Events create demand. In this episode of Sales Talk for CEOs, Alice Heiman sits down with Jonathan Kazarian, Founder & CEO of Accelevents, the all‑in‑one event management platform that’s redefining how organizations run events from 20‑person dinners to 30,000‑attendee conferences.
Jonathan didn’t start in events tech, he came from finance. But when he couldn’t find software powerful enough to run a 900‑person fundraiser for his cousin, he built his own. That event was a smash success and the demand for the tool he created sparked the beginning of Accelevents.
In this conversation, Jonathan shares
✔️ How inbound sales, SEO, and rapid support responses became key drivers of early revenue
✔️ Why listening to customers, not cold outreach, fuels product and sales growth
✔️ How hosting targeted regional dinners became an effective outbound strategy
✔️ Lessons on pricing, bootstrapping, and scaling a SaaS business the right way
Jonathan gets candid about early pricing mistakes, building a product people love, and how a customer‑first mindset helped Accelevents grow sustainably without heavy VC‑driven quotas.
👉 Action Items you can apply today
- Double down on support as a sales lever
- Use real events (not just demos) to connect with prospects
- Track customer conversations to inform product and go‑to‑market
- Evaluate pricing based on value, not insecurity
Watch below or on our YouTube channel
Want to get better results from your events? Check out these expert tips from Alice
Pre-Event Preparations for Networking Success
How to Make Sure Your Event Follow-Up Doesn’t Suck
How to Get in Front of the People Who Can Buy From You
Rapid fire questions
Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara
All-In Podcast
Advice for CEOs: Talk to customers to listen, not to talk.
Connect With
Mentioned on the show https://www.trykondo.com/
Transcript
[00:00:00] Alice Heiman: Welcome to Sales Talk for CEOs excited today to have the founder of an events app that has really revolutionized the way people think about holding events and getting customers engaged.
I always love a story where somebody was doing something completely different, right? And then they find a new idea and launch it. So this is gonna be a co a fun conversation today [00:00:30] with Jonathan from Excel events. Welcome to the show.
[00:00:33] Jonathan Kazarian: Thanks for having me on.
[00:00:34] Alice Heiman: Hey, so let’s start by just, uh, giving kind of the short story of what does Xcel events do and for who, and I bet a lot of the CEOs listening have actually probably used your app and don’t even know it.
[00:00:48] Jonathan Kazarian: Yeah. So we’re a lot more than an app. We’re a full event management platform, so everything from event websites and registration to, uh, managing all the content. Speakers exhibitors for an event, [00:01:00] but also the onsite parts. So the mobile app for attendees, the badge printing and check-in experience, even, uh, a platform for virtual events.
So we cover the full gamut for our customers and give them, uh, you know, one stop shop to, to manage every event from their 1520 person dinners up to their 30,000 person annual user conferences.
[00:01:21] Alice Heiman: So if I’m an event manager from the minute, I think, okay, we’re gonna have an event. I can do everything in Excel events.
I can plan every bit of it, [00:01:30] put the speakers in logistics. It’s all in one spot.
[00:01:35] Jonathan Kazarian: Yeah. So the way that a salesperson lives in the, in the CRM, Salesforce, HubSpot, et cetera, we are that. But for event people,
[00:01:42] Alice Heiman: I love it. I love it. And then I also love the end where, hey, how do we get the users engaged? Once we’ve got our entire event planned, we send out the link, they can connect and they’re inside the app.
Getting all the information they could possibly need to manage the, to manage [00:02:00] their own activity at the event.
[00:02:01] Jonathan Kazarian: Exactly.
[00:02:02] Alice Heiman: And meet people too.
[00:02:04] Jonathan Kazarian: Mm-hmm.
[00:02:04] Alice Heiman: Yeah. Well, great. All right, so this is a wonderful thing. I’ve run a lot of large and small events, so I know how much work it is, and I am curious what on earth got you into this business?
Because right before you started it, you weren’t in the events business. So take us back and bring us on the journey.
[00:02:25] Jonathan Kazarian: Yeah, so I, um, I studied finance in college. Always wanted to [00:02:30] go down that path, and I did after I graduated, but I had been hosting a lot of, call ’em more social events, but, you know, some larger scale ones.
And then when I was, um, when I was 24, so just a couple years after I graduated, I found out my cousin, uh, at the age of 17, uh, got diagnosed with cancer and I wanted to do something for her. So I, I ended up hosting, uh, a 900 person fundraiser in Boston. Where I was from and where I was living and going into that event, I was trying to find [00:03:00] technology to help run it.
And everything out there was just either crazy expensive, uh, the product was just not good, or the support was non-existent. And that was sort of the catalyst where I’m like, there has to be a better way. So I ended up, what year
[00:03:12] Alice Heiman: was that, Jonathan?
[00:03:13] Jonathan Kazarian: Where was it?
[00:03:14] Alice Heiman: What year was that?
[00:03:15] Jonathan Kazarian: That was 2024. Oh, sorry. 2014
[00:03:19] Alice Heiman: 2014. I was gonna say, because yeah, I would agree that the problem back then, and before that even, ’cause I’ve been running events for such a long time, it was just kind of [00:03:30] piecemeal. If you got, if you found an app, it could do this part, but it couldn’t do this part right. Or it didn’t do this part well.
Or you couldn’t, you couldn’t take the registrations, but you could do with this and it was very discombobulated.
[00:03:42] Jonathan Kazarian: It was, or it was a piece of technology that was built by a technology person and not an events person. They didn’t understand that there’s this sense of urgency that comes with events and events take place, you know, nights and weekends, and, uh, just didn’t have the resourcing to support us the way that we needed.
[00:03:58] Alice Heiman: Yeah, yeah, [00:04:00] yeah. So you decided, okay, there’s better. I’m gonna build.
[00:04:10] Jonathan Kazarian: Prototype really did some very specific things for the event that we needed it to do. And, uh, and, and we tried, it took a long shot. So like, I’m now building the largest event I’ve ever built before. 900%. Right. I
[00:04:22] Alice Heiman: was just gonna say, so you’re putting together this huge event and building software while you’re doing it?
[00:04:27] Jonathan Kazarian: Yeah. Yeah. So it was, it was sort of like, I [00:04:30] had two, two big things I’ve never done before. Um. I didn’t get a lot of sleep leading up to that, but got through it and then started to get a lot of requests from attendees in the, in the, uh, organization that we put the event on for to use it. And that was, that was when we realized we had something.
So, um, a very good friend of mine who I co-hosted the event with him and I decided to build a business around this. So we had a, we had, [00:05:00] let’s see, the event was in November of 2014 and we incorporated in January of. You know, a month, a month and a half later.
[00:05:07] Alice Heiman: Wow. Okay. Now you’re still both working at your full-time jobs, right?
[00:05:12] Jonathan Kazarian: As we continue to do for another five years? Well, for
[00:05:16] Alice Heiman: five years I
[00:05:16] Jonathan Kazarian: did. Yeah. So, um, him and I on the business side, he, he left the business probably four years after, after we launched. Uh, still really good. I got, you know, I got his Christmas card yesterday. We’re still very good friends. [00:05:30] Um, but. He wanted to go in a different direction with his career and, uh, you know, to this day really respect and appreciate the fact that he came to me with that.
Um, and it was shortly after that that I essentially doubled down and, and went full time with it.
[00:05:49] Alice Heiman: Wow. Okay. So here you are working a full-time job. You guys have built this, the first iteration anyway, I’m sure it’s come a long, long way since then, right? Um, and you [00:06:00] had pe you did it because people were asking you, Hey, where’d you get the software?
What is this? Can we, can we use it? So how did you get your actual, very first customer?
[00:06:13] Jonathan Kazarian: I think it was SEO. I think it was, uh, it was actually an inbound. We had been dabbling with outbound trying to figure that motion out, but there was only so much we could do because we were trying to outbound during business hours when we both had full-time jobs.
Right. So it essentially had to be [00:06:30] inbound. One of the things that we leaned into very early on and very aggressively though, was, you know. Having this appreciation for the, the event space and, and realizing that the support needs to be there 24 7, we set up a chat widget on the site and that was the thing that we would like no matter what.
We responded immediately and we carry that today, where like we publish our, our response response stats at the end of every month. Last month, I think our median response time was 16 seconds. Initial response time, and, and then [00:07:00] as we started to drive people to our website, we’re able to convert those people that were just visiting our marketing site.
Into a conversation into a customer.
[00:07:09] Alice Heiman: Yeah. I mean that, that’s excellent and I don’t know why everyone doesn’t do that, honestly, because yes, the events business is 24 7, but if I am an ex senior executive of a company or a CEO. I am looking for something that we need some sort of software or hardware or [00:07:30] something.
When do I have time to do that? Not during my busy, crazy day when everybody’s calling me or running in outta my office. I have time to do that between like nine and midnight and depending on what time zone you’re on, right, you could be on that website at any time, and most of the time there’s no one there to help you.
That’s really hard and I think people just bounce right off of it because it’s like, I, I need help now. Right. So having that chat was genius back found. Right.
[00:07:59] Jonathan Kazarian: [00:08:00] And, you know, it allowed us to get on the phone with them, but it, it set the tone for what the relationship is going to be. If, if support is bad presale, it’s only gonna get worse.
[00:08:14] Alice Heiman: Yeah. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. Alright, so you’ve got this inbound lead. Um, can you tell us a little bit about it? Were you excited? What happened?
[00:08:23] Jonathan Kazarian: 49 onetime payment. Um, it was, I guess it was [00:08:30] in the summer, probably six months after we had incorporated. We, it took us a long time. To get to a point where we were actually charging what we should have been charging.
Mm. Probably four or five years of just completely undercharging. And frankly, that slowed our growth. It didn’t give us any capital to re because, you know, we were bootstrap any capital to reinvest into the business, into the product, and the marketing efforts. Maybe because of my age or, [00:09:00] you know, I don’t, in hindsight, I don’t know exactly what caused it, but we were just like apprehensive to charge what we should have been charging.
[00:09:08] Alice Heiman: Yeah, pricey is hard, Jonathan. I mean, you kind of have to learn what the market will bear. And at that time that you started this, there wasn’t anybody out there really doing the same thing. So it’s like how, what were they charging like now? Well, there was, what are they charging, you know?
[00:09:27] Jonathan Kazarian: There was, but I think we had it in our head that there was just [00:09:30] such a delta, such a gap between what they were doing and what we were doing.
That like we didn’t deserve to charge that price point. But the reality is that we did, for a certain set of customers, certain set of customers we were a better fit for than this other product, they’re gonna pay the same regardless. And, and, and I, I don’t think we realized that or appreciated that the way that we do today.
But again, you know, to your point, we’re a very different company than we were back then Today. 80% of our revenue is, is mid-market and enterprise, true mid-market, enterprise, uh, [00:10:00] uh, customers with 600 contracts.
[00:10:02] Alice Heiman: Yeah. Yeah. I, I mean, I think that, like I said, it’s hard to know pricing at first and a little bit is mindset, right?
Like you even said, we didn’t really think we could charge what they were charging because our product was. Not the same bit different, whatever. Um, so that’s interesting. All right, so maybe four or five years of undercharging for sure. So that first customer came and they told you what they needed [00:10:30] and you okay, and they paid, underpaid you and got the product and, and used it.
How did that go? Was it exciting? Did they, were they happy with it? What happened next?
[00:10:41] Jonathan Kazarian: It could have gone better. Definitely could have gone better. Uh, I hadn’t really built software that way before it took a, so we learned a lot from that experience. Um, but it was the beginning of, of things starting to build and we were able to retain [00:11:00] them because of the way we supported them and learn with them.
And, and going back to the, the concept of being so responsive on the support side, it’s not just. For the sake of the customer and, and, and making them feel appreciated and that trusted and, and that you’re there with them, but you learn so much as a result because they don’t feel like they’re sending a letter into a, into a void.
They know that there’s somebody on the other end who’s thinking about what they’re saying, listening, acting, and adjusting the product according. [00:11:30]
[00:11:31] Alice Heiman: It is so important. Right? And I think that is for any founder, the first set of customers, right? It’s okay, let’s work on this together and get it improved to the point where it’s gonna really do what we want it to do.
[00:11:45] Jonathan Kazarian: Well, I, yes, but where I think a lot of companies go wrong is when they hit a point where they stop listening firsthand and they stop having those conversations and. Uh, I spend, [00:12:00] I mean, I told you at the beginning of this call, I’ve been back to back for four hours. Those are all external conversations with customers.
As soon as you stop having those conversations, you stop listening and hearing from prospects, from customers. Um, it’s kind of like giving up.
[00:12:15] Alice Heiman: Jonathan. I would say it’s the number one thing that the CEOs that I meet need to do that they are not doing.
[00:12:24] Jonathan Kazarian: It is, it’s my favorite part of what I do. I mean that and building product, but I [00:12:30] building product wouldn’t be fun if I wasn’t understanding the problems I’m solving for, right? Like it. I think a lot of people like to build technology because tech is cool and fun, but they’re trying to find a problem for the solution, especially with all the AI stuff going on right now, versus, Hey, there is this very clear problem that needs to be solved.
Let’s go figure out how to. [00:13:00] How to, how to solve it, how to address it.
[00:13:03] Alice Heiman: I had a really fun conversation, Jonathan, with, uh, Colin Stewart, who’s actually a friend of mine. I used to be on his board, and he tells the story of building a solution for a problem that no one really had, you know, so it was, they’d all say great, great, but nobody was buying it.
So if that’s a true story, right, that happens, but it sounds like you always have been aimed right at the problem. Hey. How are you using this? What’s happening? What else can we do? Right. Okay. So you got that [00:13:30] first customer and then how, I wanna stick on that
[00:13:32] Jonathan Kazarian: for a second though. Yeah. I think that’s a forcing function of being bootstrapped.
[00:13:35] Alice Heiman: Okay.
[00:13:36] Jonathan Kazarian: Because you can’t just build something because it’s fun when Yeah. You only is that what, throwing money number cycles, right? Ev? Not everything has to work, but more things have to work than not, and you have to iterate very quickly and get that feedback.
[00:13:54] Alice Heiman: Yeah. Yeah. No, you’re right. Because nobody’s throwing money at you to just build, build, build.
You’ve gotta [00:14:00] only build the most important things that are gonna make the biggest impact on the customer, right? Mm-hmm. Okay, great. So you’re doing that and more inbound leads. How did it grow and how fast did it grow and what was happening? Were you doing all the selling?
[00:14:14] Jonathan Kazarian: So, um, my co-founder and I were doing co-selling up until.
The year that he left and we had brought on, uh, Andrew, who’s with us today. Uh, he, I [00:14:30] hired Andrew on a whim while I was still working full time. He’s been with us now eight or nine years, and he’s at 200% quota. Love it. Quarter to date, so. Absolutely fundamental in us getting to where we are today. Um, the sales process though, we were very PLG, very product led and it wasn’t until 2020 that we shifted to a sales led motion.
[00:14:59] Alice Heiman: So it was all [00:15:00] coming inbound based on the SEO you were doing or word of mouth or like what was driving the people to you?
[00:15:06] Jonathan Kazarian: Back. Yeah, pre 2020 was mostly SEO. Okay. With a little bit of paid, a little bit of email. Uh, since then though, and we, we’ve dabbled with outbound a number of times. There’s only one way that we’ve actually been able to make outbound work, and that’s, that’s doing outbound invite folks, a very specific set of people to basically an executive experience, to [00:15:30] a dinner or another sort of outing where they’re with like-minded people.
Just pure outbound, Hey, let’s book a demo. Something like that has never been successful for us.
[00:15:42] Alice Heiman: No, but think about it. You’re an events company, why not have an event?
[00:15:46] Jonathan Kazarian: Yeah, exactly. So we’ve been, um, we’ve been doing the past couple of years, a series of dinners with partners throughout the us. Uh, we also do events on the back of industry events, and we’ll get anywhere between like 22 to [00:16:00] 38, 40 people in the room.
Uh, no pitching. In our space, there’s not, you know, any given company is gonna have one head of events or one VP of events. They don’t have a peer within their company to com, you know, sort of camaraderie with. And what we can do is bring those folks together where they can share their, their pains, their stories, their wins, uh, and have that conversation and do it at a nice restaurant.
But, but they’re very responsive to that. Even when somebody’s like, Hey, I can’t make it, [00:16:30] they’ll even respond saying, but you know what? Let’s set up a call. So that motion for outbound has been quite successful for us.
[00:16:39] Alice Heiman: Yes. I mean, I’ve been hearing right from people that we have to be more creative and do different things.
I’ve always felt that way, but now that Pure Cold Outreach is just not giving us the results. I mean, it really hasn’t been for a long time, Jonathan. Right? I mean, you, you’ve heard it. We’ve all heard it. Just the [00:17:00] results are just so minimal from pure outbound. But when you invite people to something special, right.
And the bonus for these event people, like you’re saying, is I get to meet other people like me that I’ve never met before from really cool companies. Mm-hmm. And share ideas. Right. And then they can become friends and they might meet again. It’s more than just, Hey, Excel events invited me to a dinner.
[00:17:30] It’s, I get to meet my peers, I get to have great conversations, and then of course they’re gonna, a good percent of them are gonna be interested. What would you say be I, I mean, I love this, right? You can set these up in every different city and invite people from the companies that you want, not that hard and really not that expensive compared to going to a trade show that could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, right?
[00:17:54] Jonathan Kazarian: Yeah. I mean, if you’re paying hundreds of thousands dollars to be at a trade show, then. Maybe reevaluate that spend. Yeah. [00:18:00] But, uh, yes, it’s very inexpensive. So for a given dinner, we’ll spend between two to $300 per head. Uh, who’s attending, obviously we have our travel, travel cost to get out there. But in a given city, you know, that gives us 300 or so 400 people that we can reach out to that fall within our, our ICP.
[00:18:20] Alice Heiman: Yeah. Yeah. Amazing, right? And people are just so concerned about volume, but when you just turn the volume down and focus on the [00:18:30] quality, everything improves, right? And what do you have a, I’m sure you do have a good idea of what your close rate is on and what the timeline is. So somebody you’ve never met before, you’re in a city, you invite them, they come to your event, they have a wonderful time, they meet other people.
What happens next?
[00:18:49] Jonathan Kazarian: So, so there’s kind of the couple of categories. There’s existing customers, which obviously any city we’re in, we’re gonna invite them because they’re advocates to the prospects that are in the room. [00:19:00] Then there’s the prospects, the pipeline accelerators. That’s the, that’s where like there’s the most clear line to revenue.
I mean, yeah, you could say with the existing customers, the retention play. Uh, but then there’s the people that are frankly cold before, before coming to that dinner. Um. And we don’t look at, we’re not looking for like a 30 day or even a 90 day attribution window from somebody attending one of those dinners to converting.
Because a lot of the times in our industry, people are in multi-year [00:19:30] contracts. Yeah. And that’s okay. But we need to get on their radar and make sure that they know there’s a better way than what they’re doing right now, so that when they start to evaluate contract renewal with their existing vendor, we’re, we’re in the consideration set.
And because it’s been. Uh, only a little over two years that we’ve been doing this, we’re now starting to see more and more pipeline attributed to, uh, those past dinner, uh, attendances.
[00:19:58] Alice Heiman: Yeah. How long have you been [00:20:00] doing the dinners?
[00:20:01] Jonathan Kazarian: Just over two years.
[00:20:02] Alice Heiman: Yeah. Perfect. So absolutely. This is like, now you really should start to see people and we are coming, right?
I mean that’s, it’s, yeah, it really started,
[00:20:12] Jonathan Kazarian: it started like two quarters ago where we started to, you know, each, each quarter see more and more folks who were directly attributed to having attended a dinner in the past.
[00:20:23] Alice Heiman: Wow. And then besides that, the rest is coming inbound.
[00:20:27] Jonathan Kazarian: Yeah, almost entirely.
[00:20:29] Alice Heiman: Wow. All [00:20:30] right.
Yeah.
[00:20:30] Jonathan Kazarian: Inbound referral, word of mouth, but that’s sort of all inbound.
[00:20:34] Alice Heiman: Yeah. Word of mouth. Absolutely. People use your product, love it, and tell somebody else about it, or move to another company and wanna bring it in there. Right.
[00:20:43] Jonathan Kazarian: That is the channel that we’re working on right now from an outbound perspective.
[00:20:48] Alice Heiman: Yeah. That is a great channel for outbound. You’re using LinkedIn Navigator to track them, right?
[00:20:54] Jonathan Kazarian: We use a, a mix of, uh, navigator Clay and, and exploring the HubSpot job [00:21:00] changing report. Yeah.
[00:21:00] Alice Heiman: Okay, great. Because, I mean, it’s so easy to, well, at least a navigator, to just, you know, make your list and see, and then it just, it is, but it’s very
[00:21:08] Jonathan Kazarian: hard to automate.
[00:21:11] Alice Heiman: That’s the problem with LinkedIn, period. But we won’t go there right now.
[00:21:16] Jonathan Kazarian: We had been doing it manually in, in, uh, sales navigator, but. Trying to scale that initiative. So, okay,
[00:21:24] Alice Heiman: so yesterday I was on, um, a training program on like advanced. [00:21:30] LinkedIn, uh, navigator stuff, and a wom. The woman who was teaching it was using a tool.
I cannot remember the name right now, but I promise I’ll send it to you and everyone, I’ll put it in the show notes, uh, so that you can see it because it was giving you a way to track and it was really simple. So I’ll send you that. Um, okay, so we’ve got, uh, actually, let’s
[00:21:49] Jonathan Kazarian: stick on this for one second.
Yeah. So there’s a tool that we use with LinkedIn doesn’t require navigator, uh, called Hub Lead. So for all of these dinners, we are sending emails, but we, we start with LinkedIn, so we’ll build our [00:22:00] list in LinkedIn. We build our list in in our CRM first with existing customers. Yes, we DM everybody on LinkedIn.
We use this little plugin, chrome extension called Hub Lead, which pushes back to HubSpot so we can see who’s invited. ’cause for a given city, we’ll send multiple AEs to that city.
[00:22:16] Alice Heiman: Right?
[00:22:17] Jonathan Kazarian: I try to go to every dinner. Uh, just had a. Another baby, so I missed the last one, but
[00:22:22] Alice Heiman: yeah.
[00:22:22] Jonathan Kazarian: Um,
[00:22:23] Alice Heiman: congratulations. That makes it hard.
You hard to
[00:22:26] Jonathan Kazarian: travel with that. Yeah. Uh, but, but this allows us to [00:22:30] see who invited, which rep, invited somebody and make sure that we’re not double inviting so we don’t look disorganized. Um, I see that process works very well.
[00:22:38] Alice Heiman: So it works directly with HubSpot. Yeah. Hub Link. Is it part of HubSpot or is it a separate tool?
[00:22:43] Jonathan Kazarian: Hub lead. Third party tool that just across. Okay.
[00:22:46] Alice Heiman: Hub lead. All right. I’ll put that in the show notes as well. That’s awesome because that is one of the hardest things when you’re using email and LinkedIn to not double up and annoy people. Right. Right. That’s the last thing we wanna do. [00:23:00] Okay, so then we’ve got that going on the inbound.
So what does your sales team look like today in order to. You hit your revenue goals, do you, it, it started with you and your partner and then there was Andrew, and now what does it look like?
[00:23:16] Jonathan Kazarian: So my co-founder departed the business, uh, over six years ago. So he, he’s no longer involved. Our sales team today, we have a, we have a CRO and two AEs, and then we’ve got, uh, two people on the account management team.[00:23:30]
So for the new B side, it’s really three folks focused on that. Um, they are getting. An average week, about 30 book demo requests, qualified book demo requests. Wow. So they’re flat out with inbound and, and, and managing their pipeline.
[00:23:48] Alice Heiman: And those are all coming from that, those inbound sources we talked about.
And those events now as well are starting to fill up their calendar.
[00:23:54] Jonathan Kazarian: Yeah, exactly. Um, but yeah, the only outbound that they’re doing is for four events. [00:24:00]
[00:24:01] Alice Heiman: Yeah. Wow. I mean, that is, I think like everybody’s dream because we still have way too many salespeople, just cold outreaching with no real, like got nothing, just wanna talk to you and book a demo, you know, like.
Ah, not good. And people of course, are not responding. So I highly recommend that every company think about what type of event is right for you. ’cause there’s so many different types that [00:24:30] you can do, and I think that can really, really help drive it. But also the word of mouth and the people who move to the next job, like we were talking about, I just don’t think we capitalize on that stuff enough and we have.
A list of companies who know us and love us, why aren’t we talking to them to see who else they could introduce us to, you know?
[00:24:53] Jonathan Kazarian: Yeah. I mean, that all starts with making sure that those folks love you
[00:24:57] Alice Heiman: a hundred percent. They, they have [00:25:00] you, they have to be successful using what you sold them. Right? Right.
And if they are, they’re happy to tell other people about it, so. Love that. All right. So you guys have been growing and growing. It’s pretty exciting. What’s next?
[00:25:17] Jonathan Kazarian: Uh, continuing to double down on what we’re doing. So over this, over this year, our average deal size has, um, increased by about 80%. Wow. So as that continues, uh, you know, we’re gonna be growing our AE team, uh, [00:25:30] going into into Q1, uh, also growing our, our implementation professional services arm.
Uh, but from a process perspective. We’re continuing to focus on making sure that we close every deal that comes inbound because again, other than the events, we’re not looking to increase the outbound effort. We don’t want to, you know, our goal is not to be the noisy one in the inbox. It’s to have the reputation where, uh, we can be as efficient as possible on the sales [00:26:00] side of things and, and have people coming to us.
[00:26:03] Alice Heiman: Yeah, it’s a great focus to have, right? They’re calling you, why not figure out what they need and get that deal closed, right? Yeah. So,
[00:26:12] Jonathan Kazarian: and it’s, you know, it’s not like the SDR motion RA are basically sales engineers. They’re, you know, they’ve both been here for six, seven years. They know the industry inside and out.
Same with our CRO. Um. We want to be [00:26:30] acting as more of a consultant and give customers that,
[00:26:33] Alice Heiman: yeah,
[00:26:33] Jonathan Kazarian: prospects that confidence that we’re a vendor they can partner with in trust, and not just trying to hit a quota because the VC told us we have to hit some imaginary number.
[00:26:44] Alice Heiman: Exactly the way it should be.
Exactly. I love that. So when you are starting to hire, let us know because we have a couple of, uh, really great groups that we’re in where we can, um, put the word out for you and get you some a [00:27:00] players to apply. So you do let us know about that. All right. Well, gosh, just before we go, I have, um, a question, a couple of questions for you.
The first one is, what’s a book that you think every CEO should read?
[00:27:15] Jonathan Kazarian: Uh, it’s behind me, the yellow one, back there on a reasonable hospitality. Yes. Have you read it?
[00:27:21] Alice Heiman: I have. And I got to see Will Guera in September. He was at the Pavilion GTM conference [00:27:30] and he’s such a good speaker. Uh, was just phenomenal and I got to chat with him afterwards a little bit ’cause a very close friend of mine is a very close friend of his.
Just coincidentally, but wow. Right. Like if everyone would just map all of their touch points and figure out where they could improve even just a little, right? What a difference the world would be. I mean, holy cow, our customers would love it.
[00:27:59] Jonathan Kazarian: So we just [00:28:00] had our customer experience team. Uh, I think they’ve got one chapter left, but they’ve been doing a weekly book club.
We shipped everybody the book, and, uh, I, I, I’ve never come across a book that’s either more fun to read yes, or more applicable, especially given that events are tangentially in the hospitality industry.
[00:28:19] Alice Heiman: Right. The stories are so good. Right, right. They’re just so much fun and at first people think, well, we can’t do that.
We’re a software company or We’re a this or we’re, [00:28:30] you can figure it out how to do it. You can, it’s just, I agree with you. It’s a phenomenal book. Everybody should read it. Okay. What’s a podcast that you listen to and you’d like it because it makes you think differently?
[00:28:42] Jonathan Kazarian: Uh, I’m biased. So, uh, there’s a podcast called All In.
Which is a tech and politics podcast. Uh, I’m also an advisor to that group, so that one is, uh, particularly interesting to me. And they’ve run a couple of large summits per year and they use Excel events to do so. [00:29:00]
[00:29:00] Alice Heiman: Excellent, excellent. And what is, what is the thing that you think that CEOs need to do to win in this market?
[00:29:11] Jonathan Kazarian: Talk to customers to listen, not to talk. Like, it’s not, it’s, it’s kinda like playing the long game, like every customer conversation I have. Yeah, would love to prospect conversation, convert that to revenue, but I’m more focused on what’s the thing [00:29:30] that I can take away from that conversation. So the next time I have a similar conversation, we have the perfect product and answer and way to communicate it so that it’s, you know, it’s.
It’s the perfect fit.
[00:29:42] Alice Heiman: Yeah. And we started out talking about that, right? You were on back to back calls listening to customers, and I could not agree more. Every CEO needs to. Get on a call, go visit, do a video meeting, whatever, and listen to your customers. What’s, what’s [00:30:00] happening in their industry, what’s happening at their company?
Where do they see the growth? How is them AI impacting them? Not just about your own product. Of course you wanna ask them, how are you using our product and how is that working? But like, what’s going on in your world? Yeah. ’cause sometimes you hear something that you’re like, oh, we could impact that. We could help them do that better.
[00:30:21] Jonathan Kazarian: My, my favorite question to ask is, where are you spending most of your time? And transparently, I don’t get very good answers, but when I do, [00:30:30] that really helps us to see where there’s pain.
[00:30:33] Alice Heiman: Mm. Yeah. So interesting. Well, Jonathan, thank you so much for spending time with me today. I really appreciate you sharing your story.
[00:30:44] Jonathan Kazarian: Yeah, it’s been fun.
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