Ketan:
So for anybody who's starting who's just thinking of starting a community right it could be a small Niche Community or whatever how should they be thinking of of events right and what what is the right time for them to start thinking that this is maybe a right time for a
webinar or a virtual conference
Asher:
yep yeah so the way I think about this is if you want to start a community right you need to be very clear of why you're starting the community for us there is no home for Partnerships people it was very clear right yeah but also there's no platform for Success there's no Institute or incident or or company that is focusing on helping partner people become partner operators right there are hundreds of companies that are trying to help VPS of sales become cros but there's no community that is focused on helping Partnerships people become Chief partner officers right right that's so true and you know good good go ahead sorry yeah go ahead yes I was just saying that you know Dave
your heart he uh runs exit five and he keeps saying that nobody goes to school for B2B marketing that's why we have
exit five and I think that whole so true for uh Partners partner people also
yeah no it it's it's true I mean but even Dave right like Dave's done amazing work at all these other companies and he
is Authority so that comes to the next part of like when you're thinking of starting a community just make sure you
have domain expertise that you have actually done the work you understand the journey you understand the problems
people are facing and you actually love the the domain because a lot of people
will start communities thinking that they would eventually go full time on it right and make millions from it right
and that may not be true because you just don't know right because if you were doing a marketing Community I would
say there are hundreds of marketing communities out there right there may be like 10 choices for for marketing
communities but there's maybe like two Partnerships communities today and even if there were 10 you would want to go to
the one where the owners or the founders have domain expertise and they have
domain actions because they everything that they build will be personalized to you
that's true that's true that would be the second piece of like when you're starting a community what you should watch out for right and then to answer
your question specifically where when is the right time to do events
I would say as soon as possible right because events help you
connect people because when you have when you run a panel you can connect people on on a on a panel right and then
there's another relationship that those people form but also you can promote people's brands
on an event and so the event you really need to look at event as a product and say well what
is the output of the event right I mean yes it is always to like attract new prospects and convert them into
customers but the customer success view of an event is promote people's Brands
connect them at a different level help them tell their story so that they can
be viewed as a human who has Rich experiences versus just a Partnerships
person right and so you have all these these qualities that can be uh
demonstrated through events and so for me it's like as soon as you can do them you should
awesome I think that's fantastic advice and um the advantage of that is you will know what works what doesn't work for
your community right earlier um and I imagine um the way you measure success for
events for partners or communities for example is going to be it's very different from how you measure success
for say a B2B webinar or a B2B event right um how do you typically measure success
for any events or event programs that uh partnership leader does yeah so so I would say the the customer
acquisition side of the measurement is probably the same we look at how many
people that signed up for an event were existing members and how many were prospects and then how how much uh uh
how much has a database increased form for uh of new contacts right so like
those are like typical acquisition stuff the other piece we do which is the customer success view of looking at the
events is we look at how many members uh showed up on an event
right how many times did those members show up on an event
okay right because all of those things also help with renewals right and so
that's that's one piece then the second piece is like okay it is an event helping us fulfill our promise right so
like very early on we were asked to help women in Partnerships
brand and so so we now strive for making sure
that 50 of the uh uh speakers are women
and the other 50 are men so we strive for those ratios right because it was something that our members asked us to
do right and so right those are like other ways of measuring events so so
um as a sales leader I would just say a customer acquisition is the key but a CEO you have to think about my customer
success you have to think about like how the industry is viewing your events are the events high quality or low quality
what is the the response rate of the quality of the events after the events
so there's all these like metrics that you have to look at that's why I I go back to like you need to look at event
as a product and say like hey these events are like SMB events and here's events or the
mid-market events and here's events that are Enterprise events right and and then and then say like what is the what does
this product actually do yeah you know and that thinking has helped me a lot in
uh working with Chris and Ty on the company yeah fantastic and you know just from
the point of um whether it's a high quality event or whether it's a work quality event I was
speaking with the Alex at uh Alex Temple at uh exploring so they basically
designed these Event Event feedback loops and Design Systems for events and stuff
um so one of the things he mentioned that was it's very important to build a feedback loop right when you're planning
that event right so how are you guys collecting feedback for any event virtual or in person that you do
yeah so I would say our transparently are that feedback loop may not be the best that we have today right we're
working to improve that the uh but our but because we have a 24 by 7 online
community right yeah like when our events are posted and we post the recordings inside of the community we
don't post our recordings externally right because they're for our members right so so when we post the recordings
people actually you can see if people were like like it or dislike it or put a comment on it and stuff like that and
that's good enough for us right but also for us to say did we hit the right topic
the conversion from uh attendees to some registrants to attendees right it
becomes goes very high and that's when we know when we've nailed a really good topic and the topic is current and it's
applicable to a number of people is when the the attendee to registration ratios
is just High
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