Ep 6: Event Day
The final episode of "No Sleep til Brooklyn" captures the moments before the event and follows the team through the highs and lows of putting on a first-year conference.
We need more ROI.
What's ROI?
I think it has something to do with customers.
No sh*t.
How do we do that?
What if we record it?
And then what?
Release it.
He doesn't miss.
Just give me pipeline.
Oh, we will.
I need something to do.
No, sleep, tell!
We're going to do it!
We're going to do it!
6.08 am.
I was up at, it was up early.
I was up at 5.
Came down early to greet the runners.
I'll dress to the nines and no one was here.
And mini freak out, mini panic attack.
I'm going to get to know there's some people running outside right now.
And just finishing up some notes in the deck for our keynote.
Good, good.
Thank you.
I don't know.
We opened with the No Sleep Til Brooklyn video,
which is always a little bit nerve-wracking because comedy is really hard.
Knowing if people were going to laugh or not.
It really felt like it could have gone anyway.
And we obviously were in the video.
We have seen it dozens of times.
And so for us, it was kind of like, I don't know, the entertainment value of
seeing it the first time. The shock value of, oh my gosh, what is this?
It had worn off.
And so playing it for the audience, I remember just being in the front row.
And incredibly nervous to go up for my keynote.
And just as the video started rolling, hearing laughter the whole time, hearing
people, literally actually laughing, not politely, like commenting.
Honestly, put me at ease.
It really kind of brought my nerves down a bit because like,
we are liking what we're doing. And there's something to that.
So I think it brought some levity to the opening.
We carried that over into sort of the opening stands of my keynote,
which was a little self-deprecating about my ability to rap.
And basically offending all of the great rappers coming out of Brooklyn.
The Tories, ViG.
Jay-Z, Nas.
What do they all have in common?
Well, they're all from right here in Brooklyn, New York.
Also, they would have all hated hearing me rap.
So my apologies to the pioneers.
Do you think Big Daddy Kane ever wondered what rhymes with nurturing leads?
Probably not.
I think I am to rapping what NFTs were to art.
So that was a late ad that we did for the keynote.
We hired a comedy writer that kind of built the bridge between the opening
moment and my keynote.
All in all, I think it was pretty good.
And from an ROI perspective too, you know,
the opening moment really get away from you on the budget,
starting with a video in our first year, actually, I think worked really well.
There is literally no separation between B2B and B2C.
The humans, this business is human, isn't it?
That same person that's filling out that RFP is the same person buying all
these Nike's
you all see to be walking around in.
I think what changed is there's no single pipeline number anymore.
Same way, there's no linear funnel or linear customer journey.
And the second thing that changed is that it's not between marketing and sales
anymore.
It's very data-driven and it allows us to make very fast decisions.
First of all, all of the right voices for the community and where we are right
now as an industry.
These are like the people to learn from.
And beyond that, without any sort of like coaching, they're on message.
Like they're saying, they're using the words.
The old playbook is all about making marketing have credibility and respect
by making everything you do directly tied to lead to opportunity to revenue.
Which was great, but in retrospect, it's hurt us.
The quality of the attendee base, their leadership, their innovation, their
voice, it's hard to manufacture.
I feel like we're in the room of greats.
So, Kudos to you Anthony and the team for this program together.
I think half of the attendees here could have been on stage as speakers.
And several folks actually referenced, "It's like I'm walking in my LinkedIn
feed."
Or, "This is like LinkedIn in real life."
Because these relationships have been fostered online and now we're all in one
place sharing this experience.
So the conversations I've already had in the first hour and a half have already
helped shape my perspective
on how we should better leverage own media for first-party engagement.
So again, just the community that's present are going to be the movers and the
shakers.
Every time the doors open in the general session room, I'm hearing a buzz out
in the main floor.
That's a good signal that beyond just the content, the relationships are
happening.
And that is again so hard to sort of force.
I think when you have these events that become a compelling kind of draw for a
certain audience,
it's a really good thing for the brand to put the event on.
There's something different about creating content in person with people.
So we created Obed's Arcade, which was really cool.
He played PlayStation with people as he was recording content.
And then right across from a bed, we've got Tim's Fruit Stand.
So I reached out to Tim Davidson.
Everybody knows him as the events guy.
He goes to literally every single event.
He's known for holding cardboard signs at those events, and he's known for
cutting fruit.
So we combined all those three things together, and we gave him a stand where
he cut fruit with people and recorded content.
So if you go back to our beautiful pineapple analogy, you started with a
quality product.
So that when you cut it up, it's nice and up. The juice is good. You can use it
on the pizza.
Do you like pineapple and pizza?
I actually do.
That's pretty good.
I think the days of there being content marketing and marketing,
I think that's over. Content is marketing. It's how we all consume content in
our personal lives.
Whether that's me as a dad, me as somebody who wants to play golf or work out
or learn in my career.
I actually think marketers should think about own strategy right alongside
earned in this beautiful Venn diagram.
It's going well.
It's going well. We missed one video clip, but you know what? We're good.
We want to come together, find our inspiration, and create an event where kind
of the medium is the message where we're doing things,
we're actually marketing it in a different way as you know, while we're talking
about marketing.
It's kind of meta in that sense.
And so we wanted to create this virtual broadcast here.
The broadcast desk literally looked like TV. It did not look like any B2B thing
I've ever seen before.
It literally couldn't believe that was us. And so I think we hit on something
really powerful with the virtual broadcast.
The set up was awesome. I felt like I'd be able to record it.
I was like, okay, maybe.
This was a proof of concept. We're going to take it, refine it, make it better,
and keep going.
We had a ton more people there than we thought.
And so if you look at the variable expenses for an event like this,
the biggest line items is food and beverage. Or you're adding basically over
150 people or so to the budget in the last seven days.
Everything goes up pretty quick.
Are we happy to spend that money? I mean, we're happy we filled the room.
But it's hard on a young company's budget when we go over.
I think the things that went wrong, some were avoidable, others were not.
But unavoidable things is we had four elevators to move 300 people up 22 floors
for lunch and down.
I'm here with Ryan. We just recovered from coming down the elevator.
We sure did. It was pretty funny. It's pretty funny that watching an entire
conference move from the bottom floor to the top floor of a building in
Portland using only two elevators.
The ROI on those two elevators.
We should have caught that perhaps, but you know, hard to fix when we decided
to host it at this venue.
This is so silly, but people were like talking during the Lindsay Sterling
performance.
There's people in the back of the room making a lot of noise.
I don't know what to do with that. How do you do? Do you shush attendees? It
feels a little on sort of in the front of the room.
What do you guys do? What's that story? What do you guys tell people who are
talking in the building?
And that's fine. That's fine.
Okay. This next one is how would you most personal slide them?
That was a question in my mind. Should we have done the live performance during
dinner? Should that have been done at a different time?
How do you like shush people respectfully while also creating kind of a good
experience for our guest who was performing?
But again, you know, I had speakers come up to me telling me that they
generated hard ROI from their speaking opportunities.
So that was like incredible. We had attendees creating vlogs on their
experience here.
It was very cool to see people in real life and interact like that.
And I'm grateful to Golden Hour for providing that opportunity.
Like seven pages of notes. I'm proud of myself today.
I came in a little scared, but I think I'm leaving with some new friends. And
that's the best feeling ever.
Brain and heart full. I'm working your ass.
There are many moments that I can be on, but that's any problem now. I have to
show my head at the team.
I don't know if you can do it.
Yeah, girl, you did it!
[Cheering]
We have a lot of this plus while we're here.
The other thing that's really interesting, I just got a slack, we had an 88.5%
conversion rate from registration to attendee.
That doesn't happen. The stats that I've heard in the past was that 50% of your
free tickets will show up.
And something to the tune of like 90% of your paid tickets.
But we had a blended 88.5% or very proud of that.
I have no idea how seven of us did this.
When you have a bunch of perfectionists putting on an event, things won't go
perfect.
There will always be something that goes wrong.
And so it's important to almost like own the wins a little bit too.
Because it's easy for me as a perfectionist to start spinning on things like HV
AC or elevator bays or whatever.
And this, just all the goodness that's happening around us, all of the
relationships that were forming,
all of the learnings that were being had, all of the joy on people's faces.
And so I'm very proud of the team.
I think we all had to rally behind a goal, to bring goal an hour to life.
And it came at a cost, not just hard cost to the budget, but a cost of our
attention, where we were focused, where we're spending our time.
But again, these are moonshots. These are the types of programs that could
really bend the trajectory of a business.
I still have a lot of growth to do as a CEO, but I still have a lot of heart
and passion as a marketer.
You can always become an event company.
Now sleep, do!
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Rockets!
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