Lessons From Leading Global Events in Tech with Amanda Young

[00:00:00] Amanda Young: We measure growth of the event, pipeline in the room, top sessions. We keep it consistent of what they're going to look at. We link them to Power BI dashboards that are powered by our demand generation teams. In every single event, they see that consistent scorecard. They know where to access it.

[00:00:16] Matt Heinz: Yeah.

[00:00:17] Amanda Young: The two successes I've had are: they know where to go to find it, and then it links back to the dashboard data.

[00:00:24] 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.

[00:00:36] Rachel Andrews: I'm Rachel.

[00:00:37] Felicia Asiedu: And I'm Felicia.

[00:00:38] Alyssa Peltier: And you're 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. Over the past few months, you've likely heard an episode or two led by guest host, Matt Heinz of Heinz Marketing, who's helped the Great Events team host on a series of conversations with marketers and experience makers. With over 20 years of experience in marketing, scaling revenue, and deeply understanding customer growth, Matt's experience brings some much welcome new perspective to Great Events.

In this week's episode, Matt talks to Amanda Young, Senior Director of Global Events at ConnectWise. Here's what you're in for in today's conversation. Amanda and Matt unpack what it's really like leading events in the tech industry, from dealing with high expectations around data and reporting to building programs that scale and deliver ROI. They talk about what's changing and also what's not and how Amanda is navigating it all. This episode is ideal for tech marketers, event leaders, and operations teams who want to build smarter, faster and more strategic event programs. Take a peek.

[00:01:56] Matt Heinz: Very excited to have with us for this episode, Amanda Young. She's the Senior Director of Global Events at ConnectWise. Amanda, thanks for joining us.

[00:02:02] Amanda Young: Thank you for having me.

[00:02:03] Matt Heinz: Oh my gosh. There's so much we could talk about here. I think you've been doing events for a long time and-

[00:02:08] Amanda Young: Too long.

[00:02:08] Matt Heinz: ...we're all on a journey, right? And so what I want to talk about today is the idea of building a great event and a great event experience, but really focusing on the ROI of that event, where the rubber meets the road and how to make sure that an event and a great event experience is delivering business results. Maybe talk about, through your career, what that journey has been like.

[00:02:25] Amanda Young: I was at a pivotal point in my career where this head of analytics at this company I was working for in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said to me, "What do you want to do? Do you want to tell me about the food and beverage we're serving, or do you want to tell me what the event is worth?" And I had no idea what that meant.

[00:02:42] Matt Heinz: Okay.

[00:02:43] Amanda Young: And he said, "If you can't figure out to tell me what the event is worth, then your career is never going to go up from here. Just stay in food and beverage, go back to hotels." He literally... it was a hard conversation, but it was a pivotal moment in my career. I think I was 27, 28. It was this CEO of this analytics company gave me that, and from there, I started to figure out, what is the event worth? What is the pipeline worth? How expensive are the people in the room? Really started to figure out what that meant, and that's how my journey started.

[00:03:13] Matt Heinz: As time has gone now, I think we have executives and teams that still want a lot out of events, but we constantly hear this, 'do-more-with-less' question, from our executives saying, "We need more but you're going to have fewer resources to do that and we expect the same, if not better results." Events are not cheap.

[00:03:28] Amanda Young: They're not.

[00:03:29] Matt Heinz: So how do you apply a 'do-more-with-less' mentality to an event?

[00:03:32] Amanda Young: Oh, it's a good question. We're running into fixed costs that are non-negotiables right now, just because of the way the world is working. Your food and beverage costs, audiovisual costs, even print signage costs. There's these things that you need for your event to be powered that are non-negotiables. But when we start talking about 'do-more-with-less', you really have to look at what you're investing into the creative strategy of your event, then what you're looking into the data from your event, how you're crunching those numbers, what you're doing with that information and making sure you have a plan. You need to have a creative plan for what you're going to execute on-site as the experience. You need to invest in that. Right?

[00:04:13] Matt Heinz: That's right. That's right.

[00:04:14] Amanda Young: But you don't necessarily have to invest into the data calculation of all the different activities that are going on, on your event. We have demand gen teams. We have your field marketers who are running the trade show booth. You just have to set those tasks up with them in advance so that they're looking at that data coming from the event throughout the whole process. If you don't have a plan for that going into it, then you're not going to be able to say what the event is worth, but it actually doesn't cost that much money. It just costs taking tasks off their plate, setting up the plan in advance for them to actually crunch that information.

[00:04:50] Matt Heinz: Yeah. How do you find that balance between making the right investment, creating the right customer experience and having the right business outcome? Because sometimes, spending less money actually is counterproductive to the results that you want. Sometimes spending more money creates a great business experience but actually is not material to the outcome you're looking for in the business. When you've got people in events, you've got salespeople, you've got demand gen folks, you've got creatives, you've got people behind the scenes doing filming sessions like this, how do you make sure everyone is aligned and has some consensus around how to make those trade-offs?

[00:05:21] Amanda Young: It's difficult. Let's focus right now on our tier-one proprietary events. It's a trade show. You're doing a large product launch at your annual Cvent CONNECT conference. We host four similar conferences to this a year. It's really important for the person who owns that event, outside of your job, to make sure they're outlining what their outcomes need to be. Is it a revenue number, a sponsorship number, a certain amount of sessions, a certain amount of pipeline? And it's really important to make sure you lead the planning that that workshop kickoff, your monthly check-in with ELT, that you have those outcomes and you're constantly measuring to them and seeing where you're at, then making decisions on if you're going to hit those goals or not. If you don't have a business leader that isn't outlining those outcomes, you should be raising a flag on that.

[00:06:14] Matt Heinz: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:06:14] Amanda Young: Because it does come up. Sometimes people in events, they have one goal. People are very micro in their one goal, and it could just be pipeline. When you're doing these big proprietary events, it's macro outcomes you need. You need brand impressions. You need pipeline revenue goals. If you're not setting those with your events, make sure you're putting a red flag up to an executive to say, "Hey, we need these outcomes in order to determine the ROI on the event." And it's okay to raise your hand and show concern if you're not seeing true measurable outcomes for an event that you're planning.

[00:06:47] Matt Heinz: Absolutely. When you get to a proprietary event like this, it tends to be sort of at the same time every year, and sometimes you get bigger and bigger, and sometimes it gets into different cities, but we're sitting here, like Cvent CONNECT is in June.

[00:06:57] Amanda Young: Yeah.

[00:06:57] Matt Heinz: It's going to always correlate with the best timing from a customer journey standpoint. You have different customers at different renewal periods. You have different prospects that are at different stages of their buying journey. How do you coordinate with the sales, customer success, account management teams to ensure that the event is having the biggest impact possible on driving net-new sales and retention renewals?

[00:07:16] Amanda Young: Yeah. So I'll give you an example. When I started with ConnectWise about a year and a half ago, we didn't operate our events across workstreams. People were doing tasks within a little bucket that didn't make sense for them to do it, and one of those was recruitment demand gen. In our company, we do call it demand generation that drives pipeline, also drives event recruitment. We made really clear roles and responsibilities of what people had to handle, so that was step number one. So make sure in your organization you do have clear roles and responsibilities of who manages recruitment, who manages the pipeline cycle, where do you get that information from? Okay, step one.

Step two, when you start to ask what their calendar looks like, we all know end of month is a really bad time to throw events. Salespeople are closing deals. It really makes your sales leadership anxious to have... We bring in, let's say, 75 sales professionals to our events. It does hurt sales leadership to do that. So I recommend stay away from the last week of the month, especially the last week of a quarter, but talk to your demand gen people to see: if I host an event in November, it is to close business for the end of the year or is it to fill pipeline for Q1? And start having those questions.

That will make the way you set up the booth, the way you go after leads, the way you calculate information, you'll start making the decisions based on what that is rather than just come to the booth, scan a lead. It's different. If you want to close business, you got to wine and dine them a little bit more. If you just want to fill the pipeline, you got to leave them with a little bit of surprise, looking for what's around the corner. So those are my two steps that you can take to make sure you're lining up with them correctly.

[00:09:01] Matt Heinz: Well, there's doing that at the event itself, but the events are not an island. So how do you make sure there's some coordination before, during, and after the event to ensure that the event is not an isolated event but that it is a central point, maybe an accelerator within a broader go-to-market play and campaign that is driving those business results? With the sales and marketing teams together, how do you make sure that works?

[00:09:22] Amanda Young: In a perfect world, events would line up to product launches, and then events would also... they should line up to product launches, and then from there, you talk to your demand gen team about what's happening with the leads that come out of this? Is it an acceleration or is it to fill the funnel? Right?

[00:09:40] Matt Heinz: Yeah.

[00:09:41] Amanda Young: I think you have to have those conversations, but it doesn't line up that way. Especially in technology, products take a little bit to launch. So I keep my teams very focused on the production of the event. I don't have them jump in and out of those other workstreams. And then the conversations that I have with my CMO, my chief product officer, our head of brand are, what is coming up for the product launches, and then we look at that and then we hand that information over to the demand generation team to figure out what that pre, during, and post plan looks like. My team is responsible for giving them the data, but they're really responsible for the follow-up on those actions.

[00:10:24] Matt Heinz: Got it.

[00:10:24] Amanda Young: So I take a very workstream-focused approach. Everybody knows what workstream interlocks with other workstreams because if you have one person who's worried about all of that and doing all that work, it's going to fail.

[00:10:36] Matt Heinz: Yeah. And having that understanding upfront, having consensus that that's the right approach to take is important. Talk about the role of technology to enable that, to really make that actually work.

[00:10:46] Amanda Young: Yeah. Well, I find this conference interesting. Yesterday, we were asked about personalization at events, and what are you doing in personalized events? I said, well, what I did last week when I was at a conference I ran for 1,200 people, with how fast AI is working, how these apps, specifically like Cvent, they're creating is changing. What I'm doing in six months is totally different than what I did last week.

So I think with technology, it's about the data and it's about looking across who's going to our booth? Who's going to the sessions about our products? Who's stopping by our coffee stand? Who's having a meeting with our executives in the executive meeting area? You have to look across those channels where you're capturing data. You put it into AI to help you find some trends. That's how I'm using it. Now, my head of demand generation, he has some more calculations. He use a little bit more formulaic, but I'm constantly talking to him about, "Hey, here are channels where I'm capturing information. I'm going to give it over to you. Give me back the top 50 leads you're seeing from this cross-channel information, and I'm going to do something with it."

[00:11:51] Matt Heinz: Have you learned, and what have you learned around prioritizing the right data? Coming out of events, there's so much data we're capturing, so much data we're seeing. There's tons of data that's in a data lake somewhere that we're not even thinking about, and this is where I think agentic AI and tools like Cvent can really help you by not knowing what data to look for, but asking the questions you care the most about and having the tools do that for you. But what are some of the signals you've found that actually move the needle to prove and generate event ROI?

[00:12:18] Amanda Young: I find when they come to your booth and they go to your education sessions, that is your best way to show engaged activity because not only are they engaging, they're going to the session, they're hearing education from your product leaders, and then they're going to your booth to see the demo.

One of the other things that I do is when we set up our booths and we have our products, similar to what we're seeing at Cvent, we put a table in front of it. We put a table. My husband always had a funny saying. He said, "Why am I going to sit at a table when I can stand at a bar? It's so much more fun." And we take that approach with our booth because people, when they stand, you sit at a kitchen island, you stand at a bar, you're so much more comfortable. We track the time that they stand there.

[00:12:59] Matt Heinz: Oh, wow.

[00:13:00] Amanda Young: And matching that up to the education sessions, you get the most qualified data. And I don't think you should not be going to a trade show unless you have education happening around it, and maybe you can't get a session during that event. I don't know. Do a roundtable at a coffee shop. Do something where you can match your booth with some sort of education because you'll find that those will be the most qualified leads.

[00:13:25] Matt Heinz: I want to talk about scorecards. I know that all this data sort of often manifests itself in a cascade of scorecards. The scorecards you use in operational team may not be the level of detail you want to show the leadership team. So when you go back to the C-suite, what's on that scorecard? What are the metrics you're showing to prove it in ROI?

[00:13:41] Amanda Young: Yeah. I've worked for organizations. When I worked at GE, we had probably one of the most sophisticated scorecards across all the businesses. Our scorecards, we measured ROI per square inch because we had sophisticated tools to do that. Now, the whole world doesn't operate like the Salesforces, the GEs, the Philips Medicals. We don't have those kind of budgets. So with ConnectWise, we keep it simple and we keep it consistent. So with our proprietary events, we measure, again, growth of the event, pipeline in the room, top sessions. We keep it consistent of what they're going to look at. We link them to Power BI dashboards that are powered by our demand generation teams. In every single event, they see that consistent scorecard. They know where to access it.

[00:14:26] Matt Heinz: Yeah.

[00:14:27] Amanda Young: Again, I can show you an example, if you'd like to reach out to me about our scorecards, but the two successes I've had are: they know where to go to find it, and then it links back to the dashboard data.

[00:14:38] Matt Heinz: Yeah, I love it. Just a few more minutes we've got with you here. You're running a pretty high velocity program. How do you think about where events are heading next? Because you have to have a long view of where events are going. An event like this comes together one to two years in advance in terms of where it's going to be, how big it's going to be. When you look out and see the trends of events, what people are willing to go to versus what we're now expecting just to have on our screens in our home office, how are you thinking about the near-term future of events?

[00:15:05] Amanda Young: I think it's a really hard question because the industry is telling us to book contracts out. I have some contracts that are booked out to 2030 because they are saying there's limited space. Post-COVID, we exploded. I'm very concerned we're looking at a crash because decisions, they change. The way people operate at events are changing. I don't want to tell you to not book your events out. I am saying I'm worried about some of the events I have contracted out because I think right now, everybody came back from COVID; they want more and more and more events, and then we're going to go back to a world where we want less events but bigger. Right?

[00:15:44] Matt Heinz: Yeah.

[00:15:44] Amanda Young: So it's almost like it breathes in, it breathes out, it breathes in, it breathes out. I'm contracted out. I'm planning for next year. My next year with my team, I'm taking a portfolio approach. And what I mean by that is I'm looking at my agency resources, my audiovisual resources, and my team will be set up as a portfolio versus by project. And I'm doing that because my events are changing, and if I can bring on agencies and vendors that know they're going to get a certain level of business from me across the year, I don't have to buy into saying 5,000 people in November, 1,200 people in June. And I would recommend anybody who has a decent-sized events team to take that approach because I'm really worried that those of us who are booking far out and our executives are booking far out, we're going to have to start changing those contracts because I don't see these conventions sticking to the dates that they've booked long-term over the next four years. Unless you're associations, they do, but corporates change.

[00:16:43] Matt Heinz: Yeah, four, five years is a long time.

[00:16:45] Amanda Young: It is a long time, but the industry is telling us book that out, and I've seen it crash before in my career.

[00:16:50] Matt Heinz: Yeah. But your point about the ebb and flow, whether it's the economic conditions or pandemics or whatever it is, that ebb and flow will continue. It'll be really interesting to see how innovations like AI and even automation and self-service changed that game as well.

And I'm curious, as we wrap up here, with a little bit of a crystal ball, the bar seems to be hitting higher for events overall. Production quality, education quality, experience, the bar seems to be getting higher for people to get on a plane versus saying, "I can watch this on YouTube or I can do this from my home office." In that lens, what do you think we need to prioritize in the future of events to really maintain not just the experience but the results we generate for the business?

[00:17:30] Amanda Young: We can't tell what people want to do, if they want to travel or they don't. And the trends go like this. We saw Q1, everybody was traveling. And we saw the data for Q2, people aren't traveling as much. I think it was down 30%. You got to make sure you have a story to tell. You got to make sure you have survey results. You're capturing survey data on-site at any event that you're going to. You have a story to tell about what's happening at the event, because that can be the only driver of what you're going to do with it. You know the dollars and the cents. You know the outcomes that are coming from it. And then you give it to leadership to say, make a decision.

And really, we have to stop beating ourselves up about it. Virtual is fine, but unless it's, what, 1 minute, 40 seconds, is that the max you can have on a TikTok video? People aren't consuming it. They are consuming it here. And I think everybody just makes sure they have a story to tell about their events so when the question comes to you about this, you can speak to it intelligently, given the scenarios of how to move forward and then let them decide how to move forward.

[00:18:32] Matt Heinz: I love it. Amanda Young, Senior Director of Global Events at ConnectWise. Speaking of experiences, next time, we'll have to do this at a Patriots Minicamp. 

[00:18:40] Amanda Young: I know. I'm excited. I work in Tampa a lot. I live in Charleston, I live in Tampa, so I'll be at the Tampa Patriots game, and then I will be at Belichick's opening game for UNC this year with my boys. So very excited.

[00:18:52] Matt Heinz: Love it. Well, thanks for a few minutes here on the show. Really appreciate it.

[00:18:53] Amanda Young: Yeah, I know. Thank you.

[00:18:58] 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.

[00:19:08] 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.

[00:19:17] Felicia Asiedu: Stay connected with us on social media for behind-the-scenes content, updates, and some extra doses of inspiration.

[00:19:25] 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.

[00:19:35] 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.

[00:19:45] Alyssa Peltier: And that's a wrap. Keep creating, keep innovating, and keep joining us as we redefine how to make events great.