One Dinner Beat an Entire AI SDR Team

# Transcript

Your inbox is more like you're trying to generate impressions instead of responses these days, right? And so what it means is the in-person human interactions are actually the thing that is now like the most valuable because trust really can't be derived through those digital channels anymore. But when you can have a face-to-face conversation or a human moment, those are the things that drive trust. Those are the thing that drive conversations, therefore drive pipeline and drive closed ones.

>> [music]

>> All right. So we are going to drop Matt right into a scenario, Matt, and I want to know what you would do here. So Flap Stack GTM, they're a $40 million B2B SaaS company. Eight months ago, their CRO cut half the outbound SDR team, enrolled the budget into none other than an AI SDR platform, and the pitch was simple: 50 meetings booked a month instead of 10 for a fraction of the cost. We've all heard this, right? Dale's trying to convince me to do this for RR. The meetings actually started showing up. So did the calendar invites. But what didn't show up was the pipeline that actually converted. The only deal that the team closed all quarter didn't come from that AI engine at all. It actually came from a dinner that a rep had with a VP that she'd been chasing for over a year. Now CRO is standing in front of the board trying to explain why that AI SDR tool that was supposed to produce a ton of meetings and pipeline produced 100 meetings and no closed deals. You've built your entire company on the bet that ops and the AI stuff are the commodity and that human movement and that human moment is the actual asset. You're in the boardroom. What do you tell the CRO, Matt?

Well, I'll tell them one, I've been in this scenario before where I've seen meetings get booked, but I haven't converted those meetings at all. It means we're not getting in front of the right people, at least the ones that should be our customers, or we have some maybe product issues, value prop issues that we need to address. But second, and probably more importantly, I'm telling them, "Hey, we need to start trading quality for quantity," which is why we saw the results we saw with the in-person stuff. So while it may result in us getting in front of fewer people and maybe having fewer conversations, it's going to give us a much higher quality conversation and higher quality of people that we'll actually be able to interact with. And at the end of the day, meetings and MQLs and target accounts don't mean anything if we can't actually have meaningful conversations with them.

So I'd ask, "What would you rather do? Have 100 meetings and have quality conversations with our ICP from a handful of those and convert none, or would you rather get in front of 15 people where you can have 100% coverage of quality conversations—people that fit your ICP, the folks you want to get in front of—and be able to convert a handful of them, right?"

I think for me the answer is simple. So I would start trading, reallocating budget from AI SDR stuff, which I'm not a believer in either, at least not yet. I would start leaning into the in-person stuff. I think one of the big reasons for this, and I find this kind of ironic, is that with the advancements of AI and technology and everything within go-to-market, what it's essentially done is it's really flooded every digital channel that we have available, whether it's email, whether it's LinkedIn messages, or whatever it might be. Essentially your inbox is more like you're trying to generate impressions instead of responses these days, right? And so what it means is the in-person human interactions are actually the thing that is now like the most valuable because trust really can't be derived through those digital channels anymore. But when you can have a face-to-face conversation or a human moment, those are the things that drive trust. Those are the thing that drive conversations, therefore drive pipeline and drive closed ones. So that's where I would go all day, every day, right now. 100%.

>> We talk all the time about, "I'd rather you have 10 high-quality conversations and convert eight of them versus 50 low-quality conversations and convert two of them," right? Where are we spending our time? What I was going to ask, but you already answered it, is: Is there a place for AI SDRs? I feel very strongly that there isn't. Certainly for outbound, inbound, I think you can make an argument depending on what type of AI and what it is we're trying to do and how we're trying to qualify. I have yet to see an AI SDR in an outbound way that is anything I would ever want to interact with in any way, shape, or form. The messaging typically is always off. It doesn't really resonate. And then the other thing is, people seem to love hunting for AI like as a sport, you know? It's like they're interacting with a chatbot on a website and they're trying to figure out how to get to. I don't know why people are so fascinated with this, but that's the world that we live in right now. Even nowadays, people are still to this day trying to call M-dashes and everything, and it's like, "Geez, this is insane." But that's just where things are at right now.

>> There'll be a bunch of laggers throughout that whole process. But the funny part, and we've said this a lot as well, is that the problem of quality over quantity has been around for a long time—probably years now. But now with AI and the invention of generalized AI, you're just exposing it a lot faster and more effectively. I mean, they've been running these workflows for a long period of time. I always say marketing destroys every little fun thing. Thought marketing automation way back in our day, so I blame marketing, but it's all good.

>> Yeah, this next question is like kind of near and dear to my heart because I've been thinking about attribution a lot lately. And so one stat that I hear all the time is that 90% of B2B companies say events influence deals that never get credited in the CRM. You've been on both sides running events for RevOps and building tools that are supposed to close that loop. Why has it been so hard to fix and why has nobody been able to do it before you?

>> So I have thoughts and opinions on attribution generally. So one, I think that every marketer and every marketing leader should have some level of attribution in place. You should know what sort of results and outcomes you are driving as a result of your marketing program and your marketing budget. Where I think people start to get things wrong is the attribution starts to get overengineered, and executive teams seem to be very far removed from what it actually means to be a marketer, what it means to be an operator. Like for whatever reason, you go into these board meetings or your board members, your CEO, everyone expects you to have an answer where you're like, "Hey, you spent X dollars on this thing. Tell me exactly how much revenue you got from that." And it's like, "Man, I wish that's the way that the world worked." But guess what? Doing a LinkedIn ad or showing up at one particular event is not going to be the only thing that drives any particular outcome. That is just not the way that marketing works. It's not the way that go-to-market works. That's not the way that the world works.

And so even going back to some of the things we talked about before, if you get in front of 15 really high-quality people that fit your persona at a dinner event, after that dinner event, you may very well convert absolutely none of them because they may not be in a position to buy. But what you have done is you've started the relationship. You've moved the relationship forward. You've probably learned maybe who they're currently using, whether they care about your particular problem space. All of those things can be used then at say the next conference that you show up to, where if you got in front of your ICP at that dinner event, chances are probably high they're going to be there. And so what you're trying to do is you're trying to build a program that's going to ultimately generate the results that you want.

And so with all of that, I always try to start with things that are relatively simple, which is at least like with our in-person stuff that we're doing—dinners, conferences. It's like the first question is: Are we interacting and getting in front of the right people? Like the people that you meet or show up to your dinner, do they fit your ICP? And ideally, that number is as close to 100% as possible because going back to the conversion information we talked about before, right? If you get in front of a thousand people but only 20 of them actually fit your ICP, it's going to be really hard to sift through the noise with all that, right?

And then the other things I always look at—two and three—outside of the profile match that I just mentioned is yeah, pipeline generation and pipeline influence. So again, try not to overcomplicate things, but for the events that you held, you should have some idea. Everyone should have some idea of what your sales cycle is. How long does it take for you to typically work people through your sales process? And if you hold an event, if you work people through that process and...

You know, you try to drive them to meetings, all that stuff. How long should that relatively take? Is it three months? Is it six months, 12 months following an event? And literally just measure: do the people that show up to your events, do the people that you meet at your conferences within that time frame, do you generate pipeline from them? And or do you close business from them? And if you can drive those three things, you can tell a pretty good story around how your events are doing.

I agree with everything you're saying, but there's a version of events drive pipeline that is genuinely true. And then there's a version, and I'm going to pick on marketing just like Dale did, that's the story marketing likes to tell to protect budget. We're doing these great events. Like at a high level, I don't want to take the whole show here, but at a high level, what is an event motion that actually drives revenue look like versus what everyone's doing, which is we're going to throw an event and it looks great in a recap because man, we had this awesome event and 45 people showed up. What's the real motion? Where do you start and where do you go? Super tactically, end to end.

One of the biggest things that people seem to forget about or say that they'll get to it when it rolls around is all the stuff that happens post-event, which is all the stuff that's going to drive the outcomes that you're looking for.

You mean you have to follow up with people, Matt?

Yes. Exactly. So, like going back, right? There's always a delay. People are like, "Oh, you know, we get the list, right? Or we take the spreadsheet from the booth or whatever, right?" And then we massage it and we clean it and then we upload it to our CRM and then you try to manually flag down the STRs and ask the questions of: are they following up? And so there's no defined process on, okay, when we are done with an event, here's our playbook, here's what we do. And so, ironically, that's kind of where you should start though with your events. And for people out there who may not have an event strategy today, or maybe you're doing events but you don't have this figured out, or you're trying to figure out how to do events: start with what are we going to do after the event is done?

So get the event attendees and that registering list into your CRM as soon as possible. Ideally you have some software or technology to help you. That's part of what we're doing at Event Flow. But if you don't, upload it, do whatever. Get it in there immediately. And then you have to have a playbook like you would for outbound, like you would for inbound. Like, what do we do to follow up with the people that either showed up at our booth or that we had conversations with at this dinner event?

Maybe it's the people that you sent to the event that are the ones who have to actually follow up with the people, regardless of who's in or out of your territory. Maybe those people need to get routed to the right people on your sales team depending on the territory model you have set up. Those are going to be some unique business things that you need to think through. But speed to lead matters here just like it does with form fills and everything else. So figure out how you can start to quickly interact with those people post-event and then get to your yes or no question. Avoid the stuff in the middle. Try to drive people to having a conversation around the problems that you solve and get them to say yes or say no, not say anything and not say maybe next time, but try to drive that response.

And then the last thing I'll mention before I turn it back to you guys is try to deliver some value outside of just the product and the sales stuff, right? So if you learn something unique, share content, share resources, you know, whatever it might be, right? Outside of your product. And have some sort of campaign to keep in touch with those people so that you don't lose sight of them and it's not like the event is then a one-off thing. If you can do that, you'll be in a really good spot.

I think a huge event hack that you can do that people can take away today is go into the sessions if you can. If you have the pass, go to the sessions and you know someone's there that you potentially want to talk with: get something from the person speaking at the keynote, something that you picked up in that conversation, and use that as a lead-in versus any feature, functionality, product that you're going to talk about.

The best events, you're not even talking about your product. It comes up naturally because, Dale, exactly what you said, like, you're not. No one wants to go to an event anymore with the 17-page slide deck that tells you how good my product is.

Yeah, but no one. Like, I've been to so many events and I do not see the people that are selling going into the sessions to pick up the tidbits to have that conversation.

I mean, it's hard to do that at like Comic-Con and the events that you go to, but you know, selling all the go-to-market technology at these Comic-Con events. That stales. That stales hack.

My jam.

Let's talk a little bit about tool sprawl and like what's killing that event motion. So we have tons of technology all over the place. It's getting worse with AI, right? Zoom, Luma, Riverside, Otter, Salesforce, all sorts of technology. And it's kind of like they're throwing technology at problems. What does a tech stack cost a company beyond the obvious frustrations in terms of an event motion?

Yeah, and I would say this applies even just across the go-to-market stack in general, whether it's events or other pieces of your motion, but people seem to obviously focus on the dollar cost of these tools first and kind of forget a lot of the other stuff, which makes sense, right? It's like, oh, this X tool costs this, Y tool costs this. They have some feature overlap, right? But one of the biggest areas is just the efficiency of your team. So obviously, switching tabs, switching tools, trying to build these integrations, maintain these things, download a CSV here, upload a CSV there. You're like, oh, you know, whatever, it takes a little bit of time for each event, right? If you're doing like one event every now and then, that might be fine. But even if you start to do like one event a quarter, one event a month, multiple events a month, like that stuff adds up a lot and it takes away from the stuff that matters, which is going to be the human-to-human connection that you're ultimately trying to drive.

But another big piece is just going to be around the data that's generated and the data quality. So, especially now with AI, anything AI that you want to do, even if it's, for example, use AI to help you craft your messaging or determine how to reach out to people post-event, is going to be based on the data that you have and the data that you collect. And all these new tools, a lot of them start to generate their own unique data sets that might be duplicative with properties you have in other tools or systems. Let's say you have people registering through, like you mentioned, Luma, or you're using your own page, and then people are showing up in person and you're marking that in a spreadsheet, or it's a webinar event and you're doing that through Zoom or Riverside or something. You start to have these unique record IDs across all these places and you're trying to join those and match those. So the data side is another big piece where, you know, consolidation and just eliminating the tool sprawl beyond the dollar amount: the efficiency piece and the data effectiveness piece are the two biggest areas where things just start to get super, super hard the more you add to your tech stack.

Especially on the event side, changing tech stack. Like we do a lot of CRM migrations, so typically Salesforce to HubSpot. When you look at changing tech stack, it's people have muscle memory, right? It's really hard. How do you actually get someone to make this switch, especially with a tool like EventFul, and understand that that muscle memory is great, but it's actually costing you? And I feel like this is actually something that I'm seeing a lot of people go through right now with AI because with all the new technology that's out there—AI native this, AI native that—we have all this baggage from how things used to be, right? Or the way that they've always been, especially on the data side.

Let's just look at our data providers, right? It's like, oh, okay, well we build our ICP based on the data properties that we're able to buy from our data providers. But it's like you've got to stop and ask: should it actually be that way, or should it be the other way around, right?

And so one example, for instance, I was talking to a company recently on this and they were like, yeah, we have some technology that helps shipping companies who have to ship really heavy things, and like, you're not going to find the weight of shipping goods in, you know, a data provider that you go and buy, right, but like with...

The help of AI—that's something that you can actually get at. And so whether it's a CRM migration, whether it's defining your ICP, whether it's anything else within go-to-market, I think now you need to be intentional about those assumptions that you're bringing to the table in terms of the way that things have always been, and just ask yourself like, should it be this way?

On the CRM migration thing, for example, I was talking to a community member a couple weeks ago, and they were talking about how they were switching CRM. I won't say like products or anything, but they were going from a call it an incumbent CRM to like a call it a new age, like one of the AI ones.

You could certainly feel free to throw out products. So they're leaving Salesforce, HubSpot, or Pipe Drive and going to a Copper or Affinity or one of the new ones. We have no problem throwing out names here. We are uncensored, sir.

Yeah, so that's exactly what they were doing. So naturally, one of my questions was like, oh, that migration will be fun. They're like, we're not doing a migration. I was like, what do you mean? And they're like, we're just starting fresh. They're like, everything has been such a complete mess, and our data is all over the place. It's just a disaster. And they're like, why would I want to infect my new CRM with that? So they're like, I'll download everything, we'll keep it there, we're just going to do a hard delete and say adios. But they're like, no, we're just starting fresh.

So even in that case where your natural instinct is like, oh obviously you migrate everything from tool A to tool B, it's like no, you actually don't need to. At least to start, maybe speaking our language, Dale. How many times have we had this conversation about why are we replicating? Just because you did it this shitty way or you have this shitty data in your shitty CRM doesn't mean you should carry it all over because all you're doing is changing the UI.

Yeah, and the problem's always been like, what are we trying to accomplish? And things are evolving—especially, and we talk about this all the time—they're evolving so quickly that we should not be just replicating stuff, especially if you're doing a transition. But I think people get scared. There's this fear factor of like, I'm going to miss something. My team's done it this way all the time. We have a client like, hey, this is the way we've always done it. We're like, okay, time out. We went through the process and they put it in the way they had in the old CRM, and like we're still going through an iteration of how painful it is. And so while it feels good in that moment to be like, ah, I feel comfortable with what I had in the past system, people will evolve and learn, and I think you need to like give them that credit for it versus like, we did it this way because that was the way the old system would work, and now we're going to just keep doing it that way.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. 100%. And easier—I mean, easier said than done as well. I'll acknowledge that. But yeah, like especially if you're taking the risk of something as important as, you know, switching CRM, like maybe one of the most important pieces of technology that any business will use. If you're taking a risk or betting on one of these newer providers, it seems like, yeah, why are you stopping short then and being like, "Oh, but no, we're going to do like the safe thing and like, you know, take all that garbage and move it into the new CRM." It's like, no, like continue. Like continue and bet on the bet that you're making, right? Which is like start there.

Here's something I keep seeing with sales teams I work with: generic sequences don't work anymore. We've all gotten so good at tuning out the noise that even your own buyers are ignoring you. The problem isn't your reps, it's that your sequences are static and your signals are somewhere else entirely. That's why our clients use Nooks. And the thing that stuck with me is that their sequences actually stay fresh because the signals update them automatically. Right buyer, right moment with no manual babysitting. If your outbound feels like it's shouting into a void, go check them out at nooks.ai/bridgetheap.

Let's talk a little bit about the event space on channel difficulty. Like, how do we get things kind of running? Because we just talked about like outbound is super hard to do, paid gets super expensive, inbound gets super competitive, but events keep showing up in the channel as a way to work and build relationships because we can't get people on the phone, we can't get them through your email. So events is a good place to kind of build that relationship. Yet over and over again, we've found that they either don't prep for the event, they don't treat them as like these one-off things. And we were just with a client last week and found out they had an event in three weeks and like no one had done any prep work.

So what should a company look like that treats events as a holistic motion, not just like something that pops up and then, like, okay, we're going to go to this event? What salesperson, what CS person, let's go?

The things that I know we do through RevOps Co-op that we've seen a lot of our clients and others do—and I mean, we've now run hundreds of kind of small group dinner events, happy hour events—and some of this stuff might sound obvious, but it's like, one is you need to pick a city. Pick where you want to go. And typically the default is like, all right, we'll just pick New York.

Big cities. Yeah, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston. Yeah. And you could do Miami. You can certainly do that. Or, again, if you want to rethink the way that things always happen, you could say, hey, instead of just picking the big cities, why don't we first look at where are either our customers and or our prospects actually located? Like, where do we have density of the people that we care about? And then make your decisions that way, which may lead you to some of those big cities, but it could also lead you to some other less obvious shorter pockets.

Yeah, like yes, like the Malibu of the Midwest, Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Right on Lake Michigan.

So do that first, you know? Second, once you land on your city and the format—you want to do a dinner style event or happy hour—got to find a venue. This is where AI can help. You can use off-the-shelf tools. We've got this built into the Eventful product as well, but you know, deep research through ChatGPT or something like that. You can use AI to say, like, hey, here's my budget. Here's how many people I'm trying to get together. Here's the type of vibe I'm looking for. And basically, get a list of places to reach out to to find your venue.

And then the third step is basically executing on the event. And so the things that I've seen work well, and some of the different approaches in terms of format and how you can put these happy hours or dinners together, like on one end you can take the completely unstructured path where it's like, hey, I just want to get people together. I want to have conversations. We're going to network, and that's going to be that. You could take the very structured approach as well, which is like, hey, we're going to have content and a fireside chat. There's going to be a panel discussion, and the dinner is going to be like a moderated dinner event. We're going to have a person from each team at each particular table, and you could take that approach as well. Or you could do something that's more in the middle.

I'd say the main things to consider there, which may sound obvious, is like, consider your team. We have some partners, customers who, you know, for whatever reason, like they aren't great at the moderated thing, right? Like they're better in unstructured situations. Then we have other partners that are really good at the very structured, like moderated sort of events. So base it on what your company is good at. And then the second thing though is like, don't forget about the whole reason why you're doing this, which is the people you're trying to get in the room.

So like, consider what they want and what they care about as well. So some of them may just want to network. Like they want literally nothing else. Like they want to show up at these events and not talk about work stuff. So they don't want to sit through your formal moderated dinner discussion on AI. Like they just want to shoot the breeze with some other people who get their job. But you might have some functions or roles, right, that do like the thought leadership and the content, and they like coming to those things because there's that piece in conjunction with the networking. And that's just one thing that I'm even going through right now.

# Cleaned Transcript

With some people, it's like, "Don't forget about what's valuable to the folks that you have in the room," which is also going to be the other people that you bring together for them. So while you want obviously your prospects and your ICP and stuff in the room, they don't want to just talk to your salespeople or just talk to you. They're showing up to talk to everybody else as well. So get interesting people in the room for them. And that can often be forgotten about.

But the best events that I've seen, what the people do is they bring their customers together. They bring their prospects together. And what that allows them to do is their customers will just naturally advocate for their particular product. So they don't have to. It's not like they got to fill the room with salespeople or AEs or SDRs. They bring, you know, one or two people from their leadership team, bring a couple of customers, and you've got this really incredible recipe for success.

**On structured versus unstructured events, what's your feeling?**

Depends on your ICP. I tend to prefer unstructured. I like more natural conversation. But I think there is a place for structure. It largely depends in my opinion what you're selling, who you're selling into, and what their personality trait is. We have a client that sells into quality assurance, right? So think like very buttoned-up, suit-and-tie quality people. They need structure. They don't want to come to a room and just wing it. But if you're selling into sales tech or martech or something more fun and laid-back, I think the unstructured tends to work well.

Dale, I want to piggyback off your structure question because they're still big events, right? Unbound is coming up, Dreamforce is coming up. And while I'm not a huge fan, they have their place. But with that, you know, when people are sponsoring booths or going to these events, weeks before, even a week before, they're still scrambling to book meetings, right? Like, who do I meet with? What do I do? How do I do it? And we have this conversation with sales teams all the time. So you spent $80,000 to have a booth. You're going to have your team go sit in the booth and twiddle their thumbs and step outside and try to scan badges. How many meetings have you scheduled? Well, none. Well, what have you done to schedule meetings? Well, nothing. Like, that doesn't work.

What are the teams that you see with big events? What are they doing differently?

Yeah. Well, it goes back to the prospect plus customer thing that I mentioned before. Start by getting some meetings on the books with customers that you've either closed in the past or people who are currently leveraging your product or solution. Because those people can also lead you to other discussions, other meetings, other people that you could potentially talk to at the big event that they're obviously maybe going to be peers with or be there with, right? And if you can get them, if you can be top-of-mind for them and get them talking to you about why they love your product, why they're getting value from your product, if you're on site and you're like, "Hey, you got any friends here that would be worth meeting with, right?" Like that's one great way to drive some of those conversations and meetings.

But the other thing is even with Dreamforce or Unbound, my team will be at all of those and our partners send people as well. A lot of times, we don't even go to the actual conference itself. We just do stuff around it. That's the other big thing. You know, even if you're going to spend two grand, three grand on one pass for Dreamforce, you could double that budget and throw a small group in-person event in San Francisco at the same time. And that could be another way to drive some of those conversations that you're ultimately looking to drive.

There's lots of unique stuff that you can do around events that people can kind of forget about, especially if you are a sponsor at the event. You're like, "Okay, we've got the booth, booth times are this, this is when there's going to be traffic." But there's so much beyond that that people seem to not think about.

And last thing I'll mention is like, while you have the booth and that will drive traffic and people will come to you, anything good in life is not just going to be plopped in your lap. You got to go out and get it, right? So don't expect meetings to just be handed to you. Go out and get those, right?

**Yeah, exactly. Earn it and do it in a creative, unique way, and you'll be plenty busy. Your calendar will be fully booked around the event.**

Well, I want to add one thing here. So we've been talking about events and all these different things and all the things you can do at events. And like, as sales leaders or revenue leaders, we select people to go to these events. And in my opinion—and I'm sure it's not everybody's opinion—this is something that should be good for the individual. Usually a nice place, yes, or yes, you know, you can't experience everything, but it's like a privilege to go to these events and do these things.

So many sales, CS, or BD people that I've seen don't treat it as a privilege. They treat it like a chore. And then it comes off within the booth or within the conversation. They're sitting there on their phone, twiddling their thumbs. Is there a place where, as you're going through this evolution with your company and building that event motion, you just pick the people that are really going to execute on this and not do what we typically do? Like, okay, John and Sally can do January, and Adam and Matt can do July, just because we want to make it even? To me...

Yeah. So obviously we have some semblance of who we're selling into, who our ICP is. Let's just say with us, with RevOps Co-op and the community that we have, obviously a lot of our sponsors or the people that partner with us, they obviously want to either sell into or get in front of people who work in revenue operations.

All right, so Dale, let me ask you this question. If I reach out and my job title is Matt Balm, account executive, I'm like, "Hey, Dale. You're going to be at Unbound. Guess what? I'm going to be at Unbound too. You want to meet up?"

Why?

Yeah, you're probably—if you're offering Dale a free drink, he'll meet up with you. But you're probably like, "Whatever. Like, who cares what this guy wants?"

Now, Dale, imagine that you're a VP of RevOps and I'm like, "Hey, Dale, I'm Matt. I'm a VP of RevOps at company XYZ. I'm also going to be in town for Unbound. I would love to buy you a drink, maybe just swap notes on AI use cases, stuff like that, right?" Probably a lot more likely that you will respond to a peer than you will a salesperson.

Yet a lot of the people that we're choosing to either send to our booth or send to these events are on the sales or the go-to-market side. And so if you're looking to again figure out how you can drive quality conversations, like in that example—if RevOps are the people that you want to get in front of and have conversations with—granted you may not have an army of RevOps teams on your RevOps team like you would on your sales team, but if you even have one, send your director of RevOps to your RevOps conferences and have them actually spend some time at the booth or have them be the ones that are sending cold outreach to the conference list to see if they can drum up some meetings in advance. Because that's going to allow you to have the conversations that you want. And they're going to be able to interact with those people as peers and they're going to be able to see things in terms of the problems that they might have and how it can uniquely apply to the product that you're ultimately trying to sell, which could lead you then to the sales conversation.

Yet a lot of people just don't do that. They're like, "We're going to send, you know, this SDR or this BDR or this account executive." And they're like, "Oh, cool. Like, I'm on the road again. Let me instead play Candy Crush while I'm sitting in my chair at the booth." Which no one appreciates.

No, definitely not.

Let's shift gears. Let's go to TripleM. It's Monday Morning Move time. I'm going to share a practical takeaway that our listeners can test this week. What I need you to do, Matt, tell me what you'd add, what you change, what you push back on, or in the rare instance that I hit the nail on the head, feel free to tell me I did that too, because then I get

To hold it over Dale forever.

All right, here we go. Last session, you didn't. Last session, you totally got it. You totally failed.

So we need to. I think we should put a scoring mechanism in the Monday morning move going forward.

I like it.

Do we have a zero to ten on what you're saying?

Oh yeah. Let's do it. Well, I like it. All right. So Matt, you got to score it and then you give me feedback or you tell me I did great. Here we go. Pull the last three events that your team ran. Doesn't matter what the format is—webinars, dinners, conferences, don't care. For each one, try to answer this single question: How many open opportunities in your CRM can you directly tie back to a conversation that started or moved forward at this event? If you can't answer that in less than fifteen minutes with your current tools, you have a massive visibility problem that is actively costing you your budget. The fix is not a better spreadsheet. It's actually deciding before the next event how every attendee interaction gets logged, tagged, connected to the accounts in the CRM on the day it happens. Do it one time, then see what the conversation with your CRO looks like at the next pipeline review.

So you want me to rate that? I mean, that sounds pretty damn good to me.

One to ten.

One to ten.

And then push back. What would you change? What would you add, change, delete? Like, it's not perfect.

All right. So not... All right. So one, I'm one of those guys that like I never give out perfect scores.

Nor should you.

Yeah. Like even, you know, like my kids all the time are, you know, like I'm like, "Hey, you did great. There's room for..." This is like one bite. Everybody knows the rules. You can even give decimal points if you want. Let's see. Let's see what you got.

All right. So I'm going to give you... All right. So Adam, I'm going to give you a seven. And the thing I think that... C equals MD.

Yep. So I think the main thing—the main thing that's missing from that. So the data piece is going to be key, but then the natural question that I would ask you is how. So like, how do we get from the event interactions to the pipeline that's closed? And so that's where the playbook piece that we talked about before—like understanding what is our business's process to go from point A to close. That's the one thing that people are going to care about or ask about as well. So I think that's the one thing that comes to mind in terms of what's missing.

I appreciate it. Appreciate it. Now we move into... I'll take the seven for the record. Like, anything above a five, I'm genuinely happy.

It's the first four. I can't wave through your first three. I have to.

We'll start tracking it. I like it. Good idea. Dale came up with a good idea this month.

One good idea a month.

Okay. Matt, let's jump into some uncensored questions and just kind of do a little bit of rapid fire through these. Most companies say events are important. Then they hand them to the most junior person. We talked about that and the marketing team. We talked about what is happening, why does it happen? You talked about how to fix it, but why do we keep doing this over and over again?

I mean, it is kind of crazy that like when people are like, "Hey, we want to do events," like especially today's day and age, their first reaction is like, "Oh, we got to hire somebody," or like, "Oh, we got to give it to a junior person." I mean, at the end of the day, events are hard to do and they're hard to do right. But once you have a playbook for what a successful event looks like, you don't need someone who's like super senior in order to be able to execute on those events. So it's kind of like, as I was saying that, I was thinking about going from founder-led sales and hiring your first couple of salespeople or like your additional sales leader. I think as a company, if you want to move into events and you haven't done them before, I think you need to have a relatively senior person or someone with expertise and experience to do them right. But once you figure out what that successful event looks like, pass that knowledge down to the next person, just like you would if you're a CEO doing all the selling and handing it off to your first salesperson, right? So that's one reaction. Matt, what's the most expensive mistake a B2B company makes with events? The one that shows up on the invoice but never gets talked about in the retro.

The most expensive mistake, I'd say, is events being an afterthought or thinking that you're able to wing it. You can't wing them. So have a plan, a playbook on how you run events up until the event is completed, and then have a playbook for what you do once that event is done. And that should be basically your entire event strategy. But you can't forget about the stuff that happens once the event is done. And you can't wing it. You can be unstructured. Unstructured is not winging it, though. You can't just cross your fingers and hope that things will happen.

Oh, come on. Adam thinks hope is a strategy. That's absolutely every time. Every time.

Yeah. Hope and good vibes, right? It's all we need.

I don't know about the good vibes. Hope. Definitely. I don't know about good vibes. But as we wrap this up, dream vacation destination. Where are we going?

Oh, man. All right. What's top of mind right now? Because it was last week, actually. My ten-year-old and I went to the All-Star game, the MLB All-Star game in Philadelphia. So him and I are big baseball fans. Being in Wisconsin, we're Brewers fans, so we've been to obviously tons of Brewers games. We've been to Wrigley to see the Brewers play the Cubs, and now we've been to Citizens Bank Park to watch the Home Run Derby and the All-Star game. So actually, if I want to like my dream vacation right now would be him and I, and we do have plans for this, but one fell swoop—him and I hitting all thirty MLB stadiums that we haven't been to yet. So I guess it would be twenty-seven.

Twenty-seven more.

Whether it's like a road trip, I don't know, a road trip would be fun, or just visiting each one with him. That would be my dream vacation.

I love that. Here's a fun fact. Actually, I didn't know this till my wife told me the other day. Bronton has like a minor league team and they're the third oldest ballpark with all the major leagues behind Wrigley and Fenway. It's the Bronton Marauders. I had no idea. So I thought that...

It's right in your backyard.

Yeah, that is super cool.

Cool.

Matt Vom Eventful, thank you for joining the show, sir.

Thank you.