How Memo’s Exclusive Dinners Drive Opportunities

Prospecting requires a unique approach for each type of buyer, and knowing those buyers’ habits — what kind of communication they respond to and the content they engage with — makes all the difference.

For Memo, a platform that reports how many people read earned media coverage, many of those buyers are senior communications leaders at Fortune 500 brands with limited time to spare. Engaging senior leaders often requires more than email or cold call; Memo had to devise a thoughtful and effective way to bring their ICPs into the conversation.

The solution? Highly curated dinners at exclusive restaurants, with only senior executives and their peers in attendance.

At a typical SaaS-hosted event, senior leaders garner lots of attention from vendors and agencies. In Memo’s experience, if an executive speaks at an event, they typically leave shortly after the presentation to avoid sales pitches.

By keeping the guest list limited to the C-Suite, Memo’s dinners are primarily for networking and swapping stories from the field, rather than fielding pitches.

Sending out the invite

Memo recognizes that senior comms directors have a full work week, not to mention lives outside of work. Memo’s dinner events need to provide real value to get the right attendance.

That’s why they hold their events at Michelin-starred restaurants — the kind where tables are usually booked out months in advance — and secure one of their high-profile customers to co-host the dinners, like a senior executive at Google.

Non-sales employees from Memo will send an email invite with all the details, and follow up with a cold call. During outreach, they emphasize that the event is not a sales presentation about Memo, but an opportunity for leaders to connect with their peers.

As a result of their outreach, Memo hosts 10-15 prospective buyers at each dinner event. Roughly 80% of those in attendance take a sales meeting with Memo after the event, with over 50% becoming sales opportunities. From those opportunities, 25%-40% become quality leads or closed deals.

Prospecting with Storytelling and Data

For Memo, the juice is worth the squeeze: if an ordinary event costs $5K and their exclusive dinners cost double, it’s worth the expense to generate high-quality, enterprise leads. The right deal can cover their entire marketing budget for the year.

But not every prospecting effort needs to cost $10K.

Memo uses various approaches to engage senior buyers. As a platform that demonstrates and measures the impact of earned media, they use their own data to tell stories about their brand.

Memo brought in a data-focused VP of Communications, Katrina Dene, to lead content. Katrina uses Memo’s data to tell stories that highlight how brands use Memo’s insights successfully, and get those stories in the press. The company’s annual Crisis Index, for example, just published with additional coverage in Axios.

Just like their dinners, this tactic to engage buyers came through research and a deep understanding of Memo’s ICP. They suspect that while senior comms directors rarely have time to look at emails from unfamiliar senders or engage with paid ads, they do read the news as part of their day-to-day. When Memo is mentioned in the press, they’re able to reach their target audience.

What’s in Memo’s tech stack?

For prospecting and outreach, the team at Memo uses Wiza, an AI-powered sales prospecting tool that provides real-time verified contact data on B2B prospects.

On the communications side, they use a variety of tools to create infographics that help enhance storytelling about their data.

Like many sales teams, Memo reviews Gong calls to learn from customer feedback, HubSpot to send out marketing emails, and tools like Google Sheets to track their outreach for the company’s dinners.