The Transaction

TT - Direct Deposit 001 - RevFest2025 Recap
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[00:00:00]

Matt Amundson: All right, here we go. This is the first ever direct deposit. Fast response.

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Matt Amundson: Here we go. Five questions for Craig. Craig, where were you this week?

Craig Rosenberg: Rev Fest 2025 AKA next year, Love Fest 2026.

Matt Amundson: Are we sure we wanna call it Love Fest.

Craig Rosenberg: no. I know. I, I.

Matt Amundson: Question number two, what made the event so unique?

Craig Rosenberg: The everything, but the key was one, they had it in a non-traditional space house of Yes. In Bushwick, Brooklyn two, they made the place into literally a comedy club slash seventies nightclub, everything. And three, they had comedians, so. The mc was a comedian. They started with Adam Conover, right?

They had him lead. They had a comedian at the end. It just changed everything. And by the way, the comedian was cursing, talking about fellatio, talking about [00:01:00] politic. Just broke the mood. Like just said this is nontraditional and we're just gonna have fun today. Tattoos all booked all day. Real tattoos. Uh, a sound bath in the morning. Uh, mimes on stilts. tarot cards. Um, amazing. So just the mood. The mood was everything. It changed everything there.

Matt Amundson: All right. Question three, gimme two to three key takeaways from the show.

Craig Rosenberg: All right. Well, takeaway one is the show itself, right? Everyone says they want to offer unique human experiences, then they don't do it. Right. It's just a traditional thing. It's a dinner. Oh, this dinner is gonna be so different than the rest. And it's not, um, this was right.

So that's one. This will be something nobody will ever forget and , they will come back. There's no doubt. I will go back just to like, I mean, do whatever I'd scrub the toilets or be the tarot reader. Uh, the second one, I'll just use some of my data, right, which is. We looked at, you know, some of the new sort of go [00:02:00] Go-To-Market benchmarks.

We have compared AI vendors to other vendors. And I think there's two interesting things, kind of a double-edged sword. Okay. And I presented this at the event. Other vendors, so traditional non-AI vendors, see longer sales cycles. So the AI vendors see shorter sales cycle. That's 6.5 months to the other vendors whose average is 9.2.

That's a big gap. That's a quarter. Okay. So it's faster. But on the other hand, uh, the competition right is one of the reasons, but it's like a big one in the amount of vendors in this space. and the amount of looky-loos, just trying to figure things out leads to lower win rates. So AI vendors were averaging 27% win rates, whereas the other vendors were at 34.

So while you have shorter sales cycles, you have lower win rates. That is a really sort of interesting factoid we presented, from the Scale Venture Partners data at the event.

Matt Amundson: Number four, what can everybody [00:03:00] learn from RevFest in terms of how they put on their own events, whether they're full blown conferences or just field events?

Craig Rosenberg: Yeah. I would say if you know your persona and you figure out an experience that they cannot get anywhere else, that experience has to combine a. you know, the mood, like I just sort of brought up in number two and value both things, hit it so, yeah, maybe you wouldn't invite CFOs to have it at the House of Yes

in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Right? But you would want to think of something really unique for them to do. I don't know. You, you, use your imagination. But that's the thing is you have to use your imagination. And this was all imagination. Okay, so all imagination, it was incredible. But there is that second part, which is like, the content was incredible.

So she had Doug Landis come in and help produce all the content. So that made it really great. Like everyone's sort of presentations had to be on point and, and tell stories and, that made it amazing as well. And [00:04:00] then she had operators, you know, I was the only other sort of third party person besides her and the comedians.

Everyone else was a real operator talking about what they did. So the value of the content plus the House of Yes experience that's like that, that's a double whammy. So if you know your persona, what is it that they would want to do? Like I, I'm not sure I'd invite CROs to that. Right. , and if you can do that and give 'em something they can't get anywhere else, then that's really the key to this sort of a new age of event marketing. So I think that's the, that's the big one.

Matt Amundson: And question number five, tell us about your wallpaper. What's going on behind you?

Craig Rosenberg: Okay, so that's, well, we're talking about ai, right? My brother likes to use AI to create pictures of me typically eating food in a wild situation. I think in this one I'm being chased while I'm eating a hot dog or a sloppy Joe. Um, so there's [00:05:00] lots of 'em. If someone wants to email or, or DM me or text or in the comments, I will happily

put one into the, uh, if someone requests it on LinkedIn, I will put it on LinkedIn. One of his fabulous pictures of me. Um, that's what you see in the background,

Matt Amundson: Nice big shout out to Paul Rosenberg.

Craig Rosenberg: is that the Direct Deposit?

Matt Amundson: That is five questions in five minutes, and that is the Direct Deposit.

Craig Rosenberg: Awesome.