Liz Moorehead
This week, I missed what might be one of my favorite conversations we’ve ever had on HubHeroes, and I’m honestly so bummed about it. George, Max, and our special guest, Justin Givens of Simple Events, sat down to tackle a topic that every business needs to get serious about in 2025: events. Not just your standard webinars or sales pitches, but events as a powerful engine for community building, lead generation, and even closing deals.
What makes this conversation so special is the way they broke down the many layers of why events matter. It’s not just about hosting a webinar or throwing together a quick virtual meeting—it’s about treating events as a core part of your strategy, whether you’re looking to strengthen your community, educate your audience, or drive measurable business results. Justin’s insights as the founder of Simple Events brought a unique perspective to the table, and hearing him share practical ways to remove friction from the event experience was eye-opening.
🔎 Go Deeper: B2B Event-Led Growth, an Exclusive Marketing Smarts Conversation
But this episode isn’t just about logistics—it’s about reframing how we think about the role events play in our businesses. George and Max talked about why events aren’t just a marketing tactic, but a way to create meaningful relationships with your audience. Done right, events can be the foundation for trust, loyalty, and long-term growth. And if you’re not using the content generated from your events to fuel your marketing engine—think blogs, social posts, and even micro-campaigns—you’re leaving so much value on the table.
If you’re feeling like events are too hard or not worth the effort, this conversation will change your mind. With the right tools, like HubSpot paired with Event Hapily or Simple Events, the excuses for skipping events disappear. Whether you’re focused on generating leads, building your community, or turning attendees into advocates, this episode is packed with strategies to help you rethink your approach to events in 2025.
Keywords
event management, HubSpot, growth strategies, customer engagement, marketing, webinars, lead generation, business strategy, event strategy, audience engagement, communication, sales events, HubSpot integration, community building, marketing events, virtual events, attendee experience
What We Cover
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Why Events Are Non-Negotiable in 2025: Events aren’t optional anymore. Whether you’re hosting in-person meetups, webinars, or virtual training, events are a cornerstone of building relationships, driving engagement, and nurturing long-term growth.
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The Common Mistakes Brands Make with Events: From trying to cram too much information into one event to focusing solely on lead gen, the team unpacks where businesses go wrong and how to fix it.
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How to Create Events That Deliver Real Value: Justin and Max share actionable strategies for designing events that engage your audience, whether that means fostering interactivity, crafting a seamless registration process, or setting clear goals for what attendees should take away.
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The Role of Tools Like HubSpot, Event Happily, and Simple Events: George dives into how the right tools can eliminate friction and streamline everything from event promotion to follow-up, so your events don’t just feel easier—they deliver bigger results.
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Why You Need a Post-Event Strategy: The work doesn’t stop when the event ends. The team talks about how to nurture attendees afterward, from personalized follow-ups to encouraging repeat participation and building long-term relationships.
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How to Build Community Through Events: Max emphasizes the power of events as a community-building tool, showing how businesses can use them to create loyal brand advocates.
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Best Practices for Turning Events into Sales Machines: Not every event has to close deals, but when they do, Justin and Max share tips for how to strategically position events for sales success without alienating your audience.
And so much more ...
Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Max Cohen: if you're lacking a better transition into the intro This is not the show for you
[00:00:08] George B. Thomas: we just, we just jump right in. We get going, but I'm, but I'm super excited because listen, at the end of the day, there's something that's been going around in my brain for gosh, maybe two years now, for sure. The last year and a half. And it's something that I want to do. It's something that I've kind of been doing.
[00:00:28] And listen, sometimes I probably do more than I think I do. And I have my own crisis when it comes to like how much content I should create or how many events I should do. You know, but listen, we do events. We do super admin training. That's 10 weeks. We do it probably two to three times a year. Uh, we do podcasts.
[00:00:46] That's an event, right? Like, and that's every week that we're doing one, if not two pod So, but, but also you start to think about webinars, you think about in person, and events, right? I've just been thinking about growth led, uh, companies, event led growth, if you will. And so I'm excited to have Which, by the way, let me just Let me, let me ask you, is there another events app?
[00:01:12] In the app ecosystem or do I literally have the only two events app humans on the podcast today?
[00:01:20] Max Cohen: what's event integrations
[00:01:23] George B. Thomas: Well, yeah, but I'm not gonna go reach out
[00:01:25] Max Cohen: mostly why me, me and Justin's, uh, you know, little event babies exist because integrations are terrible.
[00:01:34] Justin Givens: Well, there, there, there, look, George, let's just say this. There's a other, there's other event platforms, but I don't know why you'd want to waste your time on them.
[00:01:42] George B. Thomas: yeah,
[00:01:43] Justin Givens: So
[00:01:43] George B. Thomas: I'm probably not reaching out to Eventbrite. I'm not reaching out to Eventbrite to ask them to be on the podcast. I'm just, I'm just gonna say that because, well, I'm just gonna
[00:01:52] Justin Givens: yeah,
[00:01:52] George B. Thomas: but, but, but,
[00:01:54] Max Cohen: There is one more, there is one more by, um, uh, something operations, Andrew's company. He does, um, he's got like a little utility for
[00:02:05] Justin Givens: Marketing
[00:02:06] Max Cohen: the marketing events object. Yes. Um, yeah, there's one more, at least one more,
[00:02:11] Justin Givens: It what I saw that. Oh gosh,
[00:02:14] Max Cohen: know what I'm talking about,
[00:02:15] Justin Givens: do know what you're talking about. Um,
[00:02:18] Max Cohen: I feel like a jerk not remembering the name of his company. It's like
[00:02:21] Justin Givens: Ah,
[00:02:21] Max Cohen: go operations or something like that.
[00:02:23] George B. Thomas: put it in the show notes.
[00:02:24] Max Cohen: We'll find it.
[00:02:25] George B. Thomas: put it in the show notes, we'll find it.
[00:02:27] Max Cohen: There's other people fighting a good fight out there. Okay,
[00:02:30] George B. Thomas: And that's good. I, I think it is a good fight, by the way. And, and, and by the way, I want anybody that's watching this on LinkedIn, uh, live or listening to the podcast, you know, in the near future when we release it, probably like Tuesday afternoon. Um, or maybe it's like six months after this because you're just stumbling across the podcast.
[00:02:49] What's wrong with you? Where you been? Come listen to us. We love creating content for you, the
[00:02:54] Max Cohen: where are you?
[00:02:55] George B. Thomas: folks. But, but I want everybody to know this isn't just another conversation about events. I'm hoping that we can kind of redefine how people think about them. Um, because listen, I'm to the point where it's like, it's not optional.
[00:03:09] We've got to be doing this. Events are probably the cornerstone, especially if you're recording the video, because then you can do what I like to call, which is content confetti, literally turn the events into blog articles, uh, into social posts and into all sorts of stuff. Um, but, but let me back up, Max, most of the humans know who you are, but I'm going to swing back over to you in a second because we're going to shine a different kind of light on you this morning.
[00:03:34] But Justin, I'm going to start with you because if we're talking about events, um, maybe not all the hub, uh, you know, hub heroes, folks know who you are. So just give us a lowdown of kind of who you are, what you do, a little bit about the app that you bring to the table this morning during the conversation.
[00:03:53] And maybe just like your fundamental, um, 30 second spot on what you think about events and organizations using events.
[00:04:05] Justin Givens: I am the, the creator and the founder of simple events, um, and also the co founder of a company named image in a box. It is a HubSpot, uh, Platinum agency, um, at the time of this recording, and it is a agency that just loves to solve people's problems more specifically in the ERP realm of ConnectWise. And, um, cybersecurity companies.
[00:04:30] That is who we really love to help on the agency side. But where we find the biggest passion is running events. And that's why we built simple events. Uh, it was a journey we started on two years ago. Uh, it's the number two event platform. In HubSpot, it's going to be number one. I'm just waiting on y'all to sign up for it.
[00:04:48] Okay. Um, there is a freebie out there for it. Um, so it's the easiest and fastest way to get your events integrated it into HubSpot. And the simplest, and you get to use all the wonderful tools in HubSpot that you love and use every single day. Um, one of the big things that I want to say about events is that we all do them wrong.
[00:05:11] George B. Thomas: Oh,
[00:05:12] Justin Givens: Yeah. I'm just going to drop the mic because when's the last time you signed up for your own company's event and felt like an external user and see what the process feels like. So many people have gone and said, you know, why aren't these people showing up? Oh, I put in so much effort into this event and they're like, all right, cool.
[00:05:33] I didn't get any return on investment. Well, that's not the customers that show up the prospects fault. That's our fault that we're not running the event the way you should be running events. So that's my little spill that we're going to dive
[00:05:48] George B. Thomas: I feel like we're gonna dive a little bit deeper into that as we go. And, and, and by the way, I'm also sitting here at, as you're like, the number two event app. I'm like, oh, did I just create a room for chaos? Like, am I gonna be the referee of a boxing match before this whole thing is over anyway? I hope not.
[00:06:05] Maybe so. It might be good for
[00:06:06] Max Cohen: Yo, apps gotta stick together, bro. You
[00:06:08] Justin Givens: That's right. We, I think we cross share more. Cause I'm like, you know, y'all need to do event happily. That's exactly what it's for. Let's do it. Yeah,
[00:06:21] George B. Thomas: know, uh, lovable teddy bear, huggable, you know, hub heroes, uh, host. Um,
[00:06:28] Max Cohen: I'm very huggable.
[00:06:29] George B. Thomas: the, the light on you as far as event happily. So just kind of introduce yourself from that side of things, like who you are, what you do on that, and a little bit about maybe, uh, how you think about events.
[00:06:42] Max Cohen: Yeah, um, well, I guess, hey everybody who doesn't know me, I'm Max. I'm the chief evangelist over at this company called Happily. All we do is we build apps on HubSpot that make HubSpot do more. Uh, this is, I guess, the easiest way to think about it. kind of what we do. Um, we've got an app called event happily.
[00:07:01] Uh, it's the whole goal of it is essentially to look at HubSpot as a platform, figure out where all the missing puzzle pieces are in terms of event management and to fill those gaps and literally turn HubSpot into an event management platform. Uh, and that's kind of like basically what I do. Um, and you know, part of my You know, role here is, you know, mostly I create a lot of content.
[00:07:26] I'm super loud on LinkedIn and, and, uh, I work with a lot of HubSpotters to get them up to speed on the stuff we build. Cause we do event happily. We do quote happily. We got a bunch of utility apps. There's a lot of really cool stuff we got planned in the future. Um, but I've been kind of the one sort of like guiding the direction for what 2.
[00:07:44] 0, which is really the. Sort of next evolvement, the next iteration, uh, of Event Happily, uh, in its current state. Um, I guess in terms of like what I think about events is like, you know, it's so interesting, um, because everything that people do with events touches everything that HubSpot's really good at.
[00:08:05] Right? Uh, it's a function of marketing. It's a functioning sales. It can be a functioning of customer service, right? And so forever and ever as a, you know, someone who helped people implement HubSpot, right? Uh, events were always a topic and HubSpot was never good at being able to handle it because it's a CRM system.
[00:08:25] It's not built to be event management software, right? Um, you know, and For so long, uh, you know, I just remember people saying like, Oh, you know, we want to be able to sign people up for events and do this and do that. But you know, a lot of the native stuff built into HubSpot just wasn't built to handle it.
[00:08:43] You know, whether it comes to the way that forms work out of the box and, you know, doing a ton of list management and all this other crazy stuff. Um, You know, but in turn, like events are important. And like the biggest thing that I've kind of learned is that no one does event management in the same exact way, right?
[00:09:01] And events mean different things to different people, right? An event could be a conference. An event could be an internal training or some sort of course, someone's running or some sort of, um, you know, like, yeah, sure. Like a webinar, things like that. Um, and the nuances that come along with how complex. Uh, people manage their events can be, uh, are vast.
[00:09:24] And I think like the really big opportunity, um, you know, that there is a building and event management platform on HubSpot is like HubSpot has a lot of the things that other like point solutions for event management tools don't have. Already in there, right? So like when Justin was saying earlier, right?
[00:09:44] Getting all your data into HubSpot so you can use all those awesome tools that HubSpot has, like that's the point. And like what's really, really neat about it is since event management is so complex to nuance or can be, sorry, can be super complex, super nuanced and really different in the way people execute it, right?
[00:10:02] What's great about building an event app on HubSpot is that you can, you can build in kind of like what's missing. And then you can use HubSpot, you know, wild amount of extensibility and customization to fill in all of like the unique and nuanced parts of your event management strategy or process, whatever that may be right through workflows, record customizations, additional custom objects, all of these other things, depending on what you're trying to do.
[00:10:29] Right. So, um, yeah, it's cool. It's a, it's a cool platform to build on. And I think there's a million other things besides events. You could apply the same logic to probably.
[00:10:36] George B. Thomas: oh, without a doubt. I love that, um, it could be a simple event, pun intended, or a complex event. Um, but at the end of the day, you're gonna be able to do it happily er. Anyway, you saw what I, you saw what I tried to do,
[00:10:52] Justin Givens: seemed really forced George.
[00:10:54] George B. Thomas: Here's the, here's the thing.
[00:10:56] Max Cohen: The Venmo.
[00:10:57] George B. Thomas: I'll get rid of my bad dad jokes and puns, uh, for a hot minute.
[00:11:01] Um, if I think about when most people think about events, they probably think about old school webinars, right? And so just I'm going to go to you first, and then maybe Max back to you. And I might throw some pennies in the pool here as well. But when you think of like old school, you know, purpose of events kind of evolving from, you know, networking, or promotion, or just downright bad webinars and sales, like right there.
[00:11:27] To more of this like driving maybe lead generation or starting conversations or actually being human and building relationships, you know, the idea of like event led growth. What is this shift mean to businesses like what should they be thinking about today?
[00:11:45] Justin Givens: So every event should have a goal. And I'm going to go ahead and say that not every event should be closing a new customer. you should have a process, you know, there's this little thing called a flywheel, you know, that you got to promote. You
[00:12:01] George B. Thomas: heard of that
[00:12:01] Justin Givens: yeah, I don't know if anybody on this podcast has ever heard of
[00:12:04] George B. Thomas: what's that company?
[00:12:06] Max Cohen: Inbound is dead.
[00:12:09] Justin Givens: that's not the company name just so no one goes.
[00:12:11] Max Cohen: in ebook about how inbound is dead.
[00:12:15] Justin Givens: Uh, so you. When you go into the thinking, Hey, I'm going to do this webinar. Hey, I'm going to do this in person event. One, who's your target always going in. But when you think about it from a goal for that, is it to drive awareness? Is it to drive leads? Is it to drive sales? Is it the closed sales? But you got to think if I'm building one event, let's just say you've never run an event or you've run a thousand events and you're going into that event today.
[00:12:41] And you're thinking, okay, I need to run an event for say two months from now. If you're thinking I'm going to drive new leads and I'm going to close existing leads, you're probably thinking of your event completely wrong because just like as we all know, those buyers are at different stages in your process.
[00:12:57] Don't speak to them like they're brand new to your business. Don't speak to them like they've known your business for six years. So create your events that are really tailored to your buyer's journey and where they are in that stage. So you can really maximize that effort, that, um, return on investment.
[00:13:14] And the biggest thing that I see a lot of companies do is, Oh, we're going to run an events. Yeah. Yeah. And then they're like, we got no customers and they go through this process and it happens every year. You know what? We're going to do more events this year. And they always fail because they're not thinking, Hey, that lead now, how can I, Use HubSpot in a workflow to nurture that lead into a long term customer, right?
[00:13:40] They're thinking this event should close them. We used to run pre COVID, um, a training series every quarter. And my goal was to convert, if you came to one in the first quarter of the year, by the fourth quarter, I wanted to convert you as a customer, right?
[00:13:57] George B. Thomas: term, long term
[00:13:58] Justin Givens: take me a year right now. It only took me 45 minutes for the talk.
[00:14:03] So if you think that time investment, right, doesn't cost a lot of me, but I knew going in, I'm going to stage my contact or my, my content, sorry, to elevate that person the whole way into a buyer. Okay. And that's where I feel like a lot of people think about events wrong. Then they go and use the wrong tools, which then makes that friction.
[00:14:26] And they're like, we're not running events. We're just going to go back to doing what we've always done.
[00:14:30] Max Cohen: Yeah. So then you end up getting sloppy in the way that you use that data after the event too, because what are you doing? Just
[00:14:38] Justin Givens: print Excel sheets, right?
[00:14:39] Max Cohen: exactly. Yeah.
[00:14:41] George B. Thomas: We'll get, we'll get into friction and failure here in a hot minute, but Max, I want, I want you to kind of go in the same direction of like, what do businesses need to be thinking about right now when it comes to events?
[00:14:52] Max Cohen: Yeah. Well, I mean, on top of everything that Justin said, cause I completely agree with it and I love him. Um, I think the other thing too, and George, I think you've been really good at kind of championing this idea is that not every event that you run has to be something that's going to get you leads.
[00:15:08] Right. And, and in closed deals, um, there's a big reason why you'd want to invest in strengthening your community of customers, right? Think about why HubSpot is where it's at today. It's all because of HubSpot Academy and things like Inbound and the rabid fan base and community that they've Relentlessly built over the past 15, whatever years, right?
[00:15:37] Um, you know, I'm not out here saying every single company needs to go do their own version of inbound, right? But the big thing that you can tell works, right? Is that HubSpot invests in its strengthening. And fortification of its community and its user base, right? Events are an amazing way to do that because you can bring people together over the shared love of a product or a service or an industry or whatever, get them talking and really, really spin up that, you know, base of evangelists that you have when you do, you know, very.
[00:16:17] Uh, when you come up with like creative and fun ways of engaging with that community and events are like a wonderful way to do that, be it virtual or in person or meetups or, you know, HubSpot does the user groups, like things like this, right? Um, you know, and obviously you need an operating system to be able to like handle that stuff, right?
[00:16:36] HubSpot's great at doing that, right? As long as it's built. Paired with the right tools, like the two that we're talking about today. Right. Um, you know, so I think it's, I think a big mistake, you know, Justin really hit it right on the head. It's like. Just looking at it as like a lead gen and a deal closing tools, the wrong way to look at it.
[00:16:55] Right. You want to be able to, you got to know that there's, there's other tactical reasons to deploy it, right? Like even when we talk about inbound, we talk about delight, right? Delight is so important. Uh, fortifying your customer base and creating evangelists and getting people stoked on your stuff in ways that don't always necessarily translate to a very specific transaction of money or closing a new deal.
[00:17:18] All these things are important because they affect that stuff down the line and have an impact on it. Right. And events are a great way to, you know, engage that base of fans that you have of, you know, the work your company does, right. So don't sleep on it.
[00:17:33] George B. Thomas: Yeah, so I love that I'm sitting here talking to you two gentlemen and it really is about like these apps that help you set up. Uh, launch and like create and then report and then nurture based on the events you're putting on. The thing that comes to my mind, what people should be thinking about business should be thinking about is with apps like yours, it becomes a lot easier.
[00:17:56] Um, and so the excuses go away. Here's the thing that I'm going to throw into this mix, but before I do, if you're watching this live, put in the chat pane, if you do events and what type of events you do, just throw it in the chat pane real quick, because I'm super curious what people are considering or, or thinking about an events, um,
[00:18:15] Max Cohen: And even if you don't just lie to us, we need the rooster knee algorithm.
[00:18:20] George B. Thomas: But in the chat, do you do events and what type of events? Um, here's the thing. Excuses are a thing of the past or should be when it comes to events, because the other thing that I want to put in people's mind outside of HubSpot, outside of these apps, is if you're not using AI for research, you're failing.
[00:18:38] If you're not using AI for presenter notes, you're, you're probably maybe spending more time than you need to. If you're not using AI for creative ideas of what should be on the actual slides for your event, like what I'm talking about is human powered ideas in creation, but AI assisted. Because you can spin around a deck for an event in a heartbeat at this point in time if you know the right tools like gamma to use, and by the way, not sponsored could be gamma reach out, let us know if you want to sponsor the podcast, but it's one of my favorite like presentation creation applications.
[00:19:18] Um, just because of the way that it leverages AI and AI imagery and all the stuff that you can do with it. But, so, so like, I want people to rethink about that portion of events as well as the portions that we're talking about in HubSpot and with Simple Events and EventHappily. But here's, here's the thing. We've all signed up for those events. Many of us have said, well, we're not going to attend, we're just going to watch the replay. Anyway, not why we're here. But we've signed up for these events. We thought we were going to get value. We get to the event and it's like, or just flat out, like, you're like, man, I've been here for 20 minutes.
[00:19:58] I'm checking out the socks. I'm curious. You guys are doing events. You're focused on events. You see people doing events. You're helping others. You're enabling them to do events. What are some actionable steps that brands organizations can take to, to kind of make sure that their event delivers on the promises.
[00:20:18] Of truly positioning, uh, you know, the company as a thought leader, fostering relationships with the attendees, getting people to stick around, like, is there like a checklist? Is there like, here's the things you should always think about doing? Like, talk us through that.
[00:20:35] Justin Givens: Max, you want to die first?
[00:20:36] Max Cohen: Well, I mean, let's be honest. I build an event app that is built from the ground for HubSpot. I am not an event producer by any means, right? So I'm the last guy you want to talk to in terms of like, what makes a great event from a very tactical level. I guess the one thing that I would say is don't do the bait and switch, guys.
[00:20:55] Right? Don't do the Hey, you want five free nights at the hotel? All you gotta do is come listen to a seminar on this timeshare, unless you're advertising it as a sales pitch, right? Which some people are going to be interested in that. Sure. You're going to have people that are, you know, uh, in their buying cycle of whatever product that you have.
[00:21:14] And sometimes they go, yeah, you know what? I'd like to listen to someone actually talk about the product and show it and create an open forum for questions and things like that. That's great. As long as you're saying this is what that is, and if you're interested in consuming that content, here it is. The last thing you want to do is bamboozle people with some sort of bait and switch and say, Hey, come learn about XYZ, uh, you know, topic.
[00:21:34] And then it ends up being like a sales pitch webinar that people just kind of tune out from and go, Oh, I just see what they're trying to do. Right. Uh, also. Be a little bit more nuanced with the way that you follow up with people after these, you know, after these things, right? Not everyone needs a salesperson sick on them, right?
[00:21:49] Um, you know, so I would say try to do your best. To, you know, really make sure if you are going to do the sales, heavy content types of events that they're advertised as such, not only so you're, you know, doing the right thing and being transparent and not wasting people's time with a bait and switch, but also so you can actually attract the people that want to see that you got much, you know, a much better shot at getting the right eyeballs on that type of content.
[00:22:17] Right. Um, but you know, I did do new hire training. Right at that hub spot for a while, especially during COVID and to learn how to do that pretty quick and in terms of like, you know, if you are a company that's doing like virtual events, the biggest thing that you have to figure out somehow, and this is going to be different at every single type of event.
[00:22:39] So, like, I apologize if this, uh, you know, uh, advice is vague, but creating an element that is interactive. Whenever you're doing any sort of visual event is huge when it comes to maintaining people's engagement, right? So however, you can do that, right? Let's say you're doing a webinar or some other type of virtual event You got to figure out what are the interactive elements that are going to make people not just a passive watcher Right.
[00:23:06] And an active participant, right. That's what makes virtual events really good. Uh, you know, in person events, I don't know, just make sure you got like a good spread or something, you know what I mean? I don't know. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not an in person event coordinator. Right. So there's probably someone who could comment better than me than that.
[00:23:22] Right. But you know, uh, make sure the content of the event, whatever it may be. Matches the audience. Don't do a bait and switch. Make sure it's valuable, right? And then just don't just don't murder people with sales folks right after just like let them go Oh, that was a good event and I learned something right and it wasn't just a ploy to get me to buy some shit Right, so
[00:23:47] George B. Thomas: By the way, for all of you people on LinkedIn, or if you're listening to this in the future, Um, hit us up, let us know either in the chat pane or, uh, in the Hub Heroes community. Um, have you ever felt like, uh, you've been, uh, sicked on by salespeople after an event? Have you ever had to live that experience?
[00:24:06] Um, also, by the way, that was my way of making this event interactive. See what I just did there? I got them to do something. Uh, I got the, I got the humans to do something. So, so Justin, your turn, like what, where, where does your mind go on this question? By the way, after you go, I have some thoughts and thanks to Max, I have a couple extra thoughts.
[00:24:31] Justin Givens: thoughts. There you go. Yeah. So one of the big things is why are you running this event? Okay. So what information do you want to present that the consumer is going to ingest? Right. And where a lot of businesses that I've seen that we've helped with, they try to cram way too much. Okay. So this sort of goes back off.
[00:24:54] What Max was saying is know your target audience and know what they want. But don't give them everything in 45 minutes where they're just glazed over and they're like, I have no idea what to do. Another great idea is create uniqueness for those who actually attend. Meaning you want the recording, you've got to show up, right?
[00:25:17] Add these sort of checks and balances, just like the timeshare. We, to get the free nights, you just don't show up on property. You have to listen. Do the same concept and be clear about that. We're only going to send the recordings to those who show up. All right. And one of the tricks that I really love to do in it's not tricks.
[00:25:35] It's a, it's a tactic is I tell them at the beginning, don't try to take any notes. I'm going to be asked, asking you to be interactive. I'm going to be asking questions throughout this presentation. I'm going to show you how you can get all these slides. And at that moment. You're removing that barrier of somebody feels like they missed something and they just leave To giving you actually full attention because they know that fear of missing details is now removed
[00:26:07] Max Cohen: true locks him in
[00:26:08] Justin Givens: that is a huge win for virtuals now in persons I honestly you need to pick out five to ten people and call them out every time you're going through and asking this interaction Right and I usually say hey I'm going to call you out if you don't raise your hands.
[00:26:23] And I do that with a big smile. Like, Hey, this is you're here to learn. Let's, let's have a conversation. All right. People can hide behind on a virtual wall pretty easily, but you can do the awkward silence. I don't know if anybody here is a big salesperson, but you can always mute and wait for those crickets.
[00:26:40] All right. Um, so that big thing is knowing the target, knowing what to get. The other thing is a lot of marketing teams come up with ideas of events and those kinds of things, but they remove that disconnect from the sales team, going back to the sales team and saying, what's every question you've ever had.
[00:26:58] Not that every question is going to be in every webinar, but you can pick out a collection of similar topics and address those and then answer during the presentation and then move on to the next series. So then you're, what you're doing is building that knowledge and that trust with those customers.
[00:27:16] Um, one of the, the last thing I'm going to say is if you think you've communicated your event enough, you haven't. So I tell my wife this all the time. The moment my wife thinks she has plenty of time to get ready. That's the moment we're going to be late. No matter if it's two hours, 30 minutes, 15 hours, the moment she says, Oh, we got plenty of time.
[00:27:41] We're late, honey. That's it. We haven't even left the house.
[00:27:43] George B. Thomas: let me know how the dog house is later, bro.
[00:27:46] Justin Givens: No, she, she laughs every time. And she actually said it on Saturday. She goes, you know, I was telling myself I got plenty of time. I'm like, yeah. And she goes, yeah, you're right. I was behind. But when you think you've communicated, so I was actually talking to a simple inventor, that's another word I've made up. And they said, you know, a lot of people aren't using the QR code. And I'm like, well, are you telling them about the QR code? Well, not really.
[00:28:08] George B. Thomas: Mmm.
[00:28:08] Max Cohen: Well,
[00:28:09] Justin Givens: Well, how do you expect them to know to use it? If you're not telling them again, you've got to remind your people who sign up, who haven't signed up. And again, this is why I've been happily in simple events are so tightly integrated with HubSpot.
[00:28:25] Use the list functions, use your workflows to keep bringing them notifications until they actually register and then flip them into the registration workflow. So then they actually show up and during that time, bringing in exactly what you're going to talk about and why they need to join and the nuggets you're going to give them, right?
[00:28:48] I typically keep my talking points to four or less. And during those four, I always have a transformation story that can relate to one of my buyer personas, because I want to create that connection between the customer. At the end of it, there's always something free, but they, and I even cut, like George says, you turn these webinars, these digital ones into ongoing content, I cut the promotion part of the free content for the web.
[00:29:13] You only get it if you show up. All right. So those are my tips there to really maximize your event.
[00:29:20] George B. Thomas: Yeah, I love it. There's a couple things that I'll add based on the answers that you gave. One, Max, as soon as you started to go, I was like, well, Max is part of the answer because Bro, you always bring energy. Like, you're just who you are. You're authentic, and you're loud, and you're max, and you're like, you're energized.
[00:29:41] And so many events I've got on and it's like listening to Charlie Brown's teacher.
[00:29:49] Max Cohen: Uh oh. What? What? What?
[00:29:50] George B. Thomas: Many Christmas. And so like just one thing is bring the energy. Justin, you said that you I like to share a transformational story. The fact that many people aren't using storytelling as a superpower. When it comes to the events that they're creating, it's shameful. And, and, and, here, here's the thing. Not every event that you do has to be recorded.
[00:30:19] Even saying that in the promotion of it makes it a different type of event. We do an event for an organization that I help called Lifestar. They help solopreneurs. We do an event called problem solvers and we don't let no takers in. And we don't record it because it's the type of event that you got to show up, be you, be human and talk about the problems in your business and let people help you solve them.
[00:30:45] There's no, so, you know, you can't just register and then get it later. So, like, figuring out the strategy that's right for you and your event, figuring out the stories that you want to tell along the way and bringing the energy for it all. So that if people actually get captivated and get taken away and like enjoy the 30, 45, whatever minutes of the event, you know, you add that and you'll be doing a lot better.
[00:31:14] Here's the funny thing I want to swing back around to is. We've mentioned about like, uh, being, you know, sick and sales on people and we've talked about not being in the salesy, um, and we've almost like leaned into this like negative vibe of sales attached to events. But I'm going to come back to you both because I want to know if there's some steps, some ways, some mindsets, some best practices that we could actually turn these events into high performing sales machines.
[00:31:47] Um, and really streamline the process to, to go from conversation starters and relationship builders to what CEOs and CFOs and CMOs and anybody with a C and some O's in their title probably really care about, which is closing deals, revenue, and staying in business. Like what, where does your brain go when it's like, yeah, we like to yell about sales, but Here's some things you could think about as far as that process.
[00:32:18] Max Cohen: okay to have salesy events, right? It's just about making sure the right people are the audience for that, right? Like we talked about. For years, we've talked about the whole buyer's journey and top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, bottom of the funnel content. The big problem is people were only focusing on the bottom of the funnel content, right?
[00:32:40] Only focused on the stuff where it's like, this is why our product is so great, right? And, you know, I
[00:32:46] Justin Givens: what's your product?
[00:32:47] Max Cohen: Yeah, exactly. But that's the thing, there, there are people that are in the mindset of, I am trying to consume content about why your product is so great. That's okay. You can have these very sales focused events for those people, like, not everything.
[00:33:05] Has to be this esoteric top of the funnel, educational, you know, uh, storytelling, uh, stuff, right? You need to do that a hundred percent because the amount of people that are looking for your sales focus content is generally this big at all times. But the people looking for ways to solve the general goals and challenges that they have that don't even know that they have a problem that your product sells for is still, is this big at all times.
[00:33:29] Right. Cause you're talking about the rest of the world or the rest of your total addressable market that doesn't know who you are yet. Right. And like, yes, you need to be creating content for this, but it is okay to create content for the people that are just like, Oh yeah, I know that I have a. And I know that I need to solve it using this type of solution.
[00:33:47] And I am evaluating all the people that solve the problem in that way. Uh, I'd like to learn more about your stuff. Way, you know, but, but do it in a way that's not reading another ebook, looking at your websites, product features like that. Like people do enjoy places they can go to ask very pointed questions about specific products, right?
[00:34:08] But not also be dragged into a one on one sales call. All right. No, everyone likes to do everything they can. I, at least I do like to do everything I can to avoid that. That's my last, you know, generally going to be my last step is like, all right, I need to get on the phone with a sales person. Right. But you know, some sort of like open forum where I can go and learn about the product.
[00:34:30] I can ask questions, I can interact kind of as much as I want. And then I can choose if I disengage afterwards and kind of. Disappear and ghost, right? It's okay to do that. I think as long as you're presenting the content that way, you're being very clear who the audience is for. You're making it very easy for them to find.
[00:34:49] And in that case where someone's showing up to quite literally learn about your product, it's kind of okay that you stick the salespeople on them after. Right relatively to what you're doing to other people that came to learn about some topic You tried to educate them on and all of a sudden they're getting just absolutely, uh shellacked by salespeople in the rib locks after That's a totally different that's a bait and switch.
[00:35:09] We don't want to do the bait and switch
[00:35:10] George B. Thomas: You, you did, you did really well. I thought there was something else coming there. You did, you did, you did well.
[00:35:15] Justin Givens: Hold on. I'm going to, I'm going to piggyback off that because when you run your event, the last thing you want to do is give your sales team. And this, I see this all the time, 30 leads who never raised their hand to want to speak to sales. Because guess what? Sales is going to tell VP of sales. Hey, tell marketing to stop doing this.
[00:35:36] They're wasting all of our time. All right. Then marketing is going to back. No, we're going to do more. Stop, but you've got to think about in your events, what's going to generate the hand raisers that goes back to what we were talking earlier on this show is what's that interactivity of one. Think about your qualification questions and I'm going to play it on my side as well.
[00:35:59] How many events do you run one, not a customer, just use Excel. You're fine. Okay. Oh, you run 20. Awesome. In person, virtual. Great. Do you run your own conference show? Check out event happily. We don't do conferences, right? I can then funnel people the right way. And guess what? That makes yourself look good.
[00:36:20] Max Cohen: Mm hmm.
[00:36:20] Justin Givens: Instead of always saying, you need me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, right? Find what makes those hand raisers go, ooh, ooh, ooh. Because as Max said, the last thing someone wants is to disrupt their day. Right after a webinar. And you have 15 missed phone calls from an unknown phone number,
[00:36:41] Max Cohen: Yep,
[00:36:41] George B. Thomas: Mm.
[00:36:42] Max Cohen: because also like if you run events, it's more than likely you you run multiple events and you want people to come back to them and you want people to go. That was a great experience, right? Not go. I went to this one event. And now they will not stop hounding me,
[00:37:00] George B. Thomas: Mm.
[00:37:01] Max Cohen: those guys, I'm not going to go to another one.
[00:37:03] I'm not going to listen. They broke my trust. That's not what you're trying to do. Events is all about community building and giving people an alternate way to interact with you. If we're talking about the sales process type events or the sales funnel type events, right? It's not just about, yeah, we got you.
[00:37:17] And now you're never going to stop listening, like hearing, right? It's just, it's not about that. But unfortunately that's what people do, right? They just go, Oh, we need a webinar to get some leads. And then we're going to just. You know, like you just go after these people relentlessly, it's like, bro. No, no.
[00:37:33] George B. Thomas: I'm so happy with you right now. That was a great use of the sensor button,
[00:37:37] Max Cohen: Mm hmm. No swears are
[00:37:40] George B. Thomas: Just, it was a great use of that since we're on LinkedIn live, Justin, that was honestly one of my biggest worries of doing LinkedIn live is like, historically we've been able to edit certain humans and what they say on the podcast, but LinkedIn live, I was like, ladies and gentlemen, we're going to do this.
[00:38:00] So it's a good job, Max. I love this conversation. I want to, um, dive kind of a little bit into each one of the apps a little bit, Justin, I'm going to come back to you. Then I'm going to go max to you. Um, because I want to think about like simple events and kind of like the essential elements of creating these seamless, no fuss, uh, event experiences that can deliver real results.
[00:38:30] Uh, you know, for attendees and businesses doing this, like. Just walk us through kind of that process that mindset from the simple event standpoint, um for us
[00:38:56] Justin Givens: it's going to slow you down. It's going to deter you. It's going to keep that freshness from flowing or, and even the creativity from flowing for marketing side, right?
[00:39:04] We all need more time to market so we can attract the right people for this event. Okay. So the philosophy there is we've got HubSpot and if you're on HubSpot starter, if you're on one of the free plans and HubSpot. You're really missing out on the value of HubSpot Marketing Pro. Um, and that is specifically because of the landing page features.
[00:39:25] Max Cohen: Mm hmm
[00:39:26] Justin Givens: you're running your event, you should always go out with an A B test. It should be quick. You should know exactly what you're testing. Very small tests, run that quick test and then pick your winner. Once you have a good amount of traffic to it. Then now you've got that running because again, within simple events, you're clicking five minutes, your event set up, you've got a registration form.
[00:39:48] You can start funneling people into this now where a lot of people need to have that next mindset is after they register now, what, so to create this seamless, perfect experience and something that's repeatable again, this is why we integrate so tightly with HubSpot and it's the only platform we integrate with.
[00:40:08] We want you to take those registrants or those people who have registered And now nurture them. Hey, we're so excited. Oh, by the way, here's a video from max He's super stoked that you're actually registered, create that personalization. There's so many tools to create these awesome, unique one to one videos, add that flair of your business.
[00:40:28] So go back to say, who are we and how do we talk to these people? If you're cold, stiffy, and boring, your emails are going to come across that way. So think about that from that standpoint. Then when you go into that registration, all right, cool. We got you now be up front. We're going to remind you 16 times.
[00:40:48] About the event, just so you're aware, right? We don't want you to miss it because it's going to solve and we're going to highlight and give away we're going to, we're going to do, what are you going to do during that event? Be clear enough for an, and repeat that given the tools that they're used to calendar invites calendar links, so they can actually add it and they not forgetting when the event is okay.
[00:41:12] Then after the event. You've got to have a post process and it's not to say fire over to the sales team You only do that for those that are the hand raisers you then nurture them and say hey We really hope you enjoyed it. By the way, here's our calendar page for the next upcoming events Or hey, you can go get a free x you can go do y Give them something else to do even if it's like hey post this on social media Engage them because those promoters, as Mac said earlier, you don't know where they are.
[00:41:47] They could be somebody who's looking at your product for somebody else who asked them about that product. And they just had the time because they're intrigued about it, right? So think about it from not just up into the event, think about post event. How can we put them into a newsletter? If you had that on your registration form, Hey, yes, I mean the newsletter.
[00:42:08] Awesome. Send a personalized message from the speaker. Thank you, George, for hosting, uh, sorry, this is George. I really thank you, man, for showing up. I hope you enjoyed it. If you have any questions, you know, just hit a reply, like you don't have to be salesy. That's what the cell, that's what, if it was a sales presentation, make it salesy.
[00:42:28] But if it's not just like, Hey, I'm here to ask any non confrontational question. You have a one to one message with me now. All right.
[00:42:35] George B. Thomas: Yeah, it's it's interesting because as I hear you talk just and i'm like, oh, um, you mean you care And you pay attention to detail along the way. Um, and you understand and you create some type of journey, whether it's the communication journey or it's the next event journey. Like there's just so much you can pull out of what you're talking about.
[00:43:00] It's funny too, because you literally reminded me of one of the things that I have to do when we're done recording here is I'm speaking at an event in March and they asked me to do a minute to like minute and a half. teaser video of the fact that we're going to be talking about AI and getting AI to have empathy and heart and how they can like really tri So, like, even that way before video that can go out and, like, get them excited about it.
[00:43:30] Max, let's, let's pay attention to detail, people. Max, let's flip over to you. This is from the Event Happily, uh, standpoint. I want you to kind of walk us through how Event Happily can transform the way businesses manage events. And maybe even some like special advantages, uh, that it, it offers, you know, Justin was talking about like, um, calendar links.
[00:43:54] I know he has a module that goes into HubSpot emails that like makes that easy, but what are, talk us through event happily and just the awesomeness that is there for people.
[00:44:05] Max Cohen: Yeah I mean so the the way that we kind of think about it is you're gonna kind of alluded to this at the beginning is like we really looked at HubSpot as a Platform we said like hey What are the missing pieces that HubSpot's really not good at right when it comes to? trying to manage an event top to bottom on On the HubSpot platform, right?
[00:44:26] Um, and what it really kind of came down to I mean came down to a lot of different things, but um one There's a big data structure problem, right? Like, uh, you know, for example, uh, So we have something called a registrant Object, right? And a registrant object, uh, is basically a representation of someone registering for a specific event, right?
[00:44:50] And what's really tough with a lot of the event integrations that are out there is they do a really bad job at managing this concept of That time, Max went to inbound, right? And having a representation of that data, uh, and then managing that object, right? I mean, and people weren't really doing this or, or other event, you know, uh, uh, integrations for, for point solution platforms.
[00:45:15] We're doing this. Mostly what they were doing was just shoving information right into contact properties and what's really tough about that is it becomes very, very difficult to manage lists to build reporting to have, uh, you know, the concept of an event get connected to other things in your platform that it's impacting such as deals and things like that.
[00:45:38] And it's really, really difficult to manage it because that crucial piece of the data is not tangible and touchable and usable and customizable, right? So, you know, with us, there's in the 2. 0 version of event happily, we have three objects, we've got events, we've got sessions, which are like parts of events, right?
[00:45:57] And then we have these registering objects, right? And the registering object really kind of serves as that representation of that time Max went to inbound, right? And so all of these things work together to create a data structure that's very easy to use to get. really granular reporting, create whatever sort of automation you want around it, right?
[00:46:16] Build calculated properties in the way that all these things touch and connect to each other so you can drive other processes, right? Which is useful if you're, you know, events are way past just like virtual sales webinars. But if you're doing things like lead capture at trade shows, right? Or you're doing Um, you know, uh, doing more like training courses, right?
[00:46:36] Instead of it being a marketing motion, it's more of like the product that you actually, you know, sell as a company, right? If it's education or something like that, right. But really kind of what we did is we said, what can we do to build in? The missing pieces or like an event engine, if you will, for the HubSpot architecture, right?
[00:46:57] And a lot of that came down to one, making sure all the nuanced parts of your data, when it comes to your event management strategy, can be well represented. Customized, right? Uh, you know, and that's like, you know, having an event record so you can plan and coordinate the event and, you know, uh, talk to each other through notes and tasks and, you know, have an object to report on, right?
[00:47:20] And to connect other stuff to, uh, it came down to building the sessions thing and whether you're doing a cohort of training courses that last, you know, X amount of weeks, or you're doing a more long term, uh,
[00:47:31] George B. Thomas: Bradman.
[00:47:32] Max Cohen: Yep, or you're doing like a more complex event that has breakout sessions or different tracks people can go down, right?
[00:47:38] It's really easy to kind of build that data structure And then of course the registering object which holds the historical data of people registering for your events But also acts as like a really good Workflow trigger mechanism, right and you can do other really cool stuff like use fields on registering objects to collect, you know feedback On specific events people go to, right?
[00:47:59] Because the surveys tool is not really great at doing that and connecting all the data back to each other. Right. Um, so one of it was like a data structure issue. The next piece comes down to how do you actually like manage. Registrations like registrations are complex, especially if you have different data you're collecting each time for each event that you're doing right.
[00:48:20] It might be t shirt size at this event. It might be dietary restrictions at another. It might be some sort of combination of that, right? Um, but also like. Managing that takes a lot of heavy lifting and compute power, right? Like and complex workflows, you know, I mean, you can really do it that well out of the box if you're not doing some sort of custom coded solution, but like, you know, there needs to be something to say, all right, when someone signs up for an event, which event is it for?
[00:48:43] And if someone just signs up for a session at that event, how do we make sure that we're just tacking it onto that registration versus creating a new one? How are we managing duplicates? How are we doing all this heavy lifting in the background to make sure that like. Registering data is tracked properly, right?
[00:48:57] So we had to build a bunch of automation and a whole new like logic engine in the background to like really kind of manage all that stuff, right? But then it also comes down to how are you driving registration, especially for an event that you're hosting, right? Because it's really sort of like two sort of sides of the way we think about event management.
[00:49:15] There's I'm hosting and producing events, and then there's my team goes to a lot of events. We call that like the attending use case, right? And those motions are totally different. If you're hosting events, you care about driving registration and you care about tracking attendance, and then you probably care about deal attribution to some extent, because deals are another big thing at HubSpot, right?
[00:49:37] At least a lot of people care about it,
[00:49:38] Justin Givens: We hope
[00:49:39] Max Cohen: marketing attribution is fake and we all made it up, but still people like to do that. But then there's also. There's also we attend events, so we don't care about doing pre registration because it's not our event. We're going to go spend 40 grand to go put a booth at like inbound or something like that on the cheap end, right?
[00:49:55] And uh, what we're doing is we're going to go to the event. We're going to showcase our stuff. We're going to meet a bunch of people, but we're going to capture leads and have conversations with
[00:50:03] Justin Givens: Hopefully you're capturing
[00:50:05] Max Cohen: Hopefully, hopefully, right? But like, and, and what's great about it. Is that when you get all this stuff in a HubSpot in a, in a way that makes sense, cause the data structure makes sense, then it makes it much easier for you to report on those efforts, tie those to influences to like revenue that you're hopefully closing because you met this person at the event or they went to the event or something like that.
[00:50:27] Right. So we had to build. You know, especially on the hosted side, a whole bunch of things that really, uh, make up for HubSpot's lacking in this area. Like, I don't know if anyone, and Justin, I'm sure you know this, HubSpot Forms. Our dog when it comes to event registration, I'm sorry, they just are. And that's fine because that's not what they're built for.
[00:50:54] Justin Givens: And I'm going to throw out the HubSpot engineer told me HubSpot's not built for real time registration.
[00:51:00] Max Cohen: built for registrations. It's built for lead capture. Right. And so there's a lot of stuff we had to do to account for that. And like the most very simple, you know, reasoning behind that is like, look at the way HubSpot forms work. It's actually brilliant in the way that they do. Cookie tracking. And it's like, all right, if someone fills out a form and, you know, they're on the same IP address and they give a different email, well, they must be giving us a new email.
[00:51:23] So like we update the contact record correctly. Right. But what happens when you run events? Someone goes there and signs up 12 of their friends to go to the event. And then you go, why do I only have one contact? Well, it's cause it's overwriting it over and over and over and over and over. Right. And nevermind doing multi person registration.
[00:51:41] On HubSpot forums and doing the whole conditional stuff and things like that. So like we had to build a whole bunch of like CMS modules to not only like manage more complex use cases for using HubSpot forms for event registration, but then it's like, how do you keep track of like the attendance, right?
[00:51:58] Uh, and how do you do all that kind of stuff? And how do you manage people signing up for multiple sessions at an event? Things like that. So like we built. All these like missing pieces, right? That like, it's some of the craziest CMS engineering I've, I've ever seen in HubSpot in terms of like functionality, right?
[00:52:15] And what we do with forms and listing modules and like all this other stuff. Um, but we kind of build it so you could do as much as you can on HubSpot and really kind of get around some of these. You know, uh, shortcomings that HubSpot has when it comes to the event management motion, right? Um, so yeah, it's a lot of that stuff.
[00:52:34] George B. Thomas: love it, love it, love it. So as we close up, because thank God time flies when you're having fun. And this event has
[00:52:41] Max Cohen: we had like another half hour, this is a good one.
[00:52:42] George B. Thomas: this, event has been a blast. We could probably talk about this all day, to be honest with you. 'cause there's, there's so much that, um, could go into this.
[00:52:50] Usually I like to ask like, um, what's one tip? I'm not going to ask for a tip from you guys today. I'm actually going to ask for a reason. So I want you to put that in your brain. What's one, if you could only give the humans one reason to do events. I'll go Justin first since you're a guest, Max second, and then I'll go third.
[00:53:15] What's one reason they should start doing or keep doing events in your mind?
[00:53:21] Justin Givens: So the biggest one that just screams at me is you have prospects at every stage of your business that have questions and you're not giving them a platform to ask those questions.
[00:53:33] George B. Thomas: Yeah, drop the mic, which is funny because you say that and I'm like, then why don't we have longer Q& A sessions at the end? But anyway, Max, go ahead.
[00:53:43] Max Cohen: Community building is important. is probably the best way to do it.
[00:53:48] George B. Thomas: Yeah, and for me, I'm going to kind of lean into what you're both saying is like, listen, events are the easiest way to be a happy, helpful human. Like, bottom line, um, you can care, you can pay attention to details, these apps help you make the process easier, we live in a world of AI where the creation of the content is actually not as difficult as it once was, and so the excuses are gone.
[00:54:14] Build a community, create events, um, and then have a process to communicate in an authentic, human way. And just, do good. Do good with your events.
[00:54:27] Max Cohen: Can, can I give a reason of why you should do your events on HubSpot?
[00:54:31] George B. Thomas: Oh, yes, go for it
[00:54:32] Max Cohen: Think about all the other spreadsheets you've killed. Moving on to HubSpot. And then what I want you to do is I want you to go into your Google Docs and go find your massive, ugly, complicated, disgusting spreadsheet that you still manage all your events on and go, damn, I could get rid of this one too, because you can, because you can.
[00:54:58] George B. Thomas: That's a wrap ladies and gentlemen enjoy the rest of your day and thanks for tuning into the hub heroes podcast
