Michael Hartmann: 0:49

Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by MarketingOps.com, powered by other MoPros out there. I'm your host, Michael Hartman, joined today by my co-host Mike Rizzo.

Mike Rizzo: 0:59

Hey, hey, everybody.

Michael Hartmann: 1:00

Almost almost the end of the year. Almost five years since we started this. Almost five years.

Mike Rizzo: 1:06

Isn't that wild? It is crazy. This is crazy. Yeah. That's like someone was just asking me that the other day. I was like, gosh, I think we're coming up on like three. I was like, four. Oh my gosh. No, it's five years.

Michael Hartmann: 1:17

Five years. Yeah. Time flies when you're having fun. That's right. It is. Like I never thought it would last this long, I don't think. Anyway, uh, well, today, you heard the voice. We're talking about a topic that many revenue demand gen ops teams wrestle with, and that is events. They are expensive, they take a lot of effort. And for many teams, data's messy, delayed, incomplete, and it makes it really hard to build an ROI case if it's possible at all. So joining us to unpack that is Aaron Carpathi, Senior Director of Strategic Growth at Captelo, a company focused on modernizing how organizations capture, unify, and activate event data across their go-to-market systems. Aaron has worked extensively with teams trying to solve the operational gaps in field marketing, lead capture, meaning management, post-event follow-through. Breathe. Aaron, welcome to the show.

Aaron Karpaty: 2:12

Yeah, thanks for having me. Super stoked to have this conversation.

Mike Rizzo: 2:17

Events are in my heart, as all of our listeners know. So, you know, this will be a fun one. Aaron, you and I got to riff for a little bit while we were on the show floor at Mopsapalooza this year, too.

Aaron Karpaty: 2:27

So that was pretty fun. Yeah, and it's funny because I heard some of the same things from the Mops community as I do from the events community, right? And it's what made me think, uh, hey, we need to intertwine that a little bit, uh, because alone, uh, you know, they're strong, but together they can be, you know, much stronger. Um, and a lot of times, you know, we hear from events teams, uh, that's great, we love it, we wish we could, but we have no time. Uh and you know, I think that's where ops could really plug in and help. So it seemed like a no-brainer conversation to me.

Mike Rizzo: 3:00

Yeah, yeah, I agree. And uh I have to say thank you before we dive into some of our initial questions today and what we're gonna talk about. I have to say thank you for introducing me to uh Clubici and uh the group that they're running. So that's a community for all of these sort of event planner people. And uh we're actually gonna look to do a little bit of a co-op. So to your point, Aaron, um, of like trying to bring the world together a little bit more. Uh, we're both dealing with very similar problems, just from slightly different sides of the funnel. Um, and so we're gonna try to bring a little community gathering uh together sometime in 2026. So more to come there. But I appreciate you introducing me to the team there. That was actually really helpful.

Aaron Karpaty: 3:42

Yeah, awesome. And uh they were appreciative too and and totally aligned with because that you know, that community is like, hey, how do we look at what cutting edge is? Look at look at what our pain points are, and how do we come together as a community for solutions? And then I I learned the same type of stuff from this the mops community at Mops of Palooza.

Michael Hartmann: 4:00

Yeah.

Aaron Karpaty: 4:00

So like I know that these are kind of two different roles and personas, but at the same time, they have the same mission. Um, it's just that marketing ops is a lot more focused on digital marketing and some of the offline stuff is missing. So I think coming together and allowing mops to do in offline what they did so great and online is gonna really help the events community uh community and uh helps ops have more of a full picture than just the online stuff. Yep, totally.

Michael Hartmann: 4:30

Yeah, for that yeah, and it so I mean my perspective, having worked in the events industry on marketing teams, but also having dealt with teams that were going to events, whether they're putting them on or exhibiting, like from my perspective, it feels like there's there's always been sort of a I'm always surprised at just like at the aggregate how big events are from a cost perspective, like how fragmented the technology space is in it. So maybe let was when we start there. Like, what's your what's your take, Aaron, on what the state of event field marketing technology is like today? Do you think it's still as fragmented as I still think it is? And what do you hear about like major pain points that tensor gorgeous?

Aaron Karpaty: 5:09

I think it's getting better in in in some instances. I think it's getting better sometimes in more of a corporate event perspective, where uh the company that's throwing the event owns registration, they own the event, right? And they can go to an event management company. Now, most of the event management and registration platforms out there, that's what they're really good at event management and registration. But quite a bit of them have said, hey, we're gonna do lead capture because we have to. Hey, we're gonna do meetings management because we have to, we're gonna do networking because we have to, right? But they're really, really strong in the logistics of putting on events, right? Um, where you know, sometimes when you're going to a trade show, you're using a different lead capture app at every event, right? Yeah. You're managing the most important executive and sales meetings with customers and prospects on spreadsheets or in workarounds and registration tools because it really doesn't meet the requirements that you need for different types of meetings, different workflows, mapping uh meeting types and products and topics to the right SMEs, right? So we can have the right conversations with the right people. Um, all of that, you know, we we go to events a lot of times to drive connection and engagement so we can have a meeting that creates an advances pipeline. And we want to be able to measure that. Except sales is out there having great meetings, um, and sometimes booking meetings in their outlook, which is being managed on a spreadsheet. And does that ever make it back to the journey in Marketo or Elecor or HubSpot? No, but the digital journey looked really great. Yeah. Right. I tell people this all the time. I went to the um Gartner Marketing Symposium, and 95%, if not more, what I saw was these amazing, beautiful stacks, lots of automation, lots of AI. Um, and then I see Dobb lines out to events because we they just gave us mangled spreadsheets from different systems and different ways, and then we have to figure out what to do with that mangled spreadsheet to get it into our systems. And sales says, ah, those marketing leads suck, and and marketing says sales never follows up on our leads, and there's a big disconnect there, right? And I think if we could bring them together with the data, uh, we could help close some of that gap. But with a different system, and then the manual processes still uh around a lot of this makes it hard to have digital transformation on the offline stuff, right? Is what we have on the online stuff.

Michael Hartmann: 7:39

And we may get to this a little further, but like you brought up sales, like a lot of times sales this is really where you've got people manning booths exhibitors on that side, right? They send salespeople there. But I I find that you and I may have talked about this, Aaron. Like one of my things is like you've got to get the right people manning your booth, right? And if you've got people who are not focused on drawing people in and uh having those conversations, and then to your point, right, the part of actually capturing the impact of that, it's gonna be a real challenge no matter what the technology does.

Aaron Karpaty: 8:13

And and what I talk a lot about is, you know, if you're if you're you know, now there's other types of events than demand events, but the events industry has come up with like three different types of events. There's you know, customer-facing corporate user conference type events, there's the third-party or industry type events, and there's internal events, right? Um, and a majority of the customer-facing events are we go for demand gen reasons. Even clients that I talk to that are like, no, we don't go for demand gen reasons, we go for brand awareness reasons. I start to say, well, okay, why do you want them to know about your brand? You know, and they'll say, well, so they know who we are and they know what we do. And I say, okay, why do you want them to know what you do? Uh so they know more about our products. Why do you want them to know about your products? Uh, so that we can sell them. Okay, so you are going to events for demand-gen reasons, right? And if that's the case, then have a demand-gen strategy with sales and marketing connected into that, right? Marketing is really great at driving uh connection and engagement through content and experiences and solving the list of project logistics that has to happen that makes their job one of the most stressful ever, right? Yeah. But they do that so that people are warmed up and connected to have a discussion with sales to identify pain points and solutions that create an advanced pipeline. Right. And so if your marketing and your sales has a strategy, and now the booth is set up that way, that you're staffing it that way, it's all to drive connection engagement and leads and meetings that drive pipeline that you can report on, then I think we're, you know, not only are we going to have an impact, as we always have in the live face-to-face space, which a lot of times is a much more qualified discussion than they were on our product page and downloaded a white paper and it says they were on that product page for this amount of time. But when you're face to face with an expert doing the demo and asking questions, a lot of times that's the much more qualified engagement. But again, that's missing from the journey.

Michael Hartmann: 10:14

Yeah.

Aaron Karpaty: 10:15

So if we could bring that stuff in and kind of complete that circle, um, I think it's going to be a uh a big difference in now having visibility to the value because that's what events says is um I'm so busy. And um, you know, one thing that we should address that I think we talked about was, you know, the events team, they want to be able to prove the value. They know how valuable face-to-face time is. The problem is is that they don't have the budget, the resources, the training, or the come up out of the cellar of being slammed with logistics to do anything about digital transformation to be able to actually show the value. Yeah. That is well, now they even uh knowing, hey, we might have closed the biggest deal of the quarter at CES, but nobody knows about it except the sales rep was that was there that had coffee with that person.

Michael Hartmann: 11:09

Yeah. Which which brings me like one of the things that I think was interesting to me when we talked before is because I think you're right, this ROI ide idea, like what's the ROI of these events? And I think a lot of organizations go a little bit based on you know anecdotal, instinctual, right? We know there's value there, we just don't know how to tie it. And you brought up like that that example of a coffee meeting, right? Um offline uh touch points, as well as some of the I think you called it unstructured data and that that's missing or inconsistent. Like, what do you like what are those? Are those what are the big things that you think are are most field marketers, event marketers are dealing with where there's gaps in data that would help address that ROI question?

Aaron Karpaty: 12:02

Well, again, I think it's like too many different systems to use sometimes um spreadsheets. I think it's um accurate data around what happened in those conversations that gets recorded back. You know, they talk about it all the time. And then there's the turnaround time to get things exported from uh a different system at that event into a spreadsheet, and then that spreadsheet updated, and then get that to ops to get imported into Salesforce. You wouldn't believe about we go to events and have amazing conversations, and the follow-up happens three to four weeks later because of the turnaround time to get the spreadsheet cleaned up and actually imported into Salesforce. And then by the way, we get spreadsheets with notes like we had this 20-minute conversation with this perfect, you know, perfect persona ICP customer, and then the rep put great meeting, follow up. That's the only notes we have, right? Um, and and this is why I think bringing in AI conversational um technology, you know, something that Cap Tello's doing with lead capture and meetings to be able to start helping with that digital transformation so that we're getting that data and we can start having proactive action and tasks that help take advantage of that. But it's it's really the really the the the different again, it's not like one platform, it's how do I get all of these different platforms that are being used at different events for leads? How do I get the spreadsheets for each event that's being managed on spreadsheets? Or maybe we're doing an Outlook process, but Outlook's a data black hole. I can't go into Outlook and say, show me all of the executive meetings that we had at Mobile World Congress last week. Yeah, right. But I I need that information, but now I have to somehow do that manually, get that information, put spreadsheets together, and by the time I even know what's going on, it's weeks later.

Michael Hartmann: 13:58

Yeah.

Mike Rizzo: 13:59

Yep. I think for for our listeners out there who um you know uh are often in in the B2B landscape doing events of all kinds. Uh, but for those of you that maybe haven't had the opportunity, the let's call it the luxury and opportunity, we'll refer to it as such, um, to run a field program of any kind, um, but you've been the recipient of maybe a spreadsheet, or maybe you've never even seen that yet, and you're still early in your career. Um, you know, a couple, a couple things I can paint, paint a picture for you on. Uh I was um, like many of you listening, I'm sure, but for some of you maybe who are not, uh, I was in a role at a startup company many moons ago where I straddled the line of marketing ops and field. Um, and I had to do the booth planning and the this and the that, all the all of the details of execution. And so the minutia that Aaron talks about of just being like slammed with the logistics of trying to execute an event is um it's asinine, actually. It's like it's a lot.

Michael Hartmann: 15:06

Um, and there's always always at least one thing goes unexpectedly wrong.

Mike Rizzo: 15:12

Yeah. Whether you're planning a big mofsapalooza like we plan, or even just a booth presence and maybe a dinner or something at a at a conference that you're that you're sponsoring, yeah. Uh, there's just always something, you know. Yeah. Concrete example, one of our sponsors who was uh help helping us out last year as a booth sponsor for Demand and Expand, um, none of their swag got delivered on time. So they were scrambling because the the the the shipper just couldn't get it to them, right? It it failed to to deliver. So so there's always something happening. And um more often than not, you'll end up at an event where uh as Aaron was talking about, where you are um yeah, you're provided a lead scanner, right? So like part of the quality of the experience, at least, you know, 15 years ago was like, do I get a lead scanner? Yeah, because I know I'm gonna be have I'm gonna have to get leads into the system. And so, you know, that was like by default, every event was like, Yeah, yeah, you get a lead scanner. Like, don't worry, it's no big deal. Uh well, on the other side of that transaction is the issue that we've been dealing with, it's just this, this, this like messy, messy spreadsheet situation. Um, and and so to the question about like this data gap or like the traps that we fall into uh with unstructured data is is that we are beholden more often than not to whatever system the event planner is using, right? The event organizer themselves to say, yeah, here's your lead scanner. Uh and what, you know, and sort of choosing words for Captello here and Aaron, but but what I think is um sort of a cool through line here when you when you start to recognize that when you know this this separation between what you would desire as the outcome and what is happening on the floor, um, is that you have to be able to take ownership, right? And so, you know, prior to now, there haven't been a ton of opportunities for you to take ownership of that piece of the transaction, right? And so now with technologies like Captello that are coming into the market just to help you bridge that gap, if you've never experienced that pain, um, this is like still a very real pain that happens in the market all the time. But now this is saying, like, actually, you could take ownership of this piece and say, actually, this is how we want to capture leads. And so Aaron was kind of touching on that, right? It's like, here's here's why we're here and the experience we want to have, and here's the type of information we want to what we want to grab. And um, and what's beautiful is that there's AI now. So, like, you know, I think uh I don't, you know, I know we're not demoing your product on a on a podcast here, but I'm pretty sure what you were alluding to is the idea of like I could record voice notes and have that hit my my you know my upload or whatever, right through through the app. That is that is world-changing enrichment opportunity that solves a massive, massive data gap versus what Aaron was talking about a second ago, which is like you know, great combo should follow up. Yeah. That helps zero people. In fact, I could guarantee that the rep is not going to remember. It's a human bias. Like I even do it, right? When I was talking to Aaron, if I if I saw Aaron's name along like a list of of like 150 names on a sheet, and I saw that I left myself a note with Aaron that said great convo, I I would probably have no idea what the heck we talked about by the end of that show, right? Right. It's just never helpful.

Aaron Karpaty: 18:47

So just and those are the things like if we want to drive digital transformation in the offline stuff, most of the time, first of all, we have to make it super easy and adopted by the sales team, right? Because, you know, everybody will say, like, you better make it easy for the sales team or they won't use it. Well, how about we make it so they don't have to leave Salesforce? We can hardly get them to use Salesforce, right? Like, it's got to be something they love doing, and it's for them meeting their goals, right? Like, I need the product expert in their availability because they're gonna help me close this deal. I need a room that's nice to have my customer in. Um, and all I have to do is click, click, click, and I have all the right people, the right context, everyone's informed. Um, it's totally data enriched with um getting people prepared and then it's recording the call to be able to transcribe notes afterwards. And I don't have to do anything, but marketing gets all that data that they don't have because sales used it. Right. Um, and it's not a different system at every event that the sales has to use or learn or that everybody's doing differently. You know, having, and again, I'm not trying to sell Captello itself itself if you see it, uh, but having one platform will help standardize the workflows and the data layer, right? Which is what I've seen work really well in the digital stack, um, but not so much on the offline.

Mike Rizzo: 20:08

Yeah. Yeah, totally. Yeah, I mean, look, the the the ownership of this piece of the technology has previously not been available to us. Um, and and it's only been recent years where a product like Captello has come into market, right, and said, hey, we could we could help solve this problem because technology is enabling us to do that, and AI is adding to that leverage even further, which I think is just anyway. For th for the ops and field marketer guy in me, I think this is a really cool problem that is being solved today. And and yeah, awesome, I guess.

Aaron Karpaty: 20:48

Amazing technology, Mike, that we look at today. Like, believe it or not, like we're still going to events. And you know, one of my best programs is just going booth to booth talking to people, and you will still find some of the biggest companies in the world just collecting business cards that half of them get lost by the time they get home. And you'll see them managing the most important meetings on notepads. And the EAs or the meeting managers are at a desk with a real notepad of the meetings that are supposed to come in, and they're taking notes on it. Um, and uh to me it's crazy. I've also been at finance shows where the biggest banks in the world were there, and they're like, no, we can't use software because our security is so strict and data privacy is so strict we cannot use outside technology. And they have spreadsheets with all their meetings and all their customers' PII data taped to the front desk. Yep.

Michael Hartmann: 21:41

Um I didn't know, didn't know where you were going, but I predicted you where you were uh because I've I've had those same kinds of conversations.

Aaron Karpaty: 21:53

There's a transformation in this industry because it hasn't been as much in the innovation and technology piece, and it's been managed by logistics, uh, right, is is that there's a lot to do. A lot of people are way back there. The technology companies are a lot farther, but there's some other verticals and industries that um sometimes are still in this the ice ages.

Michael Hartmann: 22:13

Yeah.

Aaron Karpaty: 22:13

Um, and when I love going to those events because they've never heard of any other technology, they're like doing it on pads of paper, and they're like, you could actually have this just on your phone. Um, and uh those are really good fits, but yeah.

Michael Hartmann: 22:28

So as I understand it, you guys started doing lead capture and then evolve from there, like right is so what led to because lead capture by itself, I think, has been kind of like I was waiting for Mike to get to the point where you use the lead capture machine that literally spit out like a receipt, right? Long piece of paper that someone would then have to take back to an office and manually type into a spreadsheet that yeah, it like it gives me PTSD a little bit, actually, thinking about that. But um like what so you know, just getting lead capture digitally, even if it's as simple as you know, had great convo would be a step up for a lot of like to your point here, a lot of companies. How how did you like how did you get to the point where you were saying like there are other pieces of data that we could potentially capture through digital means? How did that how'd you identify that and then how'd you vet it and make it happen?

Aaron Karpaty: 23:29

Well, I think it it you know sometimes the universe things just come together and you're like, oh, well of course it came together like that. But you know, um I'd been in the the meeting management of meetings at events for a long time, right? And um in solving that and working with some of the biggest companies, and I used to just uh hang my hat on driving meetings that drive pipeline that drive revenue, right? I always was doing, and then um, you know, after we sold that company and I was looking at different companies, I was realizing what I was really passionate about um was always me trying to push events people to care about demand gen at events and being able to prove ROI and track pipeline because they're always very focused on the creative, the sexy, the content, the experience, right?

Michael Hartmann: 24:17

The experience or the experience's sake, right?

Aaron Karpaty: 24:19

As a put right, which or the things why sales was able to have good meetings, right? But we weren't tracking the pipeline. So those are the people that like I always say it like tracking leads and meetings is not sexy, but it sure the hell pays for sexy.

Michael Hartmann: 24:34

Absolutely.

Aaron Karpaty: 24:34

Because if you're not doing it, then the sexy is gonna get cut. If I'm a CMO or a CFO and you come to me and you say, We're gonna go to this event and it's gonna be amazing, and we're gonna build community and the brand and everybody's gonna have a great time. And emotionally, they're gonna, when they think of a problem, they're gonna think of our brand, right? And if I'm a CMO and CFO, I think you're a cost center.

Michael Hartmann: 24:55

Yep.

Aaron Karpaty: 24:57

Right? But if I came to you and I said, we're gonna do all of those things partnered with sales so that we have a meeting strategy to drive meetings that create an advanced pipeline with customers, prospects, and partners, and we're gonna measure that. And if we can't drive meetings that drive pipeline, we're gonna turn knobs to go do more events we can and go to less events that we can't. Then if I give you more money, can you book more meetings? Right? That's been kind of my, you know, hanging my hat on when um uh and I've partnered with Captello over the years as the lead capture piece, right? Okay, um, but you would have caught me a few years ago saying, leads, leads don't matter. It's all about the meeting, have a meetings first strategy. And I'll still say have a meetings first strategy, but capturing people to see if they're qualified, recording those conversations that you don't have a meeting, driving some gamification, uh, AI photo boost stuff that drives that connection to get people engaged and warmed up to have a discussion that turns into a meeting, I think is completely part of all of it. So having lead capture and meeting management in one platform with the activation capability, networking, all of that. So we can look at what is needed to drive pipeline across the events and how do we standardize on one platform to do that, right? Where we leave more of the logistics event management stuff to those companies that have been doing it for decades and decades. Um, but wouldn't it be nice if we had kind of one demand gen platform across offline programs that combined with marketing automation and CRM to do digital transformation on all the offline stuff? And that's where uh our founder, uh Ryan and uh and I got really excited about that shared vision. Um, and that's what we're executing against, right? Is uh being the, you know, really solving that pain. And and believe me, I've I've worked with the biggest companies in the world for years with the highest leaders at those companies. And I go and get validation from them. I'm like, look, this is what I'm thinking, this is the platform I'm thinking. Like, uh, am I full of crap? Am I drinking my own champagne, or does this make sense? You know, and I've gotten validation from all of them. And then what happens is I go try to spend time with them to get these things implemented, and they don't have any time. Right. And I've asked people like Nicole Kastner at the Event Leadership Exchange. She's the CEO of that group, and that's the highest level um uh companies um uh that do events with the highest in leadership at those events. I think you got to be senior director and above, and it's got to be so much in revenue with the company with a uh budget. And she said, you know, Aaron, it's because they're so slammed. They have no resources, no capacity to do anything that's gonna help them track the value of events. All they can do is make sure the event comes off well. So all the stakeholders think, that seemed easy. What a great, great experience. It's them in the background working hours. I mean, day the that lady, Nicole Kastner, I did a uh uh a um a white paper or a case study with her once, uh, a story that she wrote about, we called it her pink pants story, right? And the pink pants story was when she started out at events, she was at a very large conference that had a lot of executive meetings. Okay. And the team was like, hey, we're gonna go out to dinner, we'll we'll come back in the morning, but let's go get some break. And she's like, Oh, you guys go. I'm gonna go get some rest back at the hotel, right? And they all went out to dinner. And when they came back the next morning, she was at the desk in the same pink pants she was the night before. And they're like, Did you ever go back to your hotel? And she was like, No. I I've been here all night working on the puzzle of executive meetings to make sure that our executives were happy and they were in the right spots and there wasn't any double booking or time zone issues. And because that's the kind of things events teams do in this back room that nobody sees. They just go, man, this was awesome.

Michael Hartmann: 29:02

Yeah.

Aaron Karpaty: 29:02

Well, it took those people to know how to get all those things done on the back end to make that happen. That's that's crazy. Right. And because of that, they don't have the time to innovate and pull the things in that they would love to.

Michael Hartmann: 29:15

Okay, so let me I'm gonna play, I'm gonna throw you, put you on the spot a little bit here. I'm gonna play devil's advocate, maybe skeptic a little bit on the idea of like, why couldn't I, as a marketing office person, if I'm listening, go like, I think I can achieve some of this by putting together pieces of that on my own, right? I can find something that can record meetings and transcribe it and capture it. I can do this, I can do like what like why like why couldn't I just do that?

Aaron Karpaty: 29:42

You could look, and I'm not like I said, I'm not here to sell captello, I'm here to sell the idea of how do we help drive digital transformation with offline programs because it's dear to my heart working 20-year career with event marketing people that offer a ton of value but have to deal with budget cuts and all these things because they can't prove the value. So look, if there's other things you can do to piece it together, do it. If you're not doing it at all, at all, do it on spreadsheets. Like do what you can do, right? Yes, Catello is a platform that we want to automate that, centralize it, and drive um, you know, unification integrated with CRM and marketing automation and other stuff. But if you're doing it in a very, very manual, disjointed way and you're not able to get much at all from a summary of what was the impact of the stuff that happened at the event, then piece things together, right? Schedule time with me. I'll tell you how I've seen others piece it together. Um, and sometimes it's a uh walk, you know, crawl before you walk in we're gonna automate this piece of it, then we're gonna do this piece, then we're going to, right? We have customers like that too. We're gonna start off with universal lead capture, then we're gonna bring meetings in, then we're gonna integrate it with Salesforce and Marketo, right? And it's kind of a maturity path of how do I get to best practices by taking little steps, but we also see customers saying, we have a big project, marketing ops is gonna own this, Avet Technology is gonna be part of that, and we're going to do this big project to move towards a more centralized platform. But there's absolutely baby steps all the way into what's the best way to do it if you have no tools? Um, what can you really try to at least do manual so you have some visibility of the impact?

Michael Hartmann: 31:28

Yeah. Okay, why why like it's it's weird to me that in a today's day and age that there's still a lot of people doing so much of this from a manual effort? Like even the logistics part, right? They're not using a project management system to try like and having a template. Like what so what do you think is the driver? Why why are they not uh is it is it like you mentioned, right? They don't have the time, they don't have the budget, is it they don't have a partner in say marketing ops? Like what is what do you think are the drivers behind that still ongoing manual processes that they have to deal with?

Aaron Karpaty: 32:07

Yeah, and you know, um it can be different at different companies for sure, and definitely different at different industries and verticals, right? I find sometimes at the biggest oldest companies in the world that are the richest, sometimes uh are still using the most manual processes. Um okay. Um I already chose the direction of that ship. Right? Yeah, yeah. The really, really big companies that are very, very siloed. Um, it's really hard. Like you can have one business unit that's completely centralized on stuff, but another business unit that's totally manual and they don't talk. They they have two, they might have two CMOs, two PLs. It's very separate, right? Um, and somebody's trying to centralize things, but it hasn't been successful in the 15 years someone brought it up, right? And then there's other companies that have digital transformation owners, they have um marketing ops and kind of, you know, on my side, I call it a buying group, right? But it's demand gen, leaders in sales marketing, events, marketing ops, uh IT, right? It's like that group saying, Hey, how are we going to digitize the offline stuff and streamline this like we have the digital online stuff? And that's a project and a team effort. And when I try to pull enterprises together, that's the type of conversation our teams want to have, right? Uh, because I know that uh I gave up on trying to pitch meetings drive pipeline that drive revenue to events people because as much as they want to, they don't have time. Yeah, they need marketing ops to come in and be a part of those discussions and own that, right? And now go do the things you're amazing at, right? The sexiness, the content, the connection and experience, um, and let marketing ops figure out how do we track all of that and use it in our journey and in our stack. Um, and those are the conversations. This is why I was so passionate about Mike and uh Liz Lathan meeting, because I was like, I hear people complain on both sides about the same things. And I'm like, if we could bring these things together, it could really help both parties.

Mike Rizzo: 34:15

Yeah, for sure. Uh I really love the the sort of call out just to say, like, hey, go do the things that you're really, really good at, you know, to the events people and to the ops people, right? Like let the ops people go solve some of these. Uh what I what I continue to beat the drum on is like uh effectively the product of of the go-to-market stack, right? Like let them go build a product uh that is made up of uh workflows and integrations and other solutions that help enable an outcome um and a capability that you're looking to achieve. And and I wanted to say the same thing to our listeners, um you know, or viewers of of the the pod here, like this is a huge opportunity. If if if events is a piece of your go-to-market motion, um large, right? Inevitably it is. Yeah. Um but if it's a piece of that go-to-market motion at a small company or a large company, um uh, I don't know, stick your stick your nose into the room, you know, and see what's going on and just say, hey, I'm just here to learn, I'm just here to listen. Um, if you're not involved in the conversation, go ahead and do that, right? Um if you are, start listening with a new ear and say, are there any problems that need to be solved? And you know, I'm not I'm not gonna pretend like you're not underwater with cues of tickets and broken integrations and stuff like that. But um oftentimes our marketing ops professionals are also looking for a way to show that they can drive a value outcome uh and that they are not a cost center as well. Right. And so this is a really great way for you to help bridge a gap between uh operational inefficiency that can be turned into a go-to-market product that enables visibility into pipeline and revenue. Um, and you're you're the one potentially leading the charge, or at least stepping in as a partner and saying, hey, I can do this together with these folks because they don't have time, but I I understand the technology. Um and now you're not a cost center, right? You're an enabler that that has helped subscribe a system attract.

Aaron Karpaty: 36:28

I identified that when I was at Mops Inclusive for the first time. I was like, wow, you know, the the content here is they're really pushing ops to take advantage of the pipeline uh being influenced as a result of them setting up the right stack and data layer. Yeah, right. They should own that number, right? And then I'm over here at events and uh we're pushing to the events teams, hey, you gotta own that number, you gotta care about pipeline, you gotta talk about revenue, not just logistics. And I'm like, and we're we're speaking the same language here. We're telling them to own it, we're telling them to own it. What we need is just the buying group to own it, yeah, right? That the the sales and marketing demand gen team to own that. Um, and who own who's the right person to own what piece, like you said. Um, and then you know, uh together we we become best in class. Um, and I think now it's more important than ever, uh, to be honest. And I think sometimes things happen at the right time for the right reasons, but I don't know about you, but I've seen some of the global VPs at Fortune 500 companies that I know complaining about how filled their inbox is and their LinkedIn inbox with automated AI uh selling, right? And the content and the digital overload and the AI overload, it's like it's very hard. Even BDRs, like I heard at Mapsapalooza being re-looked at as being put back into marketing for more of a brand awareness play and embedding themselves into the market than doing cold calls and cold emails because that don't work no more. Everybody's boxes are overloaded. They, you know, I've seen people go from I don't even check email anymore, only Slack.

Michael Hartmann: 38:09

Yeah.

Aaron Karpaty: 38:09

Or the customer I'm working connect the only pushback I have is like bad outreach doesn't work still. Yes, bad outreach.

Michael Hartmann: 38:18

And actually, if you're if it's good stuff, it just stands out even more now.

Aaron Karpaty: 38:22

Again, if it's persona-based, um, if it's talking about what matters to that person, if you've used AI to identify what matters to that person, and you're not just blasting stuff everywhere, if you're very targeted and you're using ABM type as approach, then great, right? But I think that because of the digital overload, it's even more important if you can get face-to-face time with your target and strategic accounts. Yeah. Uh, because that face-to-face time to build rapport, trust, as much as we'd love there to not need to be a relationship in place, uh, most big deals get closed and people stay customers when there's solid relationships. People buy from people. Uh a cocktail reception or even a 30-minute conversation in the booth.

Michael Hartmann: 39:11

Yep, I totally agree. Yeah, totally agree. Yeah, so um that so I was sitting here smiling because I was thinking about literally a conversation yesterday. I had I I read one of those terrible automated LinkedIn outreaches yesterday to my son, who's new to LinkedIn. He was just like, he was rolling his eyes. He's like, and I've seen the same template many times over the years, and it's just a terrible one. Anyway, um, so so let's talk about this. So, like one of the challenges that we've uh kind of touched on a little bit, but I don't think we've dug into yet on the conversation is just the yeah, how do you I guess attribution, contribution, what's the ROI? Pick the variant variant of that that you want. Like, what like how do you think about is there I think that has been a challenge. I know I've gone through it as a marketing ops leader, built my own stuff to try to solve for it, but it was really high level, right? Did we get leads that I could say there was some some context that came from an event, for example? But you're talking about like it feels like you're talking about another level of detail with some of the stuff you guys are doing. How do you think about attribution or you know contribution or whatever for pipeline revenue for for events?

Aaron Karpaty: 40:34

Yeah, I mean, I think it just it it it's continuing to do some of the things that I've worked in other areas. You know, we used to start off with just lead scoring, right? Um but we need to get farther into engagement. Scoring. And I think we do that on the digital side, right? And there's actually an engagement score, low-hanging fruit that posts to Salesforce that the rep's able to take action on, etc. Right. But again, I think not much of the offline, sometimes much more qualified stuff is part of that. So I think we need to go past just lead scoring into engagement scoring on the offline stuff. Did they have a demo? Did they have an executive meeting? Did they attend a session? Uh, did they do a booth tour? What are the offline things they have done and what's the engagement score? And then the piece of that is so that we can account for attribution in influenced pipeline, right? But then there's a difference between pipeline that we helped accelerate our influence versus pipeline that we helped create.

Michael Hartmann: 41:33

Yeah.

Aaron Karpaty: 41:33

Right? So if we're meeting with people we've never talked about, talked to before, and we sit down in a room and we do discovery, that may create an opportunity. I've been to a mobile world congress with one of the biggest players where literally it was like real-time sales and marketing funnel management on the show floor. Like as they're having booth tours, they're qualifying people on a guided booth tour that's going to convert on whether that should be turned into a meeting. And that meeting is going to look at is there an opportunity here, which is going to be created in Salesforce. And in the back room, there's a dashboard that says how much pipeline is being created or advanced as a result of these meetings in real time happening on the show floor.

Michael Hartmann: 42:15

And it's like that would like I'm going like that. I can't even imagine being able to do that. Right.

Aaron Karpaty: 42:22

And so these are some of the companies I've worked with that I've learned these things from. And I think, you know, this is exactly uh what we want to do. You know, I thought it was just pipe, you know, you either help create the deal and you get 100% credit, or you help influence and accelerate it and you get partial credit. Uh, but I think, you know, I hear people saying things like the funnel's dead and it's just this 365 thing, right? And you know, I don't totally believe the funnel's dead, but I think there is this 365 thing. I think that as you land and expand, and um, and that's why I talk a lot, it's not just when I say pipeline, I don't mean just net new pipeline, right? Uh new logo and expansion. I mean retention too. Yeah. Because driving the connection and engagement and meetings that help retain your current customers through uh roadmap discussions, solving problems with experts on the show floor to keep your customers is just as important. So uh, but we need to dive more into those data layers and how we're going to track it. And I think right now, you know, like Captello can help with pipeline created or influence, but let's look at how you're managing attribution today. Let's let's get into and have more of a partner discussion and say, you know, what would make sense more for your company? Because I think we need to, again, really. I'm telling you, I love when marketing leader comes to my leadership meetings and they're like, we drove this many leads and this many, this many LQLs and this many SQLs, and we had this conversion rate on these different programs, and this is how much pipeline, right? And it's just like, holy crap, that was easy. Dude, the offline stuff is not like that. We we just need to get the offline stuff so we can manage and look at what are the conversion rates on demos, what are the conversion rates on inbound meetings versus outbound meetings? What happens if they come to a booth and they're a customer? What's the value versus they're a net in person we've never talked to before? Which again is stuff I see getting automated online, but not offline.

Mike Rizzo: 44:19

Yeah.

Aaron Karpaty: 44:20

I think we still have some work to do to understand more of it, but that that's that's what that's what I think.

Mike Rizzo: 44:28

What do you think, Mike? I was just gonna say I think I think the call out on um trying to understand the event strategy holistically. Um really like for me, it it I obviously it kind of goes without saying, but just for the sake of saying it, right, it's it's a data layer thing, right? So having visibility into the data itself allows you to start exploring uh other elements that Aaron brought up that often go uh completely ignored at conferences, which is your your profit, your current customers are at that show. So go build rapport and help them and support them and be intentional about like driving that renewal pipeline, right? At some point in a healthy uh for for many of you who are working at soft, you know, SaaS companies, um, at some point in a healthy business of any kind, really, but definitely a software company, the book of business and pipeline and revenue should actually be larger on the post-sale customer side than on the net new side. At some point in a healthy business, that's what happens. And so you should you should go into an event with the strategy of, yeah, we're gonna try to get some new deals for sure, but we also know that this is where a lot of our customers are. So let's go make sure we maintain those relationships. And the only way to do that is by getting visibility into the data layer that says, are we able to talk to them? Did we connect? What did we talk about? Uh, and how are we sort of like maintaining status quo or, you know, even cross-selling and upselling, right?

Aaron Karpaty: 46:00

Yep. So yeah. And that's totally right. And I've actually tracked it before, right? Is the biggest, healthiest companies in the world, 70% or more of the meetings that are happening at those events are with current customers.

Michael Hartmann: 46:13

Okay.

Aaron Karpaty: 46:13

And a lot of times they're VIP invite only. You go to Mobile World Congress, and some of the biggest booths have you can't even get in the booth unless you have been invited to a meeting, right? And 70% of that are with current customers to drive retention and renewal conversations and expansion conversations. It's much easier to grow your business with the customers that you have sometimes than just focusing on net new logos.

Michael Hartmann: 46:37

Yeah. Yeah. I I mean, I think it's interesting, and we're probably going to wrap up. I'll want to ask you one more questionnaire, but I think you talk about this data layer, but what it seems like one thing that's occurred to me in this conversation that didn't earlier is this idea that there's data that's unstructured, meaning like capturing it. The equivalent I'm thinking of is like the sales tech things or recording calls that our reps are having with prospects and customers, you know, you know, that are then can be consumed and used to better improve stuff. It feels like it's like that kind of stuff, I can imagine, super valuable for marketers, for sales teams, etc. So that's been really interesting for me to just think about. Um I guess since we are short on time, I feel like we're cutting this way short, but uh I think we're gonna have to cut it that way. But looking ahead, we're you know, we're mid-December 2025 as we're recording this. So 2026, it's time for predictions. You know, what do you what do you what are you seeing and expecting in 26 for the the event tech space?

Aaron Karpaty: 47:42

Um, I think people are very focused on AI and wanting to be that AI event company. Uh I think people are gonna try things. I think some things are gonna work, some things aren't. Um, I think that we're really, if you're gonna do things, you're gonna, you know, need to test some of the things out if you've never worked with that customer before, because I think there's uh sometimes a lot of noise. Um, and you can use AI sometimes to do some guessing. Um, so uh we just need to, you know, be careful, but absolutely be aware and take advantage of the things that are real and then start planning for the strategy and how that aligns. Uh, right. I think that people are looking for digital transformation and we'll see some event companies trying to consolidate uh that they do a whole lot in a one-stop shop, right? And there'll be sis, there'll be companies like that that actually do that in one platform, or just have a bunch of different companies and platforms that are that. So is it a consolidated supplier, or is this consolidated consolidated platform is something that we'd look at, right? Yeah, having sales rep use multiple different user user interfaces to get accomplished the same things, um, you know, it will be tough. But people, you know, procurement departments want to consolidate vendors. Uh uh marketing people want to consolidate the user adoption so that people use it and they get the data.

Michael Hartmann: 49:06

Yeah.

Aaron Karpaty: 49:07

Um, so those are some things to pay attention to. But again, I think that people are going to start looking cross-functionally at look at all this amazing stuff in digital marketing that we're doing, online, outreach, sale, you know, and how can we integrate that with the um event market and start driving digital transformation in those areas? Because I think it's it's not acceptable. It's going to start not being acceptable at some companies that we're spending money over here and we can't track it the same way we can over here.

Michael Hartmann: 49:40

Yeah. Makes sense. Aaron, thank you. Been great. If if folks want to continue a conversation with you or more about what you or what Captello is doing, what's the best way for them to do that?

Aaron Karpaty: 49:54

Yeah, I mean, come to captello.com and hit us up or come to my LinkedIn and hit me up. I'd love to connect. As you can see, I'm pretty dang passionate about this stuff. Um, it's been something I've been doing a long time. Um, thank God I make money at it. Um, right. But I, you know, I probably would do it if I didn't, uh, just because I've been so embedded and invested in this for so long. Um, but uh, and I love just working through those problems and talking about and helping new people that are coming into the market learning this right off the bat instead of having to relearn because they started off with doing more of the old school things. So um I talked to a guy the other day that's like right out of college, first event job, and I was like, call me up, we'll spend some time. I told him the difference between a corporate event where they own Reg and a trade show and industry event, and he was just so grateful, you know what I mean? And that's just you know, I love seeing that, and I love seeing the new people come in because he also has a lot of experience in the new generations in how to drive content and experience that drives connection that may be a little bit different in other generations. So yeah, I'm excited about the future. Yeah, on both sides.

Michael Hartmann: 51:02

I think I'm walking away with the theme that um we should expect better data out of our non-digital activities than we currently do, right? So I think that's that's really the the theme here for me. Aaron, again, thank you, Mike. As always, thank you to our listeners. Thanks for supporting us. If you have ideas for topics or guests or want to be a guest, you can always reach out to Mike, Naomi, or me, and we'd be happy to get the ball run. Until next time, bye everybody.

Aaron Karpaty: 51:29

Thanks guys for having Pat Bello and myself, and uh talk to you soon.

Michael Hartmann: 51:34

Okay, thanks.