Face-to-Face in an AI World: CAIS on Event-Led Growth

[00:00:00] Andrew DePaul: A perfect example this week, a colleague of mine asked me, "Hey, can you give me every single person from this specific firm that attended events in 2022?" If I would've been like, "Oh, we didn't really track that really well or we lost that, or it's in an Excel somewhere," I wouldn't be able to do it. I did it in a couple seconds this morning when I was drinking coffee and sent her the report. And it's just because we have the data on hand. We know how to find it, we know where it is and it's been integrated and it's just part of my day-to-day.

[00:00:25] 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. 

[00:00:38] Rachel Andrews: I'm Rachel.

[00:00:39] Felicia Asiedu: And I'm Felicia.

[00:00:40] 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. Hello everyone and welcome to this week's episode of Great Events, a podcast by Cvent. Hey, guess who's back? Guest host, Matt Heinz. This time to chat with Andrew DePaul, 

where they'll talk about how CAIS has built a tech-enabled program from the ground up. And also turned it into one of the company's most powerful growth engines. From a single internal event to 100+ touch points a year, including their flagship CAIS Summit. Andrew talks about creating a highly measurable, fully integrated event strategy that's deeply tied to pipeline and ROI. I think you're going to love this one. Check it out. 

[00:01:28] Matt Heinz: All right. Welcome back to Cvent Connect. Excited to have with us here, Andrew DePaul. Thanks so much for joining us, man.

[00:01:33] Andrew DePaul: Yeah, thanks for having me. 

[00:01:34] Matt Heinz: How's the event been so far? 

[00:01:35] Andrew DePaul: It's been great. This is my third time here. 

[00:01:38] Matt Heinz: Yeah. 

[00:01:38] Andrew DePaul: It has been fascinating. There's some old trends that you meet up. I was just telling your team that I walked into the ballroom on Monday in shorts and a T-shirt and Carissa saw me and she's like, "I have 50 things for you to do, and one of them is this podcast." So I'm really excited. It was like good timing, perfect timing.

[00:01:54] Matt Himes: You don't say no to Carissa.

[00:01:56] Andrew DePaul: You can't say no. It's been fabulous. Downstairs today meeting a lot of vendors and sitting in on some of the flash sessions. I love the roadmap session. I have 50 ideas coming out of this of what we're going to do.

[00:02:08] Matt Himes: It's interesting, because you're a marketer, right? I'm coming in the marketing space to go to an event that is emerging as a marketing event, but is really more of a travel industry event and just sort of feel the energy in the room among event planners, event producers,

the venue evangelists down on the trade show floor. It didn't feel like the pandemic was that long ago and yet the events are back.

[00:02:28] Andrew DePaul: They're back, they're back. For us, especially during the pandemic, when I started at CAIS, it was all virtual, so it was webinars and then we started to tiptoe back into this space and we've just seen such tremendous growth over the years and it's great to see the event planners get to kick back here and relax a little bit and not have to stress about an event.

[00:02:46] Matt Himes: Oh, these people could party. Yeah, learned that last night.

[00:02:49] Andrew DePaul: They're ready to go.

[00:02:49] Matt Himes: Yeah. All right. So I want to talk about what you guys are doing to have built your event program. I want to talk about your flagship CAIS Summit. But first, who is CAIS? What is CAIS and who are your customers?

[00:02:58] Andrew DePaul: So we are a two-sided marketplace. So we sit between financial advisors and asset managers, and we deal in anything that is not a stock or a bond, so alts, alternates. So we are dealing with about 2,000 wealth management firms and that is 50,000+ advisors and those advisors have $6.5 trillion in client assets, so there's a lot of money in this space and we're trying to capitalize on it.

We are working with a turn of asset managers and bank issuers to help streamline and scale their efficiency. So we're trying to be that one-stop shop for advisors. It deals with pre-trade, trade, and post-trade parts of the life cycle. So we're there for them to come on, look at some products that these asset managers have, help them with the trade process, and then help them look at their holdings and everything after. We also really dive into the education of alts. It's a newer space to some people.

Even when we have these financial advisors at our events, some of them are like, "This is very detailed and this is a difficult space." And so we have dove into that education part of it. We have a tool called CAIS IQ, which helps manage this and we are just on the ground promoting alts, promoting the democratization of alts, really trying to amplify it. So we've been around since 2009. You kind of operate like a startup, but not really anymore. I mean, this is a 'all-steam-ahead'. We've seen so much tremendous growth through just the platform and through our event space.

[00:04:23] Matt Himes: So diverse go-to-market program, lots of stuff going on the marketing side, sales side. Talk about how events fit into that go-to-market program.

[00:04:30] Andrew DePaul: Yeah, I mean we started with Cvent four years ago with a single event, an internal off-site event, and it was a success. And then we stepped into our flagship event, the CAIS Summit in Beverly Hills.

[00:04:43] Matt Himes: Nice.

[00:04:43] Andrew DePaul: It was another success and it's just ramped up from that. So three years of that, we've had about 2,500 advisors and attendees total at those events over those three years. Then we started doing more regional events. So we've been growing that space. We did about 15 last year and then we've just seen tremendous growth there and we are just full steam ahead with using Cvent to get in front of the advisors and also get the asset managers on the ground with them. And it has that angle of education that I talked about. It's not just this product push of like, "Hey, buy this." They're coming in, they're talking about the changes in private equity, sports and entertainment, investing that is now an emerging market.

[00:05:24] Matt Himes: Interesting.

[00:05:24] Andrew DePaul: And getting people on the ground to learn about it.

[00:05:26] Matt Himes: So one of the risks sometimes you run, especially I think in your industry, is events can be seen as a commodity. You run the risk of that content feeling the same in a lot of context. How do you keep it unique and fresh? How do you keep the content strategy before, during and after the events unique and relevant?

[00:05:41] Andrew DePaul: We are really focusing on what's happening now. Last year at our CAIS Summit, we dove into politics a little bit more. It was an election cycle and talking about that. This year, we'll be focusing a lot on that sports and entertainment, leaning into that. So it's really finding out, and we use data all the time to find out what people are interested in. We are talking to our advisors, we're talking to our sponsors and our asset managers about what's happening and we're surveying them. We're just having the discussions when we set up our sponsorship calls, which are really important. We're really talking to them about, "What do you guys want to talk about? What's happening in the market?" And that's how we tailor our agenda. So it's trying to have something new and exciting every year, and some of it can be rinse and repeat. We know what works, but that's a lot of the background stuff.

[00:06:27] Matt Himes: You need to have those playbooks, you need to have the things that are all in it. But I think one of the things that you mentioned earlier is that your programs are highly measurable, right? It's not only highly measuring the ROI, but making sure that there isn't a deterioration of the effectiveness of those programs. Unpack highly measurable and sort of how that gives you an edge with your events.

[00:06:44] Andrew DePaul: So we are looking at every single step and activity that an advisor takes. We're looking at from 'did they open a registration email' to 'did they badge into a session.' And we're taking those badge ins and we're doing anything from returning that back to the sponsor saying, "Hey, here's who attended." To providing the person with CE credit because these advisors, they need that credit with the national institutions to make sure that they can keep their licenses.

And then we're just really diving into that data. We're taking all that and folding it back into dashboards. We are putting them into post-event campaigns and we're really driving them and just hammering home the success of the event and giving them the information that they requested.

[00:07:24] Matt Himes: Awesome. We talked a little about measurability, let's talk about integration. Now, you talk a lot about how fully integrated your events are. What does that mean and why is that important?

[00:07:32] Andrew DePaul: There's kind of the two parts of the integration. It's become a part of the discussion when we talk to sales as the corporate life of the event. I mean, it is the number one thing we're talking about. We're getting on the sales calls internally. The first thing we're leading is, "Here's how many people are coming to the event this week." And everything. So it's integrated into the conversation.

Our sales folks, when they're on the ground, it's integrated with their conversation. It's like, "Hey, why don't you come out? We're having an event in Chicago this week. Stop by and come and see these great speakers and learn this great information." And then there's the technical integration, the boring stuff that I have to do. There is the Salesforce integrations, all the data, making sure every single touch point is marked and captured as we go through.

[00:08:17] Matt Himes: You can call it boring if you want. I think if that generates the results, that sounds sexy to me.

[00:08:20] Andrew DePaul: It's boring. I guess it's boring to some people because it's just ones and zeros, but it really gets the job done. A perfect example this week, a colleague of mine asked me, "Hey, can you give me every single person from this specific firm that attended events in 2022?" If I would've been like, "Oh, we didn't really track that really well or we lost that, or it's in an Excel somewhere," I wouldn't be able to do it. I did it in a couple seconds this morning when I was drinking coffee and sent her the report. And it's just because we have the data on hand. We know how to find it, we know where it is and it's been integrated and it's just part of my day-to-day.

[00:08:53] Matt Himes: I mean, having the data is only one part of the solution. Having the tools to be able to leverage it and activate is another thing. I think when we talk about having sort of a strategy process playbook for doing events well. The hidden sort of secret weapon oftentimes is the platform behind it. Talk about the role of technology in enabling this growing integrated strategy of yours.

[00:09:11] Andrew DePaul: Yeah, we are doing a lot with Tableau and just marrying all these points of data up. I see it really moving though into AI. I think that's going to be the future of how we take that data and what we do with it. I wish I knew where that was going to go. I think I would-

[00:09:30] Matt Himes: Right, so do I.

[00:09:31] Andrew DePaul: Yeah, I figured I'd be making a lot more money than I do now if I did that, but I don't know yet. And I think as an organization, we're being AI focused trying to lead with that. And we're trying to find ways and hearing all the great stuff this week about how Cvent is going to be pulling AI and Cvent IQ to enable that and just have that actually built into the system where I don't have to take files out and drop them into ChatGPT and do the analysis there. I can probably do it in the system. I think it's just going to ramp this up 10 times.

[00:09:59] Matt Himes: I agree. You gave some great examples of how well your events are integrated. That is not a trivial thing. A lot of organizations really struggle with getting every department to lean in and have a coordinated approach with some consensus around the why and the how. Was that a journey for you?

[00:10:15] Andrew DePaul: Yes. Yeah.

[00:10:17] Matt Himes: I think a lot of people hear that and think, "Oh, it's just asking them to do it." No, it is not. Talk a little bit about that journey.

[00:10:22] Andrew DePaul: Yeah, I mean I think it was selling it and I think it really did take that first CAIS Summit to get everybody on the ground to go, "This is the way forward." And that first one was hard. I can't think of the term, but it was just being in the trenches, I think it's the word I'm looking for.

[00:10:39] Matt Himes: It doesn't happen automatically.

[00:10:39] Andrew DePaul: The PC word I'm looking for.

[00:10:41] Matt Himes: Yeah. 

[00:10:41] Andrew DePaul: It was difficult. And now, this one, this year we're outpacing our registration rate.

[00:10:46] Matt Himes: Nice.

[00:10:47] Andrew DePaul: And we have seen an uptick because all the tracking we can do. I can now see the people that I invited if they registered versus the people sales invited if they registered.

[00:10:57] Matt Himes: That's great.

[00:10:57] Andrew DePaul: And we're seeing the sales outpace the people I invite. Now, I invite way more because I'm sending out these blast emails, and we're just seeing that outpace and we're seeing the adoption and we're seeing our sales folks asking us, "When is the invite going to be ready? I really need it, I really want to send it." And we love it. And it puts pressure on us as the marketing team to get that stuff done, and we have just seen it capitalized. And the proof was that first event, and we couldn't have proved it without Cvent, because Cvent gave us the data and the enablement to do it.

[00:11:27] Matt Himes: So on a platform of having a strong, measurable, highly integrated event platform, one way to apply rocket fuel to that is activating your partner ecosystem. Talk a little about how partners are involved in your event strategy now as well.

[00:11:39] Andrew DePaul: They have helped us sponsor these events. So we have different sponsorship tiers that come in at different values and they get different enablement for their events and where they're placed at. I remember we were sitting in the event staff room. One of the lead asset managers came in and just said, "I'm in next year." He was sold.

[00:11:59] Matt Himes: That's awesome.

[00:11:59] Andrew DePaul: It was just we had our first one right when we wrapped up the one we were at. And without the data that we have, we created this beautiful dashboard that can basically show an individual firm and then the transactions that people have made in their product. So it's not just a generalization of, "Hey, the average investor has made X amount of transactions." We can say, "They transacted in your stuff." And then we can also show them how they've engaged with the exhibitor hub, who they are, what they did. And it's just been great and it's just great data. And sometimes I'm shocked because it's so readily accessible to me. People are amazed when we give them this report that shows them all this breakdown of what people did. This is amazing. But yeah, it's there. It's like I look at it every day and so it makes my job kind of easy where I can show them these great reports and all this data and the sponsors love it.

[00:12:49] Matt Himes: I bet.

[00:12:49] Andrew DePaul: And we're trying to this year to dabble into a little bit more elite capture scanning we're thinking, giving people just the ability to track their own leads and maybe have their own targeted outreach after the event.

[00:13:00] Matt Himes: What does planning look like to make all of this happen? What's the cadence of doing that? How often does that happen? And then what happens when rubber meets the road and the great well made plan starts to sort of adjust?

[00:13:10] Andrew DePaul: Yeah, we get about... I think it's about two months after the summit is over before we start talking about the next summit. And I'm sure it's the same way with CONNECT. You get this little bit of a break and then now with the added regional events, it kind of is nonstop. The regional events, the first couple are difficult and then they start to kind of do themselves.

And then when there is an error... Luckily, we have such a great integrated team that if something happens, we all kind of put our heads together. Our CMO has been amazing with having us making this the focal point. Our CEO has said, "This is something, this is a primary goal for the organization." So everybody knows that, "Hey, there's an issue with Summit." Whatever that issue is, it's all hands on deck to fix.

[00:13:54] Matt Himes: Got it. Talk a lot about best practices, the things you guys are doing well. Along the path to achieve those best practices are always cautionary tales, things that didn't always go well. What are one or two cautionary tales for folks that are sort of earlier in the progression of this journey that you might caution to make sure like, "Don't try that?"

[00:14:08] Andrew DePaul: I have the perfect one. First year here, Carissa pulled me in to do a talk on stage, so I talked-

[00:14:14] Matt Himes: You establish you don't say no to Carissa?

[00:14:15] Andrew DePaul: Yes, yes. So I had talked about our first year and I had looked at the email system in Cvent and thought, "I don't want to use this." We use HubSpot to do our marketing outreach. I'm going to do all the email deployment through that, and it just didn't work. And I had noticed deliverability issues. I had noticed just open rates were tanking. We were having advisors all over the place saying, "I'm not getting the emails."

So the biggest pivot I made was the second year, I was like, "We're doing everything in Cvent." We're adopting it from the start. We're doing all the invitation emails, we're organizing people in the reg paths. We're doing the real basic best practice stuff that I should have done. I should have been smarter and kind of read the instructions versus trying to figure it out on my own. And it was a total 180. I mean, it was probably the biggest success story that we had was just doing that. I'm just seeing registration numbers pour in versus bounce rates pour in, and it was just a huge success for us. So I would tell anybody, just lean into what you have, especially for an event like ours that's invitation only. We're not publicizing who can come and we're really targeting our network. It makes it a little bit more important to do that through Cvent.

[00:15:30] Matt Himes: I think for folks like yourself that have a pretty advanced approach to event-led growth and event strategy, it can be intimidating to hear these kind of conversations for folks that aren't there. Talk about the journey and the steps to get there that this isn't something you just turn on and it's happening right away and you've been at CAIS for a while and it continues to evolve, but this has been progressive.

[00:15:48] Andrew DePaul: And I got lucky. So I got lucky where I was here when we got Cvent. I didn't inherit Cvent. I didn't inherit some other system. And I would say if you're lucky enough to start from scratch, work directly with the team, figure it out. If you weren't lucky enough and you maybe inherited something that's a little bit more messy, it's going to be a lot harder. It's a lot of uphill battle. I think keeping it simple is always the best approach. I've always had that of find the integrations, do the out of the box stuff, start small. Don't try to do something too advanced. Get the basics right before you start to do more advanced techniques.

[00:16:26] Matt Himes: So we started this conversation with our comment about just like events are back. I mean just the volume of people that are here and the energy in the room is just palpable. There's also a higher bar for events. I mean, we still see people sort of saying like, "Ah, I could just get this online or I can get the on demand pass, or I can get some of the value of this elsewhere." I don't necessarily buy into that in a lot of functions, but I think that, that bar is going to continue to rise. Why will events continue to be critical for companies like CAIS to drive your go-to-market success?

[00:16:55] Andrew DePaul: It was touched on a little bit yesterday during the keynote, and I think with the increasing amount of AI, as great as AI can be, I forget the stat, it was something like 90% of content online will be AI generated by 2028 maybe was the stat. I think roughly.

[00:17:13] Matt Himes: Something close to that.

[00:17:14] Andrew DePaul: Something close to that. These face-to-face interactions, you can't replace that. Getting our sales folk on the ground directly with advisors, getting them to walk over to an asset manager that they didn't know had a certain product or they didn't know had a certain tactic and introducing these two people together is just going to be crucial. And it's going to be harder to find that as time goes. And I think people are looking more for that face-to-face interaction for things like that, especially when they're doing their research and digging into products.

[00:17:45] Matt Himes: Well, I find myself, as we leverage AI more and more and as things become more sort of digital, more saturated, if you think you could replace doing this with a lot of digital strategies and a lot of AI, I find myself increasingly saying, "Boy, I hope my competitors do that." Because it'll give me an advantage to continue to go out and leverage the human element and do, not just do great events, but have a real event-led growth integrated strategy like you guys have built at CAIS, so congrats.

[00:18:07] Andrew DePaul: Yeah, thank you.

[00:18:08] Matt Himes: Thanks very much for being here. Appreciate it.

[00:18:10] Andrew DePaul: Yeah, thank you. I really appreciate it.

[00:18:11] Matt Himes: All right, take care.

[00:18:11] Andrew DePaul: Thank you.

[00:18:15] 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 never miss an episode.

[00:18:25] 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.

[00:18:34] Felicia Asiedu: Stay connected with us on social media for behind the scenes content, updates, and some extra doses of inspiration.

[00:18:41] 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.

[00:18:52] 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.

[00:19:01] Alyssa Peltier: And that's a wrap. Keep creating, keep innovating, and keep joining us as we redefine how to make events great.