Co-Founder Bizzabo! Connecting with People in an AI World w/ GUEST!! Alon Alroy Co-Founder & CMO | Ep. 438

0:00Welcome to Do This Not That, the podcast from marketers. We share quick tips, things you can do right now, and then we add a little bit of chaos at the end of every episode. We also keep it short, like this intro. Let's check it out. We are back for Do This, Not That podcast, and I have an awesome guest. I really do. Now, if you're even remotely in the world of events, you know this dude, okay, because he's a really big deal. Olon Alroy, who is the co-founder, CMO, and chief customer officer of Bizabo. You know Bizabo because when you get your badge, you got that thing at the bottom where you squeeze it and you connect with other people.

0:36It's the coolest thing of all time. But beyond that, just squeezing the badge thing. They're really the first event experience operating system for hybrid, virtual, in-person events. Basically, if you're in the event world, Bizabo is one of those companies that you've been following, that you're seeing everywhere. And alone is like the guy. Named 40 Under 40 leader. He's been named the top 100 most influential people in the event space. The 19 executives that are shaping the industry. He knows about events. That's why I brought him here, because we're going to talk about events in the age of AI and all things.

1:06Alon, how are you doing, man? That was a great intro. I can keep listening to that even more. Thank you very much. I'm so happy to be here. Amazing. All right. So before we get into kind of AI and how it's crushing all industries and the event world, oh, no, it's going to collapse, but that's not the truth. Tell us a little bit, how did Alon become Alon? How did this all happen? um well we are my co-founders and i actually are not events people and we all of us served in the air force then we um started together in university and we actually each had their own domain i started business and law another one computer science and we met at this entrepreneurship program that was a year-long venture creation program we actually had an idea that was very similar to Airbnb.

1:56It was back in 2011. We started working on that venture and started going to a lot of events to potentially recruit investors and employees and to get feedback. And we felt very frustrated about not finding the right people. Everything was chaotic. And we started getting an itch to events and started speaking with a lot of people about the networking experience, the organization experience that was very lacking. And we realized that we're very passionate about solving a big problem at the big market. We kind of like abandoned that other venture and started jumping in into that industry. And I think we had an advantage of not coming from the industry.

2:39So we could ask all kinds of stupid questions and learn from all the people that we talked about. We raised some money from family and friends. That was early 2012. I moved to New York. I'm still here to get closer to the market and closer to hopefully getting to product market fit. And I interviewed, I don't know, hundreds and thousands of event organizers throughout the years. And because I think that's how you learn. You ask smarter people on their problems and then you try and build solutions to satisfy that. And over the years, I had the privilege of building all of our go-to-market functions.

3:18or sales team or marketing team or customer success team operations so had to hands-on kind of like build everything from scratch and we were grateful that over the years we saw a lot of ups and downs but more ups than downs raised a lot of money and kind of grew nicely and today we are lucky to have some of the uh best event teams on earth uh us visible to power their events I love it. And I see it. So I go to events. I'm using your technology. I'm aware of it. And it's and it's awesome. And I think you have a unique perspective. You know, right now, when people are going to events, companies will send to me the event.

3:58Oh, they spent a thousand dollars ticket. What was the ROI in that? We got a booth. We just dropped 30 grand on a booth. What was the ROI in that? And they take a step back and you know what? This is a money loser for us. Why are we getting involved with events? And now with AI, it's like it's even harder to justify because it's do we even need to go there to learn anything? You just get it all out of chat, GPT or whatever. So how do we look at events these days in terms of the return on investment that we're making? And is AI destroying events? What's your take? Well, there is a lot to unpack here.

4:31Let's maybe start a bit about. about AI and events just a little bit. I think we are living in a super exciting, interesting times in which AI is all over us. Most people are super overwhelmed with what's going on. But one thing we see very, very clearly, because we have data that shows it, that the number of events is at all times high, actually more than pre-pandemic, which is great because honestly, as a human, I'm very happy about it, that people still believe in the power of handshakes and face-to-face meetings. But there's another factor to it. AI creates a lot of digital noise. It's so easy to send emails.

5:14I know you're a master at sending great emails, so you know that people get the highest number of emails ever. So there's a lot of digital noise. And to get through the clutter and build real relationships with the community, with prospects, with customers, I'm pretty confident that AI will not be able to replace that. So in your marketing mix, if you're in the business that relationship is important, events probably will play an even more dominant role in the marketing mix today and in the future. There are many ways in which AI can enhance it. So I'm definitely not anti-AI. Like on the contrary, I think it will make our meetings actually way more effective.

6:00less time on logistical stuff, more time on intentional meetings that deliver on the promise. And you're like, okay, what is the ROI of events? Why are we running them? How should we even measure them? Honestly, event is a big, broad word, and they have many, many different objectives. Some are related to influencing pipeline and revenue, and some are about, honestly, planting seeds for a relationship that maybe one day will turn into revenue. And some are all about brand and to make sure that your brand is seen because there are events that you just, you need to be there. You need to be there for the press.

6:40You need to be there for the influencers. You need to be there so the competition sees you. And you need to be there sometimes even for your own employees. So the approach to ROI is unique, but they can be very measurable depending on what the objective is. So, okay. And I think that's really important. I'm glad that you said that because I agree that the word events is almost like, it's not fair, right? Because you could throw a dinner with 20 people, or you could put on an event that like Dreamforce, there's a hundred thousand people and somehow they're both, they're both events. Yeah. Right.

7:14And so for everyone out there is like, well, I don't put on Dreamforce. I don't even put on a conference that has 500 people. but I would like to have events as part of my marketing mix. How do you go about saying, we have no line item for this in our budget? We don't have anything to do in that, but I want to start a small event. How do you go about that internally? Say, we're going to start out with a dinner. We're going to start with a hundred person thing. How do you actually initiate internally and justify starting out having events in your organization? Because I want to figure out how to do that for in-person events for my own business?

7:50Yeah, no, that's a great question. And one tip that worked for us is the following. First of all, I'm a big believer in micro events and dinners and kind of like small field events. Having said that, even to run, let's say, a 15 to 20 people dinner at a major city will cost you$10 ,000 to$14 ,000. So that's a lot of money. How do you go about it? One, you're very intentional on who do you invite. and two, at least for the first ones, partner with another brand. Because if you split the bill between three to four partners, then you're looking at 2 ,000, 3 ,000. That's our approach. We take the role of organizing it.

8:35We'll reach out to a few partners. Everyone chips in. They get the, you need to make sure there is a win-win as always with partners. They get to sit at the table. they get access to the whole list they need to contribute to guests and suddenly you have a win win win one more interesting for the guests they're able to actually engage with several vendors and two very it might way easier to prove roi for 2000 depending of course what your business and what are your what's your acv and all that but uh that's a more risk-free approach and also when you split the promotional efforts with more partners way easy to to fill the room so a strong proponent that doing micro events with the ecosystem as long as you have overlap around your icp your ideal customer profile so everyone can benefit from those in the room see i love that because it allows you to kind of grow from there i think it's when people say to me they're like because we've been on virtual events.

9:39They'll say, well, you should do a big in-person one. I'm like, that's a massive roll of the dice. That's a massive cash outlet. And I have no idea how the hell it's going to go. But you do a dinner, you partner up with a couple people, it works. Okay, let's grow from there. But let's flip the script for a second here. Instead of doing these micro events, which I think is awesome, a lot of people either exhibit at events, they sponsor events, they're thinking about, should I exhibit here, there, wherever? And so often people look at their ROI and be like, oh man, that was terrible. We can't show any value there.

10:10What are some secret sauce things that people are doing wrong as it relates to exhibiting or sponsoring at events of almost any size? That's a great one. Because as you said earlier, some companies invest. Sometimes they spend, but sometimes they invest$30 ,000,$50 ,000,$100 ,000 in the booth. They invest so much in the design of it and how it looks like. and to get the internal buy-in and they say we have to be there and so on so on and then they forget to invest at least the same level of effort in activating their go-to-market team and actually preparing them for the on-site experience and then you see things like reps that are on their phones when an audience walks or lack of outreach and and prep before the event and it's also very difficult to look at the numbers if they measure the numbers to prove the ROI.

11:09Another thing that I found to be a bit crazy is that the lack of understanding of follow-up urgency. If you speak with a prospect at the show, you should assume that that prospect spoke with 20 other exhibitors and the speed to get to their inbox with a thoughtful, intentional, personalized generalized note influence a lot whether you will continue the conversation or not. So practical tips is to work with your go-to-market team, set expectations on what are the metrics, what are the goals of each individual person who is attending, who is being paid to go, pre, during, and post. And it's important to distinguish between pre, during, and post.

11:51pre you're expected to reach out post you're expected to greet people do demos you're supposed to get to 10 leads whatever follow up this is how you do it this is how you're going to measure it and it will never be successful without a good go-to-market plan and collaboration so it's not enough to just have an amazing booth it's even way more important to activate your kind of like go to market partners to make sure that that investment actually translates to results otherwise though there will not be a next time in the age we live it with everyone's maximizing for profitability and you need to prove results specifically at a kind of like revenue driven events which you most of the exhibition at events are related to revenue driven objectives i think it's so valuable for people to hear about being intentional before during and after not even just about you know exhibiting but if you are going to a meeting if you're going to a cocktail party somewhere or whatever you're not going in my opinion it's terrible to have a good time you're going there because so and so is going to be there you're going to try to get to know them you're going to follow up with them and i think you know to your point i don't think enough of anybody business people marketers whatever are intentional about their human interactions and when you were you know launching you know bizabo you entered into a category that had monsters in it giant companies and that had to be like is this gonna can we even get traction here why would anybody listen to us Was that part of your playbook?

13:21How do you enter in, forget about events or whatever, but how do you enter into a category that's dominated by some massive companies and be able to break through like you all did? So we are indeed in a market that has an 800-pound gorilla. It's a market leader. Their company name is Sevent. They've been around, I think they celebrated their 25th birthday last year. Congratulations. Honestly, a great company. they got almost a billion dollars in revenue. So heads off. We believe that there are many things that we do much better. And of course, as a strategy, they have way more resources than us.

13:59Like I'm sure many of your listeners compete with bigger organizations. And it was clear to us that we need to compete differently. If we do the same thing they do, we're always going to be behind because they're bigger, they're fast, they have more resources. So we like to kind of like take the challenger approach, meaning think about AVI versus Hertz. One, we're going to work way harder. And two, we need to act like a speedboat. And I'll give you an example. During COVID, March 2020, we only did in-person events. The virtual was not even a thing. and it was very clear to us that unless we do something very differently and be first to market we are going to die as a company if you go to our blog on march 22nd 2020 you're going to see a blog post in which we launch a solution for virtual events now we did not know that virtual events would actually become a thing but it was clear to us we need to act fast and be a speedboat you know when C-Event launched their first virtual offering, August.

15:06And even that was an announcement that it will come soon. Two weeks versus six months. In addition, kind of a challenging brand is all about truly understanding the real pains of your big competition customers and speak very specifically to their pains. One of our more successful campaigns was what we call Busy versus Venti. I'm sure that if you Google Busy versus Venti campaign by Bizabo, you're going to, it won some awards and all that. And I believe that one thing you can do is to do things that don't scale until you can't. So we truly invested for our size. We invested in this big campaign.

15:53We had these two characters similar to Mac versus PC or Android versus iPhone. and I'm not sure if you saw these competitive campaigns. And we had Venti, which is a character that likes to vent, similar to maybe some C-Vent customers. And that campaign only spoke to real pains we heard on the phone from customers. And then there was Busy, which is a super cheerful character that highlights the things that we do better. So these days, you just need to do things that don't scale. We cannot scale that campaign. but it was very clear that we need to just challenge the big gorilla to go outside of our comfort zone and to make sure that it's kind of like this purple cow moment that their customers or the community will not be able to ignore.

16:39So to do some crazy things from time to time when you compete against a gorilla is something that I really recommend to do. And there could be backlash. You can get some scary letters. People will react with, oh, no, I can't believe they did it. and if it feels a little bit not comfortable, it means you're on the right track. Yeah, first of all, I love that. And I also think it's a great business lesson that so often, like I love the show Shark Tank, but the problem with Shark Tank is everybody that goes on to Shark Tank, they're trying to invent a product that's never existed before. They think that they can't go into a category of this competition because they'll never break through.

17:14But I'm of the belief that you want to look at the categories that have the most competition because there's probably enough business there for one more company. Maybe if that company does a little bit of a better job, So I love how you steered towards a category that was competitive as opposed to just trying to recreate the wheel and make something that's never existed before. Because obviously you guys have done very, very well playing kind of that challenger role. And I'm sure that's something that you thought about that, you know, there's got to be enough business there for everybody because events are exploding, right?

17:42Totally. Yeah. All right. So, all right. Before we run out of time here, I'm just curious about something. Non-Bizabo events or whatever. Do you just like love events? Are you like at Coachella and Lollapalooza and you just every day like, what event am I going to go to this weekend? Or is that not what you're doing in your free time? It's a great question. I think I love people more than I love events. And I'm kind of like I'm a super social individual. And I believe events just kind of like bring that all together. So it's not that I'm in love with events. i'm in love with the outcome of events that uh it's actually a superhuman thing and during the pandemic we we did this kind of like when everyone thought that in-person events will not will never come back because look we can meet virtually honestly we're praying that everyone were wrong and that we actually made a big bet like click the smart badge technology we bought that at the peak of the pandemic when no one talked about in-person events and we were like it doesn't make sense like people will need to meet people will need to engage so we made a big investment that really paid off but uh no it's not about me being in love with events it's me being in love with people and events is just a great medium to to to bring them together i guess you're a better person than i am i like to sit home and i like to lie to people and say i have other plans and i like to sit on my couch and just watch tv and say oh no no i'm at a dinner but i'm really not at a dinner.

19:12So we host people every Friday. We had 30 people at our apartment last week. So wow. Yeah, that sounds like a nightmare to me. Amazing. Well, by the way, if you invite me, I'll definitely unfortunately I'm busy. But thank you for the invitation. All right. Before we run out of time, we're going to put it all in the show notes. But how does everybody get involved with you? Should they follow you on LinkedIn? What should they do? Tell them everything. You can follow me on LinkedIn. You can follow Bisabo on LinkedIn. Bisabo.com is where to find us and evaluate whether we can help you would love to help and you talk we talked a lot about micro events we actually have a webinar about micro events in two weeks on visible.com you can find it or send me a note i'll send you a link but we generate a lot of valuable content so feel free to just follow us and hopefully you'll find it valuable yeah and i'm not just saying this because i'm staring alone here he really does there his company shares a lot of stuff.

20:07And let me spell his name and the company. So we all get it right. It's A-L-O-N-A-L-R-O-Y. Okay. You're not going to find many of those on LinkedIn. So you could find him. And Visibo is B-I-Z-Z-A-B-O. Follow everybody, connect, do it all. Great guy. Alon, thanks for being here, my man. Thank you. You did it. You made it to the end, but wait, the party is not over. Listen, I want to keep hanging out, subscribe to this podcast. And if If it wasn't the worst podcast you've ever listened to, give it a five-star review. Why not? But you know what? I want to do even more with you. Go to gurumediahub.com, and we can partner there.

20:45You can find out about all of our free events, all of our stuff. And if you're epically bored, go to jschwedelson.com, and we can stay connected. You can find my newsletter and everything else I got going on. Thanks for being here, and hope you subscribe.