Introduction: It's Time to Reinvent Virtual Events by Making Them Customer-Centric

There is only one boss. The customer. And they can fire everybody in the company, from the chairman on down, simply by spending their money somewhere else.

-Sam Walton

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.

-Haruki Murakami

© Luca D'Urbino

You transform a virtual event by putting your audience in the center versus panelists and an audience alone. We are taking virtual events to a new level by featuring customers as contestants in the center of the action and randomly calling on customers from the audience to make them a part of each simulation. Customers judge, drill, role-play, break into teams, and compete against business-to-business (B2B) luminaries.

We proved this model in Go-to-Market (GTM) Games, the most disruptive B2B event series ever conceived.

Like a virtual Barkley Marathons, it is innovative, bold, and compelling because marketers and sellers finally collaborate and cross-train to solve real GTM challenges through intense simulations. Our proven model of GTM learning requires teach-backs and drills, which produce 90% knowledge retention compared to static Netflixs style lectures.

The GTM Games is a monthly, nine-days-long obstacle course featuring 21 participants. We've been honored to showcase the top 100+ voices in B2B, yet we constantly look to expand our roster. Our mission is to laser-focus GTM teams on the customer so that they can expand beyond their silo.

Now is the time to tailor your events to your customers.

Flashback two years: Julia did an event where the whole agenda touted a Reddit-style design in the promo lead-up. Social media maven Brynne Tillman was the featured expert. Users and potential viewers built the event concept collaboratively crowdsourced, and the questions they asked before defined the event.

There was a landing page with a Reddit-style up-voting system. You-the audience-build/curate the event's agenda yourself versus the last hundred years of: "We are a vendor building an event." Envision potential software users promoting your event for a month leading up to it, uploading questions, and an entire webinar built on relevant themes your users surfaced and ranked. There was no ulterior motive around the topic, just a star speaker and rapt users.

Curiosity Is the Currency of the Modern Event Flywheel

She called it an "Interactive Webinar with a Social Media Expert." The tagline, "Join us in a special event where you can ask your burning questions on all things LinkedIn for Social Selling." Results? The event was super-engaged, with hundreds of questions pouring in. It began to make her think about a new event blueprint: You provide the coach's expertise, and your audience reciprocates with their time and focus. Whichever theme your base gravitates to most becomes the topic, and the thrill of building it this way makes questions fly out of the woodwork.

When we think about throwing 200 events together, one of the most unique experiences was spotlighting CEOs and VPs doing "cold calling." Our ideal customer profile (ICP) was uncommon for this theme, not just sales development reps (SDRs) but VPs of Sales. No one believed that Julia could make VPs of Sales attend an event about cold calling, much less participate. The crowd was skeptical that senior executives would even make cold calls in the age of email sequences.

Behold the elusive trap for any vendor. Vendors believe their ICP is interested in something obvious they want to sell and forget their audience comprises ordinary humans who buy for reasons only they understand. Her research revealed that nearly all roles in sales right up to the C-Suite are still interested in outbound calling.

Despite this, a large cohort of executives believes it doesn't work. It is too expensive. Valid phone and email data is costly and has low contact rates. SDRs have insufficient product understanding to resonate with increasingly technical buyers, and inbound marketing leads are junk marketing qualified leads (MQLs). There's a whole debate around whether MQLs should even be a metric and a growing insurgency against the SDR-account executive (AE) industrial complex.

Imagine breakthrough results like 2,000+ registrations and getting your customer acquisition costs (CAC) down to $2 for VPs of Sales versus $75+ cost per lead (CPL) best case scenario on the open market right now with ads. Because Aaron Ross cold called against all levels, there was a massive buzz on social media and thousands of likes. It was the talk of the B2B industry while it ran, sucking the oxygen out of the space. You couldn't "not see" this event. Word of mouth was so intense.

As her next endeavor, legend has it that approximately a year ago, Julia Nimchinski approached Justin Michael, "Hey, would you be up to emcee a competition where salespeople did marketing drills and vice versa?" Justin dismissed her immediately, "No thanks, that's the theme I'd least like to do. Can't we just hold another killer cold-call competition? Exactly like we've already been doing?" And thus, GTM Games was born, Julia's brainchild. The thought was Bransonian, "Screw it. Let's do it! No one has done it before!"

And you should follow this philosophy, too, rather than remaining in your silo and silencing the inner voice that scratches away at you to be innovative. Fan that flame and go big with us to reinvent yourself (and your industry) by putting the customer at the dead center of your corporate stage.

Until now, you've likely built your brand reputation on the bedrock of your product or service. But it's time to disrupt that. Like most, you've relied on your unique value proposition and even your brand story (if you're more sophisticated) to stand out in the ever-crowded marketplace. But we're here to tell you that you're getting it all wrong because your customers are your real "platform," literally and figuratively in a Michael Hyatt sense. You just have to unlock this potential energy stored up since your company's inception. For expansion, there's no substitute for the unlimited power and virality of word-of-mouth amplification that comes directly from the people who value you most. Customers. Execute your growth through the lens of online experiences.

2020s New Reality: No in-person sales, no in-person marketing, and little to no attribution with "dark social" communities that are untraceable and growing like gremlins. We simply don't know where our audience is coming from, and walled gardens prevent us from tracking it or leveraging open application programming interface (API) architecture to integrate with the best measurement platforms. LinkedIn is a prime, front-and-center example of a closed system we all use, but only they have access to the complete "customer journey" data.

Persistent Reality: The No. 1 thing every business needs is more customers. To grow revenue effectively, you must become a master at customer acquisition. Paid advertising is just too expensive now. The barriers to entry are often in the tens of thousands, even millions of dollars. The halcyon days of social media 1.0 or 2.0 are gone. When the medium was young, you could amass 5,000 followers or direct connections seemingly overnight. Throttles and controls regulate the information flow of every legacy social network, so if you move too fast, you'll fail over, get your profile shut off, or even end up in LinkedIn jail. We've built experiments to inform your strategy and tactics in this work. The only viable solution becomes growth hacking.

In-person events may bounce back but will never be as robust as in the prior era. The major social networks have moved to a "pay-for-play" model where reach gets cut to 5% of your followers (if you're lucky). Forking over serious capital is often a non-option for startups, founders, nonprofits, and individual thought leaders. We resign ourselves to getting 10 "likes" or need to rely on "bot" schemes to boost comment threads and rig the social algorithm to realize ever-diminishing returns. Sad to see so many gifted executives succumbing to this temptation right now, but we don't blame you. Reach is gone.

Zoom webinars are a powerful means to generate leads organically (even for free), but it's tricky to do this elegantly, and GTM leaders are time-poor running lean. Setting up a "thought leadership" webinar just won't cut it now, no matter how visionary the talent roster is and how ingenious you perceive the theme. You need to be creative and innovative, break the mold to pull an audience once, not to mention sustain and grow it over time.

It used to be enough to parade your C-level executives out like show ponies with some industry experts, crib some pseudo-intellectual questions, and follow a linear format. In the glory days of "Peak Webinars," we all winged it the night before and got away with murder to a packed house.

But now we find our tried and true antics put the audience to sleep. We've even worked...