How To Throw A Slam Dunk Event That Generates Customers For You, The 7 Habits of High Performing Marketers, Why You Should Make Your SaaS Company Free, 99% Of Content Creators Don't Think Like This

0:00I have this thing called the YPO Global Marketing Summit. So it's a members-only type of thing. But because I've done events for a couple years, I think I have a sense on how you can throw a slam-duck event that generates customers for you. Yeah. And by the way, I thought this event was at the Four Seasons. It's not at the Four Seasons. St. Regis. Yeah. Oh, that's great. Do you know how much the rooms are at that Four Seasons? No,$1 ,000. Oh, I'm talking about the Four Seasons Surfside, which is near the one where we're doing it this time. Because this one's like 30 minutes out from Miami. Oh, it's not your old condo.

0:31No, no, no, no. So this four seasons, the one next to ours, like four or$5 ,000 a night. Wow. And St. Regis? St. Regis is like a thousand or something. Yeah. But then we have a special rate. We have a group rate. I mean, it's free for you, but like, yeah. Yeah. Okay. So how to throw a slam dunk event that generates customers for you. The main thing is for us, this event is probably going to be the biggest it's ever been um i think we're going to hit a record um and i i i the first thing you have to get right is you have to have the most relevant speakers if you have relevant speakers it's going to attract people just bar none right like why do people like oh uh you know kevin o 'leary speaking or like you know um you might have i don't know like if you have trump speaking at your event or whatever it's going to be kevin o 'leary speaking uh i don't think so not for this one but i some there's someone else that that i'm talking to right now that i'll tell you right after that we're working on, I think he would be just as good, if not better.

1:30But so the speakers matter quite a bit. The second thing is you really do need to be intentional about who you want at the event. You know, you've seen events where I've been very intentional and events where I've kind of broadened it. The more intentional you are saying, oh, it has to be marketers that are people that love marketing that are in YPO and then YPO has certain qualifications to be in, right? And so that's another one. you have to be intentional about who you want to bring in. The third thing is, um, you, I like events. I don't know about you, Neil. I like events that are more intimate.

2:06And so this one will have maybe call it 200 people or so, which is a little larger than what I would usually do. I think a hundred people is usually a really good event. Um, and like Neil's also done like B2B events where he has CMOs and things like that, where if you have 50 to a hundred people, but they're very high intent, um, or they know other people you should talk to, let's say you're trying to win business, that's usually really good for you too. But I'll pause for a second, see if you want to add anything or ask anything. No, I've never really thrown events. You know, every time we've done events together, you've done everything or your team has.

2:35So I don't know much about it. So the team matters quite a bit too. And so for example, like Noah's sitting in the room, so we might have him come because I'm used to working with Noah. He's done a couple of the events already. He knows exactly what I want and what my intentions are. But also I'm working with this YPO events team too, right? And they work a certain way too. And just keep in mind that you ideally want to work with people that have been there, done that. And so for one of my events, remember we had the digital marketing, the war room team, and they also did traffic and conversion conference, which had like 2000 people.

3:05And they've also done events with like 100 people or so. I find that working with them, so her name's Deanna, she took everything off my plate. Like she's just like, we will take everything versus like in this situation, I'm having to do a lot more of things I usually wouldn't do. Right. And a lot more things are unclear. So just keep in mind, you want consistency. And I think the final thing I'll say is if you really want to bring, bring people along, like going to Miami is, is fun to people, right? If you do it in Miami or you do it in like some, I don't know, Tulum or Cabo or something like that, it does attract people.

3:39Keep in mind, if you do an event in Vegas, you're going to get a lot of distractions. So you have to understand what, what it is that you're signing up for. But overall, I think afterwards too, if you can drop these recordings online, if you want to keep this event going, that's the way to market it. You have what you want to have a sizzle reel as well. And then maybe follow up with these people, you know, immediately after maybe a couple months later, you know, what we do when, when, when Neil speaks at this event or I speak at event, we send slides to all the attendees afterwards. So that's another thing, but I'll pause for a second.

4:08Is anything missing you think from this? No. The one thing I would add is make sure your attendees are a specific type of attendees and they fit that requirement. So if you're looking for e-commerce people, make sure there's all e-commerce people there. If you're targeting people who are larger business, make sure it's larger businesses. And the reason I say this is not because it's just the speakers, it's hard to tailor content for everyone. It's much easier to create amazing experience if it's the same type of audience and everyone's looking for the same type of information. You could have multiple tracks, but that gets really complex and very costly.

4:46By the way, the final thing I'll add to is you want to if you want to create a memorable event. So what we have going on. So I think you're here the 23rd. You're leaving on the 24th, right? For the event, April. I think that's what you told me. So anyway, we have if you have really high caliber people, you want to create ample opportunities for people to network. So we have this thing called a dine around. So there's a lot of YPOs that live in Miami. So we have like, you know, eight to 10 people going to people's houses like people like they'll invite you in. You know, they'll take your food. We basically, why people pay 250 bucks per head for that, that dinner.

5:20Right. And that's a memorable experience. Um, and we just created, my thing is I've created a very learning focused event with, with like, you know, you're speaking, um, we have Greg Eisenberg, Nick Shackelford, April Dunford, the cat Cole from AG one, um, Alexandra, who's the co-founder of eight sleep. And so we have a, it's like different types of people, right. Um, YouTubers as well. And so I've created my event based on what I like, which is learning and networking. And mine doesn't have, like, sure, it's Miami, but mine's not focused on partying. So you have to understand what works for you, too.

5:55And I know if Neil threw an event, it wouldn't be focused on partying. It'd be fully focused on networking, maybe some speaking, and then he goes home. Yes. Eric knows me well. I'm like, my version of fun is having a good night's rest room, sleeping, like, 10 hours. Yeah. Would you sleep 10 hours? No, but that would be a good night. Okay. All right. I usually get eight. Yeah, eight's for me too. Speaking of high-performing, let's talk about the seven habits of high-performing marketers. Let's do an OG marketing school over here. I'll do number one first. So number one, not even high-performing marketers, just a high-performing person in general.

6:30Neil, just talk about it. Your sleep is everything at the end of the day, right? And I've actually upgraded my sleep stack. So I think taking care of your health is number one. I've worked with a lot of people over the years where they neglect their health. And in my mind, the saying is, you have a thousand problems when your health is good, but when your health isn't good, you have one problem, right? And in my mind, I'm like, how could you just neglect your health, which neglects all your loved ones around you too, and it also makes it hard to work. There's people that get sick a lot, they don't show up to work.

7:04It's hard to be a high performer if you're not high performing when it comes to your body. And so that's a little outside of the actual marketing piece, but I genuinely believe that. And maybe we'll do another episode on the ins and outs of it. But what's number two, Neil? Number two is you have to be willing to run, dissect, and document your experiments. Marketers who run a lot of experiments are more likely to find different levers that can cause more growth. But running them isn't enough. You need to understand why certain experiments worked and why they didn't. And you got to really dive in because for the ones that didn't, what can you learn from them to avoid those things in the future?

7:44For the things that are working, if you can dissect the elements that are actually causing lifts, how can you actually do more of that so you can grow faster? And if you're not willing to experiment as a marketer, you're just not going to grow as much. Doing the standard stuff that everyone else is doing is just going to create mediocre results because all marketing channels eventually become saturated and competitive. Number three for me is you have to be very strong at building your network. And I do like the saying that your net worth is your network. And what I mean by that is Neil will just pick up the phone and call somebody.

8:18I will pick up the phone and call somebody. If I want someone to teach someone on my team how they do email paid acquisition and they grow big newsletters with millions of people or so, I'll get on the phone and say, hey, can they do a call? And then in return, I might give something back to them or I might meet them in person because it's a quid pro quo, right? It's an equal exchange where I try to make it be. But my point here is if you don't build your network, it's so many opportunities come from just it's people at the end of the day. And I think the sooner that you realize that, the better.

8:46And so the example here is when I was, you know, in my mid 20s or so, I started throwing these networking dinners with other marketers. And these people were, you know, directors and CMOs and things like that. And all I had was, you know, a bag of chips to feed them. But that still worked anyway, right? Because I became a node. And so that's a bonus. If you can become the connector, people will actually envy you for your network if you can do that. Yeah. Number four. number four the ability to pivot very fast if you look at the whole marketing industry there's tons of algorithm changes um google has roughly nine plus algorithm changes a day based on the last numbers that i saw published on the internet could be even more now uh amazon you know continually has changes in how they rank sites or products more so within their search results instagram facebook tiktok they all have algorithm changes and they've had over the years hence a lot of your friends don't see your content compared to when Facebook first came out.

9:46If you don't know how to adapt and you can't adapt fast, you're going to be screwed. A lot of times you have to learn on the fly or leverage your network that Eric just mentioned, but the ability to adapt and execute fast based on changes is a necessity. If you can't, you're not going to cut out in the world of marketing because it's just getting more complex over time versus actually simpler. Number five is you have to become a T-shaped marketer. And what I mean by that is, so I started in SEO originally. So I went, let's say I went really deep in SEO and then that's the, I guess that would be the I of the T, right?

10:23And then, you know, going across, I started learning affiliate marketing. I started learning paid media. I started learning what it takes to, you know, create a great creative. I started learning more about analytics, which is interesting to me because over the last 10, 15 years or so, when I look at people and they don't understand analytics or Google tag manager. I'm like, this stuff is like, you're supposed to know this stuff learning marketing before. And then now people have decided, Oh, I'm just going to be specialized in one area. That's fine. You can do that, but you're not going to become the highest performing marketer that you can become because you can't call BS on other areas and you don't understand other areas.

10:55And because of that, that makes you a weaker marketer. Yep. Another habit of high performing marketers is they try to understand people from all different countries and cultures. The reason this is important is the world is no longer centered around the United States or China or India. The world is all one big melting pot and we're all relying on each other. And the money to be made is not from the US or China or India or Brazil or the United Kingdom. It's all the countries really do add up. And you got to really think on a global level. So like with SEO, if you don't understand HF Lang, you're not going to get as much international traffic.

11:34If you can't figure out how to use AI to translate and transcribe your content, you're not gonna do as well. And you still may need a human in the loop. If you're not willing to use technology like HeyGen that allows you to go global faster for all your social content, you're not gonna do as well. International is pretty much the standard these days. When Eric and I started as an entrepreneur, you would launch a business in just one region, that was it. And that's how you build a successful company. That's no longer the case. global and globalization needs to be part of your strategy from day one.

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14:18If there's anything that stands out with the marketers, the best marketers I know of, they're really fast at getting things done. The sooner you can get, like if I can get something done at half the time, that decreased my cost by half the time, right? If you just think about it logically. And they're very responsive. They are often the ones that are coming with new ideas. They're bringing the heat, and they're quick to get things done. So when I worked at that startup, Treehouse, we would work four days a week, a four-day work week, right? I worked seven days a week because we had to. And that's not to say I'm great or anything.

14:48And when people needed something done, I was really quick to respond. And I also expected that of my team as well. And those that were high performers, they responded very quickly. And they just were fast executors. And I think that's something you and I both really appreciate. And yeah, that's what it is. So we have time for one more. And you have one over here on, I changed your title just to make it more applicable for more people. Why you should make your SaaS company free. Yeah, so I'm a big believer that SaaS isn't that expensive to create these days. I'm not even a big believer of this.

15:27It's just pure data. Most people know this. When I first started as an entrepreneur, it was expensive to create a SaaS company. I remember when we used to host our product, we had servers at hosting locations and we had to deal with them. Nowadays, you just have the cloud. The cloud's made things more affordable. Even AI has made SaaS more affordable as well. So we did an analysis and we looked at quite a few companies that were leveraging tools, free tools for lead generation. And what we found is the companies that had free tools had 339 % more leads. When we looked at their close rate, their close rate went down 56%.

16:14But even if your close rate goes down 56 % because the quality of leads from free tools isn't as high as not having a free tool and just doing a demo request, it still makes up for it. And the reason I say it's important to do free as a SaaS tool, it's just too expensive to do marketing and sales in SaaS. It's actually the biggest cost. It's not creating the product. And for that reason, for most people, unless you're trying to create something like an open AI, but for most people, the real cost is going to be marketing and sales. So if you have a SaaS company like Eric's recently launched one, I believe you had to come up with a version that's free, not freemium, a version that's just free for a lot of people and you'll just start collecting and dominating the market share really fast.

17:03Yeah. So my response is overall, I think it, um, I don't think either one is, um, right or wrong. I think it depends on the situation. So at least for us right now, we don't necessarily have a lead problem. There's a, there's at least a handful of enterprises that come in each week. We have more of a resourcing problem right now in terms of the product. And so we're, we're pretty close in a lot of situations. Like we have the main ad feature, which someone else copied recently. But we have these two other features that are amazing around like influence pipeline reporting and then these landing page personalizations, right?

17:34So that needs to get a little closer. So that's why we're comfortable doing these pilots right now. Because the thing is, if we take on all these other leads right now, we do plan to add a free trial. So you're not saying product-led growth. You're saying - No, I'm saying product-led growth. You are saying product-led growth. Okay. So we're not saying we're opposed to it, but just right now, given that the product isn't quite there yet. We can't open the floodgates yet. Right. Um, because again, what's going to happen from a customer success standpoint, if we had a hundred customers right now, cause like some issues that we faced this week were around, um, one customer is enterprise customer.

18:08They want to launch a thousand ads at a time. Right. And so we're like, okay, like now our architecture is ready for that. And so it's better that we get these kinks sorted out first. And then I think we can switch. So, yeah. So same thing, right? Eventually it sounds like you're going to do product-led growth and have a free version of the product. You can't do it if the product doesn't meet what most people are looking for from a bare minimum standpoint. And what Eric's saying is his product's great. He just needs to fix some kinks and bugs and expand the product in a few other areas before he can release the version and just make it free.

18:42And Neil is right. I think in my mind, the two modes of the future are going to be distribution and data. if you do do a product like growth motion you are creating some type of distribution and you're going to build a lot of data around your product you just got to make sure it's the right people at the end of the day because we do have a lot of people i look at the lead list and i'm like okay here's these enterprises but what else is on the lead list a lot of agencies we actually don't really talk to a lot of the agencies right now um and then there's a lot of people that are they have potential but it wouldn't be a right fit right now so there's like other things we need to sort through like linkedin has a limitation you can only target 300 people um but we might We might have a workaround for that too.

19:19And so there's like, we're taking all these stepping stones right now. And then sometimes we might have to back up a step or two steps. And then sometimes we'll take three steps forward. But it's moving very rapidly. And I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm just saying there's a time and place for everything. And that's what we're, I think we're both saying that. And a great example of someone who did this was Teams. Teams was free. They took a big chunk out of Slack. It was so successful. It pretty much crossed Skype as well. and they're shutting it down or it will be shut down once this episode airs.

19:51And then they started, quote unquote, slowly charging for teams and they gobbled up a lot of revenue. A lot of corporations use it. It's all plugged into the Microsoft ecosystem. Dude, I have a good one we can end on. Are you ready? Yeah. Okay. So Greg Eisenberg, who's speaking at the event, so he posted. So basically the headline I'll give you guys all here is 99 % of content creators do not think like this. and so greg eisenberg said i was talking to a friend yesterday who has 2.3 million followers about my social media strategy so greg he does well i think he has like a couple hundred thousand on on twitter and then on youtube i think he's got like call it 200 ,000 or so um and so this guy was like hey dude like you can 3x your engagement just by 3xing the amount of content you put out just do more motivational tweets or funny memes bro and and so let's just react to that i think you and i both realize this we've created a lot of you know broad tam content where you might get hundreds of thousands or millions of views, right?

20:47I've done the same thing as well, where we might talk about discounts and things like that, or, you know, I'll interview someone and they'll have a hot take. But this is the wrong way to build a business, at least if you want to be a creator, sure, you can build all the volume you want. But I think if you're an entrepreneur, this is not the right way to build a business because you're going to get a lot of irrelevant people. Yes. The key with social media is to have as many followers that are qualified and the right type of followers. And it's just tough. you can't do that by posting broad memes.

21:16I used to post like Elon Musk memes and quotes back in the day on my Facebook account. Yeah, before Tesla really blew up and had tons of engagement. It worked really well. But it doesn't matter what people think about Elon Musk, whether it was Elon Musk quote or a Disney quote or Howard Schultz quote, that's not gonna necessarily drive the right audience. It's not gonna drive more CMOs to follow me. Yeah, and so that's the struggle that I know we've mentioned this last week or Monday when we recorded, the struggle with your YouTube right now, it's like you want to create more stuff around marketing, but then the people you work with, they want you to create more large-time content.

21:54And again, we've played this game before. And I can tell you, again, you'll get a lot of people, but then what's going to happen is it also doesn't help the algorithm too, because then some of the people will engage, some won't. Because let's say Neil gets all these people that like his large-time content, but when he starts to publish stuff around marketing, what percentage of those are actually going to care? Not many. Yeah. So anyway, if you're a content creator, I think if you can think more like an entrepreneur, that's going to help you make more money ultimately. And that is it for today, guys.

22:24Please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow.