How to Grow Your Revenue With Dinners & Live Events

0:01So I'm going to talk about how to grow your revenues by throwing dinners. Because again, webinars, conferences, dinners, they go a long way, especially if you're in B2B. It crushes for closing because you're actually building relationships and relationships go a long way. People remember how you made them feel. That is the saying. And so I've been doing dinners for a very long time. Neil comes to a lot of these dinners. And I think I've got it pretty down pack now. I've been doing them probably start of 26 years old or so. And now I'm 39. So I've been doing it 13, 14 years or so. And I'll give you a couple of things that work for me when I throw these dinners to have a good one.

0:40One, the very first dinner that I threw was directors of marketing and CMOs because I wasn't like an entrepreneur yet. I was still like 26 years old. And so my thing is, if you're gonna throw a dinner, always make sure that the people are around the same level because you can't invite like an intern and then invite like an entrepreneur and then invite like a director. It's just, you're not gonna talk about the same things and people are gonna hate you for that. So you gotta curate a really good group of people Okay. Ideally, you feed them. Ideally, you're the one paying for it. The first time I was broke.

1:08So we only had a half eaten bag of chips. And so we're just sharing my, I think it was like a, you know, Lay's potato chips. That's cool. Something's better than nothing. But they loved it. They loved it. The key thing is the content. Going back to the content again, right? You talk about make sure the topics are good. So let's say, Neil, you came to the dinner. You had to bring the who you are, what you do. And then one thing you're, what are you struggling with right now? And also like the best marketing hack that you have right now, right? Everyone likes hacks. Wait, can we go back a little bit?

1:34Yeah. You decide if you want to do a group, the group could be like CMOs or directors or VPs or even just entrepreneurs. I'm assuming you've done entrepreneur ones too. All the time, yeah. And some of them are related to a specific category like D to C or some of them are just broad. Yeah. How do you, okay, you got the list. Let's say you're going after VPs. How do you know who to invite? Because there's so many people in companies. And how do you get at those people if someone's not well-networked like you are? Because when you first started off, you weren't well-networked. No offense. No network, yeah.

2:05And you got access to these people and you got them coming in there. So what's the process for that? Yeah, great question. So I'll give you an example. This was maybe one or two years after I did the first one, right? But there's this one dinner where I remember I got three customers from it. And I did this in SF, right? So we had, this always worked, especially if you have agency clients or software clients. So you invite three or four or five customers. So half the group is your customers. The other half is people that you like to, that you're targeting, right? And then what you do is you say, hey, this is gonna be a CMO dinner.

2:35It's gonna be, it's a private dinner. I always say private. People, for whatever reason, private gets them, right? So it's a private dinner. It's gonna be CMOs. It's invite only. It's amazing people. Here's who's coming so far. Are you in, right? I got one spot for you. Are you in? So it makes it seem super exclusive and they feel really special, right? And you do this over email? I do this over email, yeah. And it always, I always, so I might overextend a little bit and invite like maybe 15 or 20 people, but I'm aiming for 10 really at the end of the day. I always end up filling it. Does that make sense?

3:05I'm a little bit confused. Maybe I misunderstood you. You're saying these are the people who are attending or invited. So I will have like five guaranteed that are in already, right? And I'll say these people are in so far. How'd you get the five in at the beginning? Yeah, so in the beginning, I started doing the podcast, right? Right. And then or let me rephrase. How does someone else go get the five people in when they don't have a podcast and an audience? Well, I didn't have an audience yet. I was still starting out. Right. So I got the first initial five. I said, hey, it's going to be great food.

3:39It's going to be CMOs. I didn't name who was coming yet. Right. I said, this is who's I said, it's good. We're going to be at this restaurant. It's going to be these types of people that will be there. I'm handling the bill. And are you in? And then once I got five like bigger names to agree, then at the same time, I was reaching out to other people. I would just start to include them. And then without fail, I would be able to get 10, even though I only reached out to 15, 20 people. Oh, so it wasn't that hard. No. So you reach out to initial group, call it like five, 10 people. Some of them are naturally going to say yes because you're saying these are the type of people.

4:12Once you have enough key people that said yes, you then, when you're sending the remaining emails, you're starting to list the people out instead of saying these are the type of people. Exactly. And then I say, look, it's easy for you. It's a great restaurant, great people. Just show up and then we'll... we're going to talk about marketing, right? Or I'm starting to do these AI founder dinners in LA, which, you know, obviously you're invited. But the criteria for this one is everyone has to be good at AI and everyone has to give me their tactics, right? And I have to approve. And so that's a little different, but let me rewind.

4:42So I started doing this bag of chips and the whole agenda was basically, hey, what's your biggest marketing challenge? What's your biggest marketing hack? Who are you? What do you do type of thing, right? And then we kind of went around the table. Everyone shared for like 10, 15 minutes a pop, right? And we basically gave them advice or we like ripped them apart or we shared our experiences, right? And then sometimes I'll just have like general entrepreneur dinners where it's just entrepreneurs and who you are, you've seen these, who you are, what you do, one thing you need and one thing you can offer.

5:10And then I just connect everyone afterwards. But if you start doing enough of these, people start to see you as the connector. And I just, in the beginning, I used to split the bill. I just found it way easier to just pay for it. But you also, if you're starting out, maybe you can't afford to pay for it. and that's okay. Half eaten bag of chips, right? The second time we did it was I ordered Mediterranean food for everyone, right? Didn't break the bank, but at least it was a nice food from my end. But you got to start somewhere is my main point. How do you control the bill to make sure that it doesn't go crazy?

5:37Because people start ordering tons of drinks and all this kind of stuff. Great question, Adam. Yeah, so you say what I do is usually it's like drinks are either ordered by you, you'll take care of it. All the food ordering is I take care of it too, right? And then you're not saying, not only do you pay for it, but you're saying you order the food yourself for everyone. Like you do family style. I do family style. Yeah. But you have to build experience to get there. Like we have a mutual friend who loves ordering for everyone. I think I've just gotten used to doing that. We have a mutual friend that loves ordering for everyone?

6:09Yeah. Oh, maybe you're not there. Longer hair. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. He loves ordering. He always over-orders too. I know the always over-orders. Huh? I've been to a restaurant with him in, was it Miami? Yeah, maybe. I think it was Miami. It was this place where it was exclusive. I could be wrong. ZZ's. Was it ZZ's? No, I brought you there and I ordered. Oh, that was you. I ordered for everyone. Yeah. Yeah. So I've gotten good at ordering for everyone. Oh yeah. The other person is how you got the membership. Oh yeah. Yeah. We signed up together. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We'll lead us straight at that.

6:41But my point, so even there we did a dinner too, right? But when you do these things eventually, like, cause everyone asked me, oh, how do you build a network? That's how you build a network. And then going back to the SF dinner, just to wrap this up, and then we can move on to live events. I think we got two publicly traded companies and one analytics company that ended up selling to Google, I think. And that was because of that one dinner. So that's probably Google Urchin. No. That's a different analytics company. Looker? Looker sold to them as well, I believe. So let's talk about you getting clients.

7:13So you got three clients. And how many people were roughly there? Ten. Ten? I'm assuming this was a high conversion rate because you remember it. Yeah. Higher than your normal or average. Yeah. What did you do to transition them from, you know, if I recall correctly, who you are, what do you do are the questions you're asking. Plus, what is your biggest marketing challenge? Biggest marketing challenge and also biggest marketing hack because it's information sharing. Okay. And then people are helping each other. Yeah. How did you transition that being at a dinner and it being casual? I'm assuming it would have been really awkward right there to be like hey we should work together let me get your phone number let's pitch you like I'm assuming you weren't that direct because that's not your personality no no you don't do that it's uh so they hit you up afterwards because you remember that book influenced the Robert Cialdini book right so if I do you a favor inherently you feel like you owe me something already which is why Neil doesn't really let you buy him food often I don't like people buying me or doing me favors either because then immediately I feel like I owe you, right?

8:13So the whole idea here is like, you, I just seek to give and you're the same way too, I seek to give without getting anything back. And it keeps compounding because it's like, oh, what else do you need? Because I actually do follow up on the things that they're challenged with. And I do try to help them and make introductions. Eventually, it's like, oh, by the way, we actually need marketing help. You know, are you the one right? Or who can I talk to? And, you know, sometimes we can take it on sometimes refer it out, but it's fine. I don't have any expectations. I think you actually do a better job of this where it's like, when you do the webinars, I'll scan for this one over here.

8:41If you need to talk to whatever, scan over here, I think we should in the future do a better job of just probably calling out, hey, this is single grain that actually sponsored this. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. And then when you got those three businesses to pay you, did it take a long time to close them? Those actually all happened in less than a year. That's pretty quick because it's outbound or I look at it as outbound. You're building relationships and network. Yeah. And then I will say one of those that close, that person went to another publicly traded company and followed us and then went to another company that raised a bunch of money and followed us.

9:14So she followed us two more times after that. A large chunk of our clients are from employees who change jobs. And we were working with them at the previous company. That is actually how we have gotten a lot of our clients. Another interesting point of view is we're a small company. I consider it small. People consider nine figures, depending on what country you're in, a large corporation. I I consider that small. In America. Yeah, because you look at like NVIDIA and just it's like, okay, even if I got to a billion in revenue, which I'm not at, I would start becoming a small, large company in my eyes, right?

9:53Because you look at like NVIDIA or Google. I was looking at Google's earnings. They do over$300 billion a year in revenue. If I got to a billion and I don't know if I'll get there. You're a third of a percent. Yeah, one three hundredth of a percent. And by the time I get there, what are they going to do? $700 billion? You know? Maybe even more. One of the ways we get it, because we have thousand plus people, that's small in comparison to Google, NVIDIA, you know, the list goes on and on. Microsoft has 250K and they've cut some, but yeah, 250K. Yeah. We're so tiny compared to them. And when you look at it, some of our employees leave to work at other clients and corporations.

10:34And then it actually solidifies our relationship with that company that is paying us. and then we make more money over time or they hop around to another company or they left and like, hey, I want to go corporate instead of agency side and then they hire us. Yeah. Let me ask you this. This is a side question. How often do people boomerang back to MV Digital? Like they leave and they come back. You see it happen a decent amount? No. The really good people, we try not to let go. Of course not. The average people, let's not even talk about the bottom performers every organization i don't care what size you are there's always people who are your a players b players c players and then you shouldn't have anything under c but people tend to especially when you get large we try to keep our a players forever when you want to talk about like c players specifically some of them go other places or even some of the b players or b minus players more specifically and not a big portion but a good chunk.

11:38Call it like 15, 20%. Try to come back after a few years. And we tend not to rehire B players and C players. If an A player leaves and wants to come back, we will rehire an A player. That's what I'm asking. How often do A players leave and then come back? I can't recall when we've had an A player leave. Okay. Well, that's great. That's another thing we should talk about, how you retain these A players. It's actually a cheat code and I I don't know how to retain them. The cheat code is, is I hire really good executives, like a good CEO who runs the organization. I let them run it their way. I stay in my lane.

12:17Like I work more on the software side than the agency side. I'm not talking about - M &A side? And M &A. But when I say like M &A, there's not that much time I can spend on M &A on a daily basis. You're saying you don't really get involved on the people side? I don't get really involved on people side, but on the agency side, I do get involved with clients and work, but I don't get involved in like day-to-day operations being like, this is how you should do your job better or this is what you could be doing. Like I try not to meddle too much because what I've learned is I have my way of doing things and I may believe that my way is right.

12:49Other people have their way of doing things and they may think their way is better than my way but if they get the job done just as efficient as me, produce the same amount of results, who the heck cares? Why should I meddle in the first place? All that's gonna do is just create friction. And because I stay out and the CEO tends to work with people he's worked with in past organizations that have been top performers. There's a relationship there. Yes, and he takes care of them. Yeah. So they'll come and it's very unlikely that they leave. That's good. That's good. That's a whole other episode for another day.

13:20Okay. Now, look, the funny thing, I told you that this first episode would be like 20, 30 minutes. This first one, we're still not even done yet. It's been 30 minutes already. More. We started at... 33? Oh, 40 minutes. Okay, so let's wrap this part up and then we can move on here. You're gonna go to the live events? Yeah, and I'll make it simple. So live events. I just did a live event. Okay, so here's how to grow your revenue using live events. So just at a live event. Wait, do you want to clarify live event being a conference? Conference, yes. Like a user conference. I need to get these two.

13:50I want to hear from you. Not a live webinar. Yeah, not a live webinar. Okay, so here's how you grow your revenue using live conferences or live even user conferences. So we both have experience shares here. So the recent one I did was more of me assisting YPO. And that one was 100, 185 people that showed up. And then we did it in Miami. So I will just say that of that one, we probably, I think we added four deals from that one, maybe. And maybe six in the pipeline or something like that. And that wasn't the attention, but that's just, it happens like that. You know what I mean? Or there's a bunch of agencies that want to partner up.

14:26There's this guy that does direct mail. He wants to do something. I'm sure we're going to do something. So there's a lot of angles here. By the way, Eric's not dumb. He knows that even though that wasn't his intention, one of the reasons he partnered up is because he knew that it would also generate business. Which is why I was okay not getting paid for it. And I was okay with all the profits going to YPO. And I was okay even sponsoring my own event and paying partially for my own ticket and that type of thing. And because I knew the long-term benefits would accrue, right? And so the way to look at webinars or live events or dinners is that sometimes it might not happen immediately.

14:59it's going to, sometimes it's going to be delayed, but everything we've done, like the relationship Neil and I have, it's been 14 years or so we've, we've learned over the years, even though we might not be the best with people management, both of us, is that everything comes down to people at the end of the day. And if you can control the event, the, the, the agenda, you can control the activities and all those things, you become the node and everyone looks to you just like when you're hosting your own dinners, you know, webinars. But I want to know from your side too, you do these events with internationally, right?

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17:05Or if you need help with content creation, Shopify has got AI tools that write your product descriptions, craft page headlines, and even enhance your product photos. Shopify lets you easily create email and social media campaigns to reach customers wherever they are, whether they're scrolling or strolling. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into with Shopify on your side. Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash marketing school. Go to shopify.com slash marketing school, shopify.com slash marketing school. Yeah, we call them conferences, but yes, We do conferences globally.

17:43And I actually understand what you mean by live events because conferences is a bad term. Not a bad term, but not an accurate term. Because a version, we do two types of live events. One is a conference, like you and I speaking at HubSpot's conference. The second is we'll invite our clients and potential clients, and we'll give a presentation, a network, maybe provide some drinks or pastries, depending on the time of the day. I just did one in France. It was morning, so it was pastries. and like juice and stuff like that. But when I do it in Brazil, it tends to be more in the evening. So it'll be like alcohol and appetizers.

18:19Okay, great. So look, and we'll just give you a couple of tips because we did for webinars and dinners and we can finally move on here. So when I do my conferences, one, we try to do it in a nice spot. So that was in the St. Regis on the beach in Bell Harbor in Miami. It was a nice spot, right? We tend to just try to make the food buffet style. But more importantly, it's the quality of the conversation. So we tried to leave a lot of room for networking. So we had this speed networking thing in the very beginning where everyone was networking for like five minutes a pop. And then we do leave a lot of room for breaks for people to talk to each other.

18:50And then more importantly, if you're gonna try to draw people to your events, usually you wanna have a really good topic. And what is a good topic usually is if you can get the latest marketing speakers, because this is a marketing conference, and they'll talk about the latest things such as AI. That is how this event ended up breaking records from all the previous events that happened. I think it was a big part was one, One, it was Miami, but two, the speakers were really good. And that's related to topical relevance. Yep. Yeah. What do you end up doing with the contact records after? Because I've seen your emails.

19:21Yeah. So when you're doing a co-event with people, you negotiate, or when someone's doing an event and you're speaking, you try to negotiate where you can get access to the email list or they send a blast depending on the privacy laws and the locations of the individual. But what do you typically do in that email blast? Because I've seen you generate revenue from that. We couldn't do much with this one. We did send an email and I even got in trouble for this one still. But we did send an email saying, hey, here are the slides. If you want to catch up at any time, just let me know type of thing.

19:47It wasn't saying book a call with my agency or whatever. Right. And even in our goodie bag, we had this little thing. It's like because we didn't have like any physical thing to give away. But I'm like, OK, well, we can put something in there. It was just a card to say, OK, here's like a free trial or something like that. But that was basically it. And that actually did generate calls. So, yeah. But someone complained to me that I was soliciting for business. And I'm like, but I just shared my slides and said, thank you for coming to the event. Here's the slides. And then like, you know, feel free to reach out if you need anything.

20:17My co-champion, Jesse, did the same thing as well. But I got in trouble for it. So, yeah. And Tim also got in trouble too. That one was funny. Tim Solo, remember? What did he do? For HS? Because he was, they said he was too promotional. Oh yeah, dude. That, I don't know, man. It's like, where do you draw the line then? And he also paid to sponsor. Yeah. And he flew all the way from Ukraine. Or not Ukraine. Singapore. Singapore, yeah. I'm with you. I'm like, Tim, you paid for it. Who cares what they say? You promote as much as you want because at the next YPO marketing event, they'll want you to sponsor.

20:53And also, don't treat a member like this that did this for free and put in all this heart and soul effort while he was going through family stuff, too. And so he just left me with a really bad taste. By the way, he has a really cool kids book. What? If you have a kid, check out Ahrefs' kid book. I don't know if you can buy it or where to get it. Hit up Tim Solo if you want it. Tim, I'm sorry for all the mentions or people hitting you up from this. But it is a cool kid's book. I don't know if they'll send you one. I thought it was really cool. They're competitors. So for me to say that, I do genuinely like Tim.

21:26I don't know the founder, but I love Tim. And I thought the book was really cool. Hit Tim Solo up on Twitter or X. He's very responsive. And I had Brazilian with him afterwards after we did a podcast. It was funny. We debated about AI and then we went to eat Brazilian food. So, yeah. Okay. All right. You pick the next one. That was almost a 50-minute topic. The next one's pretty quick. Did you see the stats on Google AI overviews on Search Engine Land? No. There was a case study that they had. Did you know that AI overviews, because typically they're always at the top, right? And I think it was only 2 % of the time they weren't at the top.

22:00it's now shifted to 12.4 % of the time AI overviews are not position one. They're trying to shift it below the sponsored ads. Not necessarily sponsored ads. They're trying to shift it to what they think is going to benefit people the most. It's like showing people also ask at the top or where are they putting it. Just sometimes depending on the query type AI overview may be helpful. Maybe they're not sure. So then they may, I bet you they're trying to figure out should we show AI overviews even if it may not be the exact thing, but just put it somewhere in the middle versus always showcasing it at the top.