Made in Cyprus | S3 E7 | Building Global Events from a Tiny Island with Lilly Pavlou

So when I was working in the finance space and I was working in sales and I really felt like, you know, there was such a, there's always this connect between marketing and sales, how to get leads, how to create environments for our sales teams to get good quality conversations, you know.

And when I was in this sales bubble, I was always thinking, you know, events are such a great way to generate revenue.

opportunities for sales and business development, grow your networks.

I mean, that's what they're essentially used for.

And then I was just like, I'm really missing, you know, being in events, you know.

So I guess that's how it happened.

And I just thought, I know I can bring value.

I know I can bring a platform where, you know, people can get together and they can have those kind of qualified conversations.

So that was, you know, how it happened.

There is a

bit of a friction, though, between lead generation and sales, right? and community in an event.

So what's the balance in that and how do you approach it with your events?

Listen, I think when it comes to community, firstly, what we want to do is create an environment that's relevant.

For a community to be connected, the people in the room need to be relevant to each other.

They need to have some sort of crossover in industry, crossover in direction or companies that they're looking to approach, etc.

So community is where we start first.

And then we look at the other dynamics, you know, so, you know, the sales and marketing, the lead generation, which you just asked about.

Again, it's about harvesting relationships.

So when you have a community, you have the opportunity for people to, you know, be part of that, you know, get themselves involved in conversations and build a community for them.

So that's in a way lead generation.

And then Sales is looking for direct conversations, right? So that's something that we facilitate as well, you know, having a targeted approach towards, you know, introductions.

So we've tried to, within our environments, to provide the community for people to kind of feel natural and feel connected on a common ground.

And then, you know, having the opportunity to build their networks.

And then we also have targeted conversations, which is more specifically for sales.