Because events are not only great for lead generation, but also for attendees to learn about you as much as other attendees, they’re a hot bed for growth and opportunity. And like all marketing and sales motions, events are even better with partners.
How can we use events to go to market with partners, and what does that even look like?
That’s what we’re covering in our first episode of Partnership Unpacked, season two!
Welcome back to Partnership Unpacked, where I selfishly use this time to pick the brains of experts at strategic partnerships, channel programs, affiliates, influencer marketing, and relationship building… oh, and you get to learn too! Subscribe to learn how you can amplify your growth strategy – with a solid takeaway every episode from partnership experts in the industry.
I’ve been hosting massive online conferences virtually every quarter since 2018, and they’re a tremendous amount of work. Countless hours building agendas and assets and driving attendees.
But they’re also extremely valuable and rewarding. Our annual Agency Summit, for instance, attracts over 3,000 marketing agency owners and technicians every year, and features dozens of speakers and dozens of partners.
How can you integrate events into your go to market strategy, and how can bring partners along to make these events even more effective?
That’s exactly what Kabir Uppal is going to talk to us about.
“My definition of go to market is really finding your customers where they are. With the right messaging and positioning that shows them that your product or service can help them achieve a goal or overcome a challenge and to try to keep it as simple as possible.”
Kabir Uppal
Partnership Unpacked host Mike Allton talked to Kabir Uppal about:
♉️ What a GTM co-marketing event partnership might look like
♉️ Different kinds of events partners can employ
♉️ Best practices for ensuring event success
Learn more about Kabir Uppal
- Connect with Kabir Uppal on LinkedIn
- Connect with Kabir Uppal on Twitter
Resources & Brands mentioned in this episode
- Airmeet
- Chili Piper
- How To Drive Successful Content Partnerships w/ Josh Bernoff
- Subscribe to the show calendar: agorapulse.com/calendar
Learn more about Agorapulse with a free demo
Full Notes & Transcript:
(Lightly edited)
How To Go To Market With Partners Using Events with Kabir Uppal
[00:00:00] Mike Allton: Because events are not only great for lead generation, but also for attendees to learn about you as much as other attendees, they’re a hotbed for growth and opportunity and like all marketing and sales motions, events are even better with partners. How can we use events to go to market with partners?And what does that even look like? That’s what we’re covering in our first episode of partnership unpacked season two. This is
partnership unpacked, your go to guide to growing your business. Through partnerships quickly. I’m your host, Mike Alton, and each episode unpacks the winning strategies and latest trends from influencer marketing to brand partnerships and ideas that you can apply to your own business to grow exponentially. And now.
Welcome back to Partnership Unpacked, where I selfishly use this time to pick the brains of experts at strategic partnerships, channel programs, affiliates, influencer marketing, relationship building. Oh, you get to learn to subscribe, learn how you can amplify your growth strategy with a solid takeaway every episode from partnership experts.
Now, I’ve been hosting massive online conferences virtually every quarter since 2018, and there are tremendous amount of work, countless hours building agendas and assets and driving attendees, but they’re also extremely valuable and rewarding our annual agency summit. For instance, it tracks over 3000 marketing agency owners technicians every year and features dozens of speakers and dozens of.
Partners. How can you integrate events into your go to market strategy? And how can you bring partners along to make these events even more effective? Well, that’s exactly what Kabir is going to talk to us about. Kabir has worked in the digital marketing space, particularly B2B SaaS for over a decade. And he’s passionate about go to market strategies that leverage events, content and partnerships to create value for prospects and customers.
As a senior, Kabir. Marketing manager at our preferred virtual event platform, Airme. He works closely with sales, CS and product to drive pipeline and revenue through events and partnerships. Exactly the kind of activities and results we like to talk about here. Hey, Kabir, welcome to the show.
[00:02:04] Kabir Uppal: Good to be here, Mike.Thanks for having me today.
[00:02:07] Mike Allton: My pleasure. So cool to get you in the studio and have this conversation. I’ve been looking forward to it, but I always like to bring some context and some background for my listeners. And maybe they don’t know you very well. Like I do, you’ve got this extensive background in marketing overall, but how did you get into partnerships and tell us about the work that you’re doing today at Airmeet? [00:02:27] Kabir Uppal: Yeah, that’s a long one, I feel like, but I’ll try to keep it short. I kind of stumbled into partnerships, honestly, Mike. I moved back to India after studying and working in the U. S. almost exactly 10 years ago now. And I was in the finance space in Boston and decided that I wanted to kind of move over to digital marketing and, and helping early stage companies.So I came back, started my own consulting firm. And it was at this time, one of my, you know, two of my closest friends kind of reached out and said, Hey, can you help us market this new startup? We’re thinking of, and in our conversations, I became a co founder and we started, you know, thinking about how we’re going to, you know, really launch this app.
That was primarily for fitness and nutrition. We were going to personalize. Workout plans and diet plans for our audience through an application. And it’s actually there where I started doing back partnerships quite naturally, we started, you know, partnering with gyms, partnering with nutritionists, partnering with wellness studios, corporates, really trying to get our first set of customers to test out the application.
And that’s kind of where I started off. And naturally in every role, after that startup, I actually moved on to doing sales for two startups before I joined Airmeet, but a large part of those sales roles were partnerships in both roles. One was a boutique UI UX agency that was primarily, you know, of course, again, B2B, and then there was an influencer marketing agency and influencer marketing product, which was again, B2B.
And a lot of those, you know, sales for both of those roles, a lot of our revenue came through partnerships. So we were partnering with. larger agencies, consultants that were working with early stage startups to get their apps off the ground, to get their websites off the ground, to, you know, get their first set of customers or drive brand awareness through creators.
So partnerships has kind of, you know, fit into every role that I’ve had over the last 10 years. And it’s not necessarily been defined as partnerships, but it’s kind of fit in there. And when I look back, it’s kind of helped. To contribute to me now being fully focused on partnerships as a awareness and revenue driver now at Airmeet.
And at Airmeet, I’ve now been here three years as of this month, and it started off from doing affiliates, influencers, and is now culminated into kind of looking at the entire gamut of partnerships at Emmitt particularly through events, right? So as you mentioned in my intro, my primary role here is to drive demand and accelerate pipeline through events that we host on our own and events that we do with our partners.
[00:04:44] Mike Allton: Fantastic. And I love how you’ve just illustrated that as a partnership professional, once you get it, once you understand the value of partnerships, they become woven into every motion, every activity, because we just, we understand that it helps everything work better. And we’re going to be talking today about going to market with partners using events and GTM motions and going to market.That’s something that I feel like it’s almost a buzzword right now. So I’d love to start with this essential question. What does go to market mean
[00:05:13] Kabir Uppal: to you? Yeah, I like the point that you made, right? There’s so much, I don’t want to say noise, but there’s so much content. There’s so much, you know, awareness being trying to be built around X led strategy for go to market.But, you know, really simply for me, Mike, I think what my definition of go to market is, is really finding your customers where they are, right? Yeah. With the right messaging and positioning that really, you know, kind of targets, not targets, but necessarily creates the messaging and positioning that shows them that your product or service can help them achieve a goal or overcome a challenge and to try to keep it as simple as possible, efficient and to the point, right?
And I think that’s where Even through partners, it becomes a lot more efficient because you’re not doing it alone. So that’s what I think for me, that’s the simplest definition of GTM and, and more so as you said, right partnerships has woven into almost every revenue function now. And I feel like it has a massive role now and in the future to play with, with go to market strategies.
[00:06:15] Mike Allton: That makes a lot of sense. I had just seen Sangram from go to market partners on LinkedIn was recently quoted as saying, you know, go to market isn’t like its own motion. It’s something that combines all of these different aspects of marketing into a cohesive strategy, which I think reflects really well what you just said.Now I know Airmeet adeptly handles these massive virtual conferences. That’s, that’s why we’ve been using Airmeet for gosh, three years now. I think
[00:06:41] Kabir Uppal: that’s how you and I met. That was a right. The event was a partnership before you became a customer. So, you know, partnerships can lead to great relationships and eventually revenue as well. [00:06:52] Mike Allton: That’s absolutely right. We’ve done some fantastic things together and Airmeet was one of gosh, almost 30 different virtual platform tools that I went through the gauntlet and did all the sales demos and said, this is the tool for us. These virtual conferences, they might see thousands of attendees, but does every co marking event need to be at that scale?What are some other options that businesses could explore?
[00:07:16] Kabir Uppal: Great question. And you know, the answer to that is no. Every event does not have to be massive scale. It does not have to be multiple days. You don’t have to be aiming at, you know, 5000 10, 000 registrations. You can build momentum and have a compounding effect on your awareness.The gen pipeline by doing smaller events. frequently and consistently with the right people, right? I was on a live show yesterday with, with Arthur Castillo and Bethany Fagan from Chili Piper and Panadog and one of the questions was, you know, how do you start off when you’re a tiny team and you’re looking at an ICP with the competition is big.
It’s just like, you know, reach out to the people that you want to have as your customers and start doing events with them, you know, showcase them and events can be much, much smaller. Do a, you know, monthly series, do a weekly series, do a bi weekly series, find speakers that your audience loves listening to and loves interacting with.
Find partners that are marketing to the same audience as you. And yes, the registration number might be 100, 150 and it might not look as big as, you know, The numbers that people talk about on LinkedIn and Twitter, but I promise you that will compound for you. You will build momentum and once you kind of have built that muscle of consistency, once you’ve mastered the blueprint of, you know, putting a great experience together, that will have an impact on the way that people see your brand and want to interact with it.
And you will be top of mind eventually.
[00:08:41] Mike Allton: And I love that. I don’t mean to keep plugging Airmeet, but it’s just it’s just a great tool. I love that there are these great options. You know, you can have multiple tracks if you want to, or you could have an event that’s just one single session. You could have an event that’s really just leveraging the networking capabilities, the lounge and the speed networking.And there are the tools that had those capabilities as well. So that’s definitely something to explore. I think into your point. Thank you. Which is a great one. You could be looking at a very specific partner or even a target customer and say, you know, Hey, Ogilvy, Hey, Chili Piper, you know, how can we get together?
You know, do you want to do a little webinar or a little event, whatever the case might be, you know, in a month or so, but. What are some of the other benefits to creating events as this kind of a co marketing activity with partners? And how can we measure success?
[00:09:31] Kabir Uppal: Yeah, I think one of the biggest benefits, Mike, is that you’re not going at it alone, right?You’re not looking at a Google Doc or campaign or offer plan by yourself and thinking, you know, what am I going to do to move the needle? And when you start having conversations with folks that are targeting the same audience as you that are trying to achieve the same goals as you. And of course, they have to be a complimentary product.
I’m not saying that you’re probably going to do something with your competition, but you know, it is going to start having an impact from the perspective of how you create that experience because you have multiple creative people coming together. An example would be, you know, a partner of yours may have more bandwidth in their creative team and you don’t have that bandwidth.
So suddenly the graphics of your events look way better because they had. Two or three creatives that were able to kind of spend time on it. Your email promotions might look way better because the partner that you were doing the event with, they didn’t have a great content team or they didn’t, their content team didn’t have the bandwidth, but your content team did.
Right? So you will find these kinds of balancing acts with partners that will make sure that in the end, the experience is something that is truly valuable to the audience that you’re bringing there. And eventually the metrics that you will see that you looking back outside. Three years ago, two years ago, of course, we were like many other folks looking at MQL numbers.
We were looking at, okay, how many qualified leads of people do we have that have attended an event on Airmeet that have engaged in a session, asked a question, messaged in the chat, raised their hand and gone on stage and truly been able to experience the platform and therefore may have more context about what our product can do and would be a warmer lead as opposed to somebody who’s just, you know, downloaded a case study or an ebook.
So. At that time, maybe two years ago, that’s what we were looking at. But eventually, as our analytics matured, our understanding of how we wanted to really evaluate and quantify our impact as the events and partnerships team, we started moving to pipeline acceleration. We started moving to, okay, not just, you know, MQLs, but how many medium and high intent leads will be able to generate from these events?
How many leads fit our ICP? If I’m bringing in 500 from You know, two events in a span of a month. What percentage of that was in my ideal customer profile? If only 5 percent of that is in my ideal customer profile, I’ve not really done much to make an impact in the company. But if 25, 30 percent of that audience is from my ICP, my sales team is going to have way better conversations with the people that have come to those events.
Right? So start thinking, those are the kinds of metrics that we eventually started looking at and currently look at, right? We look at pipeline movement. We look at what percentage of the audience is in our ICP, what percentage of our audience has. engaged with multiple other pieces of content before coming to our event or how many of our events have they attended.
So that gives you a much deeper understanding of what the impact of the experiences you’ve created is having on that audience that you’re creating it for. And really, Mike, I think it requires, you know, Again, going back to relationships and partnerships, it’s the more time I spent with you, with other partnerships and events professionals, I realized that, Hey, I need to have a better, you know, view of this.
I need to be able to work with my leadership to actually evaluate this differently so that, you know, they were ready to invest more team members, more resources, more time with me so that I could get more support from sales, customer success, product for the events that we’re doing. And truly, you know, I look back at the partnership that we were able to, internal partnership that we were able to build with the mark of marketing operations and.
analytics team. That’s why we were really able to visualize data much, much deeper than we were able to before, because we were just looking at MQLs and you know, the number of people that showed up at the event. But then, you know, when I seriously started spending time with our analytics team and Markov’s team, I was like, okay, what is the kind of data that will help us really evaluate the impact, right?
How many of the leads that showed up to our event are already in our pipeline and was there movement? Because of, as a result of them attending that event, do they move closer to closed one than they did when they haven’t come to an event, right? So that’s, you know, spend some time with analytics, spend some time with Markovs.
If you don’t have, you know, big teams of those kinds, get better at your CRM, build those dashboards yourself, figure out, you know, how you can show those metrics. not just to your leadership, but to yourself and your team so that you start believing, you know, deeply in what you’re doing and have conviction and, you know, start getting more inspired to do better experiences, better partnerships, get more creative.
So those are the kinds of metrics that really, you know, inspired us internally and externally to, you know, really keep doing these events. And now, you know, going back to the question about small events and large events, we’ve done 200 plus events in the last couple of years that I’ve been here, right?
And only 10 or 15 of those, Mike, would have been, you know, 2, 500 attendees plus the rest of them are 100, 200, 500 attendee events. But because we were doing them consistently and frequently, we were able to get that compounding effect and build momentum with the audience that we wanted to bring to the black.
[00:14:25] Mike Allton: That makes sense. I love that focus on basically bottom line business metrics that are going to help you not only inform management. Here’s what we’re doing. That’s actually helping to drive sales and revenue, right? But it’s helping to inform yourself as to, you know, what are we doing? That’s working well.And, you know, how are we feeling about that? And how are we moving forward? I also really loved the point that you made the beginning about getting complimentary Partners. We did an entire episode around this topic, episode 48 with Josh Burnoff. That’s basically it was focusing on content partnerships, but events are certainly a form of content.
And he made this point where you want to look for what he called asynchronous partners, partners who have strengths where you’re weak and weaknesses where you are strong. You could almost do a little SWAT analysis there and treat those partners as someone who’s going to come in. Like you said, it’d be complimentary and help you.
Grow and have a much more effective event and marketing strategy. So we’re talking about events as a channel with partners here to talk to us about another channel that you might be overlooking is Daryl Prail, CMO of
[00:15:29] Agorapulse. It’s the Arc de Triomphe. Can you imagine if you’re in charge, if you’re the CMO of marketing Paris, what are your main channels?Wow. The Arc de Triomphe, there’s the Eiffel Tower, there’s the Louvre. Those are your channels you’re going to use to drive tourism dollars in. Okay, now, but you’re not the CMO of Paris. In fact, you’re the CMO of your company, product, service. So what are your main channels? Well, I’m going to guess they’re things like pay per click, maybe trade shows events.
Maybe content. Those are all pretty predictable, right? Let me ask you this question. Are you treating social media as a main channel? By the way, only 1. 8 percent of you today measure social media and can prove an ROI in that investment. HubSpot and Gartner say social media is the number one channel to invest in this year.
Are you doing it? If not, I can tell you why you’re not doing it because you don’t have the tools. You don’t have the mentality and that’s okay. We’ve got you covered. You change the mentality. We’ll give you the tool. WordPulse tracks all the ROI for you. One place to manage all your social media activity.
Your number one channel. Change your success. Treat social media as a channel. One CMO to another. My name is Daryl. I’m with the Goro Pulse. I’ll talk to you soon.
[00:16:48] Mike Allton: All right, Kabir. So we’re sold. We’re going to do events. We’re sold on this idea of building an event strategy and using it as an underpinning to all the marketing activities we’re doing. How do you recommend getting started with potential partners so we’re not just going alone with this? [00:17:03] Kabir Uppal: Yeah, that’s a great one.I think it depends where you are at, you know, your stage of business and what kind of partnerships you will explore. Right? So specifically with co marketing and event partnerships, I think, like you said, looking at companies that are complementary in terms of, you know, potentially doing a SWOT analysis, right?
Where are they strong? Where are you weak? Where are you strong? Where are they weak? But For me, there’s a couple of things that you know are basics that you have to have in place, right? One is making sure that you have a decent amount of ideal customer profile overlap, right? That you have, you both are going after the same audience.
You both want to create value for the same audience. Both your products or services are helping a particular ICP or persona meet their goals and overcome challenges. That’s essential because at the end you want your events, your partnerships to drive high quality ICP leads that convert into pipeline and revenue.
And if you don’t have that overlap, if you don’t have a persona, an ICP match, a lot of the effort you will put into in the future will go to waste. And you know, that’s happened. That happens with a lot of folks that happened to me early on in my journey at AME. Where, you know, I didn’t focus so much on those metrics.
If a community looked really cool, or if a company looked really cool and they had, you know, folks that had solid marketing background and had done events, we said, Hey, we should jump in and work with these folks, but they didn’t always deliver results wise. Right. So I think. Now we have great account mapping technology, you know, cross beam reveal.
We use reveal heavily. I know Agorapulse and us, Mike, you and I are using reveal as well. So ICP overlap is very important, right? Second is making sure that, you know, you’re finding people where your values also overlap to a certain extent, right? What is the kind of messaging? What is the kind of positioning?
Are you customer first or are you somebody that talks more and more about your features and your brand? For us, it’s essential to work with Companies that want to create great experiences, great content that will be actionable and valuable to the audience that we’re creating it for. And maybe be like 90 percent of the value bit and 10 percent of plugging yourselves.
Right. And I would say, you know, going back to the example of, you know, the, let’s say 150, 60 plus events that we’ve done 50 percent of that. So let’s say. You know, 75 80 of those events were with partners, right? And I can’t, you know, remember single one where we may have spent more than two minutes talking about our product, right?
All of those partners that we worked with were very, very serious and very focused. That value is number one for them. They want to leave the audience from going away from that event thinking, Hey, I learned something today. I’m going to use it in my job tomorrow to make a better impact to help my company grow, to help myself grow, right?
So value, positioning, messaging, that’s important too. And in general, find great people to work with, right? So that you can discuss, you can, you know, work together to make sure that your expectations, your goals are aligned and clear, that you can have honest conversations about what’s working, what’s not working and what you hope to achieve together.
So how do you get started? Just start, just start talking to people, getting a deep understanding Try to get a deeper understanding of what’s important to them in their role. What is, you know, what are their company’s goals over the next few quarters? And what can you do together to move the needle for that specific individual so that they grow in their own role?
Plus that they’re able to make an impact for their company and team as well. So I think the best way to get started is just start having conversations. Reach out on DM on LinkedIn, send that email, approach that person at an event or at a meetup that you want to talk to. And many times you may not go from the perspective of wanting to partner with somebody and you will discover that you want to partner with them.
So I think it’s also about constantly being open minded and trying to have conversations. But that’s in number one way for me to get started is start having those conversations, feel comfortable, get comfortable with listening more than talking. And you will find opportunities where you can start doing things together.
[00:20:58] Mike Allton: Well, I couldn’t agree more. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve accepted a meeting invite from someone not seeing the value, but I accepted it. I’m like, okay, I’ll do this 30 minute, you know, intro call with this brand. You know, I might be worrying that they’re just going to pitch me or something like that to, you know, to actually purchase their product.But then you come out of that after having a really great. Productive conversation thinking, Oh, there’s a lot of mutual opportunity here is a lot of interesting things that we could be doing together. And to your point, those are conversations that each of us should be having today, not going into this conversations like, Hey, I want you on my event.
And this is the first time I’ve ever talked, but have the conversations, the introductory calls today, because in a month, two months, six months, Those opportunities to partner are going to start to bubble up because an event that you want to do targeting a very specific ICP on a particular hot topic, like maybe say AI.
Now, all of a sudden, when you have that specific example in your mind, you might have some specific partners that bubble up as a great, you know, person to turn to. And I love that you mentioned you guys have been doing hundreds of events for the past couple of years. So with those events in mind, or maybe other events that you’ve seen I mean, customers doing what’s an example of a great GTM co marketing event you’ve seen and why do you think it was so successful
[00:22:18] Kabir Uppal: that we’ve done or that we’ve seen a partner do either or yeah, so I can talk about two actually one, you know, we had, we were going, we’ve been going heavy on this messaging of event led growth, right?As a GTM motion for almost two years now, about a year and a half now. And as a part of that, we had our. ELG event led growth summit, which, you know, you also spoke at last year and we had tons of partners for that. We had multiple types of partnerships actually. Right. So we had co marketing partners who were promoting the events, speaking at the event, had brand, you know, positioning at the event as well.
We had affiliates that were driving traffic to that event, driving registrations to that event. And we had partners with partnered with creators that would actually create content around the value of attending that event on their LinkedIn and Twitter profile. And so it was a, you know. multifaceted way of driving traffic and registrations to that event.
And I think we had about 5000 registrations. We saw almost 200, 000 of pipeline being developed from that and just phenomenal content, right? I think we repurpose that content for almost six months. We build great relationships with speakers, with partners that some of which we work to, you know, till the day.
And the second one that I want to talk about is the PLX summit that partner hacker did last year as well, right? They had 20 partners. They had tons of great speakers. They had four days of events specifically, you know, for marketing product sales, customer success. And they were primarily talking about partnerships and how it impacts each of these, but they had partners for every specific day for the entire event.
Those partners were speaking, they were promoting. And as somebody who’s very closely partnered on that event. You know, a lot of the content creation was done in partnership with other companies, in partnership with other creators. A lot of content that was created live was done in partnership with other, you know, speakers and creators as well.
And they had a huge amount of audience coming in, not only registering to the event, but actually attending it. So, of course, I don’t have the numbers on what the impact on their pipeline and revenue was from that event. But if I had to take a guess, it was a very good number, but just based on the audience was there, right?
So, I think there is If you spend the right amount of time planning, and I think, you know, Mike, you do this so well, I’ve seen you, you know, have everything in place at the right time, communicating with all your partners, speakers, everybody’s well informed, everybody’s well prepared and your, you know, events, you know, go.
You know, like, like clockwork, right? And, you know, everybody comes away from that feeling great having partnered with something that they feel like they have created and extracted value. So if you put in the right time, you put in the right effort, you meet the right people, work with the right people and are honest about expectations and goals, you can achieve a lot through these co marketing.
You know, co market big, large summits that you do in partnership with many, many other companies.
[00:25:07] Mike Allton: 100 percent agree. And for those of you listening for a couple of things I want to share first, I appreciate that you said my events run smooth and like clockwork. I appreciate that. That’s from someone who’s participating.There’s a partner and attendee, right? That means you don’t actually see technically everything that’s going on. You don’t see my feet paddling under the water, right? Because things go wrong with every event. And as the event coordinator, one of my jobs is to make sure that your perception is that it’s a smooth, successful event, regardless of what actually is happening.
So for those of you listening, if you want to run events, but you’ve never run an event before, you want a little help, reach out. I’m happy to share with you. I’ve got spreadsheets. I’ve got templates. I’ve got all kinds of documents. I’d be happy to share with you. Because I’ve got that planner mindset and an attention to detail.
So I’ve got everything documented. It’s relatively easy for me now to turn these events out quarter after quarter after quarter. But like I said, I’ve been doing these for five years now, so I’ve got a process. You don’t have to come up with scratch, happy to share that with you. But Kabir, if you could, what are a couple, two or three best practices for those folks who are in the audience that are relatively new to playing events?
What should they be keeping in mind?
[00:26:17] Kabir Uppal: You know, to start off with, always keep your audience in mind. You know, we have an event brief template also, you know, happy to share with folks, but I think, you know, as soon as the second section in that right at the top is the audience, why should somebody sign up?Why should somebody attend? Why should somebody engage when they have attended? So as an event planner, as a marketer that wants to drive value through events, you have to be laser focused on the audience. And, you know, what are they going to get from giving you that time, their attention? And I promise you, if you put thought into that, you put good effort into that, people will come away feeling great.
People will come away feeling they have met great people, learned from great people, are more knowledgeable because of the experience you created and they will remember you, right? So audience, number one. Number two, I would say content, you know, and that flows down from the audience. Make sure that what you’re sharing is based on the type of audience that you’re creating with.
If you’re creating for, you know, more practitioners, make sure that it’s not heavy on thought leadership. Make sure it’s not heavy on strategy because of course, you know, they’d like to learn that, but they want to know what they can do tomorrow. They want to know, you know, what are the templates they can use?
What are the actionable things that they need to do tomorrow? this week, next week, you know, next month, so that they can actually make an impact in their roles versus, you know, something that may be more geared towards CMO, CEO, CROs. That’s going to be a little bit more thought leadership. It’s going to talk about market trends.
It’s going to be talking about, you know, how things are shifting and what they should do from a leadership level. So always keep your audience in mind, create content. Keeping that audience in mind and make sure that in the end there is value for that audience through that content, right, whether it’s very practical and actionable in nature or thought leadership and top level in nature.
And the last thing I would say is your speakers and partners, right? And specifically for let’s, of course, we’ve talked about how to get those partners, what to do with those partners to a certain extent. But your speakers are also really, really important, right? Of course, you want people that have subject matter expertise that have that great title that will excite somebody when they see their name or their title on a graphic or on your landing page, but go a little bit deeper.
You know, make sure that they have done events before. Make sure that they’ve been on podcasts before. Make sure that you know they are able to bring a certain type of energy that will keep people excited during the event. People engaged during the event. We’ve had many events where we’ve worked with speakers that, of course, very, very knowledgeable, very, very good at what they do.
But because we hadn’t spent enough time with them, the engagement during those sessions wasn’t so good. Right? Because the delivery wasn’t so good. And, you know, mad kudos to them for everything they’ve achieved, but they may not have been the best fit for that type of audience. So go a little deeper with your speakers, you know, make sure that they have a little bit of experience of speaking publicly and really, you know, sharing knowledge and actionable tips with an audience wherever they’re trying to present it, right?
And of course, partners as well. Going back to the points that we’ve been talking about, make sure that they’re complimentary, they have the same goals as you, that they are able to, you know, Pick you up when you are down and you’re able to do the same on the other side and that they’re able to contribute and extract value from the events that they’re doing with you.
[00:29:25] Mike Allton: Fantastic advice. I couldn’t agree more. I loved, you know, first of all, you, you talked about, you know, making sure you’re working with speakers and taking a little more time up front than one might normally do to make sure that they actually had that kind of experience, make sure that you’re creating an agenda filled with content that’s geared to the audience.And I love that you started with the why select occasions. I might spend an entire Saturday afternoon working with another brand client and helping them understand how and why and, and where they should put together. Their event, and we will spend at least an hour up front just talking about why are we doing this event?
Who is it for? Because you’ve got to nail that down. You’re so right. That’s the very first thing we should be talking about. Kibra, this has been so cool. I’ve only got one more question for you. It’s my favorite question. I love asking this of all my guests. How important have relationships been to your career?
[00:30:18] Kabir Uppal: Oh my, crucial man. I think all throughout my career I’ve had people that have supported me, people that have picked me up, people that have guided me, and I wouldn’t be anywhere close to where I am right now if I didn’t have a great support system and the relationships that I have. A lot of the The jobs that I’ve gotten have been inbound or through referrals because of, you know, the relationships I’ve built a lot of things that I’ve been able to achieve in my roles professionally and things that I’ve been able to do personally in my life.Things that were important have been because of the relationships that I’ve been able to surround myself with. So yeah, I just can’t stress enough on how important the people that are in my life are to me and how much I. I’m grateful for them and how much I love them. And, you know, I’m known to be one of the guys that is always saying that to his friends and people around, you know, thank the people that support you as often and frequently and, you know, honestly, as you can tell them that you appreciate them, that you love them because those are the people that are going to help you, you know, move forward always.
[00:31:17] Mike Allton: Fantastic. This has been such a helpful show and interview. Thank you so much for your time, Kabir. Thank you everyone for listening. Kabir, could you share with anyone who wants to know more, wants to follow you, connect with you, learn more about Airmeet, where should they go? [00:31:29] Kabir Uppal: Yeah, just LinkedIn is where I’m at a lot of the time in the day creating, you know, talking to people and so yeah, you can follow me there.Connect with me there. Drop me a dm. I’d be more than happy to help in any way I can in your journey as a marketer events or partnerships professional or if you just You know want to catch up and and talk about anything else more than happy to do that. So yeah linkedin’s the best
[00:31:50] Mike Allton: Fantastic and friends that’s all we’ve got for today But if you aren’t already subscribed hit that subscribe button right now Whatever podcast platform you’re listening to because we have some amazing guests Coming up, it’s going to be hard to follow up could be here, but we’ve got folks from snapchat Oracle and more coming up this season.So be sure to subscribe until next time. Thank you for listening to another episode of partnership unpacked Hosted by mike alton and powered by agorapulse the number one rated social media management solution Which you can learn more about at agorapulse. com If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe on your favorite podcast player.
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