TechBytes with Alon Alroy, Co-Founder, Bizzabo

Alon Alroy
Co-Founder, Bizzabo

Bizzabo, a Martech RADAR 2018 Company for Event Management and Tracking, recently announced a string of B2B partnerships with the most promising marketing and sales technology platforms. Alon Alroy, Co-Founder, Bizzabo shares his roadmap for the company and the benefits that customers and new partners could expect now and in the future.

Tell us about your recent SaaS partnership announcement, why was this significant?

We recently announced over a dozen new partnerships that we formed with SaaS organizations, including Sisense, Namely, Brightcove, Zoominfo, Moz, and Gainsight. That number has since grown. This is significant for two reasons. First, it shows just how important events have become as a channel for meaningfully engaging customers, prospects, partners and employees. Second, it is humbling to see that these innovative and leading SaaS organizations are trusting Bizzabo to help form the cornerstone of their events strategy.

How did you plan these partnerships? What benefits do you extend to your customers and those of your partners?

In addition to getting access to our product, the most holistic and powerful event success platform in the market, our customers get access to our people. We like to say that Bizzabo is the most loved event software, and for good reason. For the past three years, we have received the People’s Choice Award for Favorite Event Technology Supplier. We have top ratings on both G2Crowd and Capterra, where we are rated higher than our competitors and where customers frequently cite our customer success team as a major attractor to Bizzabo. Our Customer Success team is not there to just “support” our customers’ events—they’re there to help our customers run more successful and impactful events.

When people work with Bizzabo, they get to work with an organization that listens. We thrive on customer feedback. In return, our customers frequently get to see new features and tools appearing on the platform that they had requested. This can be small changes, like the addition of a new customization option, or big changes, like the launch of our new event app or new agenda management tool.

What are the core tenets of B2B marketing and sales?

At its core, B2B marketing is about earning the trust of another organization. As a business, you have to convince another business that they can trust you to get the job done. If there are any challenges along the way, your customer has to know that you are going to go above and beyond to resolve them. B2B marketing and the sales process that it entails is not about selling a product—it’s about helping people buy by consulting, listening and then working together to get to the customer desired outcome.

And it’s a lot easier to earn trust and build a relationship in-person.

Contemporary digital marketing tools may enable B2B organizations to market and sell like never before, but they are also driving a real need for face-to-face engagement. A 2017 study that we conducted found that most marketers believe that in-person events comprise the most effective channel for achieving business goals—over social media, content marketing and paid ads.

At events—be it a networking event, a VIP dinner or an industry conference—organizations have the opportunity to go beyond retargeting ads and emails and form a lasting connection with their audiences.

How do you see the technology market for automation and personalized communication improving with data science maturity?

Attendees are at the center of any event experience and we’re finding that technology is working increasingly in their favor. Specifically, with Bizzabo, we’ve recently made it easier for organizers to deliver a personalized experience in the type of content that is served.

Our new agenda tool enables event organizers to suggest sessions to specific contacts groups and makes it easier for attendees to find, rate, share sessions that they think are more valuable.

As a result, organizers can create a curated experience that is tailored to their event audience. This is only the beginning. Moving forward, with the help of AI, we can expect to see more personalized attendee experiences throughout the event journey – before, during and after events.

How does the top 1000 SaaS list influence Bizzabo’s overall industry standings?

We are extremely proud to be ranked as the 14th fastest growing organization on the SaaS 1,000. The fact that so many Bizzabo customers are also on this list is also a real treat.

We view our listing here as another sign that our timing could not be better—alongside our recent growth in partnerships, our three years of winning the People’s Choice Award for Favourite Event Technology Provider, and our recent milestone of exceeding $100 million in paid registrations processed through the Bizzabo platform. More than anything, these acknowledgments make us even more confident that we have the right team to pursue our mission of unleashing the power of events.

Which current set of markets and customers are your focusing on?

Bizzabo’s evolution from an event networking app to a B2B SaaS platform for event management has opened us to a much wider audience in the fast-growing event market. We started with a one-off app for small conferences, and are now powering events for some of the world’s biggest brands including mega-events such as INBOUND by Hubspot and Pulse by Gainsight. We are used by corporates, non-profits, agencies and any organization that believes that events are amazing to drive business objectives.

Thanks for chatting with us, Alon.

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