Cvent, the market leader in event management technology solutions, added even more muscle when it merged with Lanyon Solutions in November following the completion of the companies’ acquisition by private equity firm Vista Equity partners in a $1.65 billion deal.
Meetings Today caught up with Cvent Founder and CEO Reggie Aggarwal at the company’s Tysons Corner, Va., headquarters in mid-December, where the top staffs of both companies came together under the Cvent umbrella for its first “get-to-know-you” meeting that will serve as the launching pad for the combined companies’ future. The added firepower of Lanyon’s engineering team and other key positions should serve to increase Cvent’s domination of the cloud-based enterprise event, marketing and hotel management segment.
“We are going to be operating under the Cvent brand, and the Cvent leadership is going to be running the organization, so there’s clarity in the go-forward strategy,” Aggarwal said. “From a customer view, we have more than 25,000 customers between the two, and when you look at the users, it’s hundreds of thousands of users.”
The first order of business is to ensure this large customer base that it will be business as usual from the user experience with the products they’ve grown accustomed to.
“I’m sure the first question they’re going to want answered is, ‘Are my products going to be supported?’” Aggarwal said. “It’s all about the customers, and when you do a merger it doesn’t work unless you take care of your customers. We are going to continue to support all of the products. We’re excited about keeping the entire product going forward and being able to concentrate our investment in it, and making sure to support all of our customers in the products they’re using.”
Following the Nov. 29, 2016 merger, the combined company will operate and be managed under the Cvent umbrella. The combined company will have over 800 in technology/software development and more than 700 in client support. The combined entity has approximately 28,000 customers in 100 countries. The two companies have powered more than 2 million events and $50 billion in total RFP value sourced since inception, according to Cvent.
“What makes this merger such a hand-and-glove fit is that we both actually did focus on some of the same things and had a very similar culture,” Aggarwal said. “We both focused on a large segment of the market, the Global 5,000, and we also both worked a lot with the mid-market, from associations, nonprofits—not just corporate.…There were some things that we had and they didn’t, and they had and we didn’t, like [online and mobile booking engine] Passkey for room block management, or business transient, so from our perspective, our platform is going to get deeper now because now we have additional products that are integrated, and they’re talking together in one platform.
“We’re going to have the deepest, simplest and most integrated platform out there,” he continued.
Aggarwal said the two companies’ annual user events, Lanyon Live and Cvent CONNECT, will now be combined and operate under the Cvent CONNECT name, with the next installment set for June 12-16 in Las Vegas.
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Elevating SMM
A challenge the combined company will face, and really one that the meetings and events industry faces as a whole, is communicating the value of Strategic Meetings Management to its customer base.
“One of our strategic goals is taking a stronger lead in educating the industry, and with our combined forces we have kind of a moral obligation to do that,” Aggarwal said. “We really think it’s good for the industry because people move up the value chain.
“A typical CMO [chief marketing officer] spends 24 percent of their marketing budget on meetings and events—the highest marketing spend after websites—so not only is it a big budget item for the CMO, it’s also the second-highest ROI,” Aggarwal continued. “The problem is conveying that to the organization, and particularly the C-suite. That’s where events and meetings have struggled for years. So by quantifying that and showing that data, that’s the kind of thing that our tools bring, and it brings the whole industry up. As we’ve integrated into the marketing cloud we’ve become the indispensable part of their customer relationship management strategy.”
Cvent’s annual user conference serves as a prime conduit for communicating the value of face-to-face meetings—and the technology that makes them more efficient and trackable—to key stakeholders.
“User conferences have blossomed,” Aggarwal said. “All of the executives are there and all of the board of directors go there. The No. 1 ROI for us is meetings because you get your whole ecosystem there—your board, your partners, your customers, your prospects, your C-suite and your employees. Nothing beats face-to-face meetings—looking someone in the eye and breaking bread. But if you can’t prove it, it doesn’t exist.”
Aggarwal pointed to Concur, an SAP T&E management solutions company run by major meetings proponent and business leadership author Bill McDermott, as a prime example of proving the ROI of face-to-face events.
“X percentage of your corporate budget is spent on travel and expenses, and it’s kind of unmanaged, and there’s lots of room for saving tens of millions of dollars and sending it to your bottom line,” Aggarwal said. “Concur evangelized something that people perceived as a small space and turned it into an $8 billion to $10 billion company by solving a pain point but by making it strategically important as you tie into travel, as you tie into expenses and as you tie into management and being more strategic. We view that as an opportunity for us to educate the market and get more people understanding how their meetings and events can be used strategically to enhance their business....But that starts with getting data and to automate it so people can focus on the higher objectives.”
The Digital Footprint
The key to success in the near future is tapping into what Aggarwal dubs an event’s “digital footprint,” much like Google and Amazon track user preferences to suggest products to customers and present content that reflect their preferences.
“When you can measure that, then guess what, our meeting planners will see all the things they’ve accomplished and they can invest more in a bigger conference and do things to make sure they get more of their customers and prospects there. It grows the conference, and, of course, it grows the industry—the entire ecosystem benefits. Technology helps you do that. We’re going to be the evangelist to the industry, and we should lead that. You need a Concur-type company to push the industry toward that. It’s better for all of us to elevate how we do business.”
According to Aggarwal, the progression of cloud-based meetings and events solutions started with online event registration, progressed into e-mail marketing, and then evolved into mobile platforms. The adoption rate by meeting planners has been on the slow side, but the growth curve is accelerating at a fast clip.
“I think that veteran planners are saying it’s great to try something new,” Aggarwal said. “As they’ve watched that evolution, they can look back and say, ‘Online registration—maybe I was resistant, maybe I wasn’t, but you know what, I better not resist the next one.’
“The next one is that digital footprint, where people are going to see where everyone goes,” Aggarwal continued. “When they spend two or three days with me, how do I not know where they’re going. It just makes sense. These are the things we see evolving, and we’re excited to combine our forces with Lanyon to be the thought leader. The industry partly hasn’t moved as fast as it should with the technology community to invest in technology. We’re going to take that lead, hopefully.”
