Name: Maximize Your Salesforce Events Strategy In 2026
Uploaded: 2026-02-11T17:31:09.323Z
Duration: 57 min
Description: Maximize Your Salesforce Events Strategy In 2026

Transcript for "Maximize Your Salesforce Events Strategy In 2026": Hello, everyone, and welcome to another Salesforce Bend webinar. Thank you so much for joining. We'll give people a few minutes to join. Let us know in the chat where you're joining from, country, company, who you're most excited to hear about today. Yeah. It's great to see great to see some engagement. Yeah. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. We're talking about how to maximize your Salesforce event strategy in 2026. So just a couple of bits of housekeeping before we kinda get into the nitty gritty. This session will be recorded, and you will receive a link to the recording in your inbox via email. If you've got any questions for our speakers today, please pop them in our q and a box, and we'll try to answer them either as we go along or right at the end, or we'll reach out to you to respond to them afterwards. Other update is we'll be creating an events checklist. So it'll be a document with best practices for events. We'll create it off the back of the chat that we have today. We'll write it, design it, and we'll send it to you after the webinar as well. So look out for that. And then finally, if there's anything that we discussed today that you think you could do with some help with, whether it's your event strategy or marketing strategy, anything to do with marketing in the Salesforce ecosystem, please reach out to us because someone from our team will be happy to have a free consultation with you. Whether it's myself, our events director, or Ben, our founder, we're very happy to help. So please let us know. Cool. So just to kinda give you a quick overview of the topics we'll discuss today, we'll get into curating your events presence. So how do you choose which events to attend and why? Setting yourself up for success. So once you decide where to show up, how do you do that? How do you get the best results? Measuring ROI, which I know is a key pain point for marketers in the Salesforce ecosystem, specifically when it comes to events. And also look into the future. We'll hear some future looking thoughts from our guest speakers in terms of where they think the event landscape is going. And at the end, we'll have a bit of a q and a session with you guys. Without further ado, I wanna introduce our amazing speakers for today's session. First off, we have Elizabeth Scott, who is our events director. Thanks for joining, Liz. Hello. Hi. Then we have Jenny Lovell, chief marketing officer at Odaceva. Hello, And. then we have Sienna Cork, who is an independent consultant working with ISVs and SIs in the Salesforce ecosystem. I think Sienna might be having trouble getting on stage. Give her a couple more minutes. I can see her backstage. I think she's playing around with all the buttons. Oh, I think she's having some technical difficulty difficulties, guys. Just give us a few more seconds. Okay. While she figures that out, I'm gonna do a bit of an intro to kinda set the scene for the conversations today. So why are we here? We know that events are major in the Salesforce ecosystem. They play a huge role in helping Salesforce users, vendors, and partners stay connected, And they're really valuable to help, you know, vendors market to to their customers in a really unique and personal way. And there are thousands of events in the Salesforce ecosystem globally. There's small user groups. There are medium events and major conferences like Dreamforce. They really, they they're really super important in in our world. The challenge is that 69% of b two b events leaders are now seeing their event budgets either remain flat or decreasing, last year. And, actually, 70% have reported that proving event ROI is is really difficult. And, I was just kind of skimming through the latest Salesforce marketing report that kinda came out. I think it was last year, couple years ago. And, yeah, proving ROI from their marketing activities and events in particular is really a key pain point in the ecosystem. So where does that leave us for 2026? And this is kind of why, why we're having this conversation today. Oh, Sienna, amazing. I can see that you popped on stage. Excellent. Cool. It's great it's great that everyone's here. Yeah. I really appreciate you guys joining today's chat. I'm gonna pull down my slides because I I know that I have some questions ready. We chatted in preparations in preparation for this webinar a couple of weeks ago, and I know we had such an interesting conversation. And I'm I'm really excited to get into it with you. So just to kind of break the ice, the first question I wanna ask is it's kind of a funny one, but what is the biggest event fail you've seen, and how what is something that you think teams should really shouldn't do when when they're kind of preparing to have a successful event? Sure. Sure. Sienna? Happy to take that one. Outside of, I think, the basics of not being prepared and not having a good follow-up, I think the biggest fail is not being thoughtful about who you bring to your event and who you bring to your booth. It shouldn't always just be the person in region or the person who says they want to go, but being really thoughtful about your strongest teammates. So making sure you have someone there that is technical that can run through demos, that you have some charismatic, friendly salespeople, marketing people, folks who want to engage that are that know the product, that are willing to really lean in and and embrace the elevator pitch and why you're there, and who can really draw people in with their friendliness. I think that's super important. You have a few seconds to grab people's attention. So having people front and center who know the story and want to be there, I think, is is a huge benefit and something that sometimes people are you know, whoever's in region, whoever's local, whoever's available, it should really be a lot more thoughtful. And then the other quick one is make sure you follow the rules. Dreamforce, at least once a year, you see the blank space of someone whose booth has been taken down because they haven't followed the rules. So I'd say that's the biggest fail. That could be a million dollar fail. So make sure you know when you're supposed to be there, the rules around being there, that you've brought the right team. Yeah. That was a really good one. Wow. That that last one really hurts to think about. Can do you have anything that you've kinda seen that you wanna call out here? I mean, can you imagine? I would be. that would be it would be very, very bad. Yeah. So totally agree with everything Sienna said, of course. But I would say the other big one that's really common is people put stuff on their booth that means nothing. So it's, like, just their logo. Nobody has any idea. We've always seen people everybody's seen the people that are kind of walking by your booth kind of like, what is it that you do? Do I wanna talk to you? How good is your swag? So not having anything on there is is an, the ultimate failure as far as I'm concerned because, you know, it's just generic or it's just features or just your logo. The people need to understand quickly what you do and why they should care. Mhmm. Yeah. That's such a good point. And I think that can be kind of, you know, rolled out to a lot of marketing as well. Right? Making sure that your messaging is strong. But I think you're right. You only have a couple of seconds to catch someone's attention, and you wanna get it right. Yeah. Liz, do you have anything on that? Any event fails that. you can pull out? And I agree with both your points there, but I think one of the main things for me is that lack of lack of preparation and the last minute planning. I've seen organizations kind of fail time and time again because they leave events planning to the last minute or it sits with the wrong person within the organization, the planning side of things. I I see it often left to kind of the most junior person within the team because events are seen as easy. But I think if executed properly and the the planning goes into it, then the events the opportunity within events is is massive. Yeah. I would say that's one of the top ones for me. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a really good point. And I I like what you said about the opportunity. You know, we there's a lot of talk about, you know, are events still worth participating in? There's so much content available online. Why should people show up at these events in person? And I like that you're saying that there's a still a big opportunity. I wanna kinda open up this question to everyone. And, Jenny, you can go first again. Do you think that there's still a place for events in the Salesforce ecosystem? I'm hoping that you're gonna say yes. And and what so, yeah, tell me a little bit more about that. What do you think is the place of Salesforce events? Yes. I mean, clearly, especially in the Salesforce ecosystem, Yeah. events are critically important. I would say, like, the the big thing that I see like, lots of people just say, oh, we have to do every single world tour or I'm sorry. Agent force. So that's just not true. So I think the key here is focus. It's really important that you figure out exactly which ones are the most important to you. Maybe you have salespeople in region. Maybe it's, you know, a technical audience or whatever. So it's the key is to focus, but it's of course, they're absolutely still important. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. That sounds good. What do you think, Sienna? Absolutely. Still key, especially in the Salesforce ecosystem. And really any ecosystem, if you're in any sort of channel, you know, or marketplace business, it's all about connection and making those relationships. That's so much harder to do online. And so there are a couple things in person that you just can't do over a webinar. My background is product marketing, and one of my favorite things about events has always been testing messages. So if you're in person, you can test your elevator pitch, test your message, and actually see where people light up, where they dim out, where people get bored and start looking around. You can test your message a 100 times in one day and really fine tune. You can't do that over a webinar. And then access to the ecosystem. So if you're just thinking about events for prospects and customers, you're missing this whole opportunity to connect with SIs in the ecosystem, the Salesforce team themselves, influencers within, the ecosystem. That's hard to replicate digitally, meeting those people that are important to the business around your business. So I think definitely still a place where I think people maybe are overthinking it is you don't always have to sponsor to still get the most out of these in person events. It doesn't have to be super expensive. You can bring a few of those key individuals on-site and still get a lot of these benefits that you have face to face. Mhmm. Yeah. No. I think I think what I'm hearing from you guys is being more thoughtful. You know, who do you bring? Where do you go? What do you focus on? Rather than just, you know, do everything, which obviously is expensive and maybe not that valuable. I kinda wanna. dig more into, you know, how do you choose which events to invest in? How do you guys approach that? Yeah. What what yeah. What's your approach there? Because, you know, there's tons and tons of events. So, yeah, do you just go based on, like, past results? Do you go based on your main goals? Sure. I'll I'll take that one. So, I mean, if you're very lucky, you you can very clearly, you know, show a positive ROI from an event. That is much harder said than done, but that's certainly a great place to start on which event you're gonna pick for the future. I also think it's you know, in every industry I've ever been in, there's always, like, at least one event that you must do. It doesn't matter. You can't prove ROI. You just have to be there. So, like, Dreamforce, obviously, in the ecosystem is a perfect example of that. And it's not really just about the immediate value you see in the moment, like the number of leads or the conversions or the conversations you have or whatever, but the long term value. So, like, how do you see those event leads become an opportunity in six to nine months, not, like, immediately after depending on your sales cycle? So if you spend some time in the Salesforce ecosystem for a few years, you can very clearly see that it's not just immediately after all of a sudden you have millions of dollars in pipeline. It takes some time, especially if you're an enterprise like Odeceva is. So we definitely see it happen farther past the event than you would expect, but it still makes it worth it. Yeah. And you have to take that kind. of long life span into account. Yes. Yeah. Now what what would. you say your approach is there? I think Jenny touched on this earlier, but deciding where you go based on audience fit, use cases, industry, regional needs. So in for Salesforce, for example, if you are in government or nonprofit, if that's your audience, then agent force DC is where you wanna be. If you are in finance, then New York World Tours, both spring and winter, maybe those are your focus. And if you are in some of the the smaller regions who don't get these agent force world tours, the dreaming events are a great opportunity. So I think it's really thinking about who you're trying to sell to, where are they at, and, you know, it's it's key to to really be thoughtful because you can't sponsor everything. You can show up to a lot of places, but even that has a t and e cost associated to it. So. just being thoughtful about the audience that you are looking to attract and who will be there. And then, of course, if you've done these events in the past, how did they perform? Is it worth doing them again? And looking at the new events that Salesforce adds every single year. So new cities get added. They're usually smaller in their first year, but maybe that's a region you were really focused on. So. paying attention to what's new as well as what's worked in the past. Yeah. No. That all makes sense. And, you know, in terms of what what companies are trying to get out of events, Liz, I know I know you have some kind of strong thoughts on this, and they I think they really align with what Jenny and Sienna are saying as well. What do you think is something that people should stop doing in terms of planning for their Salesforce conferences next year and trying to establish their goals for them. Yeah. I think this links back to both what Ginny and Sienna were saying, but I think teams should stop kind of treating Salesforce events as just lead gen factories. Kind of one of the things I do with kick off kick off calls with sponsors is apart from leads, what else do you want to get out of of of sponsoring these events? And kind of nine times out of 10, the long term relationships, pipeline networking with the right people on the ground at higher priorities than the leads. So I think if you are only optimizing kind of the badge scans instead of kind of long term relationships, you're kind of missing the real value of what an event. So, yeah, that's probably the one. thing Yeah. for me. And, again, it ties back to what you guys were saying about the long term value. Right? I think, you know, you're if you're looking at the length of your sales cycle, if you're looking at the impact that an event has made over several months, if not a year, then you've really gotta have more longevity to your thinking. And I think, Liz, that's a really great point. In terms of okay. So let's say you've established which events you're gonna go to. You've got, like, a rough plan of where you're go, where you're not gonna go. Now you have to figure out how you're gonna show up at these events. Are you gonna whether you're maybe designing your booth or whether you're setting up an event that's attached to a bigger event, companies are always trying to strike the balance between business value, you know, like, getting a business value out of it and giving attendees value as well, and also just putting on something that's objectively a good event that people are gonna have fun at. Right? So how do companies how can companies strike that balance? And, Liz, I know you have tons of experience in this even kinda before your time to Salesforce Ben. So, yeah, I'd love to hear from you on this one. Yeah, think it comes down to being intentional about the experience you want to create for the attendees because you want to start with what the audience actually wants to learn or solve to to attend the event. I think in the ecosystem is probably a good example. But design the content around that and then layering kind of moments that feel human or a built in for networking or whatever it might be for that particular event. I think one of the most successful event I've seen within the ecosystem since I've been with Salesforce, Ben, was actually where numbers were were much lower than we expected them to be from the registrations. But you're so engaged and the quality of that audience was so high that the sponsor saw ROI almost immediately because it was quantity over quality over quantity. I think that speaks volumes is that it's. not always about thousands of people in the room. There was 30 people in this room and the sponsor saw our ROI straight away because of their quality. So I think it's that intentional piece what brings the audience in. Yeah. I love that. I mean, I think it's true for most marketing. Right? Like, it's it's it's not always good to care about huge volumes and huge numbers. It's about talking to the right people that are closer to your ICP. They're gonna turn into leads. They're gonna be meaningful opportunities for your business. So I love that. That's a really cool story. Junie, do have any thoughts on that? Yeah. I just completely agree with everything Liz said. So, you know, take it how do you put a value on taking your best customers out to a nice dinner or networking with other CTAs? You can't really put a dollar amount on that. It's invaluable, I'd like to say. But, you know, as marketers, that's our job. Right? We have to be able to prove some ROI from all the activities we do. So what we try to do is match the audience and the goal upfront in advance. So, you know, high end dinners for our top customers or, you know, prospects to talk about, you know, our road map and future needs or maybe some informal happy hours, for people to connect, peer socials, for technical audience like architects, things like that. To me, it's much it's very critical to match exactly what you're trying to accomplish with the type of event you're doing, around, you know, ancillary events around world tours or adventure throwing. Mhmm. Yeah. Yeah. That that's true. And I think I'm hearing a lot of value, a lot of focus putting being put on the audience and so the relevance of the audience that you're kind of engaging with. And this can be really tricky at Salesforce events because some of them can be really busy. You can have sort of really big parties. You can have a really busy booth. And a lot of the time, you're chatting to a lot of people. How do you make sure that you're either inviting or talking to the right people and ultimately capturing the right leads? Sienna, what do you think of that one? Sure. I think it goes back to preparing your team again and. not just having people show up day of event and be like, ah, what are we doing today? It's really about that preparation ahead of time. So knowing that if it's a booth, any number of different kinds of personas are gonna walk by from, you know, as Jenny mentioned, anyone looking to grab swag to Salesforce employees that maybe you wanna connect with. It could be customers. It could be prospects. And so making sure that your team has a good talk path for the different types of individuals that they may come across. So what are you going to say to a prospect versus a partner Mhmm. versus a current customer who's maybe coming by looking for somebody or even, one of my favorites, the disgruntled customer that wants somebody to, like, troubleshoot their support case right there. Like, having a path of how do you move those people along. And when it comes to, like, prospects, it's really like, what are the smart questions? What do they do in Salesforce is always a good one. How are they using it? What's their role within the organization? What are they looking to solve for? Making sure that your team has those questions ready to go. And that's, you know, from a booth perspective. But even if you are hosting a happy hour, making sure that they know some of those discovery questions, if you will, to understand why somebody is there, what they're trying to get out of it. And, ideally, you have the right people in place to be able to pick it up from there and say, oh, you work in health care. Let's me chat a little bit about what that means to us. Mhmm. Yeah. I I love that visual of your booth staff trying to, you know, do their best sales moves and the customer just coming. This is not working. But but but time. it seems really obvious as well, like, getting your team prepared to kind of reroute the right people to the right people. You know? Yeah. That that's really helpful, and I'm I'm hoping that people can take something valuable from that. I wanna talk about following up on leads because this is a really big one, and it applies to webinars. It applies to events. It applies to a lot of marketing. But I think with events, because they're so costly, it makes me feel like. it's even more important to be prepared to do that. Because, again, if you're not following up on your leads, you're not getting the value, you're not tracking the value, you're not really measuring the impact of what you've done. And we have tons tons of sponsors that, you know, do activities with us, and they might not have a clear idea on how to follow-up on those leads. You know, they wanna know how many leads do we capture. Are they relevant? Are they not relevant? But then they might not have a follow-up plan ready. And, Ginny, I know this is a huge focus for you. How do you prepare to follow-up on your leads specifically for events? Yeah. Sure. And and I agree with you, you know, that it starts even before the event. Right? So we'll have, like, a booth training to say, okay. When you identify the hot lead because you have to triage, right, like, right on-site. So we have a sort of process that enables people to book a meeting right away if they're on-site and it's a hot lead. But I would say, generally speaking, we use a, like, a layered follow-up approach motion. So we have we have AI SDRs. We have human SDRs. We target them digitally if we can. Mhmm. We follow-up with some swag, you know, an opt in email nurture track for those who have given us permission, and and runs until next year's event. Right? Because oftentimes, you'll see the same people going to, you know, New York that go because they they live in New York every year. So we wanna make sure we keep those people engaged. We start very early, and we continue long after the event. So we'd like to customize event experience, so including swag, booth messaging, etcetera, depending on whether or not the audience is technical or more business focused. And so well in advance, emphasize that follow-up is absolutely critical with opportunities taking six months, to what we were saying before, to actually materialize. So, we use again, we use the the all of the different kinds of follow-up motions that I just mentioned, and super important that we keep that going for the full year until the next event. Yeah. No. That's really cool. I think that's gonna be really useful to kind of people on the session today. I also wanna call something else because our kind of sponsor base and the people that follow our webinars and maybe read some of our marketing materials, it's a mix of companies. Right? You have the larger companies with the big budgets and lots of events planned. But then you have the smaller companies with the smaller budgets, and maybe they're wondering how can they make a strong impact with this. And, Sienna, I know we chatted about this a couple of weeks ago, and you had some useful thoughts on that. That's always that's always been me. Outside of maybe one company, company, I've always been working on a shoestring budget. So I'm here for the SMBs. I feel you. I always suggest finding creative ways to maximize impact. So focus on those free to attend events. Agent force world tour, it is free to attend. Dreaming events, I believe they're free, if not cheap. They're smaller. They're regional, but they allow you to have a more concentrated focus on a target market and to have maybe more meaningful conversations because there's just fewer people there. You're not trying to rush from. place to place. You can always co sponsor or sponsor yourself, but co sponsoring off events near the main venue. You could do that for a dreaming event. You could do that for a world tour. And then, of course, for Dreamforce, it's such a popular way to, get in front of your prospects. So renting a space, inviting your partners to to share the cost, not only does it help reduce your out of pocket cost, but then you get access to your partners, prospects, and customers as well. So finding people who are connected that makes sense and doing something with them. That could be a dinner. That could be an off-site. That could be a happy hour. You can find those kind of quieter, more conducive environments for meetings and demos and one on one conversations at a much lower cost. So think about sponsoring early morning activities. Mike Davis used to do a walk, a walk and talk, before Dreamforce, that was really popular with the EMEA crowd because it was at, like, 06:30, seven in the morning. So for those with jet lag, it was a way to connect before everyone's days got busy. I think the key is to be flexible and try to fit into a prospect's schedule as well. So if you're trying to do that one on one meeting, offer to meet them for coffee at their hotel lobby or and walk together to the venue. Try to do these small things. Maybe you wanna meet for lunch. You don't always have to do an expensive dinner. You can leverage as well just the Salesforce event schedule. So as these events get closer, especially Dreamforce, they will put out an entire schedule, and you can identify the sessions where your prospects, customers, or partners, or key industry leaders are speaking and go meet them where they're going to be. You know that you know when they're gonna be somewhere, and you know exactly where, and you can show up maybe with a bottle of water and pay attention and have some thoughtful things to say about the session that they just gave. And so there are a lot of creative ways, even if you're not sponsoring, to kind of nail down those one on one conversations without spending really much money at all. Yeah. That's really smart. I love I love the thing about tracking down a a a speaker. And then the early morning walk is so clever as well. I'm just thinking back to last year. Obviously, Liz and I are on London based, and we're in just. Yes. What do we do on our first day? We went for a super early morning walk to see the sunrise because. that's just what you do when you're on that clock. But, yeah, I love that. That's really cool. Liz, did you have any ideas on sort of the small budget budget, conundrum of, of Salesforce event attendees? Yeah. I also love those early morning walk and yoga morning sessions that people do. Yeah. I think Sienna has pretty much covered everything. I think they're like really great ideas and people should definitely make use of those. And I think it's it's about being more focused and not the loudest person in the room if if you haven't got the budgets to be able to do that. And kind of instead of trying to compete on kind of the booth size or biggest swag or the best swag, it's it's kind of having, like like Sienna said, those more focused opportunities and well planned meetings. And I absolutely love the stalking idea. That's probably my favorite. I think it's that all. the time. I think it's worth it. I honestly think I would be flattered if I came off a talk and somebody was waiting for me with a bottle of water and was like, I want I wanted to chat to you about this new thing we have going on. I'd be like, yes. Absolutely. Let's do it. Yeah. That's 100%. very cool. We'll be we'll be trying to spot Sienna in the next Dreamforce. So I wanna move on to the measuring side of things because I know this is a really big deal. Like, you know, Ginny, you were saying one of the things that you start with, you know, when planning what the next event that you're gonna be attending is is you're gonna look at results. Right? But then if the lifespan of the the the impact on an event is so long, like, how do you how do you do that? How do you measure whether an event was successful or not? And, yeah, like, you know, how do you measure success and business impact from an event? Oops. Sorry. Mute. Yeah. So there's some sort of soft measurement, and then there's, you know, actual ROI. Right? Because, know, how again, how do you measure a happy customer? We had chair massages at Dreamforce, and one of our customers is like, I'm so tired. I'm like, oh, fifteen minute chair massage. Go for it. And he was so happy. So to me, there there's, like, sort of soft success like that. We just wanna make customers happy. Right? So, but there's also, some kind of more metric y type things that you have to report, right, to your CFO or to your leadership or whatever. So to me, it's about, like, knowing the event of the the the goal of the event before you even start. Right? So you have to set some goals in advance and say, you know, maybe we want product adoption. Maybe we wanna make sure that our customers are engaged and happy. Maybe we want some referrals or just, you know, appreciation or actual leads or whatever. So to me, it's all about setting that up front, Mhmm. and you need to be very, very clear on what the goal of the event is because every event's gonna have multiple goals. So it's typically, you focus on pipeline. Right? But that's not necessarily the most important. So often, we will find that the engagement with our customers on an event like Dreamforce is just the most valuable to us, both, you know, monetarily, of course, but just in the general scheme of things because customers are sort of at the center of everything we do. Right? So and then, you know, this is the age old question for marketing. Right? How do you measure brand awareness? Yeah. It's impossible. So you just assume that, that it was a success because you have so many eyes on your booth or at your, you know, your off-site location or at your happy hour or whatever. So, you know, those kinds of, those kinds of metrics are typically harder to measure, but we do them as well. Yeah. Yeah. You've got kinda gotta measure everything. Sienna, what are. your thoughts on that? Like to set those ROI goals or KPI goals across multiple stages because pipeline can take so long to actually show up. You wanna know something was successful long before it shows up as. a closed deal. So I like setting up those touchpoint goals. So how many meetings were set before the event? How many of those showed up? What was the booth visit? How many scans? How many demos were booked as follow-up? Then it's starting to say, okay. What kind of pipeline was generated? And then, ultimately, what does revenue look like after three, six, nine, twelve month period? And so that way, you know at each touch point if you're if you're tracking towards those goals. Do you have enough people at the event who wanna talk to you ahead of time? Then those that come through, etcetera. And so having those intermediate goals, helps in that, like, lagging indicator of closed sales. You could still feel like we hit some of these things as we went. And if you haven't, I think you know then, okay. Let's adjust some of these, like, closed deal goals that we had. And, that's not brand awareness. That's not, you know, retention. It may be harder to track those, but you can track these measuring points across. And especially with Salesforce and Dreamforce in particular, I always like to track even things like, hey. Did we see, our AppExchange traffic go up afterwards? To me, that's a, you know, an, an early indicator that people saw our brand and we're starting to look into it more. So some of it you have to get a little bit creative. Do you see a spike on your Salesforce web page, more traffic, or the AppExchange, things like that? So what are these smaller things that can help your team feel good about the event or help you know if you saw the success you wanted before it starts to to hit into deals? Mhmm. Yeah. Like, starting to get, like, an early feeling of, yes, we don't know the revenue that this event has brought us, but we can see we have this many meetings, this much booth traffic. I really like that. And you would think that you wouldn't commit to attending an event if you didn't know all these things. Right? You should know what you're trying to get out. of. I know. I can imagine. Okay. So so yeah. Sorry if this question is repetitive, but I really wanna kinda hammer it in. What do you guys think a successful event looks like? If that if that's if there's one thing you want people to take away today about what a successful event looks like? Because, again, we have so many chats with sponsors who maybe are like, yeah. We got this many leads, but they weren't relevant. Or, yeah, we we only talked to this many people. Yeah. What do you think an events successful event looks like? So for me, I think it's, again, hitting those goals you've set up far in advance. One of the metrics we didn't talk about, which is actually common, is pipeline acceleration. So especially, like, as I was saying, we're an we're an enterprise, deals take a long, long time, you know, expansion or new logo. So when when you see the sales cycle kind of speed up, as long as that is that happens often when you sponsor an event. So that's my my number one thing is basically making sure that the goals you set up in advance are met. So we look at the entire life cycle, you know, not just a single event. You start early. You keep going long after. And, you know, planning ahead again ensures, like, fast, consistent follow-up and captures the value that may take six months to show up in your actual pipeline and close. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I like that. And I was actually chatting to a sponsor who was trying to track success from one of the webinars, and they found that what a few of the leads that they issued they captured through a webinar were people that they were maybe already in talks with, but then they ended up closing deals with them or moving those, you know, kind of down the pipeline. So it might not be that you've captured that lead for the very first time with that one engagement, but it's actually helping you warm up that lead and kinda helping you move them down the funnel, which is really key. Cool. Sienna, any thoughts on that? Yes. And I think it's not just that success is those leads. Of course, that's true. It's about those things that may be a little bit harder to track, like brand awareness, like brand building, like relationship outcomes. And relationships not just with prospects. It could be analysts. It could be journalists. It could be your Pam at Salesforce. They would they change so often. Maybe you got FaceTime, and it's gonna help accelerate that relationship. And so those ecosystem touch points that may lead to future opportunities, I think it's important to just keep those in mind, to track those in Salesforce as well as potential relationships, not just focused again on those prospects, but who are the people that are also going to help in your future endeavors as you as you look at, you know, who can make introductions, who can be your third party validation to a prospect in the future. Making sure you can kinda track those, opportunities as well, I think is important. And then, like, the fun one, we threw a party two years ago, and one of the folks who attended just posted a picture of that party on LinkedIn, like, this week. It makes you feel good to be like, oh, we threw a party that was so good that two years later, they're still, like, talking about it and posting pictures. And so some of it is just that success, like Jenny said, of, like, we just made people happy. And, like, sometimes that's hard to track, but it feels good for a marketing team that put a ton of effort into these sort of events. Yeah. I love that. It it's so tricky. It's such a minefield. I don't really envy you guys. You have a really tough job. Liz, do you have any closing thoughts on that sort of getting the value out of events and measuring the value? Because all of these are really good takeaways, but it seems really difficult to track success, like, right after, right after an event. So, yeah, any any kind of closing thoughts to that before we move on to the next section? No. I I think I think you've both kind of nailed it really. I think it's zooming out and measuring beyond that initial initial event. because we we have so many people where we do we do sponsor debriefs, and a week after they say, oh, I haven't had any ROI from it. And then we're saying, okay, well, what are you doing with those leads? And they say, oh, they were passed to the sales team, and the sales team are reaching out. And you just think that's. not a follow-up plan. That's not the the way. And I think you guys have kind of just nailed on how to do that and its persistency. It might be three months. It might be six months. It might be two years down the line when that actually converts, but that initial lead was from that one event two years ago. So it's a much bigger picture thing. You're probably not, if you're on it if we're all honest, you're not going to see ROI one week after the event because it it it's a bigger picture. Yeah. But I think I think you both have kind of nailed it on the head really of from a marketing perspective post event. Yeah. Yeah. And I think the milestone goal is really interesting to me. That really that really stuck with me when we first chatted. Yeah. I think that's really useful. I wanna talk about the future. I wanna hear from you guys. Where do you think, Salesforce events are going, let's say, in the next year or so? There's been a lot of talk around events. Obviously, the pandemic kind of stalled everything, and now they're back maybe more important than ever, especially based on everything that we've discussed today. So, Jenny, I wanna hear from you. Where do you think events are going in the next year or so? So I think safe to say events are not going anywhere anytime soon. Yeah. So but I will I will say, you know, just generally overall, it's clear that all marketing budgets, not just events, but marketing budgets. will continue to face 2026, 2027, probably 2028. We're we're gonna need to have very clear goals upfront, with your leadership, your CFO, whatever, to make sure that you have strong ROI proof. You can prove you're making your goals. And, you know, my prediction, we may start to, see some less people going to events. You know? So as Diana was saying before, you gotta pick the right people to go. You don't need to send 40 people to man a kiosk. You don't. So so pick the right people to go. So you might see some some some travel budgets being trimmed in order to save a little money to be able to sponsor some additional events. That would be my prediction. Yeah. That makes sense. What do. you think, Sienna? I think when it comes to those the smaller companies, I'll just kinda focus on those SMB and smaller ISVs. I think they're gonna continue to invest in the events around the events. So maybe you just get your ticket to Dreamforce or you show up to an agent force world tour, but you invest in the happy hours or partnering with others on a space for meetings. And so I think that event around the event will continue to be really popular. It gives more flexibility. It gives more of an intimate one on one meeting opportunity, and it's a whole lot less than sponsoring a booth. And I think ISBs will just continue to be selective on which events they're going to. So really paying attention to their ICP, to their industry, to their region, and taking advantage of the fact that the Salesforce ecosystem has this wonderful network of, of really passionate people that are doing these streaming events, that are doing these other types of activities outside of just Salesforce specific, like, from their corporation, what Salesforce is putting together, what you'd see on their events page. I think ISVs are just can continue to get creative and use the budget where they can pickleball matches, breakfasts, happy hours, boat trips, you know, these things that that are unique and draw people in because it's different than sitting in a conference room all day. Yeah. No. I think that's really smart. And Liz, did you have any thoughts on, like, you know, what what do you think companies should do kind of based on your experience in 2026? What what do you think they should be doing, experimenting with in 2026 when it comes to events? Yeah. Think that experiential side of things is really interesting, like the breakfast, the boat, the boats, the yoga, the paddle. It it gives people a meaning to talk without being forced and and kind. of that informal networking. And this the other point really is is kind of being touched on, but I think being more intentional with the events that they choose to be a part of that align to their audience, that's not kind of mass market, it's not it's not necessarily relevant, and partnering with companies or organizations that are aligned with either their business goals or highly trusted within the ecosystem and picking those right partners. And I think that's especially important for those with smaller budgets that maybe can't afford or don't have the budgets for half £1,000,000 booths. and the likes. I think it's just being that more intentional about who you choose to work with. Yeah. Yeah. I think I think everything I'm hearing today is okay. Budgets are under scrutiny. We can't just throw money at the marketing problem. Right? We have to be intentional. We have to choose the right events. We have to choose how we show up to those events. We have to be smart about what people we bring to kinda draw the biggest impact. So I think I think that's really the main takeaway from today, and we'll be sure to put that in our events checklist that we'll send everyone after today's chat. Cool. Before we move on to our q and a, I just wanna quickly give everyone an update on what's happening from an events perspective at Salesforce Ben. We have a really rich events calendar. Liz likes to keep very, very busy, as you can see. We have lots coming up. And if you wanna if if you wanna kind of see this, obviously, this will be in the event recording. But if you wanna see the whole event brochure, please let us know. I think it's really about picking the right events for your goals. So if you're looking to maybe have kind of one on one meaningful conversations, kind of small, like, networking for smaller groups, maybe targeting a specific ICP, then I think the breakfast blends and the bites and insights lunches events that we have coming up would be perfect for you. If you're looking to target a specific industry, we have our industry summits. We did our first one last year, which was FinServe, and it was a huge success. And we're kinda open then opening that up to other industry this year, including health care. So that's really exciting. If you're looking to generate tons of leads and maybe have something in a more fun environment combining things like interacting with colleagues, customers, partners, prospects, really getting everyone to engage in the same place. I think the happy hours and the after parties, are an amazing opportunity. Obviously, we do those around all of our all of the major kind of Salesforce events. And then we have our first SFBENCon happening later this year, which is super exciting. There's tons of opportunities you could sponsor. A nurture track, you could sponsor, you could do be the headline sponsor. There's everything in between. There's really tons happening. So, yeah, if you'd like to know more, please get in touch with our team. You have Elizabeth, obviously, here, and then you have Latia and Eva, who are on our sales team as well. So, yeah, let us know your thoughts. Cool. I'm gonna open it up to the q and a now. I'm gonna pull up some questions and see what else I can kinda squeeze out out of our guest speakers today before they leave us. Let's see. Let's see. Let's see. This is a really good one. This one gives me anxiety, and, I think everyone should get better at this. How far in advance should teams realistically start planning for major Salesforce events? Liz, I know you have very strong feelings about this, so I think you take it. I mean, in, like, your world, I'd say a year ahead. But years. realistic yeah. I mean, I'm an early bird. I like planning in advance a. lot. Yeah. But I think realistically, for kind of major Salesforce events like the Dreamforce World Tour, for a team, I think six to nine months out is kind of ideal, especially if you're sponsoring or you're hosting a side event. I think I mentioned at the start, the biggest mistake I see teams making is that lack of preparation. And we have people come into us a month before saying, oh, can I sponsor something? Can I do something? Which is fine and we can accommodate it, but you're not going to maximize your sponsorship by doing that. I think the longer planning time there is and the more focused team are, the more focused the event and the outcome is going to be, which links back to everything we've just said. So I think to kind of summarize that twelve months if you're like me, but realistically I think six to nine months is the ideal. Yeah. And I I'm gonna take a clip of that, and I'm gonna put it on social so everyone can see it. I also see another one that's popped up. Meliz, I don't know if you wanna go into tons of detail on this so we can contact Amit offline as well. But Amit would like to know more about our ISV summit. Can you talk a little bit about it, please? Yeah. So the plan is we're still working on kind of the exact of this, but we're looking at hosting the ISV summit in New York during probably World Tour New York, the winter version. But this is kind of an event that will bring ISV founders whether within the ecosystem together, kind of a half day conference led event focused around curated content that will be curated by our team, but also the chance with lots of networking opportunities to kind of to yeah. To to meet with other people within the ecosystem. But, yeah, watch watch this space. More details on that to be announced. soon. I mean, we'll have we have your email, from registering to this webinar. So we can get in touch with you, and maybe we can have a chat about it and discuss it a bit more. But thank you for your interest. Cool. What else? What else? Else? How do you justify events spend to leadership when pipeline impacts six to twelve months? So, again, it goes back to what we were saying before, obviously, and I'm happy that this resonated with people. Yeah. It's events have a long they take a long time to show impact. So how do you justify event spend? Jenny, what what are your thoughts on that? I'm sure that this is something you have to kind of grapple with a lot. Yeah. For sure. And by the way, Liz, I I feel that twelve months out. We every year, we're like, wow. Is the Dreamforce again? Didn't it just end? And the answer is yes because we start a year in advance. So I'm totally with you. So especially in that context, right, it's like, well, you already have to justify next year because you gotta book everything. So how do you justify that a year in advance is really, really hard. So to me, there's very clear indicator metrics. I think feel like we touched on this before. It's it's similar. Right? You see somebody. comes to your website and requests a demo. Like, you can very clearly see someone booked a meeting on-site, and they showed up. And they've had three or four conversations, and maybe they're engaging with your ads and your content. So there are plenty of indicator metrics you can say to say, reasonably, I think this is gonna turn into x amount of pipeline, x amount of ROI, etcetera. And, again, we have this all the time. Right? Depends how you, measure marketing attribution. But let's say you just do, you know, lead source, which would be, you know, we met somebody at Dreamforce for the first time. Mhmm. That is not an ecosystem. That happens, of course, all the time, but it's not there's plenty of scenarios where it's an existing customer. It's somebody you've met for five years in advance. You know what I mean? So they gotta get a little creative in saying, okay. This was from a multi touch attribution. Taking this person out for drinks accelerated my pipeline by x. Yeah. So we measure all of that because it's very, very important because to your point, events are not cheap. And especially in the ecosystem, everybody sponsors events, probably more so than than other industries I've been in. Yeah. So super important just to have all of that at the ready when it comes to budget season. Right? Yeah. No. That that makes perfect sense. Cool. Cool. Looking at my list here. In the spirit of being more selective about which events to attend, which not to attend, do you guys have any thoughts on how do you decide what an event isn't worth attending anymore? Yeah. I think if you've been to that event before, it's all about the metrics. Yeah. What did you actually see? As well as what is the team's feedback? There are things that you can't always see around. It wasn't as many people as it's been in the past. It wasn't as high quality as it's been in the past. It wasn't the right persona as we've seen. So I think it's a 100% you just have to go off what what did you actually see last year? What are the facts? The facts not feelings based plus a little bit of the what were the vibes? Vibe marketing right there. But I think if it's a first time event, I don't think you need to sponsor the first time. I think send a couple of your really quality salespeople. Maybe it's even your CRO, your sales leader. Send them to the event to start to scope out what competitors are there. Yes. What does the audience look like? What's the content look like? So you could do a, you know, thousand dollar ticket maybe, whatever it may look like recon mission, and just send some people. They're still going to get leads because they're still gonna have conversations. They're still gonna talk to the person sitting next to them. They're going to, you know, go to the happy hours and the events, and they'll meet people, and they'll get leads. But they can also tell you what the event felt like and who the type of audience was. So I don't think if you're curious about event, you don't have to sponsor it the first year. You can just go and test it out. But you can also see a lot from an events website. Who else are the sponsors? Sponsors? Do they fall into your same audience? Are they going after the same people? Is it your competitors? If you go to a website and or a sponsor site and you're not seeing the type of people you would normally sell to or against, it's probably not the right event for you. Yeah. So do your research, but also be comfortable just sending someone on the ground and not feeling like you need to sponsor right away. Do your research. I really like that. When it comes to kind of maybe putting on your own event, whether it's a side event, Liz, I think you might have a good answer for this one. What's an example of, like, a small detail that made an event really memorable? And I know you put on a lot of these, so this is probably you think about a lot. Yeah. I think there's two that kind of spring to mind and one's kind of a corporate example. So I think this was actually seen within the ecosystem. So a team kind of printed custom handwritten style welcome cards personalized them for each guest. And this was for like a twin I think it's 15 to 20 people dinner. Okay. It took time because the team had to do it. We had to get the the CEO got involved to to handwrite those cards, but it cost hardly any money. But the impact it had was huge. And again, it's not measurable, but everyone went away and spoke about it. And I think sometimes it's not the big huge gestures, it's those little things an event that that people remember and people take away. And the other one, which I bang out on on about all the time and the team are fed up of me talking about it, and I stole it and we did a similar thing at our hub at Dreamforce last year. But I went to see Adele in Munich, she printed out I say she, her team printed out a daily newspaper for each concert with. kind of funny Adele, highlights of previous things, funny things that had happened. And again, it wasn't a big thing, but it just made you feel part of something bigger that gave people a chance to talk about. And, yeah, we we did it. We did s f s f oh, I can't remember what it was called, the daily bend for our hub. Again, it it wasn't for us. It was a quite a big investment and the ROI probably wasn't huge, but it just got people talking. It was something nice, and and it kinda just made people feel it goes back to that thing of making people feel happy. Yeah. And, yeah, I think those two were kind of standout ones for me that are small gestures, but but make a huge impact. That's really cool. I didn't know that that's where you got the event the idea for the daily, but and I I have memories of handing out hundreds of copies of those last year. I should've kept one, actually. They were really cool. And then oh, and then on the flip side, do you have anything that's, like, a trend that you think is a bit like, it's overrated, or we should kinda move on from it? Yeah. This might be not hypocritical because I was talked about it earlier, but I think it's those experiential activations that don't connect to the event or just for the sake of doing them. So you see kind of the big LED walls, three sixty activations at events that maybe don't need them because they're more about the quality networking or the the content or the curated content, and then you've got a big prize wheel or you've got a big photo booth in the corner that actually that audience isn't gonna make use of. So I think they definitely have great traffic and and they have their place in the right settings at the after parties, the happy hours where people are more relaxed. But but use those activations in the right way and don't spend money unnecessarily if you don't need it and your audience. Yeah. So, yeah, maybe it's not a trend that's overrated, I just think sometimes activations are used unnecessarily. Yeah. Like, make it relevant. I guess if it's a huge event where you're really trying to capture someone's attention, I think that makes more sense. But like you said, if the content's really curated and it's really relevant, you maybe spend money on getting a really good speaker, then why kind of move the focus away from that? Yeah. I love that. I think that's great. Cool. I think we're almost at time. Is there anything else anyone else wants to share? Any, like, main tips, takeaways? Otherwise, we'll we'll wrap. I think to me, it's about planning in advance. That's. my number one takeaway. Our events director, notice I will be like, yes. Yes. So planning in advance because the the closer you get in, also, the more expensive it gets. That's an important point. Right? So if you're having a hard time getting people to engage, especially people that might have access to more funding, you say, okay. But if we're doing so the closer you get to an event, that's number one. And number two is just tailor your events to your audience. Right? And it doesn't have to be a zillion dollars. Like, I loved that that, that example you were giving before, Liz. Like, that's perfect. You know what I mean? Just a chair massage also for Otisavia. Just made someone so happy, and it does not need to cost you an arm and a leg in order to to. make someone happy. It's be my my key takeaways from today, for sure. then one thing we haven't totally touched on, but I think is really important is once the event is over, making sure that you give an update and a wrap up to the rest of the organization. Because you ask the whole organization usually to get involved, to drive leads, to post on social, to create follow-up campaigns. You ask them all to engage even if they weren't on-site. And I think sometimes we forget to give that overall roundup of here's what we saw, and here's what your help gave. And so whether it's taking fifteen minutes on an all hands or an email even wrap up that you send that just says, hey. All of the work that was being done back in house, here's what it looked like. Because I think it's easy to just go straight into follow-up mode with our prospects and our customers that you kind of forget that you need to follow-up with your internal team as well and let them know what the what the event produced, what you're expecting, things like that. And and just to add to that, on the flip side is also getting team feedback, which is something we've. we've started doing because while we think we're the experts at it, either sales team, their input's really important. The content team who've curated some of the sessions of of doing that debrief with the teams because it. you can only get better at these things. And if something didn't quite work, we might not have picked up on it because we're busy running around sorting the speakers or looking after something else. Whereas they've seen that, they've heard a comment from one of the attendees that have said, oh, I like this or I don't like this. And and getting that feedback is something we're introducing. this year is actually a live form for both sponsors and for our team. Yes. So when they're on-site, rather than coming to us and feeding back in person where we've got a million things in my mind going on at that time, it's actually filling the form in live throughout the day. So when we go back, we can do a debrief and they can feedback. I think taking that forward then in planning is key. So, yeah, I completely agree with that is is updating the team because that you need their back end at the end of the day. You want them to help you the next year or the next six months or the next event. And so I think it's really key to make everyone feel a part of the event even if they're not on-site at that event. And if you're not communicating, you may lose some of that support. Yeah. A 100%. I love that. That's a really good point. Thank you for raising it. Thanks, guys, for your time today. You shared so many helpful insights. I hope the audience found it helpful, and thank you guys in the audience for joining today. So, yeah, obviously, look out for the recording in your inbox. Look out for the events checklist. Please do reach out if you need help with anything. And if you spot us in any of the events, we'll be the ones in the SFN T shirt. So come say hi, and thanks for your time today. Bye. Thanks, Bye. everyone. Thanks, Bye. everyone.