The Event Planner's Playbook: Insights from CX Professionals

Nicole Saunders: All right. Hello and welcome to the CX nexus podcast. I'm Nicole Saunders here with my co host.

Chris Detzel: Chris Detzel.

Nicole Saunders: Good to see you, Chris. How are you doing today?

Chris Detzel: Pretty good, Nicole. How about you?

Nicole Saunders: I'm doing well. It's finally getting to be summer. Pretty excited about that. I feel like I
start every episode with the weather updates.
It's very Midwestern of me.

Chris Detzel: No, we do that, in the [00:01:00] South too. How's the weather and all that kind of stuff. Sure.

Nicole Saunders: True.
But it's getting hot here in Dallas. I think it was 90 degrees the other day, 95, actually. So yeah,
summer for me,

Chris Detzel: well, not for us, but so I think we wanted to talk a little bit about event management and how to run an event and all these kinds of things.
What do you think?

Nicole Saunders: Yeah, I think events are great. For people in community, a lot of time this comes up with things like user groups or user conferences or community summits or something like that. Oftentimes this is a big function of a field marketing team. Sometimes in a bigger company, there's going to be a global events team and regional field marketing teams, things like that.
Sometimes success teams. And sales teams run events and, it's just something that chances are, if you work in a customer oriented job, you're going to end up hosting or helping out with an event at some point. And so I know that you've been doing some really interesting [00:02:00] ones lately with relative, you've always been doing events, but you were just telling me about a great new one that you were doing.
So yeah, let's dig into it. Let's talk about what does it take to be successful running an event? What do we need to do? What do you need to think about? It's fun, but it's a lot of different parts.

Chris Detzel: It's insanity, to be honest.

Nicole Saunders: Don't scare the people, Chris.

Chris Detzel: Yeah. Like I believe that, in every single thing that you do, and I think you would agree is there's going to be some business outcomes and it's, you don't just run events to think, Oh let's get our customers together.
Connect. That is, one of the goals is for peer to peer connection. We know as community leaders that, that drives, the net new cross out ups, all those things. And people want to connect to others that are doing similar things. We know that's valuable. We know it's true.
But at the end of the day, we have to still have goals and things like that. And they have to be high. And I think that's where you start is we want to do an event. And, just recently I've had the [00:03:00] pleasure or opportunity to run an event that we started. Back in February to plan and doing that.
We just executed it yesterday. So congratulations.

Nicole Saunders: You must be breathing a sigh of relief today.

Chris Detzel: Oh, it is. It's it's a sigh of relief, There's nothing like the process, right? You have to go through the process to really understand it. And look, I've been doing some of these things indirectly or directly, not running the entire event myself, but back when Reltio, we did our data driven event.
Back in October of last year we'll do it again. It's our big kind of event. And we thought, and I think I've mentioned this before, obviously on some other podcasts that I've taken on a roll around expansion. And so thinking of upsell and cross zone, we thought, this is a great opportunity for us to get some of our customers in one location.
For a half day to, to learn from each other to really get the word out about Reltio, our [00:04:00] product roadmap around some of that have a keynote speaker, which in this case was our CEO. And then some people that speak about how they're using the product, what they're doing and those kinds of things.
And so that's really the high level of why we were doing the event. And again, the main reason is thinking about expansion, right? How do you expand on some of these existing accounts?

Nicole Saunders: And to think about what's at the core of that for an event, we know that if people show up, they're going to get answers to questions.
So you might remove some roadblocks. They might learn about how somebody else is using a tool that they didn't think of like a new use case. You're like, Oh, I never realized I could use the software for that. That's great. And that can lead to expansion. Maybe they're going to learn about. An add on or an app or something that you can cross sell or upsell.
And at the end of the day, really what it is the event is all about helping the people that are attending, see the value of what you're offering and understand it better. And that is. Key thing to retaining and expanding customers is [00:05:00] they're seeing value and they want to keep spending money because they're getting something out of it.
Right.

Chris Detzel: Yeah. And I was having this conversation with the sales leader that was there and he said, this is, this event is like talking to 50 plus or having 50 plus zoom calls all around our company. Instead of, and them connecting and doing peer to peer networking with each other, because they'll accelerate

Nicole Saunders: the whole conversation, talking to each other.
And the funny thing about events is I don't know that they're less work, right? We're gonna, we're about to unpack all the things you got to do. There are a lot of work up front, but then you get the bang for your buck all at once. And then the key is, That sort of acceleration and the energy that happens when you bring people together and something that we've all been craving and missing, I think, for a lot of years.
I've been seeing people just really excited to get together all of the sudden, four years later. And so I think that's really key. Events are fun, right? There's also like things that you can draw out of them. You get artifacts, you take pictures, maybe you take some video, [00:06:00] you record a couple of quick soundbites with people.
You've got all this stuff that you can bring back to your marketing team. There's a lot of different things that can come out of it that you're not going to get out of, sales reps being on zoom calls all day.

Chris Detzel: Every we're all, we all crave it. We all want in person stuff. Look, nobody really wants to be on a zoom call all day, every day.
It just doesn't. And do these virtual events overall, like a half day event really work? You know what I mean? Maybe I'm not saying they don't deliver a lot of the same

Nicole Saunders: message, but you miss that. Energy. That is so critical to the success of it. I'll

Chris Detzel: give you an example and we can dive in deep of what it takes to actually build an event.
And but we, people come for breakfast and they just network a little bit. They're just getting to know each other. So they're not really, comfortable yet, but then. Then they start talking and then you go through the event, you have a break and then all of a sudden this happened yesterday, like they're talking and then trying to get them out of the break, to quit talking, to get back into the room was difficult, it's, it was [00:07:00] cool to watch.
And then, we went through all the sessions and everything else. And then when it ended, Then we had a lunch. But no one was leaving the area, like in the main area where we had the speakers and everything. I didn't even

Nicole Saunders: care about the sandwiches.

Chris Detzel: There's a, there's food in this other area.
So I'm sitting there telling everybody yeah. And they stand in there for another 20 minutes without even going to lunch, talking and hanging out. And then almost all of them go to lunch. And they're there for the next two hours, right? It was a 12 to two lunch. And I thought, man, most people are probably gonna leave early.
No, they didn't. And I was thinking how awesome they truly wanted to network, and talk to each other. They had access to our product manager. They had, or one of our product leaders, they had access to our CEO. And our sales guys loved it because they're, trying to close deals or whatever, it's just. Yeah. It was so awesome to see that, I had a big part in to doing that. And that many people showed [00:08:00] up and there's a lot of value there. So I'll say that. So at the end of the day, all the things that I'm about to talk about, it's

Nicole Saunders: worth

Chris Detzel: it. But as you go through it, it's very difficult.
It's just a lot of stuff that you have to do.

Nicole Saunders: So we talked about, you have to know the goal, why you're running the event and of course, as I've talked about so many times, it's always good to start with the why so that you know what you need to do to get there and what you need to measure to show that you got there.
That's right. So tell me a little bit about that. What were some of the measures that you were thinking about going into this event? To determine if this was successful and to show the value of it.

Chris Detzel: Yeah, it's a good question. And I think that, that those are the first things that you look at, the positive is that we have a great person that run events.
She didn't do this particular event. She did help me. So with that said, though, there's already a template for what we do on events. This one's [00:09:00] slightly different because it was a Realto run specific event. It wasn't necessarily thought leadership, There's some thought leadership in there, but it was, specifically on when you think of expansion.
So existing customers with some potential customers. So one is, what's our goal? How many people do we want at this event? Two is there's a influence pipeline goals. Revenue. Goal, number of opportunities we want to create, while, some of that stuff doesn't happen until later down the road, but we still want to put those kinds of things together.
So for us to spend X number of dollars on this event, we have to get X. And a lot of times that's 10 to 20 X of a return is really the goal at the day, think about it.

Nicole Saunders: Yeah. That's great. That's a big return.

Chris Detzel: Well, 10 X is always the return. And sometimes you want to try to push for more. So if you spend, X number dollars, you want 10 X on that value.
And so it's important because This is new to us. This specific events aren't [00:10:00] new at all. Go to the Gartners. We have our own big event. We call it data driven. It's more of a thought leadership kind of thing. And, different speakers and things like that. But this is more specific to us as a company and within a specific industry.
So that's what that's another thing is. It's our industry event specific to And in the industry like in this case, it was life sciences. So we knew that's part of the goal. So we didn't want to bring, a B2C company in because they probably wouldn't get value out of, life sciences event, you know what I mean?

Nicole Saunders: So you're thinking about that end goal. You're thinking about how you're going to
measure it. You're thinking about your audience. Who are you going to invite? You got to think about your content. What's going to be relevant to that audience that's going to steer them towards those desired outcomes.
And then how the heck are you going to get them there? Yeah. Talk to me a little bit about those pieces. How did you think about the content and the structure of the event? And then how did you think about promoting it?

Chris Detzel: I feel like you've done [00:11:00] this before, Nicole. So a few

Nicole Saunders: times I may have done event marketing in a past life.

Chris Detzel: Yeah. All the right questions to ask. Cause those are the exact things that you have to think about is one is you gotta think about. Yeah. Before you invite people you have to at least have a high level agenda. So what are the topics that you're going to talk about? What are you going to go into deep?
You know what I mean? Because if you don't have a good agenda, then, how do you know? And then at the same time, when you have this high level agenda, because we didn't have a lot of time to get it out, so we had to hurry and then let the agenda form as it went. And so that's how we did it was we had a high level piece to say, We want to talk about this from nine to 10, 10 to 11, whatever, and so that's what we did. And then we created a page. So we'll get a little tactical because I think that is

Nicole Saunders: a lot of it. You got to do events are about the details, right? You have to have all the little pieces and the tactics in place to your point. And one thing I want to call out, there's it is totally [00:12:00] okay to get your page up and say, here's what the event is going to be about more details to come.
The more information you have, the more registrations you're going to get right away, but you also want to give people enough notice and enough time. And so if you have to balance between having the details and getting the webpage out there, get the webpage out there and send more follow up emails later so that people can register.

Chris Detzel: You have to have a venue. Like, where's it going to be? We haven't

Nicole Saunders: even gotten into the actual logistics. So yeah.

Chris Detzel: Logistics is key. And it's not my forte, let's just be honest. Like it's sometimes some of the
things we're really good at. And, so I learned a lot, I leaned heavily in on some some of our people that already do this for a living.

And trust me, like she did amazing. And So it's logistics, like what hotel you're going to have it at, what time it's going to be the, do they offer food, breakfast, lunch, dinner, whatever you're doing snacks, et cetera. How big is the room? What does the room look like?
All these things, because, if I'm going to have [00:13:00] 70 or 80 people at an event. You got to make sure it's going to hold them, and then that they can go somewhere for lunch and that there's hotel rooms available. You have to have a block of, rooms and all of that, a certain price and things like that.
Like this particular event was pretty much in, in the heart of the life sciences space in New Jersey. So the beauty about that is, is that. A lot of people weren't traveling in. They just drove in an hour away. That's nice. That makes it a lot easier

Nicole Saunders: when you don't have to deal with hotels or flights or, even parking can be a trick sometimes.
You got to make sure it's easy for people to get to you. Events are a little bit like a webpage, right? Everybody knows that. Maybe not everybody does. But with a webpage, you want to reduce the clicks to get something done because every click is a drop off point for people. And with events, you can think of parking and registration and all of those elements as clicks on the webpage where somebody might be like, I really want to go to that event, but parking there is terrible.
Maybe I'll just catch the recording. [00:14:00] Yeah. So you do want to think about those details to maximize your impact, right?

Chris Detzel: Yeah, the other thing that you have to think about and in the past. So when we did our data driven event, which we're doing this year that's where it's where we're gonna have four or 500 people.
It's not extremely big, but it's bigger than what we've ever done. So there you have to think about. Is it paid? Is it not paid? Is it free? Most of the time if people pay for the event, even if it's five, six hundred bucks, most people are going to come because you're not going to get your money back.
You know what I mean? So if they pay for it, you have a higher chance of people coming. If they don't, like this particular event we're talking about, it was free, and so you just got to know if you have 80 people that registered, you're probably gonna have a drop off of 60 or 30 or 40%. You know what I mean?
That's just what happens. Just and so you have to keep that in mind. And that's something we thought about, but we knew we're going to do this for free because we knew we'd have a pretty good, or we had a feeling that we'd have a pretty good crowd, but you never know until you get there.
You're like, okay, who's going to show up? [00:15:00]

Nicole Saunders: Yeah, that's true. So coming back to like, how did you get the invites out? How did you think about the words that went on the email? What did that look like? Because Sending the invites to the party, I feel is one of the most critical pieces.
Otherwise, you either spend a lot of effort on an event that's poorly attended, or you have a whole bunch of people who have expectations that are different than what you're trying to do.

Chris Detzel: I think one is all about the key message. What's the key message of your event? And then what does it look like at a high level from the agenda?
And so that, that's right. And so I had to create, an email template so That I could send out, that all of the AEs could send out, that, whoever wanted to, that the CSMs could send out. And so trying to build this whole entire uh, ecosystem of who's sending out what. So we probably should go backwards, because something I didn't mention that I think is very important is what I think of as work streams.
So [00:16:00] each, you've got to try to figure out, all right, Who's going to be on your team? Who's the core people that's going to be on your team, maybe five to seven people. And so I identified, it was obviously me because I'm, trying to manage the event. But two is, you have AEs that are specialized in life sciences.
You make sure those AEs are on, you have, we have a renewal reps that. Actually count, that do the expansion piece that have some skin in the game that they want, people to, and then some of the CSMs that have the relationships with so having some of those right people on.
And maybe it's somebody that can do some of the logistics that, that I invited to that's a couple of people there. So I had five to seven people that were core to that group and then you go execute and then you put names on, Hey, you're going to go do this. You're going to go do this and you're going to go do this.
I'm going to do this, and you just tap it, put it on a PowerPoint or whatever. And then it's you're racy,

Nicole Saunders: right? The responsibilities. [00:17:00] And with an event, it is so important to have those crisp roles because there are so many pieces they're in constant motion. It's good with any project, but I think events in particular, it can get, you can get cross wires really easily.

Chris Detzel: Yeah, that's right. And and then you got to meet at a, we met weekly and, and then the leader of, so there's also, in your day, see, racy, whatever you want to call it, but you People that are over this and then you have contributors and that kind of stuff.
And so there's also a main person that's over in our case, it was our leader of cells. And I could go to him when I had issues, Hey dude, like this going on, what do you think? So he was my kind of, if so and so didn't say it, I you had to go ask that guy, you know what I mean?
So I can deflect a little bit, you know, because what happens on these. Kind of events is that once the word gets out, everybody in the organization wants to go, or, and so it's hard to say no, or you have partners that want to be there

Nicole Saunders: with more employees that want to be there.
Then it [00:18:00] is,

Chris Detzel: and it's for good reason, right? It's not Oh my God, there's good reason why it, maybe they should go, but you don't want it just to be filled up with just employees, and so that's always A balance, you want them to go and, you're just trying to manage that.
There's like partners, for example, that all want to go because they want to meet these our customers and things like that. So you have to try to limit that. So bringing in our Alliance team to help manage some of that is, is key because you don't want it to be overran by partners, but you want to have our partners there because they're key to what What we do and helping us to spread the message, yeah. So I think that's core. So before I get into all the, how do you reach out to all those people? So that's core to what you have to do is come up with that Dacey and then manage that Dacey and put responsibilities and roles and things like that. So we can go into the good.

Nicole Saunders: I was going to say, I love that you're engaging the sales and the success teams in this.
That's a trick that I've always used. Oftentimes when you're thinking about events. It's easy to just be like I just need [00:19:00] an email campaign, or I just need to put some stuff out on social media, but we all know you're much more likely to attend something. If someone, and trust says Hey, I think that you'd be really.
Good for this, right? I think you really like this, or I'm going to be there. Do you want to come? And so leveraging your go to market teams. They're often looking for a reason to reach out for their customers and offer them some value. So if you can provide them with that thing of, Hey, go reach out to your customers this week, invite them to this cool thing.
We'll help them understand value. It'll help your sales numbers. It's a win all the way around. The key is just to make sure that you've got those materials. You've got those resources and you're making those direct contacts with those go to market teams that can really help you promote.

Chris Detzel: Yeah, exactly.
And I think that as you get into that, like how, one of the things that you mentioned was, how did you start reaching out? You use that. Yeah. But there's a lot of channels that you can go through. And so for us, and as you get into bigger organizations, it's even more important to say, [00:20:00] okay, if I want to send a an email out to our entire base, there's a process that we have to go through to make sure that happens.
If I want three emails sent out to our entire customer base and prospect base, I've got to write the email, get out of the title. I've got to do it three different times. It's okay, the first email is this, Hey, we have this event. The second email, Hey, just so you know, you didn't sign up yet.
We have this event. Third email is last chance email kind of stuff. And so putting that together, send it to the process for the marketing team to do, but then. Also having the AEs and the CSMs and the RAEs to start pushing the event. And creating that template of emails, saying, Hey, this is the key message.
This is what we're trying to accomplish. This is what we're trying to do, and they start sending out emails and things like that. So that's it's just using the channels, AEs, they can send out personalized emails cause they have true relationships with some of these customers and even prospects to is RAEs because the same reason.
And they're. They might have maybe contacts as well, and they can work with their AE to do that. [00:21:00] CSMs have really good relationships with our customers as well. So really trying to coordinate that and make it happen. So that's one. And then two is I have access to thousands of our customers because of the community.
And sorting out, Which spaces. So in this case, it was life sciences, and saying, okay, these are our, all our life sciences customers and some partners and then creating that list and then sending out a personalized email for me, because a lot of those people do engage with me specifically on our live shows and everything else.
And so there's like multiple. Avenues to go, to really to use. And that's what we did. So sure. There's other ways, but emails, key phone calls. Like when I did a live show, I would talk about it all the time, put the link in the chat kind of stuff. We do a lot of those live shows.

Nicole Saunders: So let's see, we've talked about how you planned the event, how you thought about it, how you invited people there. Do you want to get into some of the logistics of binding and setting up the space [00:22:00] and did you have food and some of those pieces? Cause those are critical too, right? You don't want to invite people for a day long thing and be like, all right go find lunch by yourself.
You
Chris Detzel: have

Nicole Saunders: to think about all of those pieces too.
Chris Detzel: So there's. Logistics and then there's content. So let's talk about logistics and then maybe content because I think,
Nicole Saunders: you

Chris Detzel: know, so logistics wise, you got to find the hotel the venue. What is. This can hotel. I think we talked about this.
Can they hold that many people? What are you expecting? And all of that kind of stuff. And then we wanted to do a networking breakfast. We wanted to do quick break 1520 minutes. But, there's still gonna be coffee and food. And then you got to think about then we had a lunch and so a networking lunch from.
For two hours, which went for the whole two hours. So you got to think about that. And there's a reason, Hey, look, we're going to feed you. You're going to be comfortable. Just that's what people expect. If you're going to, it was a half day long event, basically from 9am to, to 2pm. [00:23:00] So almost a whole day, but not quite.
And four of those hours were, Content focus, but then really three of those hours were really focused in on maybe only three hours of content and then the rest was focused on networking, and that's the beauty about these. You don't have to have topics to network people just network.
They just talk because they, because you have that content boom. And then now they're like, it's just to talk to your product leader, each other, or maybe our CEO, everybody's. Wanting to talk to him, but so that's what we did. Parking wasn't an issue I mean, there's a lot of stuff that goes into that.
And logistics is probably I think it's the most underrated thing if you think about it. So think about this is when you get to the hotel you got to think about swag, you got to think about name badges and all of this stuff that, and you got to ship the stuff over, and make sure that's all there.
And then I got there like at 6 00 AM when I was and then did all the setup, [00:24:00] put all the badges in alphabetical order, look, so it's just normal stuff, but, we have an extra room that I can put my bags in and then other stuff just to, that That I could just go pick up and push to the table, what kind of swag do you want to have that way at gifts for the speakers?
Oh yeah.

Nicole Saunders: Critical swag bag,

Chris Detzel: swag bag. And and so there's just a lot to think about on even a, and that was a small event, that's a tiny, I think we had 59, 60 people there overall, but it's still still extremely valuable. You can't just say, Oh, let's just get together for some beers.
You can do that on, maybe the smaller kind of user group like things. And I think some of that is important, but it's a different kind of, but this is a little bit bigger event. And can you imagine. Doing that same event, but at a bigger, you have more swag.
You just, it's very similar though of the whole process. Yeah,

Nicole Saunders: it is. And that's the interesting thing is that it scales up or down, whether you're doing a fairly casual meetup or [00:25:00] a 10, 000 person conference. It's a lot of the same steps. It's just how. Involved they are and how big you make it. And, Chris, I love this.
I think this is a really comprehensive overview and it gives people an idea to you, I, how many times have you had somebody come to be like, Hey, I want to do an event and you're like, okay, let's talk about what that means. And what is involved with that to be successful with it. Because the key thing is it's better to not do an event than to have a bad one.
And so you do have to have your ducks in a row. You do have to make sure you've thought through all of these elements and gotten it all coordinated and gotten it all planned and done it in a timely manner and do it in budget. It's a lot.

Chris Detzel: It's exhausting. Um, but and before I'd give you the outcomes, cause it's, the outcomes were very positive and good, but, um, it's the content.
And so what I did, so you got to find speakers, you got to find, who's going to be the main keynote, who's going to fit in the middle and things like that. We knew that one [00:26:00] is, it's a relative event, is for us, and we knew that, or I knew, I was like, Hey, look, Why don't I just get our CEO and I'll send him a note and see if he'll do it.
And he did instantly. Like he was like, yeah, let's go. And so he's got it. So then you got to think about his content. And here I am working with our, one of our guys that work with works with our CEO a lot, on kind of high level stuff and messaging and all that kind of stuff.
And so we worked with our CEO to come up with The presentation and people are working on his deck and all this kind of stuff, throughout and did a pretty amazing job. But then in the middle, we had we made this slightly easier for us. So that so we wanted to have customer panels. And so for us, we didn't want them to present, a lot of stuff because it's just another.
Added thing. And, it's the other thing is these customers had to get approval, before they could even present something. So it's a little less of a [00:27:00] burden for them to have to go and all these approvals. And it's a little easier just to talk about it, right? It's not recorded or anything else.
And what we did is one of our, our led a discussion as a moderator, he knows the space inside and out, and he's been working with these customers for years and had three one of the sessions and three customers, and he just, we just went to talk about business outcomes. How are you using it?
What are you doing from an MDM standpoint? And then the other session was just a chat between our leader of sales and another customer, right? Just went deep into it's very similar to the one before, but it was just a one on one,

Nicole Saunders: and then

Chris Detzel: we had a product uh, road map session specifically for this group from our product team.
And so all of that, when you think of producing it, getting it, you're trying to get people to say yes. And all these things, you're trying to produce certain things. You got to get the key messages out [00:28:00] and all of these things. And it's a lot because if you think about it, it's just, it's more than just a one person show, right?
Somebody has to manage it, that's what I did, you've got, Sky cabin doing a bunch of things with our CEO. You've got, the AEs doing stuff with their customers to get the questions ready and everything else. And, I'm having to attend all the sessions and every, all that kind of stuff.
And then product roadmap session, we've got to make sure that the key message you're there. And so working with that guy, so you're working with every single person, that is part of it and you're just trying to guide it, manage it as best you can. And nobody's perfect. I'm certainly not.
But. You just got to drive, just get through some of that, that mistakes are going to happen, and so that's part of it. And then you get to the event, you got to make sure that from a logistic standpoint, that the presentation is sent like a day or two before to the team, the hotel team.
So they, because they had these laptops. And this happens almost in every hotel I've seen it is they'll you email them the powerpoint deck [00:29:00] and then they get They put it on a thumb drive and push it into these laptops sometimes in this case it was two laptops because one did the monitor that the speaker reads and then the other one was And so, then, but then people want to make changes day of, and I'm like, this is going to be difficult.
Like I have to move this slide to this slide and then get an email. You know what I mean? So there's a lot of things that are happening. Like you think just things that shouldn't, but they do. And it's just life, like one person wanted to move around the, their deck and everything else.
And, when they get up there, it didn't, Do exactly what they thought, so they had to improvise themself, so there's a lot of opportunities to make mistakes. And so you gotta really think about all of that stuff. But it turned out overall the content was good, and it was really great actually.
And then, but there's just so many moving parts.

Nicole Saunders: Yeah, there are a lot of moving parts and that's the key. You have to make sure that as you're going through the whole piece, you've got your project management diet dialed in. Know where you're [00:30:00] mapping this stuff out. Make sure you can check on progress because all of these things we talked about, you're going to be working on in parallel, right?
It's, some of them are dependencies where you work on them in a chain order, but a lot of these, you're working on the content. At the same time, you're confirming the sandwich vendor. At the same time, you're coordinating your speakers. Inevitably something will be settled and then we'll blow up and you have to pivot and fix it.
On that note, I have to give one shout out to the Zendesk global events team. Two weeks before our user conference this year, they had to find a new venue because the venue we were going to use, a whole bunch of their staff went on strike and thousands of people flying across the country to attend this and they did it.
seamlessly. The event was great. There were almost no hiccups with all of that. And so that's another thing. If you're going to plan an event, be ready to be like the Zendesk Global Events team and pivot if you have to, because something will always go wrong.

Chris Detzel: You have to pivot. Like speaker's going [00:31:00] to there's a speaker that might cancel at the last minute.
You've got to go find somebody else. You know what I mean?

Nicole Saunders: You might find out there's no power in the room that you were going to do this big presentation that requires, something or, something about the setup is going to be different or you never know. Good to have backup plans and good to go into these events knowing it's going to be a lot of pieces.
I'm going to have a lot of information to keep track of. I'm probably going to run into some hiccups along the way. But it's not going to be worth it when you get those people in the room and they won't even go to lunch because they're so excited to talk to each other. And then you walk away with results, like the ones that you've been seeing, it was just yesterday

Chris Detzel: and the results I think are going to be really big and I think we'll hit all of our goals. And even if we don't like, it was really good to get everyone together and Connecting and we knew we had the right people in the room and it went extremely well from my point of view and I think some others as well.
You're always going to, sometimes you just got to prepare that you might not know what's going to happen. You might not be able to have a backup [00:32:00] plan, but you'll think on your feet, you'll figure it out. One guy and I'll, we can stop it. He said, Chris, you're pacing around, what's going on?
I was like, I'm just thinking, like I'm thinking, okay, how do I make this better? How do I make it not, like it just, I was pacing through the event and going to people saying, Hey, we gotta do this, and it's just, it's a lot of fun, but it's a lot of work, and, but it's, so I thought this was a great topic.
So thanks for indulging me a little bit, to talk more about it.
Nicole Saunders: Absolutely. If anyone ever wants to pick our brains on events, Chris and I have probably decades at this point of combined experience doing this kind of thing. We're always happy to share our ideas. We appreciate you listening.
Please please share, please give us a five star review. That's the thing that makes the biggest difference in showing up in search results. And until next time, I'm Nicole Saunders and

Chris Detzel: I'm Chris Detzel.

Nicole Saunders: All right. Have a good one.

Chris Detzel: Take care.