Sign in or Join the community to continue
Event Replay: Context First: How a One-Person Community Team Influenced $3M in Pipeline
Posted Jul 09, 2026 | Views 36
Share
Speakers
Ed Giansante
Head of Community @ Persona
Ed Giansante is Head of Community at Persona, where he built a community-led pipeline engine that generated $3.4M in influenced revenue on a $56K budget over two years. He previously led global community programs at Dropbox, Zynga, and Wix, scaling initiatives that drove engagement and growth across millions of users. In 2020, CMX named him Online Community Professional of the Year for his impact on the field. Ed is also the founder of Edublin, the largest community of Brazilian expats in Europe. Based in San Francisco, he continues to build community strategy while mentoring and investing in early-stage startups.
+ Read More
Joshua Zerkel
Head of Marketing & Community @ Gradual
Josh Zerkel is Head of Marketing & Community-Led Growth at Gradual. A recognized leader in community strategy, he has built and scaled programs at Asana, Evernote, HeyGen, and CBS News that have driven millions in pipeline, global engagement, and cross-functional impact. He’s the author of The Community Code, and a trusted advisor to startups and enterprise teams building community-powered growth engines.
+ Read More
SUMMARY
In this session, Ed Giansante from Persona breaks down the four pillars behind driving pipeline as a one-person team: AI-powered operations, VIP experience design, ruthless tracking and measurement, and close partnership with sales. He shares the systems, workflows, and lessons that helped turn community engagement into measurable business impact.
+ Read More
CONTENT & TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00:05 - 00:00:22:14 Joshua Zerkel Hello. Welcome to context first with gradual and today's topic, how a one person community team influenced $3 million in pipeline. I'm Josh Zirkle, head of Marketing and Community here at gradual. In case you are new to gradual, it's the all in one engagement and community platform to turn connection into lasting business impact and grow engagement beyond your product.
00:00:22:15 - 00:00:49:22 Joshua Zerkel Before I introduce our guest expert, a quick note please drop your questions in the chat and we'll get to as many as we can today. After our sessions ends, you'll still be able to ask questions and share your thoughts in the forum. AMA and now I'd like to introduce you to our speaker, edge and Santee is Head of Community at persona, where he built a community led pipeline engine that generated $3.4 million in influenced revenue on a $56,000 budget over two years.
00:00:49:23 - 00:01:11:25 Joshua Zerkel Amazing and can't wait to hear more about that. He previously led global community programs at Dropbox, Zynga, and Wix, scaling initiatives that drove engagement and growth across millions of users. In 2020, CMC's named him Online Community Professional of the year for his impact on the field. Ed is also the founder of Dublin, the largest community of Brazilian expats in Europe.
00:01:11:27 - 00:01:20:04 Joshua Zerkel Based in San Francisco, he continues to build community strategy while mentoring and investing in early stage startups. Welcome, editor.
00:01:20:06 - 00:01:30:00 Ed Giansante You're welcome. Thank you so much for having me. I have to steal this bio that you just said out loud, beautifully, to use it across all the places that are going out.
00:01:30:03 - 00:01:48:14 Joshua Zerkel It's all true. And I mean, honestly, for those of you joining us like it is one of the community builders that I respect the most. He just does amazing work. And he's also an amazing person, just like to be around. And so I am super excited to have you share your take on how you can truly influence the business of your community.
00:01:48:14 - 00:02:07:06 Joshua Zerkel Because as you know, this is something perpetually talked about in Go to market in community circles, which is how do we show our impact of the business. We all know that it's there. But you've developed a really impressive and proven strategy for how to take a motion within the world of community and create real, tangible business results from it.
00:02:07:08 - 00:02:09:21 Joshua Zerkel So I'll let you take it from here.
00:02:09:23 - 00:02:18:14 Ed Giansante I appreciate it. Thank you. Yeah. Let me share my screen and then you tell me if it's looking good and then we can get started.
00:02:18:16 - 00:02:20:03 Joshua Zerkel Looks great. Take it away.
00:02:20:06 - 00:02:43:29 Ed Giansante All right. So great to have you all here. I'm always excited to talk about community stuff. And I guess especially when we mix community and business, a lot of times we see people talking about community from the more emotional perspective, which is great. There's a there's a space for that. But when we work in a business, it's important that we tied all that we're working on around like outputs, outcomes that we have that makes sense for the business.
00:02:44:00 - 00:03:04:04 Ed Giansante And there's one thing that I've learned in life, and I guess there's one language that no matter where you go, it's not English and it's not Japanese. It's not, you know, anything that matter most in talking about money. Everyone understands if you're making money or if you're losing money. That's the language that the world speaks. So I guess that's the starting point.
00:03:04:04 - 00:03:27:15 Ed Giansante So when I mentioned it is I mean, that's why the title is talking about the pipeline and money spent is like, how much did you spend and how much did you generate? That's the baseline of business. So maybe maybe go back a little bit before I just go into this in very much detail and just share a few things, because I moved to the US in 2023, and that was the very first thing I did, is try and connect with people.
00:03:27:18 - 00:03:49:10 Ed Giansante These are community folks. You may have recognized some of the faces here. I was like, I know no one in this city. I don't even know where to start. I'm just going to maybe invite people to come and hang. And they showed up, which was awesome. And then months later, we did like something a little bit more, let's say bold because that's like a mention in Hillsboro.
00:03:49:11 - 00:04:13:07 Ed Giansante That's called the AGI House. It's like a $63 million mention. And we were able to host a couple of community leaders there. Crazy. And then we moved down into like 100 plus people that we're hosting in an office to then go into finally CMC's. Yay! Great. And then moving forward from there, you will see a lot more of what you see here in this picture.
00:04:13:10 - 00:04:39:11 Ed Giansante What's the difference there? When I was starting, if you look back, I just like wanted to meet people. I wanted to connect. I was like, I know no one. Let's throw something out there. And then I start to move into like bigger groups, which was great because, you know, volume and you're like, hey, a lot of people seeing your name, seeing your face, and then you're hearing a lot of the conversations, exchanging a lot of QR codes on LinkedIn, people trying to connect with you.
00:04:39:13 - 00:04:59:18 Ed Giansante I was like, maybe there's something there, but it was really hard to find the thing. And then when you look forward and you see this private dining room, you know, on a rooftop, this is like a beautiful place. It's a distillery. Whiskey distillery. We did like a whiskey tour and then whiskey tasting and then private chefs serving as the dinner.
00:04:59:18 - 00:05:19:19 Ed Giansante And this is all a bunch of, like, leaders from the crypto stablecoin space. Amazing, amazing. Highly created group. And I guess that's the main difference. When you look back to when I was starting this, it was pretty scrappy. It was, you know, not really clear on the format. It was more like, let me just get the, you know, get this going.
00:05:19:20 - 00:05:48:01 Ed Giansante Just try and do something here, see what happens. And then out of that learning that I had, I moved into like now I know a little bit more. Now I can, I guess, be bolder and maybe try different bets here, try and put a little bit of a format. And before I kind of keep going on this and show the actual results of this, I guess a lot of you may have this question, and I guess you started with this because that's where we when I presented this before, I saw people asking the question.
00:05:48:02 - 00:06:03:12 Ed Giansante You're like, yeah, but I don't know how to start. I don't, you know, I don't have a group of people to invite. And I literally had zero people to invite me because I was new to the country. I didn't even know if the place I was going to, the bar I booked was a decent bar, was a dodgy bar.
00:06:03:18 - 00:06:19:09 Ed Giansante I just went for it. And maybe similar to how you would go to, I don't know, start working out for the first time in your life, or start running or start doing anything. Maybe you do like a little bit there. You try out, you get hurt. Maybe you forget that you have to warm up first and it's okay, right?
00:06:19:11 - 00:06:47:26 Ed Giansante And then I moved into something that's a much more structured. And the interesting part is this that's what everyone wants to see. At least the executives want to see. It's how much money. Are you helping us? You know, influence. And that's a pipeline influence. As you can see there, there were 86 events that's across late 2024 and the entire 2025 2000 almost, I say close to 3000 attendees.
00:06:47:26 - 00:07:08:19 Ed Giansante There were some people that were, you know, repeated, but these are unique. And then the total invested was 56,000. So imagine that you have a vending machine that if you put in that vending machine $1, that will spit you $60, and then you give another $1, it gives you another $60. How much money would you put in that vending machine.
00:07:08:26 - 00:07:33:26 Ed Giansante Right. So question that people usually ask is like, how did you do that? How did you influence all these millions of dollars? The question I would say you should be asking is not that. And the question you should be asking is, how did you do that 86 times with one person? Because if you divide that by a couple of weeks, it's sometimes we had like 2 or 3 events per week.
00:07:33:28 - 00:07:56:28 Ed Giansante Obviously we have weeks that have nothing going on like holiday season, Thanksgiving for for July week, you know, all of those big breaks. So it's a lot of events to run with one person. And that's the part I wanted to share with you. Because the outcome, the numbers, the dollars are just a result of doing this well. So I divided into four pillars.
00:07:57:00 - 00:08:18:01 Ed Giansante I know people say I should be using the rule of three, but I'm using the rule of four. I guess so four pillars that I feel could work and help you get this done. One is the I operations, VIP experience tracking and then the sales partnership, because that's where you have to bring people into actual pipeline. First part what's an AI powered operation.
00:08:18:01 - 00:08:39:13 Ed Giansante So I guess the question you have to be in every time you're doing something is, is there an AI that can do what I'm doing right now? And if the answer is yes, go and use it. And if the answer is no, go and build it. Because we're in this era where of vibe coding, where everyone can build something using AI, it doesn't need to be perfect.
00:08:39:13 - 00:08:57:29 Ed Giansante And I guess it would never be perfect because no matter the software you go into and if you are a community manager for over five years, you have seen a lot of forum platforms that were meant to be insane, spent a lot of millions of dollars in building them and they're not perfect either. So why would you try and make something perfect yourself alone?
00:08:58:01 - 00:09:19:01 Ed Giansante You know you won't get there, but what I really mean by that is you will find that the more you do these things, there are repetitions. There are things that can be created as systems and processes and can start developing AI for that. So that helps you get scale, right. So that's part one for operations, the part to use the VIP experience and think about business.
00:09:19:03 - 00:09:38:16 Ed Giansante I'll bring two very random examples. But I guess this is going to be part of the ending here. If you have questions when you go to Disneyland, what matters the most? Is it the people there, or is it the experience you're having there? And I guess it's the experience, right? If you go to a michelin star you want to be experienced with like that uniqueness.
00:09:38:17 - 00:10:07:00 Ed Giansante You know what makes a michelin star? According to the dictionary? What makes a michelin star, Michelin star? And it's also like how they put the criteria criteria on this consistency over the top quality created by some expert. So what does that mean is you have an expert and I guess that's you, the community expert, that can deliver top notch through like, you know, the ingredients which in the greens in a in a dinner would be the guests, the food, the seats, the quality.
00:10:07:03 - 00:10:28:23 Ed Giansante But that's part one. And you and then the part three is the consistency. Because if you do that consistently, people know what to expect. Why is this Starbucks so popular or McDonald's so popular abroad, especially for Americans? Because they know what to expect. There is not necessarily like the most top quality, but they know, okay, this is the coffee I'm going to get if I go to this place, no matter where in the world.
00:10:28:24 - 00:10:49:00 Ed Giansante Consistency is really, really important. It brings security to people. So that's part one and why I'm bringing the Disney World example, because at Disney, the experience matters more than the guests. When you're hosting the dinner, when you're hosting something top notch, something that's going to make people want to come back. It's a mix of both. It's the experience and it's also the quality of the attendees.
00:10:49:01 - 00:11:07:18 Ed Giansante They matter even more than the delivery of the actual experience. So that's the other part. Then the part three or pillar number three is the rough list tracking. So that's essentially like don't think that, you know, you have to just do something fun. And people are going to maybe post something about it on social media and that's it.
00:11:07:21 - 00:11:34:08 Ed Giansante You really need to think about the language that your executives are speaking. And as I mentioned, English is not the one. It's actually all about money. So no pipeline error, LTV, cock bounce shit. You want to. You want to talk to the business numbers. Numbers that they will know and understand. You can't try and invent engagement ratio. I don't know whatever other words that people used to use in community.
00:11:34:09 - 00:11:59:21 Ed Giansante I don't know if they still do, but forget that that's not the numbers or the actual things that they will understand. And then third or fourth actually not listing Portland. Actually, this is probably the part is going to make this all make sense for you is the sales partnership. So you want to make sure that as you're building this and you're getting this excitement building these experiences, how do you track that back with sales?
00:11:59:21 - 00:12:20:07 Ed Giansante So imagine that if you're doing a dinner for highly qualified leads or leads that are yet to be, you know, to become pipeline or sales leads. So they're probably like marketing qualified leads. You want to make them more SQL. How do you get there? So if you're doing these events, creating these experience, you have to think about your hand over process.
00:12:20:07 - 00:12:38:02 Ed Giansante So they're wasting how you can do that. And that's how you work with your sales team so that it doesn't feel like you're just essentially trying to move from someone who had a great experience to the next day. They're getting like a link to book a time to a salesperson and try and get into a demo. That's not a smooth transition.
00:12:38:02 - 00:12:55:10 Ed Giansante You have to think about that as well. That's when you work with your team. So these are the four pillars I try to create a fly with that doesn't look like a fly. We would just broke the whole thing. But imagine that the whole thing of a flight was the more you do this, the more you build this energy and credibility.
00:12:55:14 - 00:13:24:03 Ed Giansante The more you have content to distribute, the more you have knowledge to distribute. That becomes pipeline, and that will influence potential new events. New activities are going to run because you have people who are going to advocate for you. And I say advocates don't think about brand ambassadors. Think more about people who know you do a decent job consistently with high quality, the Michelin star experience, and therefore they will want to come to your events that we want to invite someone there, they will want to refer someone to you.
00:13:24:05 - 00:13:45:00 Ed Giansante That's the compound effect. So that's the flywheel. So I guess just to come back to you to an ending, because I want to make this like short and sweet, but also something that you can apply and it doesn't become like just something to generic abroad really. First thing is starting before you're ready. I was definitely not ready when I moved here.
00:13:45:00 - 00:14:07:23 Ed Giansante I was like, I have no idea what good looks like, but I guess I'll try. And this is not the first time I've done this. I moved to Europe, to Dublin in 2008. So that's like what, 16 or 17 years ago? And I knew no one there. I knew absolutely nothing. And I started to like, okay, how do I talk to people about what's going on?
00:14:07:23 - 00:14:25:17 Ed Giansante And I found something in common, which is fellow immigrants who are moving abroad and were like struggling to figure things out. And I found my niche there, start to invite them to connect, to meet. And I built a community that eventually became over a million members community in Europe. And it became a thing. It's a business. It's operating now.
00:14:25:17 - 00:14:41:20 Ed Giansante It's still operating. I'm no longer in the day to day, but there's a whole team operating that. So you start before you're ready. Same thing for here. I was not ready. I just came in and start to build and start to do things. So that's really, really important. Second, if you don't have an actual physical team people team.
00:14:41:21 - 00:14:57:09 Ed Giansante You think about AI. And I guess even if you have people, you should think about how to use AI more and more. It may sound dated if we listen to this again in the year, because I think that's going to be the norm. It's the same thing as asking you like, hey, should is the internet so you can get more access than just going offline.
00:14:57:12 - 00:15:18:17 Ed Giansante I'm pretty sure it's going to be the same thing. AI is just like now. It's becoming commodity in the sense of everyone has access to it. A lot of like regular people who are not technical, they have more superpowers if they know how to use it well, and soon enough, it's going to be so embedded into everything that you do that if you haven't implemented at the beginning, you're going to be just behind again.
00:15:18:18 - 00:15:40:14 Ed Giansante So think of AI is like your support, your extension to your knowledge, then trying to just ask for more headcount and whatnot. The third thing, track everything that you're doing. Really. The very first thing I did when I had no data and I used Luma a lot, was just export that data and just track people like, hey, let me see this person, LinkedIn.
00:15:40:14 - 00:16:01:14 Ed Giansante Let's see what's going on here. Let me see if this person posted something. Let me see if this person is going to follow up with something here. Let me send an email to them. Let me try and text them and ask how they're doing. And I had to like figure out the ways of doing this pretty manually initially before I could figure, okay, that's now a system that I can move to AI and just auto make this a little bit more.
00:16:01:16 - 00:16:17:03 Ed Giansante And then the fourth point again, the partnership with sales is super important because you're not meant to be doing sales. It's not your job. And I guess if you start doing this, you're going to ruin your first experience of like the VIP delivery. It's going to become just weird if you come to the room and then you try to sell.
00:16:17:04 - 00:16:35:28 Ed Giansante So you want to make sure that what you're doing is just facilitating, you're being the enabler, and then let sales do their thing. That's what they're paid for. That's why they have the commissions. Let them figure it out okay. Awesome. And I guess all of this that I'm telling you is not new. I have like a big source of truth for me.
00:16:36:01 - 00:16:55:26 Ed Giansante And this is like, I like I mean, I like obviously the entire Bible's is magical, but this is one of the pieces that just tells you, like, how much have you learned from, you know, self-help books that is already embedded in the Bible? So a generous person will prosper. Whoever refreshes others will be refreshed. That's the principles that I operate.
00:16:55:26 - 00:17:12:13 Ed Giansante So if I'm, you know, helping others, if I make enabling others, if I'm refreshing others, I'm going to be refreshed. And with that, I want to thank you. Thank you for your time. And then I'm going to be, you know, if there are questions, feel free to throw them. If you don't have questions just yet, you can ask me later.
00:17:12:13 - 00:17:16:28 Ed Giansante You can ask Josh and pretty sure he's going to be able to collect them all. Thank you.
00:17:17:01 - 00:17:41:18 Joshua Zerkel Thanks, Ed. Really appreciate that. And yes, if anyone attending live has a question or a thought or run an event like these themselves, or is curious how to do it, feel free to drop that in the chat. And like I too have run a lot of these types of events. And there's a big difference between these more curated dinner style events versus meetups or larger scale events that I find them both awesome and challenging in different ways.
00:17:41:18 - 00:18:02:04 Joshua Zerkel And for you when you run one of these more curated events? What do you think the difference is between one that generates real relationships and business results, versus one that's just like, hey, I went to a nice dinner because I certainly, as a leader myself, have been invited to these dinners and have gone to some where it's like, oh, this was a good use of my time and others where I got a meal.
00:18:02:06 - 00:18:10:11 Joshua Zerkel So what do you think makes this room experience work, and what are some of the things that you do in order to make sure that these are successful?
00:18:10:14 - 00:18:29:10 Ed Giansante Yeah, that's a great question. And you're absolutely right. I guess we've been invited to a couple of this where we go in like, hey, at least I got a good dinner. I'm not sure if I got much more value out of it. And for a lot of companies that I'm seeing doing this as well, from the community person's perspective, it's the same challenge.
00:18:29:11 - 00:18:50:22 Ed Giansante They're like throwing this and they don't know how to extract value out of it. So there are two things that I imagine it's one is hard to replicate, but I guess once they figure it out, it's easy to do. And the second is more like, let's say systematic. The systematic part is really when they say there's no agenda, there should be an agenda, even if the agenda is just known to you and not to them.
00:18:50:23 - 00:19:09:00 Ed Giansante So you should have an agenda when you walk in. You knew, okay, what do I need to get out of this data? What are the questions that will help me form an understanding whether this person is ready to buy or this person is considering my product, or this person is the decision maker, and then the part two, which is, I think, something that's going to be harder for someone who's just new to the business.
00:19:09:00 - 00:19:26:12 Ed Giansante And I guess it's probably a more common thing for you, for example, is you can read the room because you've been there. So, you know, okay, this person, I know their BS and I know this one person who's like, legit, how do you know that? It's hard to explain. It's just experience by doing that, by having that that gut feeling.
00:19:26:17 - 00:19:36:19 Ed Giansante Okay, I know these are the people I need to follow up with because they're legit, even though they didn't speak that much. And it's a mix of repetition with the experience that I guess makes this unique.
00:19:36:22 - 00:19:57:28 Joshua Zerkel Yeah, I think having all of that in mind is critical when you go into one of these. Also, one of the things that you laid out while you were talking was these ladder up to like tangible business goals. And does that impact how you think about structuring and setting up these events differently than just, say, like a community meetup, for instance?
00:19:58:00 - 00:20:14:26 Ed Giansante Absolutely. Yeah. If you're to mixers were good initially because I knew no one, I needed to I needed to build my brand a little bit. And when I say brand is not just the persona brand really adds brand. So they're like, if I get an invite from this dude, I know he's going to do something here. That's interesting.
00:20:14:29 - 00:20:34:18 Ed Giansante So you need the mixers. They have it their own value in its own ways. But for the credit dinners, yes, they they the idea there is that the more you're trying to understand, if you're getting the right person, you're getting that consistency, building that like expertise, they will come back. They will be the ones that are going to refer you to to further business.
00:20:34:18 - 00:20:56:00 Ed Giansante So there's a value in both. No, I'm no longer doing a lot of the mixers anymore. We do support other communities that are running this mixers by offering them in their spaces or helping create some groups, but it's just like it's harder, you know, and it's it's more consuming for me, even energy wise, than it is to do like a creative dinner nowadays.
00:20:56:02 - 00:21:18:24 Joshua Zerkel Absolutely. So we have a raised hand in the audience from Token Bow. Do you want to promoting you to a panelist? So you should be able to come off mute and ask your question. Let's go.
00:21:18:26 - 00:21:20:17 Joshua Zerkel Feel free.
00:21:20:19 - 00:21:22:26 Ed Giansante I might be mute.
00:21:22:28 - 00:21:35:15 Joshua Zerkel Like you're muted to vote. So if you'd like to, you can just drop your question in the chat and I can read it aloud to editor. So feel free when you're ready.
00:21:35:18 - 00:21:59:23 Joshua Zerkel In the interim, while we're waiting, how does one even get started doing these types of more curated dinner events? I think this is something that not a lot of community people have experience with. Sometimes these are hosted by like a Demand Gen team, not necessarily a community team. So if you are in a community team or you're not familiar with where to begin with these sorts of more high level experiences, where should you get started?
00:21:59:23 - 00:22:02:07 Joshua Zerkel Where would you begin?
00:22:02:09 - 00:22:06:21 Ed Giansante Good question is oh, there you go. Hey, hey.
00:22:06:24 - 00:22:09:06 Q&A So sorry about that. I had to leave and come back.
00:22:09:13 - 00:22:11:01 Joshua Zerkel No problem. Go ahead.
00:22:11:03 - 00:22:31:18 Q&A Sorry. I guess I was also thinking about, like, those bigger events. Really kind of build your brand, don't you think it. Because I think you wouldn't get to know the people you know today if you didn't throw those bigger mixers. So I think they do still have an effect on, on community as a whole. Even very early, early days.
00:22:31:20 - 00:22:48:00 Ed Giansante Yeah, 100%. And I guess it's going back to the, the goal to maybe divided into two parts. If when you do larger events, imagine like you have like to find gold and you have to like you know put the I don't know how do you call that thing like that. You just throw like there's sand and you're like, fine, okay.
00:22:48:01 - 00:23:01:09 Ed Giansante Maybe there's like a little bit of like gold or there's a little pearl here that I found. But after shake, shake, shake. So if you do larger events, you kind of have to do a little bit of that of like, who are the pearls here? Who are the people that I want to kind of build up on, on that relationship with?
00:23:01:09 - 00:23:22:01 Ed Giansante But then if the agenda is really like my goal is to try and get a lot of the early stage startups to to feel excited about maybe something we're launching, maybe there's a program that we have that's targeted towards like early stage founders. It is going to be a large group because you're not going to pay like a $200 dinner for someone early stage, because it's going to be really expensive to justify that.
00:23:22:01 - 00:23:41:22 Ed Giansante So maybe the mixer will make sense. But if you're talking about. Hey, my target is sea level at enterprises, they're not going to hang in a mixer with the Lakra and and pizzas. They will want something a little bit more designated and prepared for them. So it goes back to the goal as well.
00:23:41:25 - 00:24:12:11 Joshua Zerkel Thanks for your question. Like one of the things that stood out to me in what you were just saying was different events for different audiences to serve different goals essentially. And all types of events are great. They just do different things for different people. And recognizing that up front, getting leadership, buying to host these different kinds of events, I found to be absolutely critical when when you think about doing these events, what's one thing that you think companies get wrong when they try to run their own version of a curated dinner series like this?
00:24:12:14 - 00:24:39:04 Ed Giansante Yeah, I guess a lot of them, they think that the event is the is the end, and they try and operate and try and get to their goals there. So they will send someone from sales and trying like persuade something there, or they will try and make something more than just build a relationship. And when I say build a relationship, it may sound like I'm talking about creating engagement with this metric, but it's really like if you don't earn the trust, it's going to be really hard to build up from there.
00:24:39:04 - 00:24:58:07 Ed Giansante But it's just imagine that the event is just a milestone. It's just one point of touch that is going to be high touch, because you're spending 2 or 3 hours or someone, so you can get a lot of out of that. But just like you would have like a podcast, a slot, maybe like there's an advertisement on Billboard that's like a three seconds of someone's attention.
00:24:58:07 - 00:25:09:25 Ed Giansante We got three hours of someone's attention so you can get way more from there. But it's another touchpoint. And if they treat it like that, it's going to work. But if they try and like use that as the sales channel, that's not going to help them.
00:25:09:27 - 00:25:36:14 Joshua Zerkel Yeah. This is really a relationship building motion, not make a transaction at the dinner table type of motion. And I found from my own experience making sure everyone on our team. The team that's putting on the event understands how these things work and what the expectation of attendees is. And attendees really need to get a lot of value out of their attendance in order to even consider wanting to continue to do business or make a purchase or anything like that.
00:25:36:14 - 00:25:55:26 Joshua Zerkel If they walk away feeling like they've been sold for three hours, no one wants to attend a dinner like that. I don't want to. You don't want to. I don't know anyone who does. And so having these conversations with stakeholders I found to be absolutely critical so that they understand what they're going into and how to best leverage these types of events and the relationships that can be built there.
00:25:55:29 - 00:26:10:16 Ed Giansante Yeah. And I know you host a lot of host the breakfast as well for community leaders I would imagine it's the same. But you kind of want to you have to have a little bit of an agenda, even if it's not like a publicly shared agenda. But you have okay, what's my goal here? What am I trying to get out of this?
00:26:10:18 - 00:26:14:21 Ed Giansante And I guess it worked. Because you did successfully a couple of them already.
00:26:14:22 - 00:26:35:09 Joshua Zerkel Yeah. And it's all about like, what are we trying to do here beyond just like have a nice experience with people like what is the business reason for doing this? And I think if you are being tasked with, hey, host this event, that's the first question that you should ask is we can host an event, no problem. What's the purpose of this and how are we going to measure it exactly?
00:26:35:11 - 00:26:41:28 Joshua Zerkel So Ed, in our last couple of minutes, if someone's just getting started with hosting these types of events, what advice would you give them?
00:26:42:00 - 00:26:58:27 Ed Giansante Yeah. Again, similar to if you were to try and run a marathon for the first time or go to the gym for the first, I'm speaking as if I was a like, I've never ran a marathon, so I had no idea. But if going back to the event thing is really like try and do it, you know what would make it?
00:26:58:28 - 00:27:23:28 Ed Giansante How hard it is for you to just book, I don't know, a table at a restaurant. You don't need to book like a private dining room and spend a fortune. Just book a table. It's usually free. Maybe book for like 6 to 8 people and then ask some people. I'd say the early. The easiest way would be if you have an operating business that has sales and has customers, ask your sales team or your post sales team, hey, who should I invite from our customers?
00:27:24:00 - 00:27:39:24 Ed Giansante You know, user base here, and they'll probably give you a few names and you're like, hey, these people are based in SF or maybe whatever city that you are in. Can I invite a, hey, I'm doing this dinner here. I've just booked this place. I would like to come and then maybe start there, and then you can ask people, hey, I'm inviting you.
00:27:39:24 - 00:27:57:03 Ed Giansante And then do you have anyone else you would like to invite to be your plus one? That's maybe from your business. Someone from your network, someone that you know that would be a value add to this dinner. They usually do. And then you start there. Even if it's like 5 or 6 people. It's sometimes even nicer when it's super tiny because you have like this one single conversation.
00:27:57:03 - 00:28:12:18 Ed Giansante It's not like a small groups doing clicks. So it works really well. And then try and just be really, really good and serve. Don't try and like be the leader. Try and like be the expert in the room. Just serve them, you know, be there at their service. And I think that should work great.
00:28:12:20 - 00:28:16:26 Joshua Zerkel Thank you. Where would you like people to find you online.
00:28:16:29 - 00:28:36:22 Ed Giansante Oh, they can go to the easiest ad community or just LinkedIn slash ad. That's easy to you, but that community is probably the easiest because that's domain. I'm really proud that I'm able to to buy, so no way to mix that because the surname is hard to remember is not an easy one, but at that community is just easy enough.
00:28:36:28 - 00:28:59:29 Joshua Zerkel Great. All right. Well thank you editor. This was awesome. Everyone, I invite you to join us in the gradual community where you can continue the conversation with editor in the AMA, in the forum, access other playbooks and resources which will be creating from this event, and check out all of our other upcoming events. And there's a lot so you can find out all of these resources and more at Community Editor.
00:29:00:01 - 00:29:14:16 Joshua Zerkel And thank you again for taking your time to chat with us. This was awesome as I expected. Thank you for sharing all of your wisdom and your resources and this important topic with the audience and everyone. Thank you so much for attending. We'll see you at a future event.
+ Read More
1
Comments (0)
Popular
Watch More
Event Replay: Context First: The People Playbook: How to Build a B2B Community People Actually Show Up For with Darragh Collins
Posted May 07, 2026 | Views 123
Event Replay: Context First: The Missing Signals in Customer Success
Posted Jul 24, 2026 | Views 54
# Customer Success & Support
# Community
# Career Growth
Event Replay: Context First: The Three Questions That Shape Member Experience
Posted Mar 19, 2026 | Views 64
# Format: Event Recaps
# GTM Strategy
# Community