As Live Mtgs. Return, Bizzabo Charts Path

Bizzabo's Eran Ben-Shushan discusses:

The company's new wearable attendee techChanging corporate client buying patternsThe effect of corporate reorganization

Meetings and event platform Bizzabo is adding functionality from its acquired companies, this month launching new wearable technology for attendees. The SmartBadge technology, based on an offering from Klik—which Bizzabo acquired last year—is the latest move for Bizzabo at a complex time, as the return of in-person meetings has scrambled the outlook for hybrid and virtual events. 

BTN lodging and meetings editor Angelique Platas spoke with Bizzabo co-founder and CEO Eran Ben-Shushan to discuss the company's plans and the industry's outlook through the end of the year and beyond. Edited excerpts follow.

BTN: Bizzabo recently announced significant year-over-year growth for the first nine months of 2022 in terms of planning activities on your platform. What’s contributing to that growth?

Eran Ben-Shushan: The world [is] returning to in-person and fewer companies [are] positioned to play across the gamut between in-person, virtual and hybrid. We're equipped to deal with all those cases and have a strong customer base do [that is] doing more events. We see virtual [as] relatively constant and then in-person is supplementing, it's not replacing. So the pie just got bigger, and we're one of the very few solutions that can actually play really nice in all of those use cases.

BTN: How will activity as evolve as we get into 2023?

Ben-Shushan: First, I think, humbly, all of us in the last two-and-a-half or three years probably realized we can't predict anything. But based on all the data we have; it does seem like in-person is going to increase in volume. There's going to be a virtual component to the vast majority of in-person event. My personal assumption is that it's going to become more and more prominent. 

Right now it seems far-fetched to some, and it seems complicated, but technology is catching up. It's becoming easier over time to run hybrid events or virtual when in-person exists, and to coexist those two formats—over time it's going to become simpler and more cost-effective. In-person is going to go back, and then they're going to tap into the virtual formats, which are also good for recession times or economic slowdown.

We might see fewer mega-big events in terms of participation and cost of production, [but] we will see big in-person events. We may see a little bit more of the smaller in-person events—[like] field marketing events, executive dinners or roundtables. Overall, I think the pie is going to keep growing now with the return of in-person.

BTN: Do you see customer buying patterns changing as the in-person situation evolves?

Ben-Shushan: With the increase of in-person events, [our customers] run more events, but virtual is not getting slower. What we do see is that on the buying side for virtual solutions, there is a slowdown and those who provide only virtual solutions are experiencing a massive slowdown. New [customers are] buying new software, and the ones that bought software during Covid are retracting back and are trying to consolidate to platforms that can do everything. During Covid, if you did only virtual as [the] platform of choice, it wasn't a concern. Now, customers are ditching those virtual-only platforms and are looking for platforms that can do all of it together, which makes sense.

BTN: How is Bizzabo investing to continue to meet the all-in-one needs?

Ben-Shushan: We are seeing new demands and needs on the analytics side. I think it became a much more complicated world where events are focused mostly on generating sales leads. In those cases, data is paramount. In the virtual world you have a lot of data because everything is happening digitally, and you can surface this kind of data, where in-person events sometimes it's more of a black box—you don't really know what's going on the floor.

We acquired several companies in 2021, all focused on technology and delivering product market fit faster. We've been very strategic about that. One of the companies we acquired called Klik is a company from Montreal that basically has all these on-site services for in-person events, [including] wearable devices with passive Bluetooth tracking. So you get seamless check-in, peer-to-peer or exhibitor-to-attendee contact exchange, and you don’t need to do anything. It can recognize and surface data during the event about where people are around the event and about the event flow. 

Mobile also has become very important for events, and we're investing a lot into that along with better registration capabilities combined with promoting events. In-person events as a whole have more advanced and complicated registration workflows—[especially] paid events with more sponsors and exhibitors. So we're investing into registration capabilities, mobile on-site services, wearable tracking devices and data, all areas that we see a lot of demand.

BTN: Bizzabo reorganized some executives in the past six months. How has that changed the client experience?

Ben-Shushan: We've always been focused on the customer… and investing in that through real-time availability, [so we are there] for customers in those moments of truth when they needed us. That was the big part of how we designed the organization and where we invest most of our capital and resources. We have an SVP of customer experience who's overseeing the entire customer organization in a centralized manner. That's been part of the structural changes and senior leadership we've brought in as well.

BTN: What are the biggest challenges for your business, and how are you addressing them?

Ben-Shushan: Constant change [and enabling] customer adaptability. We're in a crazy industry that got hit by Covid overnight. Everybody needed to learn everything and teach themselves and then [had] some level of exhaustion throughout the second half of 2021, especially with the variants. People thought in-person was coming back after everybody got vaccinated, and then delta and omicron kind of exhausted everyone. Then, 2022 started on a high note. And now, with some economic slowdown we're seeing, people need to revise and devise strategies again. So I think constant change on the customer side is something that is also rolling back to us in terms of challenge.

We need to stay very nimble, extremely agile and consultative and supportive to our customers. And they're also learning. So we need to be resourceful to them. So I think that for us it's just like being ahead of it and being faster than the customer… so we support them as much as they need.