One Dinner Beat an Entire AI SDR Team

AI flooded every digital channel, and the teams winning pipeline right now are the ones getting people in the same room.

Matthew Volm is the founder and CEO of Eventful and RevOps Co-op, and he’s run hundreds of dinners and conferences for go-to-market teams. He joins Adam Jay and Dale Zwizinski on GTM Uncensored.

They get into why in-person moments now drive trust, and what it takes to turn an event into pipeline you can prove.

We discuss:

• Why AI SDR meetings rarely turn into pipeline
• The simple metrics Matt uses to judge whether an event worked
• Why your post-event playbook matters more than the event
• Why some teams should start a new CRM from a clean slate
• Why the best events put customers in the room instead of extra reps

(00:00) Why the inbox stopped earning responses
(00:33) The AI SDR that booked 100 meetings and closed nothing
(02:45) Trading volume for fewer, better conversations
(05:53) Why event attribution is so hard to get right
(10:36) What an event motion that drives revenue looks like
(14:48) The hidden cost of event tool sprawl
(17:37) Starting fresh instead of migrating a messy CRM
(23:33) How to pick the city and venue for your next event
(29:24) Booking meetings before the big conference
(33:25) Sending peers instead of reps to events
(37:19) Monday Morning Move
(40:30) Uncensored questions

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Creators and Guests

Host

Adam Jay

Co-founder & Managing Partner of Revenue Reimagined

Host

Dale Zwizinski

Managing Partner & Co-Founder of Revenue Reimagined

What is GTM Uncensored™?

Most GTM content covers the same ground. GTM Uncensored finds the operators actually in the seat and digs into what's true in today's GTM, not what sounds good.

Every guest is currently building a company, leading a revenue team, or running a GTM function inside a real business. During the show, Adam and Dale push the envelope until the real story comes out.

The show goes where most content won't: The motions that determine whether a company stays in business, or goes under.

GTM Uncensored is built for B2B revenue leaders at $5M–$100M ARR who are accountable to a number and need a real-world playbook, not philosophy.

Every episode ends with a Monday Morning Move. One specific action you can take this week, and a series of Uncensored Questions where listeners get unfiltered answers from people who've actually been there.

What we cover: Pipeline & GTM motion, post-sale architecture, CS & retention, NRR/GRR mechanics, RevOps, AI in the revenue org, executive branding, and more.

Your hosts: Adam Jay and Dale Zwizinski are co-founders of Revenue Reimagined. They didn't build a consulting firm. They flipped the fractional CRO model because strategy without execution doesn't move the needle. The questions they ask on air are the same ones they're solving inside real companies right now.

GTM Uncensored is the GTM conversations nobody else is having.

Matthew Volm (00:00):
Your inbox is more like you're trying to generate impressions instead of responses these days. And so what it means is the in-person human interactions are actually the thing that is now the most valuable because trust really can't be derived through those digital channels anymore. But when you can have a face-to-face conversation or a human moment, those are the things that drive trust. Those are the thing that drive conversations, therefore drive pipeline and drive closed ones.

Adam Jay (00:33):
All right, so we are going to drop Matt right into a scenario, Matt, and I want to know what you do here. So Flap Stack GTM, they're a $40 million B2B SaaS company. Eight months ago, their CRO cut half the outbound SDR team and rolled the budget into none other than an AI SDR platform. And the pitch was simple, 50 meetings booked a month instead of 10 for a fraction of the cost. We've all heard this, right? Dale's trying to convince me to do this for R.R.. The meetings actually started showing up, so did the calendar invites, but what didn't show up was the pipeline that actually converted. The only deal that the team closed all quarter didn't come from that AI engine at all. It actually came from a dinner that a rep had with a VP that she'd been chasing for over a year.

(01:18):
Now, CRO standing in front of the board trying to explain why that AI SDR tool that was supposed to produce a ton of meetings and pipeline produced a hundred meetings and no closed deals. You've built your entire company on the bet that ops and the AI stuff are the commodity and that human movement and that human moment is the actual asset. You're in the boardroom. What are you telling the CRO, Matt?

Matthew Volm (01:42):
Well, I'll tell them one, I've been in this scenario before where I've seen meetings get booked, but I haven't converted those meetings at all. It means we're not getting in front of the right people, at least the ones that should be our customers and/or we have some maybe products issues, value prop issues that we need to address. But second, and probably more importantly, I'm telling them, "Hey, we need to start trading quality for quantity," which is why we saw the results we saw with the in-person stuff. So while it may result in us getting in front of fewer people and maybe having fewer conversations, it's going to give us a much higher quality conversation and higher quality of people that we'll actually be able to interact with. And at the end of the day, meetings and MQLs and target accounts don't mean anything if we can't actually have meaningful conversations with them.

(02:45):
So I'd ask, "What would you rather do? Have a hundred meetings and have quality conversations with our ICP from a handful of those and convert none? Or would you rather get in front of 15 people where you can have 100% coverage of quality conversations, people that fit your ICP, the folks you want to get in front of, and be able to convert a handful of them?" I think for me, the answer is simple. So I would start trading, reallocating budget from AI, SDR stuff, which I'm not a believer in either, at least not yet. I would start leaning into the in-person stuff. I think one of the big reasons for this, and I find this kind of ironic, is that with the advancements of AI and technology and everything within go to market, what it's essentially done is it's really flooded every digital channel that we have available, whether it's email, whether it's LinkedIn messages, whatever it might be, essentially your inbox is more like you're trying to generate impressions instead of responses these days.

(04:01):
And so what it means is the in-person human interactions are actually the thing that is now the most valuable because trust really can't be derived through those digital channels anymore. But when you can have a face-to-face conversation or a human moment, those are the things that drive trust. Those are the thing that drive conversations, therefore drive pipeline and drive closed ones. So that's where I would go all day every day right now.

Adam Jay (04:31):
100%. We talk all the time about I'd rather you have 10 high quality conversations and convert eight of them versus 50 low quality conversations and convert two of them. Where are we spending our time? What I was going to ask, but you already answered it, is there a place for AI SDRs? I feel very strongly that there isn't certainly for outbound. Inbound, I think you can make an argument depending on what type of AI and what it is we're trying to do and how we're trying to qualify. I have yet to see an AI SDR in an outbound way that is anything I would ever want to interact with in any way, shape or form.

Matthew Volm (05:08):
The messaging typically is always off. It doesn't really resonate. And then the other thing that, again, which I don't necessarily always get, but it's like people seem to love hunting for AI as a sport. It's like they're interacting with a chatbot on a website and they're trying to figure out how to get it to... And it's like, I don't know why people are so fascinated with this, but that's the world that we live in. Even people are always still to this day trying to call out M dashes and everything. I'm like, "You guys, geez, this is insane." But that's where things are at right now.

Dale Zwizinski (05:53):
There'll be a bunch of laggers throughout that whole process. And the funny part, and we've seen this a lot as well, is that it's always been a problem quality over quantity for a long time and it's probably been years now. But now with the AI and the invention of AI or generalized AI, you're just exposing it a lot faster and more effectively. I mean, they've been running these workflows for a long period of time. I always say marketing destroys every little fun thing. Thought marketing automation way back in our day. So I blame marketing, but it's all good. Yeah. This next question is kind of near and dear to my heart because I've been thinking about attribution a lot lately. And so one stat that I hear all the time is that 90% of B2B companies say events influence deals that never get credited in the CRM.

(06:43):
You've been on both sides, running events for RevOps co-op and building tools that are supposed to close that loop. Why has it been so hard to fix and why has nobody been able to do it before you?

Matthew Volm (06:56):
So I have thoughts and opinions on attribution generally. So one, I think that every marketer and every marketing leader should have some level of attribution in place. You should know what sort of results and outcomes you are driving as a result of your marketing program and your marketing budget. Where I think people start to get things wrong is the attribution starts to get over-engineered and executive teams seem to be very far removed from what it actually means to be a marketer and what it means to be an operator. For whatever reason, you go into these board meetings or your board members or CEO, everyone expects you to have an answer where you're like, "Hey, you spent X dollars on this thing. Tell me exactly how much revenue you got from that." And it is like, "Man, I wish that's the way that the world worked, but guess what, bro?

(08:02):
Doing a LinkedIn ad or showing up at one particular event is not going to be the only thing that drives any particular outcome.That's not the way that marketing works. It's not the way that go-to-market works. That's not the way that the world works." And so even going back to some of the things we talked about before, if you get in front of 15 really high quality people that fit your persona at a dinner event, after that dinner event, you may very well convert absolutely none of them because they may not be in a position to buy. But what you have done is you've started the relationship, you've moved the relationship forward, you've probably learned maybe who they're currently using, whether they care about your particular problem space. All of those things can be used then at say the next conference that you show up to where if you got in front of your ICP at that dinner event, chances are probably high they're going to be there.

(08:56):
And so what you're trying to do is you're trying to build a program that's going to ultimately generate the results that you want. And so with all of that, I always try to at least start with things that are relatively simple, which is at least with our in-person stuff that we're doing, dinners, conferences, it's like first question is are we interacting and getting in front of the right people? The people that you meet or show up to your dinner, do they fit your ICP? And ideally that number is as close to 100% as possible because going back to the conversion information we talked about before, if you get in front of a thousand people but only 20 of them actually fit your ICP, it's going to be really hard to sift through the noise with all of that. And then the other things I always look at two and three outside of the profile match that I just mentioned is pipeline generation and pipeline influence.

(09:52):
So again, try not to overcomplicate things, but for the events that you held, you should have some idea, everyone should have some idea on what your sales cycle is. How long does it take for you to typically work people through your sales process? And if you hold an event, if you work people through that process and you try to drive them to meetings, all that stuff, how long should that relatively take? Is it three months? Is it six months, 12 months following an event? And literally just measure do the people that show up to your events, do the people that you meet at your conferences within that timeframe, do you generate pipeline from them and/or do you close business from them? And if you can drive those three things, you can tell a pretty good story around how your events are doing.

Adam Jay (10:36):
I agree with everything you're saying, but there's a version of events drive pipeline that is genuinely true and then there's a version, and I'm going to pick on marketing just like Dale did, that's the story marketing likes to tell to protect budget and we're doing these great events. At a high level, I don't want to take the whole show here, but at a high level, what does an event motion that actually drives revenue look like versus what everyone's doing, which is we're going to throw an event and it looks great in a recap because man, we had this awesome event and 45 people showed up. What's the real motion? Where do you start and where do you go super tactically end to end?

Matthew Volm (11:12):
One of the biggest things that people seem to forget about or say that they'll get to when it rolls around is all the stuff that happens post event, which is all the stuff that's going to drive the outcomes that you're -

Adam Jay (11:22):
You mean you have to follow up with people, Matt?

Matthew Volm (11:24):
Yes, exactly. So going back, and there's always a delay. People are like, oh, we get the list or we take the spreadsheet from the booth or whatever, and then we massage it and we clean it and then we upload it to our CRM and then you try to manually flag down the SDRs and ask the questions of are they following up? And so there's no defined process on, okay, when we are done with an event, here's our playbook, here's what we do. And so ironically, that's kind of where you should start though with your events. And for people out there who may not have an event strategy today or maybe you're doing events but you don't have this figured out or you're trying to figure out how to do events is start with what are we going to do after the event is done? So get the event attendees and that registering list into your CRM as soon as possible.

(12:10):
Ideally, you have some software or technology to help you. That's part of what we're doing at Eventful, but if you don't, upload it, do whatever, get it in there immediately. And then you have to have a playbook like you would for outbound, like you would for inbound. What do we do to follow up with the people that either showed up at our booth or that we had conversations with at this dinner event? Maybe it's the people that you sent to the event are the ones who have to actually follow up with the people regardless of who's in or out of your territory. Maybe those people need to get routed to the right people on your sales team, depending on the territory model you have set up. Those are going to be some unique business things that you need to think through, but speed to lead matters here just like it does with form fills and everything else.

(12:53):
So figure out how you can start to quickly interact with those people post-event and then get to your yes or no question. Avoid the stuff in the middle. Try to drive people to having a conversation around the problems that you solve and get them to say yes or say no, not say anything and not say maybe next time, but try to drive that response. And then the last thing I'll mention before I turn it back to you guys is try to deliver some value outside of just the product and the sales stuff. So if you learn something unique, share content, share resources, whatever it might be outside of your product and have some sort of campaign to keep in touch with those people so that you don't lose sight of them. And it's not like the event is then a one-off thing. If you can do that, you'll be in a really good spot.

Dale Zwizinski (13:49):
I think a huge event hack that you can do that people can take away today is go into the sessions if you can, if you have the past to go into the sessions and you know someone's there that you potentially want to talk with, get something from the person speaking at the keynote, something that you picked up in that conversation and use that as the lead-in versus any feature, functionality, product, bullshit that you're going to talk about.

Adam Jay (14:13):
The best events, you're not even talking about your product. It comes up naturally because you're doing, Dale, exactly what you said. No one wants to go to an event anymore with the 17-page slide deck that tells you how good my product is.

Dale Zwizinski (14:27):
I've been to so many events and I do not see the people that are selling going into the sessions to pick up the tidbits to have that conversation.

Adam Jay (14:37):
I mean, it's hard to do that at Comic-Con and the events that you go to, but...

Matthew Volm (14:42):
Selling all the go-to-market technology at these Comic-Con events, that's Dale's hack.

Dale Zwizinski (14:48):
My jam. Let's talk a little bit about tool sprawl and what's killing that event motion. So we have tons of technology all over the place. It's getting worse than AI, right? Zoom, Luma, Riverside, Otter, Salesforce, all sorts of technology. And it's kind of like they're throwing technology at problems. What does a tech stack flow cost a company beyond the obvious frustrations in terms of an event motion?

Matthew Volm (15:16):
I would say this applies even just across the go-to-market stack in general, whether it's events or other pieces of your motion, but people seem to obviously focus on the dollar cost of these tools first and forget a lot of the other stuff, which makes sense, but it's like, oh, this X tool costs this, Y tool costs this. They have some feature overlap. But one of the biggest areas is just the efficiency of your team is one. So obviously switching tabs, switching tools, trying to build these integrations, maintain these things, download a CSV here, upload a CSV there. You're like, "Oh, whatever. It takes a little bit of time for each event." If you're doing one event every now and then, that might be fine, but even, man, you start to do one event a quarter, one event a month, multiple events a month, that stuff adds up a lot and it takes away from the stuff that matters, which is going to be the human to human connection that you're ultimately trying to drive.

(16:17):
But another big piece is just going to be around the data that's generated and the data quality. So especially now with AI everything, anything AI that you want to do, even if it's, for example, use AI to help you craft your messaging or determine how to reach out to people post-event is going to be based on the data that you have and the data that you collect. And all these new tools, a lot of them start to generate their own unique data sets that might be duplicative with properties you have in other tools or systems. Let's say you have people registering through, like you mentioned, Luma or you're using your own page and then people are showing up in person and you're marking that in a spreadsheet or it's a webinar event and you're doing that through Zoom or Riverside or something. You start to have these unique record IDs across all these places and you're trying to join those and match those.

(17:17):
So the data side is another big piece where consolidation and just eliminating the tool sprawl beyond the dollar amount, it's the efficiency piece and the data effectiveness piece are the two biggest areas where things just start to get super, super hard the more you add to your tech stack, especially on the event side.

Adam Jay (17:37):
Changing tech stack, we do a lot of CRM migrations, so typically Salesforce to HubSpot. When you look at changing tech stack, people have muscle memory, right? It's really hard. How do you actually get someone to make this switch, especially with a tool like Eventful and understand that muscle memory is great, but it's actually costing you.

Matthew Volm (18:00):
And I feel like this is actually something that I'm seeing a lot of people go through right now with AI because with all the new technology that's out there, AI native this, AI native that, we have all this baggage from how things used to be or the way that they've always been, especially on the data side, let's just look at our data providers. It's like, oh, okay, well, we build our ICP based on the data properties that we're able to buy from our data providers. But it's like you got to stop and should it actually be that way or should it be the other way around? And so one example, for example, I was talking to a company recently on this and they were like, "Yeah, they have some technology that helps shipping companies who have to ship really heavy things." And you're not going to find the weight of shipping goods in a data provider that you go and buy, but with the help of AI, that's something that you can actually get at.

(19:08):
And so whether it's a CRM migration, whether it's defying your ICP, whether it's anything else within go to market, I think now you need to be intentional about those assumptions that you're bringing to the table in terms of the way that things have always been and just ask yourself, "Should it be this way?" On the CRM migration thing, for example, I was talking to a community member a couple weeks ago and they were talking about how they were switching CRMs, and I won't say products or anything, but they were going from a, call it an incumbent CRM to call it a new age, one of the AI -

Adam Jay (19:46):
You could certainly feel free to throw out product. So they're leaving Salesforce, HubSpot or Pipedrive and going to Attio or one of the new ones. We have no problem throwing out names out here. We are uncensored, sir.

Matthew Volm (20:00):
Yeah, so that's exactly what they were doing. So naturally, one of my questions was like, "Oh, that migration will be fun." They're like, "We're not doing a migration." I was like, "What do you mean?" And they're like, "We're just starting fresh." They're like, "Everything has been such a complete mess and data's all over the place and it's a disaster." And they're like, "Why would I want to infect my new CRM with that?" And so they're like, "I'll download everything. We'll keep it there. It's like we're just going to do a hard delete and say Adios." But they're like, "No, we're just starting fresh." So even in that case where your natural instinct is like, "Oh, obviously you migrate everything from tool A to tool B," it's like, "No, you actually don't need to, at least to start.Maybe you do start fresh from a clean slate.

Adam Jay (20:58):
You are so speaking our language. Dale, how many times have we had this conversation about why are we replicating shit? Just because you did it the shitty way or you have the shitty data in your shitty CRM doesn't mean you should carry it all over because all you're doing is changing the UI."

Dale Zwizinski (21:13):
And the problem's always been what are we trying to accomplish? And things are evolving, especially, and we talk about this all the time, they're evolving so quickly that we should not be just replicating stuff, especially if you're doing a transition. But I think people get scared. There's this fear factor of I'm going to miss something. My team's done it this way all the time. We have a client that's not like, "Hey, this isn't just the way they've always done it." We're like, "Okay, time out. We went through the process and they put it in the way they had in the old CRM, and we're still going through an iteration of how painful it is." While it feels good in that moment to be like, "Ah, I feel comfortable with what I had in the past system," people will evolve and learn, and I think you need to give them that credit for it versus, "We did it this way because that was the way the old system would work, and now we're going to just keep doing it that way."

Matthew Volm (22:08):
Yeah, 100%. And easier said than done as well, I'll acknowledge that. But yeah, especially if you're taking, I'll say, the risk of something as important as switching CRMs, maybe one of the most important pieces of technology that any business will use, if you're taking a risk or betting on one of these newer providers, it seems like, yeah, why are you stopping short then and being like, "Oh, but no, we're going to do the safe thing and take all that garbage and move it into the new CRM." It's like, no, continue and bet on the bet that you're making, which is start there.

Adam Jay (22:54):
Here's something I keep seeing with sales teams I work with. Generic sequences don't work anymore. We've all gotten so good at turning out the noise that even your own buyers are ignoring you. The problem isn't your reps, it's that your sequences are static and your signals are somewhere else entirely. That's why our clients use Nooks. And the thing that stuck with me is that their sequences actually stay fresh because the signals update them automatically. Right buyer, right moment with no manual babysitting. If your outbound feels like it's shouting into a void, go check them out at nooks.ai/bridgethegap.

Dale Zwizinski (23:33):
Let's talk a little bit in the event space on channel difficulty, how do we get things running? Because we just talked about outbound is super hard to do, paid gets super expensive, inbound gets super competitive, but events keep showing up in the channel to figure out how to work and build relationships because we can't get people on the phone, we can't get them through email. So events is a good place to build that relationship. Yet over and over again, we found that either they don't prep for the event, they treat them as these one-off things. We were just with a client last week and found out they had an event in three weeks and no one had done any prep work. So what should a company look like that treats these events as a holistic motion, not just something that pops up and been like, "Okay, we miss this event.

(24:24):
What salesperson? What CS person? Let's go."

Matthew Volm (24:26):
The things that I know we do through RevOps Co-op that we've seen a lot of our clients and others do, and I mean, we've now run hundreds of small group dinner events, happy hour events. And some of this stuff might sound obvious, but it's like one is you need to pick a city, pick where you want to go. And typically the default is like, all right, we'll just pick -

Adam Jay (24:50):
New York.

Matthew Volm (24:51):
Big cities.

Adam Jay (24:52):
New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston.

Matthew Volm (24:56):
Miami. You can certainly do that. Or again, instead, if you want to rethink the way that things always happen, you could say, "Hey, instead of just picking the big cities, why don't we first look at where are either our customers and/or our prospects actually located? Where do we have density of the people that we care about?" And then make your decisions that way, which may lead you to some of those big cities, but they could also lead you to some other less obvious - Sheboygan.

(25:27):
Shorted pockets. Yeah. Yes, like the Malibu of the Midwest, Sheboygan, Wisconsin, right on Lake - Bradenton, Florida. Yeah, right on Lake Michigan. So do that first. Second, once you, say, land on your city and the format, so you want to do a dinner style event or happy hour, got to find a venue. This is where AI can help. You can use off the shelf tools. We've got this built into the eventful product as well, but deep research through ChatGPT or something, use AI to say, "Hey, here's my budget. Here's how many people I'm trying to get together. Here's the type of vibe I'm looking for." And basically get a list of places to reach out to find your venue. And then the third step is basically executing on the event. And so the things that I've seen work well in some of the different approaches in terms of format and how you can put these happy hours or dinners together, on one end, you can take the completely unstructured path where it's like, "Hey, I want to get people together.

(26:31):
I want to have conversations. We're going to network," and that's going to be that. You could take the very structured approach as well, which is like, "Hey, we're going to have content and a fireside chat, and there's going to be a panel discussion, and the dinner is going to be a moderated dinner event. We're going to have a person from each team at each particular table." And you could take that approach as well, or you could do something that's more in the middle. I'd say the main things to consider there, which may sound obvious, is consider your team. We have some partners, customers who, for whatever reason, they aren't great at the moderated thing. They're better in unstructured situations. Then we have other partners that are really good at the very structured, moderated sort of events. So base it on what your company is good at.

(27:31):
And then the second thing though is don't forget about the whole reason why you're doing this, which is the people you're trying to get in the room. So consider what they want and what they care about as well. So some of them may just want to network. They want literally nothing else. They want to show up at these events and not talk about work stuff. So they don't want to sit through your formal moderated dinner discussion on AI. They just want to shoot the shit with some other people who get their job. But you might have some functions or roles that do like the thought leadership and the content, and they like coming to those things because there's that piece in conjunction with the networking. And that's just one thing that I'm even going through right now with some people is don't forget about what's valuable to the folks that you have in the room, which is also going to be the other people that you bring together for them.

(28:25):
So while you want obviously your prospects and your ICP and stuff in the room, they aren't showing up just to talk to your salespeople or just to talk to you. They're showing up to talk to everybody else as well. So get interesting people in the room for them, and that can often be forgotten about. But the best events that I've seen, what the people do is they bring their customers together, they bring their prospects together, and what that allows them to do is their customers will just naturally advocate for their particular product so they don't have to. So it's not like they got to fill the room with salespeople or AEs or SDRs. They bring one or two people from their leadership team, bring a couple of customers, and you've got this really pretty incredible recipe for success.

Dale Zwizinski (29:20):
Then structured, unstructured events, what's your feeling?

Adam Jay (29:24):
Depends on your ICP. I tend to prefer unstructured. I like more natural conversation, but I think there is a place for structure. It largely depends, in my opinion, what you're selling, who you're selling into, and what their personality trait is. We have a client that sells into quality assurance, so think very buttoned up suit and tie quality people. They need structure. They don't want to come to a room and bullshit. If you're selling into sales tech or MarTech or something more fun and laid back, I think the unstructured tends to work well. I want to piggyback off your structure question because there's still big events. Unbound is coming up, Dreamforce is coming up. And while I'm not a huge fan, they have their place. But with that, when people are sponsoring booths or going to these events, weeks before, even a week before, they're still scrambling to book the fucking meeting.

(30:22):
Who do I meet with? What do I do? How do I do it? And we have this conversation with sales teams all the time. So you spent $80,000 to have a booth. You're going to have your team go sit in the booth and twiddle their thumbs and step outside and try to scan badges. How many meetings have you scheduled? Well, none. Well, what have you done to schedule meetings? Well, nothing.That doesn't work. What are the teams that you see with big events, what are they doing differently?

Matthew Volm (30:48):
Yeah. Well, it goes back to, I guess, the prospect plus customer thing that I mentioned before. And one, use that time. And actually maybe the place to start is start by getting some meetings on the books with customers that you've either closed in the past or people who are currently leveraging your product or solution, because those people can also lead you to other discussions, other meetings, other people that you could potentially talk to at the big event that they're obviously maybe going to be peers with or be there with. If you can be top of mind for them and get them talking to you about why they love your product, why they're getting value from your product, if you're on site and you're like, "Hey, you got any friends here that would be worth meeting with?" That's one great way to drive some of those conversations and drive some of those meetings.

(31:51):
But the other thing is even with Dreamforce or Unbound, my team will be at all of those and our partners send people as well. A lot of times we don't even go, most times actually, we don't go to the actual conference itself. We just do stuff around it. That's the other big thing is even if you're going to spend two grand, three grand on one pass for say Dreamforce, it's like you could double that budget and you could throw a small group in-person event in San Francisco at the same time. And that could be another way to, again, start to drive some of those conversations that you're ultimately looking to drive. There's lots of unique stuff that you can do around events that people can forget about, especially if you are a sponsor at the event.You're like, okay, we've got the booth, booth times are this, this is when there's going to be traffic.

(32:48):
But there's so much beyond that that people seem to not think about. And last thing I'll mention is to your point, while you have the booth and that will drive traffic and people will come to you, anything good in life is not just going to be plopped in your lap. You got to go out and get it. And so don't expect meetings to just be handed to you. Go out and get those meetings. Earn that shit.

Adam Jay (33:16):
Yeah,

Matthew Volm (33:17):
Exactly. Earn it and do it in a creative, unique way. And you'll be plenty busy. Your calendar will be fully booked around the event.

Dale Zwizinski (33:25):
I want to add one thing here. So we've been talking about events and all these different things and all the things you can do in events. And we as sales leaders or revenue leaders select people to go to these events. And in my opinion, and I'm sure it's not everybody's opinion, this is something that should be good for the individual. They're usually in nice places. Yes, it's work. Yes, you can't experience everything, but it's a privilege to go to these events and do these things. So many sales or CS or BD people that I've seen don't treat it as a privilege. They treat it as like ho-hung. And then it comes off within the booth or within the conversation. They're sitting there on their phone toddling their thumbs. Is there a place where as you're going through this evolution with your company and building that event motion that you just pick the people that are really going to execute on this and not do what we typically do?

(34:28):
Okay, John and Sally can do in January and Adam and Matt can do in July just because we want to make it even. This bullshit to me.

Matthew Volm (34:36):
Yeah. So obviously we have some semblance of who we're selling into, who our ICP is. Let's just say with us, with RevOps Co-op and the community that we have, obviously a lot of our sponsors are the people that partner with us, they obviously want to either sell into or get in front of people who work in revenue operations. So Dale, let me ask you this question. If I reach out and my job title is Matt Volm, account executive, I'm like, "Hey Dale," and you're a VP of revenue operations. I'm like, "Hey Dale, you're going to be at Unbound. Guess what? I'm going to be at Unbound. You want to meet up?"

Adam Jay (35:17):
What?

Matthew Volm (35:18):
Yeah.

Adam Jay (35:21):
If you're offering Dale a free drink, he'll meet up with you.

Matthew Volm (35:24):
You're probably like, whatever. Who cares what this guy wants? Now Dale, imagine that you're a VP of RevOps and I'm like, "Hey Dale, I'm Matt. I'm a VP of RevOps at company X, Y, Z. I'm also going to be in town for Unbound. I would love to buy you a drink, maybe just swap notes on AI use cases, stuff like that." Probably a lot more likely that you will respond to a peer than you will a salesperson. Yet a lot of the people that we're choosing to either send to our booth or send to these events are on the sales or the go-to-market side. And so if you're looking to, again, figure out how you can drive quality conversations, in that example, if RevOps are the people that you want to get in front of and have conversations with, granted, you may not have an army of RevOps teams on your RevOps team like you would on your sales team, but even if you have one, send your director of RevOps to your RevOps conferences and have them actually spend some time at the booth or have them be the ones that are sending the cold outreach to the conference list to see if they can drum up some meetings in advance because that's going to allow you to have the conversations that you want.

(36:41):
And they're going to be able to interact with those people as peers and they're going to be able to see things in terms of the problems that they might have and how it can uniquely apply to the product that you're ultimately trying to selling, which could lead you then to the sales conversation. Yet a lot of people just don't do that. To your point, they're like, "We're going to send this SDR or this BDR or this account executive." And they're like, "Oh, cool. I'm on the road. I'm on the road again. Let me instead play Candy Crush while I'm sitting in my chair at the booth," which no one appreciates.

Adam Jay (37:19):
No, definitely not. Let's shift gears. Let's go to Triple M. It's Monday morning move time. I'm going to share a practical takeaway that our listeners can test this week. What I need you to do, Matt, tell me what you'd add, what you change, what you push back on. Or in the rare instance that I hit the nail on the head, feel free to tell me I did that too because then I get to hold it over Dale forever. All right, here

Dale Zwizinski (37:40):
We go. Last session you didn't. So last session you totally failed. I think we should put a scoring mechanism in the Monday morning move going forward.

Adam Jay (37:50):
I like it.

Dale Zwizinski (37:50):
Do we have a zero to 10 on what you're saying?

Adam Jay (37:54):
Hell yeah. Let's do it. I like it. All right. So Matt, you got to score it and then you give me feedback or you tell me I did great. Here we go. Pull the last three events that your team ran. Doesn't matter what the format is. Webinars, dinners, conferences, don't care. For each one, try to answer this single question. How many open opportunities in your CRM can you directly tie back to a conversation that started or moved forward at this event? If you can't answer that in less than 15 minutes with your current tools, you have a massive visibility problem that is actively costing you your budget. The fix is not a better spreadsheet. It's actually deciding before the next event how every attendee interaction gets logged, tagged, connected to the account in the CRM on the day it happens. Do it one time, then see what the conversation with your CRO looks like at the next pipeline review.

Matthew Volm (38:47):
So you want me to rate that? I mean, that sounds pretty damn good to me. One to 10. One to 10. And

Adam Jay (38:53):
Then push back. What would you change? I mean, add, change, delete. It's not perfect.

Matthew Volm (38:58):
No. All right. So one, I'm one of those guys that I never give out perfect scores.

Adam Jay (39:06):
Nor should you.

Matthew Volm (39:06):
Yeah. My kids all the time are, I'm like, "Hey, did great." This

Dale Zwizinski (39:12):
Is one bite. Everybody knows the role. You can even do the dots if you want. Let's see what you got.

Matthew Volm (39:20):
All right, so Adam, I'm going to give you a seven. And the thing I think that - C equals MD. Yep. So I think the main thing that's missing from that, so the data piece is going to be key, but then the natural question that I would ask you is how? So how do we get from the event interactions to the pipeline that's closed? And so that's where the playbook piece that we talked about before, understanding what is our business's process to go from point A to close. That's the one thing that people are going to care about or ask about as well. So I think that's the one thing that comes to mind in terms of what's missing.

Adam Jay (40:13):
I

Dale Zwizinski (40:13):
Appreciate

Adam Jay (40:14):
It.

Dale Zwizinski (40:14):
Appreciate it. Love it. Now we move

Adam Jay (40:16):
Into - I'll take the seven for the record. Anything above a five, I'm genuinely happy.

Dale Zwizinski (40:21):
It's the first four. I can't wave through your first three.

Adam Jay (40:26):
We'll start tracking it. I like it. Good idea. Dale came up with a good idea this

Dale Zwizinski (40:30):
Month. One good idea a month. Okay. Matt, let's jump into some uncensored questions and just do a little bit of rapid fire through these a little bit. Most companies say events are important, then they hand them to the most junior person. We talked about that on the marketing team. We talked about what is happening. Why does it happen? You talked about how to fix it, but why do we keep doing this over and over again?

Matthew Volm (40:57):
I mean, it is kind of crazy that when people are like, "Hey, we want to do events, especially today's day and age," their first reaction is like, "Oh, we got to hire somebody." Or, "Oh, we got to give it to a junior person." I mean, at the end of the day, events are hard to do and they're hard to do right, but once you have a playbook for what a successful event looks like, you don't need someone who's, I'll say super senior in order to be able to execute on those events. So it's kind of like, I don't know, as I was saying that, I was thinking about going from founder-led sales of hiring your first couple of salespeople or your additional sales leader. I think as a company, if you want to move into events and you haven't done them before, I think you need to have a relatively senior person or someone with expertise and experience to do them.

(42:02):
But once you figure out what that successful event looks like, pass that knowledge down to the next person just like you would if you're a CEO doing all the selling to handing it off to your first salesperson. So that's one reaction.

Adam Jay (42:21):
Matt, what's the most expensive mistake a B2B company makes with events? The one that shows up on the invoice but never gets talked about in the retro?

Matthew Volm (42:29):
The most expensive mistake, I'd say the events being an afterthought or thinking that you're able to wing it. You can't wing them. So just have a plan, a playbook on how you run events up until the event is completed and then have a playbook for what you do once that event is done. And that should be basically your entire event strategy, but you can't forget about the stuff that happens once the event is done and you can't wing it. You can be unstructured. Unstructured is not winging it though. You can't just cross your fingers and hope that things will happen.

Dale Zwizinski (43:12):
Oh, come on. Adam thinks hope is a strategy.

Adam Jay (43:15):
Absolutely. Every time. Every time.

Matthew Volm (43:17):
Yeah. Hope and good vibes, right? It's all we need.

Dale Zwizinski (43:20):
I don't know about the good vibes. Hope definitely. I don't know about his good vibes, but as you wrap this up, dream vacation destination, where are we going?

Matthew Volm (43:28):
Oh man. All right. What's top of mind right now, because it was last week actually, my 10-year-old and I went to the All-Star Game, the MLB All-Star Game in Philadelphia. So him and I are big, we're big baseball fans. Being in Wisconsin, we're Brewers fans. So we've been to obviously tons of Brewers games. We've been to Wrigley to see the Brewers play the Cubs, and now we've been to Citizens Bank Park to watch the home run derby and the All-Star game. So actually my dream vacation right now would be him and I, and we do have plans for this, but one fell swoop. Him and I hitting all 30 MLB stadiums that we haven't been to yet. So I guess it'd be 27 more. Whether it's a road trip, I don't know, road trip would be fun or just visiting them all with him, that would be my dream vacation.

Dale Zwizinski (44:22):
I love that. Here's a fun fact actually. I didn't notice till my wife told me the other day. Bradenton has a minor league team and they're the third oldest ballpark with all the major leagues behind Wrigley and Fenway. Marauders. I had no idea. I though that was

Matthew Volm (44:39):
Worth it. That's right in your backyard.

Dale Zwizinski (44:41):
Yeah.

Adam Jay (44:42):
That is super cool. That's

Matthew Volm (44:43):
Cool.

Adam Jay (44:43):
Matt Volm eventful. Thank you for joining the show, sir.

Matthew Volm (44:46):
Thank you.