Main point of contact
Lauren Sommers — VP of Corporate EventsCompany
GainsightWhere
Redwood City, CAIndustry
Software & TechFavorite features
Event Analytics Dashboard & Ticket BoostNumber of events per year
10+Types of events they plan
Pulse – Annual ConferenceGainsight is a SaaS platform that is largely responsible for defining the customer success category. Critical to Gainsight’s market presence is the Pulse brand.
First launched in 2012, Gainsight’s Pulse has grown from an annual user conference to an omnipresent, year-round initiative comprised of events across the world. Pulse North America alone has managed to scale from 300 to over 6,000 attendees.
Executing on the Pulse brand is a company-wide responsibility, but the majority of the project falls on to two teams. Lauren Sommers, VP Corporate Events, and her team own the relationships around attendees, prospects, speakers, sponsors, vendors and internal stakeholders at Gainsight. As the Sr. Director of Marketing at Gainsight, Matt Stone is responsible for managing promotion and the technological logistics surrounding the event with this team.
“From someone who has seen a lot of different platforms over the course of 15 years of running events, Bizzabo is by far the most intuitive platform that I've ever used.”
Lauren Sommers
VP Corporate Events
To elevate Gainsight’s position as a category leader in the customer success space, expand the customer success community, build out sales pipeline, accelerate the sales cycle and increase customer retention.
When Matt joined the Gainsight team in 2015 the conference catered to 2,000 attendees. In 2016, that number jumped to 3,200. By 2018, when Pulse began using Bizzabo, that number doubled again. As the Pulse brand grew, Gainsight grew with it. Lauren and Matt found themselves in need of technologies that could scale with them. The Gainsight team had to be able to easily build multiple event websites, update speakers pages and sessions, manage registrations for multiple sold-out events, and measure the overall success of different event marketing campaigns. Prior to using Bizzabo, Gainsight relied on an array of disperse systems to manage their larger events. The resulting “melting pot” of technologies made it difficult for the Gainsight team to maintain data integrity. Efforts to sync the various systems in Gainsight’s event technology stack were time-intensive and often not wholly successful.
When evaluating potential solutions, Lauren and Matt were struck by how comprehensive the Bizzabo platform is. “The fact that Bizzabo,” says Matt, “had pretty much everything that we need now or wanted on the roadmap helped a lot.” The combination of these features enables Gainsight to consolidate their event technology stack and more efficiently operate. In Matt’s words: “Bizzabo, has a lot of little things that get us closer to that end goal of having a single source of truth where everything goes into one system.”
“We weren't able to get by tying different things together. We had to find something that had the features that we needed to scale.”
Senior Director of Marketing
Having access to accurate data in a timely manner is crucial to the Gainsight team. Bizzabo helps the team surface insights and sync data at scale.
By far one of the greatest benefits of Bizzabo for Gainsight is the ability to streamline registration management through Bizzabo’s open API and integrations. The Gainsight team integrates Bizzabo with Marketo, their marketing automation platform, and Salesforce, their CRM, for a seamless flow of information between these platforms.
The ability to sync data through Bizzabo enables Gainsight to quickly update registration information between different platforms. As Matt puts it: “In previous worlds this would require that we make the registration changes in our events system and then in Marketo or Salesforce. Each time this would take 5 or 10 minutes, which quickly added up. With Bizzabo, we’re able to automate this process.”
Through Bizzabo’s session registration tool, the Gainsight team can better balance the volume of attendees at different sessions, understand which sessions are most popular and plan their venue layout accordingly. “We can typically guess which sessions will be the most popular,” says Matt, “but with session registration, we have actual data.”
Matt and Lauren are able to draw meaningful conclusions about this data—in addition to data from registrations, ticket sales, and attendee engagement—with Bizzabo’s Event Analytics Dashboard. “There is a really streamlined process,” says Lauren, “in terms of viewing and analyzing revenue capture on the back-end.”
Embeddable widgets, the agenda builder and promotional tools like Ticket Boost help the Gainsight team effectively promote their event.
The Gainsight team uses Bizzabo’s embeddable widgets to quickly add essential event website functions—like registration, speaker profiles, and sponsors—to their custom-built Pulse websites. Though these widgets may live on several different event website pages, all it takes is updating one widget to update the rest. “One of the most valuable things about Bizzabo,” says Lauren, “is how simple it is to do what I need to do.”
One valuable widget is the event agenda created with Bizzabo’s event agenda builder. The Gainsight team has found it not only helpful for organization, but also for learning about attendee preferences. “The ability to add multiple tags and track different things in the agenda builder was a great help and boosted the value that we got out of the platform,” says Matt.
Ticket Boost—which leverages the power of viral marketing to incentivizes attendee promotion—is another feature that the Gainsight team found to be a great value-add. For Gainsight Pulse 2019, the team was able to generate over $50K in revenue with Ticket Boost months before the event.
“We saw a lot of uplift with Ticket Boost,” says Lauren, “which is a feature that I’ve not found with other platforms.”
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