Bethany's 8-Step Event Marketing Framework
In this exclusive conversation, Bethany Murphy (Event Marketing, 6sense) shares her 8-step framework for creating events that drive real impact.
Thanks for tuning into this exclusive edition of GTM News Desk presented by the
TAC Network. This show is hosted by me, Nick Bennett, and my co-host, Mark Kill
ins.
Now let's get to the goods on with the show.
Welcome to the exclusive content with Bethany.
This is where we're going to dive deep into her actual playbook of how she is
having so much success with Sixth Sense.
So we've got a few questions to further the conversation.
First one that we'd love to dive into is tell us about the most successful
event
that you've executed in the past couple of years.
I mean, I know we've talked about breakthrough, but I would have to say that
it was breakthrough 2023 for many, many reasons.
But it was my first breakthrough that I kind of managed to soup to nuts.
At Sixth Sense, it was the largest one yet.
We had a thousand attendees with us in lovely Frisco, Texas.
It was three and a half days of amazing content and experiences.
From the hotel, we had a buyout at the new Omni PGA Frisco.
Shout out to them. It's an amazing property evening events, like cowboy hats.
We had a corporate Coachella theme party.
We had a drone show in the content, right?
12 general sessions over 50 breakouts, 75 speakers.
And it all just kind of came together and really exceeded my expectations.
So I've got to say that that's my favorite.
And of course, like I've got to put a plug in on the metric side, but, you know
from a metrics perspective, again, breakthrough is a huge line item for us.
And so we need to make sure that we're hitting all of our goals to be able to
secure budget year over year.
But we hit our attendee goal.
We hit our goal for a number of accounts on site.
We hit our influence pipe goal and we held over 500 meetings with accounts.
Onsite at the event, which is pretty awesome.
But I think my favorite statistic of all, the last two years for breakthrough,
we've had 100% of accounts that attend breakthrough renew with Sixth Sense.
And so that for me is so awesome because it's a huge motivator internally for
our sales and customer success teams to like want to get people to break
through.
Right.
It's like get your account to break through like your golden, right?
And that's super cool.
For an event to have that much impact on the business.
I have a little bit of a follow up question there.
So like when I, when I worked for Alice, we actually were, you know,
Sixth Sense was a customer and we would do the gifting station every, every
year.
I'm curious, like what made you switch from where breakthrough was to that new
location?
I didn't make it last year, but I did see the property and it looked amazing.
I'm just curious because there's a lot of thoughts and questions that go into
like,
Hey, if I've been at this property for so long and it's been successful, like
why switch?
Yeah.
I mean, I love venue sourcing.
I could have a whole podcast alone talk about venue sourcing, but I think for
me,
it's like finding unique venues, right?
It just kind of changes.
It just changes the event, right?
And, and then there's certain hotels that I love and I would do events there
year after year.
I think for me, like having finding this Omni PGA for scope, super random,
right?
It's, I mean, outside of Dallas brand new hotel, we were able to take over the
whole
hotel, which from an event's perspective is super cool, right?
Like branding.
I mean, we could really kind of have, have a run of the place, which you don't
often
get when you plan events.
Um, so I think that was a huge motivator for me and just having a resort where
we
could have like almost everything outside, right?
I mean, we had all our meals outside, every evening event was outside.
And that's hard to do, especially in Phoenix when it's hot, what is usually
hot.
And, you know, I, I just think it adds to the event when you, when you move it
around.
That's not to say that every year we will be moving because it's just getting
to
the size that that becomes difficult, right?
But I think you have a lot of flexibility when events are between, you know,
under
500, 600 attendees, like you have a lot of options.
And yes, is it easier for my team if I do the same venue every year?
Sure.
But it's not as fun.
Got to keep it exciting.
Stask, quote, break that status quo.
You're going to get to the proven method of how you did this event.
So before we get to the next question and how, and that question is going to be
about
how you impact like this amazing event, you know, you do it every time.
You just create an amazing event no matter what it is, you know, an elevated
dinner breakthrough.
My question and I challenge you, Bethany, 50 plus sessions, it seems like too
much
content.
Would you have that same amount of content next time or is it going to be more
or less?
We are cutting one track.
So we're going from four tracks to three tracks.
And, you know, I, it is a lot of content for sure.
I mean, it's definitely a lot of content, but every year we're kind of changing
things up.
This year, every year, we do this session called six, six street live, right?
So it's how six cents uses six cents.
And it's become like the most popular session at the event.
And it's always on the last day.
And so it's the last morning, the night after our party where people go crazy
and
we'll do like a late kind of brunch with bloody mary's of amosas and then we'll
go
into six street live for this coming breakthrough.
I had an idea to change it up and do that session before the welcome reception.
So start at like five o'clock, go from five to six 30.
We'll probably have some fun drinks and maybe past apps and stuff during the
session.
And then we'll kind of go straight into the welcome reception so that Thursday
we
can really keep that content really in the weeds, like more workshops, people
that
want kind of in depth content that we don't really have time for during the
main event.
Right.
So and it gives people the opportunity if they don't want to stay for Thursday,
that's fine.
You know, stay for the party and then go home Thursday morning.
But I mean, to your point, it's, it's hard, right?
What's the right amount of content?
I mean, I think that's really hard.
We always get, we spend a lot of time reviewing attendee feedback.
And it's like there aren't enough, you know, beginner sessions.
There's too many advanced.
I mean, you can't please everybody.
But I think we just want to make sure that we're giving our customers a
platform
through the event to tell their story with six cents.
And that has a huge impact for other people to learn.
Right.
And so it's a work in progress, I would say.
OK, that's fair.
That's a good answer.
I give you an A on that answer, Bethany.
It's good.
I like that.
I like that.
I was stressed.
So I got like golden pen now.
Next, where's your pen?
I expect you to take notes like myself with a tack notebook.
Give us your proven framework, Bethany, to never have a shitty event.
What do you need to do?
To never have a shitty event.
That's that's my goal, really.
Um, so I think number one, and we've kind of touched on this in our segment
number one,
but you really need to have executive support from the onset, right?
And so you can't have a successful event without starting at the top and making
sure that the executives are aligned, that everyone has support, that you have
secured budget, right?
I feel like a lot of people start planning an event and they're halfway down
the road and they don't even have budget for it yet.
Like don't bother.
Make sure you have buy in and budget like before you do anything.
I think that's number one.
Number two.
And again, we talked about this, but define your event goals, objectives,
and metrics for success.
Right?
Like this is crucial because if you don't do this really early in the planning,
you're going to lose sight of why you're even doing the event.
And likely you're not going to be successful and not going to hit your goals.
So that I think includes creating an event brief marks.
Favorite.
He drove me nuts about this when we were at Drift together.
Where's your event brief?
Make sure you have a brief, make sure that that aligns all internal
stakeholders.
Right?
It has an event overview, your target audience, your timeline, your KPIs,
your messaging.
That is your kind of go to document to make sure that all teams are aligned.
And that's important before you even again, kind of start that in depth
planning
process.
Then we talked about venue sourcing, right?
You got to have a cool venue that works for the event.
I think that's number three, right?
You got to figure out where the event's going to be and then where all of your
evening events or ancillary events are going to be.
And that's got to happen pretty early, right?
And I think sometimes, you know, we struggle here with like planning ahead,
like in this environment, like you really got to be planning ahead for many,
many
reasons, engage your attendees and your sponsors throughout the lead up to the
event.
Right.
I think that's really important.
It's like we have people register.
We've launched registration for breakthrough 24 in December of 23.
That's a really long time prior to the event.
Right.
And so how do we come up with ways to engage those people and keep them excited
for those 10 months leading up to the event, right?
And sponsors too.
Sponsors play a huge role in a lot of our events and go a long way in offset
ting
our spend.
And so how do we make sure that those sponsors are engaged?
They're helping us promote the event, right?
I think that's super important.
Use your your partners to promote and help you get attendees there and just
make
sure that's happening.
And then that that's not forgotten about throughout the process.
Event promotion, right?
This is kind of a line with that.
But again, like have a really in depth audience acquisition plan.
And I think, and I talk about this a lot, like I am super lucky here at Sixth
Sense
because our internal CS and sales teams are obsessed with Sixth Sense events.
Like we launch registration for an event, a dinner, whatever, like sells out,
right?
And that's amazing.
But I think they are so on board because we've proven again and again the value
of events on the business, right?
On the pipeline, on the upsell, cross sell, whatever it is, we've proven the
value
and we've proven that we're going to create amazing experiences.
And so I would really try to, you know, and I'm lucky.
I stepped into Sixth Sense and that was already kind of here and in the culture
But if you don't have that, it could be really challenging, right?
Like Mark and I went through this at Drift like you got to get sales on board.
Like sales has to understand the value of getting prospects to events.
And that is hard.
And I think we spend a lot of time
during that this kind of attendee acquisition period of enablement.
So I would say internal enablement is also a huge component of what we do here.
And we spend a ton of time on enabling our internal teams.
We have like 50 slide decks with links and resources and past, you know,
Salesforce campaigns and all this data that we can give them.
Try to help them drive attendance to our events.
Step six, I would say, is design the experience, right?
I think again, it all comes down to the experience that you're going to create
on site at these events.
And so think about and, and yes, like I'm lucky.
I have a healthy budget.
I know everyone does not.
You can create really cool experiences and personalize things without a lot of
money, right?
And so just think about creative ways that you can do that and that you can
make
the event memorable and fun for people and networking, right?
We get constant, like there's not enough networking.
There's not enough networking.
So think about ways that you can, I'm not a fan of forced networking.
But think about ways you can organically create networking experiences
on site, you know, during your event.
I think seven execute the event, right?
That's easier said than done.
Everyone wants a flawless event, right?
Exclude the event, do the best you can.
And, and I would say, like I spend a lot of time with my team in advance of an
event
walking through the attendee journey, right?
They go from the hotel lobby.
They get to register.
What happens, right?
Where do they go?
Just think about all the things that happen on site and, and where can you put
like fun activations and experiences throughout again and create that amazing
journey on site.
And then eight, which I think most important from an event marketing
perspective,
measure and analyze the data post event, right?
Collect as much data as you possibly can.
I'll give a quick shout out to Bizibow.
Bizibow is our event platform and we have these, we use these super cool badges
through them called click badges.
They're basically like give us heat mapping information.
It tells us how long people were in each room, where they were, how many people
entered each session, like super cool.
It's also lead retrieval for our sponsors and for six cents.
Does a lot of cool things.
Collect as much data as you possibly can.
So that that will inform your strategy moving forward.
And then I think this, this also goes to the follow up plan, right?
Have a very in depth thought through follow up plan.
A month before the event, don't wait to figure out what your follow up is.
When the event's over, right?
It's too late at that point.
You need to have a follow up plan in place a month before you need to start
getting those emails, those blogs, like as much as you can possibly do in
advance
so that the event is over and the follow up goes out immediately, right?
And then you can watch the money flow in, right?
Watch that pipeline come in, hopefully.
So that's it.
Eight steps can have a great event.
So easy.
I mean, come on, how can this be?
Geez.
Oh, speak speaking of someone that hasn't doesn't have an event background,
right?
Well, well done.
Yeah, I completely evaked it in my entire bed.
Expert.
I have no idea why I was in high-risk, see mode air meat.
I mean, like, I mean, sure, I was thrown into events.
Luckily, I had Bethany on my team at drift.
Shout out to Jana to, I mean, Jana was there and then then Bethany came in.
I mean, my God, like I, I would have been screwed if I didn't have the two of
you.
But you missed the most important thing, Bethany.
You missed the most important thing.
Dress to impress.
That's the most important thing when it comes to events.
Dress to impress.
Okay.
I like that.
You guys, you get to take a page.
I'll add nine steps.
Number nine number nine.
Actually, that should be zero.
You dress to impress.
I mean, I'm half, half kidding.
Kind of.
All right.
That was incredible.
That was just incredible.
Nick, do we have other questions we want to ask Bethany because I feel like,
you know,
we're going to over like thousands of dollars for this, this masterclass in
events.
So the next question is, so let's do you, you talked a little bit about data.
I'm a huge believer of data.
And I think that, you know, data as a, as an event marketer, the field marketer
as anyone in revenue marketing, if you can paint the beautiful picture using
the
numbers, one, you get more budget and two, you get more headcount and you get,
hopefully the ability to do a lot more cool things.
So this is a two part question.
The first part is what data in multiple things helps you inform your event
strategy.
And then the second piece is what are the KPIs that are most important to you
and
that you think plays, you know, what feedback plays a role in that?
Yeah.
I mean, I think I talked a little bit about the sources of data, right?
But we spend a lot of time.
Again, pre event setting up dashboards and we have an awesome mops team, right?
But we have really complex Salesforce dashboards that help us kind of compile
all the data in one nice buttoned up place, right?
So pre event, we're looking at number of accounts registered customers versus
prospects, ICP, right?
And then, you know, I think we're, we're starting to transition into,
we used to have a pre event dashboard and a post event dashboard.
Now we're just kind of trying to centralize and, you know, KPIs that were
super focused on registrations.
I mean, breakthrough, like we have a registration goal.
All of our like large proprietary events, we have a registration goal and, you
know, almost more importantly is the show rate, right?
I mean, virtual events, I think we all know it's like 40% of you're lucky.
We strive for like a 95% show rate for all of our events and for breakthrough,
we pretty much hit that every year number of accounts in attendance.
So we look at our total number of accounts and we say we want 60% of all of our
accounts to attend breakthrough, right?
And that's important for us because again, we want these accounts to renew and,
and we see huge success with accounts that attend breakthrough.
So that's a huge metric for us.
Number of meetings on site and we touched upon this a little bit, but
I've never seen this before.
I came to sixth sense, but we are super focused on getting a meeting booked in
advance with every single account that attends breakthrough.
And that takes a ton of enablement and a ton of time internally to do that.
But we last year, we had a goal of 500.
I think we had 539 meetings on site at breakthrough.
It takes a lot of time.
And to Mark's point earlier about the agenda, it's hard to fit that many
meetings in the agenda, right?
Like we don't want to overlap with keynotes.
We don't want to overlap with the evening, right?
Like it's hard, but it really helps us understand the account and,
and build those relationships, which again is a huge part of what events
do for the business, right?
Is that relationship building sourced and influence pipeline, right?
Like these are the two kind of metrics, I mean, especially sourced.
We aim for 10x ROI for source pipeline, which is really hard, especially
at our user conference, which is 98% customers.
That's really hard.
And that goes back to what I talked about earlier is like every event can't
have
the same goals, right?
So the goals for breakthrough, I mean, that 10x again, like we're not
with the ACV of a new deal, like that's not the same as a 20K, 50K upsell,
right?
And so the source pipeline for breakthrough, we do dip below the 10x.
Although maybe not this year.
Well, we're going to try and influence pipeline, right?
I mean, it's super interesting to watch that number
and to see again the overall impact that events can have and how many people we
can touch through our events.
And then lastly, I would say revenue, right?
Like I have huge revenue goals, especially for breakthrough, but from a
sponsorship perspective and a ticket revenue perspective, this is a huge way
for me to like offset our events spend, right?
And again, like that money isn't going in my pocket, unfortunately, but it's
going toward creating a more amazing attendee experience, right?
So the more tickets we sell, we get a lot of requests for comp tickets and
free sponsor and all the sense like, no, we got to make money, right?
Like that's part of what this event does for the business is, you know, get
that revenue and offset the event spent.
So those are kind of our key KPIs.
Absolutely.
Yeah, that was fantastic.
So people first go to market, you know, we're big believers and, you know,
advocates of that events.
I mean, arguably one of the most people first things you can do as part of
your go to market.
I mean, seriously, what though is the most epic event when it comes to the
people involved and just the people experiencing the event together that you
think you've ever, you've ever done.
And then I'll give you maybe a two part question.
It's up to you if you want to answer it, no pressure though.
The most epic event does not have to be B2B by the way, FB2B, screw B2B,
that you attended.
That was an amazing people first experience.
So the one you hosted that was amazing and the one you attended.
My favorite event that I've ever planned was in 2019.
Um, I was working for LogMan at the time now go to, we had our sales
incentive in Dubai at the four seasons.
And it was crazy.
I mean, Dubai is so, everything is so over the top and Dubai to begin with.
And the final evening, I had 95 four wheel SUVs pull up to the four seasons.
We loaded people like four by four drove out to the desert and did dune
bugging for like 30 minutes out into this like amazing, like the middle of
the sand dunes, basically.
And I had a whole event set up there with like fire throwers and camels and
this like amazing entertainment.
And it was just super cool and so different.
And it was just one of those experiences that I, I hope people will never
forget.
That's tremendous.
That's, uh, that means, or Nick, I mean, that's what we'll do next.
Just put it on the left.
But we're going to do my.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Perch the tickets are not sure.
It's just my old money going to Dubai, but like, if someone was paying for me
to go
there, like, sure, why not?
Could be a tack six cents event in Dubai.
Who knows?
I like it.
I like it.
Okay.
And then did you answer the question though?
Did you, did you want to answer the second question?
Like, what's the most big non B2B events?
Like, yeah.
I mean, I think for me as like, you know, being an events professional, I think
Dreamforce to me is always one of those events that's just so cool to go to and
see come together.
Like it's just, I used to go back in the day when it was like a hundred
thousand
attendees and it would like take over it.
Now it's much smaller and I think different.
But it was just so cool.
Like when I was younger in my career just to go and see like everything they
did to
take over the city and just create these like amazing experiences in this crazy
expo hall.
And again, they're selling sponsorships for like millions of dollars.
It's just like super impressive all around.
Bethany, they do so much.
You are a.
I was going to say prodigy.
Maybe that's not the right adjective.
A queen of events, you know, give yourself whatever you want.
You deserve it.
Your event execution.
When I was at drift, we did flash.
The first event, by the way, that a company pretty much in our space did after
the
pandemic, we did this in March 2022 and we went for it.
And I thought it was great.
I thought people loved it and that we set the toll in the momentum for the next
, you
know, nine months of that year because of what we did at flash, Bethany.
So it really not we as you.
I didn't do anything again.
I don't know what I'm doing when it comes to events.
So again, Bethany, thank you so much.
Yes, of course.
Honestly, thank you, Bethany.
I learned a ton again as someone that has done this.
I learned even more from you.
So might take you up on that mentorship, but hopefully you like this exclusive
content.
Make sure to tell a friend, subscribe to tacknetwork.com for not only this
exclusive content, but lots of other exclusive content on how to match how
people buy today.
So that's it.
And hope you enjoyed episode one and we'll catch you at the next one.
Thank you for joining us for this exclusive edition of GTM News.
If people first content like this is your jam, you should think about joining
tack insider, our community and resource hub for GTM tech folks like you.
You can find more info on our website at tack insider.com.
And until next time, keep it people first, everybody.