102: Events with Brian Ludwig SVP at CVENT

all right good afternoon everybody this is john barrels make it happen mondays hopefully you had a fantastic weekend i had a 50 51 i got my bruins who lost and my celtics who won so i'm pretty happy about the celtics a little pissed off about the bruins but we are here to have a conversation and i'm looking forward to this one because it's actually directly relevant to some stuff i'm thinking about these days brian lugwig over at c event how's it going brian going great how are you john doing fantastic my friend tell the audience a little bit about yourself and where you're coming from these days absolutely so i'm a senior vice president of sales at c event an event management software company uh been here uh 19 years and uh got a big team of account managers sdrs and direct sellers slash you know hunters uh and then technical sales uh consultant group as well so a whole bunch of different roles uh selling across the world all right so i love it man so first and foremost and we said i said this right before we started recording here 19 years so i can't remember the last time i met somebody who was in in this in the tech world who stayed in the same company for 19 years so something's got to be going right over at c event for you to stay that long what what has kept you there so long and i mean this just from a like from a business standpoint right we all look for a business that kind of the ideal state is you get into an organization that that shares your values and you grow with it as long as you can and you get keep challenged uh but it's so rare these days so talk to me about what's kept you at c event for for so long it's a good question i get asked it a lot um it's been a long long journey right so when i started with the company i just got my mba and the honest truth is i was in sales before i got the mba i went to get the mba probably did not stay in sales honestly and uh i was looking around and none of the other opportunities were really uh blowing me away and there was a girl in my business school program that was going to start working at c event and she said you got to come meet with these guys they've got a really amazing management team they've got a great vision etc etc so i come in meet with the ceo and a handful of other people and i took a shot on it and at the time they had no commission plan no territory management no they didn't even have a head of head of sales i started the same day as our first vp of sales um and it went and it went well like i was one of the original sales guys one of the first four or five and i was selling more than the other guys and things were looking good um despite no uh no real structure at all yeah but uh then the dot-com bubble busted and we went from about 120 so i got there were 40 50 people it grew to 125 we downsized in 2001 to uh i don't know 70 people we do another round of layoffs down to 40 there's natural attrition because it was a shitty place to work at that point down to 25 stayed from 25 to like 35 40 people for the next two to three years okay and i interviewed i honestly considered leaving yeah but i kind of liked the battle scars i liked that we were learning how to be more fiscally responsible not burn through money the same way we were like drunken sailors and build a sustainable you know EBITDA margin based business with with good growth so that 30 people became 50 50 people became a 100 100 became 200 we're a 4 000 person company now from 25 in 2002 2003 um and i'll tell you why i've stayed is because we we've done a great job of reinventing ourselves along the way so we were originally kind of a one-trick pony for event registration we built venue sourcing and strategic means management all these things that mobile apps and uh on-site check-in and badging and abstract management appointment management we just keep building stuff and we're doing it either through our own team we have like 1500 people in tech or we're buying companies and then integrating them so between i mean it's just been such an adventure we went public we then got bought by private equity firm went private we you know i've opened up you know seven or eight international offices we have built a ton of things i uh i've gotten more and more under my feet from so every day is different i think we've done a really really good job of hiring great people because everyone that's here whether they've been here for 19 years like myself and there aren't that many or whether they're you know five years in the job six months in the job they're passionate they really give a shit about what we're doing our customers what we're building and i think that is the number one reason so i like kind of that every day is different but i'm we've done a great job of surrounding ourselves with passionate people that care about what we're doing and it makes for a more fun and interesting day and and obviously a lot of success for the company and myself i love it man so and to talk about passion right because i believe firmly like if you don't believe in what you sell go find something else to sell right because this is too hard of a profession and to to not um how do you get i mean i'm assuming you look for passion in the hiring process right you look for that drive you look for that passion what are some of the things that you do to kind of live that that and reinforce that passion for the team like to keep everybody excited right when they're on boarding and those type of things are there specific things you do to maintain that culture of continuous improvement and drive and passion and love for what you do yeah you know uh it's a good question i think it starts with training we put a very thorough training program out there so it's like a one month um ignite program we call it they're almost like like a pledge class right they come in wide-eyed and bushy tail and it really becomes like their best friends many of them were from the greater dc area but a lot of them have moved here and this becomes like their extended family um you know a lot of you know it's the cliche you know work hard play hard kind of stuff but um we do a lot of social events we have a cool office space with kegs and kind of glass environments so everyone's kind of collaborates there's a great beer garden downstairs any given night there's going to be 10 to 50 people from the company out there hanging out and joining each other's company you know talking about their weekend but also talking shop too so uh i don't know i think we've we've we've we give them enough opportunity to really mix it up with each other you know we do a big incentive retreat um generally in the caribbean each year people are really pumped up to try to get on that you know it's like a president's club you have uh just a ton of happy hours uh we have a big event called cvent connect which is for our customers but 500 people from the organization 100 or so that are going to be in sales in my organization get to go and be a part of that so giving them an opportunity to be on stage or in front of high dollar customers yeah i think keeps them really engaged they all get to travel for their job and go into their territory you know there's just it's a myriad of things john yeah i love it and i think one of the things you brought up which i i really encourage reps to think about is you know i think a lot of people are in the grass is greener mentality these days of oh you know they had a couple of layoffs or hey there's a better company over there that'll pay me a little bit better but but sticking with and and also keeping your eyes open to pay attention to what's happening i mean one of the things i didn't do enough of when i was a kid and you know getting going through business was i didn't pay enough attention of what was happening around me so that i could then learn from like i wasn't proactively paying attention you know like small stuff like when they rolled out a new commission plan and everybody was pissed off about it you know what i mean like there's an opportunity there to watch how they rolled that out watch how the reaction was so that later on when you're a leader you can say you can pull on that experience and be like yeah i remember that no or when they merged with another company how did they integrate right so i think it sounds like you've had you almost lived your mba even even if you didn't go get your mba it sounds like you've been living it for the past 19 years yeah yeah sure having and you know it's funny you just touched on something that you know grassy is greener and we have people that will come to me and yeah look i'm gonna leave and go take this other job for for five grand more right and and it kills me because a they don't have appreciation for what we built for them and and in large part that's maybe our own fault we hire a lot of people straight out of school yeah we hire people with experience the people with experience get people straight out of school you know they have the curiosity which i get here's the thing everyone that i interview not everyone most people that i interview i get their ote i drill in are they hitting the ote no they're not generally they'll leave for five grand more in ote and i say well how many people hit it i don't know but you didn't ask that question and then when they peel back the onion and ask the questions people aren't hitting their ote even where they're going and i know this because i'm so i interview people all the time and almost no one's hitting their ote then i give them the data turn saying who gives a shit what the ote is it's what's the likelihood of hitting it or exceeding it yeah don't even worry about ote what are you actually going to make yeah it's uh it's especially kids out of school it's like you kind of it's almost like you do want them to have some experience so they can appreciate what you're what you're handed to them but at the end of the day you got to kind of bring them through that and sometimes they're going to learn right i mean you got to go make that mistake of going somewhere else and coming back and saying oh shit and we love that too uh we've got a ton of them by my last count we literally have 45 to 50 boomerangs no shit really 45 to 50 that's saying something across the organization probably 20 to 25 of them in sales that's that's saying something yeah and that's that's a great story to tell the newbies coming on board right like i put them on stage at our sales kickoff nice awesome let's talk about events right because this is a little bit near and dear to my heart like my team right now is really trying to figure out you know all the channels that we do from a sales standpoint right you got your outbound prospecting you're inbound lead generation and events are a huge channel for us um but last year i think we did a little crazy like we went to almost every event we could get our hands on and i remember we did a lot of activity but i still can't point to much direct roi from an event and i and i noticed a lot of marketing company you know business organizations in general struggling with with with really showing a true roi number from an event standpoint so i mean obviously steven from a technology standpoint it helps with that but in general how do you look at events from a and i know it depends on what you sell and those type of things some are way more trade show oriented but in the typical b2b sass worlds where there's some boost there and your target audience is pretty much there and a lot of sales reps look at it as okay i'm here to sit at the booth and they're not looking at it as a direct sales opportunity they're looking at it as a marketing thing let me get your badge and scan that like are there some things that you help people reframe their mindset around about how to get the most out of these events and how to show true roi around them yeah it's a good question and i think we're experts at this because we do eat our own dog food so part of our pitch when we go out in the market is like look there's no replacement for live events it's not going anywhere i don't care how often we have conversations like this digital one here which is amazing there is no replacement for human connection and the power of that live interaction and what it could do for business in fact we share stats with people the second most influential channel behind a company's website are live events wow and about 24 percent of the average b2b marketers budget is spent on live events okay there's six percent on web-based events so 30 percent is going into events it's a big category of spend for any you know cmo or bp of marketing as it should be um you can absolutely drive roi pipeline generation faster closes etc with sales excuse me with events of course you says with events so um we as an example use our technology for two different types of events events we host and events we go to and those are two different things so for events that we host we invite people we 4 000 people to a cvent connect conference but forget about that one that one's kind of obvious we go and do 500 ish luncheons we call them product seminars okay like through our technology you know a thousand people in the greater chicago area that i think have any potential need for our stuff and we'll go to the magianos one day then we're to roost chris the next day then we're to this one that one etc and i get 25 to 45 people to join one of my sales reps for lunch and i used to personally run around and do these left right center get the 40 50 people in the room let them network with each other a little bit feed them lunch do dog and pony show of course showcasing our technology at the same time we have that attendance and survey data that they give us through an app all feeding straight back into our crm which of course is salesforce and we update their campaigns that they're associated with okay we then have reporting from a marketing standpoint where we look at attribution not influence we'll look at influence too how much money closed from anyone that went to a product seminar in 2018 i could pull that but that's almost giving it too much credit so we have this time decay attribution model so if i met you at that lunch but i'd also gotten you in through this channel that channel whatever i'm going to split up that twenty thousand dollar sale across the six different channels and i'm going to give a little bit more to the newer stuff versus the older stuff but then i'm also going to look at what if i talk to you and lucas i got you from these three channels and i got lucas from these this one channel and then you drove the sale not lucas yeah right so i had 27 touch points with you in salesforce and lucas i had two i'm going to put far more of the weight to the event or to whatever channel it was to you versus lucas because clearly you were driving the sale so we look at activity in salesforce then we split up how much weight we're giving to each side and then we do this time decay model so we're pretty sophisticated about it so we literally can have a stack rank of which channels are actually driving business and then within the channel i'll look at the 150 trade shows that we go to and i literally get an attribution number for each and every one of them and the number of leads that we produce so like a raw number we have 42 leads from that the attribution was you know 1.3 million dollars yeah so we can decide you know a do events really deliver the answer is yes but b and maybe we want to try 15 new events and not go to these 10 anymore you know just that insight to be able to make those tough calls on where where we should cut you know marketing spend i love it i mean because that's what we were saying like morgan it's funny because morgan you know if we have a deal in the pipeline and morgan then meets that person at an event it's an accelerator no question about it but you know the attributes like you say where you know the influence is all over the place it's like where is the heaviest influence at what stage of the sales process that we can attribute it to because there's no like hey these are the people i want to meet and i'd like to talk a little bit about that like what are your reps say it's just a typical trade say it's not one of your events say you're going to a trade show what's a what do your reps do like when they're walking around like how do they prep and then what what is their plan during that event to get the most out of it that then you can take that data and put it into this event for like what are some of the best practices you have from an event execution standpoint yeah really good question so um there's so many things you can do i mean we see so many of our competitors or just people in general that go to a trade show they dutifully show up to the booth the first day they've got their golf shirt that has their company logo on it and they sit there and it's kind of like someone looks in the eye hey do you have a question and really and they're on their phones right right that is the last thing you're gonna do right you're gonna invest what i don't know we invest 20 to 40 000 for every show we go to and we go to 150 so it's a six million dollar spend to go to these shows so we do a lot of things one we try to get the pre-show list yeah sometimes you can sometimes you can't a lot of times i'll just give you the company i have a team in india that will research all the companies and names if we have them but get the email phone number title get everything that we need scrub it load it up deliver it to my sdrs ahead of the show okay it will then invite people to have one-on-one meetings at the show we'll manage calendars for all that two if it's a big enough show maybe our uh out of those 150 maybe there's 40 where we will do an event at the show because again an event so we will have a reception or sit down dinner or maybe a series of sit down dinners with high price high value prospects and clients and get them in that kind of environment so when we're calling we're not just saying hey meet us at booth 614 we're going to show the latest and greatest it's and tuesday night we'd love to invite you to reception this company's gonna be there that company's gonna be there so for themselves so that helps when we're at the show we give every rep here knows but we take them and we do pull-up meetings with the six that are the three the 20 obviously each show is different in terms of number of people and we give them a pep talk on exactly what's expected of them you know one you're you're smiling you're out in the aisle you're pulling people in right two your um what decks do you have what collateral do you have let's make sure everyone's equipped with the right stuff which of our we were in our blue shirt first day then black and blue i mean just full game plan oh there's six stations at this booth you're on the back left you're on the back right you're here you're here just so that you get there it's all business yep then we do not scribble on the back of business cards to take notes we instead use our own technology steven has something called universal lead capture so the concept is don't pay for lead capture from the organizer of that event that event that event why it's going to be a different process every single time this one's going to give you back a ticker tape this one's going to give you back an excel file this one's going to give you back a pdf with the data scrubbing it and getting into your crm so you can have fast follow-ups almost impossible so we turn and say no equip your sales team and marketing team that goes to 100 shows it goes to 20 shows it goes to 500 shows like cisco goes to a thousand shows why not use the same technology customize the questions that you guys care about when you're talking to an attendee of the show score it and then have it automatically flow into marketo hubspot eloqua salesforce dynamics you know salesforce course etc etc because the number one thing that i hear from people is like look yeah we got a thousand leads from all the trade shows we went to yeah and you know the stats like 70 of them don't even get a follow-up yeah but then that that million dollars they spent two million dollars five million dollars whatever it is money down the toilet so our whole pitch is like get consistency give people the right tools have it flow straight into the crm because here's the thing i might have let's say this rep johnny over here might have met the person at the show but it may not be his lead to follow up with i don't want to wait till he gets back and cleans the cars and gets minutes gonna be three weeks before sally who's sitting over here can follow up on that lead i've got her following up the next day and the next guy booth that's out that the prospect network is not doing the same thing so speed of follow-up getting into the crm it is absolutely the the most critical but most often overlooked part of the process how do you so how do you then differentiate or balance the quality versus the quantity follow-up so because i'll example dream right i go to dreamforce and i get fucking accosted as i walk through the aisles right like nobody even talks to me they're just scanning my badge and i get like 700 emails from reps after dreamforce saying it was great meeting you at dreamforce and then this data dump of all the crap that i i probably didn't even talk to him about and literally i don't even care if it's somebody i actually did meet because i don't remember because i met 700 people there even if it is somebody i did meet um if it says it was great meeting you at dreamforce and it kind of looks like a can thing i i delete every single one of them so do you have a an approach where you section out and say hey you know these send a real personalized follow-up to versus these put into a sequence or a cadence or whatever it is yeah so a couple of things i mean one again there's qualifying questions in that scan so you can score the hotness what you talk to them about etc so what dreamforce is a different animal right i go there every year as well like most shows are not you know 80 000 people and you know all the exhibitors and see half of that is is the booth staff just scanning people to win a car or to win a trip or whatever it is those should go into a drip nurture campaign right the ones that had a demo and a real conversation at the booth should also be scanned but properly scored so it's kind of like well these two were just scanning people as they walk by we're not going to do direct follow-up at the rep level because reps are expensive and i don't want them chasing stuff that's not warm enough that's not warm enough however if you had to sit down with someone for 30 minutes to go through some sort of challenge you're having they showed you a piece of software that would pose a solution of course that should be scored the rep that's following up has all the details of that conversation that you have with that sales professional and that follow-up's on point and you'd probably respond because they would reference what you guys talked about reference the pain that you shared the problem they can solve and you're off to the races i love it what so what do you think the biggest mistake uh reps do at events uh that that you see consistently outside of your time i mean your team you got pretty good here but what do you screw around on their phone at the booth show up for stuff late and they don't take advantage of all the other opportunities at an event right there's the new attendee breakfast the first day there's there's times that this trade show floor is closed now not at every event like a dream force as an example if you only pay for booth staff they can't go to the sessions but tons of other shows you can't right so you go to all the sessions you get in your seat two minutes ahead of time five minutes ahead of time have a conversation with the person on the left person to the right pay attention to people that ask great questions that you can tell they're thinking uh in a certain way you kind of accost them out in the hallway when they're getting coffee you follow people you go to the lunches you go to the networking events at night a lot of people will turn and say well you know what i was so jammed up at the show all day i don't have time to go to the networking event at night and the breakfast in the morning that's the worst mistake you can make yeah you have such an opportunity if everything if you went to 10 sessions got two cards in each session that's another 20 you go to four or five other events around the event you get four or five cards in each of those that's another 16 now you got 36 cards on top of the 40 or 50 that you naturally got on the trade show floor now what if you multiply that by 10 people that all went to represent your company at a show it makes a massive difference well i and i find out i find the the networking if you will and the the results out of those off prime times you know the events in the evening and the breakfast and where you can actually have conversations with people as opposed to sitting in a booth and trying to get their attention while 700 people walk by i found those conversion ratios are actually way higher than the ones that are at the booth in a lot of ways yeah you're spot on i love it um so what do you do this is personal curiosity do you have any like what do you do at booths to to draw people in i mean i know you're driving a lot of people in the pre thing to say hey come meet us here go have a meeting there whatever it is but you know everybody's always looking to differentiate themselves to just attract people of the masses um outside of the quality of the product and the look and feel of of what you're doing do you guys have any like things that that that bring people in if you will i mean it's it's gonna sound stupid it's something as simple as eye contact you make eye contact with someone's walking by and they slightly smile you turn and say hey have you heard a c-man yeah i know you guys a little bit suck them in you start having a conversation but it's all about making eye contact if you don't you gotta lock in and then they can't look away and start having a conversation two yeah it's again stupid we put candy at our front little check-in station and people will even come up and they're like oh i'm so sorry can i just grab that kitkat i don't know you can grab it but you got it what do you know about us and you know you're doing a cool way you could actually start conversations i've closed deals from people that were stopping to get the kitkat like legitimately yeah i mean there's that reciprocity thing there i mean you know i actually train from negotiation standpoint give gets right like they're it's a human condition when when somebody asks you for something there's that fleeting moment that they all feel obligated to give you something in return and if you ask for it right then and there so that's why like when they grab that thing there's that obligation to at least stand there for a couple of seconds and listen to what you got so capitalize on it right and then there's kind of an in-between i was mentioning you know some shows get an event like a reception and some don't some i have the the in-between where i'll have like a happy hour or little sandwiches and stuff at the booth at like five o'clock the show closes at six o'clock on like a middle day and then we market it we hand out little cards to people and tell them to come back at five or six o'clock it's not as expensive as renting out a restaurant or a hotel but you get a little buzz and then people sort of see a bunch of people they come by and and that's that's another uh very popular option cool man um so let's talk a little bit about uh you know you need things that you're doing so use 30 goes towards events and that drives revenue what are some things from just a sales team standpoint that you're seeing that your team is doing right now that's working to to drive new business into that pipeline like from either a messaging or an approach standpoint is there anything some new stuff that you're seeing right now that's working a bunch of different strategies we have um one thing that i think we're really good at is showcasing our stuff live so again this is leveraging india i got a team in india 13 people all they do is build out samples sample event website registration form a sample mobile app a sample sort of ipad checking experience so that when my sales rep is demoing you our solution it's not theoretical i'm showing you your stuff in my environment i could never do this without a team that i built to serve this function so the next competitor is not coming in with the same stuff i absolutely know and then they're sitting there going like a wow this this company really cares about my business but b i can fully envision leveraging their technology and i saw exactly what it could look like and how it could operate in that meeting that i have with them immer so that's that's game-changing stuff for us um other strategies that we've been employing are um to have subject matter experts and overlays i kind of resisted this because i really really care about my team knowing their products and their solution cold i think there's no replacement for that because you can't have a technical resource on every call maybe on demos but all follow-up but it's so big our platform has become so wide and so robust that i have created a team of technical sales consultants that work sort of like as overlays they get brought in to be that second voice you know it's not a salesperson that's blowing blowing smoke it's a real technical person that can help them think about you know all the different ways that the product could or maybe is not a good fit um i think that's helped that's helped us ramp up new reps the old days if the rep didn't know the product deeply they're gonna have a tough time closing now they kind of have the second person riding along with them that can help um deals quicker um another really awesome strategy for us is um you know as you said a minute ago give get so we're always pushing for multi-year deals it's not because customers don't renew with us we have a high renewal rate but if i have a three-year deal instead of a one-year deal it's just less to do with that customer one year from now and i can rely on there's ten thousand dollars it's hitting for a second year we're just going to focus on giving them great service great consultation on getting the most out of the software and not push paper around i know it's via docusign it's easier now but having that visibility and knowing that i've got four years of this relationship because that's what we sold up front and of course we reward that with lower pricing so we have stats and metrics galore on what is our multi-year deal rate what's the average term line how much of a discount you need to do to give to go from three to four from four to five etc it's a huge part of our culture so let me ask you this so this is interesting on your like let's talk about the urgency factor right because i i think your your wheelhouse is somebody who's running 20 30 40 50 events on a yearly basis right look i'll sell someone selling what you know doing one event with 300 people and they might buy a 10 12 000 license so that so that's my point right so now say you got to say so so kind of a wheelhouse is somebody's doing a shitload of them and they're off the right and all that other stuff but then there's the all right a couple events a year type of stuff um how did what how do you coach your reps on creating urgency if you will if you know what brian i appreciate this but really are we don't have an event until november right now so why don't we talk in why don't we talk in september we're really going to start planning our our november session here are i i mean outside of hey it's better to plan early so you don't you know blah blah blah like are there some things that you do to help drive urgencies to get that person bought in a little bit earlier but because i i work a lot of clients who have that problem right where it's like it's not like yeah but we're not doing that for another year so let's talk then whereas they could absolutely imply it now and see some benefits to it but their head says let's not do that until that's a thing so how do you create urgency over at cven a couple different things i mean one i'm going to do the backwards math with them so events are a little bit unique in that look my events in october i'm not launching registration october right so sometimes people don't even think that way so it's like okay you have an october event well when do you launch registration historically oh we like to get our reg site up and running in uh june okay great so how many people get involved in that process and reviewing it making sure you have your price points your speakers your agendas your sessions your floor map your exhibitors blah blah blah oh a lot of people like to look at well listen if you're going to launch something in middle of june you need to start building it in like early may mid may at the very latest you have enough time for people to throw it and if you need to launch something in mid may you probably should sign paperwork and get started so you get trained and get comfortable with it by middle of april so actually you should have signed two weeks ago and that's october event and i can almost always create the urgency going back using all those steps now let's just say the event's not till april of next year and they don't need to launch it till december now it's hard right because here we are sitting in april and i want them to sign before december yeah but then i'd say look you want three months of getting comfortable you know training getting all the different people on board we can set up user roles and permissions and get all the great all the best artwork in the account so that the non-technical people have everything they need blah blah blah but then you know we'll just do some traditional old school stuff like look q4 we have a major release coming out right i i don't know yet but i've been in a few meetings there's going to be a price increase right that kind of thing or look i've given you really aggressive pricing because you told me you were burned on event tech before blah blah blah but when i give pricing like this i can only have it out there for 30 days maybe 60 days 90 days i mean i'll use whatever is appropriate based on when i legitimately think or when the sales rep legitimately thinks they could close so price increases low pricing can only be out there for a little bit using the event dates against them to bring back the timeline lots of things um cool i mean uh we're we're kind of close to the 30 minute range here anything else you want to kind of chat about or things that's top of mind right now that you're working on the other thing the only other thing that's a little bit newer to us but but we're having some success with it but it's tricky so we're owned by vista and you know they kind of have a playbook of different things they like to do we have you know so much of what they like we were already doing so they brought us a few ideas and we're like you know what we really should put that in place one of it is one of them is we put a cpq system in place so salesforce bought steel bricks it's not cpq we put it in place so that i can uh approve deals or not approve deals right so we have to go to manager if it's greater than 20 it goes to a dp level if it's 30 this that and the other service views can't be discounted at all other ones can and and look we're pretty flexible with the approvals but i get to inspect the deal drill in give my insights maybe press them to hold the line or do this that and the other so that that's a major change that i think has fundamentally helped us now discount less and see reps that have uh you know are bigger offenders and then make you know take corrective actions with them number two the other thing that they're bringing to us is this concept of a year over year price increase so say i've got a great customer they're happy they're going to renew they paid ten thousand dollars well now in the rule i should make it higher so sure make it 10 5 or 11 but also then show a pattern that look i'm going to give everyone a five percent raise here it's gonna be even more than that so costs are going up i need to bake an increase and look we signed software contracts with people and we signed a three-year deal there's a five percent increase year over year three percent or sometimes seven percent and we weren't doing that in fact we were going the other way sign a three-year deal the price is going to be lower sign a two-year deal it's going to be lower but not as low and we still do that then have it still escalate from there so you might earn yourself a better price on a four-year deal but that doesn't take away the fact that it needs to accelerate now if you walk in to future years knowing that hey most of our deals are going to have a five percent uplift before i even sell a new dollar well that allows us to get to our 20 plus growth that we've been experiencing for the last 15 years it'll be even easier to do so because we're going to have five percent that's just coming naturally so that's a big focus and i have uh kpis to track all of this very closely i love it but what's the what's the objection handling stuff you go through with the team to push for the clients to push back on that be like hey what the hell you know i mean you know obviously we're improving our and we're adding these things but is there a specific talk track you have around that objection why should i pay more every year when i don't even know what you guys are going to do in the next year yeah i mean this is a lot there's a ton of different different playbooks there but uh but generally i have some reps that are better at it than others so i put them up in front of the team but uh you know for starters it's like look it's price protection i do a two-year deal shit three years from now i could double my price with contracts for us but it's also for you and there's four percent that i'm putting here that's that's nothing in the grand scheme of things that's what all software companies do and sometimes they even blame vista look we got a private equity firm they want us to plow more money back into product development and features that are going to serve your needs i'm going to be better able to do that if we just get a nominal increase in the price year over year and but at the end of the day i could talk to them blue in the face i really love to showcase reps that are having success so we use slack there's channels where they're sharing that stuff but then in like the bi-weekly meetings put them up on a pedestal and have to tell the story yeah and i think that that internal knowledge of being able to share that internal knowledge from the people who are doing it right and sharing those stories is easy as everybody gets it so awesome man well i love this i mean i'm actually it's funny because i'm going to have my cro uh take a look at cvent a little bit more after this conversation because exactly what you're what you're talking about which is we're trying to assign influence in a deal and understand exactly what influenced that deal and how much of my influence there's this morgan's and and also the same thing with webinars and stuff like that it's like how do you get you know do that follow-up because i think the stats are something ridiculous where like after you do an event you know say say you did a webinar and it kicked ass right if you don't follow up like the next day or freaking the next hour for crying out loud and you try to go after it a week later it's pretty much not even worth it at that point that's right right we go and do a webinar or a seminar and we do a ton i talked about the 500 seminars then i do 800 webinars i have two seven webinars per day with like 15-20 people my sales rep wakes up now we don't get to it in the next hour but my sales rep wakes up the next morning in crm is all the stuff your survey answers all the details perfectly open task for them to just plow through it so that it's never longer than a day yeah that's i mean it's all inbound leads or influence right because we're in such a short uh attention span world right now right where even if i had like one of the things we did a webinar about uh you know at the end of last year and it was just we just kind of did it because hey we're trying this new messaging framework out right so we did a messaging slash cold call webinar looking 2,000 people showed up to this no 2,000 people registered for it a thousand people showed up to it and we dropped a fire but but we because we didn't have a process around it you know what i mean because we were just kind of like hey let's let's test the waters here our follow-up i can't i can't push a button right now and say what i got out of that webinar thousand people i had a thousand people who were like that was awesome and i can't tell you what i drove from a revenue standpoint or what the roi of that webinar was for us which drives me bat shit crazy so let me give you a simple thing that most people don't do but again we're experts at this so when you're a thousand people at 10 you probably had 1800 sign up at 2,000 yeah right so who's calling the thousand no shows right those are great leads too they were hand raisers they couldn't make it you can get them to something else people just let the no shows fall into the netherland uh we're all over those are great cool well how can people find out more about what you're doing these days and get in touch with you and i know you're hiring a lot so any yeah i mean you know cvent.com cvent.com is the website or on linkedin or twitter or facebook we're everywhere and uh yeah we're hiring a ton of people we'll probably hire uh we'll hire 500 people this year nice things are going great and uh that's how you get a hold of us i was gonna say onward and upward man good for you guys well i'm psyched to hear that you stuck it out right because it's one being the 25th person and now it's uh what is it again how many total about 4,000 what's awesome i'm number five now says four people that have been here longer that's pretty badass man so good for you for sticking it out and again learning less than everybody else the grass isn't always greener on the other sides my friends and learn from every single interaction that you have in a business yep very cool all right everybody well thank you very much for listening hopefully got some value out of this and uh if you do nothing else today go make somebody smile make somebody smile at least your day was a little bit better than everybody else's or you can make somebody else's day a little bit better than everybody else's all right have a great week everybody thank you very much brian make it happen thanks john so so so so so so so so so so so so we'll be we'll be we'll we'll be we'll be we'll be so so we'll be we'll be we'll be we'll be we'll be we'll be we'll be we'll be we'll be we'll be Thank you.