How To Throw A Slam Dunk Event That Generates Customers For You, The 7 Habits of High Performing Marketers, Why You Should Make Your SaaS Company Free, 99% Of Content Creators Don't Think Like This

In episode #2944, Eric Siu and Neil Patel discuss creating engaging events, high-performing marketer habits, and the benefits of free SaaS products. They highlight strategic event planning, key marketing habits, and free SaaS offerings as a competitive advantage. TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES (00:00) Creating Impactful Events (06:12) The Seven Habits of High Performing Marketers (13:04) The Case for Free SaaS Products Prefer single topic episodes? Head over to our YouTube channel. To suggest a topic, go to https://www.marketingschool.io. For more content from Eric and Neil, check out Eric’s Leveling Up with Eric Siu YouTube channel and Neil’s Neil Patel YouTube channel. Connect with Us: Single Grain << Eric's ad agency NP Digital << Neil’s ad agency X @neilpatel, @ericosiu Instagram @neilpatel, @ericosiu Drop Us a Review If You Enjoyed the Episode!

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Finding customer information shouldn't mean digging through emails, call notes, and spreadsheets. HubSpot Starter Plan brings all of those details together, so it's easier to track what's happening with every deal, and what to do next. It pulls information from calls and emails. Then it gets to work, logging and summarizing them. Right after your call ends, HubSpot pulls next steps from your call notes and drafts suggested follow-ups. And it stays up to date for you, so you can build demand, win more deals, and spend less time on repetitive work. Your records, insights, and next steps are ready for you to act on. And you don't have to miss a beat searching for any of it. Try the Starter Plan for $10 a month. Learn more at hubspot.com. I have this thing called the YPO Global Marketing Summit. So it's a members-only type of thing. But because I've done events for a couple of years,

• 0:42Speaker 00

  I think I have a sense on how you can throw a slam dunk event that generates customers for you.

• 0:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, and by the way, I thought this event was in at the Four Seasons. It's not at the Four Seasons?

• 0:52Speaker 00

  St. Regis.

• 0:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, that's great.

• 0:55Speaker 00

  Do you know how much the rooms are at that Four Seasons?

• 0:57Speaker 01

  No, a thousand bucks?

• 0:59Speaker 00

  Oh, I'm talking about the Four Seasons Surfside, which is near the one where we're doing it this time? Because this one's like 30 minutes out from Miami.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  Oh, it's not your old condo?

• 1:05Speaker 00

  No, no, no, no. So this Four Seasons, the one next to ours, like $4,000, $5,000 a night.

• 1:11Speaker 01

  Wow, and St. Regis?

• 1:13Speaker 00

  St. Regis is like

• 1:15Speaker 01

  Thousand?

• 1:15Speaker 00

  Thousand or something, yeah. But then, but then we have a special rate. We have a group rate. I mean, it's free for you, but like, yeah, yeah. Okay, so how to throw a slam dunk event that generates customers for you? The main thing is, for us, this event is probably going to be the biggest it's ever been. I think we're going to hit a record. And I, I, the first thing you have to get right is you have to have the most relevant speakers. If you have relevant speakers, it's going to attract people, just bar none, right? Like, why do people like, oh, you know, Kevin O'Leary speaking, or like, you know, you might have, I don't know, like, if you have Trump speaking at your event or whatever, it's going to be huge.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  Is Kevin O'Leary speaking?

• 1:55Speaker 00

  I don't think so, not for this one. But I, there's someone else that I'm talking to right now that I'll tell you right after, that we're working on. I think he would be just as good, if not better.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  Cool.

• 2:04Speaker 00

  But, so the speakers matter quite a bit. The second thing is, you really do need to be intentional about Who you want at the event. You know, you've seen events where I've been very intentional, events where I've kind of broadened it. The more intentional you are saying, oh, it has to be marketers that are people that love marketing. That are in YPO and then YPO has certain qualifications to be in, right? And so that's another one. You have to be intentional about who you want to bring in. The third thing is you.

• 2:37Speaker 00

  I like events. I don't know about you, Neil. I like events that are more intimate. And so this one will have maybe call it 200 people or so, which is a little larger than I what I would usually do. I think 100 people is usually a really good event. And like Neil has also done like B two B events where he has CMOs and things like that. Where if you have 50 to 100 people, but they're very high intent. Or they know other people you should talk to. Let's say you're trying to win business. That's usually really good for you too. But I'll pause for a second, see if you want to add anything or ask anything.

• 3:03Speaker 01

  No, I've never really thrown events. I, you know, every time we've done events together, you've done everything your team has. So I don't.

• 3:10Speaker 00

  So the, the team matters quite a bit too. And so for example, like Noah's sitting in the room, so we might have him come. Because I'm used to working with Noah, he's done a couple of the, the events already. He knows exactly what, what I want and you know, what my intentions are. But also I'm working with this YPO events team too, right? And they, they, they work a certain way too. And just, just keep in mind that you ideally want to work with people. That have been there, done that. And so for one of my events, remember we had the digital marketing, the, the war room team. And they also did traffic and conversion conference, which had like 2000 people. And they've also done events with like 100 people or so. I find that working with them, so her name's Deanna. She took everything off my plate. Like she's just like, we will take everything versus like. In this situation, I'm having to do a lot more of things I usually wouldn't do, right?

• 3:56Speaker 00

  And a lot more things are unclear. So just keep in mind, you want consistency. And I think the final thing I'll say is if you really want to bring, bring people along, like going to Miami is, is fun to people, right? If you do it in Miami or you do it in like some, I don't know, Tulum or Cabo or something like that, it does attract people. Keep in mind, if you do an event in Vegas, you're going to get a lot of distractions. So you have to understand what, what it is that you're signing up for, but. Overall, I think afterwards too, if you can drop these recordings online, if you want to keep this event going, that's the way to market it. You want to have a sizzle reel as well. And then maybe follow up with these people, you know, immediately after, maybe a couple of months later. You know, what we do when Neil speaks at this, an event, or I speak at an event, we send slides to all the attendees afterwards.

• 4:38Speaker 00

  So that's another thing. But I'll pause for a second. Is anything missing, you think, from this?

• 4:44Speaker 01

  No. The one thing I would add is make sure your attendees are a specific type of attendees and they fit that requirement. So if you're looking for ecommerce people, make sure there's all ecommerce people there. If you're, you know, targeting people who are larger business, make sure it's larger businesses. And the reason I say this, not because it's just the speakers, it's hard to tailor content for everyone. It's much easier to create an amazing experience if it's the same type of audience and everyone's looking for the same type of information. You could have multiple tracks, but that gets really complex and very costly.

• 5:21Speaker 00

  By the way, the final thing I'll add too is you want to, if you want to create a memorable event. So what we have going on, so I think you're here the 23rd, you're leaving on the 24th, right? For the event, April. I think that's what you told me. So anyway, we have, if you have really high caliber people, you want to create ample opportunities for people to network. So we have this thing called a dine around. So there's a lot of YPOers that live in Miami. So we have like, you know, eight to 10 people going to people's houses. Like people, like they'll invite you in. You know, they'll take your food. We basically, YPO pay 250 bucks per head for that dinner, right? And that's a memorable experience. And we just created, my thing is, I've created a very learning focused event with like, you know, you're speaking.

• 6:06Speaker 00

  We have Greg Eisenberg, Nick Shackelford, April Dunford, the Kat Cole from AG1, Alexandra, who's the co-founder of Eight Sleep. And so we have, it's like different types of people, right? Youtubers as well. And so I've I've created my event based on what I like, which is learning and networking. And mine doesn't have like, sure, it's Miami, but mine's not focused on partying. So you have to understand what works for you too. And I know if Neil threw an event, it wouldn't be focused on partying. It'd be fully focused on networking, maybe some speaking, and then he goes home.

• 6:35Speaker 01

  Yes. Eric knows me well. I'm like, my version of fun is having a good night's rest from sleeping like 10 hours.

• 6:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. Will you sleep 10 hours?

• 6:45Speaker 01

  No, but that would be a good night.

• 6:46Speaker 00

  Okay, alright.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  I usually get eight.

• 6:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, eight's for me too. Speaking of high performing, let's talk about the seven habits of high performing marketers. Let's do an OG marketing school over here. I'll just do number one first.

• 7:00Speaker 00

  So, number one, any, not even high performing marketers, just a high performing person in general. Neil, just talk about it. Your sleep is everything at the end of the day, right? And I've actually upgraded my sleep stack. So, I think taking care of your health is number one. I've worked with a lot of people over the years where they don't, they neglect their health. And in my mind, the saying is, you know, you have a thousand problems, you know, when your health is good. But when your health isn't good, you have one problem, right? And in my mind, I'm like, how could you just neglect your health? Which neglects all your loved ones around you too. And then it also makes it hard to work. You know, there's people that, you know, they get, they get sick a lot, you know, they don't show up to work. And like, it's hard to be a high performer if you're not high performing when it comes to your body.

• 7:42Speaker 00

  And so that's a little outside of the, you know, actual marketing piece. But I genuinely believe that. And, you know, maybe we'll do another episode on the ins and outs of it. But what's number two, Neil?

• 7:54Speaker 01

  Number two is, you have to be willing to run, dissect, and document your experiments. Marketers who run a lot of experiments are more likely to find different levers that can cause more growth. But, running them isn't enough. You need to understand why certain experiments worked and why they didn't. And you gotta really dive in because for the ones that didn't, what can you learn from them? To avoid those things in the future. For the things that are working, if you can dissect the elements that are actually causing lifts, how can you actually do more of that so you can grow faster? And if you're not willing to experiment as a marketer, you're just not going to grow as much. Doing the standard stuff that everyone else is doing is just going to create mediocre results because all marketing channels eventually become saturated and competitive.

• 8:40Speaker 00

  Number three for me is you have to be very strong at building your network. And I do like the saying that your net worth is your network. And what I mean by that is Neil will just pick up the phone and call somebody. I will pick up the phone and call somebody. If I want someone to teach someone on my team how they do email paid acquisition and they grow big newsletters with millions of people or so. I'll get on the phone and say, hey, can they do a call? And then in return, you know, I might, I might give something back to them or I might meet them in person because it's a quid pro quo, right? It's an equal exchange where I try to make it be. But my point here is if you don't build your network, it's so many opportunities come from just, it's people at the end of the day. And I think the sooner that you realize that, the better. And so the example here is when I was, you know, in my mid twenties or so,

• 9:24Speaker 00

  I started throwing these networking dinners with other marketers. And these people were, you know, directors and CMOs and things like that. And all I had was, you know, a bag of chips to feed them. But that still worked anyway, right? Because I became the node. And so that's a bonus. If you can become the connector, people will, people will actually envy you for your network if you can do that.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. Uh, number four, number four, the ability to pivot very fast. If you look at the whole marketing industry, there's tons of algorithm changes. Google has roughly nine plus algorithm changes a day. Based on the last numbers that I saw published on the internet, it could be even more now. Amazon, you know, continually has changes in how they rank sites or products more so within their search results. Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, they all have algorithm changes. And they've had over the years. Hence, a lot of your friends don't see your content compared to when Facebook first came out. If you don't know how to adapt and you can't adapt fast, you're going to be screwed. A lot of times you have to learn on the fly or leverage your network that Eric just mentioned.

• 10:30Speaker 01

  But the ability to adapt and execute fast based on changes is a necessity. If you can't, you're not going to cut it out in the world of marketing because it's just getting more complex over time versus actually simpler.

• 10:43Speaker 00

  Number five is you have to become a T-shaped marketer. And what I mean by that is So I started in SEO originally. So I went, let's say I went really deep in SEO and then that's the, I guess that would be the I of the T, right? And then, you know, going across, I started learning affiliate marketing. I started learning paid media. I started learning what it takes to, you know, create a great creative. I started learning more about analytics, which is interesting to me because over the last 10, 15 years or so, when I look at people and they don't understand analytics or Google Tag Manager, I'm like, this stuff is like, you're supposed to know this stuff, learning marketing before. And then now people have decided, oh, I'm just going to be specialized in one area. That's fine. You can do that, but you're not going to become the highest performing marketer that you can become because

• 11:26Speaker 00

  you can't call BS on other areas and you don't understand other areas. And because of that, that makes you a weaker marketer.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  Yep. Another habit of high performing marketers is they try to understand people from all different countries and cultures. The reason this is important is the world is no longer centered around the United States or China or India. The world is all one big melting pot and we're all relying on each other and the money to be made is not from the US or China or India or Brazil or the United Kingdom. It's all the countries really do add up and you gotta really think on a global level. So like with SEO, if you don't understand Ahref Lang, you're not going to get as much international traffic. If you can't figure out how to use AI to translate and transcribe your content, you're not going to do as well and you still may need a human in the loop.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  If you're not willing to use technology like HeyGen that allows you to go global faster for all your social content, you're not going to do as well. International is pretty much the standard these days. When Eric and I started as an entrepreneur, you would launch a business in just one region. That was it. And that's how you build a successful company. That's no longer the case. Global and globalization needs to be part of your strategy from day one.

• 12:40Speaker 00

  Frictionless Growth Marketing hosted by Sonya Thompson is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Frictionless Growth Marketing hosted by Sonya Thompson shows how modern brands grow by removing the friction in their marketing and customer experience that pushes customers away every single day, often without leaders even realizing it. Each episode delivers practical insights, real brand examples and conversations with marketing leaders, showing brands how to win with the new rules of growth, identity-driven marketing, cultural relevance and frictionless customer experiences. Listen to Frictionless Growth Marketing wherever you get your podcasts. Number seven, last but not least, you've got to be really fast. If there's anything that stands out with the marketers that the best marketers I know of,

• 13:23Speaker 00

  they're really fast at getting things done. The sooner you can get like if I can get something done at half the time, that decreased my cost by half the time. Right? If you just think about logically, um, and they're very responsive. They are often the ones that are coming with new ideas. They're bringing the heat. And they're quick to get things done. So when I worked at that, uh, that startup treehouse, we would work four days a week, a four day work week. Right? I work seven days a week. Because we had to, and that's not to say I'm great or anything. I just, and when people needed something done, I was really quick to respond. And I also expected that of my, of my team as well. And those that were high performers, they responded very quickly. Um, and they just were, were fast executors. And I think that's something you and I both really appreciate. And yeah, that, that's what it is. So we have time for one more.

• 14:08Speaker 00

  And you have one over here on, I changed your title just to make it more applicable for more people. Why you should make your SaaS company free.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I'm a big believer that SaaS isn't that expensive to create these days. I'm not even a big believer. This is just pure data. Um, most people know this. When I first started as an entrepreneur, it was expensive to create a SaaS company. I remember when we used to host our product, we had servers at hosting locations and we had to deal with them. Nowadays you just have the cloud. The clouds made things more affordable. Even AI has made SaaS more affordable as well. So we did an analysis. And we looked at quite a few companies that were, uh, leveraging tools, free tools for lead generation.

• 15:01Speaker 01

  And what we found is the companies that had free tools had 339% more leads. When we looked at their close rate, their close rate down, went down 56%. But even if your close rate goes down 56% because the quality of leads from free tools isn't as high as, um, not having a free tool and just doing a demo request. It still makes up for it. And the reason I say it's important to do free as a SaaS tool is it's just too expensive to do marketing and sales in SaaS. It's actually the biggest cost. It's not creating the product. And for that reason, for most people, unless you're trying to create

• 15:43Speaker 01

  something like an OpenAI, but for most people, the real cost is going to be marketing and sales. So if you have a SaaS company like Eric's recently launched one, I believe you had to come up with a version that's free, not freemium, a version that's just free for a lot of people, and you'll just start collecting and dominating the market share really fast.

• 16:04Speaker 00

  Yeah. So my response is overall, I think it, I don't think either one is right or wrong. I think it depends on the situation. So at least for us right now, we don't necessarily have a lead problem. There's a, there's at least a handful of enterprises that come in each week. We have more of a resourcing problem right now in terms of the, the product. And so we're, we're pretty close in a lot of situations. Like we have the main ad feature, which someone else copied recently. But we have these two other features that are amazing around like influence pipeline reporting, and then these, these landing page personalizations, right? So that needs to get a little closer. So that's why we're comfortable doing these pilots right now. Because the thing is if we take on all these other leads right now, we, we do plan to add a free trial. So it's, you're not saying, you're not saying product led growth, you're saying.

• 16:47Speaker 01

  No, I'm saying product led growth.

• 16:48Speaker 00

  You are saying product, okay. So we, we're not saying we're opposed to it, but just right now, given that the product isn't quite there yet, we can't open the floodgates yet, right? Because, again, what's going to happen from a customer success standpoint, if we had 100 customers right now, because like some issues that we faced this week were around one customer, it's an enterprise customer, they want to launch a thousand ads at a time, right? And so we're like, okay, like now our architecture is ready for that. And so it's better that we get these kinks sorted out first, and then I think we can switch. So.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. So same thing, right? Eventually, it sounds like you're going to do product led growth and have a free version of the product. You can't do it if the product doesn't meet what most people are looking for from a bare minimum standpoint. And what Eric's saying is his product's He just needs to fix some kinks and bugs and expand the product in a few other areas before he can release the version and just make it free.

• 17:43Speaker 00

  And Neil is right. I think in my mind, the two, the two modes of, the two modes of the future are going to be distribution and data. If you do do a product like growth motion, you are creating some type of distribution and you're going to build a lot of data around your product. You just got to make sure it's the right people at the end of the day because we do have a lot of people. I look at the lead list and I'm like, okay, here's these enterprises, but what else is on the lead list? A lot of agencies. We actually don't really talk to a lot of the agencies right now. And then there's a lot of people that are, they have potential, but it wouldn't be a right fit right now. So there's like other things we need to sort through, like LinkedIn has a limitation. You can only target 300 people, but we might, we might have a workaround for that too. And so there's like, it's, we're, we're taking all these stepping stones right now. And then sometimes we might have to back up a step or two steps and then sometimes we'll take three steps forward.

• 18:27Speaker 00

  But it's moving very rapidly. And I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm just saying there's a time and place for everything. And that's what we're, I think we're both saying that. So.

• 18:37Speaker 01

  And a great example of someone who did this was Teams. Teams was free. They took a big chunk out of Slack. It was so successful, it pretty much crushed Skype as well. And they're shutting it down, or it will be shut down once this episode airs. And then they started quote unquote, slowly charging for Teams and they gobbled up a lot of revenue. A lot of corporations use it. It's all plugged into the Microsoft ecosystem.

• 19:02Speaker 00

  Dude, I have a good one we can end on. Are you ready?

• 19:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:04Speaker 00

  Okay. So Greg Eisenberg, who's speaking at the, the event. So he, he posted. So basically, the headline I'll give you guys all here is 99% of content creators do not think like this. And so Greg Eisenberg said, I was talking to a friend yesterday who has 2.3 million followers about my social media strategy. So Greg, he does well. I think he has like a couple of hundred thousand on, on Twitter and then on YouTube. I think he's got like, call it 200,000 or so. And so this guy was like, hey, dude, like you can 3X your engagement just by 3Xing the amount of content you put out. Just do more motivational tweets or funny memes, bro. And, and so let's just react to that. I think you and I both realize this. We've created a lot of, you know, broad TAM content where you might get hundreds of thousands or millions of views, right? I've done the same thing

• 19:48Speaker 00

  as well, where we might talk about discounts and things like that, or, you know, I'll interview someone and they'll have a hot take. But this is the wrong way to build a business, at least. If you want to be a creator, sure, you can build all the volume you want. But I think if you're an entrepreneur, this is not the right way to build a business because you're going to get a lot of irrelevant people.

• 20:06Speaker 01

  Yes, the key with social media is to have as many followers that are qualified and the right type of followers. And it's just tough. You can't do that by posting broad memes. I used to post like Elon Musk memes and quotes back in the day on my Facebook account. Yeah, before Tesla really blew up and had tons of engagement. It worked really well, but it doesn't matter what people think about Elon Musk, whether it was Elon Musk quote or a Disney quote or, you know, Howard Schultz quote. That's not going to necessarily drive the right audience. It's not going to drive more CMOs to follow me.

• 20:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, and so that's a struggle that I know we've mentioned this last week or Monday when we recorded. The struggle with, you know, your YouTube right now, it's like you want to create more stuff around marketing, but then the people you work with, they want you to create more large time content. And like, again, we've played this game before. And I can tell you, again, you'll get a lot of people, but then what's going to happen is like, it also doesn't help the algorithm too, because then some of the people will engage somewhat. Because let's say Neil gets like all these, you know, people that like his large time content. But when he starts to publish stuff around marketing, what percent of those, what percentage of those are actually going to care? Not many. Yeah. So anyway, if you're a content creator, I think if you can think more like an entrepreneur, that's going to help you make more money ultimately.

• 21:23Speaker 00

  And that is it for today, guys. Please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow.