- About a month ago - seemingly an eternity, amid the coronavirus crisis - Okta decided to move its annual Oktane customer conference online, for a virtual event that was thrown last week.
- We asked CEO Todd McKinnon if a virtual conference was worth it, given that one of the main points of a conference like Oktane is to spend quality time with customers who might otherwise be scattered across the globe.
- His answer was surprising: he said the virtual conference actually worked better as a marketing tool than a live one, generating 4,000 leads - more than a typical physical event of its type.
- The downside was that he didn't get that precious face time with his biggest prospects and customers -which, he warned investors, could mean the company won't close as many bigger deals this quarter.
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Normally, Okta throws its annual multi-day Oktane conference in Las Vegas, with thousands of the identity management company's customers descending on Las Vegas for business meetings and parties. This year, however, Oktane was streamed online over two days, with a keynote address delivered from CEO Todd McKinnon's home.
It was certainly cheaper to put on a virtual event than doing its annual Las Vegas extravaganza, but now that this unusual Oktane is over, we asked McKinnon if it was worth it at all. Would it have been better to have postponed the event until after the coronavirus pandemic had passed? Or should it have just skipped Oktane this year altogether?
Ultimately, McKinnon says he was shocked at how much more valuable the virtual conference turned out to be than the live one, at least in terms of marketing.
"We had 15,000 people watch it [the keynote]. We would have 6,000 people in person," he said,"We got 4,000 fresh leads, which is way better than usual."
As a bonus, each virtual Oktane conference session created videos which will be easy for the company to use for other needs, he said. Okta makes identity and security products for enterprises that use many cloud computing services, and always launches new products at its conference each year.
The downside, however, was that the virtual conference didn't giving him the quality face time with big customers and prospects for "moving deals forward. That personal interaction that gives [customers] the conference and trust for a big purchase. You can only do that in person," McKinnon said.
He credits a long one-on-one meeting with the head of procurement at Wells Fargo at last year's conference for helping his company close one of the it's signature big deals.
So, despite the fact that the event created a bucket of new leads for his salespeople, Okta used a virtual investor day event at the conference to warn Wall Street that it could experience some "headwinds" on closing big deals as enterprise IT budgets suffer from the grim economy.
Slower deals should be offset by lower costs for the quarter, the company said, thanks in large part to spending less on sales and marketing. That includes the money saved on the in-person conference.
All told, the restrictions imposed by the coronavirus will forever change how his business is conducted in the future. McKinnon loves his annual customers conference and won't ditch it forever. The 2021 conference is already scheduled for Las Vegas. But he says that he also plans to invest in and do more virtual conferences.
And, as valuable as 1:1 meetings are for the biggest deals, less-costly video meetings are turning out to be a decent substitute, too. "Our sales team in general is doing pretty well. We can deliver our message over video conference," he said.