Agency Forward

Chris DuBois 0:00
Hey everyone. Today I'm joined by Nick Sal. Nick is a B to B event strategist and professional MC who helps companies turn attendees into advocates. He has led event strategies at HubSpot drift and several top tier agencies, and now he runs Nick Sal inbound, where he helps B to B brands grow through events, partnerships and community. I wanted to have Nick on because too many agencies run events I feel forgettable and they miss this huge opportunity to actually drive sales and start building a brand through these events. So in this episode, we discuss how to turn virtual attendees into raving brand fans, creating standout experiences without big budgets, the 8020 of planning events that convert and more. No one was asking for another community, but I've made one anyway. So what's different? The dynamic agency community is designed around access, rather than content, access to peers who've done it before, access to experts who've designed solutions, access to resources that have been battle tested. And right now, the price for founding members is only $97 a year. Join today, so your agency has immediate access to everything you need to grow. You can join a dynamic agency dot community and now Nick Sal, it's easier than ever to start an agency, but it's only getting harder to stand out and keep it alive. Join me as we explore the strategies agencies are using today to secure a better tomorrow. This is agency forward. How do you transform attendees into brand advocates?

Nick Sal 1:44
Yeah, well, it's a decent question. I think that's anybody who's putting on a lot of effort to put on an event on behalf of their business. They want to, what I most often hear, if nothing else, is we want to make a splash and we want people to have a good time. And I would add to that and get more specific and say, you probably want your event to be remark event to be remarkable. I know just being like remarkable, but like literally people are remarking on it when I grow up in the marketing world at HubSpot, that's what we maybe want to make remarkable content, content worth remarking on social and elsewhere among your peers. We want the event to be remarkable. So if you want people to be advocates for your brand and your event, make sure they have some something to talk about. So let's make sure that there's clear key I think, if there's a clear point of maybe controversy, some hot takes and a chance to have a debate and to weigh in on things, make sure, if you're thinking about putting on an event or an experience, what are the one or two or three key takeaways. We want everybody walking out of the room, and if they came to somebody in their office afterwards, how was it they could rattle those off easily and test yourself on that when you're walking somebody through the agenda, when you're talking to a focus group, or some of your clients about the event that you might be putting on, and I hope, by the way, that you you are talking to clients, or ideal fit prospects, or ideal fit attendees, guests, whatever you want to call them, who are coming to the event ahead of time. And say, is this clear what we're getting after is this, you know, an issue or a topic that is hot, that is meaningful to you? If we talked about in this way, what would be your key takeaways, like try to pre play that pre test that to see if you're going to get the remarks, you're going to get the the impact you want, just about the substance of the talk, of topic of the event. Now you have that you can ice, put the icing on the cake, which is, let's create some quote, unquote, like, viral moments. And I'm not telling anybody anything. They haven't they don't already know here, but it's a reminder, since you asked, like, have there be some people can take a photo in front of for, yeah, the Instagrams for the social feeds and so on. I've seen trade shows where there's a nice backdrop. It's got angel wings. You put yourself in front of it and take a picture of that, some cool backdrop that's not just logo of the event, logo of you, of the sponsor, but something that makes the the attendee, the guest, the participant, a part of something that enhances them in some way. So if you want people to be advocates for you. Are you being an advocate for them both? In the topic, it's based around the clarity of the information that you're solving for, the takeaways of the people you're solving for, enhancing the how they look and feel with visual opportunities, photo based opportunities. But then also, I'm a huge fan of this. Chris is bring them in on the event itself. Have them be the content that, to me, is the safest bet. Do you want to create something that appeals to your target audience, that they will advocate for? Maybe it should star your target audience. Let's find obviously good fit customers, big fans who are in your corner from your Rolodex, people in your network who love you, love what you do, love your brand, and that type of thing. You have to even be clients. They can be a job. Clients. They can be adjacent vendors and partners, but bring other people from your community in and let them present, let them be case studies, let them be recognized, have them be sort of like plants in the audience, interacting and sharing and testifying and that type of thing. I think those. Are all good ways to turn people into brand advocates, and failing all that, make sure also, you're being your own best advocate. You're capturing your own content. You've got somebody in charge of the photo, video capture of everything. You've got a good editor who's remixing that and getting that out onto social and make it easy for other people, maybe to advocate for your point of view for the clips that you caught. I think if you do all those, you're pretty good shot of people being brand advocates. And as I'm kind of riffing here, Chris, I think the last thought is, just notice when people are doing that, it's so i It happens to me all the time, and I'm sure it happens to other busy business owners and marketers and organizers. Is suddenly, you check LinkedIn, you're like, oh, man, they even like reposted this. You know, they posted about this and I missed it, so make sure you're paying attention. Who is remarking, who is advocating, and don't just add a comment. Thanks so much. Sounds so great. Send us private message to them, email, LinkedIn message, phone call, whatever's the most appropriate with who that person is. And say, Hey, thanks, by the way, for doing that. And do you know, Chris, that's where some of my best leads have come from, not from the actual event itself, not from them hitting my CTA, but for them sharing a photo or doing something nice in support of me and the people who organized the event, and then Me Doing Something nice back, saying, Hey, I noticed you, one on one saying that. And they go, Well, the reason I did that is actually I thought it was really something interesting. I want to talk to you about lead, lead, lead, so that's just my, my handful there,

Chris DuBois 6:25
bud, yeah, no, that was good. I want to add a constraint to it now, yes. So you've worked with HubSpot for, like, some of these inbound conferences, absolutely, some other bigger companies, which you can talk about as well for, like, putting together kind of events that essentially had a budget, a big budget behind them. A lot of the people listening probably have less budget to be able to throw behind their their events. What are some of the things that they should be prioritizing within that mix of everything you just went through in order to kind of maximize the effect?

Nick Sal 6:59
I think it's a great question, because when I attend conferences, trade groups, discussions of all kinds about events, and that's something I study a lot and focus on a lot, this is one of the big sort of objections or challenges that gets raised by other attendees and participants such as myself, to the thought leaders and other people who are showing off. This is how I put on this fabulous event. This is how I started this great movement. And you get the hub spots and and the drifts and the other people of the world talking, and then people go, Yeah, but I'm small. I'm just starting out. We're not as well known, we're not as well funded. And I have actually interviewed some of the heads of events at some of these big companies, and they didn't have the budget either. To start first of all, like no event just starts fully funded, with a massive following, a massive amount of alignment with their sales team and their finance team, and a huge budget, almost everybody starts scrapping. So at least that's the good news. Is that for every, every inbound started out as, what is this? Who's going you know, what was this thing? So you're in good company. You're starting where the greats have started, even where, you know, Dream Force started that way one day back in the day, but then also, when I've interviewed these leaders, even today, of these well known brands and events, they'll say, we have to get creative too. The budget's never big enough for anybody, so get creative. Don't always throw money at it. Can you use your own talent? Who, inside your company has charisma, who has passion, who has advocacy for the customer, the target market. Do you have people, whether they're called this or not, who are brand evangelists and so on? I personally Chris when I was at Drift, because I feel like I'm a natural person like that. I raised my hand to do those types of activities. I'm drawn to roles and opportunities where I can, I can be an evangelist, but also Help others discover their inner evangelist and their ability to to present and advocate for their cause. This this company, so every customer, every employee, has a chance to be a star of your show, to be a key contributor to your content. And we're talking about events and gatherings that are interacting with our fellow humans. Humans want to interact with humans. Yeah, we can have robots, and we can have fireworks, and we can have ice cream trucks and stuff like that. But at the end of the day, field events, virtual events, whatever you want to call them, B to B events that need to drive some sort of ROI or impact. For a business, they're about draw drawing connections at scale. So if you have people who are relatable, who are passionate, and then you also can rally your the rest of your team, the sales team, the marketing team and so on, to be focused around connections. And how can we draw those connections? Then may the best brand win. That is not something that you have to throw money at. That is something you have to throw creativity logistics. You have to throw personality at. You need to throw empathy and advocacy at one of the just a case in point, one of my favorite events is by this software company I'm a huge fan of, and I did a lot of interaction with, called six cents. So you have an ABM, ABX, sort of software, very premium. A leader in the market, and they put on a big event in Vegas last year. And one of the things that this, this hugely expensive gathering that was happening there was this candy bar area. There's this whole just a shelf with candy, and everybody's grabbing at that, ah, free candy, free whatever. Yeah, that's a trip out to a grocery store to get that candy, right, and to get a booth just you got to get a shelf that looks nice, throw a couple of little lights on it and stuff like that, put the candy on it. You got yourself something there, and that was from a huge budget, well established brand with a couple of full time event people running it, with an event agency and everything else that there are opportunities like that for every single event, every single organizer, and I would say, no matter how big your event is and how well funded is, if you're not seeking those chances to leverage existing staff, leverage something that is otherwise pedestrian or cheap or basic, to put it in a different light, in a different context, let it be free and all you can eat, all you can grab or whatever, then you're wasting funds and resources. I think you need to be frugal and be imaginative at every stage of your event.

Chris DuBois 11:06
So a lot of agencies probably also don't necessarily have the budget to do a like in house or like a live event, and so they're starting with a lot of virtual events. I mean, I'm I'm one of these. I started with virtual events, and eventually we'll, we'll get live but what are, what are live events? Are hard to run? Or, sorry, not Well, yes, live events definitely hard to run, but virtual events also hard to run because there's, like, a drop off, there's this in engagement, primarily because there's a computer, there's a screen between you and everyone else. What are some of the things that you do within virtual events that just get get people actually engaging and showing up? Sure,

Nick Sal 11:50
one thing I didn't touch on with your last question about, like live events and limited budget, was, was venue choice, and at least in a virtual venue, don't have to worry about that. I don't have a hard and fast rule about venues. I've seen people choose really fancy, expensive venues and have them feel like this could have been anywhere USA. It's just another large hotel from the inside, I've seen people choose more edgy sort of venues. This is inside a club or a bar or a refurbished bank and so on. And that is like the acoustics aren't right here, the logistics aren't right. So venue. There's no hard and fast. If you spend more money, you get a better venue. If you spend if you spend less money, the venue is better. The good news is, for those of us who focus around virtual, and Chris, I'm focused there too, mostly because I have an agency background, a software background, like you do with agencies, and lot of agencies, yeah, they're starting virtual if you don't have to worry about the venue, the venue The venue is the screen. The venue is what's interesting is the venue is, is actually what's going on behind every single person who's participating. So this is my venue, my background. But you have a venue too. We're sharing two different venues. You're in Maine, I'm outside of, you know, Boston. You've got the books in the background. I got my lightning bolt. Our lighting slightly different. So when I think about a virtual event, you have to think about normalizing sound, lighting and so on. That doesn't mean it's a bad thing for us to have two different backgrounds that might actually be good visually, but you have to that's your playground. It's no longer, what's the conference room? What's the registration desk? Where are they going to sit down and eat? It's going to say, how can we optimize and take advantage of every little bit and byte and things that are coming out from what's showing up on the screen, what's coming out of their speakers or going into their headphones? So there's a little bit more of an AV techie sort of focus around it, because if you lose there, if the sound's no good or inconsistent, or whatever, people are gonna lose interest, no matter how interesting it is. So there's that make sure that just technically you're putting that AV sort of hat on, or you have somebody who thinks that way, can do sound checks, tech checks. Can coach a speaker. Make sure the person who is make sure these people have presented virtually before. There's anybody like, I'm sure you have Chris. There's always war stories of people who don't do this regularly and now their mic doesn't work, or the slides aren't showing, or their computer dies, or their some people have joined webinars. Have organized from the side of the road. I'm like, What are you doing? Why didn't you just stop somewhere, you know, and actually set up for this? You know, you have to be prepared for anything like that, but anyway, and a little bit of planning, a little bit of testing, checking, communicating expectations, can go a long way. But after all that is said and done, it's the content, it's the content, and then your master of ceremony. So make sure you've got great content. I already think I spent enough of your air time with your audience talking about making your customers, your best employees, your best advocates and stars, but then also making sure that there's somebody who's constantly focused on who's modeling attention. That's what I mean by a master of ceremonies. It's something I love to do, as you know, it's something I specialize in, is I'm modeling the level of intensity, the level. Of excitement, the level of enthusiasm, the level of focus around whatever's being talked about. So it's like, wow. This is, I mean, obviously that's important for being live, but you already have the audience sort of captured, so you that's, it's great. But here it's, it's your lifeblood, wow. This is exciting. We cannot wait for you to see what's going to come up next. Here's this person, here's what's going to matter. Like you already doing it before this episode. You're doing a little emceeing before the episode. You talked about me, my background, why people? Why your audience would find it interesting? That's care, that's priming, that's hooking people in. So the MC is kind of doing that from the very beginning, and is keeping people engaged, giving them another shot in the arm in between each of the sessions. Also, I just feel, Chris, there's an opportunity for more spectacle and stunts from being in virtual like, I could pick this laptop up right now and go somewhere with it. People be like, What? What the heck's going on? I could have people come in to the screen that you didn't even know were there. I've done both of those things, people, music cues, sound effects, easier to bring in special effects, ability to show a quick clip of something and get back out. These things are all again, guys, let's all be more creative with the tools that we have. Let's not look at lack of budget. It's going to be virtual as this is why it's going to stink, or why it's going to be sub par. But this is how I'm going to here's how I'm going to change it up. And I do think you need to give especially in a virtual environment, because you're competing with Netflix, YouTube, you know, pressing emails, business messages and stuff like that, to show them. This is worth keeping your eyes on, because we're here, we care. We're curating every minute, every moment and have a little bit of unexpected spectacle and stunts, like I said, could be something as simple as some music cues. Could be some entertainment, something unexpected, could be a surprise guest. These are all things that are, I, my opinion, easier to arrange at a virtual event. Oh, look who's here. Click camera on this person appears. They're able to do it because they're still at their house or at their office, and then they they disappear. More possible to bring different people together virtually and do some fun, creative things with them than in person. So there are obviously, as we know, and we can discuss disadvantage pros and cons to live, you know, in in person versus virtual, but I think there's a lot of things that virtuals got going for it that in person cannot do, and we should be leaning hard into that, versus apologizing for it or pretending that this is trying to be in person.

Chris DuBois 17:28
Yeah. I mean, having ran virtual events, I've gotten tons of very positive feedback on the content and everything that when kicking this off, like kicking this event off, I would not have been able to do a live event, and so knowing that I can still get this, that level of content in front of people, and they're engaged in, like, our, I mean, we have people showing up. I think I talked this on your podcast, actually, like, we had people there all day, like, as long as I was, which is for an eight hour event, was pretty impressive. It was like, wow.

Nick Sal 18:00
Another way to do that. Sorry, you got me fired up just thinking about this. Another way you can do that is also arranging for watch parties. And sometimes, I mean, I'm sure you've I'm just thinking your own event, because I've certainly done this with other agencies. So you hear this is so and so agency, we've got all five or 10 of our local staff are in a room right now or watching you. For some reason, agencies will do this more because I think they value knowledge. They value up leveling their staff, and like sharing these events with them, but like watch parties among individual businesses who are attending, or even just like the Boston watch party for your large event, plus, here's Austin and stuff, you can weave that in. You can't really do that

Speaker 1 18:33
with an in person event. Yeah. You know, that's another interesting yeah.

Nick Sal 18:38
The only other thing I'd throw in, just you made me think of with your response was, Oh snap. Was also that you can do a virtual event as a lead up to an in person event. Whether you know you're gonna do the in person event or not, like I imagine one day you know your your virtual event will have a in person counterpart. Will probably snowball into that. But you could even start with that, hey, we're gonna do virtual and the virtual to get people hyped up and build awareness and anticipation and excitement for what is most of the time, a bigger risk, a bigger commitment, which is to come in,

Chris DuBois 19:06
in person, right? Yeah, like that idea. What are some of the common like planning mistakes that agencies make as they're planning an event, live or virtual?

Nick Sal 19:17
Sure. And you know Chris, that I've been in and around the HubSpot agency ecosystem for over 15 years I've worked with, I've worked at for at least a year or more, some of them two or three years, four different agencies, all of different sizes, all of them partnered with HubSpot and some of other big tech focuses, or different service mix focuses and stuff like that. So a whole range of marketing services, professional services firms. And the question was, what are some of the challenges that they face, or, I'm sorry,

Chris DuBois 19:45
what are some of the challenges that like when planning an event like this, oh yeah, that an agency would face.

Nick Sal 19:52
The reason I bring all that up is because I have intimate empathy and knowledge that the car, the carpenter's house has no roof, the cobbler Sun has no shoe. Shoes type thing. So is it so ironic that those of us who are in the business of helping others market and communicate better like we barely have time to do that well ourselves? So one of my first big planning suggestions would be plan as early as possible, so whenever you think you're going to do the event, fill yourself with paranoia that there's barely any time to prepare for that, no matter how far and out it is, so that you can sit down as soon as possible. Second would be to make sure there's an owner for what is to be planned. It doesn't matter. It's not that doesn't matter who it is. It needs to be somebody who's passionate about the cause, the topic, the event, and the people we're supposed to be doing it for, and someone who has a bit of authority, or at least knows some of the key stakeholders, sales, marketing, client, success, operations, whatever, but that person needs to own it, because we're in the whirlwind. In agencies, there's so much going on, client fires flaring up on a weekly basis. And without that owner, things tend to slip, don't they? If it's the carpenter's houses, no roof type stuff. Well, that can wait. We have to put out this fire, save this client, retain this client, expand this client, whatever it is. And so the event will slip. So planning early helps you try to get ahead of that and give yourself more buffer to deal with those inevitable things. Having a chief owner and advocate who's comped on it, gold on it, is been empowered to be I'm the person who's going to push back and say, No, we have to meet so that can really, that that can overcome. I find that a lot of times the owner of the event is like the owner of the agency who wanted to do this event, so and then everybody else kind of owns a piece of it, and never enough to steer the ship, if the agency owner, or the CMO type person is busy, as they inevitably will become in the weeks that follow. So plan early. Make sure there's a make sure there's an actual owner. Make sure that we're leveraging clients in the actual content itself. As I said earlier, a lot of times, oh, we'll do an event, and it'll be great for our clients, yes, and your clients want to meet and learn from other clients. A lot of times, clients never get to, hardly ever meet each other or learn from each other. We, as professional services firms, when I work in them and at them, talk about, oh, we leverage our 20 years of experience, or we've worked with 50 different companies, and we can share those best practices. How do I never get to meet those companies? You know? How come I'm not seeing that proof in the pudding. I believe you, but maybe I a marketer who hired your agency would like to meet another marketer at another firm who also thought it was a good idea to hire you, who also works with you, and we could share some ideas I can hear from them that would be nice. And any and every time I've done that, everybody's leaning in when you hear from another client, because that's the real deal. That's a fellow peer, not the hired goons who are trying to spit out the propaganda. That's like, you know, I'm joking, but, you know, that's a little bit of what sometimes, cynically, I feel like the audience can, can file our words under so let's get some, let's get some of their peers in there. So sometimes they skip that part. They think it's for the clients, and it shouldn't be with the clients. But a lot of your newer clients or smaller clients, are trying to grow up to become big kid clients of yours. They're trying to become big kid marketing departments as well in either in sophistication, size, maturity, whatever. So why don't we model a little bit more of that success by getting some of our more sophisticated clients? They don't even have to be your biggest or best clients. It could just be a recent client who's just a clearly more mature, sophisticated in terms of the organization than others. Let's get them in so that's a dropped ball sometimes, and then also not leveraging your own staff. We're creative businesses. We have designers on staff, we have email marketers on staff, pay per click, people and so on. It's all but I understand they're a precious resource. But any agency I've been a part of, I've either directly made this happen or strongly advocated for it to say we need to be our own client. We need to model our own best client service on this project. Would we kick off in this way with a client? Maybe we didn't even kick off the planning of this event. Let's model this like our best client engagement. Let's put a budget against it of our own staff's time, so we can get the designer, we can get the email marketer, we can get some air time, and we'll pay for it by counting those billable hours. And we want those designers to treat this request on equal footing with other requests, because we are one of the clients, at least for this project, I think that's a missed opportunity as agencies not treating this work as that. And the ironic part is, is your clients are viewing this as an evidence of how you will work with them, and a qual and the evidence of the quality of your work product, your ability to organize, your ability to communicate effectively. So treat it as we're making a case study here. We're making the demo here as to how we plan and organize and put on great experiences for people, even if that's not literally what you do for a business like I do, you still you're on stage here, and let's give it our own best effort. Let's use it as an opportunity to showcase some of our best work. Maybe it's a lab. Maybe we can try some things here and see if it works okay on us, and if it does, we'll pass that on to our clients. Yeah.

Chris DuBois 25:00
Right? So shifting gears a bit, but I guess it's probably good follow up too. Just what are some of the metrics that you're looking at to kind of identify the return on investment for these events, what we want

Speaker 1 25:14
is engagement and what we want is qualification. So

Nick Sal 25:22
the leading in. So we want our own target audience to be engaged, and if they are, and I don't just want them to be engaged, like, wow, I interacted a lot. That was great. But I can't forget the sales side of everything. Otherwise I won't get the budget or the buy for the next event. So I'm always thinking about, how do I hook up sales after this? And that is the qualification part. How are we engaging people in a way that they actually get qualified. And what I love about virtual events, I'm sure you can others can agree, is that, like, there's so many obvious points to engage people and to qualify them right there. So I'm looking at, first of all, the signup form. How many people are visiting it, versus filling it out. How many people fill out the optional, really juicy things I'm asking versus the required email address to give you the registration link and stuff like that. Then I'm looking at in the actual, you know, the lead up emails, how many people are clicking on My promotional emails, the emails that are priming the audience with information about what to expect, what to anticipate, emails that are asking them questions about what they want to discuss, what they want to talk about and things like that. Hopefully your sales team is reaching out to any of their targets who are showing registration activity at the event. So how I'm looking at indicators for how are people coming in and registering? What are we learning from that? How are we how are they interacting with the nurturing feed and the invites and the ways that we're trying to hook and pull them in? And how are they interacting with sales reps who are trying to hand invite and sort of hand qualify them as they're going into the event. Then in the event itself, especially virtually, you've got live polls and how people can interact. What were their answers? It's so amazing what the reporting abilities of these platforms are. You can see how many people filled out the poll. Who were the accounts that filled out the poll? What were the different answers they gave in different ranges, those are all leading indicators of engagement. What sessions did they choose if you're used, if you have a virtual event, and there's multiple sessions or tracks that they can pick, which ones did they attend? How long did they stay and interact the overall event versus individual sessions. You can look at chat transcripts. How many times did these people chat in? What are they chatting about? How interactive? What were they there's the survey that you can do at the very end of the event or emailed shortly after which people filled it out, what did they score? High versus low? All of these, to me, are engagement indicators if they're using them and doing them, but they're also qualification opportunities if you're clever enough and you're planning ahead enough, the form, the poll, the chat, the session choices, all of that builds you a profile of a person that you can serve up that lead profile to a sales rep on a platter, and they're like, Oh, my God, I certainly know who this person is. What were their key questions? What topics and challenges were they interested in? What were the questions that got them so fired up? They asked, you know, and gave a response. What was the response? How excited? How well did they rank the usefulness of this information? How intrigued do they attend the demo? Whatever it might have been? So that, to me, gets you engagement and qualification. Those are the two things I'm looking for.

Speaker 1 28:11
A ton, yeah. Those are so

Chris DuBois 28:17
Okay, shifting gears for a second again. Yeah. Can I go further on that? No, that's good. I was thinking, I've got my brain going in multiple directions. And so we're, we're honing in here the what's the 8020 here? If, if we want to just make the most of every like an entire event, right from warming up an audience to getting some credibility through this event, getting some potential clients through like, what is, what are those few tasks that we need to be focused on in order to actually make that happen? Okay?

Nick Sal 28:53
Where My head went, as you started asking, is that I've obviously, perhaps have some bias with my answer. But if I had very little budget, or I had limited budget, limited time, limited knowledge, to put on a quality business, driving business, developing virtual event. I want them to be a really solid MC, and that MC is not just an actor, person who reads lines at the end. I want them to truly be a master of ceremony. That's how I look at my job. So I'm a master of the ceremony, not a master speaker, a master of ceremonies, the person you again, you need to have an owner who's carrying the football, who's going to make sure that everybody, in a limited amount of time, with limited amount of attention, buy in understanding all this other stuff is going to rally what is needed, and what should the event be. I believe, if nothing else, if I don't know anything else about you that

Speaker 1 29:41
there's two or three clients on there? Two or three clients, because one

Nick Sal 29:45
can be a flu, sure you got one client to say, this thing works. This thing great. This thing is great. This topic matters. We can get two or three. You show it's a trend, and you can show a bit of a variety. This is a big organization. This is small organization. This is an organization that a ton of resources. Not a ton of resources. This was a manufacturer versus a software versus a professional services firm. Two or three clients build social proof, gives you a hook in the water for every fish you want to relate to. So I don't even care what the thought, what the true agenda is, but I hope there's two or three clients in there advocating, telling their story, providing that social proof, providing that relatability on it, then I hope that there is I heard this great formula that entertainment plus education equals engagement. Most webinars, people know they have to educate. This is our product. This is the trend. This is the stack. This is the information. This is what happened. Fine, great, but I think we all know humans love to be entertained. We love fun. We love the unexpected. We like to smile, we like to laugh. We like those types of things. So make sure there's some aspect of entertainment. And this could be subtle. This could be music to warm up the crowd. Walk out tracks for people who are going to be making announcements. This could be the use of video, creative use of video, highlight reels, opening videos about people, about the event itself. This could be the use, again, of just these things, like interactive polls. Could you do? Could you inject humor into this? I've been to some virtual events. If your budget is huge and you're reaching, not huge, but I'd say, if you're reaching far, do you get a Virtual DJ, a hypnotist, someone who's gonna play Simon says with the audience. And you can roll your eyes, but every single time those things pay off. Every single time that says, Oh, you cared, you can say, Oh, I just don't think that'll work. What you really say is you don't care. You don't wanna take the risk, you don't wanna spend the money, because you don't think it'll matter. But then you want your event to make a big splash and to have people be truly engaged and remark about it, and you wonder why that doesn't happen. Because you suck the life out of the thing. You never gave it any life to begin with. So make sure there's some entertainment factor as well. So what was I saying? Someone to own, just to own and run the football. This person knows it's on them to keep all the trains running on time. Whoever's contributing two or three clients to give you social proof from the outside that this thing you're doing makes sense, is worth being a part of, and that other people are contributing to it, that automatically puts a halo on the whole thing, no matter what happens, and then inject some entertainment value. Because no matter what happens with it, whether it flops, doesn't work or whatever, it shows that you cared. It showed that you any good host is gonna do that you wouldn't put on a wedding that just said yes, they said yes, they said they're man and wife. Here's a document proving that. Get out of here. No, it's like, if you have guests, you're going to entertain them. We need to entertain in business. And B to B, we're the worst offenders of not being willing to do

Unknown Speaker 32:34
that. So you

Nick Sal 32:36
put those things in and then Chris and everybody else, I hope you're listening right now, strong CTA with a can't beat offer you cannot get it anywhere else that, in my opinion, is often missing. They don't even do a CTA. Or the CTA is the same thing that's on your website. Did I honestly have to come to a webinar to hear you read off a deck? That is that I could have read faster than you, and then to hear a CTA. That's the same thing that's on your homepage. No offer them. If you do this today, since you came, you get access to something, someone that you couldn't get otherwise. And it's only for a limited time I remember I was at, let's tie it all together. I was at a hub, one of hub spots, North American agency, Partner of the Year. It was impact, and we did a big event, and we partnered with Vidyard. And before Vidyard came on to sponsor, we said, we want to offer them something incredible from Vidyard they can't get anywhere else. And Vidyard said, oh, we'll offer like, a 10% discount. I said, now you've offered that to other people. We want something incredible. And I can't remember exactly what the discount was, but it was like a one time, we'll give you half off this, this video platform, video for sales. We don't know Vidyard is that only for today. We sold and we said, we'll do it for three people. The first three people to sign up, or whatever, within minutes we be actually became the VAR the largest reseller of Vidyard in a day, just for that day, because Vidyard was willing to take a chance, and we were willing to push for that. They didn't offer that. We pushed and said, We want remarkability. We want to offer something really incredible to our attendees, and we took the risk. Everybody won

Chris DuBois 34:09
like that. That's good example. Two more questions for you. First one being, what book do you recommend every agency owner should read?

Nick Sal 34:19
You know, I really thought one of the most powerful books I've ever read when it comes to gathering groups is the art of gathering. By

Speaker 1 34:27
Priya Parker. I've got it in my office here. I probably shouldn't have had it near

Nick Sal 34:32
nearby to prove my point, but it's I was listening to. I listened to it on on audiobook, if I'm not reading

Unknown Speaker 34:36
it, it is the classiest

Nick Sal 34:41
description of how to put on gatherings, from dinner parties to like United Nations delegates are getting together. This woman, Priya Parker, has done it all, the art of gathering. Just great title, too. You're gonna get a nugget from there that's gonna help your next business meeting. Hands down, I could throw on a bonus, if I may, Chris and that. Will be endless customers by Marcus Sheridan, somebody I know has been on your show, has been on mine as well. I'm a big fan of they ask you answer. This is the second coming of that book. And I just like, for those of us who create content who are content marketers, it's just the book for us. So you combine, this is what modern day content marketing is, endless customers built on they ask you answer. Plus, this is the modern day business gathering playbook in the art of gathering, put those two together,

Unknown Speaker 35:24
you'll be made in the shade.

Chris DuBois 35:26
Awesome. All right. Nick, last question, Where can people find you?

Nick Sal 35:31
Yeah, I'm all around very active on LinkedIn. I have my own company now, next level inbound, which you can find at next level inbound.com, the whole concept is, I've been in and around the inbound space for over 15 years. I'm trying to help businesses take it to the next level, primarily through events, partnerships, communities. I really think that's the currency of the realm in an AI driven world. So next level, inbound.com, but also just find me over there on LinkedIn, linkedin.com/in/nick, Sal, lot easier to spell and pronounce than Salvatore yellow. Find me on there. I'm active. I'm posting weekly. Would appreciate a follow, but would love to, love to share notes with anybody who's trying to figure out how to be the best you know, B to B event organizer.

Chris DuBois 36:11
They can be awesome. Well, Nick, thanks for joining. This is a it's like a mini master class and everything they need for events.

Nick Sal 36:17
My pleasure. Think about it a lot. It's been, it's been awesome to get to know you. Chris, I'm looking forward to the event that you've got coming up again for your next one. It's great to have you on my podcast. So it's just been a pleasure.

Chris DuBois 36:34
That's the show everyone. You can leave a rating and review or you can do something that benefits. You click the link in the show notes to subscribe to agency forward on sub stack, you'll get weekly content resources and links from around the internet to help you drive your agency forward. You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai