People are returning to in-person events. But they are not necessarily interested in returning to the way events used to work.
The three-day conference built around hours of presentations followed by a long sales pitch may still exist, but attendees have different expectations now. They want to participate. They want to meet people. They want conversations they could not have gotten from watching another video at home.
Amy talks with Afreen of Herd Ventures about what event hosts and speakers need to reconsider as live experiences return. They discuss relationship capital, designing an experience rather than simply delivering information, using AI to listen more closely to what attendees are saying, permission-based selling, and why ten people in the right room may matter more than hundreds of passive attendees.
Here are two takeaways from Season 11, Episode 10:
1. The value of an event is no longer just the information delivered from the stage.
People can find information almost anywhere now. A speaker standing at the front of a room and delivering expertise is no longer enough to justify the time, travel, expense, and attention required to attend an event in person.
What people cannot replicate as easily is the experience of being in the room.
Afreen describes the host as having a responsibility to lead people through that experience. That means thinking beyond slides and presentations and considering movement, conversation, exercises, participation, community intelligence, and what happens after someone leaves.
Amy and Afreen also discuss using event chats and transcripts to understand what attendees actually cared about, the questions they asked, and what landed for them. Instead of writing generic follow-up emails before an event even happens, that information can shape follow-up that reflects the conversation people actually experienced.
The event does not end when everyone walks out the door.
2. A successful room does not require turning every attendee into a buyer.
The traditional event model puts enormous attention on conversion. Make the offer. Make it again. Measure how many people bought.
Afreen points out the obvious problem: even an event with a strong conversion rate leaves most of the room outside the paid offer.
What happens to them?
Rather than treating everyone who did not buy as a lost conversion, she encourages hosts to create multiple ways for people to remain connected. They may attend another event, use a free resource, stay part of the community, refer someone, or become a client much later.
That shift also changes how the offer itself can be presented. Afreen has moved toward permission-based selling, where hearing about the paid opportunity is optional rather than consuming hours of the experience attendees came for.
And bigger is not automatically better. A small room of ten people can create the kind of conversation, trust, and relationship capital that changes what happens next for everyone in it.
Resources from this episode:
- We Are Herd: Join Afreen’s world to stop building alone, and start building with HERD. fhttps://community.herd.team/herd-ventures
- Trusted Voice Exchange: Our curated conversation for experienced business owners who want deeper conversations beyond surface-level business advice.
https://joyfulbusinessrevolution.com/trustedvoice
