool for a while. Then after a while, I was like, "This is [00:26:00] great that we're growing because of the right growth. Are we seeing any differences? Is it actually impacting the business?" Then we're like, "Isn't that your job, man? We got the people in the room. Great. What's next?" And then that's when it started to change. You guys are the drivers of this. You need to be the one speaking about the impact.

Megan Martin: Yeah. And I think we've all learned that the hard way, and I think a lot of people will continue to, but the brands who can really tie that together and the planners who can say the impact their event had are going to be far further ahead and better off than "This was our NPS score and we had 4,500 people there and everyone had a great time. Look how pretty the pictures were."

Rachel Andrews: Those are also important.

Megan Martin: Attendee and participant experience is very important.

Rachel Andrews: Totally.

Megan Martin: And people will always remember how you made them feel and the experience that they had. So, I don't want to diminish that at all, but there's a way to tie them together where they're having a really impactful experience that ultimately grows your [00:27:00] business.

Rachel Andrews: We've had an amazing podcast. Thank you, Megan, for being here.

Megan Martin: So glad to be here.

Rachel Andrews: Events are evolving. Planners are needing to be more demand gen focused experts, and there's a lot of worth in the impact and showing that impact from the events. I agree. Is there anything else that you would like to tell our listeners on the podcast today?

Megan Martin: Just put yourself out there in front of your leaders. I mean, these are not skills any of us were trained on or know how to do. And I think to safeguard yourself and to really challenge yourself on not just designing great experiences, but the impact that they have, start having those conversations with your sales leader and kind of force yourself to the table.

Rachel Andrews: Right. Yeah. It's good advice. I just have to give Megan a quick little kudos. She is now part of our and shameless plug for Cvent Connect. She is now part of our content creator influencer program for Cvent Connect. It's a new initiative this year. Congrats to you. [00:28:00] I'm excited to see you do with it. It's going to be really fun.

Megan Martin: Yeah. Myself and the other creators are already in a group chat and trying to figure out the best we can do because I think all of us have realized the need for these micro influencers to be at events. And I give you guys so much credit for putting this program together. It's great. And I hope the rest of our industry kind of adopts that also because it's a great program. And I'm honored to be part of the inaugural class.

Rachel Andrews: Thank you so much for joining. And one last cheers.

Megan Martin: Honored to be here.

Rachel Andrews: One last cheers. Cheers to joining us, and thank you. So, thanks for listening to all of our loyal Great Events Podcast listeners. We really appreciate it and onwards.

Megan Martin: Glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Rachel Andrews: Thanks. All right. Bye.

Alyssa Peltier: Thanks for hanging out with us on Great Events, a podcast by Cvent. If you've been enjoying our podcast, make sure to hit that subscribe button so you [00:29:00] never miss an episode.

Rachel Andrews: And you can help fellow event professionals and marketers just like you discover great events by leaving us a rating on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcast platform.

Felicia Asiedu: Stay connected with us on social media for behind-the-scenes content, updates, and some extra doses of inspiration.

Rachel Andrews: Got a great story or an event to share? We want to hear from you. Find us on LinkedIn, send us a DM, or drop us a note at greatevents@cvent.com.

Felicia Asiedu: Big thanks to our amazing listeners, our guest speakers, and the incredible team behind the scenes. Remember, every great event begins with great people.

Alyssa Peltier: And that's a wrap. Keep creating, keep innovating, and keep joining us as we redefine how to make events great.