Camille White-Stern - Splash

In this episode, Camille White-Stern, who leads experiential marketing at Splash explains Splash's mission to support enterprise organizations in unlocking event-led growth and simplifying the event marketing process. Camille emphasizes the importance of aligning event strategies with business goals and objectives, particularly in demand generation. She suggests starting with top-of-funnel webinars to engage new audiences and establish thought leadership. Camille also highlights the effectiveness of small, intimate, repeatable events like VIP dinners for building relationships and providing value to attendees. She emphasizes the need for event marketers to track attendee sentiment and measure the success of events. Camille advises aspiring event marketers to be data-driven and use data to make informed decisions and secure budget for their programs. She concludes by inviting listeners to connect with her on LinkedIn for event strategy discussions.

Transcript

INTRO:

The Demand Generation Club podcast is back and we're turning up the heat with season three. Get ready for insightful conversation with experts from Splash, TrustCloud, WorkRamp, UserGems, and more, as we dive deep into B2B marketing approaches that are making an impact in 2024. This podcast is brought to you by SaaSMQL, the SaaS growth agency that helps B2B software companies land seven-figure deals with highly targeted multi-channel campaigns. Since 2018, SaaSMQL has helped over 100 SaaS companies generate millions of dollars in sales pipeline and recurring revenue. To learn more, go to SaaSMQL.com.

Franco Corporale:

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Demand Generation Club. I'm here today with Camille White-Stern, and she leads experiential marketing at Splash. So Camille, welcome to the Demand Generation Club.

Camille White-Stern:

Thank you so much, Franco. I'm so excited to be here today and to get to be a guest on this show and talk to you about what I do and my take on events and experiential marketing.

Franco Corporale:

Fantastic. So tell us a little bit about your background and also about Splash and what you guys do.

Camille White-Stern:

Yeah. So I have worked either in or adjacent to events marketing, branding pretty much my entire career. But I started off actually in the music industry, so not in software. I started off working at a few different major record labels, really working with talent, developing them, developing artists. And then from there, I pivoted. I left the major label system, I started my own creative agency where I was managing talent, and then that kind of naturally transitioned into managing brand activations and brand campaigns, product launches. And I realized, wow, I love events, I love creating meaningful experiences, not just for brands to benefit from, but from the attendees themselves to gain something from that event or that experience. And as much as I love music and entertainment, I really wanted to get into the tech industry, really software specifically, just with the idea that I might be able to reach more people, impact more people on a bigger scale.

And so I pivoted my career again and I got into really what I'm doing now with a bit of a longer story that is... I love to always say, every successful professional has a long, messy middle of their career. So I too had a messy middle, dabbled in different things. I worked for a startup bootcamp as their director of events, and then I eventually found my way to Splash, which is a B2B software company. So Splash is really on a mission to and what we're doing is supporting leading enterprise organizations across the globe in their efforts to unlock event-led growth. And I'm really excited to dig in with you today and kind of define what event-led growth even means.

But the Splash product just makes it really easy to help event marketers simplify their process, amplify their organization brand, and then of course maybe most importantly measure their results of their events to better serve their audience and of course better serve their business objectives. And at the end of the day, we help businesses grow through events. So that is a little bit of what I am doing today and kind of how I got here.

Franco Corporale:

I love the raise event-led growth, and I think that's what we're going to talk today. I want to really dig in the power of events to impact revenue, but also people and their career. Because I think there are many, many examples of people's career that were impacted by attending one event or a conference or a seminar, and maybe something changed or they got inspired. Obviously, with your experience, how do you approach events as part of your demand generation strategy? Because they take a big chunk of the budget. That's always the case. So how do you plan for it at the beginning of the year and how do you make it successful and really ROI positive?

Camille White-Stern:

Great question. Great, great question, Franco. Whether you are running several different event programs as an event marketer or you are just getting started. Maybe your organization doesn't really have a sophisticated event strategy. Regardless of where you are, where your organization is, I think the place to really start is with the business goals and objectives in mind. You have to understand first, and I approach my planning and strategy for Splash the same way. First question is: What are the most important business metrics that we're trying to influence here? And then once we have clarity on that, let's say it is... We're talking about demand generation. So for most B2B SaaS organizations, one of the key metrics that you would want to influence from your events would be opp gen. You want to generate more opportunities for your organization, especially for your sales team.

If the goal is opp gen, that then is the starting place that then you can build an entire event framework around. Once you have the end goal in mind, then you can really design, okay, what does the experience need to be, where is it going to be, who are we going to invite, what's the budget? These are all of the key questions that you need to answer when you're building out your strategy. And if your organization has been running events, I would say absolutely work with your marketing ops or your business ops or your revenue operations team to get any historical data that you can because that's going to help you figure out what your strategy should be, what has worked in the past, what hasn't worked.

And if you're in a position where you don't have historical data, then I think you need to approach everything with an experimental and testing mindset. But even thinking about setting up a successful test or experiment, you have to think scientifically and you have to be very specific and calculated in what are your controls, what are your variables, and how are you going to then measure success based on those inputs and the outputs that you'd be looking for.

Franco Corporale:

When you look at events, do you think of third-party sponsorship, you look at small regional events, workshops, or your user conference? How are you mixing all of this or when would you start if you are just getting started?

Camille White-Stern:

I don't want to be a broken record, but again, it's like, all of those different use cases are examples of event types that you just mentioned. To me, they could have different goals. A top-of-funnel webinar, for example, that could be and is a really great way to get new people into your funnel, to expand your audience, to introduce more people who are maybe already in your audience somehow, but they're not super familiar with your product or with the services that your company provides. A top-of-funnel webinar I think is a great way to get started. If you don't really have successful event programs that you have been running, if you don't really have a super-engaged community or audience yet, I would say start at the top of the funnel. Focus on engaging the people that are new or that you want to bring into your funnel and make them net new.

And the reason why I would say start there if you have nothing is because webinars are typically much more budget-friendly. You're not so constrained geographically, which means your audience reach can be much more broad and vast. You're not constrained by time zones. You can repurpose that webinar for other content or distribution or marketing distribution channels. You could take that webinar and chop it up into snackable bite-sized content pieces for either semi short form for YouTube or very, very short form for LinkedIn for example. That to me is a really smart place to start. Because you're working smarter, not harder, you are activating engaging with people at the top of your funnel and educating them around your product or your service. And then you can also repurpose that event into content, which is going to then fuel your whole demand gen engine, so to speak.

I think it's important to just state that demand generation really, really requires educating people. How do you generate demand? You need to make sure that your market is aware of the problems that need to be solved and how your product or services solve those problems for them. So that's a great place to get started. I think ultimately what I really preach and what I practice in my own work is thinking about the full funnel. If you're just getting started. Because every organization is going to be in different position. Do you feel like you're struggling the most at getting new people into the top of the funnel or is that not really the challenge for your business? Maybe the challenge is you're getting a ton of people, your marketing team is great at getting new people into the funnel, but you have a mid-funnel blockage or conversion challenge.

So if that's the case, especially thinking about the B2B SaaS framework here. Top of funnel, you have your opportunities that are in early stage and then you can use a different event program. Not a top-of-funnel webinar, a totally different event program that provides a different experience and has different goals and outcomes for both the business and the attendees. Those middle-of-the-funnel event programs should be designed to take your early-stage deals and move them through the funnel closer to late stage, closer to closing. And then if that is not your problem, if you're like, "Actually, we're great. We don't have a top-of-funnel challenge, we don't really have a mid-funnel challenge. Our business is really struggling is, we're hosting these great events, we have really great engagement, but we're somehow not closing these deals."

These ops are coming in, they're aging with our events and other marketing touchpoints, but then we're losing them and we're not closing the deal. So then I would say, "Great, let's spin up an event program that is your deal closer program." Again, totally different design, experience, goals, and outcomes, and that event program would be your closer. Those are the events where you send your super, super late-stage opportunities to, in order for them to be closed one. The ultimate goal here, and we're going to get into this because I love talking about metrics, but we want to increase pipeline acceleration, we want to help sales win more deals at a faster velocity, higher win rates, higher ACV. Those are all the things that we can stand to influence if you are thinking about your event strategy programmatically, which means no one-off events, rinse and repeat what works and turn it into a program, and if you're thinking about the full funnel and/or life cycle of your customer.

Franco Corporale:

When you look at the experience for the user, for prospects that you buy, for the customers, how do you make sure that they have a great experience? Because head of experiential marketing, I'm assuming that's an important metric as well. How do you measure that? How do you optimize it?

Camille White-Stern:

Great question because you could have the most well-thought-out journey. I think of events as being one of the key levers and channels you have to influence the customer or your buyer journey. But you could have the most well-architected plan and program, but what if you're not delivering on the experience and the attendees are not walking away feeling the way you want them to feel or thinking whatever you want them to think, or most importantly, taking the actions that you want them to take? Because let's not forget, we're not just hosting these events and spending a lot of business money on events just for fun, we're doing it to generate revenue. And you can only generate revenue if you inspire these people, your attendees, to take an action after they attend an event.

So how do we do that? I think that the best marketers and the best event marketers are secret psychologists, and I think that they are obsessed with the human psyche and understanding people deeply to their core. And that is no small feat, especially when you think of the scale at which the best marketers are able to do that. Now I'm thinking about ABM. It's easier to one-to-one or one-to-few kind of really deeply understand people, but how do you scale that and how do you measure that even? I think to answer your question, one way to measure that through events is to have attendee sentiment or an attendee NPS score as one of your key metrics that you measure for every single event.

There are a couple of different ways that you could tactically do that and accomplish that. But I would say if there are any event marketers or demand generation marketers listening to this and you're not tracking attendee sentiment across all of your events and you don't know what your average attendee sentiment score is for your overall, for your brand events, start tracking that immediately and report on that for every single event and then report on the quarter-over-quarter growth.

I'm really, really proud that Splash, we've been tracking this for a long time. I think post-pandemic, it was tough. I think everyone's gone back to the drawing board post-pandemic thinking about what's the new normal, what are the new baseline benchmarks for what constitutes good or successful. And we are finally seeing a creep towards 9.5 out of 10, so a 95% average satisfaction rating from our attendees across all our events. That took a while. I'll be honest, we were hovering at 80% for a while. We got to 85% and we just crossed 90% as of this quarter. And that is something that we will continue to track and measure and pay attention to, but it couldn't be more overstated how important that is.

Franco Corporale:

Do you have any recommendation on how to track attendee sentiment because it can be a very blurry type of metric?

Camille White-Stern:

Well, first I think you should standardize. You should send a post-event feedback survey after every event. And there should be some standard questions that you ask in every survey so that you can... You can't be asking different questions all the time. There are a few questions that we ask in every single survey. Things like on a scale from 1 to 10, how would you rate your satisfaction or your experience? We have our, would you recommend this event to a colleague or a friend? We also always ask for just open feedback. Is there anything that would've made your experience more impactful? The two metrics that we track are the, your experience of the event and would you recommend this event to a colleague or friend. Because that's the point of having a net promoter score is would they promote your event to someone else. And that is just such a great way of measuring it.

So send out a post-event feedback survey. It should not be long. Make it short, make it easy for them to fill out. Splash for that, it's very easy, we use our forms to collect the responses. And don't be afraid to incentivize as well because really important data to have. And not having event feedback data from your attendees, I think it would be like running a business where you have customers and you don't ever do any voice of customer programs, you never meet with your customers to listen to them to hear what their experience is like using your tool or your product or working with your services. We have to be getting that feedback always, and if you're not, then you're missing out on crucial data that could be and should be informing your strategy.

Franco Corporale:

From your point of view, what kind of events are working the best on your end that you see the highest success or the highest attendee sentiment?

Camille White-Stern:

Not to brag, but people really love our top-of-funnel webinars. They're pure thought leadership. They feel very organic. It feels very much me and you having this conversation right now. Our audience is always incredibly engaged. It is wild. Attendees will start co-facilitating the chat with the event host, which is usually me and whoever our guest speakers may be. I think we've been hearing for a while, "What about virtual fatigue?" It doesn't exist if your content is really strong. People want to learn. People want to level up in their careers and one of the best ways to do that is by learning from experts in their field. So webinars are a great way to do that and also to establish your organization as a thought leader and an authority in your space. That's working really well for brand awareness, for top of funnel, and just getting our thought leadership out there.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention our Magic Spark dinner series program. Intimate, repeatable events are working very well. Not just for Splash, they're working for our customers as well. Why? Because when you think about whether you're in marketing, sales, or customer experience, at the end of the day, we're in the business of building relationships. And what better way to build strong, deep connected relationships with people than by breaking bread with them over an intimate, VIP, well-curated meal with other peers in their space who can add value to them in some way by either sharing solutions, just commiserating and shared challenges and networking and learning together.

So small, intimate, repeatable dinner series if you're not doing it. Or a lunch or a breakfast. Breakfastses can be more budget-friendly. Pro-tip. But think of it as an everyday event versus a big flagship tentpole event. If you don't have an event program or several event programs running successfully already, I would not recommend trying to spin up a large user conference or flagship tentpole event as your first go-round. Start small, build your community, build a loyal audience of repeat event attendees. And then in one or two years, invite them to a big user summit, something like that.

Franco Corporale:

I love a VIP dinners. I've always found them super valuable. Two hours where you're going to learn a lot and network with people of your same level, same problems, so they're great. I have one last question for you, Camille. What is the one thing that you wish you knew at the beginning of your career that maybe you learned the hard way?

Camille White-Stern:

Oh my gosh. Especially, for me, I'm obsessed with experiences. Experiential marketers are sometimes also called or known as brand marketers, and I think there's been a kind of a reputation that brand or experiential marketers are not data-driven or don't have to be or don't need to be as data-driven as maybe their demand gen marketing counterparts or the marketing ops leader. But I disagree wholeheartedly with that attitude and mindset. And something that I wish I had started earlier in my career is just really being data-obsessed. The experiential side, the vibes side of it all is great, you need that, but what is going to make you an absolute ninja and unstoppable is if you can become a data junkie and go through hell and high water if you need to, to get the data that you need to make more data-informed business decisions about your event programs. That'd be my advice.

Franco Corporale:

And that's how you get the budget to run them, once you show the data.

Camille White-Stern:

Absolutely. It makes everything so much easier. It makes you look like a badass. It makes you look like you're on your stuff. And then your higher-ups will want to invest in you, they will want to support you, they will trust in you. That would be my biggest piece of advice.

Franco Corporale:

Camille, it was great speaking with you today. I really, really enjoyed our conversation, so thanks again for joining Demand Generation Club.

Camille White-Stern:

This was so much fun, Franco. Thank you so much for having me on as a guest. We should do it again. And want to just encourage any listeners, if you want to reach out and connect with me on LinkedIn, you can find me. My name is Camille White-Stern. And if you ever want to talk event strategy or how to scale your programs or get into the weeds, I do free consultative calls all the time because they're just fun. This was really fun, Franco. Thank you so much.

Franco Corporale:

Thanks again, Camille.

CLOSING:

That's a wrap for today's episode of the Demand Generation Club podcast. If you're curious about how we're landing enterprise deals and unlocking millions in recurring revenue using account-based marketing and integrated direct mail campaigns, check out our website SaaSMQL.com. That's S-A-A-S-M-Q-L.com. We share tons of content every week on tried and true strategic ABM initiatives that actually generate pipeline from enterprise accounts. Thanks for tuning in.