Meetings App Maker DoubleDutch's New Plan

Lawrence Coburn founder & CEO of meetings app DoubleDutch, talks about:

• The opportunity presented by the Cvent-Lanyon merger
• Plans to approach more enterprise customers
• Messaging platforms for influencing & measuring attendee behavior
• Bridging the gap between sales & marketing

San Francisco-based meetings app firm DoubleDutch has built its business by tracking live event data and attendee engagement. Ranked 95 on Deloitte's 2016 Technology Fast 500, the company restructured in July and released a statement that it was "breaking hard" for profitability after largely sustaining itself on $78 million in venture capital funds over the past six years. While maintaining its intense product focus, DoubleDutch is expanding its view on partnership strategies and setting sights on more enterprise clients. To convert the business, CEO Lawrence Coburn told BTN meetings editor Elizabeth West, DoubleDutch wants to enter client conversations earlier in the process. Here's the plan.

BTN: How is your customer strategy developing in 2017?

Coburn: We're moving away from one-off event customers, even if it's a big event. That's not going to be our sweet spot. Because our sweet spot is data the ability to compare events and optimize performance and do A/B testing, that's all a big selling point. We excel with customers that treat events as part of a campaign, run them year-round and do the performance comparisons. Those are the clients that really appreciate our platform. Tech, pharmaceutical, financial services, a bunch of big banks. Insurance is another strong area, as well as professional services. So there are a lot of corporates. We also think that association events model corporate events. The way we describe our ideal customer is an organization that sees events as a strategic means to an end and, therefore, cares about the data coming out of the event. The organizations where the event is the product are a little trickier for us.

BTN: You worked in tandem with American Express Meetings & Events on an app specifically for pharmaceutical events. What was the objective for that and how is it going?

Coburn: For pharmaceutical, there's a governance and compliance component. It's important for them to track every aspect of their meetings, and our event engagement vision ties nicely with that. American Express Meetings & Events has been a great channel partner for us to help us get to know some of the big pharma companies better. We started off with Bristol-Myers Squibb, Novartis, Sanofi. We are starting to put some more thought into how we can better tailor our product to meet their needs. What we released with American Express last year is just the start of what we hope to deliver.

BTN: Mobile meetings app adoption has skyrocketed over the past two years, and many companies are grasping for a piece of that business. Where do you fit in?

Coburn: We've taken the approach that being best in class is the way to go. So we put every engineering minute we have into mobile experience and analytics. We want to let the folks who come out of registration work on registration. We feel the folks that try to do everything—whether it's sourcing, registration, analytics or whatever—they're going to do a mediocre job at all that. Some of the bigger companies trying to do that are an example of this, in our opinion. We see the Cvent-Lanyon merger, for example, as an opportunity for someone.

BTN: As you approach more enterprise clients, do you see any benefit for DoubleDutch to get into meetings registration or other meetings tech functionality in order to leverage data captured outside the event proper?

Coburn: As our data story comes into focus, there are some really interesting signals that are captured by systems upstream from us. So whether it's interactions with an event website or demographic fields in registration itself or how people respond to email campaigns or even emerging stuff we see with companies like Feather with retargeting [i.e., grabbing up advertising inventory around the Web to serve up promotions for events] and how interactions are happening with those advertisements. Those are all signals. While product vision drives everything for us, we see an opening [with these related data signals] to increase our sales and marketing opportunities and to get into conversations earlier in the life cycle. That is interesting to us. You are not going to see DoubleDutch build something or buy something tomorrow, but you are going to see us looking at targeted partnerships with some of the upstream folks. We want to get closer to them.

BTN: With Marketo acquired by Vista Equity Partners last year, your deepest downstream integration to date now sits in the same portfolio as your newly enhanced competitor Cvent. Will you develop differently now?

Coburn: Cvent may now have access to tighter integrations than we would because they are owned by the same company [as Marketo]. We are conscious of that, but it doesn't change our path in the short term. Live Engagement Marketing is a way to generate audiences, to build lists of interesting audience segments in a theme that are sending similar signals. Then you integrate that data into marketing automation systems. The longer-term goal is to execute those campaigns within our own system and more in real time. We are working on audience builder functionality that shows a list of everyone at the event who is interested in, say, analytics and travel. Users will pull data from all the signals and filter into topics. Eventually, we want to enable push notification from within the app: "Hey, everybody, we see you are interested in analytics and travel. Join us for a special happy hour in two hours; let's bust a move and go." It's the ability to move these people closer to real time. For that, we think that Marketo is the wrong system, email is the wrong system; no one is looking at their email during an event. So we don't think that the Marketo-Cvent situation is a problem.

BTN: What else are you working on in 2017 that is reflective of the market and where DoubleDutch will be really competitive?

Coburn: We are getting increasingly interested in the idea of bridging the gap between sales and marketing at events. When we talk to our customers, marketing voices frustration with the lack of discipline in the sales force. I'm sure sales would have a different opinion of this, but [the view from marketing is] they've done this incredible job of bringing people to the event and queuing them up for sales, but they see the sales people talking to each other or standing around at the bar. So how can Live Engagement technology help marketing people arm the sales people with the right task list and notify them if the customer is nearby? Could that be a Marketo type of functionality? It could be, but we think it's more a bridge technology that sits between Marketo and Salesforce. That's interesting to us.