0:00
Jennifer Gutman
Welcome to the radically transparent webinar. On today's webinar, we're going to be getting radically transparent, if you will, and answering the question, is field marketing dead? So we are absolutely going to have a Q and A at the end. So if you have any questions, please feel free to type them into the chat or at the end, go ahead and put them in the Q and A. Yes, absolutely. You will get the recording of the webinar after the webinar as well as this presentation. And for anybody who would like to follow along, perhaps, perhaps spark conversation or catch up on any of the other webinars in this series, you can use the hashtag radicallytransparentacross Social and we look forward to seeing you there. So with that said, quick introductions before we dive into this hot topic. My name is Jen. I'm the director of social strategy at Oktopost. And with me today is a seasoned and phenomenal growth marketer, Natasha Dalinsky. Natasha, I'm going to pass the ball to your court to do a little intro.
1:03
Natasha Dolginsky
That sounds great. Thanks so much and thank you for inviting me and good to be here. I run the growth marketing team at Clari and I own both the digital aspect of our demand generation engine as well as the field marketing virtual events. And what Clari does is it helps organizations manage their revenue process better. It helps them make it more efficient, more predictable, more connected essentially it helps organizations sell more, which in turn means we can invest more in marketing, invest more in hiring and all the good things. And I especially am excited to be at Clari because it feel that it gives people a seated marketers a seat at the table because marketers can really inspect the pipeline and see where we can put in an event or virtual event and add. And we talk the talk that the executives and the leadership, which is pipeline and revenue, which is really, really helpful.
1:57
Jennifer Gutman
I love that. And the fact that you're helping marketers everywhere gain a seat at the strategy table I think is something that is irreplaceable. So. So with that, the last guest we have today is our little Octi. He's known actually as our cmo, our chief mascot officer. So he'll, you'll see him throughout the presentation as well. And there he does a little flip. All right, Natasha, the question we're all waiting for, we've sparked a lot of debate across social media with this question. Some say no, some say yes, some are somewhere in the middle. I want to know from you, this is what you eat, breathe and live is field Marketing today, dead.
2:41
Natasha Dolginsky
It is not. It is not dead. It has evolved, and it has, for some companies, transformed on how they run field marketing events. And I really feel. I'll talk more about this later, but I feel when I look at virtual events and field events, they both learned something from each other. And so field events, in my experience, has been an area that is harder to track to pipeline and harder to really measure. Did it work? Did it not? There was a lot of reliance on anecdotes from the sales team, like, yes, that was a really great dinner, or that was a really great event, and that's it. That's all we had for success criteria. And so what I feel Covid has forced field marketing to do is really become a lot more measurable, which I think is fantastic for the company and the field marketers.
3:29
Jennifer Gutman
Yeah, I'd have to agree now when you say that it's become more measurable. Right. And so essentially, right. Field marketing is not dead. It's very much. You could say alive, but it's not alive as we know it. It has transformed. When you say it's become more measurable, can you kind of explain what that means? I mean, what. What exactly are you able to measure now that you weren't able to measure before? Because from what I know, right, is that when we send our sales teams out to events, I mean, we would see deals being driven further down the pipe. We define success, and we felt we could really measure it based off of sending those teams in person on the floor. So I'm a little curious to hear about. What do you mean you can actually measure it better?
4:19
Natasha Dolginsky
Yep, that's a really, really great question. And I've had a hand in or manage field marketing teams at two companies. So my experience is based on that. But what I. Is that webinars and virtual events of something that we're doing now has always been a lot more easier to tie to pipeline because you have, you know exactly where the attendees came from when you can track it digitally. You're running ads for them, you're running email. And so you know exactly how you got each person to that event. For field marketing, it's always been maybe overwhelmingly reliant on those anecdotes from the sales team. And what I've seen companies do is invest in, let's say, golf games and movie premieres, even though they don't end up in pipeline. And so what marketers used to focus on in film marketers, in my experience, is legion. Right. They would talk about, well, we had this Many people register for a webinar. We had this many people attend a movie premiere and they didn't take it in further and say, well, did it actually end up being pipeline? And because of that vocal sales team, we continue to invest in movie premieres and other things that didn't quite drive Pipeline and it wasn't good for the company. Right. We would spend a lot of money, we would drive a lot of lead rev dev team, SDR team, then got a lot of a big influx of thousands of people to follow up with and then nothing happened. There was just no revenue or no pipeline generated from it. And I've seen a shift in that where and I'll talk more about it, but now that we're back to doing in person events, we are taking the same measuring stick that we used to take to our virtual events and are applying it there. So we're tracking where people are coming from, how it's converting to pipeline and tracking it all the way there and not just stopping with. That's how many people registered.
6:17
Jennifer Gutman
Yeah, you know, it's really interesting that you say that and I know we're going to touch on it later on. So everybody hold that thought because it's an interesting point. You mentioned something. What you're doing now is you're kind of as in person events are coming back, you're taking a look at them, you're analyzing them, you're running through them. And I'd like to kind of challenge you. Right. There's this new role, if you will, of field marketing in a virtual world. And as you said, it's easier to measure. Right. And you have a better accuracy of what works and what doesn't. But what I'm still not understanding as I'm looking for to plan out 2022 and I've got my team here Oktopost, we're trying to figure out, okay, how are we going to do these events? What type of events in person do we do? What type virtual do we do? Can you talk a little bit and talk to us through kind of what goes through your mind when you're structuring or planning out, you know, an unknown, uncertain, you know, hopefully 2022 will be better than the past few years. But what is going through your head and how exactly are you reaching the right people through the right type of events? How are you planning?
7:31
Natasha Dolginsky
That's a really great question. And Jen, we're talking about both field marketing as well as just the virtual event that is now great. So what we do is we always start with an outcome is we ask ourselves what is the outcome that we want to get out of this sets of events. And so what we've done on the virtual side is we have the outcomes set up by different Personas. So for example, we have our round tables which you have on the list here the masters of revenue roundtables that are targeting the VPN above. And the outcome is that we educate them and we provide network opportunities for them so they can come in, they share best practices and that's the outcome. And so we have the top of the funnel very thought leadership piece for our VP and above. And then we have our broader reach webinars which means that we are reaching much more broadly. It is, you know, manager and above and we're there to educate but then also talk a little bit about more clarity and how clarity provides value to all the sales team and the sales ops team and the marketing teams. And then finally we have our VIP events. So cooking classes, we've done, gosh, we've done escape rooms as I'm sure many companies have done before as well during COVID they've shifted those experiences to online and they have worked really well for us. We do a good job at doing learning loops. So every time we do an event we both get the quantitative and the qualitative back in to say should we do it again? And so to summarize is we look at the our funnel and we say do we have top of funnel, middle funnel, bottom funnel content? And then we also look at segmentation to make sure that we're inviting the right people at the right time to the right cup of an event and then adding in the physical events to that. We're definitely looking at our dinners which is what we're coming back with is our VIP dinners and Michelin rated restaurants to get to that C suite person or to get to the exec level person. And that's our outcome is we want to get this visa execs there and that really makes the rest easy. We know who then who hosts those dinners. We know what topics we're going to talk about. It really clarifies things when you know why you're doing it.
9:43
Jennifer Gutman
I really like that and I also love how you've divided this right. Because I can definitely say, and I don't know, maybe the big conferences, we won't see as many in 2022 or maybe we will, I'm not sure yet. But I think those kind of more niche, more kind of smaller circles also allow these events to be more meaningful. Hopefully for our customers that are coming together in a smaller event to really get to know one another, build a community. Right? That's big buzzword I think now. And you know, I think it will continue to be the up and coming trend into 22, 2022 is creating these communities and I think both these kind of do that. Like if you've attended a cooking class, you know, sponsored by Clary, you know, you're building that community. And same for those in person, round, round tables for, for leadership. Now I want to talk about this for a moment. So, but there's a lot to kind of dig back on the, the events and I'm going to come back to them, but I want to get into this because when we spoke previously offline, you had mentioned some of the really interesting initiatives that you had done in 2020 and 2021. I think a lot of organizations were doing something similar, but something even though field marketing might have transformed, I feel something that has emerged is this idea of engagement. Be more engagement or engaging rather. And really, as you know, Clary says go for engagement. And I'd love if you could talk a little bit about that, maybe give some examples of how you're being engaging, you know, what kind of discussions are being had and you know, I'm seeing Your point number two. So there's a little chuckle here as we use PowerPoint. What would you recommend instead of PowerPoint? So I'm going to pass it over your way.
11:32
Natasha Dolginsky
No, that sounds great. Also want to give a huge shout out to the field marketing team. Really one person for now, Myra on my team, who really made that pivot. I joined Clary right when Covid first started, literally in April, May of 2020. And Myra, who used to run field events, she almost single handedly took all the knowledge, all the expertise about creating an intimate, engaging event and transitioned to virtual events. So for virtual events what we do is, you'll hear me talk about this a lot is how do we get to our outcome? And so for virtual events we look at how do we drive more people there or to register, how do we more drive people to attend, how do we follow up with those people? And so that, that that attendance piece is really important because we do want to keep it small. And the reason we keep it small is so people can talk and people can interact with each other, people can ask questions. There's a lot of value in learning from each other. And so I'm really hoping that folks are going to ask questions and participate. And if you have any ideas or thoughts, please Add them to the chat. Don't just ask questions, but if you have an opinion on something, we'd love to hear it because that learning from others is really, really important. And you are then able to take other people's ideas and kind of build on them. So keeping it intimate is what makes it the ditch the PowerPoint.
13:01
Jennifer Gutman
Sorry, everyone. I went old school.
13:05
Natasha Dolginsky
I think the reason why people say it is because you sometimes see PowerPoint slides that are size 10 font and you can't really get the key points right. What you see here is four bullets and things are bolded and it's easy to read on there. There's graphics, there's pictures. But the slides that are super text heavy are hard to read and they're not engaging. Right. I also think the engagement piece in virtual events is so much harder now because we're all working, most of us are working from home and you have so many distractions which you just didn't have before. You don't have a physical event. There is, you know, my kids and my dog and I see somebody or hear somebody at the door. So it's really important to be super engaging, make it timely. Definitely. Let's talk about topics that people care.
13:57
Jennifer Gutman
Right.
13:57
Natasha Dolginsky
Let's not talk about things that either used to be important and not anymore, or the audience is wrong. So if I'm talking to everybody here today and I'm talking about things that are relevant for what group? For finance, it's not going to be as relevant to you. You're going to tune out. And then finally tapping the subject matter experts, it goes back to the point about learning from each other. It's really nice to hear everybody share their experiences and really share the expertise because everybody is an expert and everybody should have a voice and should talk about what they've done well, what they haven't done well. I really learned a lot by when people, when I look at things that we haven't done well, because I can learn a lot more from that.
14:40
Jennifer Gutman
I find that really interesting. And I'd like to ask you. And this is maybe a curveball question, right. We'll get a little radically transparent. But so, Natasha, if we're listening in and, you know, we want to kind of keep this conversation going, what are the. What are some of the communities you belong to as a growth marketer that might be relevant to get some of these ideas besides this webinar? Right. Where can we go? Or where should we be reading? Or is there any groups to be a part of?
15:11
Natasha Dolginsky
Yeah, I don't Have a. I do a lot of organic talks, so I talk a lot with, with, with peers and just kind of one to one type of conversation. So I'm not part of any groups, but I do a lot of reading and I do a lot of these. Oh hey, what did you do? You know, or I saw you run this webinar, I saw you do an event. I have a really great colleague, just an expert in field marketing for my previous company. Just amazing ideas both for trade shows and field events. And so I'll tap in her quite a bit and then we'll do happy hour and just again very organically will end up talking. So that's how I get my a lot of information and then a lot of reading, a lot of research. I sign up for a lot of newsletters and emails from different vendors so I can kind of choose what I would. I read what I don't read and then books as well. Although I do read more articles and really just hearing what other people say. So the person on my team, Myra that I mentioned, if she has any ideas, a lot of times we'll talk about it. And I ask her, oh great, how did you come up with that? And she'll say, oh, I talked to somebody else. Right. So it's this network of effect of conversations that happen. It is my personal goal to belong to more of the community talks and to do more of a more. What's a good word? Not official, but a more structured approach to learning from others. Right now it's a lot of one on one conversations.
16:32
Jennifer Gutman
Thank you for sharing.
16:33
Natasha Dolginsky
Not a good answer, I know, except
16:36
Jennifer Gutman
for my PowerPoint, it's totally fine. But it's helpful I think because as we all, I think marketers, we've got to stick together. So we want to know where everybody is that we can tap into each other's network. And I hope everybody who's, you know, listening in today that you know that we are part of your community, you can always reach out to us to tap into that. I want to kind of move things forward and kind of get back to some of the points that we had spoken about earlier because I have a few kind of heated questions inside of me that I'd like to ask with a few things to keep in mind as we do plan for 2022 as we do look at, you know, virtual events and in person events. Right. So the one thing that comes to mind, and I know we did chat about it offline, was this idea of like this fear, if you will, maybe what's Keeping us up at night of as we're planning these events in uncertainty. We want to make sure we're not losing money and we're not losing pipeline. But to me that sounds kind of impossible because everything we're about to do, right, you need to put money down. And as we spoke about before, we can really measure and understand how to drive that pipeline. And so can you kind of just give us a view into what Clary is doing, Some ideas you have, how you're building contingency plans, your, your field marketing playbook or if it's changed right, to event marketing. Just help us, you know, help us point us in the right direction and how can we, you know, better prepare for the unknown?
18:03
Natasha Dolginsky
Mm. There is no easy answer, as you may guess with, especially with contingency plans, when it comes to the cost. So I'll talk about both the pipeline impact and so if we had depended on an event or set of events to generate, you know, 100 opportunities, 50 opportunities and that event does not happen, what do we do? And that's when, you know, a little, a little Clary mention is that's where I go to Clari and I take a look at what the pipeline looks like so I can fill in those gaps within my virtual programs or my paid advertising programs. But there's that the pipeline, which is really, really the key one. But then there's also cost, right? If I spent money on an event I didn't do, that means that is the sun cost and I can't leverage that money to do anything else. And so we had a couple of very expensive lessons where we did have those sunk costs. Unfortunately, that's not up to our control.
18:59
Jennifer Gutman
Right.
18:59
Natasha Dolginsky
And so the decisions we make is if we want to book a Michelin rated restaurant that does not have a cancellation policy, you just, you pay upfront and you don't get the money back. Do we do that and do we risk it or do we go to a non Michelin rated restaurant and, and get our money back? But then it's not maybe as much of a draw for a VP level and above person, right? So it's always those, those trade offs that we have to do. And what we've been doing is with these dinners, what we talk about is if we were to cancel, can we move the dates or can we give gift cards and we basically make that part of the negotiation as we sign up for them. Because what we've done with all of our restaurants that we did book, not hotels because those are not refundable, but the restaurants is we're able to then do a meeting maker where you say, hey, if you meet with us, you get a X$, gift card to this three star Michelin rated restaurant. So they still get the experience. And, and we've basically pivoted. It is meet with us to still have that really impactful conversation. You were going to have a dinner, but then you get to go to dinner at completely your chilled time. You can bring your partner, you can bring whomever else you want. And so it's actually been okay. And people haven't necessarily been disappointed that they didn't have to go to that dinner or didn't get to go to that dinner. So thinking if we were to cancel, can we get the money back? Can we shift that spend somewhere else and how to fit that pipeline gap or meet up? So I'll talk about that. And then your bullet about being intentional about the events you attend. It kind of has to do with that is if we are really good at knowing why we're doing an event that we can pivot a little bit easier because we can once again either shift the people's attention to something else and just provide those people with something else. Because a lot of times people are not in it just for the food, right? For dinners or for the experience. They truly are interested in the product you're selling and in the solution. So it's making sure you're targeting those people who are not just there for the, you know, for the free stake or whatnot. Getting inspired by others. I just, I'm such an advocate for learning from others and really looking at best practices and not reinventing the wheel. So there's a lot of great ideas out there. And the, the pipeline piece is if we are dependent on a set of events to bring in opportunities and those events don't happen, then we do look to either shift them completely online. So we've moved a lot of our Roundt that we used to do in person to online. We're going to continue to do roundtables moving forward virtually. We've moved experiences like cooking classes online and we're going to continue to do them quarterly moving forward. They work really well and they reach a broader audience. So we are essentially still running the event. We just run it in a different format and we still get that pipeline impact from it.
21:52
Jennifer Gutman
I love hearing that and I want to dive into something we hadn't talked about. And I know a lot of us attend this, but you had mentioned kind of some of the challenges that you had had when you had to pull out a dream force and maybe just some solidarity words or, you know, maybe can you speak a little bit about what went through your head when you pulled out? I mean, what, what was, what was that like? Because that's expensive.
22:19
Natasha Dolginsky
It is expensive. Yep. It is expensive. We made a decision and this was in September, so just, gosh, oh my goodness. This year is flying by. So literally last month, and basically we just weighed the pros and cons and we listened to the sales team. We did not feel that they were as excited as they would have been if the safety wasn't a thing. And so we decided to eat it and not have that money come back to us. And basically we made a safety decision which worked for us. And a lot of it was just communicating back up and resetting expectations. Right. And just showing them. Yes, we spend this money, we can't get it back. Here's what we're doing to you. Look for the gap. And then I'm super lucky to be at CLARY because the leadership, both marketing leadership and all the Way up, is really understanding about just that that's just life. Sometimes you will literally lose money and you don't have a contingency plan and that's just life. And you need to move on from it and just learn to maybe do things differently. However, with a lot of these situations, like I said earlier is you don't have a choice. If you want to be a dream forest, you have to be in San Francisco. If you're being San Francisco, you have to book hotels and hotels are not refundable. So that's just. It's out of your control. And instead of dwelling on that, we just say, yep, that's. It's. It's a lesson. But also it's just reality. That's just what happens.
23:45
Jennifer Gutman
So onwards and upwards. Which leads me to my next. My next question for you. Right. Field events. We talked about virtual events. I want to know from you. Right. Field events versus virtual events 2022 planning thoughts. Which one should we be investing in? Which one should we be focusing in on?
24:10
Natasha Dolginsky
Good question. And it is not a versus it is an and we are doing.
24:16
Jennifer Gutman
Yep.
24:16
Natasha Dolginsky
It's not an or it is. And we are investing heavily in both field events. I see a question in here, Event marketing. Field marketing. I think to me the nomenclature depends on the company you're at. The biggest. The biggest thing that I have about whatever they're called, virtual events or I'm sorry, physical events or in person events or field events, is why are you doing them? And Is it bringing in pipeline for the sales team? That's really it. It doesn't matter what you call them. But if you set it up in such a way, which we are for both field and virtual, then that's what matters to the execs, that's what matters to the rest of the company. And the reason we're doing both is because they serve a different purpose. Right. There's. I talked a little bit about earlier about how we use our field events and all the events we're planning in the Q1 and Q2 is really to get to that exact club and BP plus. And that's why we're doing physical events. We're trying to expand regionally. We want to make sure that each sales team and region has an event that they can invite their customers and prospects, that we do that a lot as well as we put them in the same room. So basically we don't have to do any of the selling because they're happy customers, do it for us. And that's the outcome we're trying to get out of physical events and in person events and then our virtual events. I talked about our funnel. So we have top of funnel, middle funnel, bottom funnel, and we have different audiences in the topics, the relevancy that exists for each of the audiences. And we're going to do both and we're going to measure. We're very good about setting our KPIs up front so we know exactly why we're doing it and we know exactly what success means. I get this question a lot is, well, did it work and what does that mean? You've got 10 people there, did it work? Well, it depends. Let's take a look at the pipeline impact we always come back to that is if it worked, it means that we generated good conversations and we now have opportunities within these accounts.
26:12
Jennifer Gutman
Right.
26:12
Natasha Dolginsky
Or we were able to build a better relationship with the customer. And so we're going to continue to measure it. And what I like to do is I do annual planning because I asked for budget that way. But then within that, and Clary once again does a really good job at the leadership is I get a bunch of money and how I spend it, quarter to quarter, month to month, is completely up to me. So every month and every event we track it and if it worked, we'll do it again and if we didn't, we won't do it again. So it's this constant lever pulling to make sure that we continue to invest in things that work and we don't do the things that don't. But we are doing both field and virtual because they have a place at
26:51
Jennifer Gutman
the table and that, you know, it kind of comes full circle. Right. We said in the beginning that kind of this whole transformative experience with moving what we've known as field to virtual or, you know, whether it's in person or online, helps us to gain that seat at the strategy table. And I think that that is so important. Right. For so long, marketers have been on their island. The organization is always wondering what is going on on Marketers island. And we've always had to communicate quite well with the rest of the organization what we're doing to prove our value. And I think what you've just shared is how much these virtual events, when coupled correctly with the right field events can do that and people can start to see the impact and see the value. We no longer have to kind of crawl our way into the strategy room and then we've earned our seat. So with that, I see Daniel Heron, who is a participant or panel or I should say a guest on our webinar. He has invited everybody to connect with him. Daniel Heron on LinkedIn. He has some groups for event marketers, field marketers, that he would like to recommend. Feel free to ping him as well. And I'm just seeing some in the Q and A box. Let's see. I think. Okay, we had answered that question earlier. So we're there, into the Q and A. Natasha, on your side, are you seeing any questions coming in that we didn't get to.
28:26
Natasha Dolginsky
Yeah, we talked, I think Peter, we answered the field marketing, really in person. Event marketing. I think it matters less what you call it. Just call it the same thing so people don't get confused. It's all about the outcome that you're looking to get out of it. And those KPIs and the success measures and then the ROI. Daniel, is. That's exactly right. It is pipeline. So what I look at is pipeline to spend is if I spend a dollar, how many dollars do I generate in pipeline? And what I don't do is I don't always measure channel by channel or compare not measure. I do measure channel by channel. I don't compare them because just because something is less ROI of pipe gen to spend doesn't mean it's a bad thing because some channels are more top funnel. So I need to let it a quarter or two. So we, we are a B2B company. Our sales cycle can be anywhere from, you know, one month to nine months. And so what I don't want to do is run an event, look at it a month later and say oh there's no pipe generation from it. I'm not going to do it again. So I do give it time. But yes, it's, it's ROI is measured by pipeline and then webinar fatigue. Any ideas? Great question, Paula. We've definitely. So I've done virtual events for gosh, a really long time and you know, seven years ago attendance rate was at 50%. That was the baseline. Now 30 to 30% is what we see as a standard and we're happy with that and we are trying to create more engagement. So Myra on the team again, she's looking at every step in the journey is how do you get more people to register, how to get more people to attend, how do you get more people to then engage post the event? We try to make them shorter. So we have shortened it. We're playing around even doing 20 minute events. We have definitely tried giveaways. That works. So so and then we really do a lot of work around segmentation and so we feel that if we have the right topic in front of the right person they will show up and then we'll engage Registered organizer virtual. But attendance rate. Yep. So whoever made the comment about the attendance, I think it's just the reality similar to email performance metrics. You know we used to have a baseline of let's say 20% open rate and 20% click rate and now we're lucky if we get 10 and 7 for both. So it is a little bit of resetting our expectations of what the new baseline and what the new reality is. But I haven't, I don't think there's a silver bullet besides just right content for the right person. I really think it and it matters everywhere, not just events. It matters in our ads, it matters on our website. Website personalization. So any channel that you look at, just, just think about yourselves. Right. You're here because this topic matters to you and and if you do extend the same courtesy expectation to your the people you're going after is what makes them attend and engage. Peter Multi touch attribution yes. Not now but we will be. We just. I have just a Rockstar marketing operations person who just signed up openprise. We're going to use that tool to measure influence pipeline and essentially what we'll do is what Clary does is anybody who is on the buyer committee it automatically adds those people to the opportunity record and what we're going to able to do is look at that opportunity record and look at the 1, the 5, the 10 people, however many people are part of that buying committee. Look at every touch that they've had, whether it's the first touch or middle touch or last touch. We'll be able to measure them, aggregate them, and take a look at what's working and what's driving our opportunities.
32:12
Jennifer Gutman
All right, I think we've hit all the questions for today and in word we try to keep around the 30 minute mark and as Natasha said, we're kind of learning our new benchmark. But with that said, if you do have any additional questions or you'd like to continue the conversation, you are always welcome to reach out to myself to Natasha. You can find us on LinkedIn. You can reach us via email. As I mentioned in the beginning of the webinar, everybody who attended will get a copy of this presentation. So we've included our emails and links to our social and we've also gone ahead and put some nice resources here for anybody who is looking at the role, the new role of field Marketing, what B2B Event Market Marketing and why you should still consider it. We've popped in a great Forester study about the predictable growth with revenue operations and intelligence platforms and we encourage you all to take a look and we look forward to seeing you as part of our community and wishing you all much success in your virtual in person online events and a fruitful revenue to close out 2021 and hopefully begin 2022. So thank you all for joining us.
33:17
Natasha Dolginsky
Thank you so much. Thanks Jen.
