Ernie Garcia

Sr. Director
Citywide Sales, Meet Hawaii – Hawaii Visitors & Convention Bureau

Ernie recently joined the Hawaii Visitors & Convention Bureau (HVCB) as Sr. Director, Citywide Sales. Working remotely from the Bay Area, he is responsible for developing business, selling, and promoting Hawaii as a preferred destination for citywide conventions to take place in the Hawaii Convention Center on the island O’ahu. In his new role, he will be handling the corporate market on the West Coast.

Ernie’s career in sales and hospitality spans more than three decades with positions held in Hyatt and Hilton hotels and destination management organizations. Prior to joining HVCB, he served as Director, Citywide Accounts for San Francisco Travel Association for nearly 18 years. He handled the West Coast corporate market specializing in the tech industry. In his role with HVCB, he will be able to do what he does best — lead collaboration and strategic efforts with stakeholders to meet customers’ objectives and deliver successful corporate citywide events.

A native of Honolulu, Ernie received his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of San Francisco with a double major in marketing and finance. He enjoys outdoor activities – especially water and snow sports. In the pandemic year, he rediscovered the love of running and is currently putting in an average of 30 miles a week. Since the shutdown, he has also done weekly hikes with groups of friends in various trails throughout the Bay Area. This past year has reaffirmed the importance of spending time with his family, enjoying friends and being healthy. One of the things he enjoys doing in his spare time is community volunteer work – another activity prompted by the pandemic that will ensue.

Ernie believes that things do happen for a reason. As such, his new role with HVCB allows him to have the best of both, which is to be able to live in the Bay Area while representing his island home, Hawaii.

Sponsor of the Month

Encore creates memorable experiences that engage and transform organizations. As the global leader for event technology and production services, Encore’s team of creators, innovators and experts deliver real results through strategy and creative, advanced technology, digital, environmental, staging, and digital solutions for hybrid, virtual and in-person events. Encore operates in more than 20 countries across North America, Europe, the Middle East, Australia and Asia Pacific. Encore is the trusted partner of choice for leading hotels and venues worldwide and was named to the Forbes 2018 and 2019 America’s Best Employer list. The company is headquartered in the Chicago metro area in Schiller Park, Ill.

EncoreGlobal.com

April SWIRL circle learns keys to resilience from executive coach Karen Calder

Coming out of the pandemic, Resilience @Work is certainly a timely topic. As executive coach Karen Calder explains “Resilience is about advancing despite adversity and learning from it.” Karen walks the talk. After resigning from a high-profile, high-stress corporate job managing more than 200 people, she did a deep dive into how to thrive under pressure by studying the neuroscience of the brain.

Karen didn’t know how her learnings would play out until she started a fight for her life after being diagnosed in 2019 with uterine cancer that was progressing into her blood stream. In addition to fighting cancer, she had to endure chemotherapy during the pandemic lockdown.

Her story was truly inspirational, and the SWIRL circle learned how to practice three keys to resilience, mindset, limiting beliefs, and habits. Each circle member shared a time when building resiliency was critical to surviving a work challenge.

Thank you again Karen for sharing your insights.

You can contact Karen at Karen@karen-calder.com if you’re interested in learning more.

We’ll be hosting more SWIRL circles throughout the year. We’re building more Smart Women I Really Like networking groups, interested? Contact CEMArsvp@CEMAonline.com with your name, email, company, and regional location if you’d like to be invited to participate.

Free White Paper from CEMA Webinar with Jay Acunza and Shane Snow

Taking digital events from bland to grand – download this free whitepaper with actionable ideas for digital engagement here.

In 2020, the events industry made the manic shift to digital events. In spite of successes, we’re facing real digital fatigue. It shows in our attendance stats: registrations and dwell times are down, and no-shows are up.

This free white paper summarized their insights and actionable ideas for digital engagement including:
• How to move from Lo-Fi to Hi-Fi digital events
• 4 transitional dynamics that undermine our biggest event assets: speaker and audiences
• 3 virtual event golden rules
• 5 ways to radically rethink small screen delivery
• 6 tips to bring “Hi-Fi” production value to your “show”
• 7 important tech and tools to improve your audience

We need to fix dull and clumsy virtual events because we’re asking people to spend valuable time and money with us. At a recent CEMA webinar sponsored by SpeakInc, expert professional speakers Jay Acunzo and Shane Snow, discussed the challenges event marketers have faced making the pivot and shared actionable tactics event executives can use to bring energy and engagement to the small screen.

Five Best Practices for Generating Meetings at Hybrid Events

Best practice ideas by Ravi Chalaka is the CMO and VP of Product Management at Jifflenow.

Major live events, where marketing, product, and sales teams engage with hundreds or thousands of prospects and customers are where sales conversations get jump-started.

For 2021, hybrid events will be the norm as a majority of the event marketers believe that Hybrid events will rule the roost this year.

To drive ROI from your events budget this year, focus on booking more customer and prospect meetings in connection with your hybrid events. B2B meetings, whether they are in-person or virtual, are excellent drivers of sales pipeline and revenue because they enable your prospects to have more in-depth conversations about your products and services.

The pandemic has subtly changed the enterprise B2B sales cycle. Socially distanced customers and prospects are motivated to set up an informational meeting to determine whether your product or service meets their needs, but they don’t always want to contact a salesperson to set this up — many would rather request a meeting with the appropriate experts.

#1 Empower event attendees to book Inbound meetings 

For event marketers, our new secret weapon is the inbound, attendee-initiated meeting. The trick here is to integrate contextual inbound meeting request links throughout your pre-event, during event, and post-event marketing programs.  Unlike outbound efforts, inbound meeting requests are initiated by customers and prospects. This makes them an excellent indicator of purchase intent. 

#2 Enable sales teams to pre-schedule meetings with customers and prospects

Sales teams typically reach out to key customers and prospects in advance of a live event to book face-to-face meetings with internal experts and product teams. This outbound, sales-initiated approach is valid for hybrid events as well, and the sales team can take advantage of the ubiquity of digital platforms to book even more virtual customer meetings. 

#3 Pre-define customer engagement types 

Customer meetings — in-person or virtual — include product demos, executive meetings, roundtable discussions, webinars, special sessions, meet the expert (MTE) briefings, and partner meetings. (Including your partners in this program helps them drive additional value and ROI from their sponsorship dollars.) 

#4 Simplify workflows at every step of the process

Remember, it’s more than just volumes of meetings. High-engagement meetings with the right people within your organization is how you will convert prospects to pipeline. Look to activate all of your industry experts, technical experts, product managers, or pre-sales engineers who can influence the sale, and make them available to your information-hungry prospects.

Here’s a three-step process that many enterprises are already successfully employing:

1. Make it easy to book a meeting by integrating a meeting request button into all your pre-event digital marketing campaigns. You should also integrate meeting request links within your virtual/hybrid event lobby and at key locations within the virtual event itself. Offer meeting request links in your post-event follow-up activities as well. 
2. Automate the booking/reservation process to methodically capture key data such as the prospect’s specific information request, objectives for the meeting, stage of evaluation, features and technical parameters that are important. 
3. Ask the prospect to select from a range of dates and times for the meeting (ideally, based on the real-time availability of your internal resources).

To further streamline and scale up this process, you can automate the mapping of internal experts and executives to specific topics, integrate all available calendars to facilitate match-up, and create rules for how meeting managers are involved to approve or manage each request.

#5 Create visibility into all meetings across all events

Visibility into what’s happening at each event meeting, an assessment of the meeting’s impact, and learnings on what worked and what didn’t are all crucial information for the company. It helps you make better decisions such as which experts and representatives should be attending meetings in consecutive years, what customer segments you should meet with at different events, and what themes and topics resonate best with your targets of topics. 

Finally, Scale-up with a meeting automation platform 

You can significantly increase the number of meetings booked with prospects and customers by adding a meeting automation platform (MAP) to your marketing tech stack. This automates the scheduling of outbound and inbound meeting requests; enables precise workflow management (gives meeting managers or the marketing ops team the ability to oversee all meeting requests and confirmations, ensures essential sales information is captured and manages meeting logistics); and then delivers post-meeting analytics (provides dashboards for meetings and influenced revenue metrics, and manages surveys to understand performance and buyer intent). MAP provides every detail of your customer engagements such as the number of meetings scheduled, number of customers met, meeting leadership board, meetings by topic, meetings by executives, influenced revenue, and much more.

Keep in mind that collaboration is key. To drive maximum value from events, all marketing teams will need to put their heads together — event marketing, field marketing, demand gen, corporate marketing, and marketing ops. Make it a great year!

If you would like to know more about the meetings at events, click here to set up a one -one meeting with one of our experts.

About:

Ravi Chalaka is the CMO and VP of Product Management at Jifflenow and a marketing and business development expert who creates and executes business strategies, generating demand and raising brand/product awareness in competitive markets. As VP of Marketing at both large and small technology companies, Ravi built strong teams and brands and enabled faster revenue growth for a wide range of solutions based on Big Data, SaaS, AI, and IoT software, HCI, SAN, NAS.